The Delivery Story

We were officially without power for 9 days (minor compared to some) and every day I prayed that God would not let our baby come until we had electricity and were back in our own home again. We got the wonderful phone call from our neighbors at 5:45pm on 9/21/2008 - "We have Electricity"!!! So, Keith and I loaded up the car and headed home! We got home about 7:30pm and immediately started re-situating back into our home. We "repacked" our labor bag since we had been living out of it for the last week and a half. After situating we sat down and had stew that my mother-n-law had sent with us for dinner at about 9:30pm. "Whoa...what was that!" I think I just had a contraction and it really hurt...not anything like those Braxton Hicks I had had before. But then I thought, well, I've been on my feet running around the house that is probably all it is. We finished dinner, did the dishes, and got ready for bed. At about 10:15pm as I was laying in bed..."whoa, there is another one!" Now I was starting to think something must be up. I decided to time them. Ten minutes later....there was another one. They quickly escalated and were 5 minutes apart by 11:30pm. I called the doctor and she advised me to head to the hospital to be "checked out". I had a fear of being Annie from Father of the Bride II and just knew I would be sent back home after the evaluation.

We pulled up to the hospital at about 12:15am and I told Keith to have the valet just hold our car in case we were headed back home. By this point my contractions were 3-4 minutes apart and were greatly intensifying. We got to the labor and delivery floor and they showed us to a room. They hooked me up to the monitors and sure enough I was in labor. My pain intensified quickly and my contractions were now 1 minute apart. My doctor was not on call that night so her partner advised the nurse to get me and IV with pain meds and "slow everything down". Well, Ellery had her own plan. At about 2:25am almost simultaneously I had a revisit from my stew from dinner and my water broke. These events led right into another hard contraction, a nurse trying to draw blood and another nurse trying to get me to sign some consent forms (which I have no idea what I signed). It was pure chaos but everyone was quickly making plans to deliver our baby that night! They finally got me hooked up to an epidural at about 3:00am...relief! At 3:41am our little princess made her debut! Welcome to the world Ellery Grace Bilski!