Kaden's birth story

As I sit here at 4am with my sweet, but wide awake Kaden-boy I am realizing that I need to get his birth story posted. He turned 8 weeks old this weekend for goodness sake!

It began on the night of May 7th at 7:30 pm, I was having some really weird back pain that would go away and then come back every 10 minutes or so. I didn't think it was labor at the time for some reason until I was on the phone with my mom an hour later and I was complaining about it and she thought that it might be labor. After I got off the phone with her I was debating on whether I should go in or not. It didn't hurt too much, but then again it did, y'know? So after packing some stuff up, we went to the hospital where my parents met us. My mom stayed with Curtis and I, and my dad took Riah to spend the night at their house. I was put in triage where they assessed me. I was dilated to a 3.5, and the baby's head was at a 0 station. My contractions were pretty regular, but the doctor wanted to get things going so she requested that I walk the halls for an hour. I did, then went back to triage. When they checked me again I was dilated to a 4 - and they admitted me. It was almost midnight at this point.

When we got to the labor & delivery room everything was good, I wasn't in too much pain yet (as far as labor goes) and was determined to have the baby with no epidural. We turned on the TV and watched a couple shows, I breathed through the contractions. My grandma and sister got there around this time.
Two hours later my doctor came in to check me, I was dilated to a 5. She offered the option of breaking my water, and after talking with her we decided that it was a good idea.

About 15 minutes after that the contractions started getting much stronger. I was able to get up and walk around, but didn't really want to at that point. After a few really bad contractions I got up to take a warm shower, the hospital didn't have any heat packs and I needed heat. Before I got in the nurse checked me and I was at an 8. I was in there for a few minutes and then the pain got really bad so I went back to the bed to lay down. I had some more really tough contractions, toyed with the idea of having an epidural, and then started to feel the baby coming, which is the weirdest feeling in the world. The nurse checked me again and I was at a 10, and the baby was coming. She tried to call my doctor, but my doctor was at her home which was 15 minutes away. She then tried to page some of the other doctors that were at the hospital, but they were all in other deliveries. So she thought she was going to have to deliver my baby until a doctor came rushing into the room from down the hall, and delivered my baby after 2 quick pushes.

Kaden was born at 4:55am on the early morning of May 8th. I loved holding him right after he was born, he was so tiny and cute. Sariah came in to see him just after he was born. We got to hang out for about 2 hours as a family in the delivery room before the nurse noticed that he was breathing faster than he should've been, so on the way to the recovery room we had to drop him off in the special care nursery. He stayed in there for a little over 24 hours, then I was released from the hospital to go home and he was transferred to a nearby hospital with a NICU. They found that he had a spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung) before they transferred him, and it was the reason for his rapid breathing. When he got to the NICU they put a chest tube in him, put him on a cpap machine and IV nutrition and lipids and put him in an isolette. They slowly took these out over the course of his stay. His stay in the NICU was about 2 and a half weeks. It would have been a bit shorter but some blood was found in his stool after the first week and a half, and they wanted to make sure that it wasn't necrotizing enterocolitis - which is common in early preemies, but because of his heart defect and the fact that he was a little it early (3 weeks) they wanted to rule it out. His heart looks pretty much the same as it did in utero, so the surgery is still going to happen around the time he's 2.

We love having him home. He is such a sweet baby, and he likes to be snuggled. He is growing so fast, he already looks so different from when he was first born...

(Right after he was born)
(Now)