Introducing...

Our daughter, Elise Charlotte.  She was born May 3 at 1:15 pm.  She weighed 7lb, 6oz and was 19 in. long (my smallest baby).  And she has lots of dark hair!  We are so in love with our little girl!! 

just born! 

Here's a re-cap of the birth story: My due date was Wed. May 2, I was dilated to a 2 and thought it could still be a while.  But I was ready to have her and trying many of the wives tales to get labor started!  Around 2 am on May 3 I woke up with contractions--they were mild and only about 10 min. apart.  They stayed that way for about 2 hours, then started to fade away and I wasn't sure if I was "in" labor or not.  They picked back up again around 5 am--still mild and not any closer together.  Because I have a history of fast labors with my boys, I told Jon to stay home from work and called my midwife.  They wanted me to come in and be checked.  We got to the hospital around 8 am and I was 3 cm dilated.  So she had me walk for an hour, when we got back I was now 4 cm so she decided to send me up to L&D, but said if things hadn't progressed in 6 hours she would send me home.  By the time we were up to a room, it was around 10/10:30 am.  The contractions start picking up but were still manageable with the help of Jon holding my hand and encouraging me and I was moving around the room and changing positions often.  After a while I decided to get in the shower (a huge pain/stress reliever for me).  The contractions were getting really intense so I told Jon to have the nurse and midwife come in.  They had me get in the bed to check me (and then said they would fill the birth tub, since I wanted to do a water birth).  When she checked I was 9 cm, so she was going to fill the bathtub instead (not time to fill the birth tub)--but I was ready to push (the water ended up overflowing in the tub since she came back quick to catch the baby).  5 or so pushes later, our little girl was born.   My water never broke, so she was born in her sac--which is apparently a sign of good luck!  I could tell right away that she was smaller than my boys.  She was healthy and normal so we were able to spend an hour or so right after birth just holding and bonding with her!  I did have some  hemorrhaging afterwards and lost the equivalent of a bag of blood--but they were able to get it under control and besides some anemia, I'm fine.  And Elise is doing great! 

trying out girly bows!  Too cute!

daddy loves having a little girl!

going home from the hospital (2 days old)

4 days old (she was already back up to birth weight when we took her to the dr)

such cute feet!  They're pretty long too!

She is a great baby so far!  A good sleeper--already sleeps 5 or 6 hour stretches at night.  She nurses well (besides some initial problems with getting adjusted to my fast let-down and oversupply) and me realizing that I can't "force" her to eat if she's sleeping--she will totally refuse it!  The boys both love her.  Grant is a little too eager to hold her/carry her and always in her face, but they're both big helpers.  What a sweet addition she is to our family!!