Welcome to the World Ian Maurice - October 15th 5:56 a.m.

Welcome to the World Ian Maurice Parrott!

We were blessed to have our baby enter the world at 5:56 a.m. on Monday the 15th of October. We were absolutely overjoyed that he finally came to be with us! Ian was 7 lbs 5 oz and 19.5 inches long.

This family photo shows just how tired we all were...especially me after 58 hours of labor.

It all started at about 8:00 p.m. on Friday night. We were eating at the Cerulean (a really nice restaurant in Winona Lake) with Stephanie our Co-op and Edi our co-worker from Switzerland. I took a gamble and decided that if our baby didn't come yet, we could at least go for a nice dinner on Zimmer. Half way through, I noticed that the contractions I was having actually hurt and I was having a hard time breathing through them. Friday night was okay. I had to get up and walk with each contraction...but luckily they were about 30+ minutes apart.

Saturday started out fine, but then the contractions started getting closer and closer (5 minutes apart). We were packing our house up and trying to get work done, but we finally went to the hospital at about 3:00 p.m. to find that I was only 1 cm dialted. I was sent home and told to come back when my contractions hurt more and were 3-4 minutes apart. When we were in the hospital, Russ called Mom Parrott and she and Ryan hopped in the car to start driving down.

Saturday night was horrible! I had really painful contractions 10 minutes apart all night long. I got absolutely no sleep. UGH!

Sunday was really long. My contractions weren't getting any closer together than 5 minutes. In fact, every time I would nap or try to sleep, the contractions would slow down to 10 minutes. Anyway, I didn't want to go the hospital to get sent home. Mom and Mom finally convinced me to call the hospital at 5:00 p.m. I spoke to Dr. Howard and he told me to come at 8:00 p.m. He didn't want me to have another sleepless night...especially if I would have to have the baby the next day. That was a really long 3 hours. Nicole drove down in the afternoon, so when she got here, everyone went to dinner (we didn't go because I couldn't hold down any food anyway) while Russ and I stayed home.

We got to the hospital and found out I was 4 cm dialated! YEAH!!! I still can't believe that it took me 48 hours to dilate 4 cm. Oh well. I thought I was going to be real tough and have a natural birth without an epidural, but after 48 hours of exhaustion, I gladly took the epidural. Russ and I thought that we had requested the epidural, but I guess we did not offically request it, so 3 hours and 2 cm later, we finally got it!

IT WAS AWESOME! The pain went away and I got to go to sleep. Unfortunately, my contractions slowed down to 10 minutes apart because I was sleeping. At 3:00 or so, I was only 7 cm, so they gave me some petocin. At around 5:00, I was fully dialated, so the doctor came and we started pushing. It wasn't bad at all. The epidural took away a ton of the pain. Less than an hour later, our bundle of joy was finally delivered!

I hope you enjoyed the labor story!

~Becca