Okay already...

Family and Friends,

I must first apologize for neglecting to post anything to the blog after my due date.. I did in fact have the babe! Her name is Addison Jane Porter, born on January 7th at 11:33AM. She weighed 7lbs 4oz and was 20.5inches long! I feel like I should go back in time and give some details about the birth for those of you who haven't heard it:)

On my due date (Jan 3rd) I had thought my water had broken. I was super excited at the prospect of having little AJP so Ryan and I raced up to Evergreen. When we got there and I got all "checked out" I was told, "Sorry, your water has not broken. You probably just peed your pants a little bit".... ARE YOU KIDDING ME!! I was beside myself.. I thought at that moment I would be prego for EVER... The next day I had a drs appt. My progress was minimal so my Dr, Dr Gong said that she would like to schedule my induction for 1 week from that appt. I was depressed as I wanted to go as "natural" as possible but also was SO incredibly uncomfortable, I agreed.

Fast forward to Wednesday Jan 6th. I started having more and more painful contractions that day. By lunch time they were pretty frequent and increasingly painful. Ryan and I had met for lunch in Bellevue and thought we might have to go to the hospital from Baja Fresh. However shortly after lunch, the contractions subsided so I went home and Ryan went back to work.

By dinner time I was getting more and more uncomfortable. At 2AM we left for the hospital. When I got checked I was only 2cm dilated but they let me stay!!! I think that was on account of the level of pain I was feeling. I labored until 8:30am when the dr on call came in to check me. I was already to 4cm!!! The dr also said that I didn't have a bag of waters to break.... So they probably had broken on Sunday... "Peed my pants..." Whatever!

Ryan and I had also had a chance to go over my birth plan with our awesome nurse Jen. In short, I wanted to do as little pain meds as possible. She said she would help in every way to get me through! She was amazing!! We could not have had a better nurse! The next couple of hours are now kind of a blurrr but I do know that by 10:30am I was 8.5cm dilated!! I started pushing around 11am and Addie came into the world at 11:33am!!

The last 8 weeks have been wonderful, challenging, amazing, fun, tiring and surprising. Here are some pix from start to current. I promise to update more frequently.

40 weeks on Sunday and darn ready to have this kid!!!

From Ryan: We called the hospital Christmas night because Laura was having contractions as close together as every 4 minutes but then they started spacing out and weren't progressively getting stronger. The contractions stopped after a couple hours and she was finally able to get to sleep. False alarm! Since that time just some random contractions with notably strong, but infrequent contractions Wednesday night. The rule of thumb for gong to the hospital is contractions every 4 minutes, at least 1 minute long for a duration of at least an hour. Or water breaks.

At this point we're just waiting.... It looks like our little girl is just way too cozy! At Laura's last dr appt she was 1 cm dilated and 40% effaced so we're hoping that the activity this week has increased the effacement. We'll keep you posted!

Here are some pics of our Nursery: