Becoming Parents!

Our baby was due May 17th, but he decided to stay longer. On the eve of the 20th at about 8:45pm I started to have just very little contractions about 20-50 minutes apart.  I was so excited,  but tried not to think about it.. we had been trying all week to start my labor. I was scheduled to be induced on the 23rd and I really didn't want to be. We went on walks. . I walked on curbs.. I got a massage.. I used oils.. foot zoning.. ect. My contractions started to increase. Needless to say I got zero sleep and by about 1:30 my contractions were about 5-7 minutes apart. I woke up Chase and told him to get ready.. our drive to the hospital took forever and it felt like we were off roading. Thankfully there was no traffic and I kept yelling at chase to slow down but not too fast ect. Looking back on it, it was probably hilarious how much I wanted chase to slow down.. I went through the ER because it was in the middle of the night. I was handling the contractions fairly well at this point. I had to stay in triage for quite a while to make sure I was in active labor. I had to do a lot of walking and chase thought lunges, squats, and jumping was a good idea.. I basically told him once he has a uterus that is contracting I would, but until then... lol. I was only dilated to a 2 after a couple hours, but during the exam the nurse broke my water unintentionally which means you're automatically admitted because there is only a 24 hr window of your water breaking before there is danger of infection. Finally I was able to get out of triage with all the other crazy ladies in labor to my own room. I was able to zone out when chase wasn't bumping my bed or someone wasn't touching me. Lol everyone was trying to be so helpful, but all I wanted was for everyone to leave me alone so I could tackle each contraction on my own. It was around 10am ish and I had been in labor for a little over 12 hrs. I felt good with controlling the contractions, but I was exhausted because I hadn't had any sleep yet. They told me that I was more than welcome to do it naturally if I wanted to, but it could take many hours because I was only dilated to a 3 or 4.  I decided to get pitocin to soeed things up, but I got the epidural first because I had read that pitocin increases the contractions so much and so quickly its very hard to handle. The epidural can also take up to about 15 minutes. So I got that first and then pitocin. To say the least.. I was feeling good and had many random comments. I was no longer anti-social. I felt the epidural working almost immediatley. I was fully dilated very quickly and so the nurse had me push to see if the baby had dropped. I pushed and was crowning. She told me to call kylee and my mom in the cafeteria to come up cuz I was ready to push. The nurse called the OB the peds nurse ect. Everyone looked around like what are we doing here she isn't even pushing. My nurse told them it was going to go fast. I pushed twice and delivered a boy! We didn't know the sex of the baby so knowing the gender was way exciting! They laid him on my chest and he opened his eyes wide and looked right at me. It was so amazing. We named him Stedson Chase Halverson. He weighed 7lbs 9oz and was 20 inches long!