Welcome Sophie!

I've said it before and I reiterate it now, giving birth is an amazing and crazy thing. You go in as one person and come out as two. Isn't that wild? Sort of a reverse Thunderdome.

On Saturday, October 13th, as I suffered through contractions, I still had no real grasp on what I was in for. I know that millions, maybe billions, of women have gone through this process before, many of them multiple times. That knowledge does not make your own experience any easier, nor does it really prepare you for what lies ahead. Just as I cannot imagine describing the sensations of a sneeze to someone who has never experienced one, I don't think a woman can truly understand the birthing process until she has been through it.

I took a Hypnobabies class to prepare me for the birth. This is a program that emphasizes natural birth and pain management through mind over matter kind of self-hypnosis. I do believe in this stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed the class, meeting some really great people in the process. Unfortunately, the practice of said pain management during the actual event was less effective than I might have hoped. Because of a cervix that was still at 0 more than 18 hours after my water broke, the doctors recommended pitocin. That's fine. I do not, however, recommend pitocin on no painkillers. After about 6 hours of pitocin-induced contractions, I decided it was time to allow modern medicine to do its thing and asked for the epidural. Seven more hours of contractions followed by three hours of pushing and still no baby and the decision was made to bring in the forceps.

Now, I don't want to say that I'm a convert to the epidural, however, if I would have had to have a forceps delivery without it, I might not have made it through. The result of a forceps delivery, not surprisingly, is often a fourth degree tear. That was the case with me. If you don't know what this is, spare yourself and DO NOT look it up, suffice to say it is bad, bad, bad. The end result though is that we had a beautiful baby girl with 10 fingers and 10 toes and we were instantly in love with her.

Sophie Blevins entered the world on October 14, 2007 at 10:17 am. She was 18 1/2 inches long and 6 pounds 13 ounces.