Introducing: Brody Lawrence Griffin!

We are pleased to announce the arrival of our sweet baby boy! Brody was born at 5:29 this afternoon. He weighed in at 7lbs even, and is 21in long, both Brody & Mama are doing well!

After a slow morning for us things picked up and progressed very quickly towards the end. As I mentioned in my 4:00am post, I was 2cm dilated when they first checked. After they started the pitocin the contractions came on pretty strong almost right away. Around 10:30am they gave me some Stadol, it knocked me out right away and took about two hours to wear off. After a long morning of labor they checked me again and found I was only 2.5cm, that was disappointing because I had expected after all those painful contractions that I would have been closer to 4cm. The nursing staff decided to move me over into one of the delivery rooms at this point, and strongly encouraged that I take the epidural. I reluctantly agreed because I had planned to go without, but in the end I felt like it was the best decision for us. Basically the nurses felt the main reason I wasn't progressing was because I was too tense and unable to relax during my contractions, they thought it would actually speed things up if had the epidural and it would also allow them to up the pitocin a little to make things happen a little faster as well. At around 2:oopm the doctor came in to break my water. Immediately following the anesthesiologist came in to administer the epidural. I do have to say the combination of these two procedures were actually very traumatic for me. No one really tells you what you are in for when you get an epidural! I thought they'd come in, give me a quick shot to numb the place where the big scary needle goes... and then use the big scary needle to get things started and get the catheter in place. No one ever told me it would take about thirty minutes and that I would have to sit completely still in the same uncomfortable position while enduring the most intense contractions I had ever felt. Once that was finally over it was only about 15 minutes and I was feeling much more comfortable. By 2:30pm I was at 4cm, I got to 5cm by 3:30, 7cm by 4:30 and fully dilated and ready to push by 4:45. Everything progressed very quickly after I got the epidural. The nurse had me do some "practice pushing", but realized in the process it would probably happen pretty quickly. I only pushed for about 25 minutes, and the doctor barely arrived in time to catch the baby. His head actually out before the doctor made it in the room. It turned out he had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and they couldn't get it loose, so the doctor cut it, suctioned him and then he pretty much slipped out on his own without me even pushing. I will post more pictures of him tomorrow, but for now we are all exhausted and need to get some rest!