Zachariah Huxley; Born March 19, 2013

I went in for my 41 week appointment and had an induction scheduled (strongly recommended) and my membranes were "stretched" and I was told about it afterwards (which explains a lot).  I was a 4cm at my appointment.  Mom, Gabriel and I went to In-N-Out for lunch and I'd started having contractions at about noon.  At three or so, I texted Chris and let him know that he should plan to come home instead of going to PT.  During Gabe's naptime, I alternated between being in the front room...and then the bedroom on the exercise ball...and then finally made it into the bathtub right around the time when Christopher got home from work.  It took me FOREVER to finish watching the episode of Medium (while trying to time contractions to make sure) so that we could head off to the hospital.  Yes.  I'm weird like that and wanted to get to a good stopping point.  We headed off to the hospital at 5'ish when the pain (especially in my back...again...like I had with Gabe) was less than bearable and my contractions were 3-5 min apart.  By the time we got checked in, questions answered, and had my first cervical check, it was 7pm (I was told when I first got there that since my first labor was 14 hours, I'd probably have a 7-10 hr second labor).  I'd brought my birth plan with me, but pointed out when I first got there that if I hadn't progressed enough/if the back pain didn't get better, I'd scratch my entire birth plan and want an epidural right away.  I didn't realize I wouldn't even be checked until 7 hours after things had started.  When I had my first check, I was at 5cm.  Yeah.  Exactly.  I'd progressed one miniscule cm since 10:30 that morning.  Poo poo on that.  I wanted pain relief and I wanted it NOW.  I told the nurse as much.  It took until 10:00 to get said epidural.  And it took four times of getting sticked in order for them to find the right spot. 
Life is hard when you're me....
Please note that while we'd researched different ways to deal with back labor, they couldn't get a good reading on Baby b/c he kept moving, so I had to stay hooked to the monitors on my back for several hours.
That said: after I got the epidural, things got WAY better!  The back labor was 99% gone.  The contractions were 99% pressure, 1% pain (until the very end).  So I watched Grease (twice) and Willy Wonka (once, I think) and spaced out a lot.  Baby Fester kept having issues with his heart rate dropping (like Gabe did that one time) and I was warned that he may have the cord wrapped around his neck, so we were being extra monitored and hopefully things would go well.  Things didn't really get better.  I ended up attached to monitors, an epidural, an IV, and then oxygen by the end of things.  It was pretty crazy and I'm SO glad Gabriel never saw me like that.  I imagine I looked scary...(and scared)...  Blah dee blah blah smack... 
I was fully progressed, but Fester was having more and more issues with his heartrate, so I ended up getting rolled into the OR just in case they had to do an emergency cesarean.  By the way, this was WAY more terrifying than what happened with Gabe, but at least this time they let me know what was going on the entire way (whereas with Gabriel, no one told me anything, but 5 or so nurses ran into the room freaking out, etc when Gabe had issues with heartbeats).  Maybe it's because I let the initial nurse know what happened with Gabriel and that I wanted to be informed the whole way...Maybe it's because this time I actually talked, whereas last time I didn't really speak through the whole thing...Maybe it's just because people were nicer this time than they were with Gabe...
Zachariah Huxley was born at 0211 on 31913.  I pushed for a handful of times and then they brought out The Vacuum and sucked him out with the next set of pushings.  Despite having an epidural (which may or may not have been working uber well, since I remember two of the nurses talking about if they could get Dr Fields over in time and decided he wouldn't make it) pushing out a 10 pound (literally) baby was one of the most painful things ever!!!  Then again, I didn't have any tearing big enough to stitch and healed/am healing quickly.  And...Chris didn't get to cut the cord (again) but I'm assuming that's because the cord was, in fact, wrapped around Fester/Zach's neck and he was blue when he was pooped out, so they had to take care of that *minor* (
Oh yeah.  So last time the biggest thing was that I said maybe 3 words the entire time (and went natural for about half of it before getting hooked up to Pitocin and drugs).  This time, the biggest thing was that I was shaking...like...a LOT...because it was so painful (and later shaking because of a bit of pain and a lot of fear; sorta like how when I'm angry I go silent and shake with frustration, only this time I was shaking with pain and/or fear) and went naturally for 10 of 14 hours of labor...

It's now a week and a day post partum and everyone's doing well.  I guess the one upside to being nauseous for all of pregnancy and then pooping out a ten pounder is that I'm already back to my pre-pregnancy weight.  Yay?