Welcome Charlotte Mary Curran

This little peach arrived yesterday, November 29th (two days early), at 9:06 am.

She weighed 7 lbs 12 oz and was 19 3/4 " long. She had quite the traumatic event happen as she was being welcomed into this world which I'll explain below. These picture are some random ones of her first 24 hours and are in reverse order.

Darling little girl finally sleeping for hours in the morning. This was taken exactly 24 hours after she was born.

Throughout the night she didn't quite know what she wanted and we didn't know what she wanted... it was a rough first night. But Ben was awesome and switched off all night with her because she refused to be put down.

She looks really different now than in these first few shots of her.

LOVE all of her hair. As I was pushing, Ben and everyone else announced that she had a ton of dark brown hair. We high fived - I was that excited.

My whole 15 seconds with her before they took her for monitoring for a few hours.

The NICU team was there waiting to help her out.

Right before the lovely epidural.

I know what you're thinking about the picture below... hot. This is me pacing the hallway trying to get the labor to progress a bit more.

I think this picture can speak for itself

For the past week or so I had been having contractions and by Thanksgiving they were getting pretty strong and closer together. Ben and I both thought it would happen over the weekend, rather than on the due date. So we were able to enjoy Thanksgiving, black Friday shopping, and getting our Christmas tree on Saturday. Then on Saturday the contractions were consistently 3-5 min apart for 2 hours by 6:30 pm. We went to the hospital, but they said I was only dilated to 2 cm; so they had me walk around for an hour to see if I was in labor. After that hour, I was dilated to 3 cm and they admitted me. At this point, the contractions were now 1.5-2.5 min apart and strong enough that I couldn't walk anymore. They started me on pitocen and inserted the epidural, which only worked on my right side, but was fortunately corrected after a few hours. Shortly after starting the epidural, my water broke spontaneously, which had meconium in it (Charlotte's first bowel movement), so they had to contact the NICU team to be there when she came out. At 8:15 am or so I started to push and when she arrived they immediately had Ben cut the cord and they worked on her for a good 10 - 15 min because she had inhaled the meconium. She wasn't moving much the whole time so we were both scared for awhile but she ended up being fine and there aren't any lasting effects.

I absolutely loved the nurses, residents, and attendings - everyone had a great sense of humor which totally helped me because when I get nervous I joke a lot. It was definitely an interesting experience - the whole giving birth thing. We definitely had a rough night, but are getting the hang of certain things and completely guessing on others. But we absolutely adore and love her to pieces!