Welcome to the World Caleb!

So I am finally updating the blog!  A lot has happened since our last post, Jason left on his first deployment to Afghanistan, and about 6 weeks later we welcomed our second son into our family.  Caleb was born on January 20 at 6:56 am, weighed 7 lbs 10 oz and was 20.5 inches long.  He has a full head of blondish reddish hair, and is such a sweet low key baby.  When we found out that Jason was going to be gone for the birth, I was terrified.  With the horrendous experience I had with Ethan I didn't think I would be able to handle that again without Jason.  He was the person who kept me sane through that whole ordeal.  Living out here in North Carolina near a military base I realized that this kind of thing is actually quite common and realized I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself because many women had gone through much worse.  I gained strength from the women around me and was incredibly blessed through the whole experience.  It was really an incredible blessing to be stationed here where my sister lives 5 minutes away.  I could not have gone through this without her.  We flew my mother in law out to stay with us for a few weeks to watch Ethan while I was in the hospital and to help out when the baby came.  I was so stressed and worried about delivering on time so that I didn't waste her time, and I ended up delivering 4 days late.  Those 4 days seemed like an eternity though!  I tried every "trick" I could to kick start labor, and nothing worked. On Thursday I came to the conclusion that I really had no control over the situation and decided to let the Lord decide when it was time for us and put it in His hands, and that night I went into labor.  For those who don't want to hear about the labor and delivery, don't read on, and just skip to the pictures part :).


So I went to bed Thursday night with some light contractions, but didn't think anything of it because I had been having the same ones for weeks.  Then around 1:30 I woke up with some stronger ones, so I started timing them, they were coming around 5-7 minutes apart.  I got through those for a while then got in the shower to try and labor through some more.  The shower helped a lot, and helped me relax.  When I got out I started timing contractions again and they were about 3 minutes apart.  It was about 3 am at this point, and I was thinking ok well this hasn't been too long I should be ok for a while, but something told me not to wait and to call my sister.  So I called the hospital they told me to come in. By the time we got to the hospital it was 4am.  They had me sit in triage and get monitored for 20 minutes which was pure torture, I was so nervous that I was going through all of this and was only going to be at a 4 or something.  They finally checked me and I was almost to a 7!  That's when all the rushing started.  They didn't have a room ready for me yet, they were so busy that night they were cleaning up a room to get me in, then they struggled to get the IV in me.  They couldn't get an IV in so they had to get anesthesiology to come in to do it, but they had 2 other women to give epidurals to before they could even get to me.  Finally another nurse gave my veins a try because she didn't think they would even get a chance to get over to my room in enough time.  She was able to finally get the IV in then they had to ask me the 50 million admission questions like if I smoked or drank or did drugs which was really annoying trying to answer during contractions.  Thankfully Heidi was there and she did most of my talking for me.  I was exhausted and knew the worst was only coming so I asked for an epidural, but it kind of seemed like they were ignoring me and were like oh you are doing great you don't need one.  Then the nurse told me ok What I thought was going to be the hardest thing I had ever done really turned out to be a lot easier than I expected.  I am so grateful for this beautiful baby boy,  and even Ethan seems to like him :).  We can't wait until Jason comes home so he can meet this sweet son of his.