Powerful: Derek + Laura

Warning: This is long and is written in detail as it's meant to be my record of her birth.  Well it's been a long time since I've blogged. Life gets busy and it's hard to keep up. However, I found myself wanting to record the details of Hazel's birth story. She's already 4.5 months old and I am finding that I am starting to forget small things. I want to write them all down before I forget. So here I am, sharing our story, so that I can remember and share it with her someday. Hazel Anne Power joined our family on September 3, 2017 at 8:40 pm weighing 7 lbs 5 oz and 19.5 inches long. She is my smallest baby. She's 6 oz less than Brooklyn and 1 inch shorter. She is just darling and we are so glad she's a part of our family.  So I guess I'll start at the beginning. I found out I was pregnant right after Christmas time and was able to share the news with my family that was in town for the holidays. We return home from our trip and I start bac...

January 3, 2013: Afternoon: Checked in to the hospital and made the mistake of not eating anything. I was starving but due to the fact that I almost threw-up multiple times the night before I didn't want to put anything in my system. Let me tell you...it was a long 24 hours without food and without sleep. I was so tired and that just seemed to make everything worse. They take me to my hospital room and hook me up to monitor my contractions. As soon as that happened I was no longer in active labor. My contractions were every 6-9 minutes. They gave me an hour to see if active labor would start up again. Nope. They presented me with my options: go home or get induced. At this point I didn't want to do either. I was in so much pain. I had back labor like nobodies business. They gave me an hour to walk around to try and start labor on my own. So grateful I had a midwife who supported my choices to want to go as natural as possible. After that hour they checked me aga...

Since our little girl is almost 4 weeks old I decided it was time to write her birth story. I want to put down the details before I start to forget them. This is the first time I have had a chance to look at all the pictures from birth and I am reminded of all the emotions I experienced. I have feared child birth my whole entire life and it is so surreal to know that I actually did it, barely, but I did. Now before you continue I should warn you: There will be lots of photos and it will be lengthy in text in the two following blog posts.  Just needed to put that disclaimer out there in case you didn't want to read on. Since I some day hope to turn this blog in to a book I want to record as much as I can. December 30-31, 2012: I had started to feel light contractions during the day...maybe about every 1.5-2 hours. There weren't too bad but I was excited as I knew it was a sign of labor. I still had my doubts that we would progress at a quick rate since this was my first bir...