Well, hello there...

On Thursday, 11/29, I went into work with a full day of meetings ahead of me. About mid-morning, I noticed that things were starting to feel a little...funny...with the false contractions I'd been having off and on for the last couple of months, so, around noon, I started tracking the contractions to see if maybe we had moved out of the false stage and into the actual contraction portion of the party.

Sometime, between 3:00 and 4:00PM, the contractions were moving along at a steady pace and starting to get a little painful, so I called Steve to let him know I'd be heading home early. Oh, and also that we'd most likely be heading to the hospital that night. Because, yeah...
By the time 6:30-ish rolled around, I was bent over the kitchen table, with a heating pad pressed to my lower back, trying to breathe through the pain. And you know what?

I am TERRIBLE at breathing through the pain.
We got to the hospital around 7PM, and I was already 5cm dilated, which was a much better result than the first time I went into the hospital with Brigid, when they sent me home for not really being in advanced labor. I immediately asked for some kind of pain medication, because again...breathing just doesn't cut it for me. I am a wimp. And surprisingly proud of it. By the time they actually got me into a labor and delivery room around 9PM, I was 8cm dilated and begging for an epidural, since the initial pain medicine they'd slipped into my IV was starting to wear off already.

I am a BIG fan of the epidural. Big. Fan.

The final centimeter was a long time coming, and my water never did break on its own (since I managed to avoid pain-induced vomiting this time around), and we were even starting to wonder if the baby was going to make it on the 29th or hold off for a birthday on the 30th. But where I spent at least an hour pushing with Brigid, baby number two came in about six minutes flat. Second kids, man.

Of course, it probably also helped that this kid's head is measuring in the 8th percentile, instead of the 80th percentile, like some OTHER kids that I know. Not to mention any names or anything.
  
*coughBRIGIDcough*

And at 11:40PM, Caitlin Rose made her appearance, weighing 7lbs 11oz and measuring 20inches long. And she is absolutely perfect. The nurses were a little concerned with her ability to breathe when she first came out, because she seemed to have a lot of fluid in her. And they heard a murmur when listening to her heart, which put everyone on alert, given Brigid's heart history, and earned baby Caitlin her very own heart scan. Everything cleared up, though, and as of today, she's even regained enough of her birth weight to satisfy the doctors.

See? Perfect.
(Yes. We named the baby Caitlin in the end. Brigid got her way, after all. This surprises absolutely no one, does it?)