So I’m writing this as I have my one week old daughter laying on my chest, hopefully I have time to write it all down since I’ve been trying to since yesterday. I apologize if this ends up being a little lengthy.

On Saturday October 21st I believe at midnight I started feeling what felt like menstrual cramps. Painful but bearable and irregular. I assumed they were Braxton Hicks which I rarely felt through my last trimester. Around 6am they became really painful and hadn’t stopped since I started feeling them hours before. It got to the point I told my husband he needed to take me to the hospital. So we waited it out a little and drove to the hospital Saturday at 11am. They checked me in told me I was 3cm dilated and they wanted

me to walk around the hospital for an hour to see if I dilated anymore. If I do I’ll be admitted and if I don’t then it will be time to go home. So after an hour of walking the hallways I came back and no difference...I was so disappointed that I had to go back home. So at this point I’ve been having non stop contractions for almost a whole day and I can’t do anything about it but wait until I can’t handle it anymore. Again my contractions never stopped so Saturday night as I’m trying to go to bed (I hadn’t slept at all since my contractions had started and I wouldn’t sleep until after my baby was born) I downloaded an app to help track my contractions so I can tell when is a good time to go back to the hospital. Although my contractions were extremely painful they were also very irregular. Sometimes only a minute or two apart and sometimes 20 minutes apart so I really had no clue what to do. But around 10 or so Sunday evening I told my husband I couldn’t stand it anymore and we need to go in. I was sure that I had to have dilated atleast to 4cm if I was feeling like this. So I went in and i was 4cm!!! The nurse said I got to stay to have my baby❤️❤️ so she gives me my IV which I needed since I tested positive for group b and also gave me a pain medicine which she called the tequila IV. It didn’t take any of my pain away, it just made me feel really happy. Then once I got into the birthing room I got an epidural. Which I was so nervous to get because I’ve read so many stories and people saying how painful it is. It was fine I felt a little pinch and that was it, and after that no more contraction pain finally! The nurse comes back in like 6 hours later and tells me I haven’t had any contractions at all since my epidural and I’m like seriously??? So I got petocin and apparently the contractions started coming in steady. I wouldn’t know since I couldn’t feel anything. Actually near the end close to when I began pushing every now and then I would feel a small part of the contraction pain. And then around 8-9 I started feeling like baby was gonna come out it hurt so bad and I was ringing the nurse and trying to figure out why I could feel what I was feeling. My nurse made me wait until 10am to push because my delivering doctor was doing a c-section in the OR. So I finally got to push which wasn’t as bad as I would have imagined, and an hour an 15 minutes later my beautiful daughter was born. Scarlett was born at 11:31 on Monday October 23rd. She weighed 7lbs 2oz and measured 18 inches long. She truly is my sunshine and I could never have imagined I would feel love like this towards someone. This first week has been challenging and hard, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Happy one week to my beautiful baby girl ♥️