Charlotte is here! It took me a bit to get organized and write up a blog post, but I think I have a pretty good excuse.  So I went in to be induced on August 16 at 7am. I started progressing well and got an epidural at around 10am. We were both just hanging out and watching the contractions on the screen since I couldn’t feel them (epidurals rock!) and then Charlotte’s heart rate started dropping dramatically each time I had a contraction. The doctor was pretty concerned about it and tried a few things to get her out of distress, but none of them worked. I could see the writing on the wall in terms of a c-section being imminent. and the nurse started preparing me for the inevitable. I wasn’t happy about it, but I was obviously willing to do whatever was best for our daughter. The amount of people and chaos that ensued when the c-section decision was made was pretty overwhelming – there are definitely a lot of people involved. When it was all over it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected; my recovery was fairly quick, and I was up and about in no time. And we had our beautiful, perfect daughter as our prize! She weighed in at 7 lbs, 11 oz, and was 19.5 inches long. The past 2 weeks have been sort of a blur, but we are slowly working things out and figuring out ways to get more sleep. I posted some pictures from our hospital stay and will try to get some newer pictures up soon.

In the back of my mind, I always thought I would have given birth to this baby before August 10 arrived. I had no actual reason to think this; it just seemed like everyone I knew always delivered at least a little bit early. But now the date is here, and there are no signs of her coming any time soon. I realize it could all start happening very quickly, but now I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I will probably have to be induced.

If there’s a theory out there about something you can do to start labor, then believe me, I tried it this past weekend. The bottom line seems to be that nothing will really work until she’s ready to come out, and she seems to be plenty happy hanging out inside me right now. Matt says that she must be like me and doesn’t like change.

I’m at the point where it’s very fun (and easy) to freak out random strangers. All through my pregnancy I’ve gotten the standard, “Oh, when are you due?” comments from people I don’t know, who would smile politely when I would tell them August (or more often than not would tell me how sorry they were that I was due in the summer. It’s OK; we have air conditioning.) But now when I get to say, “Oh, I’m due today,” or pretty soon: “three days ago,” their reactions are priceless. Most people visibly recoil or move away from me in some way. I realize it’s subconscious, but it still cracks me up.

Hopefully my next post will be full of happy labor news. Until then, back to the pool I go.

Welcome! After seven years of posting an online gallery of all of our photos, we’ve decided to take it up a notch and add a blog section to our website. This came about partly because Matt took the time to significantly redesign our website (which was in need of an overhaul) and partly because we are adding on to our family next month and wanted a way to write about the changes which will be coming in our house in addition to posting photos. Our little girl is expected sometime around August 10, and we’ll do our best to keep this site updated with pictures.

In the meantime, please check out some of our photos from recent adventures. We’ve been hitting the beach fairly frequently since there probably aren’t going to be any end-of-summer beach trips in our future, and we also have lots of baby shower pictures and pictures from the Triangle Triathlon. It was a great race this year with all three brothers racing together for the first time! Matt finished 6 minutes faster than he did last year, and James won his age group. Mark finished his first triathlon ever, and everyone was proud of all three of them.

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