We were released from the hospital last night. All three of us (how weird is that!) are pretty tired, but it felt soooo good to sleep in a real bed. I am feeling much better then I expected to at this point, so that is good. I can't beleive I have a little one sleeping next to me, it still all seems a bit surreal. It seems weird after all this time, to have a face to go with the name. I have added her website to the links on my journal, eventually we will be making a bunch of improvements on her site. I am still learning how to do it, so it may take some time.

So for the record, here is the short version of what happened. (No gross stuff, I promise.) I am going to start at last Tuesday. I went to my regular Dr. visit, and my blood pressure was still a bit high. She checked the baby, and we were almost 3cm dialated and 75% effaced, which was good progress. The baby looked fine, so the Dr. compromised with me and told me to come back on Thursday to check everything again. Thursday I went in and my pressure was...well...a bit high...(ok, it was really not good.) So the Dr. sent me to the hospital for monitering for the morning. (I might mention here that I had not eaten breakfast yet. Big mistake) I called Paul and met him in the parking lot, and in we went. That is the last of the outside world I saw for 3 days. So from 9:30 to 1:30 I was on moniters and not really doing much. At 1:30 they started the nasty induction drugs. After that, everything proceeded in a fairly normal labor process. The first few hours were very boring. We watched a baseball game and chatted. (And Jess, we were thinking about you, as the discovery channel kept showing ads for shark week. I know you would have hated that!) After things really started to kick in (maybe around 8pm.) I decided that pain killers were a good thing. One of the side effects of an epidural is that it lowers your blood pressure, so the Dr. and nurses were all encouraging me to do that. After that, their was very little pain, but I could still feel what was going on. Towards the end they brought in a mirror so that I could see everything. It was really cool. You feel a bit disconnected with the process with the epidural, so the mirror let me feel a bit more in touch with everything. And it was not very gross. So at 11:55pm little Jade was born. And two hours later, they finally let me eat. (It took another two hours to get all the post delivery stuff done.)

Side note here. Paul was really awesome. There were only 4 people in the delivery room, including me and Paul. So he got to play a very active role in the whole thing. He was very supportive and the Dr and nurses were really impressed with how calmly we both managed the whole process. We had been told that no one has a sense of humor during labor, Ha!

So now we are parents. I have to admit, it was kind of nice to have a full staff of nurses to help take care of her the first day. Paul and I only got about 3 hours of sleep the first night, because it was so late when we finally got to a room, almost 3am. And I had to get up every hour so the staff could take my blood pressure, or just take blood. And of course every couple hours we had to feed the baby! But on Friday night, we were able to sleep for 3 or 4 hours at a time, all night. That was great.

Now I must go. Its feeding time. (And yes, ChynaKatt was very correct, breastfeeding is hard work! and a bit painful too!)