Baby on board

Hi everyone. I just wanted to announce the birth of the newest addition of our family. Gretchen Kristine Miller was born on Monday, July 28th at 11:02 am. She was a week earlier than planned but we welcomed her with open arms.

My contractions started Sunday night about 1/2 hour apart, then progressed through the night. At 5am on Monday they were 8 minutes apart. We called my doctor and since I had a c-section scheduled for the next week, she told me to go in right away to be checked. We made all then necessary phone calls to family and eventually made our way to the hospital. It turns out the contractions were not laboring contractions (although they felt pretty painful for me) but between her heart rate deceleration and the fact that I had a section scheduled anyway, the doctors decided to go ahead and perform the surgery so I wouldn't have to go through all that just to come back again the next morning.

Gretchen was 5lbs 9 oz, just one ounce lighter than Tyler was, and 18 inches long. Tyler was 19 1/2, so she doesn't look as scrawny as he did. She's still pretty tiny though.

This whole experience is amazing. To think that she was in my belly two days ago, and now she's here. And to think that my body has known how to take care of this little baby for the last nine months and even now that she's here. God certainly knew what he was doing when he created life.

Tyler seems to love his little sister so far. There are some adorable pictures of them together floating around (if you took one, email me!) Everything is well and we should be coming home from the hospital tomorrow. The only access I have to pictures right now was my cell phone, so that's where the one above came from. When we get home I'm sure we'll be sending out a nice montage of pictures. Stay tuned!

Waiting and working

Just over three weeks to go, at the longest. We still have a lot of work to do, getting things ready, but the list is getting smaller. Tyler is in his "big boy room" now and we're washing all the baby clothes and blankets and stuff. My hospital bag is packed and in the car, just in case.

With the average temperatures being in the mid 80's or higher, I'm definitely starting to feel majorly pregnant. My feet are swelling just about everyday. Not a ton, like I've heard about, but they hurt before I even leave the house for work now. My back has been bothering me a lot this past week. I sit almost 8 hours a day at work and everytime I get up I have to move pretty slowly in order to work the pain out of my tailbone/sciatic areas. It's quite humorous--I'm sure the guy that sits next to me laughs at the "show" every time. I've been trying to get up more often, but that doesn't seem to be helping either.

Other than back pain and feet swelling, I've been feeling pretty good. I've been having a considerable number of Braxton-Hicks contractions ("practice contractions" as they call them in pregnancy world). They're not doing anything except getting my body ready to go into labor. I could have them for weeks before anything happens. I thought Monday I was going into labor though. They were so often, I started timing them. One way to tell if they're real or not is if they are consistently apart from one another and if they start to intensify--neither of which were true. I had them anywhere from 15-25 minutes apart all day at work, but nothing consistent.

Work is going well. I've been training my replacement for about a month and a half now and she seems to be doing a great job. She'll be fine as soon as I'm gone and not her crutch anymore. I'm definitely looking forward to the 12 weeks at home and not working though. I saved all my vacation time in order to get paid for my time off and it's starting to take a toll, not having any days off of work. Soon.... :)

Well, I'm off to finish cleaning and getting baby stuff ready. Weekends are busy doing this, since I'm too exhausted on the weeknights to do much.