More of the Story...

Anyways it was getting near the end of school, I was pregnant, huge, and miserable. I was so ready to be away from school and the kids that I prayed every day this would be the day our baby boy would make his entrance. Everyone talks about the first few weeks of pregnancy being so hard but no one tells you how bad the last few weeks are.

Well it was a Wednesday night and Steven had church so I watered my whole yard and then went to sleep. I was planning on going to our end of the year field trip with my school kids the next day. (Steven was planning on going too, incase anything happened with me.) About 1 am I woke up and felt really hot and sweaty. I asked Steven to feel under me because I thought my water had broke. Well as it turns out it hadn't...we had just put a new plastic water-proof mattress cover on our mattress and it was just making me sweat really bad. So with that I turned over and went back to sleep. Exactly 2 hours later at 3 am I woke up with the strangest feeling. I woke Steven up and said, "Steven I think my water just broke!" With that announcement he popped straight up out of bed. I said its ok, we can take our time I feel fine. So we did. We called the doc and he said to go ahead and go to the hospital. We showered and got a few things together and at 4 am we were headed to Forsyth. The ride to the hospital was surreal...knowing that we would eventually have a child in our arms was crazy.

I had not actually started contracting very badly so I was able to relax and walk in the hospital calmly (more so than Steven). We called our parents and announced the news that we were going to go have our baby and they were both ecstatic. Well, we checked into LDR and I was put in triage for forever since I was not actively contracting. Finally after five boring hours and some prodding with nurses I was put into a nice LDR suite. At Forsyth they have recently re-done the LDR rooms and they are really nice and huge. About 9:15 am they came and checked me and decided to start me on Petocin because I really was not in labor. Petocin is a drug that helps induce labor and make your body contract. I had thought I would try to be drug free and forego the epidural, however they say that Petocin makes your contractions worse. So I had an epidural at about 3:30 that afternoon because my contractions were getting really intense. Fortunately the Petocin was able to help my body relax enough and it actually sped up my dialation! However it also made Brayden's heart rate drop once I was about 8 cm. I remember the machine thing started beeping a nurse popped in immediately. She looked at what was going on and then explained it to me. When she left I started crying and said that I just wanted this baby out now. They ended up taking me off of petocin for a hour or so to monitor Bray. Then the doctors decided they had to put me back on it to help my labor get to the last stage. Once I was about nine cm, they came in and checked me and said that Brayden had turned and he was facing the wall instead of down. I was really upset at this point. Here I had labored to 9 cm and I thought I was going to end of having a C-section. I remember praying for God to turn that baby and get him here. Finally around 8:30 on Thursday night I suddenly felt this overwhelming urge to push. Steven's mom and my mom were in the room and Steven looked over to them and said "See ya when the baby gets here." They left and I pushed for 1 hour and 7 minutes and Brayden was born at 9:47 pm! He weighed in at 7lbs. 1 oz. and 21 inches long. Here are some pics of the fresh Brayden Ackley.



Me feeling pretty good and texting friends and family to update them.





Brayden a little more cleaned up.

First Born hugs!




N......C.....State. NC STATE!



Getting him warm in the hospital.



Daddy dressing Bray to go home!



Bray and mommy ready to go home!

7 weeks already!

Whew, this last seven weeks have flown by yet been very slow and tiring. I just now have had the time to sit down and write and reflect on these past two months....so lets start from the end of school.

I was measuring pretty large, actually I was measuring two weeks over what I should have been which was ok but the doctors wanted to check things out. So I had another ultrasound because they thought baby Bray was extra huge. What ended up being the case was that he was normal size when they measured me but I had a whole lot of extra amniotic fluid in there which was making me so big. They said everything looked ok but they would do anther ultrasound in a week. (At this point I was about 38 weeks along.) In the meantime I talked to one of my med school friends (Jenn Wilson) and told her of my latest pregnancy news. Around the same time Casey did some research on extra amniotic fluid in the womb and the results did not look so good. Jenn also did not tell me of all the problems associated with this. Casey was quite worried and Jenn told me after Bray arrived safely of all the horrible conditions such as the intestine's of the baby developing outside of his abdomen.

Here are a couple pictures of how huge I was. Things that were said to me a million of times by all sorts of different people..."Are you sure you are not having twins"...."You still have not had that Baby"...."You look like you are going to POP!" Wow, being a huge pregnant person taught me SO many things NOT to say to a pregnant woman. Advice to all: Just say wow you look so great or cute, don't comment of her size! :-)




I will have to finish my entry later because Bray is waking up and it is time to eat!