Wow! Hard to believe that only a week ago I was posting about being 39 weeks pregnant, miserable, and ready to be done.  Little did I know that the clock was already ticking and it was the calm before the storm.

I’ve been letting the pictures speak the words that I didn’t have, but now that we are adjusting it’s easier to sit down and chat a little bit about how this all went down.

To start,  allow me to remind you all that I had been saying for weeks that this little man was going to be coming early.  Mom is always right.  I was scheduled to go in Monday morning for my c section but in my head thought that by Friday I would have everything done that needed to be done (doctors, last minute errands, laundry, etc).  Feeling rather accomplished on Thursday, Angel and I were sitting on the couch after putting Lucas to bed and I kept asking him what time it was so that I could loosely keep an eye on how far apart my contractions were to make sure they were only Braxton Hicks (they were, and at this point that was par for the course every day).  We went to bed that night, nothing out of the ordinary.

About 4am, I woke up with contractions, which was also par for the course at this point so I went back to sleep.  The third time that I woke up I realized that I should perhaps time them and to my surprise they were exactly 15 minutes apart.  Enter: concern.

I went downstairs to sit on the couch and watch TV while I continued to time them.  By 6am they were 8 minutes apart.  Enter: Worry.

When Angel’s alarm went off for work, I struggled up the stairs between contractions and told him “Yeah, you’re not going to work today.”  He got Lucas up for me and was feeding him breakfast when my contractions suddenly dropped to 6 minutes apart (the time the doctor told me to go straight to labor and delivery).  I started calling friends to come get Lucas.  Enter: panic.

The contractions went back to 7 minutes so I went upstairs to get in the shower quickly and see if the warm water would calm them down.  I’m sitting down drying my hair and Angel comes up the stairs “Do you really think we’ll have to go to the hospital?” he asks me.  To which I reply “I think my water just broke!”  Enter: extreme panic.

According to the doctor, if my water broke, I needed to be in labor and delivery at the hospital within the hour.  I hurried to throw a few things in a bag, call my friend to wake her up so we could drop off Lucas on the way.  We threw things in the car as quickly as we could, ran down the street to drop off Lucas (literally with a bag of diapers and a sippy cup of water and told her “I’m sorry, we’ll call when we know more”), and flew to the hospital.  Checked into labor and delivery where they quickly confirmed that it was my water, and they were prepping me for a c section, which would take about 45 minutes.  Here come 4 nurses who are all setting me up with IVs, asking me questions, doing paperwork, etc.  I started sobbing all over again, having never had the time to take a breath and process what was going on.  My water broke at 9:30am, and at 11:58am, Joshua Nicolas Rivas was born into the world:

 

and put into my arms:

It was that fast.

A few hours in recovery waiting for me to regain the ability to feel and move my legs (while we surprised folks with a “so guess what we did this morning?” message), and Joshua and I made it upstairs into a regular room.  Angel went to go pick up Lucas and bring him to meet his brother while I enjoyed the morphine on a push button every 8 minutes.  My only complaint about it is that it made me sooo sooo incredibly tired that I literally couldn’t keep my eyes open when paired with the fact that I woke up at 4am and JUST HAD A BABY.  So I dozed in and out for the rest of the day while my boys met each other for the first time:

Angel had to go home at night to put Lucas to bed and let the dog out, and I stayed in the hospital with the amazing nurses to take care of the smallest of our clan and myself.  A few days of this with Lucas spending the day with us in my hospital room and nights at home and an occasional break with friends in the area, Angel was on his way to get my parents from the airport while I was working on the discharge paperwork to go home.

Now we’re working on a new normal.  Lucas loves his brother, who is a champion sleeper and eater.  So far, if I feed him when we go to sleep around 11, he wakes up once around 5am and then again around 9am.  We’ve made it out of the house a few times even, and Lucas is doing as well as you would expect a 2 year old who just got his mom’s attention cut in half to do.  Today he seems pretty desperate for my attention, but he’s so in love with his grandparents being here that it’s been easy to keep him occupied.  He may be giving them a run for their money though, because this afternoon I caught them both sleeping on the couch while I could hear Lucas playing with toys in his room during “nap” time.  They were successful in wearing someone out, just maybe not who they intended.

Cheers to my life full of boys!