Elizabeth Anne – July 18th, 2005

Libby

I have to say that my pregnancy with Libby was the worst of the bunch. Only really at the end though. This story is slightly longer than the others, but I feel that the reader must also experience the events leading up to Libby's birth.

We decided that it was time for us to move out of our first house. Steve was offered a transfer, and so we took the opportunity to move out of the city. We sold our house and had to be out by the end of April. We found an apartment to live in until our new house was built in August.

The summer seemed to be quite hot, and life in the apartment was not so great. We were wrought with all sorts of sickness and distress.

Even though Jonathon only attended Kindergarten for 1 month in the new place, he did manage to bring home pink eye for everyone to share. Even Steve and I had to go through the annoyance of waking up with our eyes glued shut. It was the worst case I’ve ever had, and it seemed to last forever.

Once we got over that, we seemed to have contracted some sort of hanta virus stomach flu – again it went through all of us. However, Jonathon and I could not get rid of it – maybe we just kept giving it to each other. I don’t know, but it was bad. I have never spent so much time in the bathroom. The whole ordeal was made worse by the fact that I was 8 months pregnant. At one point in time, I made Steve take me to the hospital, because I could not stop wreching.

Sometime during the summer the sprinkler system in the complex flooded our apartment, so we had to live with that smell of damp sour carpet that just wont dry. I worried about mold growing in the walls, but tried not to think about it.

Needless to say, we could not wait until our house was done. One day the builder’s realtor called and asked if we might like to have our house done sooner. As soon as I verified that we could get out of the apartment lease and round up the necessary funds, I called them back and said YES!

Unfortunately, the message did not get passed on to the builder, and so for a month, our house just sat there not getting worked on. It was very frustrating. We finally got the mess figured out, but they were not sure if the house would be done by the time the baby came. We were not sure what to do - I just knew that I could not bring a baby back to that apartment.

I was scheduled to be induced on the 18th of July. The builder let us move in on the 17th – even though the final inspection had not been done.

So on the morning of the 18th, we headed down to Salt Lake to be induced. My doctor was running late, and so the nurses just went ahead and got things started. I got my Happy Epidural, and things seemed to be progressing smoothly.

My doctor finally got to her office, but was running behind and needed to see some patients before she came to check on me. So the nurses just kept things moving along, but never checked me. After about 3 hours, the nurse gave up on the doctor and decided to see how things were going. Not well, because sometime during the morning the baby turned and was now breech.

Uh oh – stop everything! They had to actually give me medicine to stop the labor. My doctor finally showed up and gave us our options.

C-Section or turn the baby? You would think that it would be a simple choice to just turn the baby, but there were several reasons that tuning the baby might turn into an emergency C-Section.

So Steve made a few calls, and got one of his friends from work to come and they gave me a blessing. We decided that we should do what the doctor thought was best and put our trust in the Lord.

The doctor said that she felt confident that she could turn the baby without any problems. It was definitely quite an experience. She had to have another doctor come and help. One doctor pushed the baby’s head down, and the other doctor pushed her bottom up. They were both pretty much on top of me pressing down.

Thank goodness for the Happy Epidural! There was so much pressure, I was sure that they were going to hurt her somehow.

I’m not sure if there was actually a sound, or if I just imagined it, but when she was turned the right way, her head just sort of suctioned right down into the birth canal and I was ready to go.

They got everything started up again and a couple of hours later we had a new baby girl.

For some reason I have also had a hard time finding pictures of Libby – maybe it’s an every other child thing.

She was born at 5:54pm
She was 7lbs 1oz
19-1/2 inches long.

We named her Elizabeth Anne

We started calling her Libby because it was difficult for Hannah
to say Elizabeth – she would always call her Libbybif.

So Libby stuck and it’s the perfect name for her.