For those interested in a few details, here's how things went. Carrie started having regular mild contractions around 6pm last night. I got 'the call' at work and headed home. The contractions came every 5-7 minutes and lasted most of the night (these were accompanied by tons of peeing). Around 3 am, we got tired of waiting for things to progress, so Carrie went on a walk with Cheerio. I think he thought that was pretty cool. That helped to bring on more frequent contractions that finally hit the 3-4 minute interval.
Around 5 am, Carrie called the doctor and they told her to come in. Our neighbor kindly agreed to come to stay with Nicholas. Just when we arrived at the nurse triage station, Carrie's water broke. That was interesting, since they asked if it had broken, and she said it just had. They clarified, "so what, 30 minutes ago, an hour ago etc?" She was like, "no just now." They admitted her to the hospital and got us set up in a delivery room. She was just a little over 1 cm dilated at this point.
Over the next 4 hours not much changed, just those same mild contractions. At some points they even slowed down. The midwife finally sent her on a walk for an hour. She lasted 45 min. That helped to move things along. If it hadn't, they were going to recommend starting petocin. When the midwife checked next she was 4 cm, and she noticed one water bag that hadn't broken yet. After a short while, she suggested breaking it. That really moved things along, although we didn't really realize it. Things got a little blurred for me at this point, but she got the epidural in, endured continuing contractions, most of which weren't too painful. After a couple more hours, we thought not much progress had been made, but were surprised when they reported she was nearly to that magic 10 cm dilated. They let her rest for about an hour, as the epidural was in full effect. Then she started the pushing. It took about 30 min for Ryan to come out. All went pretty smoothly.
Carrie was really proud to have done it, especially since it was a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean). Since it was a normal delivery, it was nice that they immediately put Ryan on Carrie's chest to clean him and cut the cord. I got to do that - at least that made me feel somewhat useful. Also, I wasn't ever woozy, mostly I just watched in awe. They wouldn't let me watch the epidural, though, saying they've had too many men faint on them. The whole thing is a miracle, and I'll never forget watching him come out. I thought it was nice for him to immediately start bonding with Carrie. The name came down to wire. We had liked Ryan during most of the pregnancy, but nearly changed our minds to our 2nd choice, Andrew, during the last week. In the end, we both felt like it was going to be a Ryan, so Ryan it was.
