Baby Aspen

Aspen was born three and a half weeks ago, but time just seems to be flying by because it doesn't feel like it was that long ago.  She was born on October 25 at 3:58pm, and she was 5 lbs. 10.8 oz and 19 inches long.  I don't know why they didn't just round up or down and say 11 or 10 oz., but they didn't.  So now I feel like I have to say the .8, and it seems a little too specific but oh well.  Even though I was induced ten days early, I was surprised that she was that small.  I thought that she would be at least six pounds since Bristol was 6 lbs. 5.5 oz. and she was two weeks early.  Even the newborn size diapers were big on Aspen, and when we brought her home, all of her smallest clothes were huge on her.  I can tell that she's grown because now the diapers fit her just right and she fills out her clothes better.

The delivery went well.  I was actually a little nervous about being induced especially since I was only dilated to two the day of the induction.  I was worried that I would be in pain longer, but it went better than I expected.  We arrived at the hospital at 7:30am, and they started me on antibiotics.  This time around I had group B strep (which is part of the reason for my induction) so I had to have antibiotics so it wouldn't be passed on to the baby.  Since my labors are usually so fast, I wasn't even induced until 11:30am.  They wanted to make sure that I had the first round of the antibiotics (which takes about four hours to administer) before I was even in labor.  So for those four hours, we didn't do much.  The nurse took care of a whole bunch of administrative stuff with me, and then I napped a little.  Trent read, surfed the internet on his iPod, and went and ate lunch.  It was nice to have that time to nap and relax before labor.  Then at 11:30am, the doctor broke my water and they started a little pitocin.  For the next two hours, I had contractions, but they didn't hurt at all.  Sometimes I wasn't even sure if I was having one or not.  Then they started to hurt a little but just barely.  That lasted for an hour, and then all of the sudden at about 3pm they started hurting a lot more.  The nurse checked me, and I was dilated to a 4.5.  She checked me again at 3:30pm, and I was a 7 so she turned the pitocin off and called my doctor.  The doctor was there in fifteen or twenty minutes, and they quickly got the bed and everything else ready.  By that time, I was at ten.  The doctor told me to push whenever I was ready.  I was ready right then, and Aspen was out in just a couple of minutes.  So I was really only in pain for about an hour.  I just wonder how fast labor would have been, or at least the painful part of it, if I wasn't induced and went into labor on my own.  I am glad that I was induced, though, because I was able to have the baby in Tucson, and we were able to know when Trent's mom should come to help us.

Oh yeah, Aspen's middle name is Beverly.  Trent't mother's mother was named Beverly, and her birthday was also October 25.  She was killed in a plane crash when Gayle was a young adult so Trent never met her.  We thought that this would be a nice memorial of her.