The Koenigs Four : Welcome Baby Piper!!!

We had a big surprise to finish up the end of the year. Our little girl was born on the last day of the year - December 31st, 8 days early. She was 20 inches long and weighed 7lbs 2 oz. I am usually a very organized and prepared type of person but I procrastinated A LOT of our to-do list. Now that Piper is almost 6 weeks old we are starting to catch up. We are totally smitten by our little doll face. All 3 of us have a hard time putting her down. At our 20 week ultrasound we saw her profile and it looked exactly like Daniel's. Well, she came out looking just like him too! Now we have a little one that looks like each one of us.

We had a very positive experience with a successful VBAC (TOLAC) at UW hospital in Seattle even though it was a total of 33 hours of labor. Here is the timeline: We went in at 7am Sunday the 30th after I started feeling consistent contractions since 4 am. I was checked and disappointingly was only 1 cm and 70% effaced. Which is pretty much nothing. We reluctantly went back home but stopped by an AWESOME sub and crepe place called Sarducci's. Nutella is always the right answer when you are feeling down or frustrated. Contractions were still pretty consistent but apparently were not strong enough yet. At 10pm things got really serious. I started having crazy strong contractions that were 3 to 4 minutes apart. I wanted to try to labor at home as long as we could. My goal was to go back in at 7am ish so that we wouldn't be sent back home. At about 5am, my contractions started coupling, which means they were pretty much back to back! Poor Daniel scrambled as fast as he could to collect everything. We checked into the hospital and went up to the 5th floor. After having a very quick exam I was 8 cm dilated but my water was still intact. They broke my water and it seemed like I instantly dilated to a full 10cm. At about 11:30am on Monday the 31st, I started pushing. Piper was born at about 1:15pm. About an hour and a half post delivery, Daniel's family got to come and see us in the labor room. At that point, I could already feel that my recovery was going to be much better than with my c-section. There were a couple of unexpected minor trials that happened during labor that I thought I would mention. My c-section scar was really irritating during my final contractions (3 hours before she was delivered) and they were unable to keep the monitoring straps on my belly for her heart rate. Since they were having a hard time getting a consistent heart rate externally they tried to get one internally. She had so much hair that the sticky end of the monitor wouldn't attach to her head! On the 4th try the Dr accidentally got the sticky monitor tape stuck on the lip of my cervix! OUCH! I think that hurt worse then any of my contractions or her final delivery! The other problem that happened was that I broke my tailbone during the final steps of delivery because of my overly curled tailbone that is shaped like a "J". Its week 6 and I still can't sit in a upright position. I have been going to the chiropractor weekly and that has been helping immensely. Can't wait to be able to sit down like a normal person again though!

Some of the "little" things we appreciated from the staff birthing techniques were:

They let you eat whatever you want during labor as long as you don't have anesthetic. So you basically can eat and drink all the way up to the last 2 hours of labor.

Most importantly once your baby is born they do everything on the baby while in your arms and treats him/her like its your baby, not the hospitals.

They were very good at helping me move around to different positions which helped the labor move and also helped me to feel much better. There were several times it could have been easy to transfer to a c-section but the nurses and doctors were very informative and considerate of our birth plan.

We are a family of 4!