After Nya and Roman's births, I typed out their "birth stories" so that I could then print it and put it in their baby books…so that I never forget the details. So I'll do the same for our third babe :)
As with my other two, I was in PEI at my parents waiting for this wee one to be born. Nya was 10 days early, and Roman was 3 days late, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this one! But I was content waiting, because we still had to pick out a name for our tiny doll! Jamie liked Tatum, Remi, and Zoe…I liked Ruby, Mae, and Zoe.
I was due on October 7th, and that date came and went. We had our induction date set for the 14th, which is actually our anniversary, but I very much wanted it to happen naturally…plus I wanted She-who-was-not-yet-named to have her "own" day! As it happened, my water started breaking at about 2:00am on the morning of Monday, October 12th. After about an hour of trying to decide if we should head in to the hospital or wait for a bit (we were about an hour's drive from Summerside hospital), we finally packed up the van with our go-bags, camera, and giant birthing ball, and took off! We arrived at the hospital, where I was assessed, and told I was a little over 4cm. Since I still wasn't having regular or painful contractions (I had been having uncomfortable, but not painful, tightenings for about 6 weeks, and that day was no different), I spent the next 7-8 hours hanging out in my room, bouncing on a birthing ball, and walking the hallways (I tried to convince Jamie to run up and down the stairs with me. He said no). At 1:00pm, I was checked again and hadn't progressed, so I was told I'd be induced soon if I STILL hadn't progressed. By 1:30pm, I had an epidural and FINALLY started having more regular contractions, thankfully without having to be induced.
With my last birth, I had the epidural at about 8.5cm, so I basically felt everything except the pushing. For Zoe, it was sort of the opposite: I got the epidural earlier (4-5cm), but started feeling a lot of pain again a couple hours later, at 6-7cm. After waiting all day in the hospital and staying at about 4cm, it only ended up taking about 30 minutes to go from 6cm-10cm. By that point I was feeling a lot, both pressure and pain, so I was really, really hoping pushing would be quick (like with Roman's 8-minutes-of-pushing!) and as it turned out it was: I was checked and was 10cm, and started pushing at 5:49pm, and Zoe was born at 5:58pm! (This puts my grand total of "time spent pushing", for all three kids, at 45 minutes. I'm totally ok with this…)
Apparently because of Nya's "name story", I'm supposed to have a really great story about how Roman and Zoe got their names, too. I don't. They were just names that we loved! While I was doing skin-to-skin with Zoe, I looked at her and I just couldn't think of any of the other names on our lists! So she is Zoe Grace. Grace was the middle name we had picked out even before we were pregnant with Nya: we loved "Harper Grace" (but then moved to Bell Island, NFLD, and realized that "HARBOUR Grace" was a community right across the bay from Bell Island and then it just would've felt weird! Haha).
So this is the story of how Baby Hawk 3.0 entered the world. She was very purple, and very average-sized at 8lbs 2oz, and now, at 11 days old, is very sweet and sleepy and snuggly. And it's pretty hard to believe that we somehow thought our family was finished, before she was here with us.