Elise here.  Lydia Grace is sleeping right now and amazingly there aren’t any nurses in my room, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a post about our newest family member and her arrival into the world.

First off, I’d like to say thanks for all the prayers and words of encouragement.  It was fun to read your comments on the blog while we were waiting for labor to progress yesterday.  Speaking of labor, can I just say how much easier it was the second time around?!!?!  I thought maybe I would try to do this one without drugs, but then after experiencing real contractions without an epidural for the first time, I decided that it was better for everyone involved if I just got the epidural after all.  It did slow things down, which I was afraid it might, but then with a little pitocin things got moving again.  At 1:08 they told me I could start pushing.  They said they thought she’d come quickly.  I said, “The last one took me three hours to push out.  I’ll believe it when I see it.”  At 1:15 our baby girl arrived in the world.  Amazing!

For how much I was dreading labor, I have to say, it really wasn’t that bad the second time.  And now I feel great!  I’m actually more comfortable and mobile than I was at the end of my pregnancy!  If it weren’t for the room service and free night time babysitting, I think I’d just check out of the hospital now.

But I know none of you stopped by today to hear about the delicious (or not) hospital food.  You want to see baby pictures.  Here’s one I took this morning:

Lydia has been a real champ.  She’s feeding like a pro and sleeping great too.  Our night did start out a little rough because she kept spitting up amniotic fluid and then choking.  I was so afraid to fall asleep because I knew that after having been up for 40 hours straight, I was going to really be out once I did.  After the fourth or fifth time getting up to help Lydia spit out the fluid, I sent her to the nursery so that she would be safe and I could get some rest.  The nurses brought her back in the middle of the night so I could wake her up to feed her (which I didn’t do).  Then we both slept until 5:30am when I did finally decide to wake her up so that I could to get some food into her stomach.

We had a relaxing morning together and then Peter and Alethea came by so we could spend some time as a family getting to know each other.  Alethea likes ‘the baby’ and only seemed to get jealous of her when I was feeding Lydia.  However, even wanting to be near her little sister hasn’t cured Alethea of her dislike of getting her picture taken:

Well, my lunch is here, so I’m going to eat, but I’ll write again (and post more pictures!) when I get a chance.  If Lydia keeps sleeping so well, it might even be tonight!