My Bradley

Has it really been three whole months since my last post? With everything going on, I've lost track of time. And while sometimes it seems like time is flying, like my baby boy is already 11 weeks old (!), other times it feels like the whole world has completely slowed down.

I truly have so much to fill you in on, I think I'm going to just take it one event at a time and try to catch-up. We'll see how this all works out.

So let's start with the beginning. What made my whole world get rearranged and turned upside down. The birth of my second baby boy, my Bradley.

My original due date, as you might remember, was February 22nd; however, thanks to my 11 week ultrasound where my little man was measuring a little bigger, they bumped my due date to February 16th. Silly doctors, though. Clearly February 22nd was right from the get-go, as that was the day my Bradley made his grand entrance.

It all started at 1230am on February 22nd, when I had my first contraction. Fortunately, I was able to fall back asleep until 130am, when I had my second contraction. The next contraction came at 215am, then 245am, then 255am, then 305am. With my contractions now 10 minutes apart I decided it was time to wake up Matt and fill him in. Then from 3am until about 6am my contractions continued at about 10 minutes apart, with me falling back to sleep in between them. By 7am my contractions were about 7 minutes apart so we started to make our way to the hospital.

That was the fun part. The part where I couldn't walk from the pain, the part where I was crying on the bathroom floor, the part where I was screaming in agony and already begging for an epidural (the same epidural I had convinced myself I would not have this time around, mind you). That was the part where my amazing husband carried me, both physically and emotionally. The part where he literally held me up. The part where he convinced me I was strong enough.

By 730am we arrived to the hospital. The timeline starts to really blur for me at this point, but once I made it to the delivery room and was examined, I was 9 cm dilated. Shortly after being examined, my water broke and a few pushes later, at 845am, my Bradley was here. He weighed 8 lbs and was 21 inches long and he was perfect. I had done it, I had given birth without any pain medication. It was physically the hardest thing I had ever done in my life, but it was so completely worth every painful minute.