Tweleve Months of June a year: June meets mommy and daddy

Wow, so its been over a year since I last posted. Who knew that having a full time job could be so demanding? I had been working full time for a biotechnology company working mostly in their quality control lab until recently. On Sept. 8th, 2011, Jeffery and I welcomed into the world our first daughter, June Melody Vahrenkamp. Since she now consumes our lives, my blog will be mostly focusing on her. Its now been eight weeks since she was born and I have been meaning to do this for awhile now, but I'd like to share my birth story with you. I'd like for her to someday be able to know what I was thinking and how I was feeling and every detail of the day she was born. So here it goes...So a little back story to start out, just so you know whats going on. In June, while I was home visiting my family, Jeff informed me that my car had been stolen from our apartment parking lot. It has been very stressful and frustrating trying to figure everything out with insurance and the police. Well on the morning of Sept. 8th Jeffery and I had an appointment with the District Attorney's Office to submit our paperwork for restitution from the guy that was caught with our car. After the meeting we decided that it would be a good time to skip work and get some things done such as grocery shopping which hadn't been done in awhile. Well we have a Piggly Wiggly two blocks from our house and so we like to walk there for the extra exercise and to keep us from overbuying. Just before we left I felt like maybe I had peed my pants or something. It hadn't happened before, but hey, I was 39 weeks pregnant and there is a first time for everything. I didn't really think anything of it and we continued our journey to the store around 1:00pm. We made it most of the way back before the same thing happened again and I became suspicious. By 4:00pm I was convinced that my water had broke and called the doctor's office to see what they wanted me to do. They asked me to come in and have the doctor on call, Dr. McKenzie, check to see how things were going. At this point, Jeffery and I were under the assumption that we would just be told to go home and wait it out until contractions start (I hadn't had any). We texted our friends to let them know that we may be late getting to small group and that they may have to do without the salad we had made. With Birmingham rush hour traffic we ended up getting to the doctor's office at about 5:00 and saw Dr. McKenzie at about 5:15. He took one look and knew my water had broken. He also checked to see if I had dilated at all. I was still barely at 1cm (same as at my appointment the day before). He looked a little confused, but proceeded to tell us that we wouldn't be leaving the hospital that night. He told us that we would see if I started labor on my own and if not, they would start pitocin in the morning to induce labor. Both Jeffery and I were quite upset about this and were ready to object. I had been planning on a natural labor since before I was pregnant and using pitocin would make that much harder. Pitocin makes the contractions much stronger and it can be more painful. Well, by the time we processed what might be happening, Dr. McKenzie decided to take a look with the ultrasound. The ultrasound confirmed what he had feared. Baby was breech. When babies are born, doctors want them to come out head first which means their head must be down. Breech means that the baby is head up and it can be very dangerous to deliver a baby feet first. My baby had been head down at my weekly appointment the morning before. The little stinker had flipped upside down in the past 24hours. There was only one solution considering my water had already broken. This really upset me because obviously there wouldn't be a natural birth with a c-section. I looked at Jeff hoping for him to tell Dr. McKenzie that he was wrong and that we wanted a natural birth with no surgery. Sadly, he did not come to my rescue. I shed a few tears when Dr. McKenzie asked to pray with us before the surgery. At 5:30, I was admitted to the hospital.

By 6:30, the paperwork was signed, my IV was in place, and I was ready for the surgery. They wheeled me into the operating room and gave me an epidural. I actually thought that getting the IV was worse than the epidural which was surprising to me. The epidural took effect almost immediately and I couldn't feel anything from the top of my belly down.

At 6:43, Jeff took a picture of himself in the recovery room before coming to meet me in the operating room and at 6:49 our beautiful daughter was born. Jeff announced that it was a girl (we had kept the gender a surprise) and that her name was June Melody Vahrenkamp.

This was the second time I cried that day. It was such an amazing feeling to finally meet that little bundle of joy I had been feeling for the past several months. It is such an indescribable feeling. I felt like it was more of a shock considering it all happened so fast and I never had that labor time for it to sink in that I was going to have a baby, but after talking to friends, I have found that it is just as shocking when you have a long labor to process everything. Its just crazy that at 5:30 I was told I would have a baby that night and by 6:49 I was meeting her. Everything happened so fast, but it was all very worth it. We love our little June Bug!