She loves to bathe

Amy really loves bathing! She doesn't like to be undressed and she doesn't like to get out the bath, though. Very understandable :-)

Bathing

Dressed and warm again
Great grandma and great aunt
Very satisfied

Guillaume

The first night

It's 8 o'clock now, so yes, we survived the first night ;-) We should feed Amy every three hours, but we didn't need to set alarms. Amy appeared to have her own :-). Yesterday evening breast feeding worked, miraculously, but we weren't able to reproduce it during the night. So we tried every three hours and then Chenée extracted some milk which we fed with a table spoon. Amy likes it :-) She slept fine during the night. At one point she had some cramps, but after laying on my tummy for 15 minutes, she was fine again.

Stating the obvious: having this little miracle is amazing...

Guillaume

Amy

Yesterday (the 18th) Aimée Noëlle was born at 16:49. She's perfect :-D We call her Amy.

Short summary: They tried to induce labor on Monday and Tuesday. Monday failed and Tuesday seemed to fail, however, at 1.00 her water broke, after which "real" contractions started. At 8.00 she had 2 cm dilation, after which the doctor gave 2 more hours to gain 2 more cm. She gained 1 cm, so the doctor wanted to make an infusion to increase the contractions. But because contractions already hurt as much as Chenée could take, she first got an epidural to take away the pain (preparing her, getting her downstairs, connecting her to all the monitors, connecting the baby to the monitors, applying it, waiting for it to take effect and reinstalling her upstairs again took a few hours). This also enabled us to get some sleep.

The infusion worked like a charm. Three hours later we woke up 'cause she got the urge to push. 30 minutes later the doctor arrived, who confirmed full dilation and allowed Chenée to give in to the urge. 35 minutes later Amy was born in perfect health.

I'll try to give some updates, but we've got very little spare time now. For now: some pictures :)

Weather in Eindhoven

Time

Just born

Weight

Sleepy

Status update

This morning they applied the gel which did pretty much nothing. The dose she got at noon started doing something at 16:00. Contractions are getting painful now, but they are not so strong that they can open the uturus. There are two possibilities: they do get strong enough, in which case delivery will probably take place during the night, or -stating the obvious- they do not.

They won't be able to reapply the gel tomorrow, so that would be a day of rest. This morning they said she'd have to go home for a day, but fortunately she doesn't. They'll keep her here until the baby is born. (Taking her home would be irresponsible, so I wouldn't have done it anyway). There are no spare beds in the hospital, so tonight I'll have to go home.

Then Thursday they'll reapply the gel two times and again on Friday if necessary. If by then still nothing happened, they'll use the "blunt axe" (Dutch): they will force labor even if the body isn't ready. This has a considerable higher chance of resulting into c-section, which is a risk they're not willing to take at this point.

For more updates, see "Guillaume's twitter" on the left (press F5 to refresh), twitter itself (ghanique) or facebook.

Guillaume

Check up - almost there

This morning we had a check up. As always everything was fine.
Last Monday I had contractions and just when they became bad enough to go to the hospital... it stopped. So this morning the doctor checked if I was dilated and there is a start: 1 cm. It's not enough to induce labor yet, but they did another procedure to get the contractions to start again to speed up the dilating process. If nothing happens on it's own this weekend, they will induce labor on Monday. So we're almost there...