Our newest baby girl arrived 5 days early on Memorial Day, Monday, May 26th - and boy was it memorial! ;)
After several days of false alarms and lots of false labor, we finally decided on Monday morning that it was time to make our way to the hospital. By the time we arrived, though, contractions had stopped. So we decided to take a walk. We circled the hospital two times before the rain drove us inside. I still wasn't convinced I needed to be admitted, but wasn't ready to head home either, so we hung out in the waiting room for awhile, watching an episode of Star Trek.
Contractions started back up again and we decided to go ahead and check in. So I called my doctor to let her know we were at the hospital only to find out that she was off for the holiday and another doctor was covering her patients. Ah! I didn't want some strange doctor delivering our baby, so at that point, I was all about going home and seeing if we could wait it out one more day.
Since we were already at the hospital, though, we finally decided to go ahead and check in and see how things went. Since I wasn't in really painful labor, they put me in triage to monitor my contractions. If I have the times right, we had left home around 7am and were put under surveillance around 9am. By shortly after 10am my contractions had become very painful and VERY frequent so they checked me again, realized this was the real deal, and sent us to delivery.
And this little sweet girl arrived at 2:27pm!
She was face up, so she took a bit of work to get out :( Neither she nor I was happy about that!
But she was healthy as can be, so no complaints....
And big too! 8lbs 12 oz and 21 inches long!
Eve and Halle were super excited to meet their new sister!
And Grandma Smith was too!
Such a good helper already!
Grandma and James were able to come down later that day to meet Abigail:
And thankfully, they brought things to amuse Eve and Halle with (cause the girls were feeling somewhat cramped in the small hospital room with nothing to do....and it was not pleasant trying to keep them occupied and quiet).
Grandma Smith wasn't feeling well, so she wore the mask as a precaution - no fun for her, but I'm sure Abigail appreciated it.
There was no chance of Eve getting Abigail sick - she quickly found and became obsessed with the foaming hand sanitizer on the wall and put more on her hands every couple of minutes until we said no more!
Andrew stayed at the hospital with me and Abigail that first night and neither of us got much rest. Hospital nights are the worst! Between the baby waking up and two sets of nurses constantly coming in for something, we essentially got no sleep :(
The girls came back for another visit on Tuesday:
And we managed to take our first family picture!
My parents sent beautiful flowers (and the baby girl balloon picture with Halle above)!
And just like that, it was Wednesday and time for us to go home!
So tiny in that big seat!
Welcome to Abigail! And now the fun begins....
