Luke Joshua Seaver

It's been a long time coming, but finally, here is the story of Luke.

I had been pretty miserable the last few weeks of my pregnancy. I had horrible sciatic pain and often had days when I couldn't stand or walk. We were all pretty sick of it. At my 32 week ultrasound the sonographer (sp??) commented on how big he was. Really we're only talking 8 pounds, but apparently that's big. Anyway, I had been begging my doctors to please induce me early, but the rules are no earlier than 39 weeks except for medical emergencies. I was hoping a big baby and sciatica was a good medical emergency, but no such luck. I'd also been having really bad contractions. In fact, 3 times I told Jeremiah I was sure this was the day, but all 3 times, the contractions eventually stopped.

On Friday the 3rd I had my doctors appointment. I was 39 weeks and 2 1/2 cm dialated and he said I could go ahead a be induced on Monday. So we start making preparations including looking for flights for my mom. We had almost booked one when we got a call from the nurse that the hospital was booked solid and I couldn't go it until Wednesday and even then, if they were super busy, I'd be bumped. Talk about a bummer.

We decided to go ahead and fly my mom in Tuesday night and hope I didn't get bumped. Tuesday about 3pm I started with contractions again, but since I'd already had 3 false starts, I wasn't too worried. They were pretty intense contrations, but 15-20 minutes apart. I cooked dinner and while we ate, the contractions subsided and I figured we were done. We got in the car to drive the 40 minutes to the airport. We had been on the freeway about 5 minutes when the contractions started up again. Jeremiah was slightly worried. He was not interested in delivering his baby on the side of the road and asked if we should turn around. I was sure it was nothing so I told him to keep going, but I would start keeping track of the contrations (as it turns out, there's an app for that). The contractions grew more intense and closer together, requiring some deep breathing and by the time we got to the airport, I was sure we were having this baby that night. We picked up my mom and I didn't want to worry her, but she noticed I was checking my phone often so I confessed that we would probably be heading to the hospital sometime that night.  The contractions were 2-4 minutes apart and some even less than 2 minutes.  When we got home, we put the boys in their pajamas, gave my mom some quick intructions and we were off to the hospital.

We got to the hospital about 8:30, and I was dilated to a 4.  They hooked me up to my antibiotics and called the anesthesiologist so I got my epidural pretty quickly.  At midnight I was a 5 1/2 and they decided to break my water.  I warned them that once they broke my water that baby would arrive in an hour.  It's happened with all the other three.  They wanted me to have one more bag of antibiotics, but I couldn't start another bag until 1.  Do the math, that wasn't going to work, but they broke my water anyway.  And sure enough, at 12:45 the nurse came in and said they could see head compressions on whatever machine they were using and that baby was ready to come.  The doctor showed up, I pushed three times and Luke showed up at 12:50 a.m.

He weighed 8lbs, 6 oz, and 20 inches long.

He swallowed some meconium before birth, so we had NICU nurses at delivery and he was assigned a NICU nurse during our stay at the hospital, although he was not actually kept in the NICU.  His lungs were fine and he passed all his breathing tests.  But while he slept he kept making this sighing sound.  Everytime a nurse heard him do it, they would whisk him out of the room for another test.  I kept telling them that like his brothers, he is just a noisy baby, but they insisted he needed to be tested, but he always passed the test.  They almost kept us another day to keep an eye on him but he passed all the tests and managed to be quiet long enough for us to be discharged, and as soon as we got home, he started up again.