Cooper is here!! (Part One)

Born Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 1:09pm

7lbs, 15 oz

20.5 inches long

Tons of dark hair and absolutely perfect :)

I'm probably going to tell this story in more than one post. It's not really long, but I'm long winded and, obviously, don't have enough time in one sitting to write it all down.

The Saturday before Cooper was born, I started having some really bad back pain. I also started having what felt like cramps and thought (hoped!) that maybe I was going into labor. But I laid down for a little while and the cramping went away. The back pain did not. It was constant and lasted the rest of my pregnant days. It was weird and would start in my lower back and go all the way down my legs and into my feet. But I had experienced back pain of all sorts throughout pregnancy so I wasn't really sure what it was.

When I left work on Monday, the back pain was extremely bad. I wouldn't say excruciating, but I could barely walk around. After dinner, I took a nap and started feeling like I did on Saturday, with the cramping again. I thought that maybe I was having contractions but I didn't know so I just didn't even say anything to Lee. All day long I had been annoying him about going to this self serve frozen yogurt place, so after my nap, he was like "well are we going or not?!" He had no idea and I don't know why I didn't say something about how I was feeling. Anyway, we went to the fro yo place (Cherry Berry and so good, btw!) and I definitely started having regular contractions. I still didn't tell Lee until we got home, haha. But I still wasn't sure it this was IT so I had no idea what to do! So we sat around and pretended to watch tv and just didn't know what to do. Finally around 10 I decided that if this was the real thing than I wanted to go to sleep while I still could, so we went to bed.

Around 11:45 I woke up with intense regular contractions. I tried to go back to sleep, but after an hour went by, I realized I couldn't sleep anymore and got up and started timing them. They were about 4 minutes apart and lasting for about a minute. At that point I freaked out a little because they just seemed to have progressed a lot in just the couple hours I slept. (Before they were totally irregular, sometimes 8 minutes, sometimes 40 minutes, and the pain wasn't bad at all, I'd say a 3) I was supposed to go to the hospital when contractions were 5 minutes apart, but I still didn't know if we should go or not! haha. Around 2 I went in and woke up Lee to see if he thought we should go. Finally we decided that we would just go and see what they said. I, for some reason, was sure they would send us home.