Jonah Michael

Yep, I'm 2 months late with this post.... Let's get Jonah's birth on here!

Tuesday, June 20th, 2017.  We got to the hospital and I had not really progressed much overnight from my doctor stripping the membranes the day before.  They got the pitocin going shortly after we got there.  By around 10:00am I was starting to feel some small contractions so they ordered the epidural to get that started.  My doctor came in and checked me and both her and the nurses assumed that this would go fast since it was my third baby etc...."maybe we'll see a baby by noon!"...  Around 12:30 I was at 6 cm so obviously, not a noon baby.  The epidural definitely numbed up my lower half, I couldn't feel my legs.  But, I don't think it was quite right because I could still feel contractions - just not as intense but I could still definitely feel every single one of them.  I tried to up the dosage a few times but it didn't help - probably just made my legs more numb.  They came in to check me at 2:00pm and I was only at a 7 cm.  After that it progressed a bit quicker though.  Alittle before 4:00pm is when I was ready to start pushing.  I assume a few pushes and I'd see my baby.   Wrong.  After a few sets of pushing with nothing really happening, my doctor realized that baby was face up, meaning it'd be harder to push out.  Because of this they wanted to try to get baby's head to turn.  For me this meant them having me roll on my side, putting me sitting up, laying flat, sitting up, laying flat over and over again.  Because of the terrible heartburn I had the whole pregnancy, every time they would make me lay flat I immediately felt terrible.  One time I did end up throwing up from it.  After a good hour of pushing at this point, my doctors wanted me to get on my hands and knees as a way to get baby to turn.  Gosh, not a fun thing to try to do between contractions and when you have a big belly and a completely numb lower half.  My gosh.  They literally had to roll my legs over for me.  Miserable 10 minutes.  When they got me back to normal position though, they did think the baby had turned for us - thank God!  After this I was so tired and determined to get this baby out!  It didn't take much longer after that for us to hear the awesome words "It's a boy!"

Jonah Michael Ford was born at 6:15pm and weighed a whopping 9 lbs 5 oz and was 21.5 inches long.  Holy moly.  Way bigger than expected.  He was about 2 lbs and 2 inches more than Ashley and Bennett.  What a beautiful baby.  I honestly was not expecting a boy though - I was thinking girl pretty much the whole pregnancy.  Mike was guessing boy though and obviously Bennett was hoping for a brother too.

After he was born, Mike called my mom and told her to bring Bennett and Ashley to the hospital.  He didn't tell her on the phone what the baby was so they had to wait until they got there to find out they had a brother.  Ashley was alittle disappointed it was a boy but that only lasted a minute.

A little info about how we picked his name.  We had been trying for months to find the perfect boy and girl name.  I had a girl name we liked but the boy name was giving us lots of trouble.  A few weeks before he was born Mike told me just to pick what I wanted.  So...I picked Joey.  Well of course, he didn't like that!  (Then don't tell me to just pick what I want!)  For a week we were still trying to find one we could agree on and I was still determined to get Joey somehow.  So when I was looking in the Jo names I ran across Jonah and asked Mike if he liked that one and surprisingly we both agreed.  We still waited a short bit after he was born before we were 100% sure but I'm so in love with his name now and glad we agreed on it.  AND, I can still call him Joe/Joey if I want :-)

Look at his squished little cone-head.

So long.