Introducing Lily…

I can’t believe its taken me so long to get this post written! On Monday 1st November I gave birth to my beautiful baby daughter Lily. She was born at 11.50am and weighed 6lb 10oz. We feel truly blessed to have her in our lives and its hard to imagine life without her!

On the Saturday I started having what I felt were contractions which were building in intensity and frequency. I had almost no sleep on Saturday night due to this pain but on Sunday morning they died down and I realised that this was not labour, just practice labour! Damn!!

So I convinced myself that I had days left to go and headed to bed early on Sunday night feeling fine.

At 12.30am I was woken by some really painful contractions and knew immediately that this was it. I decided to let the hubby sleep for a while and headed downstairs on my own. I used the TENS machine for some pain relief for a few hours.

By 4.30 I was really struggling with the pain and knew that we would need to head to the hospital soon. I woke the husband and we grabbed our bags and headed to the car. The car journey was awful – each corner and bump in the road was excruciating! When we arrived at the hospital I was assessed and was already 5cm dilated.

Over the next few hours the labour progressed until I was fully dilated at about 10am. By then I had moved onto gas and air for the pain which I found really helped.

At about 10.30 I started to push. This was the hardest part of the labour by far. Although the pain wasn’t as intense as the contractions had been, the pushing phase was physically draining and I really struggled to keep my energy levels up. The midwives were amazing, as was hubby, and at 11.50 I gave birth to a baby girl.

We immediately had skin to skin contact and decided to call her Lily, a name we had been thinking about for a few weeks. We spent a couple of hours just holding and cuddling her before being moved to the ward where we had some visitors and later spent the night.

We were allowed home at 3pm the following day and since then we have been in a bit of a spin! We have had visits from Grandparents, Aunties and friends. We have taken Lily for her first pub lunch (she slept through the whole event) and to the supermarket.

I have been breastfeeding Lily since she was born and am really enjoying it. I will write a separate post on this as I have a lot to say on the subject!

The hubby is back to work tomorrow so I will be caring for Lily on my own during the day. Wish me luck!