Settling in at home - 1 week old!

We came home from the hospital on Monday afternoon and have enjoyed this week with family and taking time to settle in with our new little guy. He's doing really well, eating like a fiend, and becoming more alert every day. He sleeps almost all day and night, but is a little confused about day and night... last night he wanted to be awake from 2 AM - 6AM, then finally passed out and we had to wake him up to eat about 3.5 hours later. :)

He's already in size 1 diapers and doesn't fit any of his newborn clothes. Darn... some of them were really cute. I guess that's the way it works when you have a 10-lb baby, though.

Stephanie's mom was in town this week being an amazing help with cleaning, laundry, and food and Eric's family is in town also, splitting time between Mark & Sarah's and our place.

Eric will be off work next week also and we're open to visitors almost anytime, just give us a call! :)

Caleb 1 Week Pictures

He's HERE!!!

He finally decided to make his appearance yesterday! Caleb James Swanson was born at 7:31 PM at 10 lbs 1 oz and 23 1/2 in long. He is huge. Taking after his father, who was also 10 lbs 1 oz at birth. :)

He has a full head of hair and everyone is doing great, although a little tired after all the excitement. 18 hours of labor and everything went really well, especially given his size.

Pictures are available here on Picasa. Enjoy!

Caleb James - July 2010

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And for those of you who would like all the gory details, here's how it all went down:

At about 1:10 Saturday morning, we woke up to Stephanie's water breaking - he had to start the adventure with a bang, that's for sure. We called the midwives, who told us to go in to the hospital to make sure that his vitals and everything were still fine while we waited for contractions to start.

As many of you know, we were wanting to have as few interventions as possible, so we discussed at the hospital how long they would let us wait for contractions to start on their own before inducing labor with Pitocin. They started naturally getting stronger by about 2:30AM, so we were able to be admitted and wait for them to continue without intervention.

At about 10:00AM, Stephanie was only dilated to a 3 and the contractions were slowing down and getting further apart, so we decided to start inducing with Pitocin due to the risk of infection and exhaustion if things didn't progress with the water already broken. We decided to go ahead without an epidural still and see how it went with the Pitocin. At about 3:00PM, we decided to get an epidural when the Pitocin kicked up to 13 mL/hr. It was definitely the right choice - Stephanie was exhausted by this point and unable to rest because of the strength of the contractions and there was only about a minute between when one ended and the other started.

After getting some rest when the epidural finally kicked in around 3:30PM or so, things progressed really well. At about 7:00PM, Stephanie was fully dilated, feeling the urge to push, and a short 30 minutes later Caleb James made his appearance into the world at his enormous size of 10 lbs, 1 oz. We are incredibly excited and should be out of the hospital on Monday morning. Stephanie lost a good amount of blood, so we'll definitely be taking it pretty easy for awhile as we get adjusted to home with our new baby.

Love you all!

Stephanie

Due Week

And it's here... we're due this Thursday! Not that it necessarily means much... according to a report in the Kansas City Star last week, only 4% of babies are born on their due date.

However, at our last appointment with our midwife, based on my current symptoms she thinks he'll be born on this Friday or Saturday (16th or 17th). She said that with first-time moms, the baby is almost always born two weeks after he "drops," which happened when I had several regular contractions last Saturday. Also, first-time moms on average have their baby 3 days past the due date, so that's right on. We'll see how close she is. :)

We haven't gotten all of our maternity pictures back yet, but here's a link to the few that we do have. We should have the rest pretty soon.

Maternity Pictures

Keep checking back and we'll let you know when he decides to come!

Steph & Eric