Nolan's birth story; what a tale it is. I'll start last spring...
Knowing Emerson was starting kindergarten sort of put me in a panic of sorts. Not a bad panic, more of just a sadness knowing that she was going to be starting school and those first 5 1/2 years had gone by so fast. I just wasn't ready to be done with the baby stage and even when we bought a car 2 years ago, I made sure it would fit a family of 5. It took some convincing to have a 3rd baby on Ryan's part but he got on board pretty quickly. I traveled with him to Chicago for a quick getaway the last week of May and thought I might be able to find out if I was pregnant. I hid a pregnancy test in my luggage and the second morning when I woke up I took the test and sure enough, I was pregnant! It was pretty cool to go about my day knowing that I got to tell Ryan the good news when he got back to the hotel from work. I was just out of the shower and getting ready when he came back. I had just left the test on the bathroom sink as I was curling my hair. It took him about 10 (long!) minutes for him to notice but he looked down and did about a triple take and said, "is that for real?!" We celebrated that night and talked about how different our lives were about to become...
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My due date was set for Thursday, February 6, 2014, Opening Ceremonies for the Winter Olympics. I remember watching them from our hospital room the week we were in the hospital with Easton so that seemed oddly familiar to me. My appointments were always on Thursdays (Ryan still read the Week by Week book to me every Thursday) and at my 39 week appointment Dr. Wegner told me I was dilated to a 3 and fully effaced so he'd be surprised to see me for the following appointment. I was exhausted, not sleeping well and just crabby. We made plans for Superbowl Sunday and went to church because Roan Corrie was being blessed and the Froese's were in town. After church the kids went swimming at the Froese's hotel and then we went to Jonathan and Amber's for the game. I remember telling Ryan that if I had to be home all day the next day alone to take care of Easton I'd be in trouble because I was so uncomfortable.
We went home and I started Downton Abbey and Ryan met Jared at 54th Street. I went to bed around 11:30 and Ryan came home around midnight and I had started feeling some cramping. He crawled in bed and I told him I thought I might be starting labor. We started timing my contractions which were 7 and 8 minutes apart for about an hour and a half. We just laid in bed sort of dozing with me telling him every time I felt the cramping. With Easton I felt like I waited too long and it took my mom too long to drive over so I went ahead and called her around 1:30 am. She came over and in the meantime my contractions got painful and closer together. Emerson woke up and crawled in our bed and I gave her lots of kisses and told her we were going to the hospital to have our baby. My mom got to our house and I don't think I even spoke to her I was so frantic, I knew this baby would come fast. We got to Centerpoint around 2:15 and parked at the ER. The lady sat me in a wheelchair and I sat (very uncomfortably) and had back to back contractions for a few minutes in the ER before a very sweet nurse came to get us. She took us to triage which I knew was useless because I was INDEED in labor! Just take me to a room! They checked me and I was dilated to an 8. I immediately panicked because I desperately wanted an epidural. They just kept me laying on the bed and wheeled me to a room. They got the IV going as I repeatedly asked for my epidural. By the grace of God, the anesthesiologist was ready to go and I got the epidural about a half hour later and was MUCH happier after that. Dr. Wegner came in after I was so much more comfortable and said, do you want me to break your water now? I said, can I just relax for a few minutes? I had had such fast and back to back contractions, I just wanted to relax for a bit. He said sure and before he was even out the door, my water broke.
My mom wasn't in the room for the girls' births- Ryan and I just wanted it to be us. For baby #3 we thought it might be cool for my mom to be in the room as well. It was something she had mentioned (a few times) that she'd love to be in the room. Since she was at the house with he girls, we had a plan that if I went into labor in the middle of the night (which of course I did) that she would call Uncle Howard and Aunt Junia to come sit at the house until she could come back and relieve them. My labor was moving so quickly I said to a nurse, my mom's going to miss this! The nurse said, OH! Your mom's in the waiting room! She ran to get her and my mom came in the room and I started pushing 15 minutes or so later. About 3 big pushes later we met our sweet baby BOY!!!! I remember looking to Ryan after seeing his large, um, testes. Ryan said, "it's a boy!!" I was shocked to say the least. I had just assumed we'd have another girl. There was a very sweet nurse who volunteered to take pictures of the delivery and we got some great ones that we wouldn't have had (some a bit R rated that won't make the blog.) Our sweet Nolan William Wood was born at 3:56 am (less than 2 hours after we got to the hospital!) and weighed 9 lbs. 15 oz. and was 21.75 inches long. The minute he was out the nurses were commenting about what a big boy he was. I remember just wanting to hold him. After they got him cleaned off I got to hold him and nurse him for the first time which he took to very well.
We knew for awhile that if we had another girl, her name would be Evelyn Margaret and a boy would be Cohen William. On the way TO the hospital IN BETWEEN contractions Ryan said, what if we did Nolan? We had always talked about Nolan for all 3 of our kids but Ryan wanted Nolan Ryan. I vetoed it. He was alive for about 4 hours with no name. Once we knew it was a boy we agreed that Nolan William sounded pretty great.
