to C or not to C...

today we are officially one month away from welcoming #4 into the world. it's hard to believe this pregnancy will be over in just four short weeks. i have thoroughly enjoyed this pregnancy...even those hard first 11 weeks which seem like a distant memory now.

some of you may be wondering why i'm so confident this baby will arrive on may 15th...well let me break it down for you.

i have c-sections.

ok, well maybe i didn't need to break anything down...

i know people are always curious why one would have a c-section so i thought i'd give you all a little bit of my history.

let's start with little miss high maintenance herself...

i was due with ryan on february 10, 2008. when that day came and went and my doctor saw absolutely zero progress in the labor department, we scheduled an induction for thursday february 14th.

happy valentine's day to me!

we were admitted around 1pm and thus began the long process of bringing our precious gal into the world. labor was pretty relaxing until about 5am when my dr came in to check on me. still no progress so she broke my water to see if that would get things moving. at this point the pitocin...which i hadn't really been feeling overnight...was cranked up pretty darn high.

needless to say i really started to feel those lovely contractions. around 1:00 i had made some slight progress...we're talking maybe 3cm's however the epidural i had just gotten was starting to make me sick. around 2:30 we had a talk with my doctor and that's when she opened the c-section discussion. i just wasn't progressing fast enough and she was worried it would be saturday before little miss stubborn would arrive.

dan and i agreed a c-section was the best option and ryan was brought into this world on friday feb 15th at 3:45pm.

my recovery wasn't bad at all...but come on, this was my 1st baby so I just laid around all day and let people wait on me.

man, why did I ever think one baby was hard? (because it was...i had no clue what i was doing!)

anyway...when we got pregnant with tiger lil, 8 months later, i brought up the possibility of a vbac early on in my pregnancy. i was interested in it but not gung-ho. I really just wanted to hear my doctor's views on the issue. i would say my doctor sways more to the conservative side so she wasn't all hugs and high fives about the idea.

that was ok with me, after all my body had just healed from a c-section 16 short months ago. so we scheduled lilly's birthday for the day before her due date.

i am sure had i pushed, my doctor would have been fine with me giving natural birth a try but to be honest the thought of having care for ryan all sorted out months before her sister arrived sounded pretty darn nice.

once we got pregnant with may there was no discussion. another c was scheduled on may's due date.

my doctor always offers to take me at 39 weeks but i never feel too bad at the end of my pregnancies so i try to get as close to 40 weeks as i can. this baby will be the earliest coming 4 days before his/her due date. only because my official due date is a sunday and my doc schedules her c's on thursdays.

so the 15th it is!

i'm sure some people might ask "do you feel like you are missing out on the childbirth experience?"

i honestly do not.

sure, i would have loved to have felt that "i am woman, hear me roar" feeling i'm sure you get with regular childbirth...but that's just not how it worked out for me. i would consider myself a pretty go-with-the-flow kind of gal so not having my first delivery go exactly how i wanted it too was ok with me.

that's life.

i went through labor, I felt contractions...i'm totally ok with not having had that perfect birthing experience.

in my opinion my experience was perfect...for me.

we, as women are all the same. how the baby arrives does not erase what we all went through to have them. we all carried our babies for 9 long months. we all loved them with our whole selves from the minute we saw those two lines appear on that stick. the way our babies were brought into this world doesn't make us any more or less of a mom.

i have zero regrets in my decision to ultimately have a c with ryan. in the end the outcome was a healthy, beautiful baby in my arms.

isn't that all that really matters.