What the heck just happened?

Hello out there, fans, friends and family of Josephine! Jack and I brought Josephine home tonight and, aside from the fact that it has decided to snow all day today after weeks of clear weather, here we are safe and sound.

A bit about what happened on Tuesday the 18th...It all started with me thinking I needed a root canal (another story). Turns out I didn't...got out of the dentist early and headed to my regularly-scheduled doc's visit. A blip on my blood pressure (it was reading high but hadn't all through the rest of the pregnancy) had my doctor decide to send me over to the labor & delivery hospital to have it re-checked and to run some blood tests "just in case." I thought I would be home in an hour or two. I headed over for the test around 3:30.

I was alone and reading my book for about an hour while my blood pressure was monitored by an automatic cuff. Very calm and soothing. Then the nurses came back in and said "your blood pressure is staying high...this can indicate a risk of preeclampsia so the doctor says you're going to deliver today." Calm and soothing was now over.

This was around 5 or 5:30 by now. Jack was on his way over already and seemed less surprised than I had been that I was going to deliver (he had been reading about preeclampsia on the internet while I was having the tests done--the only way to "cure" preeclampsia is through delivery...when the baby is close to term, this is the preferred option). They whisked us up to a labor and delivery room and began to induce labor (I'll spare you the details on this). This was expected to go on all night and actual labor and birth wasn't likely to happen until some time on Wednesday, possibly even Thursday (natural labor, in all of its stages, takes many, many hours, fyi).

However, by around an hour or two into the process (must have been around 8-ish), baby's heartrate started to drop with contractions and I was possibly days away from being able to deliver naturally. This is not good. Our next bit of news was: "You're going in for an emergency C-section. This baby has to come out now."

So...you know the outcome from there. By 10:17pm that Tues, March 18th evening, Josephine Ross Simpson was here to stay. Jack posted the earlier sneak preview shots--we've got way more and will post them soon. Just thought I'd use this lull in between feeding and diapers to fill in some of the missing pieces.