Birthing Baby Jonas

On October 27th, 2010 at 5:41 pm we welcomed little Jonas Nathan Otterstrom into our family. He was 8 lbs 6 oz and 20 inches long. He is a healthy eater and other than still having his days and nights a little mixed up, doing well. We are so excited to have him here safe and sound and, as you can imagine, every diaper change, feeding, bath and clothing change are quite the production with two older sisters helping out with every detail.

Due to a mandatory change in insurance policies at Jared's work we needed to have the baby during the month of October to save thousands of dollars so our doctor kindly agreed to induce the baby on Wednesday even though it wasn't my top choice. I really wanted the baby to come when ready, but alas, it wasn't in our budget so Wednesday morning about 9:00 I was started on Pitocin to induce my labor, followed in an hour by breaking my water! Both Jared and I agreed on our drive to the hospital like we felt we were "cheating."

I was at a 3 when admitted to the hospital and at about 2:00 pm I was only at a 4, much to my dismay. I was having contractions 2 minutes apart and fairly strong; in a normal labor I felt I would have been much further along. I was determined to speed things up so I tried walking around the room to get things going, and really tried to welcome every contraction knowing it would get us closer to our goal, but just ended up feeling very uncomfortable pausing to breathe through every contraction. I felt my epidural during Jocelyn's labor had really slowed things down and I really liked my experience of having Lillian naturally, so I was trying to just make it through, but finally, we tried some pain medication through my IV. This just made me loopy and barely took the edge off so at about 3:00 the nurse talked me into an epidural suggesting it might let my body relax. Well, that was the best move we could have made. The epidural was AWESOME and I progressed from 4 cm to 8 cm in about 20 minutes and didn't feel a thing.

By about 4:00 pm the doctor had me try to push because he felt the baby was low enough, but the epidural was working so well I told him I had no urge or indication of whether I was pushing correctly. We turned off the epidural so I could get some feeling back and about an hour later we tried pushing again a few times, but I told him I still didn't feel it was time so they turned the lights off and let me relax for about 20 minutes. When the doctor came back we tried pushing again and in a few pushes little Jonas was born. My epidural was still in my system enough that I felt very little pain, but out enough that I could feel what I needed to do. I felt so present in the moment unlike Jocelyn's where I was completely exhausted or Lilly's that happened so extremely fast. I just cried as I got to hold little Jonas on my chest while they finished up all the other procedures and felt so fortunate everything went so smoothly. I didn't even tear this time which was amazing and Jonas was healthy.

Jonas is a family name from Jared’s great great great grandpa Otterstrom who migrated from Sweden in the 1800s and Nathan is my Grandpa’s and my Brother’s name so we felt good about combining two family names for (hopefully) a name that fits this little guy.