41 weeks!

Our 41 week appointment was pretty exciting. At about 11am, Sean and I went in for some routine tests to make sure our little girl was still okay to incubate a little longer. They strapped me in bed with a fetal heartrate monitor and another monitor to look for contractions. About 10 minutes in to the 30 minute test, the technician came bounding into our room and said 'ummm. can you feel those??' referring to my contractions, and I said yes, but they were not painful so I thought they were the Braxton-Hicks contractions I had been having since my 2nd trimester. So, come to find out, I was having contractions every 2 minutes and after people running into my room with a panicked look on their face, surprise, my blood pressure was high. The combination of those things brought my ob/gyn walking into the room to talk us into getting induced that day because she was nervous about letting us go home for the weekend.
We were pretty easily convinced, so we went home, packed up our stuff, gave Izzy some snuggles and headed back into the hospital. The above picture is me with my hospital bag before we left the house.
We were admitted to the hospital at 3:06pm. I barfed, I got drugs, I pushed and she arrived at 6:36pm.  I was lucky enough that the ob/gyn that I saw for most of my visits stayed past her on-call shift to deliver our little girl. She was great, in fact, I could go on about all of our interactions with nurses, doctors, etc, but suffice it to say, that they were all great.

Hazel about 10 minutes old

 It took us about 30 minutes after she was born to decide on a name. We took over the labor room's whiteboard and wrote out all our 'maybe' names. I think the medical staff were a little disappointed that we hadn't chosen a name beforehand, but we narrowed it down quickly to Hazel Moseman Pfalzer. Hazel was initially my last choice, but I guess she didn't look like a Leah or a Fiona.
Hazel weighed 7 lbs and 1 ounce and 20 inches-- much to my surprise and relief. Throughout my entire pregnancy, I measured small when at the doctor's office and outside the doctor's office, I had the whole world commenting on how little my bump was -- well...take that!

Hazel about 1 hour old

Dad and Hazel

 We spent Friday and Saturday night at the hospital. During our stay, we had wonderful doctors and nurses who took great care of us. Sunday afternoon they let us have the option of staying an additional night, but with no fresh air for 36 hours and a loud, noisy hospital floor -- Sean and I both started packing our things and we went home... as a new family of 4 (including Izzy :) ).

Hazel's first car ride