It's been a whole week...

....and I haven't screwed up my kid. Whew.

What a whirl-wind! A quick birth story (for those of you that haven't heard):

After a mad-crazy nesting session Thursday night (getting our hospital bags packed, etc.) Chris & I finally settled down for bed around 12:30am Friday morning. I was just about to doze off to sleep when I heard a distinctive sound coming from my nether-regions and I just knew something was up. I went to the restroom and realized that that my water had broken. Chris immediately jumped out of bed to start getting dressed while I got on the horn with the doctor's office. They asked me to go ahead and come to the hospital so they could confirm that my water had indeed broken. A few quick phone calls to parents & the photographer and we were on our way. We got checked in to the hospital and they confirmed that my water had broken and that I was only 2.5 cm dilated. The contractions were still pretty manageable so we just sat around waiting for everyone to show up.

By 5:30am the room was full and everyone was feeling excited. I had a couple strong contractions, but for the most part I was handling everything pretty well. At 6:00am I asked the nurse to come and check on my progress since it had been almost 4 hours. She obliged and announced that I was (wait for it...) still 2.5 cm dilated. Complete and utter dejection. I told the nurse to go ahead and start preparing for the epidural...if labor was going to take a million hours I wanted to be able to get some rest. The anesthesiologist came in at 7-ish and said she had one other person ahead of me and would be back shortly. Famous.Last.Words. ONE AND A HALF HOURS OF THE WORST CONTRACTIONS OF MY LIFE later, she finally came back and gave me the nectar of the gods. (Seriously...the contractions were awful. The nurse later told me she imagines I went from 2.5 cm to 7-8 cm during that 1.5 hour period. But, I digress...)

After the epidural, I closed my eyes to get some sleep. You know...because I had been awake for almost 24 hours at that point. 45 minutes later, I woke up with a sharp pain in my lower left abdomen. It felt exactly like the type of cramps you get when you're running. The epidural wasn't giving me the relief I needed so I asked Miller to call the nurse and make sure everything was okay. She came in and gave me a quick peek and told us that we would be having a baby. Very.Soon. They quickly started getting everything prepared; nurses appeared like ants scurrying around moving equipment and setting everything up. I remember at one point the nurse called to have the doctor paged and she told the person on the other end, "No. We need the doctor, NOW."

With the doctor (barely) in place, they asked me to start pushing. Less than 10 minutes later, Audrey was here.

Okay...so that wasn't short.

We're settled back at home and trying to get used to our new "schedule" (if you can even call it that). My lifesaver mom has been here helping out around the house; I don't think Miller & I have eaten this good in a long time. A is a really good baby...she doesn't cry too much (knock on wood) and has taken really well to breastfeeding. We're still up half the night, but I honestly don't mind it right now. I seriously just can't believe that I have a kid. Too strange. But totally awesome at the same time.

Lyndsay will be coming over tomorrow to get A's newborn pictures done so I'll have more AMAZING pictures to share later this weekend but in the meantime, here are a couple crappy/amazing (crappy quality, amazing subject matter) pictures taken this week.

Audrey is 1 week old