It has taken me eight months to write this, I could blame it on how busy I am with four kids but really it’s because it was such a different experience than my other girls (both her birth + the pregnancy), and it’s taken me a while to process it all. Delilah June’s birthday will forever be one of the happiest days of my life, it was beautiful + special + also really hard, but best of all it brought us her.
I have written about Delilah’s pregnancy here, after three very normal and uneventful pregancies (all three overdue + induced), I ended up with just the opposite the fourth time around. Our baby girl was diagnosed with SIUGR at 22 weeks, and after a few REALLY hard weeks waiting to see if she would make it or grow at all, I was transferred to a high risk doctor who I saw twice a week, every week, for the remainder of my pregnancy. I was reminded at every appointment that if she showed any signs of distress, they would immediately send me to the hospital for a C-section and to be prepared for a very premature baby who was going to be “a challenge”. They never ever talked past making it past the current week with me and I was told to always have a bag packed, it’s still hard to wrap my head around the fact that in the blink of an eye, I was hoping for a baby who would make it to two pounds and past 30 weeks — something that would have never crossed my mind before. Those days/weeks were brutal and so incredibly scary, but we did it! I always have said that everything happens for a reason and I am convinced that the entire experience gave me so much perspective, peace in knowing that our family was complete, and made me so much stronger than I could have ever been before.
Fast forward to 37 weeks — and somehow, with the help of prayers, and because our tiny girl is one STRONG, resilient little lady, we made it as far as they let anyone go with SIUGR and our delivery date was set for Friday, May 13th. I remember leaving the high-risk doctor’s office for the last time before my scheduled induction and what a surreal feeling it was after months of being there ALL the time. The doctor who followed me through most of my appointments (and was always very real, to say the least) looked at me and said — “Sometimes in OB you can’t explain why things go wrong, and sometimes you can’t explain why they go right. Just say amen”. Our little Delilah is truly a miracle.
Because I was high-risk and with a different doctor than the other three girls, I had to deliver at a different hospital. This made me sad at first (I loved the hospital + all of my birth experiences so much), but after what we went through I truly just wanted her here + safe. We were not sure if I would be able to go through with the induction or have to do a C-section, mostly because she was breeched so much of my pregnancy, but the morning when my husband and I arrived, an ultrasound confirmed that she was not breeched and we could try for an induction. So we did, I got hooked up to pitocin to induce labor for the fourth time — but this time just felt SO DIFFERENT. It was quiet (we could only have one visitor, my mom), an entirely new place that just felt so foreign to us, and of course I was so anxious about all of it. We tried pitocin and a foley bulb to help me dilate, and though it was taking forever, much like my other inductions, everything seemed to be going well. Until it wasn’t. In the middle of the night the nurses all of the sudden kept coming in to have me change positions because her heart rate was apparently dropping with every contraction. It improved once I moved but then went right back pretty much every time, and it quickly became obvious that our my fourth labor was going to end in my first C-section.
Continued in Part Two, and sharing just a few photos from the last couple months of my pregnancy since through this crazy experience, we didn’t take any photos during her labor at the hospital!

