And it's only taken me 5 months

to get this on here...

(side note here... I find with 4 kids that finding the time to record things is super hard and so from here on I will be recording most things here... please feel free to skip over too-detailed parts and please don't be offended by what I write...)

Joseph is our fourth child.

He is the first pregnancy since sarahbeth that we ALMOST got to plan :) (we found out i was pregnant the month before we planned on starting to try for another baby:)

And from the moment I found out I was pregnant, I KNEW I wanted to do it naturally.  With our ghost baby I had decided I wanted to try and go naturally using what a several of my friends had used, hypnobirthing .  One of my friends is even an instructor and has had all of her babies at home and the last few were water births.  From my own personal experiences I have learned that my body doesn't handle epidurals well, and I'm pretty sensitive to medicine, so I ordered the book on line and began to read it when I had finally come to terms of being pregnant with the GB. But when I began to miscarry I loaned the book to a friend and didn't think about it again... until I had another positive pregnancy test in May of 2010.  at first I was a little shocked and then really excited... and then 1 week later when I started bleeding I actually sobbed.  That's when I realized that I wanted another baby.  So our discussion on the matter began and we had decided to start planning in September.

Then, as my expected cycle for September was soon to begin, I woke up early one morning with the feeling that i just KNEW i was pregnant.  5 days BEFORE aunt flo (i always found that phrase awkward...) was due to arrive, I jumped out of bed (i'm pretty sure it was around 5 am) and ran to use one of the tests from the box that i had recently purchased.  well because it was around 5 in the morning, i wasn't paying too much attention to the type of tester stick thing i was using... i mean seriously, i've been pregnant uhm 7 times at this point and had several "possible" time that i thought/dreaded maybe freak outs... so i think i'm sort of an old pro at taking the tests... two lines right? well this time i took the test and after getting myself all situated i looked at the test stick and realized there was a digital hourglass doing flips on a screen... uhm, first of all, a screen???? I never buy those kind... the dollar store tests work just as well as those fancy schmancy tests, and i'm such a cheapie that I just refuse to pay more for something that works just as good. let me tell you that was the longest 3 minutes!  but sure enough it said PREGNANT (all in caps :) So then I was super excited, like this was the best early birthday present ever!!!!

plus, thanks to the advice of a couple of friends, I have been using the Fertility Awareness Method not only for a form of birth planing, but to get to know my body better... I think brad and i are in like the .002% of birth control failure percentages... we've tried it all (except for the shot and the patch), and have gotten pregnant on all of it, or it just didn't work right for us.  So I had noticed a second temperature shift early on too... however even using this method we were very careful around "that" time, but it just goes to show that our kids are meant to be here i guess :)

anyways, so the 2nd thought after finding out i was pregnant was now i get to use my book!  And I had planned to labor as long as i could at home for a couple of reasons, on being that despite my desire to use a birthing center or midwife, both at this time are illegal in Alabama, and as much as it might be growing on me, I think for us a home birth just isn't a smart option given my medical history.  So a natural birth at the hospital with minimal in hospital laboring without induction and iv was my goal.  Unfortunately I tested positive with Group B strep.  Which I had never done before with any of the other kids.  so this changed a few things.  One I would need to be hooked to an iv during labor to administer antibiotics, two, i would need to come to the hospital as soon as labor began since my last 3 labors had all been between 5-6 hours and the peds like to have 2 doses of antibiotics in before the baby is delievered and they are given 4 hours apart.

So that was that.

Now when I learned my due date was May 13, 2011 we all got excited because that is the day before Sarahbeth's 7th birthday.  and if she couldn't have a sister, she wanted a baby brother to share her birthday :)

With all my other babies I have been induced at least 1 week before the due date.  For sb this was because i was in pro dromo labor and the dr felt it was best to help get things going.  With TJ it was for convenience since we had just moved to OK and my mom was going to come help so we wanted to make sure everything would work out for her time off from work.  plus tj's due date kept getting moved up since he was growing so big! his original due date was dec 6 and he was born 11/23 at 8 lbs 11 oz! anyways, Kempton was induced 10 days early again for my mom to be there and for it to work out for her schedule.

This time around I didn't want to be induced, although the other times worked out timing wise, I wanted to be able to go natural and didn't want to mess anything up with being induces.  After talking this over with my dr (LOVE her!) She said that was fine and if we wanted, since she was scheduled to be on call the weekend i was due, we could just go in the hospital on the 14 and she would just break my water to help things get started, which yes, i understand is a form of induction, but i figured by that time it would be past my due date and enough progress might have been made... and i don't know why, but i just assumed that since i hadn't ever givven my body a real chance that it wouldn't go into labor on its own.  In fact that was my biggest concern and worry, not about the labor and delivery but going into labor and would i really know when it was real! I asked one of my friends and she said when it you can't talk through a contraction, it's a pretty good indication that you should get to the hospital.

Also, just a couple of months before joseph was due, a new friend moved into the area! and she was due just a couple weeks after me! AND we got to talking and not only did she love cloth diapers and switch to them, but she LOVED the idea of going naturally!  so now i had a buddy!!!! which gave me extra motivation to go through with my birth plan!

WOW, This is getting to be pretty long.  sorry. i will finish in another post :)