wow... uhm where'd i leave off...

ah yes. so i had a new "birthing buddy" sorta..

I think I have to back my story up to april 26th, just to give a little back story to help understand the craziness of the next 2 weeks.  Tuesday, April 26th  I had one of me weekly appointments where i was checked... maybe a fingertip dilated... nothing big even with this being baby #4. so again to add to my angst of not going into labor naturally.

Then, Wednesday happened.  It began as a muggy yucky day with several small tornadoes around Alabama... already not a good day.  we (me and the kiddos) had some good friends over to play for the morning and possibly to last through the day with the hopes that the university would just cancel classes and that brad would bring friend's hubby home with him since their home was an older, less structurally sound one and just to be on the safe side we could all squeeze into our bathroom :) kind of a weird party plan no?

anyways, kiddos got tired so plans changed and my friend and her son went home... then brad came home... actually he was going to stop at hobby lobby for me and Barnes and Nobel for sb's birthday present, but i told him to just come straight home (thank goodness because the timing would have been perfect... perfectly awful!)

The weather was getting pretty intense and the last that we got from the weather man before the electricity went out was that there was a HUGE tornado, about a mile wide up top? was coming through... originally directed straight for moundville (our house) but then shifting up to tuscaloosa (they all seem to shift around the river by our house... thank goodness for us) and heading basically towards my friend's house.  so i called her and let her know just in case she hadn't heard yet... then the power was out and all our neighbors gathered on our porch. we lived on the hill and looked directly at the tornado... (i do have a couple of pictures and video that i might add later...idk) it was crazy...

* now, before you all go thinking we're crazy tornado watchers... we lived 10 miles south of where the tornado was at... well in the "safety zone"... we barely got any rain even!

The next we heard on the radio was that krispy kremes was gone and i started bawling.  brad of course gave me a hug and said all would be alright but it wasn't until later that he put 2 and 2 together... our friends from earlier lived RIGHT behind/kiddie corner(?) to the krispy kremes place... he just figured preggo wife who loves donuts was very distraught.  this helped us laugh later that night.

As we were all (neighbors and us) just in shock over all of this and hearing from our radio what was going on,  we learned our cell phones wouldn't work... we couldn't call out or txt out... BUT we could txt to facebook and receive calls... thank goodness annalie is a worry wort when it comes to tornadoes and was able to check in with us and make some calls for us and i was able to get messages to my family via facebook! but it was seriously one of those situations where panic sets in when you don't know what's really going on.

*side note (i know this doesn't seem to have to do with birth but i'll get there :) just a few months before in book club we read a book (my pick) called One Second After... later we all discussed how eerie we felt recalling events from the book and comparing them to our after-tornado experience.

anyways, as these things were happening my neighbors (awesome neighbors...) were taking turns rubbing my lower back and they realized there was kind of a pattern to my "aches"... and then we played the game of "am i in labor- no, i can't be in labor..." it wasn't until the weather man gave the all clear for our area that i had a contraction that brought me to my knees that i thought... well uhm maybe...the next problem was that we weren't sure how to get to the hospital... see the tornado crossed the 359/69 (which i'm sure to most of you means nothing) but that's the road that we need to take to get directly to the hospital that my doctor is at.  somehow my neighbor got through to 911, we just wanted to see what the best way to get there was and they were misunderstanding us and trying to send out an ambulance... which we didn't need... especially since i'm SURE there was a greater need for them all over tuscalossa... not for me.

eventually brad and i made it into the car (my bag wasn't even ready yet!) and the neighbors kept the kids since we had no way to get in touch with our kid care friends... or our back up plans either... and thank goodness it was dark as we were getting into town.  what we DID see was heartbreaking enough. and luckily for us, all the traffic was going the other way.  What we did see were tons of cars just crumpled and dumped along side the highway... just as if someone crumples up a tissue when they're done... so weird. It was at this point when brad realized why i was so upset about krispy kremes...

when we got to the hospital, brad quickly gave me a blessing and then we hurried inside.  it was eerily quiet, and dim.  we told the nurses what had happened and they put us in a room on the other side since they had moved everyone closer to the one nurses' station.  also, they were running off a generator and so there was no tv, no radio, no internet (of course)... and only dimly lit rooms.  they hooked me up to the monitor and sure enough, contractions were regular and 3 minutes apart. when i was checked i had made it to just about a 2. compared to a fingertip the day before...

they decided to keep us for a while... brad and i talked and both decided we did NOT want to have this baby that night.. not that we get a say in it or anything, but there was just so much that was going to need to be done that having a baby right then would have made helping difficult.  To pass the time, and hopefully help me relax, brad was able to borrow a book from the hospital's library :) it was a detective novel that reminded me of sherlock holmes... and a lot of the book coincided with what we were experiencing that day/evening... the description of the weather, the dimly lit room that the detective was led to... and so on. we amused at that for a bit...

then things began to slow down and i wasn't contracting all that much anymore... the dr said he was fine with keeping me there and admitting us to have a baby if we wanted, but we opted to go home.  he said it was most likely the stress of the day and the pressure that started the labor process but that as we were able to come down from that and relax it would probably calm down too.

when we finally got home and got the kids from next door, brad set up "camp" in the living room with the kids and let me have the bed all to myself...

(this is a REALLLY long birth story no? is anyone still here????)