Lots o' Little Lukas

Yea!!!

Lukas Elijah (we'll be calling him Lukas)

(as in Luke from the Bible and Elijah Fordham, one of Derek's ancestors)

9:28 am Thursday, February 10th, 2011

9 lbs 1 oz 20 in

First, the cute photos...

 Next, the NICU photos. He was only in for about 36 hours. At first he needed a little (very little) help breathing, and then help stabilizing his blood sugars. But overall, he was very healthy and doing very well. He had an IV in his head, a feeding tube down his nose, and during only the first hour, that thing you see in the last photo helping him keep air in his lungs.

 And finally, this isn't Lukas. This is Joshua. I just thought it would be fun to compare. These photos are from the day we brought Joshua home from the hospital.

Here's the story of Lukas' birth.

My water broke at 4:30 am but since there was only pain and no "water" I wasn't sure exactly what had happened. 15 minutes later after a very hard contraction I woke Derek up, the water came, and we got everything into the car and went to the hospital. We got there around 5:30 ish. I was in tons of pain (I tried so hard to relax everything through the contractions and focus, but I obviously wasn't very good at it, despite my efforts. I suppose I could have done worse).  Labor and Delivery was full so we got sent to a triage room, another woman in labor right behind us went to the next triage room. I was dilated to a 7 so the nurses started running around in a panic trying to get some help. The epidural was a fabulous help - I'm glad they found it! Then an operating room opened up so they moved us in there, you know, to make more space in the triage area for the rest of the laboring women coming in, our hospital has been on baby overload the last few weeks. But less than a minute after being in the OR we got to move into a real labor and delivery room, which was much much better. After the epidural labor slowed way down. 3 hours later I was ready to push (actually I was ready to push as soon as I got to the hospital.) Pushing took longer than anticipated, but when he came out we realized why. Nine pounds is not an easy feat. And I was really tired. They took him to the NICU, but there was no room down in Mother Baby so I had to wait in the labor and delivery room for a while. Eventually something opened up. Every three hours I went up to Lukas to nurse him. He made steady improvement, was taken off formula (just to keep his sugar up) and then he finally got to spend the last night with me. Very nice. Now we're home, he's sleeping, Derek is falling asleep reading his scriptures, and I'm going to hit "publish post" and go take a nap.