Baby Girl's Birth

1st Brother's recent interest in the one blog book we have and some journals I kept as a pre-teen has encouraged me to get back on the horse and post some stuff about our last year.  It's been a big one, and I feel like I've been in and out of survival mode, thus the lack of blogging.  First, I totally had a baby girl 11+ months ago!  We moved into the house we bought about 5 weeks before my July 30 due date.  My feet and ankles started to look like this a couple weeks before the move:

They mostly stayed that way, especially since it was much warmer than SF and I was on my feet a lot shopping and trying to put the house together.  I slept okay, but the puffy feet and occasional sudden, sharp pains in my groin and down the back of my leg when she moved sometimes were not great.  I decided to schedule an induction 3 days after my due date because a) I was done and b) I was scared of a fast labor, especially with the hospital 25 minutes away and having 2 older kids to make arrangements for.  Here's me on July 4:

July 30 came and went with nothing serious happening.  I called the hospital at 6:00am on August 2nd as instructed, thinking I wasn't going to be admitted since I wasn't a high priority case, but they told me to come in - hooray!  My mom and sister had already been staying with us for a week, so my husband and I left the boys with them and got to the hospital around 7:30am.  I was 4cm dilated and having contractions 6-7 minutes apart anyway, so things went smoothly.  I got an epidural just after pitocin was started around 8:30, threw up at 6 cm then started feeling some decent contraction pain, but I got it under control by 10cm.  She was delivered after 3 pushes at 12:07pm by the only doctor I hadn't met in the new group practice I'd been going to.  Easy! About as easy as birth can be, anyway.  I was grateful for a drama-free delivery.

I thought she would be smaller than her brothers, especially since I went with the induction, but she was the biggest of my three at 9 pounds 10 ounces!  Ahhhhh!  Why do I have these giant babies?!?  My mom brought the boys in to visit around 4:00.  I love introducing an older sibling to a new baby!  Such sweet memories!  She was kind enough to bring magic wands to her brothers:

We named her Jane Ellen, mostly because we liked the name, but "Jane" has other significance.  I have an Irish ancestor named Jane Johnston Black who joined the Mormon church in England, then immigrated to Nauvoo, IL.  She traveled to Utah when the Saints were driven out and endured incredible hardship.  She and her family moved two separate times when asked by Brigham Young, first to Manti and later to Cedar City.  My great-great-grandma on my dad's side was a Jane too.  She died at age 28 leaving 5 children, including my Great Grandma Hastings who I knew.

There are other good Jane associations: it's the name of Kurt Vonnegut's long-suffering first wife, the daughter in American Beauty, and my friend who I served with when she was the Relief Society president has a fabulous daughter named Jane. There's also this disturbingly awesome connection from the world of cinema:

And "Jane" is the title of what is clearly the Barenaked Ladies best song, as well as a great one from Ben Folds Five.

The two nights at the hospital went well.  I was feeling good enough to have my husband sleep at home, and the 2012 Summer Olympics kept me company. I couldn't send the baby to the nursery as this hospital didn't have nurses dedicated to hanging out there (grrrrrr!), and the food wasn't as good as my SF hospital, but I liked my nurses.

We love her teddy bear ears and the toe on her foot that "got put on wrong" (next to the pinkie toe!):

She hasn't peed on me NEARLY as much as the boys did, but she has kept more of her chubs and seemed stinkier (did the boys' neck folds smell that way?).  I love the influence she's already had in our family; we are thrilled to have her!