The Birth Story: Getting to the hospital

This is kind of a long story, so I'm going to break it up into pieces. Here we are with part one: Getting to the hospital. Just an FYI, at this point, Wednesday, I was 38 weeks, 5 days.

The last picture we have of me preggo.
I'm 37 weeks, 3 days.

We'd already had two false alarms where the contractions stopped right before we were heading to the hospital. Because of this, I knew the contractions I was feeling at Grandma and Grandpa McCoy's on Wednesday night weren't anything to be excited about.

I also knew they hurt. A lot.

It was about 10:00 p.m. when Garrett noticed I was probably in more pain than I was letting on. However, he also knew it was nothing to get excited about. They would stop.

On the way home from Springville, with just Garrett and I in the car I was finally able to let my pain show. It was at that point that I made a decision I thought I was saving for the hospital.

"If this isn't labor I'm definitely getting an epidural. There is no way it can be worse than this."

I continued to have hard contractions that wrapped deep into my back and around my front all the way home. They weren't very regular though, so I thought I was just in for a long night.

By the time we made it home I was convinced we needed to go to the hospital.

"45 more minutes of this and we'll go in," I told Garrett. We may have started to get a little excited and I started to become a bit bi-polar.

During contractions I was convinced we needed to go to the hospital immediately. I was sure the baby was going to pop out any second. However, in between contractions I'd decide it wasn't really that bad — I was just being a hypochondriac and needed to toughen up.

Well, we finally decided to head to the hospital at around 11:00 p.m. I felt a little bit ridiculous, because I was sure they were just going to send us home after charging us an arm and a leg for the visit, but away we went.

We live maybe two minutes from Utah Valley Regional Medical Center if we hit all the lights wrong. About a minute and a half into our drive (yes, we could see the hospital) Garrett remembered a request I had made earlier for a Priesthood blessing before going to the hospital. Because I have an awesome husband, we turned around to go back home and have Garrett and his cousin's husband give me a blessing.

This added about 10 minutes to our trek. (This is an important point. Remember it.)

... to be continued...