What a Difference a Day Made

What a difference a day made, twenty four little hours...

Okay so maybe that's taken from a Jamie Cullum song about a girl, and it was more like 15 hours, but I thought it had a nice ring to it as our title and intro into this little guy...

Photo credit to the wildly talented Lynn Pugh.

So this is our little stud at 8 days, he has now been in this world 19 days. Let me take you back even further...

Tuesday, August 7th, I went in for my 38 week checkup [I was officially 38 weeks on the 5th]. All checked out well— I was 70-80% effaced and roughly 1.5 cm dilated. I was having some cramps that morning, but thought it was due to my checkup. I was having the same crampy feelings on Wednesday, but didn't think much of it. Then the feelings continued on Thursday... so what did I do? I googled "What do contractions feel like?" [Oh the age we live in!] The results I found described exactly what I was experiencing. I was having contractions. Oh my.

These lovely muscle movements consisted pretty regularly throughout the day, but had yet to reach the magical combination of 5-1-1 [5 minutes apart, 1 minute long, for 1 hour]. We were told not to go to the hospital until you had reached this point. Well by 10:00 Thursday night, mine were anywhere from 3-10 minutes apart, from 30-70 seconds long. We called the hospital to see what we should do and I was told they'll get to a point where they feel much more intense and will be a consistent 4-5 minutes apart. That finally happened from about midnight to 1:00 a.m. — so it was time.

Can I interrupt here to say, at this point I was probably still in denial? That night Kam kept saying, why don't you pack your bag? Or this is really happening, O. Or we can go to the hospital to check, it's okay if they send us home. He probably felt like he had to convince me I was in labor! Sweet man. What a silly wife he has...

For some reason 1:23 sticks out in my mind as a significant time, so maybe that was when we left for the hospital or maybe when we arrived. Regardless, it was the middle of the night and we had a bit of a journey ahead of us!

For those of you that are a lot like me and get overwhelmed if I see a blog post with numerous paragraphs of type, I will now trick you and sum up the rest of my labor story in bullet points :)

• Once checked in, I was dilated 3cm and spent an hour in the observation room where I progressed to 4cm.
• I was admitted into one of the delivery rooms and struggled through contractions and got to 5cm.
• After some conversations with my dear husband and a couple of nurses, we decided to go with the epidural. A kind, kind man administered that miracle at 5:30 am. 
• After an hour I progressed to 6 cm, but then for an hour and a half after that was at a standstill.
• Since I wasn't progressing, they put me on pitocin to get things going again.
• At some point they broke my water [not sure where that fell in the timeline — definitely post epidural though].   
• For the next while, I got to relax with my husband until we reached the magical 10 cm mark.
• I finally reached 10 cm, pushed for about 40 minutes and had our baby boy at 2:58 pm on Friday, August 10th — 6 lbs. 11 oz. — 20 inches.

This had to be taken post epidural!

A fresh Joshua Haddon Pugh. He wailed with perseverance for a while once he made his escape. So thankful for those little lungs— most of the time :)

We were not surprised by the blonde hair, but definitely surprised by the amount in which it expressed itself!

Though there were some things about the delivery we wished we could have avoided, the Lord was so gracious through it all and we were so pleased with how everything went and how wonderful the nurses and doctors were. So many prayers were answered and our great wise God proved Himself to be faithful once again.

During this process, I had an amazing husband encouraging me and loving me all the way through. Since then, he has continued to amaze and bless me with how he cares for Haddon and me. Words can't describe what Kameron means to me and how my love for him has multiplied since the birth of our son. Our time together is definitely different these days, but it has opened my eyes to so many more ways the Lord has made Kameron and I specifically for one another. My, my, my... such kindness from the Lord. How did I get it this good?

I love this picture because you get to see Kam's wedding band so clearly as he holds our sweet Haddon.

We also had the loving support of some kick-butt grandparents. They were such troopers to drive to Auburn in the middle of the night and then wait the agonizing wait as we went through the whole process. So often I forget how blessed Kam and I are with the parents we've been given. Times like these are sweet reminders of how good we have it.

The next day we got a visit from this fun family! I'm so thankful they're back in Alabama. Now to only get that other sister of mine moving back to Bama...

Since then, we have had a continuous stream of people coming to see our new little family member, bring us meals, check on us, and pray for us. We have been blown away by how people have just loved on us. We have found much encouragement in your support, which makes this new season less daunting. Please continue to pray for us. More than anything, please pray that Haddon would love and give his life to Jesus. That is our greatest desire for our son. That he would know and be known by our Savior and King.

Pugh party of 3! Sorry for the low quality, it's from my sister's phone. I realized we never took a family shot on our camera at the hospital. Oops...

Haddon, my son, we're so thankful it is you that has filled these shoes. What a blessing it was to receive you into our arms 9 days early. 8.10.12 is probably the coolest birthday ever, but all joking aside, the Lord knew exactly when you needed to come. We're so excited to see what He has in store for the rest of the days that were written in His book, every one of them, that were formed for you, my son, when as yet there was none of them [Psalm 139:16].

What a difference a day made. And that difference is you.