A Valentine Day's never to be forgotten

Sunday, February 12th, I started to have a weird feeling during church. After church, I told Nick, I think I had a few contractions during church, but I'm not sure. As we ate dinner and watched TV that night, I noticed a few more. By the time we went to bed that night, I told Nick, "we might have a baby tomorrow." All night, we tried to sleep, but I didn't sleep long enough between contractions which were coming every 5 minutes for about 45-60 seconds each. In our birthing classes, the doula told us to go to the hospital when contractions were 4 minutes apart, 1 minute long, for 1 hour. She also said if they started during the night, try to take a bath to relax your body so you can sleep. So into the bath I went. And nothing happened. So at 5am, I got up and took a shower (because I wasn't going to have a baby with dirty hair--I know, I know but I wanted the hospital pictures to look decent). Finally, the hot shower was helping the contractions/back labor and so I stayed there for about 45 minutes. Well...the doula never told me not to take a LONG shower! When I got out of the shower, I called school and told them the baby was coming and we weren't coming in. But...contractions had stopped. We spent the next 19 hours trying to get consistent contractions again. We watched TV, we went for 2 one hour long walks and I climbed 11 flights of stairs twice. Still, my contractions were anywhere from 20-45 minutes apart! By 10pm, we were contemplating going to work the next day because we didn't want to just sit around the house for nothing. But as we got ready for bed that night, the contractions began to intensify. I knew that we needed to sleep because the night before we didn't really sleep. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to have a baby if I didn't sleep for 2 nights. So, we decided to go to the hospital to get an epidural so I could sleep (and thus allowing Nick to sleep also.) When we got to the hospital, I was hopefully that I was at least a few cm dilated. Unfortunately, I was only 2cm dilated. By 4am, I was 3 cm and they agreed to give me an epidural. After that, we slept until 7am. The rest of the story goes like this...I was slow to dilate, they tried to induce, that was even slower. Finally at 4pm, my doctor came and broke my water and by 5:30, I was in the delivery room getting ready for this baby. FINALLY, at 6:11pm, Elliot Joshua Su came into this world. And just like that, it was all over...YET, something NEW and WONDERFUL was just beginning.

The NEW Su family!

The hospital had a little baby photo shoot for Elliot. This is just one of many costume/prop changes. So funny!

Doesn't he just look so tiny?