cannon thomas carberry.

my first post of 2017 and it's definitely the one that has brought me the most happiness to write... because this one is to introduce cannon thomas carberry! at 11:40 pm on january 1, 2017 this little man made me a mother and i couldn't be more grateful to him and his dada for making that a reality. and one thing i know to be true is that i could not love them both any more. 

i swore that i wouldn't share my birth story because while I enjoy sharing my life on the blog, i felt it might be too personal. but after the experience i thought i would share an overview and two pieces of advice... 

i went into labor at 3:30 am on saturday december 31 with contractions and i thought that my water broke, and when patrick woke up that day i turned and said that i thought that it was finally the day. i labored at home very mildly until finally calling the doctor and going into the hospital at 3:00 pm. when i got there i was not anywhere close to ready to have him but my contractions were less than two minutes apart so they admitted me and patrick and i spent 4 hours walking around and squatting through the halls of sibley. after laboring through the night and still no real progress toward his arrival. finally on the morning of january 1 they got pitocin in my system and things started to move along. then around noon that day they start my epidural and i was able to start pushing shortly after that around 2:30 pm. well the biggest issue came after about 2.5 hours of pushing when my epidural slipped half way out so i started feeling the most intense back pain you could possibly imagine. it. was. awful. at around 6:00 pm they had to readmit my epidural to help with the pain in order for me to be able to continue pushing. another four hours later, after pushing for roughly eight total, the doctor and nurse were fairly certain that this little man was not coming out on his own because his head was stuck. we all decided we still wanted to proceed with him coming naturally and the only way to do that was "vacuuming." from the start the risk was explain that "vacuuming" could only be tried three times, after the third time being unsuccessful then we would have to have an immediate c-section. here comes my first piece of advice - do not ever go through with vacuuming. had we known how traumatizing this was then we would never have gone through with it. so yes you guessed it, after three times of this method failing at around 10:45 pm I was rushed into an operating room for a c-section and just less than an hour later cannon thomas arrived and after 44 hours of labor, my only question was "does he have ten fingers and ten toes." the one thing that was not something i expected was that because of the c-section recovery time, i was not able to hold him for three hours. while this gave patrick some amazing time with him from the start it definitely was a difficult pill to swallow while i was in bed recovering from surgery. 

after spending four days in the hospital recovering, we have since been at home getting settled and starting life as a family unit. and just this week had the opportunity to sit down for the genius lauren louise photography for our first family portrait session. we wanted to capture cannon and our family in as natural a way as possible - no naked baby in weird positions happening in the carberry house. well, she was spot on and although cannon chose to be the fussiest he's ever been in his 17 days of life, she captured him and our family flawlessly. for all of the photos check out her blog, but here are a few of my favorites. 

and my second piece of advice... stay in bed as much and for as long as possible in the days leading up to your due date. just lay there, watch your favorite show, sleep, stare at the ceiling, but do not get up. you'll thank me later. 

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ps - i am obsessed with every photo so narrowing them down was impossible... thank you lauren!