Our Very Small Surprise (3 weeks and 1 day early!)

At about 4:30 am on July 3rd, I thought I felt something a little wet. Of course, I was in denial, but it became more and more apparent as the morning went on that my water had indeed broken. So, at about 8:00 am Matt and I headed to the hospital.

Apparently when your water breaks, they need to get the baby out within 24 hours to avoid infection. I was not really having contractions, so they had to induce me with Pitocin. Now, I really thought I would be able to get through delivery with no pain medications. However, I guess I really didn't have an accurate picture of how much pain it actually entails. So I got an injection of demerol and felt a little better, but then I decided I needed an epidural as well. After I got the epidural placed, I had uncontrollable shivering. The interesting thing was that I went from 1cm dilated to 10cm dilated in the span of about 3 hours (very fast!). Then the nurse decided to check my temperature and turns out, I had a 103 degree fever! This increased the urgency of the situation. We needed to get the baby out as soon as possible and if I didn't push her out fast, I would've had to get a c-section. So I pushed like crazy and broke about a million blood vessels in my face (you will not see any close-ups of that). But I was able to get her out within about 45 minutes (this is according to Matt...to me it seemed like I was pushing for hours). She was born exactly at 6pm on July 3rd. However, she looked pretty bad at first and she had to spend a few hours in the neonatal ICU. We finally got her back with us at 11:30 pm.

Gianna Jolie Torregrossa. Isn't she cute? She has Matt's dimpled chin. She was very small at birth (6 lbs and 1.7 ounces) and was even smaller when we left the hospital (5 lbs and 11 ounces). She is 19 inches long. We left the hospital today--they kept us for 48 hours just to make sure we were ok, and I had IV antibiotics for 24 hours.

Matt and his new girl.