It's a Boy!!

Hayden Michael Bunch was born on Monday July 6th at 6:03pm.

I am not sure if you can read his stats on the picture below, but he was quite the big boy! Thank goodness I wasn't all belly and was mostly all baby, I was a little worried there at the end when I was getting huge!! He was 9 pounds and 7 ounces, and 22 inches long...phew!! It was kind of funny because our doctor came in a few hours into labor to check on me and felt my belly to see how big she thought he was going to be and said he was about an 8 pound baby. Then when she pulled him out she was shocked to see how big he was!!!

The labor went well, it was long....but my husband was amazing through it all and seeing my little angel made it all worth it. Because Hayden was on Bunch time, our doctor decided he had been cooking long enough, and so we started induction on Sunday at 8:00pm. I had the second round at 1:00am, and contractions started about 5:00am. They continued to get stronger and stronger, but I wasn't dilating so they put me on Pitocin at 10:00am. Then Hayden still didn't want to come out quite yet, so the doctor broke my water at about 11:00am. Well the combination of Pitocin and breaking my water made my contractions unbelievable, so for an hour and a half I had contractions a minute apart that lasted a minute. My contractions beforehand were 40 on the monitor, but between 11:00am and 12:30pm, they were 90. At that point I decided I didn't want to continue like this for hours longer so I got an epidural (which was a good thing because I didn't deliver for another 5 and a half hours). It was smooth sailing after that, I told Chris that I thought it was cheating and fake labor because I could not feel an absolute thing!!! It was awesome, we napped, talked, watched TV, and hung out until about 5:00...we had a great afternoon together.

I then pushed for about 45 minutes, and out came this beautiful little guy.

The doctor said "daddy what is the sex," Chris looked down at me with the most amazing proud look and could barley even talk and then smiled the biggest grin I have ever seen on his face and told me that we had a boy. Those few seconds were worth the 10 months of waiting.

We stayed in the hospital for 2 more days and enjoyed all of our kind friends and family visiting with us and the opportunity to catch up on sleep and rest up for our new adventures. Here is a picture of our family (minus Tucker, who was at home waiting for us!) on the day we left the hospital.

I just wanted to share a picture of what I looked like a few days before Hayden's birth at 41 weeks. We took the boat up the Chena river to have dinner on the deck at the place where Chris and I got married. It was in celebration of my dad's birthday, which was on Tuesday....Hayden almost shared a birthday with my dad!