Almost to the minute, I was giving birth to a beautiful baby girl!  I can't believe it's already been four weeks!!  So the story of labor and delivery goes like this. I woke up about 3:00 a.m. feeling like I was leaking fluid.  I had this feeling a couple of days prior and went to the hospital on Monday to see if I was, but was sent home because nothing was happening.  So I didn't think too much about it, just got up went to the bathroom and then went back to bed.  I laid there for a few minutes and started having some pains.  Hmm, now that was something new, because up until that point I hadn't had any contractions..well, that I had felt.  So I tried laying there, but that wasn't comfortable so I got up and came out into the living room.  I didn't wake Robbie up because he had just gone to bed and I knew he needed to get some sleep.  I hung out in the living room until about 6:00 a.m. with the pains getting a little stronger, and after each contraction I would leak a little more fluid, so I knew something was going on, and this was no test run.  I  decided to take a shower since the heat was supposed to help with some of the pain.  After getting out of the shower, I woke Robbie up to let him know what was going on.  He started timing my contractions and they were between about four and seven minutes apart.  We waited until about 8:00 a.m. to start getting ready to go to the hospital.  Just as we were getting ready to go, I was having another contraction and then lo and behold, my water broke, well gushed!  It's the craziest, grossest thing!  That was definitely our queue to go to the hospital. We got to the hospital around 9:00 a.m. and was admitted.  At that point I was about 4cm dilated.  They got us set up in our room and hooked me up to the monitors, and then left us alone to progress.  The contractions were getting stronger and closer together.  Nobody is able to tell you what contractions are like except that they are painful, and that's no joke.  Robbie was great in helping me make it through them.  Around 1:00 p.m. Dr. Long came in to check on how I was progressing.  Unfortunately, after all that time I was still at 4cm.  That was really disheartening to me because I was sure that after all of that I HAD to be more.  He told me that we were going to have to make some decisions shortly, because they would want me to deliver within 18 hours of my water breaking (or in my case of when the leaking began).  He started talking about starting pitocin and I knew there was no way I wanted to go through contractions with them, so I said if we were going to do that I wanted to go ahead and get an epidural.  It took no time and the anesthesiologist was there.  He was very nice and explained everything to us.  They make husbands sit down while administering the epidural because apparently a lot of the men pass out at the sight of needles.  Man, they are always trying to take the attention off of the women!! Epidural was administered, and I was laying back down and the nurse was in there and all of a sudden other nurses started coming in asking if she needed help.  They put an oxygen mask on me, turned me on my side and went to work.  One lady was massaging my stomach while another was giving me g some epinephirin (I think that's what they said).  I was staring at Robbie, scared out of my mind.  I didn't know what was going on.  Nobody was talking to us, they were just doing what they needed to do to stabalize me and the baby.  This went on for a few minutes and then everything was fine.  Apparently when I got the epidural my body relaxed and I dilated from 4 to 8cm in no time at all.  Margot's heart rate dropped down to in the 50's (it had been between 120-160) and my blood pressure had dropped too.  It was really scary, but we were glad to have such wondeful nurses there helping us. At about 3:30 the nurse came back in and asked if I wanted to start pushing.  Sure, why not.   I wasn't feeling any pain any more and had finally calmed down from the earlier episode.  I For a while it was just the nurse, Robbie and I in the room, so the nurse had one leg and Robbie the other.  He was really surprised at how big of a part he got to play in helping with delivery and that he actually got to see the head crowning.  I pushed for about an hour and was getting close, so the doctor was called.  Margot was delivered at 4:57 p.m.  The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck twice, so we are lucky that everything turned out ok.  They put her directly on my chest, but she was a little purple and wasn't responding as much as they would have liked to their rubbing her, so they took her over to the heating lamp and cleaned her up and put a tube down her to clear her airway.  Soon after that they brought her back to me.  There's nothing more awesome than seeing your baby for the first time.  Robbie and I were in awe of this beautiful little creature we had created. I'll write more later on how the first few weeks went, but four weeks have gone by and we are finally getting used to things.