Tanner's Birth Story

I'm sorry for neglecting our little corner of the internet, but that's just about how exciting our life is. Haha. That is, until we had a baby! Tanner William Larsen was born on November 18, 2014 at 5:02 a.m. weighing 6 pounds, 6 oz and was 19.5 inches long. If you remember, my due date was December 2, so he was exactly 2 weeks early and quite the surprise.
Sunday, November 16th was a pretty normal day. This was the day of the Phoenix Temple dedication , so there were no regular meetings, just the dedication.  Later that afternoon, brennen and i went for a long walk at the nature preserve near our home. That next morning,  around 1 am, I started having some cramping in my abdomen. I wasn't really worried about it and didn't think much of it until it stared coming and going and keeping me awake. They weren't super bad, but they didn't go away, were lasting about 30 seconds and we're 7 to 10 minutes apart. I called my work to let them know I wouldn't be able to make it in, and spent the day timing contractions. All day I had no change in the frequency or duration,  so I just figured I would go to my doctor's appointment the next morning and ask about it. Since I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, we headed to bed around 9. About 10 minutes after I laid down, my contractions got worse and closer together. I monitored them for about 10 minutes.  They were about 30 to 45 seconds long and 3 minutes apart. We decided to head to the hospital so they could check me out. When we got there, they monitored my contractions for about an hour and then checked my cervix. I was 100% effaced and dilated to a 4! The nurse called my doctor and I was admitted around 10:30. I received that blessed epidural at 11:30 and they checked me again. I was dilated to a 6! They told me to get some rest (haha, ya right!) and left us alone for a while. At 2 am, the doctor came in and checked me again. I was still at a 6, so she broke my water and propped my leg up on th e peanut ball. If you have never heard of the peanut ball, it's exactly that. It looks like an exercise or yoga ball that got cinched in the middle. It seems silly, but 20 minutes later, I was fully dilated and started pushing at 2:30. Let me just say this: pushing is hard. Especially when you can feel nothing down below. About an hour and a half into pushing, I started to feel some pain in my right hip. Basically for some reason the epidural stopped working in that part of my body and i could feel every. Single. Contraction. It was no fun. I told my nurse, but she just acted like I was crazy and had me keep pushing. So, I used it to my advantage. I could actually feel when I needed to push, and it wasn't when she was telling me to, and after that, it actually went a lot faster. Tanner arrived at 5:02 am, and the rest is history!  Childbirth is no joke. It was as hard as I expected it to be, and my labor was actually not as bad or as long as I expected, but it was still hard and totally worth it.