Welcome to the World, Little Girl

Hadley Anna Joy Heinl was born at 11:19 PM on June 28, 2008. She weighs 7 lbs, 3 oz, and is 20 inches tall. She also has very chubby adorable cheeks that everyone who sees her must make comments about.

Not much hair, but it's brown! She has gorgeous gray-blue eyes (but all babies have that color, so we'll see what they turn into!).

She is completely perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes, 100% cuteness.

Now for the whole story:


We arrived at the hospital at 9:30 PM on Friday, June 27...Mom was scheduled to be induced. She was only 37 weeks, but the doctors thought it would be best because of her age and high-risk factor, not to mention the diabetes.


So we got all settled into a room, and shortly after the doctors decided to use a gel on her cervix to get it to dilate and open. They told us it would take 12 hours to work, so we had nothing to do but wait.


It DID take 12 hours, all for nothing! Didn't really work. After that the doctors put her on an IV of Pitocin, which is a drug that starts contractions and dilations. Mom got an epidural first off, so she felt no pain.


By then it was June 28, Haddy's b-day! I had spent the night at the hospital with Mom, while Dad and Kevin went home to tend to our menagerie of animals, but Mom and me hadn't gotten much sleep.


There were a few scary points, like when Had's heart rate would drop during contractions, but not enough to make anyone really nervous. Also, around 6 or 7 that night, Mom had felt she was just too exhausted to have a regular delivery. Dr. Lam, the doctor who delivered Had, came in and they talked about the possibility of a C-section (which we never did).


I had fallen asleep and gotten a couple of hours by that point, so Kevin and I went to get some dinner from the cafeteria (which kind of turned out to be a bad idea...) and by the time we came back, the nurse told us that Mom and Dad were fast asleep inside, trying to get some rest.
So we went down the hallway to the waiting room and passed the time for a while. Dad came out to see us and we talked, and when we decided to go back to the room, my cell phone started ringing, and it was Mom...


"The doctor said it's time to start pushing."


When she had fallen asleep at around 8 or so, she was 5 centimeters dilated...it had looked like this might take a while. But when she relaxed and let God take over, her body did the rest of the work and nudged her to the full 10!


We got back and the nurse, a wonderful Brazilian woman named Thais, was preparing the room to have a baby...Mom seemed to have some of her energy back. After a little while, Thais refreshed Mom on the fine art of pushing, instructed me and Dad to hold her legs, and we started. (By this time Kevin had bailed to the waiting room.)


Mom pushed 3 times. I could see little Had's head on the first one. Around the second one, I felt dinner coming up and the floor getting closer, if you know what I mean. I asked for a mask to put on, to help with the nausea, and by the time another nurse got it to me, I had zero time to get it on...Haddy was coming.


Dr. Lam popped in, took one look, and immediately started to fumble with gloves and masks. The nurses were putting down cloths on the floors and dropping the end of the bed, and the whole time I could see Hadley sliding out, force of motion; Mom wasn't even pushing, but she's coming!


Mom pushed one last time, and there was Hadley. She was purple, cheesy, and mad, but she was beautiful.
I had wanted to cut the cord, since Dad passed, but things were too fast and I let Dr. Lam go ahead and do it.


Tears were nonstop, and Hadley was placed on Mom's chest; Kevin came in a little later and Hadley met her family. She opened those blue-gray peepers and got a good look at Mom; her grip on our fingers was strong, and she was perfect, and the rest is a little bit of a blur.


She is completely perfect. I can't stop saying it, because it's true. People were saying all along that because of Mom's age, it was likely she'd have Down's Syndrome, be deformed, too small, she wouldn't make it, but look at her! What do you have to say now? What is there to say when you look at her? There are no words, only feelings.


She is beautiful.