the story of charleigh - part 4.......

We were well on our way to having a baby.

Get pregnant. Check.

Find out gender. Check.

Name baby. Ummm.........

Now if we had been having a boy, we had a name all picked out. As in, we would have called him by name during the ultrasound. A girl name? Not going so well. We figured that we didn't have anything to worry about seeing as how there had only been one girl born in his family in about 3 generations. We were positive that it would be a boy. The joke was clearly on us.

Things would have been simple if we had even been in the same name ballpark. But, no, we weren't even in the same city. For my toss outs of "I like boy names. How about Tyler, Ryan, Mac, etc.?" Josh would respond with "What about Lacey, Emma, Miriam, or Rachel?" If you have met me before, you are probably clear on the fact that I do not birth children with names like that. Add in the fact that before we were even officially engaged I had informed Josh that if we ever had a daughter I wanted to name her Charlie. (the current spelling came later.) He had always hated it with a passion. Still did in fact. So finally one weekend I kidnapped him, er, I mean, suggested that we go out of town. Once I had him trapped in the car I laid out all my reasons for going with my chosen name of Charlie. Including but not limited to the fact that he could barely remember the names he "loved" 10 minutes after suggesting them and I had been hanging onto this one for 6 years. He caved because he is great like that. Shortly after informing my folks that we had in fact settled on the name, my mom suggested that we at least use an alternate spelling so that in her future people who saw her name would know it wasn't a boy. And so, Charleigh it was.

The next couple months flew by in a blur. I had been taken off work in January due to some back problems I was experiencing. By problems, I mean that back pain which resulted in 2 to 3 hours of sleep a night does not a productive or healthy person make. Anywho, as reluctant as I was to leave work, I really did enjoy the time of "rest" leading up to her birth.

My due date was May 15th and like any good pregnant girl I really hoped that she would grace us with her presence before that time if possible. :) I really had no Braxton-Hicks or contractions of any type that I can remember. The morning of May 6th, I took part in a yard sale in a school parking lot and then spent the rest of the afternoon shopping with my mom. I clearly remember that we were walking around in Michaels and I had stopped and was rubbing my belly. The following conversation then ensued:

Mom: What's wrong?

Me: Nothing, why?

Mom: Why are you doing that?

Me: I don't know. Every few minutes my stomach gets this really tight feeling and if I just stop and rub it a little the feeling goes away after a minute.

Mom: Uh, how long has this been going on?

Me: I don't know. Since this morning sometime.

Mom: Is it possible that those are contractions? (said with extreme sarcasm)

Duh. I didn't even realize what was going on. Once I was aware of what was happening, I realized that they were actually happening quite frequently. Later that night, Josh and I went to my folks for dinner and were hanging out on the patio. I got this really genius (read: colossally stupid) idea at that point. My friend Krista who had given birth a month earlier had told me that if you are near labor and go in to the hospital they would strip your membranes and that would get things moving along. Perfect. We made a plan to go down there as close to 10 as possible so that it would be late, but not so late that we would have to use the emergency room entrance. I figured that we would go in, they would check me, declare that I was having some false labor, strip my membranes and we would be back in a day or two to have a baby.

So we left the house around 9:30 to head to the hospital to check my "labor". As in, we didn't even take my bag because we knew that I wasn't really in labor. Upon arriving we were taken to a room where a very nice male nurse checked everything out, hooked me up to a monitor and promised to be back in a few minutes. About 45 minutes went by and he walks back into the room. Carrying an iv bag. And saying crazy stuff like, "Well, Mrs. LaGore, you are being admitted."

Uh, what???????