elise lenore

wow is it amazing to type her name! for those who haven't heard, we had the baby...and it's a beautiful girl! her name is elise lenore. "elise" comes from j's great aunt elise and "lenore" is also my middle name picked out by my father when i was born. i have to laugh reading my last entry...because not even 9 hours after i made that entry, did my water break. yes, we enjoyed a wonderful Christmas morning with the sells, came home and did Christmas together, and as we were getting ready to head over to my mom's, i decided to take a quick nap. no sooner had i laid down on the couch than my water broke. of course i was oblivious and didn't realized what had happened, until j said, "do you think your water broke?" as he said it, the "ah-ha" look came over my face...he was right!

we stayed home for a while because i had no contractions. we took a walk around the block (almost 3 times actually)...met some of our neighbors in the process...had my mom and doug come over (and they brought dinner...which was a delicious "last meal")...we watched a movie...and finally headed over to the hospital at 7pm...still hardly any contractions.

i can give the rest of the details to anyone who'd like to hear them, but the short version of the rest of the story is this: justin, vanessa and my mom were in the delivery room with me the whole time. contractions started around 9:30 pm, we endured naturally until about 5/6am when the doctor told me i was only 6 cm. with my muscles twitching uncontrollably, the pain increasing, and my strength gone, i asked (more like begged or demanded!) an epidural. this gave us all a chance to rest until about 9am. with some petocin we got to 10cm and after pushing for 2 hours, little elise was born at 3:02pm on december 26th.

she is beautiful! so here are some pictures. we are falling in love with her more and more each day and can't thank the Lord enough for all He's done in creating her and bringing her to us.