A little early and completely unexpected...but hasn't that been the story for the last 8 1/2 months?!

Welcome to the world, Caleb Andrew!!

Day 1: We never imagined we would be updating this blog to let you know that Caleb has arrived...and in true Caleb fashion!! :) As with the entire journey we have been on so far, his arrival into the world was nothing short of a miracle and a complete surprise. We were all prepared to welcome him on the induction date which was set for 8/11 (39 weeks), but of course, he decided he was done waiting and he arrived 10 days earlier then that. I woke up in the night Sunday night to extreme back pain. I tried to do things around the house, rather then lay there and think about being miserable and not being able to sleep. The back pain grew more intense and I realized that it was coming every 2-3 minutes, right from the start. After trying to put it off for an hour or so, I woke John and told him I thought we needed to head to the hospital...something certainly was not right as I was experiencing such pain in my back that I was having a hard time breathing or talking through it at this point. We had NO emergency plan in place, so we called John's parents to see if they could come down to be with the kids. Okay, it was before 4am, so it was basically come and 'sleep' till the kids woke up. After a few minutes, I realized I could NOT wait the hour that it was going to take them to get to our house and so we called our next door neighbor to come in the interim. You know you have wonderful neighbors when you can call them in the wee hours of the morning. THANK YOU, Christy! :)

Off to the hospital we go...my back pain turned into all over insane pain and it was NOT letting up at all. I think I could count 20 seconds of downtime before another episode would begin again. I knew I was in trouble. We had an hour long car ride ahead of us to get to Fairfax Hospital, which is where he needed to be born because of his heart conditions. Half way to Fairfax I told John he needed to hurry up. Things were certainly progressing quickly. After surviving getting through the initial registration people on the main level of the hospital, I had to then endure the triage lady on the labor and delivery floor...I mean really...could they not tell by my body language and look on my face that I was seriously going to have this baby right there on the floor?!? A nurse came out and took us to a room and asked us more questions and finally realized that I was SERIOUS about what was going on. Thankfully, labor was not too stressful on him as he did fine. It was certainly worrying me that he was to be induced just for that reason - to keep him monitored during the labor process. When it was all said and done, the nurse said we had checked in to the hospital at 5:09 and he was born at 5:27!! No epidural, nothing! He weighed 8 lbs. 3 oz. and is 21" long.

He was whisked off to the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) as soon as he was born to be closely monitored. He will remain there until his oxygen level can remain in the upper 80s/low 90s (we walk around with our oxygen level at 100%) without any extra oxygen help. He did not seem that bad off in the beginning and the cardiologist did a check of his heart and said that it looked as they expected. In other words, it did not look any worse then what they had seen on all my previous sonograms. So far he was holding his own with extra oxygen (which is the piece that looks like a space helmet). By the end of the day he was on a lot of oxygen in order to keep his O2 rate in the upper 80s, we were not sure what this meant. The neonatologist wanted to start him on a heart medication already, at the end of day 1, but thankfully the cardiologist stepped in and said he needs at least 24-48 hours to see how his body starts to regulate things on its own...so they stopped the medicine...