Braelyn's Birthday

Thrusday July 12th I had an appointment at the OB to see if anything was going on, I wasn't suprised to hear I was dialated to a 2 and really nothing had changed from a week prior, so we were all suprised how fast it all happened. Friday morning I woke up and took Sadie for a walk around the elementary school in our neighborhood, I wasn't having any significant feeling or contractions but thought it would be a good idea to start walking to see if anything would start happening. I came home from walking and James and I ran a bunch of errands around town. I talked James into going for another walk with the dogs Friday night about 7 and still wasn't having any real significant contractions.
I had heard a few times to sit on an exercise ball to help get the babies head down and into place so while watching TV I sat on my exercise ball and although I was getting a bunch of funny looks from James I bounced around on that for a few hours while watcing TV. We went to bed around 11:30 and I started having contractions between 5-7 min apart regularly. I really didn't think much of it and honestly thought they would stop and I could go to sleep. Boy was I wrong! They continued to get stronger and closer together so about 1:30 I had the urge to take a shower. James couldn't quite figure out what was going on and kept checking on me. I stayed up for a little while longer and tracked my contractions before deciding I should try to lay down again. To my suprise about 30 min later my water broke! I haven't ever seen my husband run around our house so fast, he had the car packed and all the last min packing done and I hadn't even got my clothes changed!
We headed to the hospital which is about 25 min away and they confirmed that my water had broke, but I was still only dilated to a 3. I was having very strong contractions at this point and requested my epidural ASAP! They nurses were all wonderful and got things started quickly so I could have the epidural. By 5:00 am I got the epidural and was dialated to an 8 and everything became much more plesant for me and James. The nurses let me rest for about 2 hours and about 8:00 I began to push. For me, the entire process was kind of a blur but at 9:29 am we welcomed our little girl Braelyn Jo Hollis into the world.
She was 7lbs 19 inches and perfect in every way!