Isla Grace Hollingsworth

She's here! Isla Grace Hollingsworth was born July 20, 2008 at 2:13 pm. She weighed 7 lbs. 4 oz. and was 20.5 inches long. We are loving our new baby girl!

Birth story: I started to have irregular and only mildly painful contractions on Wednesday night (July 16). They were between 6 and 10 minutes apart and lasted through the night. I was certain labor was about to begin! But by late morning on Thursday the contractions pretty much stopped. I walked. I bathed. I swam. I relaxed. I went sky diving. Okay not really, but I tried EVERYTHING get this kid movin'. Thursday night the contractions returned. Still irregular and only mildly painful. But hey it was a glimmer of hope. So we carried on as normal, hoping that this time labor was just around the corner. Again the contractions lasted through the night only to subside by Friday midday. We took this time to go see The Dark Knight (which was awesome). This pattern of starting and stopping continued until Saturday evening. The sporadic contractions I was having started to get increasingly intense and by about 11pm we started to time them. This was it. Contractions were pretty consistently 10 minutes apart and started to feel like they were doing some work. Before we knew it, it was 2am and we were really having to focus to get through each contraction. They were 6 minutes apart so we decided we should call Michelle (our midwife) and giver her a heads up. She told us to give her a call as soon as contractions were 5 minutes apart or less. We called my mom at about 4am and told her to come on over. She sounded like she had been up all night just waiting for us to call! When my mom got here, she had me get up and start walking around. This really got things moving. It seems like contractions jumped from 6 minutes apart to about 3 minutes apart in no time. So we called Michelle at about 5:30am and she was here by 6am. She checked me out and I was pleasantly surprised to find out I was already dilated to 5cm. Thats when I realized that 5 is only half of 10 and there was a long road ahead of me. The next several hours are kind of a blur for me. I labored in the warm tub for quite a while which brought some relief and helped me to relax through the pain. By about 11am I started to feel the urge to push. Michelle checked me and I was at 8cm. By this time I was feeling like labor would never end and I secretly began to hope something would happen so I could go to the hospital and get an epidural. But no such luck. The next hour and a half of labor was the absolute worst! Contractions were ridiculously close together and there were some definite double peakers in there. But after some very uncomfortable maneuvering we were finally at 10cm and I was given the go ahead to start pushing. About an hour and half later Isla Grace was born! I couldn't believe it when they plopped her on my chest and I heard her adorable (and loud) little cry singing through our home. She is the cutest baby I have ever seen and we are absolutely head over heals in love with her!