IT'S A GIRL

We're excited to finally have another member of Team Petro join the ranks, and I have to say, it is good to be home from the hospital.

Joni did splendidly with the whole pregnancy, but especially the delivery. Yes, she did go completely natural and she did awesome! We went to the Dr. on Tuesday for an appointment and Joni started to have contractions that day and woke up at 2 am with stronger contractions, but was able to sporatically get some sleep during the night. We were going to go on a walk in the morning, but I had to run to an appointment so she took Tanner and really started to feel the contractions. I got home and she told me that I probably shouldn't go in to work, and by that time the contractions were getting closer and lasting longer. We called the Dr. a little while later, and packed everything up and got to the hospital around 1. Joni was in triage until 1:45 or so while they checked her out and did a stress test on the baby. Things looked good and were definately progressing so they moved us to the labor and delivery room.

We had all these great intentions of playing some games, etc. while in the delivery room, but things ended up going so quickly we didn't even have a chance to think about them! After getting settled in to the delivery room and getting some monitoring done on the baby to make sure everything was still okay, Joni tried walking around a bit just to stay on her feet. But the contractions were getting even more intense. Joni didn't realize this at the time, but I think the nurse was a little worried that the Dr. wasn't going to get there on time. Things were going so quickly, and the Dr. was stuck in traffic, that she seemed to be getting a little worried. The Dr. ended up getting there around 4:30 or so, was able to change into his baby delivering outfit, and not just a few minutes after they got the baby delivering tools ready, did Joni start pushing. It was only four good pushes or so and Hannah Gray Petro (19.75", 6 lb 12 oz) made her grand entrance at 5:14 PM 6/11/08!

We were held up a bit once Hannah and Joni were ready to go to the recovery room (they thought we would be there around 6:30 or so) but because they were having a shift change, they decided to wait to move us until after the new shift came on. Well, to make things a bit more interesting, Joni decided to let her blood pressure crash to about 41/20 so we had to wait for her to recover from that before they could move us.

We ended up getting to our recovery room after 9 and got settled in a bit while they were giving Hannah Gray a bath. We saw some family and then crashed for the night.

Yesterday, we saw some more family and friends which was fun, and helped pass the time in the hospital. We were able to go home last night, so we spent our first night as a family of three in our house. As I type this, Hannah and I are hanging out while Joni gets some much needed rest! We're looking forward to more family coming today for the weekend.

Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers, we couldn't have asked for a smoother delivery, or (in our opinion) a better baby.

I'm sure there is a lot of stuff that I left out, but here are some pictures as well.