A New Story Begins

Hello from Mommy-land. It is totally UNREAL to have this perfect little guy in my life. I've been wanting to update for a while, but I don't really even know how to put into words how I feel about everything, from labor to coming home, and now just over a week since I met my son. It's just unreal.
I have SO much to write about, but I'll dedicate this post to the labor and hospital stay... it's a long one, sorry in advance. On Thursday the 6th I had an appt in the morning. My doc told me that I hadn't made any change in the past two weeks... still at 1cm, and 60% effaced. I was totally bummed. Pat and I went to lunch, and I jokingly put on facebook that I was wallowing in self pity. During that day, even when we were at the docs, I kept telling Pat that I felt like I had bad gas pains (sorry, TMI lol). They weren't horrible, but just kind of persistent all day. Later that evening I felt what I thought might be a contraction, but it was just a quickish, bad pain in my back, so I wasn't sure. When I talked to my dad that evening I told him I'd maybe had a contraction or two, but was still not really sure. About 6pm I started having regular contractions... all in my back. I probably should have guessed then that things would get painful fast haha. By 8pm my contractions were definitely regular, definitely painful, and still all in my back. I tried various positions to help, sat in the bath, sat on the exercise ball... all that good stuff. Our plan was to go to my moms, who lived closer to the hospital, once I felt like I couldn't be at home. That happened around 11pm. By time we got to my moms, around 11:40ish, I was in a lot of pain. We stayed there as long as I could handle it, and headed to the hospital around 1:15am. At that point my contractions were 4min apart, which was our goal for going from home to hospital.
By time we got there I was pretty out of it. I threw up a couple of times, and the pain was really bad. I hadn't felt any of the contractions in the front because the back labor was SO intense. The doc did a check and LUCKILY I was dilated to 5cm. She also confirmed what I guessed as soon as I realized what I was having was back labor... Drake was "sunny side up". I got the epidural as soon as I could.
Once the epidural set in it was smooth sailing for quite a while. I progressed pretty fast from 5cm-9cm, and then everything stopped. My contractions, which had been off the charts were suddenly barely registering on the monitor. That lasted almost 5 hours!! They put me on pitocin, which didn't seem to be doing anything, and finally discussed a c-section. They said they'd turn up the pit one more time and then in a half hour make the call. Luckily things decided to pick up again.
I started pushing at about 1:30pm and 2 hours later, at 3:33pm, my beautiful son was born. He was immediately perfect and immediately the best thing that ever happened to me. Even though everyone had told me that it would be amazing, I just had no idea. Amazing didn't, and still doesn't even begin to describe it.
After I got all stitched up (blah) we moved to our room. The next few days (from Friday afternoon to Monday) are kind of a blur and mostly just all run together. The best thing I did, by far, was send the Husband home for two nights so that he could get some rest! We did have to stay an extra night because Drake had jaundice, but luckily we didn't have to spend an extra three days with him in the NICU because his labs began to even out.
Getting discharged from the hospital was the point where things got real, haha. I just kept thinking that at any moment I'd wake up from the amazing dream I'd been living in, or that the hospital staff would decide we really didn't get to have this perfect little guy all to ourselves. But, they basically kicked us to the curb with our baby, our bags, and our stockpile of stolen hospital supplies.
Overall we couldn't have asked for a better experience. It was amazing. My husband was amazing... BEYOND amazing. I don't think I have ever been so proud of him. Our son is unbelievable. I'm just so in love. It's hard to imagine life without him now. It's hard to imagine when he wasn't in our lives. He's perfect, and beautiful... and yes, all the crap we went through to have him was TOTALLY worth it.