Joe and April Russell: Riley Delaney Russell

We will use this blog mainly to publish family photos and perhaps it will grow into more frequent posts but for now it will be rather infrequent.

Riley Delaney Russell

She was born 6/9/2006 last Friday at 9:17pm. She weighed 8.3lbs and was 19.7 inches in length. It's interesting that my dad's birthday (Joe's dad) is on June 7th and our anniversary is on June 8th. So, June is getting really full now.

April began having contractions at 3am when they woke her up from sleep. She went to the restroom (as she will find out that she will be doing for most of the day between contractions) and went back to sleep. They kept waking her up until finally she decided to just get out of bed at 5am. She woke me up at 6:30am and I took the day off.

We went on a walk at 7am and her contractions became closer and we couldn't walk for long because April couldn't hold her bladder for too long at this point. It was misty outside and still kinda dark out. It was a nice walk and April enjoyed the mist because she was hot.

I monitored her contractions and by 8am they were consistantly 4 minutes apart and lasting a minute long. We called Amanda who is our Doula and she is also a midwife and she told us to watch a movie and call her when we are finished. Normally at this point most people go to the hospital but we had no plans on being at a hospital all day so we took Amanda's advice.

We tried to watch a movie but at this point we knew that April's sister Rebecca just gave birth to a baby girl so we decided to go visit her. Rebecca gave birth to a 5 lb 13oz girl named Michaela.

By noon we were back at home and the contractions were closer and getting more painful especially for April's back. We called Amanda and she agreed to come over. I continued to comfort April by giving her backrubs and moral support.

By 5:00 we decided to have Amanda check April and she was dialated to a six! We started to get ready for the hospital but by this time the contractions were getting tough for April. We got her in the car around 5:30 and April was already getting the urge to push. We definitely didn't want to have a baby in the car but I made the decision to try to make the trip to Bellevue because that is where we wanted to have Riley. We called the hospital and let them know we were on our way. We decided that the backroads might be quicker. The first light we get to it takes us three light changes before we get through and I begin to question our judgement about the backroads.

We had Amanda on speaker phone and she talked April through her contractions and we all breathed with her. We get to Redmond around 6:15 or so and the road we are on was closed because of an accident! Amanda flagged down the traffic officer and he called in an ambulence. It took them about 10 minutes before they were on the scene. I was impatiently waiting for them to leave which took another five minutes but felt like thirty. We decided that Amanda would ride with April in case she gave birth in the ambulence.

We finally got to the hospital a very long hour and a half later at 7pm and April thankfully had not had her baby and was dilated to about an 8 at this point.

At around 8:15 or 8:30 we decided to have her water broken. She was fully dialated between 8:30 or 8:45 and Riley was born at 9:17pm.

We had moral support from all the mom's who waited in the lobby.

My mom: