Welcome to the World Brianna Kirsten Billings!!

The day has finally arrived! At 2:47 AM on August 3rd we were blessed with a beautiful baby girl, weighing in at 6 lbs 12 oz and 19 inches in length with just a little blond hair on her head! I have to say the way we got there was not quite what either of us had expected.  Amy had a doctor's appointment on the 2nd at 11:30 at which point she was told that she was 2 cm dilated, which means she could go in the next day or two or as long as a week depending on how things go.  At this point she wasn't contracting yet, but by the time 2:00 arrived she was having full blown regular contractions.  At 3:00 she called me to say that her contractions had been 5 minutes apart for the past hour.  She called the doctor and they told her to head into the hospital, so we were off to the races! Her supervisor was kind enough to drive her back to our house where I met her after my commute back from work.  I got all the stuff ready as fast as I could because Amy was not digging the contractions at all!  When they checked her out at the hospital she was still just 2 cm dilated and they considered sending her home, but luckily they gave us a chance to walk around to see if we could speed things up.  After an hour of walking around she had increased to 4 cm and her water broke, so now we were good to go!  Thankfully it was a fairly slow day in the maternity ward and the anesthesiologist was waiting for Amy in her room to give her the epidural, I'm pretty sure based on the few hours that she had to endure the contractions that Amy will never be doing natural child birth!  Once the epidural was in place, she felt no more pain and the rest was more or less just a waiting game.  With pushes through about 4 contractions we had ourselves a beautiful baby girl! The doctors were so surprised out how easy the baby was to push out, I guess Amy really was done with being pregnant.  I lost the shiny penny bet since it wasn't a boy, but happy and healthy is all I really cared about and we were thankful to get both.  It was so surreal, one minute there's two of us, the next minute we're three! I think we're still both in shock about the whole thing, it still feels like we're just babysitting someone else's kid, we just can't believe we created this wee one.  Her whole first day has pretty much been spent sleeping, though after 24 hours she's likely to become a bit more active.  Amy's parents came down early in the morning and my parents are due to arrive in an hour or so.  So little Brianna has had a lot of activity for her first 24 hours outside of the womb!  We were both pretty nervous and anxious at first not knowing what to do, but once we do more and more things it really does just become second nature.  A few hours ago I was iffy with the diapers, now I'm changing them like no one's business!  We're so excited to see what the coming months and years have in store for us.  Just to let everyone know we plan on continuing the blog so the fun doesn't stop here.  Stay tuned for more news about little Bri as she learns to navigate the world.  Thanks to everyone for all their love and support throughout this whole process, Brianna is truly lucky to have so many people who care for her!