Birth and name stories

I know it's almost a month since Amri's been born, but here is the birth story (the nurse in me is coming out) and how we picked her name.

We arrived at the hospital at 6 AM and were admitted. The first two hours there I was having regular contractions, but they suddenly stopped about 8. Between 8 and 9 I had two contractions. I started walking around at 9 and they picked up again, but when the nurse checked me at 10, I was still only dilated to a 3+ (exactly what I'd been four hours earlier when we'd arrived). So frustrating. They started pitocin at 10AM and kept upping the dose every 20-30 minutes and the contractions kicked back in, but they still weren't very painful. By 12:30 I was close to the highest dose of pitocin they'd give, and still no progress. I was still only dilated to a 4.

My midwife came in a little after 1PM and suggested that she break my water since it was really odd that I was on such a high dose of pitocin, and on my second birth, and progressing so slowly. I was really hesitant because with Jeffrey, breaking my water made labor more painful but did not in any way speed it up. With him, it was the pitocin that had helped me dilate. Tyson and I talked about it and she broke my water close to 1:30. Within 15 minutes I was having hard contractions two minutes apart and dilating rapidly. Just before 3PM I had an epidural. Poor Tyson had only eaten a granola bar all day (I'd suggested he go to the cafeteria but he declined leaving) and was still wearing a warm sweat shirt over his t-shirt from when we'd left early in the cold morning. While he was standing up, holding onto me while I was getting my epidural, I heard him say, "Nurse," and he started sinking for the floor. I tried to hold him up (all this was in the middle of the procedure) and kept him from falling until the nurse quickly made it over to us and helped Tyson to the ground. He almost immediately came to again and felt a lot better with some juice and taking off his sweat shirt. And I felt a lot better from the epidural ;-)

Just before 4PM I started pushing and less than 10 minutes later at 4:06 beautiful Amri came out! It was quick, going from a 4cm to delivery in 2 and a half hours, but so worth it!

Her name Amaris Shoshana is derived from my name. When I was in high school I was playing around with names and took out the abc in Cambria, and that left Amri. I loved it and always wanted to name a daughter that (although I always thought it would be my youngest daughter, not my oldest. . .but I guess it's hard to know exactly when you'll have your youngest daughter). Shoshana is the root of my middle name, Sue, and is Hebrew for "lily", and I put it with Amri, shortening my first name and lengthening my middle for a new combo. The idea for Amaris came from a baby shower for Jeffrey. We played a game making up names from our names, and one friend came up with Amaris from the letters of Cambria Sue. This friend happened to be a Hebrew major and told us that Amaris was a Hebrew name meaning "promised of God". So, late at night the last couple weeks of pregnancy as I was pondering names this idea kept coming back to me. Amaris Shoshana, with the nickname of Amri. It's a cool connection for us that both of her names are Hebrew since Tyson and I met at BYU-Jerusalem.

As for pronunciation, there may be a technical way to pronounce them, but we say ah-MAR-iss (although when people say AH-mar-is or AH-mar-EES we don't care) and Sho-SHA-na kind of like Anna with a shosh in front, not Sho-SHAW-na. And for some reason I do care about how that name is pronounced. And Amri is pronounced Cambria without the ABC.

Since we don't have a computer, it takes forever for our external hard drive to load pictures up to a campus computer, and I don't have time right now. However, hopefully more pictures will be forthcoming and possibly even a birth announcement if we ever get around to making it.

In the meantime, we are loving being in Hawaii and being a family of four. Jeffrey loves living by so many kids, near the beach, and LOVES little Amri. He gets super excited and runs up to me laughing when I'm holding her. He loves to touch her soft hair and face. . .however, when he gets TOO excited he'll suddenly grab and pull her hair instead of stroking it, or try to grab her face in a hug to hold her close. We're working on teaching him to be a little more gentle, although it may take a while to get that through to our year-old cute little boy. Good thing Amri is tough. They're off to a great start of a fantastic friendship. ;-)