Louie: 1 month old!

I promise to only post about our darling little son every so often- hoping to keep it to once a month 🙂 (I apologize now for the long post- who knew how many things you could do in a month with a little baby?!) But I will say he is a big reason why Bria Hammel Interiors exists. I have always wanted to be able to stay at home with my kids once I finally had them, but I also knew that I could never give up my passion for design. Thanks to my loving and supportive husband, I am able to do both!

Needless to say this past month has FLOWN by… for how slow pregnancy can go at some times, once the baby comes, what feels like a day becomes a week!

A lot of people have been asking me about our birth story (don’t worry I’ll save you from the gory details) and how things have been going having our little man home, so I thought I would share some special moments and a few images from Louie’s 1st month!

Louie’s Birth:

We checked into the hospital on Thursday evening at 7pm for a scheduled induction due to blood pressure issues. All went well the first night with only moderate contractions, and thanks to sleeping pills we actually got some sleep that night. Friday morning my water was broken at 9am and the pitocin began. Throughout the day everything was progressing nicely, and thank goodness for an epidural, I actually felt ok. Around 4pm Louie’s heart rate started dropping with each contraction, and after a very long contraction (actually 2 contractions back to back) things became a little intense because his heart rate wouldn’t come back up (they said this was due to the pitocin). Thanks to my mom for some Dr. intervention and the help of the wonderful nurses at Fairview Southdale, they were able to get us both stabilized. After 26 hours of labor, giving my body a chance to progress on its own and not succeeding, and with Louie being “sunny side up” and causing horrible back labor, around 8:30pm the Dr. decided a c-section was the best thing for us. 1/2 hour later, Louie was born! It’s an amazing thing, those c-sections… Louie was out in about 30 seconds of the surgery beginning, and 20 minutes later I was in the recovery room.

Our first family picture!

Daddy holding Louie for the first time 🙂

We were so lucky to have my mom in the operating room with us! When Louie was taken by the nurses to get cleaned up Charlie went with him and my mom stayed with me and held my hand while they finished up the surgery!

We were in the hospital for a total of 4 nights, and of those nights we were there, we counted Baby Louie had 42 visitors! The hospital was nice enough to let everyone who was waiting all day in the waiting room come visit us when he was born even though we didn’t get to our room until 10:45 Friday night. He had 14 people waiting to meet him that night! Talk about being a loved little boy 🙂

All clean after his first bath in the hospital

Grandpa spending time with Louie in the hospital

Louie having his first visit with “Uncle Llewie”

This is one of Louie’s “hospital pictures”… they are not the same as they used to be!

When we got home from the hospital, we had lots of help from all the grandmas! Our meals were cooked for us, laundry done for us, and house cleaned! I was thinking I should have a baby every month with this kind of treatment! Another HUGE help to us the first week being home was our dear friend Hillary, who seriously acted as a live-in nanny for us staying with us for 4 days when we were home! I don’t know what we would have done with out her, and needless to say she was GREATLY missed when she left!