Oh the adventures we will have...: Emma Grace has arrived!

After 41 weeks and 2 days of waiting little miss Emma Grace finally made her grand entrance into the world at 7:44 am on Monday, June 25, 2012. We feel so very blessed and are in complete awe that she is actually ours! For those of you keeping tabs, here are her stats (we will be nice enough to convert them from the metric system for you):

6 lbs, 14 oz (3.115 kg)

20 inches (51 cm)

Blue eyes

Light brown hair

After spending five nights in the hospital we are happy that the entire family is now at home and getting adjusted to what is our new "normal." We feel that so far (in all of her 8 days of life) she has been a relatively easy baby. Don't get me wrong, we've already had our fun times including a diaper blow out on daddy and getting sick on mommy on the first day home! We have also concluded that we are jinxing ourselves if the clothing we put on her is more than half white as it is bound to mean a messy clean up later in the day!

We can't wait to see what Emma has in store for us in the coming weeks, months, and years ahead, but it is without a doubt that we will always remember our experience having a baby in a foreign country and how it differed from any experience back home (aside from the heaps of additional paperwork). Here's a look back at the past week.

Since Emma was being more than a little stubborn and had no intention of coming out on her own will in the near future the doctor decided that it was best to induce one week after our due date. We were told to head to the hospital at 10 pm on Saturday night to be induced with the first set of drugs with the idea that it was going to still take awhile for them to kick in and we would be able to sleep most of the night (I laughed when the doctor told me that). It was clear from the moment we arrived at the hospital that our experience with Swiss healthcare was going to be like nothing else (we admittedly went to a small hospital, even by Swiss standards, as so far I know of no Swiss hospitals that come close to rivaling U.S. hospitals in size. Just to give you an idea of the size, when we arrived there were 7 or 8 new babies there and the day we left there was only 1 other remaining baby there). We had been given no directions other than go to the main entrance which was the same as the emergency entrance. At 10 pm on a Saturday night the doors were locked and we didn't know what to do. Luckily there was an employee outside that let us in without really asking any questions (I'm guessing he took one look at me and figured out we weren't trying to break into the hospital just for fun), but once we got inside there was no one in sight! So we decided to just head up to the maternity wing.

There's Emma's ID band!

After feeling like we had snuck into the hospital we finally found a midwife and she looked very surprised to see us. Evidently there was a bell we were supposed to ring for her to come meet us at the entrance, but we had completely missed it! Even though we had done some paperwork ahead of time, I was still surprised that we didn't fill out anything upon our arrival. There was no formal admissions process, no hospital ID bands, no hospital gowns, and she simply whisked us away to a room to get started. Another main difference at the hospitals here is that midwives instead of nurses work in the maternity departments, and although I don't have a U.S. hospital experience to compare it to, I think it was significantly better as a result. The midwives were very attentive and there to help in anyway possible with suggestions and advice. Although by the end of the week I was a bit tired of feeling like someone was always checking in on me, overall I am thankful for the experience and feel that we walked home with much more knowledge and confidence than we would have in the U.S.. And luckily the majority of the midwives spoke very good english, except in the normal Swiss way they said they spoke "a little english" only to go on and speak it almost perfectly. However, it was quite comical that the one midwife that spoke limited english was the one that was on duty the majority of the time I was in labor. Yet her actions made up for it as she did a great job seeing us through the labor and if there was ever a significant communication barrier she would track someone down to help translate.

Not sure I understood everything the midwives had us do - it was 75 degrees and the hospital had no air conditioning, yet they still put about four layers on Emma. Here she is with an additional sleepsack for bed!

If you didn't notice I went into the hospital Saturday night, but Emma wasn't born until Monday morning, so it was a bit of a slow process to say the least! So much so, that another surprising moment that I don't think would have occurred in the U.S. happened - the doctor told us just to go out for a walk or go home for a few hours around lunch time on Sunday. Now, we do only live two blocks from the hospital but we still didn't expect that they would just tell us to do what we wanted for a few hours. No need to sign out, tell them exactly when we would be back, or anything. Just walked out with an IV in my arm and went home for a couple hours before labor really kicked into high gear!

First family photo shortly after Emma was born

By the time Emma arrived on Monday morning it had been a long 36 hours that didn't pass without a few surprises, like finding out I was allergic to penicillin about 24 hours into it, but as I had been told several times before nothing else could have possibly been more worth it. We were pretty much madly in love as soon as we saw her. I'm convinced she already has her dad wrapped around her pinky. And I am already relating the experience to a marathon (and not in the normal way of referring to how long of a process it is), but in the way that you feel afterwards and how surprisingly easy it is to forget the pain involved that got you to that incredible moment. But don't get too excited, unlike my normal marathon routine of signing up for another one right after I finish one I think we'll take a little time off before we have another one of these little ones!

So happy that Emma is finally here!

One of the last major differences between Swiss healthcare and U.S. healthcare is the amount of time that you stay in the hospital when you have a baby. For a regular birth in Switzerland it is usually at least four nights and closer to seven or eight nights if you have a c-section! I spent "only" three nights in the hospital after Emma was born (after all we had already been there two nights before) and was definitely ready to go home by the time we got the go ahead on Thursday. But I was surprised at how quickly the time passed as it seemed that everyday the midwives had several different things planned that they wanted to teach us or discuss. And when we were told on Wednesday night that we could go home the next day the midwives had to rush to go through everything else that was still on our "agenda" as they hadn't expected us to leave until Friday! Then by the time we finally got everything done on Thursday our exit from the hospital was just as nonchalent as our entrance. We simply called the midwife when we thought we were ready to go. We asked if there was something we were supposed to sign or do and she said "No, you are good to go. Do you need any help on your way out?" And as simple as that we walked out the door and walked the two blocks back to our home.

Emma's ready for the long walk home!

All in all, our first week with Emma has been nothing short of incredible. It's amazing to look back at what we were thinking and feeling last weekend in anticipation of her arrival, to the moment of her arrival, and now to how we feel after a few days of being at home. Although I have no doubt that we will continue to be nervous and worried about something most everyday, it is much different from the anxiousness and apprehension we felt as we waited to be induced. And what I do know for sure is that it's true that these little ones truly are an incredible gift from God, and Emma is one that we will continue to be thankful for the rest of our lives.