OKAY, im' finally getting to the story. I woke up at 4 with contractions and couldn't go back to sleep. We went to the hospital about 8 and I was dilated to a 4. We watched psych between contractions till about 1:00. I hadn't made much progress so they gave me an epidural and broke my water, after which my contractions slowed down and got weaker. So they gave me some Pitocin to get my contractions stronger, but then I was feeling them again. The little stinker was posterior so I had terrible back labor. We tried to turn him around but it didn't work. So they put more medicine in my epidural so I could try to rest. I was still moving really slow, and by now my doctor had had to leave for her vacation. But the other doctor said I WAS progressing so just keep...sittin around I guess. At 4 or 5:00 I had made it all the way to 6 and a half centimeters. UGH! At some point after that I fell asleep and was able to relax. I woke up around 9 and was dilated all the way, finally. The nurse let me rest a while longer before I started pushing. I pushed and pushed and made no progress. The baby hadn't come down any more after an hour and a half of pushing, and his heart rate was starting to drop during contractions. So, the doctor decided to use the vacuum to pull him down hoping that the baby didn't have too much hair for hte suction to work. It popped off his head once, but the vacuum worked pretty well to pull him down. Too bad though, his head was too big! The doctor started getting a little worried about his heart rate and decided to try an episiotomy and then maybe forceps, but if he didn't see good progress in 4 more pushes then he was going to do a c-section. Thank heaven, the episiotomy did the trick before forceps were needed. When he was finally born at 12:28, Edgar wasn't breathing. He had swallowed some of the poopy junk and I got to hold him about three seconds before they cut the cord and took him. They didn't want him to aspirate any of the nastiness, but he wasn't breathing either, so they hurried him off to take care of those things. They had to suction his nose and mouth and pump his stomach. His first APGAR score was a 2; basically he had a heart beat and that's all. But they got him going and everything turned out just fine, just a scrape on his head where the vacuum popped off. He was 8 pounds, 3 ounces, and had a massive cone head and lots of hair. He is doing great now, at just over 3 weeks old. At his 2 week check up he had gained a whole pound! After a long 20 hours, he seemed to bounce back surprisingly well.