I'm going to come back here and write the long version in a bit. But for now, my second baby girl--Amara James M---------, was born yesterday at 12:56 pm. 7 lbs, 7 oz and 20 inches long.

Short version: I had been having prodromal labor for over a week. 8 days before, I was 3 cm dilated. The day before, I was 3.5 cm dilated and 75% thinned...had been cramping for over a week but no active labor.

Yesterday morning, I went into work for a teacher training with the same cramping I'd been having for days. By 10 am, the cramping was starting to get worse. I waited a bit to see if they were "real", then told my boss I was going to go home at 10:30 and actually left around 10:45am. I have a long commute, but luckily traffic was good at that time of day, so I was home by 11:30 am. While driving, my contractions started getting INTENSE, fast. I timed them and they were already 4 minutes apart.

I got home and was in PAIN....I could hardly walk around picking up my hospital bags and started ordering around my mom while I leaned on the exercise ball. Just 10 minutes into that, I told her we couldn't wait on my husband and had to go to the hospital. Luckily, as we were going to the car, he came running up in his work clothes and jumped into the car with us, not packing a thing for himself.

We got to the hospital at 12:35 pm.....and Amara was born at 12:56 PM. We barely had time to get into a room before I was pushing. It was SUPER FAST compared to my first labor which was 30 hours long. No time for an epidural--there wasn't even time to get to a real L& D room.

I'll post all the details later.