"My Water Broke..."

She's here!! Mark and I are absolutely in love with our little miracle. Landrie Grace Long was born at 1:20am on Monday, September 14th. She weighed 6 pounds, 7 ounces and is 19 1/4 inches long. She's a dainty little thing with a head full of long dark hair. It even sticks out the bottom of her little cap! If you look at the ticker on the top right, you can see that she's a bit early. I want to write down how it happened now, so I don't forget!

Sunday morning Mark and I decided to sleep in a little and get things done around the house. We finished painting the nursery, moved the furniture back in, and cleaned up around the house. My parents, my sister-in-law Christy and my 3 nieces, Abbie, Anna, and Adelynn came over after lunch to ride together to my shower.
Our birth mom and I both had a feeling she would come early, and I wrote earlier about my intense need to get everything done! Mark had the feeling too, only he was thinking the 24th. :) I was praying that she would at least be able to make it through the weekend. I wanted to go to my friend's shower and to my shower on Sunday. We needed so many things, and I was hopeful that we'd be a little more set.
I was SO excited to have another shower. Little did I know what a great day it would be!! I'll do a post on the shower later, but let me just tell you, those girls out did themselves! It was so beautiful, and we got so many sweet things. I loved seeing all you girls! One of the things I had been the most stressed about was getting the car seat. You can't leave the hospital without one, so I kept bugging Mark about installing the hand me down one we had in the car. He was secretly planning with the hostesses, and the girls got us our travel system for our shower! Many of you knew that our birth mom was dilating and starting to efface, and I kept getting reprimanded for not having my cell phone in my lap as I unwrapped gifts. :) Really?? As if she's going to go into labor during my shower...
After the shower, I got into the car with my mom and Abbie. As I was pulling away, I half jokingly asked my mom to check my cell phone for missed calls. OUR BIRTH MOM WAS A MISSED TEXT. She simply said,

"My water broke, and I'm on my way to the hospital."

The text came through at 4:30. My shower ended at 4:30.
I freaked out and immediately called Mark, crying, laughing, speeding through the rain, and trying to think ahead to everything I had to do. After I hung up, I called Christy (in the other car) and told my mom and her everything I needed packed from the shower! Abbie was screaming, "She's coming! She's really coming! We're going to have a real baby girl!" the whole time in the backseat. I would LOVE to have had it all on video!
We flew in the house, and I literally started throwing clothes from across the room into the suitcase. I think we were out the door in 5 minutes flat. I ran back in the house when I began to doubt if I packed the camera. My mom let me take hers. We prayed for our birth mom and baby before we left, and took off through the pouring rain. I peeked in the backseat and laughed. It was FULL of baby clothes, hair bows, blankets, bags, and a brand new car seat sitting at a wild angle on top of it all. We spent the rest of the trip crying and laughing as we made phone call after phone call the entire way there. My community group was meeting, and they even put me on speaker phone! I knew we'd never get to everyone, so I had my friend Megan log in to facebook and post that her water had broken.

Well, I've written a novel, and we aren't even to the hospital yet! It looks like this event is worthy of multiple posts. Look for PART II, "She's here!" coming soon! (I promise, that post will be FULL of pictures.) For now, I'm going to go love on sweet little Landrie, who is sleeping peacefully in my lap as I type. :)

PS- We LOVE all of your sweet texts, phone calls, messages, emails, and facebook notes, and I'm sorry we haven't been able to respond to all of them. We can't wait to talk with all of you!