Ashleigh's First Pictures

I went into the Hospital on Tuesday to start the inducement process. After spending Wednesday on 30mL of Pitocin/hour with no progress, we stopped. I started again on Thursday afternoon, this time with some progress being made. At 11:03pm, on October 4th, this beautiful little gift from God, blessed us with her arrival.

She weighed just 5lbs, 7ozs and measured only 18 3/4" long. She had APGAR scores of 9 at both measurements (10 is best). I couldn't have been happier. Then, when my doctor began to collect the blood for the Cord Blood Kit, she says, wow, you had a very small placenta, you're lucky.

Not being medical, I had no clue what that meant. But, being the techie, I did look it up when I got home. Apparently, women who have small placentas sometimes suffer from the placenta pulling away from the uterine wall and have late miscarriages and others deliver still born babies, and then there are the babies who are very small, who suffer from some very serious developmental and medical problems. Neither of which her doctor, the Head of Pediatrics (only the best for our little girl) believes Ashleigh will experience because she was pretty big in the "small placenta" world...

So... Our precious little gift from God, my piece of Heaven to love, has become a lot more precious,
now knowing she may not have ever arrived.

I wonder if her Daddy had a hand in that? He definitely blessed me with the fact that she looks a lot like him... She has his eyes, his nose, his forehead and hairline (can't have it all and maybe she can have bangs) ...
but I think she's gonna grow up to be a beautiful and blessed little girl.
After all, she's loved by an Angel!

Ashleigh in her Daddy's Little Girl outfit...
Daddy would be
SOOOO proud!!
I know I was ...

Ashleigh in her adorable pink little outfit...getting ready to go to the Doctor's for a weight check!!

Ashleigh after her first sponge bath...
She just loved that!! ...
:-( But oh her little red spots...
Doctor said it's her skin getting used to our world... Poor thing!!
No wonder she didn't want to come out!

While it's not a picture of Ashleigh, I wanted to put this picture here... My mother "decorated" Nealy's grave with pink carnations and a balloon before I left the hospital.
Ashleigh and I went there on the way home,
but it was too cold to get out and go over.

We went on her one-week birthday.
It was a VERY emotional time...
I think honestly, the worst thing I've ever had to do in my life....

It was hell to bury my soul mate...It was 10 times worse to have to take his daughter to "meet" him at the cemetery.

But we "celebrated" the way Neal and I had planned...
with the Asti he bought for her birth!

Pictures from Ashleigh's first trip to her Daddy's grave....

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