Well, Ryan finally decided to put in his appearance! He was born Wednesday night, January 24, 2007 at St. Marien's Klinikum in Amberg. Of course as we had expected, he waited until the absolute worst snowstorm of the season to make his arrival. It snowed all day long and we got about 15" of snow. Needless to say, the trip to the hospital which usually takes about 25 minutes, ended up taking closer to an hour. Not fun when dealing with contractions that are 3 minutes apart.

At any rate, we got to the hospital just in time. As soon as I was admitted and the nurse checked me and determined that I was about 3cm, my water broke and contractions started coming on even stronger. I was pleading for an epidural and they ended up calling the on-call anesthesiologist to come back in - thank goodness! She got there about 9:40 and I was hooked up by around 9:50. The dr. noticed that the heart monitor wasn't picking up Ryan's heart rate, and did another check which revealed that I was fully dilated and that Ryan was crowning! Wow, that was fast! It took all of about two pushes to get him out and then he was here. This was 110% easier than Nicholas and I loved the staff of the German hospital because they were so much more understanding than the military drs. from before.

Anyway, I'm uploading a few photos of Ryan that I took this morning. They're not the best because of the lighting in the room, but they're still perfect to us! Enjoy!