At 4:33 yesterday afternoon, my 3rd son was born. He's happy, healthy, adorable and both he and mom are doing great. The whole family is doing great.
Milo at 5 minutes old
I spent the day at the hospital, thinking, talking and helping my wife as she went through the totally misnamed process of 'labor' - it just shouldn't be called 'work'. Clearly, a man came up with the term.
We were all set for a natural, drug free birth but my wife was overdue by about 5 days and the risks of complications increase once you go over 41 weeks so we decided to induce. We got up at around 5:30 am and started our normal routine of getting our other two boys up, making coffee (for me) and having breakfast. My mother drove to our house to babysit the boys and my wife and I got in the car and headed for the hospital. We arrived at 7:30 and signed in. The first question we got from the woman taking our info was. "scheduled c-section?" No, just an induction. We confirmed our information - thank you health insurance - and headed up to delivery room 4.
We were both very happy with the room. It was well lit, roomy, looked more like a hotel room than a hospital room, and just put us at ease. We've been doing a lot of work on our house and we commented on the really nice hardwood floor (we also later noticed that the chair moulding needed an extra finishing nail or two but we figured that we could always come back later and hammer one in for free).
We met our main nurse - Mary - and we learned that just about every nurse on the floor was named Mary. I'm not kidding, we called out Mary's name once and 4 nurses popped their heads into the room. Anyway, our Mary was great. She was knowledgeable, funny, a good conversationalist and extremely empathetic. She was great and she deserves to be recognized for her professionalism. My wife needed a hep-lock for the IV and the pitosin drip and this took a bit more poking than she would have preferred, but what can you do? The doctor checked her out, said we were at 2 cm and then we were off to the races.
My wife has a very high pain tolerance. She delivered out first child after 30 hours of back labor without any medication whatsoever. Our 2nd took about 20 hours, although he came out sunnyside up so the pain was a bit less. Our plan was to follow the same game plan and do this one without pain meds as well.
As the pitosin started to kick in and the contractions began, we sat and talked. It was a great conversation and we realized that when you're parents, you don't really get the opportunity to talk (as adults) with your spouse until both kids are asleep and then you're so tired that you just want to veg out. We discussed life in general, swapped a few stories, I mentioned that Obama was going to get over the delegate threshold that evening so the day would be important in more ways than one.
The contractions were starting to come more frequently, but you wouldn't know it by looking at my wife. She really could be a great poker player, (well, only if bluffing means that you have a bad hand AND are getting kicked in the uterus). But I digress.
To take her mind off the pain, we played a really neat card game called Settlers of Catan. We're geeks, we accept it. It's a great game. Go out an buy it. We played for about 90 minutes. It was a very close game and it was a back and forth contests, but I won in the end. Now, I know that a lot of you are probably going to criticize me for not letting her win, but she would have figured out that I was backing down and lord help me then.
When we finished, it was about 12:30. I was getting hungry and ate one of the peanut butter and pickle wraps that we had packed. It's not gross, it's very good. My wife makes it better than I do. I messed up the peanut butter to pickle ratio. She wasn't too hungry and she wasn't supposed to eat anyway so I ate her wrap as well.
The pitosin was really starting to kick the contractions up a notch or six and the doctor checked my wife at about 1:00. She was at 3 cm (you need to get to 10 cm). We decided to break the amniotic sack to help the labor progress. After about 2 hours the contractions were coming every 90 seconds or so and my wife was clearly in significant pain. She'd been through all this two times before, but I think having been a parent for 6 years, I just don't think either of us have the strength or stamina that we did when we were 27/28. I still remember clearly what my father said to me the morning my wife went into labor for the first time. "I hope you got a good night sleep, it will be about 20 years before you have a chance to feel fully rested again." Boy, was he right.
At 3:00 the doctor checked my wife because she was having trouble breathing and felt shaky. She hadn't eaten solid food and I think she was really running low on energy. The doctor was a bit concerned and checked her cervix to see where we were. Then she said she was at 4 cm and that we might be looking at 6-10 more hours of contractions. I can't describe how devastated my wife was. Just looking at her face, the way she just crashed, the drooping body language - it was terrible. Up to this point, I had felt pretty much useless. During the first labor, I really played an active role as a coach. By the time my wife was ready to push out our first child, she was not really conscious of what was going on. She was really close to passing out and I had to yell at her, keep her focussed, at one point I basically carried her up and down the hall in order to get our son to move downward. During our second, I really didn't do nearly as much and this third one I wasn't doing all that much. Anyway, when she heard that she was at 4 cm, she just looked at me and said she couldn't do it. My wife is very anti-medication, but most of all, she didn't want a c-section. She looked at me, said she wanted to hear about pain medication options and then asked if I though she was a wuss. I told her that even if she took pain meds, I'd never doubt, for an instant, that she could kick my ass in a fight. She smiled and said, "you bet your ass I could."
At 3:15 the doctor came in to give the epidural. I was told to sit in a corned because I might pass out. I didn't argue and sat in a chair, annoyed. After the line was in, I talked to our nurse, letting her know that I had watched my first son, at 3 days old, get a spinal tap so I could have watched an injection without getting sick. She seemed to feel bad so I let her know that it wasn't that big a deal and that, although I had been emasculated, I hadn't been much of a man to begin with.
Within a few minutes, the look on my wife's face changed completely. She was relaxed, her breathing was normal and she was no longer tense. Within another 30 minutes she said she felt ready to push. The doctor did one final exam, said she had gotten to full dilation in under 45 minutes and that someone should call the nursery. My wife pushed twice and out came a very healthy little person at 4:33.
It is amazing how you can suddenly and fully love a baby. Up to that point, I had been somewhat disconnected from this baby. Our first two were planned and we never intended to have a third. When we found out we were going to have another, we both accepted it without batting an eyelash. For me, I spent a lot of time thinking about how this would affect us as a family, financially, educationally all of the things that are important, yet aren't. My first son was conceived a few weeks before 9/11 and my second came in 2005. The world is in terrible shape and I have always questioned if it was right to bring children into such a world. They bring so much joy to me and my wife, but what if the world doesn't return that joy to them? For the first time in a long time, I have begun to feel hopeful. Change for the better is coming. When I saw that little baby, I was overwhelmed with such a powerful sense of love and care and joy. The same feelings that I had with my first two, but those sensations were built gradually over time as we got nearer to delivery. This time, it was an explosion of emotion and I think it may have been the greatest feeling I have ever experienced.
Pax vobiscum nobisque