A Baby Story

Ok, since many have wondered, here’s the basic rundown of events:

Tue morning: We had our scheduled check-in, everything was fine, no progress at all. Looked like maybe next week at best.

Wed morning: Kate started having fairly regular contractions in the morning around 1:00AM. They were about 5 min apart and lasting for 45 sec. We went in at 8:00 for a check-in, but still no dilation, so we thought maybe we’ll walk around a bit, try to get things moving.

Wed afternoon: Kate’s still having contractions but they’re farther apart, but lasting 70 sec now. Pretty weird, but she’s having trouble relaxing (understandably) and her lower back pain is worsening, so they called over a script for Ambien and she took that to try to get some sleep. What they don’t tell you is that Ambien is a mild hypnotic that is really fast-acting, one minute Kate was asking for a pudding-pop, the next minute it was falling out of her hands and she looked completely stoned. Nothing’s freakier than talking to your wife and having her just stare back at you glossy-eyed. Don’t do drugs kids…

Wed evening: The Ambien zonked her out for about an hour, but after she woke up the contractions resumed and were 3 min apart. Seemed like we must be progressing, so we went to the hosptal for a labor check. She was a little further along but still nowhere close so they gave her some pain meds and we spent the night there.

Thu morning: She’s feeling better, the contractions are still there, but less frequent and less intense. So rather than try to induce we decided to go home and relax to see if the contractions went away or became more frequent again.

Thu afternoon: Rather uneventful: Kate got some sleep in, I went to work that day.

Thu evening: The contractions came back in full force. After a few hours of progressively getting worse it got the point where her back muscles began to spasm (probably from going through 36 hrs of contractions) and it got point where if the contraction itself wasn’t hitting, a spasm was, and she was in constant enormous back pain. Back to the hospital we go for the epidural. She was checked in and setup by 11:30. Now we wait.

Fri morning: Over the night she actually got some sleep and much needed relief from the back pain. By morning she had progressed fully and was ready to deliver. 10:30ish she started and at 11:00 Molly came into the world: 8 lbs. 2 oz. 20″ tall and big head of dark hair. Kate had some minor complications afterwards, but she’s doing fine now, recovering well, and Molly is healthy as an ox. I never understood that expression and still don’t.

Labor: 58 hours.
Delivery: 25 minutes.
Beautiful healthy baby: priceless.

Never in my 30+ years on this earth did I ever think I’d be excited, I mean really excited, to see someone else have a bowel movement. I can honestly say it never even crossed my mind…

It’s actually been going really well so far, our only real major concern was that she hadn’t had a bowel movement in a day and half. So we were worried: was she getting fed enough? was she constipated? was it ok? … kinda freaking us out by Monday morning. Then after the doc told us how to give her a little “encouragement”, she went like a champ. And we were ecstatic

Can you believe you actually just read about this? Bet you didn’t see that one coming huh?

Aah… it’s so nice to be home. We all got discharged on Sunday afternoon and are all glad to be home. Hospital food is so flavorful…
Anyway, I’ll try to write-up a bit more of our actual experience later but figured photos would be desired early on so…

Here’s some pics we took, there’s more but I think these are the best of the first bunch.

Real quick:
Molly’s here! She was born November 9th at 11:00 AM.
I’ll post more once we get settled in probably tomorrow or Monday night.

Our room choices upstairs have been fairly arbitrary except for choosing the biggest room as the bedroom. For awhile this was the “office”, but it was recently re-made as a nursery for Molly. We stripped off the couple layers of wall and ceiling paper, sanded and spackled, painted…

We’d already decided on the Cocalo Turtle theme (long before we knew the baby’s gender) and we painted it to match. Kate did the more laborious job of painting the waves. If I never sand/spackle/paint another ceiling again, it’ll be too soon…

We also brought up and installed the carpet that we took out of the dining room. It’s nice, quality carpet, we just don’t care for the color, but Molly won’t care too much. It’ll come up once it stops being a nursery anyway…

I like ellipses, I don’t know why…

Before

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