A Baby Boy!

So in the depths of despair, with an induction scheduled for Wednesday, Andria more or less told me that she had lost hope of the natural childbirth she wanted on Sunday morning. Two minutes till midnight that same day, I caught my son in my hands and placed him on Andria's chest where he opened his eyes for the first time to get a good look at mom...and planet earth. Actually it probably wasn't a good look as he had never used his eyes before and I am told that babies are more or less legally blind when they are born.

But baby philosophy aside, let's share a little back story first. Andria was at 41.5 weeks. We had pretty much spent the last month thinking "today could be the day." So by Sunday, August 11 we were honesty getting a little bored of the waiting. We had watched about half a dozen too many movies to pass the time together, shopping for names in the credits. I mean, we actually prevented the movie theater employees from cleaning the auditorium because we stayed through ALL of the credits. We had also run out of house chores. I mean, we made a list of all the stuff we absolutely had to get done before the kiddo came, and made sure that stuff was done 2 weeks before Andria's due date of July 31. So we lived on 3.5 weeks of borrowed time...but with little to spend that time on!

Andria stopped mountain biking at 36 weeks, so we had started taking up hiking together. Once Andria started to despair, we kinda said - to heck with it - let's go enjoy a nice hike. And so it was that on Sunday, August 11, Andria and I decided to drive about an hour to get to a really nice hike - perhaps not the best idea of the previous few weeks. We started at the bottom of the South St. Vrain Trail and hiked up. It had just stopped raining when we got there, and Andria was having surges, but they seemed pretty far apart. As we started the hike, I broke out my "contraction timer" Android app so we could establish a good baseline. Turns out the begining-of-hike surges were about 10 minutes apart. But they weren't all that intense and Andria could mostly smile and talk through them.

We hiked maybe 2.5 miles out and uphill. By then the contractions were six minutes apart. They were getting more intense, and she would have to stop occasionally to manage the pain. I was actually getting nervous and suggested we head back a bit early, but Andria wanted to get to the top, and I had long decided not to argue with my pregnant wife. As we started hiking down you could tell things were getting more serious. I had to start applying pressure to her back during the surges to keep her happy. We got back to the car, but the way down seemed to take forever compared to heading up. And Andria's started complaining of pretty significant back pain. She hugged quite a few trees on the way down to keep it together. But at the car, her surges were still around 5-6 minutes apart.

But we still had an hour long drive to get back to the house. I kept tracking her contractions using my phone app, and over the course of the drive, they went from 5/6 minutes to three minutes apart. We had given up on the idea of picking up some food on the way home (we thought this might be one more date night!). And by the time we got to the house, I knew it was time to call it in, throw the bags in the car, and go to the hospital. Unfortunately this is easier said than done. I'm used to two people packing things up and getting the ball rolling. Now there was only me. And worse, Andria was curled up on the floor of our bathroom listening to our hypnodoula - pretty hippie, yes, but man-o-man did it work! Anyway, it's really hard to focus on packing everything up and calling the hospital when your wife goes into 60 seconds of intense pain every 2 minutes!

But we finally got in the car, drove to the hospital - about 20 minutes - and checked in around 9 pm. When the nurse first examined Andria, we were both waiting with bated breath. I mean, we had heard so many stories of women who labor forever, suffer immensely, and make only slow and halting progress. The nurse said Andria was dilated between 7-8 cm, a very promising sign, and was quite impressed with how well she was managing the pain. About an hour or hour and a half later, Andria went into transition. There is no way to describe what that is like without seeing it.

But Andria was a superhero. She gave birth to my son at 11:58 pm - about 3 hours in the hospital in total. He was 7 lbs 3.5 oz and 20 in long. The doctor let me catch him and hold him for a minute before clamping the umbilical cord. And then I got to place him sticky and icky right on Andria's chest. The look in her eyes said it all for me - I'm sure I had a similar look in mine. And then just to give us a quick taste of the future, our son decided to immediately poop on Andria while having their initial skin-to-skin time. It was amazing how little that mattered though.