birthing: d-day

Thank you for your patience. You deserve a pat on the back. I'm totally holding on to the I-have-a-new-baby excuse, and throwing in a lot of I-have-tons-of-family-visiting too hoping you'll let me off the hook a little. It is true that I thought I'd have more time than I do now that Eli's here. (I'm guessing all mothers out there just snickered a little.) Enjoy the next installment of Birthing Eli, though I warn you it might not be as entertaining as the muppets.

As an aside: I suspect Eve is one of the few enrolled in heaven's Witness Protection Program. If not and I can find her up there, I have a few choice words to share. Beginning with, "I hope that was a darn good apple..."

So I left you at 5 centimeters.

We made it to the hospital, heard the wonderful words that admitted us to Labor & Delivery. By 4:30am I had my epidural. By 5:30am they broke my water.

But back to the epidural. When they asked I said, "Yes!" and they sent the nice anesthetist in. Dr. Talks Way Too Much wheeled in his cart and I promised myself I wouldn't open my eyes until it was all over. But he took forever and talked me through the whole thing. Which I didn't really want. I even interrupted him at one point to say,

"By the way, I should mention that I used to teach high school science. And when I got to the back part of anatomy, I skipped the spinal cord entirely. I'm not a fan. In fact, the spinal cord in general creeps me out."

He didn't take the hint. He continued to talk and even mentioned something about "two holes" but he didn't say Oops so I didn't realize he'd made a mistake at first. I still haven't looked at my back in case the two holes are still there. It gives me the heebie jeebies to think about it.

Shortly after they took the ginormous crochet hook to break my water, one of the nurses was encouraged by my progress and said she thought we'd be having lunch with our new baby. Silly nurse. Noon came and went. Every two hours or so they'd check what they check and the eternal day continued. It was slow going. We looked at magazines. We watched the whole first season of The Cosby Show. Jim played lots of computer games. And I took lots of naps, thanks to the epidural.

Dinnertime came and went, too. Speaking of food, I was really hungry. I found myself dreaming of a big bowl of spaghetti. Why spaghetti? Who can say. But I wanted it and I wanted it bad. Jim was so sweet. Every time he left to get food he just kinda pretended he needed to stretch his legs or something. He felt so bad that he could eat and I couldn't. My mom was also sweet. She'd come in from the waiting room to keep me company and feed me ice chips. It wasn't spagethetti, but at lest I didn't puke later.

Fast forward... 17 hours and two nurse rotations after being admitted, Dr. Brown finally gave me the ok to push. As I did I was convinced every blood vessel in my face was going to pop. And a few did (see picture above) but over all we did alright. Jim was a great coach and counted me through every contraction. I even remember asking him if he'd remembered to ask his co-worker if his wife still wanted to sell me her breast pump. Jim just looked at me funny, said something about "guys don't talk about that stuff" and we were on to the next contraction.

Exactly one hour later, Eli was born with his full head of hair. And his bloody, gooky self was beautiful. And I just stared at him. And I loved him.