6 days old

My wife is an absolute ROCK-STAR!!! More on that later.  I’m going to regale you with the story of my daughter’s birth.  It’s kind of long so I’m going to break it into small chunks.  Here is the first:

Act I

   I woke up Sunday morning January 8^th with my wife telling me that she’s been having more severe contractions since 1:30 am.  I say “more severe” because she’d been having Braxton Hicks contractions for a couple of weeks before the birth.  When she said this, I was immediately hopeful that things have started for real, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.  I was not disappointed when we discovered a small wet spot on the couch where she had been sitting while watching episodes of StarTrek Enterprise and Parenthood on Netflix.  (I don’t care what Netflix has gone through this last year, I still LOVE it!)

   I don’t know why movies like to show water breaking with a gensis style flood pouring all over the floor.  Oh wait, yes I do.  Because if it showed real life, no one would watch it.

   We were scheduled to meet our midwife that afternoon so we called and decided to postpone until the evening when we felt like we would need their support.  So we spent the afternoon watching another episode of Enterprise and an episode of How I Met Your Mother while the contractions continued.  Nothing like a little Scott Bakula and Neil Patrick Harris to pass the time.

  I played the role of dutiful husband/birth partner and started recording the length of contractions and the time in between.  Sometime between 6 and 7 pm the contractions were getting pretty regular.  There was about 4 – 6 minutes between and they were lasting about a minute.  Note to those not wanting to be an ass:  don’t tell the mother the times of contractions.  The last thing they want to know is how long they’re actually lasting or how long until the next.  I learned this the hard way… once.

To be continued…  But here’s a little something to tide you over until I get around to the next section.  Whenever that may be.

Cute, huh?