Finally...the Details

I love you all dearly, but maybe now you can finally cease the clamoring for the details of Mama K's labor and Young Old's birth. To keep it simple, and truth be told the lack of sleep has been a wonderful amnesiac, I'll provide a basic, and potentially fabricated, timeline with a few comments along the way.

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6:30pm 8.18.08
Due to some unforeseen complications (do we ever really anticipate these things?), we ended up at Labor & Delivery at Kaiser Permanente's new Sunnyside Clinic in the deepest darkest heart of Clackastani, Oregon, approximately 6 days before Young Old's due date. Surprise, surprise, the due date is apparently a rough approximation. Upon entering, we were sent to a triage unit, and promptly told to hang out and relax while the midwife on duty was delivering three other womb goblins.

8:00pm 8.18.08
Our nurse Denise helped us move over to the birthing room, a spacious suite replete with a wide array of amenities, such as a comfy bed for me, a mini fridge for the beer, CD/DVD player for mood setting, and hundreds of half-hidden medical gadgets to ensure that we didn't forget we were, in fact, still in the hospital. Due to Mama K's water having broken the day before, paired with the above said complication, it was decided that labor would have to be induced with Pitocin, the synthetic version of Oxytocin, the hormone that naturally instigates contractions. Unfortunately, due to operator error, the IV drip rate was set way too high and Mama K instantly went into horrific body-shaking contractions, spaced about 30 seconds apart and lasting for minutes at a time.
Me: "Ummm, is that there Pitocin coming at the right rate?"
Nurse: "Ummmm, ooooops." A comforting response, to say the least.
Bleeps and bloops ensued and Mama K's contractions leveled out to a more manageable rate. For the rest of the night and early morning, Mama K and I did our breathing exercises...Ahhhh heeeee, ahhhhhh hooooooo. Much dizziness on my part, and a good deal of wickedly terrible pain on her side followed. Her sis, Auntie Ren, made it into Portland via Seattle in record time, and instantly got to work supporting the both of us...thanks, Seren, you were absolutely amazing and neither of us would have lasted a second more without your help. We spent the next 10.5 hours in various labor positions/locations...we tried out the birthing ball, the bathtub, walks around the birthing wing IV in hand, leaning over the bed, squatting on the couch, and many more colorful kama sutra-like positions I am hesitant to describe. Finally, Mama K settled into the warm soaking tub, her liquid throne for the remainder of the evening and morning. Here she labored through five hours of the most painful contractions, lasting minutes at a time with a minute break in between. She was getting so exhausted that she ended up falling off into a body-shocked sleep, only to quickly wake up in a terror when the next contraction hit it's peak. This, combined with the news that after all of this she was only 2cm dilated, helped us come to the conclusion that an epidural was inevitable, and at this point, desirable. Mama K asked me if I was disappointed in her for "giving in"..."Hell no!" I replied. I honestly think I would have begged for the spinal tap within the first hour of this shit. I'm still in awe of the patience and endurance my wife exhibited that night...to this day, and I'm sure for the rest of my life, I've never seen such a show of strength of heart and body as she put forth, and my love for her is all the greater for it.

6:30am 8.19.08
Epidural nicely in place, the contractions continued without all that painful bullshit, and Mama K's body was able to finally relax a bit and get some must needed rest.

7:00am 8.19.08
Nurse Denise sat down next to Mama K to help outline the expectations for the rest of the laboring process.
Nurse Denise: "Okay, so in a few hours you may feel a deep urge in you abdomen to push. Kinda like when you're driving on the freeway and you really have to go poop, but there's no where to get off the road and you have to hold it for several hours. That's when you know the baby's about to come and then you start pushing with all your might."
Mama K: "Ummm...I think I'm feeling like I have to poo. Really badly."
Nurse Denise: "Quick hold back her ankles, let's go! Oh, and I'm off in 20 minutes, so it'd be nice if you hurried up and got him out before I left."
Well, sounds like as good a reason as any to push a human out of your crotch. So Mama K started in...

7:25am 8.19.08
And baby makes three. His crumpled little head unfolded like a Transformer as he emerged into our world, umbilical cord firmly wrapped around his neck as he emulated an unnaturally big eggplant. Thankfully the midwife was cyborg-quick, and snipped the cord, enabling Young Old to take his first breath and scream his guts out. No holding him upside down by the ankles, no bottom slap. Mama K didn't even scream during the pushing, and didn't tell me what a fucking asshole I am, and didn't ask me "Why the fuck did you do this to me?" Nothing like the movies, and honestly, I felt a bit ripped off.

Young Old's Specs:
-7 lbs. 8 ounces
-19 inches long
-Thick, long black hair.
-Dark, dark blue eyes.
-My ears.
-Mama K's eyebrows.
-A mixed contribution from both of us in the nose department.
-My muscular solar plexus.
-After long afternoons of inner debate (Mama K shrugged the decision off onto me. Thanks, babe!), an uncircumcised penis. We started out wanting an all-natural birth, and damn it, fate wasn't taking this choice away from us.

The Stay:
The next two days at the hospital were basically uneventful. Young Old turned out to be very healthy, apart from some oddly babbled references about a guy named Billy Reuben (okay, so he was actually a bit jaundiced, which has since mostly cleared up). Mama K's mother flew into town moments after the birth and has since moved in with us for the next week or so to help out with dishes, cooking, and general Grandma support. Again, huge thanks are in order, you're helping us maintain our tentative grip on sanity. Just please stop trying to kill our cat and burn our house down, okay? Sorry, just had to get one last jab in, Aurora. You are loved. Anyway, the rest of the visit looked like this: lots of lazy lounging in the hospital beds, cleaning up the sticky tar-like shit of the Devil called meconium, reading various newborn info packets, cleaning up meconium, making decisions on immunizations and wellness tests, cleaning up meconium, receiving visits from our dearest friends, cleaning up meconium (are you sensing a pattern here?) and, of course, bonding with the babe.

To stress the point of how terrible this meconium stuff is, please refer to the below picture, courtesy of some brave soul at Wikipedia:



The rest, as you psychics know, is the future, and you can catch it right here on the daily.