Whatever you do, don’t look! Oops, I looked…

The craziest 24 hours my wife and I had ever experienced started Monday morning. There were so many subplots, I think I’ll have to focus an entire entry on each one. Now the main storyline it all revolved around and ended with: Dec 31st, 2013, 8:10am, our son was born!!! 😀

For now, as I’m stacked with paperwork and reports due here at my desk, I’ll focus on one subplot:

When we first did the tour of the Labor and Delivery Unit at our hospital, they showed us the delivery room and all of its options. One of which was a mirror so the mom could see herself giving birth. This was instantly shot down by my wife. And any mention of me videotaping it was instantly shot down by me

I do not want to see what goes on there nor does my wife! It’s completely illogical to us that someone would

And come game time earlier this week… yep we saw what went down there. But we had no choice!

They eventually brought the mirror for my wife to look. You see she was in labor for 24 hours. Yes, 24 HOURS!!!!! So we had to do everything to hurry the delivery. Apparently visually seeing down there helps the mom see which muscles to really focus on pushing. My wife’s not sure if that actually worked

What did actually work was getting her off the epidural. She loved that it numbed down the pain, but when you can’t feel anything you don’t know what you’re pushing. The pain returned, but her control of her body did as well

Now why did I look? Well there’s things you learn that actually happen in the delivery room versus what’s shown on tv and film. One being that they don’t always put that drape wall up so it’s impossible to see below her waist! I wish they did! I expected they would, but alas they didn’t, haha

But I didn’t look down at that point. I still made sure to focus on the opposite side of the room! Then we learned something else about giving birth. The mom has to crunch her upper body towards her abdomen, while pulling her legs upwards toward the abdomen to really help push that baby out of there

She did have stirrups up, and she was trying her best to push, but she couldn’t focus all these muscles at once everytime. So a nurse helped, and volunteered me to do the same, by grabbing her leg and helping push it upwards toward the abdomen while keeping the knee out and down to further open up the baby’s escape route

So since she has no drapes up covering the view, and I am now being a human stirrup and holding the leg in place for each push, I couldn’t help but glance. And glance. And after enough times I no longer feared looking down there, haha. But it’s every bit as gross as one can imagine

On a side note: I was really drawn to look because the crown of my boy’s head was showing really early. Curiosity won! Now I’m a math mind. I’m an accountant and have been in advanced level math classes since 2nd grade. So I see the tiny crown of his head showing, I proportionately figure the size of his head. Then proportionately figure the size of his body in correlation with his head

When he did come out, boy was that prediction wrong! My baby boy was 8 lbs, 1 oz and 20 inches long. It’s still mind-boggling to me to see all that come out of there when it was just a tiny crown of a head at first…

He’s my boy! My baby boy! Our miracle baby! Next entry I’ll focus on why he’s considered a miracle baby

moral of the story: It took 30 years and seven and a half months for me to meet and hold my son. It was worth the wait, and worth all the hardship and pain I’ve endured on this journey

Have a Nice Day!