The Whole Story

Now that I've had some rest and things have stabilized somewhat, here's the whole story. Honestly, I never understood why anyone would want to know ALL the details of a birth, so here's just the short story:

Lynn went into labor Saturday morning, so we made the call to the hospital and went in around noon. The labor basically stalled at 6 minutes between "birthing waves", so at 6:30pm we went home. Lynn tried to get some sleep since she had been up since 2:30am and because she wanted to be well rested. Yeah, that didn't work. Contractions got more frequent so we went back. We slept at the hospital Saturday night and woke up ready to get things moving again.

Sunday morning the doctor told us that we were too far along to go home but also at a stage that could last several days (he recently had a patient that went 8 days before being induced). So we started the induction. Lynn was amazing. I could see the strength of the contractions on the monitor, and they were pretty extreme, but she was clearly in control the whole time. However, circumstances beyond our control again gave us extreme options: epidural or C-section. The epidural was started soon after.

After 2 hours of rest, Lynn started the pushing. Again, she was phenomenal. I got to be on the receiving end, so I could see the head slowly moving closer. Unfortunately, with Lynn's fever and Bean's racing heart, we had to move faster, so they used a vacuum (it's not as bad as it sounds). In two pushes we had a baby. The doctor handed him to me and said, "What do you have there?", so I got to be the one to declare Bean to be a boy. I quickly handed him over to Lynn, and we gave him his name.

The end of the story is that Andrew was immediately taken to be weighed and measured and everything, then given back to Lynn, and then TAKEN AWAY. That's right, they took our baby to the "Special Care Nursery" (a.k.a. Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) for 48 hours of antibiotics. We can see him as much as we want, but it's still sad having to go through a security procedure just to watch our baby sleeping (or to nurse or anything). We're just trying to take the opportunity to rest up and get ready to take him home Wednesday morning.

Oh yeah, and here's a picture.