Well I officially am a dad. I think the whole thing is still starting to set in. Up to this point it has been quite a whirlwind of action with lots of people around. We went in last Friday night to have Melissa induced. I am glad we did. We were having a hard time making the decision because we did not want to make the wrong decision. The kicker was that I talked to my friend Tom who just the day before had their daughter and he told me that the doctor they were seeing based the due date on their ovulation schedule. If we used that for our due date we would have been 12 days overdue. Kaiser had our due date at the 24th. We had it at the 13th. Maybe it was somewhere in between. But when I came to the realization that if we were at a different doctor then we might have been considered 12 days overdue, the decision was an easy one. It was fun getting admitted and getting into our labor and delivery room. They gave Melissa something to ripen her cervix at 10:30 pm on Friday evening. I actually went to sleep at my brother's house that night in anticipation of a long next day and realizing it would be very helpful if I wasn't also exhausted. Melissa's sister Emily stayed with her in the room. When I showed up the next morning around 8am she was having little contractions, though she could not feel all of them. But they were already very close together between 1.5 - 3 minutes. That never changed throughout the whole laboring process. Well between noon and 3 the contractions started getting really bad. Melissa got something in her IV to help with the pain. She did not want to get an epideral. After numerous hours of painful labor, she finally decided to get an epideral because the pain was simply unbearable. Here is something that became very clear during this whole process. It is very difficult for me to watch her go through immense pain and not be able to do anything about it. When she decided to get the epideral I was totally supportive. Besides the horrible pain (and she has a high tolerance to pain) Mel was also worried that if she didn't get the epideral she might be too exhausted to push when the baby was finally ready. Then the likelihood of a c-section increased and we definitely did not want that. So I was definitely wrong about thinking that the epideral is one simple little shot. I think the guy was messing around in her back for almost 10 minutes, or at least it seemed like that. And during that time she was at 7 cm and having real bad contractions. It was rough. But it was downhill from there. Not even an hour later she was at 10 cm and ready to push. Basically her body just needed to relax so she could go from 7 to 10 cm. She pushed for about 10 minutes and out came our baby daughter (to my surprise, I guess I just always assumed we would be having a boy) Isabella Mackenze at 11:44pm on Saturday evening. One thing I am very glad I did was actually watch my baby being born. A friend of mine said he had watched his and did not recommend it. It was just too much. I am so glad I did. There is something miraculous about watching that (and fairly grotesque too, but I did not see it as that at the time, I think that is what is so powerful about it). So I think I am still coming to grips with the reality that I have a baby daughter. I imagine as a little time goes by and things slow down a bit that it will really hit me. It already is. I just keep wanting to look at her. I also can't wait to see what she is really going to look like, meaning, to me, that she still kind of looks like all babies do which, to me, looks like a boy. I was recently looking at photos of me as a newborn with my mom and I think it was around a month or three months (I can't remember which one) where I could say "oh yeah that looks like me. I can't wait for that. But I can, because I know how fast time will go by and so I will enjoy my baby Bella every moment, savoring each one as a precious gift from the Giver of life.
