Our baby was born on Tuesday morning at 12:44 am. He was 10 lbs 4.9 oz. Just 2 oz heavier than Isaac but Isaac was born at 42 weeks and 1 day and this one was born at 39 weeks and 4 days. He would have been huge if he had gone a little longer. Rebekah was only 8 lbs 10 oz at 41 weeks. Comparatively she was small but realistically she was a good sized baby. He was 20.47 inches. Shorter than Isaac and I am not sure about how long Rebekah was. He has brown hair and blue eyes (don’t all babies) and is very cute, but I am not biased.
Tori is doing very well. Tuesday night she still didn’t feel any pain and was up walking the third time shortly before I left. She was even excited to get her favorite Tuesday Tacos for dinner from her father. The plan is to go home on Thursday.
So here is the longer story (I hope I get it all correct, I know Tori is more tired than I am but it is all starting to turn into a blur :) ). Saturday and Sunday she began to feel a lot of contractions. Sunday she lost her mucus plug and was very excited to be actually doing normal pregnancy things.
By Monday morning she had to stop and breathe. She started to have extra discharge so she called the nurse. The first one didn’t offer any useful advice or help. A little while later she called back and was told to come in within an hour. While they told her to forget about the laundry she ignored them and we finished the laundry and finished packing just in case.
We arrived at the hospital in Riverside at about noon. Bama met us there and took the kids. The place was packed. We went into an overflow area for monitoring. After one contraction Tori told the nurse she had urinated but it turned out to be her water breaking. Now Tori was really happy. A real pregnancy action all by herself. So she was admitted and a doctor came and told her that she was completely effaced and had dilated to a 1. This made her day, to say the least. I mean, she was bouncing off the walls with joy. Now all she had to do was touch her slimy baby and she would be complete. It also helped her make it through the challenges still coming.
So the first doctor we saw told us we were third or fourth in line for a cesarean section and that he felt like a baby. Kaiser is definitely not a c-section hospital. They really push for normal births even after c-sections. So we sat in the triage for hours and hours while Tori had fairly regular contractions. The first doctor switched to another doctor who eventually was replaced by another assistant to him. At one point Tori got some good pain medication and was happy and sort of slept a bit while I went to get some dinner.
The poor doctors really were butchers. Between 2-3 pm they told us we were the third or fourth c-section in line and they were just getting started. Well, the scheduled ones were bumped to the next day and all the urgent and crash c-sections were put in line. But 11 pm we were wheeled into the OR just to be bumped again by number 7. Just before midnight we went back in and had our baby. There was still another one in line. The doctors felt so bad. They only had 2 or 3 normal births that day and were sad there c-section percentage was so high.
When the baby was coming out the doctor said wow what a big boy. So Tori asked if it was a boy and he said I don’t know yet and finished pulling him out and said yeah, it is a boy. They gave him to the nurse who was very kind and allowed us to touch the slimy baby before cleaning it. This time he didn’t even go to the nursery. He stayed with us in the OR for a bit while they cleaned him and then we took him into the recovery room with us.
It was a wonderful day. I will post some pictures tonight.
Warren
