deza | Happy birthday, Kyle!

My baby boy is eight today. Eight. Where has the time gone?

I spent all night with little tiny contractions--just enough to keep from sleeping, not enough to count as labor. At 5:30am (12 hours after the induction began), I was given a second dose of the prostoglandin gel, and a shot of morphine to help me sleep.

I'm going to go ahead and say now, morphine is my friend.

Around 10am,

musicwolf showed up at the hospital to see how I was doing. He said that having a wife in labor counted as a good reason to ditch classes. I was still fairly loopy from the morphine, so he sat and watched some tv, then went to the cafeteria for lunch, then came back up to sit in the room some more. About 1pm, I started having real contractions. After the third contraction in 20 minutes,

musicwolf talked me into calling the nurse. The morphine was keeping me from realizing just how strong these contractions were, and I didn't want to bother the nurse too early.

musicwolf insisted, and I pushed the call button. The nurse came in on the tail end of my fourth contraction, ready to hook me to the monitor.

Now, for those who haven't been through this, monitoring contractions is actually kinda neat. Two sensors are held on mom's belly with some heavy-duty elastic bands. One sensor tracks the baby's heart rate; the other records the strength of the contractions. The mother is generally monitored for 30 minutes.

The nurse suggested that I go to the restroom before getting hooked to the monitor. I waddled in to the bathroom, and as I was sitting down on the toilet, I got very light-headed. I felt and heard the mucus plug fall out. The nurse asked if I was ok, and I said no, I had this strong urge to push. She opened the door, grabbed me, and literally tossed me onto the bed. She lifted the gown, saw Kyle's head crowning, and said, "we have to get you to delivery."

All this time, I'd been in one of the delivery recovery rooms. L&D was down the hall. The nurse pushed the panic button, and a team of nurses (followed by

musicwolf), started wheeling my bed down the hall. They were running, and didn't have very good control of the bed, so I got bounced off the walls and ran over a laundry hamper on the way.

In L&D, I was rushed onto the delivery bed. Kyle was coming out so quickly that my midwife didn't have time to make it over from her office. One of the nurses grabbed the first OB walking by, and pulled him into the room. He said "What's the--oh" and halfway threw on some scrubs. The scrubs were only around his upper arms when he caught Kyle on the way out, at 2:12pm. After he cut the cord, he introduced himself to me and told me I had a very healthy-looking baby boy. At this time, the midwife came running in, so the OB left it to her to clean me up. I had a level 4 tear from Kyle coming out so fast, and it took longer for her to stitch me up than it had to give birth.

First contraction to delivery was an hour and twelve minutes.

The whole time, I was very aware of where

musicwolf was. As soon as I was on the L&D bed, he stood by my head and held my hand. With Rowan's birth, he had been supporting my feet, welcoming our daughter into the world. He cut the cord with her. This time, he stood well back from the birth, and he chose not to get involved with cutting the cord. That tore me to pieces. I have never felt so alone in my life as I did while giving birth to my son.

But then, while I was getting stitched up, and Kyle was getting cleaned and measured,

musicwolf went over to the warming lamp to see him. He laughed when Kyle pissed on the nurse (my son has a built-in fire hose), and reached out a finger for Kyle to hold on to, and said "Hey, there, I'm your dad." That's when I started crying; when I knew that Andy finally saw Kyle as a separate person, not as a part of the wife he didn't want anymore.

musicwolf went out to make all the phone calls. His parents got there with Rowan pretty quickly, and by 5pm (when my mother got there) he'd already taken Rowan and gone home. He didn't come back until three days later, when Kyle and I were discharged. And even then, we sat there for three hours after signing the discharge papers, waiting for him to come take us home.

Thank goddess (and the Navy) that

musicwolf now is such a different person from

musicwolf then.