From what I can remember this whirlwind week started just about like every other one of our last few weekends, with our saturday ritual which had turned into our little running joke....cleaning the house, taking the dogs to the park, and making our "last trip to ... before brayden gets here" (with ... being Target, Whole Foods, etc.). Well this week the "..." happened to be trader joe's. about 20 minutes into our shopping expedition stephanie looks at me, with a little different look in her eye, perhaps a look of angst, and tells me she's having a contraction and has to go to the bathroom. In my head i'm thinking, oh my gosh, is she going to have a baby in the bathroom at TJ's? I mean they do have absolutely fabulous prices on specialty items, but not the most ideal place to welcome your son into the world. luckily a couple of minutes later stephanie emerged empty handed from the bathroom and we were on our way shopping.
Stephanie continued to have contractions throughout the day on saturday, and around 5pm we started to time them to see how frequently they were coming. We actually wrote them down so we could keep track of them in case i decided to blog about this....(4:25, 4:27, 4:45, 4:25, 4:00, ....). The whole time we're trying to coordinate the travel itineraries of Nana, Oma, and Opa. Not knowing for sure if these are the real deal made this a difficult task. And at around 7pm, after it was too late for Nana to catch the last flight out of Atlanta, we decided this baby is coming, tonight.
Now being the midwife that she is, stephanie was bound and determined to labor at home until she hit her goal of 4cm dilated. So we sat around all night, packing our bags for the hospital (we probably should have done this beforehand, but seeing as how Nana packed her's 30 days in advance we figured it evened out our procrastination). At about 2:30am, after around 10 hrs of constant 4 minute contractions, stephanie decided she'd had enough and so we took off for the hospital. at about 2:45, and and roughly a half-mile from the hospital, stephanie tells me she hasn't felt a contraction since we'd been in the car. 40 minutes, 2cm dialated, an 2 ambien later we were on our way home. Now i've never taken ambien, but I imagine that under normal circumstances it works much better than it did for stephanie saturday night. When we woke up around 8 or 9am stephanie was still in a bit of a daze and talking incoherently about some plan (from what I could gather anyway). luckily this daze seemed to only last a little while and she was quickly back to laboring away.
At this point Nana is already here, and Oma and Opa are over half way to DC so there is a little added incentive to get this baby out into the world, only problem. contraction times that had been so steady at 4 minutes apiece have dropped down to around 12 minutes. Now normally pain is better when spaced out, but when you're talking about labor, stephanie put it best with her statement "I can't wait to hurt". The contractions continued all day, varying in intensity and frequency, at one point reaching close to 45 minutes between. They picked up again toward the later part of the day so stephanie gave the midwife a call around 6:30pm. Her prescription? Take 3 glasses of wine and call me in the morning. Oma and Opa showed up around 7 to help with the first 3rd of the prescription. At this point the contractions really started to come on strong, although the only hint of it from stephanie was the tapping of her hand and a slight impediment to her speech. When 9 o'clock came around stephanie had decided she couldn't take any more, so we once again packed up the car and headed to the hospital. About 10 minutes into the drive stephanie looked over at me and said "I haven't had a contraction since we got in the car", so I'm thinking to myself o brother here we go again. But much to our delight, we were checked into the hospital to stay at around 9:30, at 4cm.
To help speed the labor our midwife broke stephanie's bag of water and we ambulated and showered for about an hour. At this point stephanie was ready to call in calvary for help (Dr. Shea the Anesthesiologist). That was the end of the contractual pains. We (I) decided it was time for a little sleep, we'd let the pitocin flowing through stephanie's veins do the heavy lifting of contractions through the night. Little did I know, at this point, that sleeping on this 4 foot pleather sofa would be the best sleep i'd get for the coming week. While I slept, stephanie stayed up to chat with Nana and her upcoming labor, she did manage a few hours sleep.
We woke up around 5 ready to start the pushing. Patrice, our midwife, came in to check the cervix one last time to make sure she was the full 10 cm. It turns out that she was only 9.5cm, with a small rim around one quarter of brayden's head. So she upped the pitocin and we waited it out another hour. Patrice came back at 6 to check the cervix again and realized that brayden was OP (sunny-side up, or face up for us non-OBGYNs). Well, apparently this makes the delivery a little harder. I went out to tell the very eager soon-to-be-grandparents-again that we were getting ready to start pushing. Patrice said that we should wait a little longer, and she got called away to help another patient deliver. About 5 minutes later we heard the screams of bloody murder coming from across the hall. Normally this wouldn't evoke this reaction, but I had to start laughing, knowing that Nana, Oma, and Opa were thinking this was stephanie. I went out to assure them that we were still status-quo. They were extremely relieved.
Around 7 Patrice arrived back in our room and told us it was time to get that baby out. She said that she had delivered several OP babies and she was confident she could get him out. So we started pushing, with 3 sets of 10 for each contraction. We pushed for about 30 minutes before Patrice took a break to tell us that brayden may be stuck. She called for the doctor to come in and advise. This only made stephanie push even harder, instead of 3 sets of 10 for each contraction stephanie stretched these out to 4 sets of 10, and when the doctor showed up it got extended even more to 4 sets of 12 to 15!!! I couldn't believe the effort she was putting forth. She could have lifted a bus off a baby, she could have straightened the leaning tower of pizza. I tried as hard as I could to hold back my emotions, and I found out later, that my counting was actually louder than stephanie.
At 9:06am on July 16, 2007 we welcomed into the world Brayden Michael deRijke. The doctors put him on the scale to weigh him, 9lbs 8 ozs. For those of you that heard he was only 9lbs, you are correct. 3 minutes later we realized there was a blanket on the scale, we reweighed him at 8lbs 15.8ozs, and 21 inches long.
A week and a thousand pictures later I still can't believe all thats happened.
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