To Sania: The day you were born

Sania, as I sit on the couch and watch you and your mom play on your butterfly, I realize that now's a good time to tell you about the day you were born.

We went to bed the night before Easter thinking we'd probably get up and go over to your Aunt Naynay's for a nice Easter lunch. Lucky for those folks, we were only responsible for bringing drinks to lunch. Because in the wee hours Sunday morning, your mom sorta-kinda thought maybe her water was...leaking. Not breaking, but leaking. Her doctor had been down there giving her the business trying to make you come out on Good Friday, and it looks like her efforts were going to bear fruit.

Nonetheless, your mom woke me to tell me about the developments, and we decided to monitor the situation until morning. The sun came up, and I opened my eyes to your mom standing beside the bed in exactly the same spot she was standing in when she told me she thought maybe something was happening with you five hours earlier. She said maybe we ought to go to the hospital.

Two other things were going on. The doctor had scheduled us to induce your arrival Monday afternoon. Therefore your grandparents on your mom's side hopped on a plane from Atlanta. They were sleeping downstairs. Down the hall, your brother wasn't sleeping. He was shouting. So we needed to get Grammie and Pawpaw up and get Reid locked in to some kind of breakfast solution while we went to the hospital.

Much shouting and sobbing later, we were on our way to the hospital where you were born. It was just about eight a.m. on Easter Sunday, April 16th.

The hospital where you were born recently did some renovation, so it's a long thin hospital linking about four big buildings. The new ER is in building number one. The baby-delivering portion is in building number three. We thought we needed to go through the new ER, because it wasn't regular business hours. We were wrong, and two nice ladies in the ER stuck your mom in a wheelchair and we proceeded to drive her through the hospital which is still having some renovations done, getting lost a couple times, and eventually winding our way to the Women and Infant Health place, back to labor and delivery, which everyone called L and D.

We signed in and got a room. Lucky number 10. Our nurse bustled around getting things ready, putting monitors on your mom to listen to your heartbeat, and we waited for a doctor. When one came in, she checked your mom out, looked at her chart, and decided that we would stay and have a baby that day. Because your mom had a positive group B strep test, she would have antibiotics added to her saline along with some pitocin to bring steadier contractions. Her water hadn't broken, but it was leaking.

Unlike with your brother, your mom was feeling fine while we waited for you to come that Sunday. We went to the hospital on a Sunday morning with him as well, but your mom had a fever that day, and it was two weeks until his due date. Your due date, my dear, was the Thursday before Easter, and we were in penalty minutes with your pregnancy. Anyhow, because of your mom's fever, or maybe because we were first-time parents, the situation in the delivery room that day was tense for us both. I don't remember a lot of it disctinctly, because I was really worried about your mom feeling better. What I don't recall is being bored.

Awaiting your arrival, Ms. Sania, was pleasantly uneventful. The most excitement was figuring out how my mom would get from your Aunt Naynay's house to our house to get your brother so he could have an Easter egg hunt while your mom's parents got themselves over to the hospital in time to attend the birth. Otherwise, your mom watched some TV and I read a magazine. Maybe with your brother we thought about how our lives would change, or we thought about all the things we hadn't finished, or we just worried. With you, we were ready. We wanted to meet you. It was a waiting game.

Some time after noon, the doctor decided it was time to move things along a little bit, and she went ahead and broke the membrane in which you comfortably had been floating for the better part of a year. Your mom's always been a champion water drinker, and things were well-hydrated throughout the pregnancy. Of course, your mom had a nice gentle dose of anasthetic (not as much as with your brother, for whose delivery your mom recalls 'not feeling my legs'), so the contractions were technically getting stronger, but she was mostly just surfing through them without much pain. She's a champ, your mom.

By late in the three o'clock hour, your mom told the nurse that she thought maybe it was time to push a little. For weeks -- literally weeks -- your mom had been telling me that it felt like you were right there, on top of her pelvic bone, waiting to get out. But obviously, that feeling was more acute at this time. The nurse took a look at your launch-pad for the oxygen-breathing world and her eyes widened. "Don't do anything. The baby's right there. I'm going to get to the doctor."

We sat there, we two, waiting for the doctor.

Things happened very quickly from here on out. It took longer to put all the plastic and autoclaved instruments and accessories out for the doctor to run things in the delivery room than it did for your mom to push you out. The pushing, since you won't know for a while, goes like this: When a little monitor shows that a contraction is coming (along with the pain your mom is feeling), the nurse and your dad stand on either side of your mom and try to help her push. She only pushes for ten seconds at a time, basically two or three times per contraction. Your mom pushed nine times in the space of twelve minutes. The last push brought us you.

When your brother was born, because of your mom's fever, a neonatal specialist was in the room to make sure he was totally fine (he was). I recall skipping back and forth across the few feet from where he was carefully inspected and your mom was catching her breath and regaining her stamina. With Reid, she pushed for nearly two hours. When you were born, they took you over to a table where the nurse checked some things but let me get right up there next to you.

This is the first picture I took of you.

Your mom recovered quickly and let me take a picture of her holding you that I will cherish for the rest of my life and show no one else. After a little bit of holding and a little bit of nursing, they took you down to the nursery and I got to come. They bathed you and brought you up to temperature and checked to make sure everything was solid and intact. It was. You enjoyed the bath, and you showed that all your systems work fine by, well, demonstrating them. (Something you've continued to do admirably.) You were born at 4:11 p.m. Our life changed forever at that moment, again. Welcome to the world, little one. Your mom, brother and I love you.