“Dude, you’re a dad” were the words that my sister responded to me after i told her that Joy had finally given birth. Those words were pretty much sums up me becoming an actual father. The past 9 months really haven’t affected me too much, with my day to day being pretty much the same, just with a lot less drinking and a lot more prepping i really didn’t have anything else to do.
Then it starts. Wednesday night we went out for Jonathan 36th birthday at Pitfire Pizza and of course I enjoy a glass of beer to go along with our pizza but passed on the second glass just in case.
Fast Forward to October 31st, 4am.
Joy wakes me up saying that she needs help timing her contractions, and that she’s been up since 1am with pregnancy pains. I immediately get a shock of adrenaline and help time it using an iPhone app. I know that once its 5 minutes in between for 1 minute long consistently for an hour its time to go. The problem was that by the time i started timing them it was somewhere around 45 seconds long and 3 minutes apart. I really didn’t want to wait for the entire hour so i decided just to leave for the hospital since its a good 35 mile drive. We called the hospital in the car and since we were on our way they just had us come in even though they probably wanted to stay home a little longer.
5:30am.
We get to the hospital and head up the delivery room where we get checked into the triage room to see where we were at. Joy actually had only dilated to 2cm, but was running a slight fever so they just had us wait for a room to open up instead of sending us back home.
7:15am
A room finally opens up and we get to our delivery room where we’d spend the rest of the day at. As we get settled in and hooked up to all the monitors at 15 minutes later Joy’s water breaks.
8:30am
When we checked into the hospital initially Joy told the admitting nurse that she was going to get an epidural and i guess she thought that meant she wanted it right away. We’re werent quite ready when the anesthesiologist showed up but we didn’t want to turn the away since we didn’t know when she would be available again, so just went with it since they were going to start Joy on pitocin as well.
11:15am
The midwife came by to check in on Joy and said that she was 5cm dilated. My sister said that she gave birth 7 hours from that point.
12:00pm
The epidural wasn’t quite working correctly so we had the anesthesiologist come back in and she adjusted Joy’s position so that the drugs would get to all of the right places. At that point it was best that Joy just get some rest and let her body take care of everything on its own. I took a nap myself as i didn’t know how many more hours it would be.
2:00pm
I saw joy was moving around a bit and asked her what she was feeling. She said that she was farting and i knew that was a good sign. I went out to tell our nurse Terri and she was excited because she’d been waiting for that sign all afternoon. She came in and checked where the baby was, and what do you know she was already in the birth canal. I quickly texted my mom while she left the room.
2:10pm
The nurse went and got the midwife so they could start the actual delivery. From that point it was game on. They put Joy in the birthing position and had her start pushing with each contraction. After the 2nd contraction the rest of the amniotic fluids came gushing out. There were no barriers preventing me from looking but i kept my eyes mainly on the other side. I took one glance over but didn’t understand what i was seeing and thought best not to look over gain.
2:21pm
10 minutes into it and by the 5 contraction baby Alice joined the world. She was all purple in color, conehead, and covered in fluid but i’ve never seen anything more amazing in my life.
After getting all her vitals documented and cleaned up a bit the nurses gave a chance to spend our first minutes as a family together.
Alice clocked in at 20.5 inches long, and 7lbs 4 ounces. She’s definitely got my sleeping habits and poops to match.
Dude, i’m a dad. No scarier words have been spoken before.
