A Baby Story

We don't have cable TV, so a major factor in our decision to have a second child was the two days of free cable at the hospital.  We made it through 9 months of pregnancy, the labor, the pushing and the delivery...and when it was finally time for cable TV, what did we watch??...TLC's A Baby Story.  Are you kidding me?!  We just lived it...and now we have to waste our cable TV time by watching some cheap reality show version of it?! That would be like David Freese going home to watch The Bad News Bears after game 6 of the World Series.  Well, we definitely hit a home run with lil' #2, so I'll share our baby story with you...

These two cuties were about to become three 

Emry was wondering why daddy
was home from work so early...

Waiting for Mia to arrive

Maren called me around 1:30pm on Thursday the 23rd from the doctor's office to tell me her water had "sprung a leak" and we needed to get to the hospital within a 2 hours because things would start progressing.  I rushed home from work, put our hospital gear in the car, and waited for Mia to come pickup Emry.  Mar, E and I spend our last few moments as a threesome walking around the neighborhood and taking some pictures.

The last photo as a threesome

Knowing how fast Maren's labor was with Emry, we wanted to make sure to get to the hospital quickly.  But everyone knows you can't have a baby without some chocolate cigars to give to your visitors, so we made a quick stop at Stephen Libs to pick some up.  The "quick stop" became a lengthy ordeal...first they only had a couple cigars on display, so the lady helping us had to get some "from the back."  Then the lady wanted to talk about how great it was that we didn't find out if it was a boy or a girl.  We dropped the hint that we were in a hurry to get to the hospital because Maren had started labor.  The lady finally rang up our purchase when Maren grabbed a bottled water to add to the order.  But the lady had the already finished the order, had the cash register open and had our change in her hand.. I saw what she was thinking and said "Just give me the change from that order back and ring up a separate order for the water."  She said "No, its no problem, I'll figure it out here."  And started the process of mentally trying to add $1.07 to our original order and then figure how much change she owed us.  After a few seconds (that seemed like 10 minutes) she whipped out a calculator to do the thinking for her.  She kept looking at the receipt, then back at the cash in her hand, then back at the receipt again.  Just when I was ready to walk out and say "Just keep the change" she finally had it figured out.  Maren would comment later it reminded her of this scene from Love Actually.
 
I mentioned earlier how Maren's labor with Emry went quickly...by the time we got to the hospital at 3:30pm, her contractions were already coming every 4 minutes.  You wouldn't have known it because she hardly complained of any pain.  On the ride from Libs to the hospital, she mentioned she was becoming "uncomfortable," but that was her only comment about the labor.  We were admitted right away and put into a triage room.  After about 45 minutes, we were moved to our labor/delivery room.  Then the waiting began...

Luckily one of our good friends was our nurse.  She was supposed to leave at 4:30 but stayed a couple hours late to help Maren get her epidural and get settled in as much as possible.  Maren's doctor was also not supposed to be on call that evening, but she came over to the hospital anyway to be with Maren.  She stayed the entire evening just to do Maren's delivery.  We were so lucky and blessed to have such wonderful, generous people helping us out!

Catching a few zzz's while waiting for "things to progress"

My jobs at this point were to text updates to our family and to provide Maren with ice chips. Maren was doing great handling all the discomfort, and the ice chips were the only thing she could "eat". Maren was extremely hungry -- She began having her first contractions and felt sick on Wednesday night. She woke up Thurs still feeling sick, so she had only eaten half a piece of toast that morning. After visiting the doctor, she was told not to eat anything else since labor had started. -- Finally around 9 pm things started happening more rapidly. It had been over 12 hours since Maren had eaten anything. Thus, at that point Maren "calmly asked" me to put my phone away. 

Ahh the ice chips!

After what seemed like forever, it was finally time for Maren to start pushing. The long wait with no food had taken its toll on Maren. She had "the shakes" and some extreme nausea. She would push for a couple contractions, then stop to throw up for a minute(she gave me permission to share this info!), but she still pushed through it like a champ. After 45 minutes of pushing, they finally used the vacuum to assist in the delivery.


The doctor successfully delivered the baby, set it on Maren's stomach and said "Can you see what it is?" Number 2, as the baby had been affectionately known for the previous 9 months, finally had a name. It was a girl...little Whitney Ann Smith* was finally here! She weighed 8lbs 5oz, was 21 3/4 in long, and had a full head of dark hair. *Disclaimer: Despite all the news recently about Whitney Houston's passing, our Whitney's name was chosen months ago based on one of Maren's longtime childhood friends.

The first pic of Whitney and mom together!

  The doctor clamped the umbilical cord and let me cut it. The nurses took Whitney and began the newborn tests and cleaned her up. The doctor finished the delivery with Maren and got her cleaned up as well. 

After being poked and prodded, Whitney was a tired little girl!

Maren's nausea vanished almost instantly and she asked for some food.  It was about 11:15pm at that point, so all they had was a pre-wrapped turkey sandwich with american cheese on plain white bread.  Maren commented that it was the best sandwich she had ever eaten! 

Pre turkey sandwich
(Whitney was winking at a cute doctor in the room.)

Post turkey sandwich

About 12 midnight Whitney's grandparents arrived at the hospital to visit her.  Whitney would would have to wait until the following morning to meet her sister Emry for the first time.(There will be more on that subject in the upcoming days on the Emry board.)  When everyone had left and things settle down we were finally ready to get some sleep.  The only thing left for me to do was sing Whitney her first song - the chorus to "I Will Always Love You."

Whitney Ann Smith

The family of four