The Story of Jack, as Told by Caleb

On Sunday morning Holly woke up like normal, but all of the previous night she had been having some pretty intense contractions about every 20 to 30 minutes which basically kept her up so she was incredibly tired. She ate breakfast and then the contractions came back. This time they were 10 minutes apart and stayed that way for about five hours. It meant we didn't go to church because we weren't sure if they would get closer together and Holly obviously didn't want to deal with the scene of having a bad contraction in public, who can blame her.

Anyways, at about 3:00pm she fell asleep on the couch from the exhaustion of being awake the entire night and the contractions slowed down quite a bit. They were just scattered throughout the rest of the day, but never consistent until about 8:30pm when they came back with a vengeance.

By 10:00 she had been having them 5-7 minutes apart for almost two hours, and I called the hospital to check what we should be watching for before driving over to check in. They said to wait until midnight and if they stayed at the same pace to come in then. That's what we did and by midnight she was 3-4 minutes apart and getting more pain from the contractions.

So, we grabbed the packed bag and pillow and headed to the hospital. We took the elevator up to the 5th floor where the Labor and Delivery area is and on the way Holly's water had broken. By the time they got her to sign one or two papers and changed into her fancy hospital smock she was dilated to 5cm and well on her way to having a baby. She was relieved because she was worried that they were going to send us home and she'd have to deal with the contractions at home all night long before taking finals the next morning. They told her she was going to be having a baby before the sun came up, which made her pretty happy.

The nurses got her all situated with an IV, heart and contraction monitors, etc and then settled down to watch her and check her progress. After another hour she was dilated to 6cm so the guy showed up to give her the epidural and make sure that was ready to go. Not too long after the epidural kicked in, Jack started to show some weird signs of stress as his heartbeat started to do some funny stuff following each contraction. Apparently they don't like that to happen because within minutes every single one of the 8 nurses on duty that night were in the room doing something. They had to turn Holly from side to side to see if they could get Jack to calm down and at one point they even had her up on her hands and knees to see if that would work. They wound up calling in the Dr. Harrison early just to be safe because they thought they might have to do a C-section if Jack's heart didn't start behaving.

Eventually the shot they gave her to stop the contractions got him back to where he was supposed to be and as it wore off over the next half hour or so he didn't act up, just dealt with it like he was intended to. That's when the nurses and Dr. Harrison said to just take it easy and go to sleep.

While we were asleep until about 5:30am Holly finished dilating from her 6cm all the way to the full 10cm and the nurses quickly got the stuff ready for Jack to arrive. Holly started pushing at about 5:50am and had to push three times each through about 15 contractions and Jack was out and in the world.

He arrived at 6:27am and weighed 7 lbs, 10 oz while measuring in at a healthy 19 1/2 inches long. He was quite purple when he got here, just like all babies are, and his hands are quite large for a newborn, so who knows what is going on with that at the moment. He has passed all of his fancy tests and hasn't had any problems so it looks like we should be heading home either this evening, or tomorrow morning unless a new complication arises.