Gideon Ries Smith was born at 1:11 PM on Saturday May 3rd 2008. He weighed 7 lbs. 11 oz.
Michelle was such a trooper. She was very brave and labored for 38 hours long. She woke me up around 11:00 on Thursday night to tell me she was having contractions. I was half awake told her to relax and sleep as much as she can, which of course, she barely slept. Her contractions continued through the night and so I called in work and told them I was not coming. She labored pretty well for a long while. Her contractions were about 40 seconds long and 7 minutes apart all morning. Then in the afternoon they progressed to 60 seconds long about 3-4 minutes apart until 4:30 when the fun began. She was now very serious and her contractions were 90 – 110 seconds long and about 3 minutes apart. We called Jackie (our midwife) and told her that we were pretty sure it was time and that we needed to get to the birth center. She was at a midwifery conference (turned out to be by our house) but was going to meet us at 7:30. After tying up some loose ends and eating a quick dinner Michelle and I headed for the birth center. Let’s just say that Michelle did not enjoy the ride too much. When we got there and got her first pelvic exam (at 9:00 PM) Michelle was only 3 cm dilated. They were still pretty serious contractions so we stuck around. Michelle labored very hard all night. I was pretty sure she was in transition, all the sign-posts were there. We put her in the bathtub because that was the only place where she could handle the contractions. That may have slowed it down to some extent. At 7:00 AM her water still had not broke so we decided to have another pelvic exam, unfortunately she had only dilated to 5 cm. This was very disheartening. But now it seemed that she was going into transition again. She would fall asleep between in the 30 seconds she would have now between contractions. I kept hoping it would be a long nap where she would wake up claiming that she needed to push, but no such break ever occurred. We put her into the bath one more time so she could have a break but before long at about 9:30 she was pushing. She pushed for almost 4 hours it was very hard. But she dug down deep and pushed with all her might.
Gideon came out with such a conehead I could swore he came right out of Alien Resurrection and he must be a human / alien hybrid. But he is still the most adorable human that walked this Earth, you couldn’t convince me otherwise.
Complications developed right after birth but I will describe that in the post below.
–Ries, proud father.
Leave a comment