2009-08-28

Yakko, Party of Six...

Last week, we welcomed our fourth child into this world. I certainly don't mean to belittle his arrival or how happy we are to have another healthy boy in our family, but compared to our last experience, this one was rather uneventful.

My wife, who had been having a lot of Braxton Hicks contractions this pregnancy, had just sat down to rest, and I had just sent the kids upstairs to get ready for bed while I finished up a couple rounds of a videogame I was playing. After a bit, though, she said, "I think I'm in labor." The contractions didn't go away with sitting down, and they were coming regularly.

She made the required phone calls, and I turned the game off and went upstairs to hurry the kids into their sleepwear and grab the sleeping bags — their overnight bags were already packed. We loaded them up, dropped them off at a friend's for the night, and went to the hospital.

Just as we were pulling into the parking lot, we finally got a call from the obstetrician. He hadn't called yet, as he was in the middle of another baby delivery at the time at a hospital about 10 minutes away, and he had another delivery coming. Knowing how fast my wife tends to deliver, he wasn't confident he could call another doctor and get them to our hospital in time, so he asked if we could come there. The contractions hadn't gotten any faster or harder yet, so we turned the car around and drove down the highway to the next hospital.

We got there and had to fill out paperwork (because we had preregistered only at the other hospital), then got checked into the room as her contractions finally started to get hard enough to hurt. The doctor came in, broke her water, the contractions really started, and before long, we had another healthy baby boy, just about two hours from the time my wife told me "I think I'm in labor."

Yeah, my wife tends to make a lot of women jealous in that respect. Strangely, though, they're not too jealous of her having a baby on the couch. Go figure.

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