The Police and Babies
Guest post by your neighborhood Cycling Friend
Fear not my Bernina obsessed sewing friends. Put down your thimbles and rickrack and lets talk some rock-n-roll and newborns!
So after a hard night of Rocking at the Police concert last night (Thanks for the tickets James. The show was amazing). Those old farts can still rock pretty hard!
We got a call at 7:15 am this morning. I heard the phone ring, rolled over and wondered who in the hell would be calling my house at that hour on a Sunday Morning? Didn't the SF get released from the Primary Presidencey a couple of weeks ago? Oh its the American Fork Hospital. They wondered if we could be there by 8:30 and they said they would get the party started for us. So we pulled the kids out of bed, got them dressed, called Grandma Valentine to see if they could take the kids to church for the day and we were out the door.
We made it to the hospital and got settled in pretty quickly. The Sewing Friend and I are kind of old pros at this birthing thing now. Its our fourth time and we have had all of them at this hospital. We feel like we practically own the place. So the Doc made his way in, broke out his darning needle and broke the Bag O' Waters. We hung around for a while talking, watching T.V. , and reading our books. The SF finished reading a biography about Porter Rockwell while I was working on a book about David Breshears (Everest Mountain Climber). The contractions were coming and going but nothing too serious.
So about 1:30 we talked to the nurse about putting the SF on a small dosage of Pitosin (sp?). Oh I should probably mention here that the SF was planning on doing this birthing thing sans medicina and was a little apprehensive about making the situation any more painful than it needed to be. Nevertheless we decided to get the PIT line going and sure enough the contractions started coming in consistent and hard.
Now for the Sewing Friends out there who don't know the SF's cycling friend (me). Rest assured that the cycling friend and his buddy's know all about suffering through pain as we race our bikes up the high altitude climbs of the Wasatch mountain range. But the SF can put us all to shame. This chick is tough. She doesn't complain and does whatever it takes to get the job done. All of the nurses and doctors were amazed (and so was I) at how well she was dealing with the pain and how much control she had over her body in keeping it relaxed and focused on the task at hand. In fact she didn't even swear! Which we were all greatful for because she spent 15 minutes apologizing profusely to the entire hospital staff after baby #3. She said there was just this one word that really helped alleviate the pain.....Sh*t I said it again!
Anyway about 3:00 o'clock the pain was getting to be unbearable and the SF was questioning her resolve and commitment to this whole "all natural" approach. But after the nurse checked her and we realized she was almost completely dilated and ready to start pushing she doubled her efforts and decided to stay the course. Holy smokes ...... a couple of good hard pushes and we got's us a baby boy!
Porter Robert James was born just a couple of minutes after 4:00 and tipped the scales at 9lbs 3 ozs and was 20.5 inches long. That's a lot of baby boy. He looks just like a little James baby with big lips and a healthy nose. He was super quiet and mellow the first couple of hours. In fact he was so mellow the nurses were trying to rough him up a bit to get him to scream out a little fluid that was in his lungs. They were all laughing because no one could get him upset....even when they broke the needles out and starting sticking him.
We feel so luck to have this little guy in our family and rest assured there will be no lack of attention paid to this baby. Ya think?
Jonathan rode the 4th out of 5 legs of the relay, thank goodness. With a new baby I don't think I could handle all the training time it would take for him to do the entire thing-206 miles in one day!
He did a great job!
All our friends at the race. We had enough for two relay teams.
Kind of what I did the entire day.
We had waffles the next day. (We were all too busy getting a plate ready to look at the camera!)
We hiked around Jackson.
We wore our little baby out!
Porter enjoyed a little sling time.
