He's Here!

You may have inferred by my four-week blogging absence that something big has happened. (Or maybe not. I haven't exactly been blogging consistently lately.) If so, you are right! Our baby, Ossie, was born on November 7th at approximately 2:00 PM--yep, he came on his due date. And yep, he is a HE.

Wow, just looking at this photo of him, I can tell how much he has already grown in the past two-plus weeks.

I went into labor on November 6th. I guess I was in "early labor" most of the day, but I continued to work and finish season four of The Jersey Shore throughout the day (priorities, people). Between 7:30 and 10:00 PM, my contractions were coming five minutes apart and lasting for a minute. It was getting to be time to head to the hospital! I was trying to watch the election results in between contractions but finding it very difficult to concentrate. Right before we left the house, NBC called the election for Obama. We could drive to the hospital with one less thing to worry about!

My labor went very smoothly, and though I had wanted to try for a drug-free labor/birth experience, my contractions became unbearable right after my water broke. Luckily at this point I was already six centimeters dilated and close to 100% effaced. So I asked for an epidural and got it pretty much right away. It was about 7:45 AM when I got the epidural. From there, I had about five hours of downtime to rest. (And the Dude was able to rest at this point too! He had been such a trooper but by this time he was ready to pass out.) Then it was time to push! Pushing took a little over an hour, for a total labor time of about 18 hours. Not too bad!

When Bean finally made it out and they placed him on my chest, the Dude and I immediately agreed that he was an "Ossie." It was one of the names we'd been throwing around, and we both just knew it was perfect for him. We weren't expecting his barrel chest or his big chubby cheeks at all!

Nor were we expecting him to weigh in at nine pounds four ounces. Holy shit! I pushed a nine-plus pound baby out? If I've known he was that big, I would've been terrified of labor (even more than I was).

Due to his size, the nurses tested him immediately for hypoglycemia, and it turned out that he did have it. It was a scary whirlwind of trying to get him to breast feed, and when it didn't work right away he was whisked away from me and fed formula in the nursery. :( I can't even being to explain how awful this made me feel. We had planned on rooming in with our baby 100% of the time we were in the hospital, and now they were telling us if his blood sugar didn't come up quickly enough they were going to hook him up to an IV in the neonatal intensive care unit.

After several attempted feedings (some successful, some not), the hospital made the call that he would need to go to NICU to get his blood sugar up. A nurse showed up in our room at 2:00 AM the morning after I gave birth to let us know and to take Ossie away from us once again...

The next 18 hours went by painfully slowly for us, as we trekked back and forth to the NICU every three hours to see Ossie and try and feed him. But finally, his blood sugar levels evened out and he was released back to our room. It was such a happy moment for us! The next day I was released and we were able to bring him home on time. It was such a sweet feeling of relief. I know now that in the grand scheme of things the hypoglycemia was not a big deal and it just needed to get regulated quickly so that he didn't suffer any issues like brain damage. Now he is happily eating nothing but breast milk and he's doing great.

Above are a couple outtakes from the birth announcement photo shoot we did a couple days ago.

The three of us on Thanksgiving

And just for fun, here is my last belly shot, taken at 39 weeks:

And here I am at 41 weeks, when Ossie was one week old:

We are so happy and in love with this little guy. Now just when it feels like we're starting to get the hang of things, the Dude has to go back to work tomorrow. Boo. I wish he could be a stay-at-home dad and I could somehow pay all of our bills with my work-from-home gig.