While I have never been a part of another labor, and while I wasn’t the one actually laboring, I gotta say The Dude seemed to arrive here relatively easily.  Here’s how it went, from what I can recall of the whirlwind:

The Girl jinxes us by commented around bedtime how it would be so great if we could get a full nights sleep and go into labor after 9am the next day.  She then starts having contractions about 20 minutes later.  They are about 10 minutes apart and by 10:30 they are about 2-3 minutes apart and we are calling the advice nurse, who tells us to come in.

We get to the hospital about 11:30 and she’s still contracting about 2 minutes part and she’s dilated 2cm.  The nurses hum and haw about whether we should be officially admitted and suggest we go for a walk around the hallways for 30 minutes or so.

We walk for 30 minutes and come back and The Girl is now 6cm dilated.  The nurses now seem to get slightly panicky about how fast she’s progressing and proceed to get us a room real quick.

By 2am The Girl is 10cm dilated and her mother arrives just in time to witness the initially pushing.  But The Dude is still too far up so the NP tells us to chill with the plan of trying again in 30 minutes.

About six “30 minutes” later, they start humming and hawing about possibly giving The Girl some pitocin to make The Dude spit out faster, which he apparently hears, because he decides it’s time and three pushes later and he’s out.

The Girl and mom get gushy, I take pictures and make phone calls.  The Dude doesn’t cry as loud as staff would like so they run a few checks on him, but in the end, he’s fine and just doesn’t like to cry that loud because he’s too cool for school.

And that was the birth experience.  Again, I didn’t go through any of the pain, but all in all it still seemed pretty easy to me.  After all the possible complications you learn about when pregnant, I was fairly surprised (and happy) that nothing bad happened.

The End Result - All 10 Fingers and Toes

People keep smiling at me and nodding knowingly like I just joined some club they’ve been a member of for decades, asking me questions like “so what’s it like having a new baby at home?” or “wasn’t the birth the greatest day of your life?” and I nod and say vaguely what’s expected, but really I have no clue.  I’m assuming these people are all speaking in hindsight or something, because for me it all seems very surreal still.  He’s cute as hell, but I have no idea who this little guy is, even though I’ve been waiting for him for what seems like a decade.

It blows my mind when I think on it and remind myself that he is 50% me.  I’m curious to see what form he will grow into, as right now his features still consist of buttons and squishiness.  Who’s eyes will he have, how tall will be?  People are already saying he has my feet, which is hopefully not true.  Otherwise, sucks to be you, little guy!