Birth Story

The full birth story will be published in Rachel's book (this of course means we need to make that book). However, here are some of the highlights:Kristine's water broke just as we were putting the final touches on Rachel's room. Specifically we were putting up the light in the room. Kristine came and sat down and said "I think my water just broke". We had that hanging moment of a thousand thoughts, then things started happening. We paged the midwife and she came over to check out how things were going. Nothing was moving yet, so we decided to try to get some sleep. It was only about 10pm. If things weren't moving by morning then we would make a plan from there. However, as we would shortly find out, things were moving just fine. Since Kristine had never experienced actual labour before, just the chemically induced kind, we weren't all that sure what normal was. About 11:30 or so we started timing what we though were contractions. They were all in the 5 minute range so we eventually decided to page again. The midwife came over and sure enough, we were fully into active labour - who knew! We activated Luanne, who was to care for Matthew while we went to the Hospital. She came over and Kristine's labour continued to progress. We were quite far along when Luanne got to us. We passed in the door and basically said "he's asleep, we'll call later, good luck". It was about 2:45am. The midwife followed us to the hospital in her car. We found out after that she called ahead to warn emergency that we may need them, and to get the room ready in delivery. We arrived, after a number of minor traffic infractions, and a lot of swearing, with as of yet no baby - so that is good. It was 3am. We did the classic Hollywood flight through the hospital - Kristine in a wheelchair, me pushing and Kristine breathing hard. We had a bit of a barrier at admissions- they wanted all the paperwork filled out, but the baby didn't really care. The midwife arrived and basically took Kristine to the room for delivery and I stayed signing things that I didn't read or even really care about. I ran to the room where they were flagging me down. 17 minutes later Rachel was here. Those 17 minutes (less for me) were pretty blurry, but Kristine was in fine form and the birth was generally without incident. Rachel was perfect, is perfect. The cleanup afterward took far longer, but I guess that is normal. At about 6am we had a little nap and at 8am we had breakfast and started calling people to tell them the exciting news!