History of the J Man

Julie: 

Looks like it’s time to officially change the name of this blog.  I’m thinking something like “History of the J Man and Little E”…

Jonah’s little brother was born early Monday morning, May 10, 2010 at 2:42 a.m.   I started feeling contractions around 10 p.m., after celebrating Mother’s Day with the family in Morton Grove then getting a crabby Jonah to bed once we got home.  Chris and I went to bed hoping to sleep through much of the beginning stages of labor.  Chris snored away without any trouble while I slept on and off for a bit, trying to relax through contractions and not wake up enough to even time them. 

Around 12:15 a.m., I woke Chris and asked him to get the phone so we could call our doula to ask her to come.  I thought contractions were about 8 minutes apart at that point.  I had plans to wait a little longer before calling the midwife but ended up calling her too around 12:45 a.m. or so.  The midwife got to our house around 1:40 a.m. and her assistant arrived a few minutes later.  At that point I had gotten up to soak in the bathtub while Chris started to set up the house for our homebirth.  There wasn’t a ton to set up but he had to put plastic down on the bed and on the floor and pull out some other things like towels for the delivery.

The midwife came and took my blood pressure while I sat in the tub and then left to get set up herself.  By the time she was ready I was also ready to get out of the tub.  It was sort of tricky getting out of the tub and walking back the length of the house to our bedroom but I made it. I crawled into bed, and Hillary checked me.  She said I was 9.5 centimeters and fully effaced so I could start to push any time I was ready.  That was much better news than when I got to triage with Jonah at the hospital and was barely at 5 centimeters.

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Chris:

From my position at the head of the bed, I didn’t have such a great view of what was going on, though I held Julie’s hand and massaged her head during the more intense periods.  As the contractions started to come more forcefully, I could tell Julie was in a lot of pain, but fortunately they didn’t seem to last very long (at least to me; I’m sure to Julie they felt interminably long). 

At some point I did happen to look down and see his head poking through down there, and I heard the midwife say, “He’s in the call” or something like that.  I wasn’t sure what she said, as another wave of pain coursed through Julie’s body.  It was only a few more pushes and the baby was out!  Julie had only pushed for about 15 minutes, which is a far cry from the two hours from when Jonah was born.  In fact, from the time I woke up (12:18 a.m.) to when he was born (2:52 a.m.), only about 2.5 hours had gone by.  When Jonah was born, it had been a 30 hour odyssey.  From when Julie had started to feel the first contractions to time of the birth, it had been just under five hours, or about the length of a Red Sox/Yankees playoff game.

Once the baby was born, Julie got him on her chest and after a couple of fitful false starts, he latched on and started chowing down.  He didn’t cry out right at first, but once Hillary moved him over to the bed to run through the standard battery of tests, he was really able to test out his lungs, and they were in fine working order.  We debated over whether he looked like Jonah and after consulting Jonah’s baby book, decided that he didn’t really look anything like his older brother. 

I also found out that what the midwife had said was that our new baby had been born “in the caul,” which simply means he was born without the amniotic sac having been broken:

To be “born in the caul” simply means a child is born with the amniotic sac or membrane still intact around the body. When a baby is born in the caul, the sac balloons out at birth, covering the baby’s face and body as it emerges from the mother. The baby is in no danger of drowning, as it is still being fed nutrients and oxygen through the umbilical cord, and will not take its first breath until the face emerges from the fluid contained in the caul. The caul is harmless and is easily removed by the doctor or midwife. (From Wikipedia)

According to the article, only about 1 birth in 1,000 result in a baby born in the caul, and most of those are premature births.  It explained why Julie’s water had never broken.  Apparently being born this way is quite auspicious, according to our midwife.  She told us how European cultures believed the caul, or baby membrane, was said to have powers to save people from drowning, and how they were richly prized by sailors. 

The baby’s vitals all checked out and as the midwives were starting to pack up, my cell phone rang: Our doula had arrived!  Of course, she had missed the birth, which was too bad, but in some ways, it was great that labor was so smooth (relatively speaking) that we were able to manage things on our own.  She was coming in from Bolingbrook and had taken her time because she didn’t want to get there too early, but never in my wildest imaginations did I think the whole affair would take under five hours.  I remember distinctly hoping that we would be done by noon the following day as I rolled out bed just after midnight.  As it turned out, we were all tucked into bed as the sun was coming up. 

Around 6:45 a.m. or so, Jonah wandered out of his room, and much to his surprise, he had a baby brother!  I still can’t believe that he slept through the whole thing, and Bianca also didn’t make a peep.  I don’t know if her instincts told her what was going on and to lay low, or she was just tired, but neither Jonah nor Bianca disturbed us at all.  We were all set to call Julie’s parents to take them back to Evanston and get them out of the way, but it was never necessary.

Before she left, our doula was nice enough to make us some pancakes which we thankfully ate together.  Jonah was very excited to hold his new brother and had fun touching his fingers, toes and hair.  It was nice to see him ask permission to touch the baby; hopefully his respectfulness will last!

It’s about 5 p.m. now and it’s still hard to believe what we’ve all experienced.  Our home now has four people in it (five, if we count the dog!).  It’s going to take some adjustments and definitely won’t be easy, but I think we’re all ready for the adventure.  We’d better be, because it’s coming at us whether we want it to or not.

Finally, we did decide on a name, only an hour ago or so: Elliott Cameron Diehl.