A caveat: for my first post on this blog, I decided to write my version of our delivery story, including my (admittedly hazy) memories of the first few months of parenthood. It captures essentially the first 3 months of our experience with Nora and Nolan, so it's a little long (for which I apologize). I've broken it into 3 parts, which I hope you'll enjoy and which--if nothing else--I hope will serve as a reminder to Kate and I if--somewhere down the line--we forget what the concept of "having a baby" really entails. Here's to us never forgetting.
***
Part I
7:45 a.m. on
Monday, January 9. My wife—36 weeks and 3 days pregnant with twins—sat
beside me in her doctor’s office when he popped his head in, looked at us, and
asked, “So you guys want to have some babies today?”
To be fair, we
weren’t completely shocked by this question. Because we were having twins our
pregnancy was considered ‘high risk,’ and we had been warned from the beginning
to expect an earlier delivery than a traditional single-baby birth. Her doctors
had suggested we prepare for bed-rest by Thanksgiving, at the latest; my wife,
being the determined (stubborn?) woman she is, promised she would make it
through Christmas. Now, despite two brief hospitalizations for pre-term labor
scares and weeks of increasingly-frequent contractions, she had carried them
into 2012, and we were essentially “playing out the string” until her due-date
arrived or the babies forced the issue (whichever came first). The previous night,
after experiencing an alarming number of contractions and an assortment of
other pregnancy-induced discomforts, her doctor suggested we come in for a
check-up early the next morning.
My wife and I
stared at him. Though not wholly surprised by his question, “Not Shocked” and
“Completely Prepared” are totally different concepts. “Yes?” she said, and I
half-nodded, half-shrugged in agreement. Her doctor picked up the phone and
dialed the Mother/Baby ward at the hospital to confirm scheduling. Holding his
hand over the mouthpiece, he asked “How does 9:30 work for you guys?”
Within the hour we
were checked into a hospital room, frantically texting/calling family and
friends. Several nurses stopped in to perform pre-surgery prep work on my wife
(and to drop off the stylish hospital scrubs I’d be sporting during the
process). At 9:30, we walked in to an operating room made chaotic and
terrifying by a whirlwind of medical professionals (twin births require double
the number of attendants). By 9:50 all the prep work had been completed. “OK,”
the doctor said, “let’s deliver some babies!”
At 10:01 my
daughter Nora was born, and my son Nolan followed her into the world at 10:03.
At 10:10, I woke to find myself on the floor of the operating room after
passing out from the realization that I now had two newborn babies to care for.
Ok, the last thing didn’t really happen, but the “overwhelmingess” was
definite; I had doctors sounding very doctor-y as they explained baby-minutia
in one ear, nurses rapidly firing off to-do lists, all amidst the backdrop of
two crying newborns who were suddenly and irrevocably mine. The hours following
the delivery room were a blur spent in a constant shuffle between the nursery
(to spend time with our new babies), the recovery room (to check on my wife),
and on the phone with my travel agent desperately looking for the first flight
SOMEWHERE ELSE (kidding—sort of). At some point my kids received their first
shots; at another, they must have had their footprints taken for our baby books, because those prints exist and I have no recollection of it occurring; later, someone must have given me their unofficial birth certificates and DNA samples
because I found them scattered on the floor with my hospital scrubs the next
morning. Parents and in-laws came to visit, left, and came by again. Finally,
around 3:30 p.m., we settled into our room, each of us holding a sleeping,
peaceful baby—a new mother and father confident and ready to face the
challenges and responsibilities of mothering and fathering.
Yeah right.
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