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Please note... while most of our friends wrote to say they really enjoyed and appreciated the following account when it was sent as an email, I was recently told that some of our friends across the Atlantic felt it was too explicit. It was written quickly, immediately after the birth and at the first chance I had to jump on a computer, so that those who weren't here (i.e. nearly all of our friends and family) might be informed of Aidan's progress into the world. My goal wasn't to create great literature, and neither style nor story were edited, then or now. They are stream of consciousness from an exhausted but exhilarated new dad. You wouldn't be here reading this unless you were someone we know and love, and we have no desire to make anyone uncomfortable. If frank discussions of the birth process are something you would find indelicate or offensive, please just refrain from reading this. For the rest, we hope you feel that by sharing the awesome experience of Aidan's birth that you were part of it, just as you are part of our lives.
THE STORY
Here are the details...written yesterday as i was dropping by the house to grab a few things, and prepare the place for the arrival of momma and the new baby. this was written in between and around a whirlwind effort to clean up the detritus of the at-home portion of cathy's labor wed. nite [discarded clothing, vomit, draped yanked off rods in an effort to close them too quickly, not to mention the hundred other things i knocked/fell over rushing to get our hospital stuff ready]. after writing this i expected to then head back to the hospital to bring the family home, but the hospital recommended that cathy stay an extra evening last night [friday] due to low hemaglobin levels [no problem, i picked up her prescription for iron supplements today after we got home]. at any rate, please excuse the spelling and grammatical freedoms i take...
yes, it's official... seven lbs. nine ounces [i believe that's half a stone to our british readers] of impossibly soft and sweet ektoplaz, struggled for through the night and early morning and finally won through the herculean efforts of catherine r.e. mars, my beautiful and indomitable wife. and never was cathy more beautiful and indomitable as she was wed. night and in the wee hours of thursday, right up until fate chucked our bundle of joy into the cold cruel world at 3:38 am, thursday morning, april 24. 'twas a hard fought labor, with a few scary complications [cord around neck etc] that required i.c.u. team intervention as soon as the baby was born. we had a girl's name all picked out, and lots and lots of lovely girls' clothes ready thanks to the generosity of our families [esp. cousins like judy pernice], but we were still hotly disagreeing over a boy's name, and had maybe one twentieth the clothes for a boy as we did for a girl... all of which meant that the joe harvard variant of murphy's law dictated the baby would be -you guessed it - a boy.
and what a boy! at first site i thought "ugh!", and made the doctors laugh when i thought out loud "wow, you're just like your old man....totally full of s#*t!" the kid had a certain something, tho', even pre-cleanup, and despite ears that reminded me of a goblin etc. etc. his body was perfect, a tiny version of my dad's athletic physique, and clearly by the way he scooted almost immediately across the table he had inherited the strength of the late joe shoemaker as well as the build. he opened his eyes within minutes of being born... big, intense, soulful eyes, which you can see in the attached photo taken about 30 minutes after he was born [because the emergency team had to work on him immediately after he was born, and i didn't feel it was appropriate to get in the way, there are no earlier pictures of the baby just after he was delivered]. even tho medical science tells us a newborn can't see beyond 10 inches away, ours gave the appearance of being focused intently on everything happening around him, taking it all into those gorgeous peepers. cathy thinks he looks just like her late father, george, so he's inherited some of both of our dads' features, and we can only wait to see how our mothers, Alice and Mae Mae, will be reflected in our son once he grows up some more.
The labor built up slowly at first.... tuesday, a few hours of mild, ten-minute apart contraction, followed by the first full nite's sleep cathy has had for weeks and weeks; guess her body knew it was time to store up a bit of energy. wed., early afternoon, the contractions returned but this time much stronger, gaining in intensity thru the day, cathy getting more and more uncomfortable despite a couple of hot baths. by dinner time they were intense, and while i was preparing a bath for cathy at 9pm she came tearing into the bathroom, nauteous, and that's when her water broke - sparing our new sheets, which she was trying to get some rest on. we got ready, and were out of the house in 25 minutes. we left in our wake all kinds of flotsam and jetsom, mainly things I knocked over trying to 'calmly' get the bags and birthing ball to the car. we brought enough stuff for a short safari to the seek the source of the nile river - our snack bag alone was a case formerly used to carry a mac classic computer, filled to the top [note: besides the fresh fruit- bananas and plums - and a gallon of spring water, i think cathy has thus far only eaten about four bites of the starbursts, chex mix, veggie potato chips,japanese rice cracker mix, fruit chewies, mixed nuts, and raisinettes we brought; i've cut a wide swathe thru 40% of them, plus a quart of melted ice cream].
partly into the labor our midwife noticed cathy's water hadn't finished breaking [it ruptured at 9pm, initially, tho' it was so little in volume we guessed it hadn't totally broken], and during one examination for dilation she helped it along. that's when she saw that the amniotic fluid had been contaminated by merconium [baby poop], requiring a speedy interaction to prevent distressing the baby, possibly fatally. she ordered an iv tube to be inserted into cathy's uterus, to pump in clean fluid to replace the mucky stuff. then she notified the intensive care unit they'd need to send in a 3-doctor team who'd take the baby at the time of birth; they'd perform emergency intervention procedures and then observe it for any problems, removing it from the delivery room to intensive care if necessary. as for the labor, it was a fantastic, olympic gold medal level job on cathy's part. the baby was 'sunny side up', i.e. facing the right way down but wrong side pointing up. the baby's head can't dip to help the passage, making the birth harder on the mother. a first baby is always a bit more difficult, but the sunny side up combined with a big old head means this one was it was utterly exhausting, but cathy refused to give up or take anything for the pain. i got a little woozy after three hours, and realized at times i was unconsciously holding my breath and pushing with her, and it made me see how intensely she was working, pushing with everything she had three times in a row with every contraction, and holding her breath until her face was so red seemed it would burst. i thought i was going to burst, too... but not with pain, with pride at how amazing cathy was doing.
early on [after maybe two hours at the hospital] cat was told to stop and resist the contractions because they needed to place the uterine tube, sort of like saying 'jump out a window but stop half way down and wait til i say you can keep falling'. she knew the tube meant clean new fluids for the baby so she took the pain until the tube was in. patti had cat stop pushing again later despite the intense pain of resisting MUCH stronger contractions. now patti was clamping and then cutting the umbilical cord, which had gotten wrapped around the baby's neck... this could only be seen once the baby's head appeared, at the time when the mother would be giving her greatest effort to push out, using the strongest contractions to help her; to avoid hurting the baby now that the cord was stretched so far it was choking him, cathy had to do the opposite, and fight those strongest contractions. later for midwife told me later that cathy had been exceptional for a first-time mother, and if she hadn't been so determined and so strong it would have definitely required drugs, and it was highly probable it would've ended up a c-section, not the totally natural birth cathy had committed to trained for, and fought so hard to give as a gift to our new child.
cathy couldn't see the baby right away, as it was taken directly out of her over to the corner with the emergency intervention icu team; she asked what he looked like. i said "you did a fantastic job. he's kinda ...cute.., ummm, er, sort of..." she asked something like "what do you mean 'sort of' ?", and I said "like a good-looking gargoyle, or a handsome gremlin maybe... really not at all as ugly as most babies are when they're born..." that may sound mean, but to be honest, i was actually exaggerating how GOOD he looked, to save cathy's feelings. there was a brief period when he seemed more like a cucumber with eyes and ears and a lovely little irish nose. he had such a very long head, and then too he was sorta khaki and green all over due to the merconium that had contaminated the amniotic fluid [hence the reason for the icu team, who took him into a corner to get the poisonous gunk out of his lungs and other orifii, get his heart going properly and perform other somewhat-terrifying procedures]. But as i watched his features, just like claymation it all quikly changed. lumpy bits settled in and dips popped out, wrinkles smoothed up and behold, by the time the team had stabilized his heart and cleared his passages of the brownish muck, our little boy was actually a human bean. he'd gone in short order from kinda scary, to somewhat swank, to definitely cute. finally, he ended up looking truly beautiful. cathy suggested one of the dozen or so prospective names we'd been able to agree on earlier...Aidan [welsh or some other language for 'fiery little one']. Looking at him I was thinking Leo or Amadeo, but I had to agree that Aidan fit the best. and he really is a fiery little one, with a set of lungs that seem destined for performing opera -- or, perhaps, use as an air raid siren.
after the emergency procedures and observation period were done they wanted to take the tadpole off to the nursery immediately for further scrutiny, but we circled the wagons and dug in our heels [not so easy, as mine were worn away from weeks of nonstop pacing and cathy's were still up in the air while patti, our awesome midwife, did some necessary needlepoint]. we were able to get in a forty-five minute reprieve. once the white stuff was rubbed in, and the green stuff scraped off, he was a wee bit pale. but when cathy nursed him for the 1st time it was like 'the wizard of oz' or that movie 'pleasantville', when the film suddenly goes from black and white to color. aidan fed, and when he looked up next he had gone from an ashy white to a healthy, pink and orange glow from head to toes. cathy had it down flawlessly for that first feeding, and it was clear that they were going to be a great mother-son team as aidan latched on perfectly too, first time out, and our son had a good ole nosh. about 2 hours after the delivery he was led away to the nursery for further observation.
anyway, since then we have of course not slept much. after escorting the baby to the nursery, we passed out together on cathy's hospital bed from 6:15 to 9 am, at which time they brought the baby into our room [we had asked and originall intended to have the baby admitted to our room imm. after delivery]. Cathy had a hard labor, but she has yet to sleep more than that first three hours at a stretch. mainly it's all about her trying to catch a desperate hour of sleep after nursing and while I'm burping the baby. aidan has an incredible appetite, which i guess is what babies do. no sooner thanh e has eaten, been burped and been changed than he is ready to eat again....often sooner! i have become the official burper, the term 'burp' being a euphemism for what aidan actually does, i.e. issuing a timely grunt, fart [LOUDLY!] or crap in response to my not-so-expert ministrations. he does everything in fact BUT burp. but he does stop crying, and i'm fast becoming cathy's 'go-to guy' when aidan needs to be calmed down enough to be put into his crib w/o screaming his head off the second we put him down. he hasn't quite laughed yet, but his eyes are little jacuzzis of love and his breath and hair and skin smell the way i suppose heaven will.
we are home now for a few weeks, with cathy laying up in the 2nd floor guest room recovering and the baby staying in there as well. i will never come to miss the fold-out mini-bed of the recliner in cathy's post-partum room, nor will she miss the hospital bed with its' plastic sheets, but the monmouth medical center was a good place to give birth, nice people, and we're gld we picked that facility and our midwife. still, both of us are relieved to be home, and will be calling our friends and family as time permits now that we're back.
thanks for all the concern and love everyone has shown, see you at the christening or in the near future...
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