The Realm of the Verbal Processor

Sam is here!

What a day! We both woke up at around 5am. We stayed in bed talking for a while then got up to get ready to head into the hospital for the 7:30am induction. After checking in and getting everything set up, Dr. Manneh broke the water at around 8:30. Based on Julie’s past history of rapid labor, we were expecting to be done well before lunch. Well…God had different plans for us this time. Lunch came and went. Julie was progressing, but much slower than in past pregnancies. When we came in, Julie was at 3cm…by 1:30, she had only gotten to 6cm. However…

About that time, things kicked into high gear. She went through the classic “self doubt” signpost (I’ll try to get a link to that at some point). At that point, I knew that she wasn’t far off. The nurse checked her again…still 6cm. But the self doubt phase (characterized by the woman saying she “can’t do this”, is typically right before transition. Because I was aware of this (and because I had seen her go through the same phase with both of our daughters), I had the nurse check her again pretty soon after. The nurse got a surprised look…”wow, you are completely dilated.” Julie had gone from 6cm to complete in 15-30 minutes.

Right after birth, the nurses were all saying that he looked big…that he was definitely going to be 8 pounds. Once they weighed him, we were all shocked. 8 pounds 12 ounces. Based on the ultrasound from a few weeks ago, they were estimating that he was going to be just over 7 pounds at birth. Uh…really glad we induced early. He would have been well over nine pounds had we not.

Some may know the significance of the names, but others may not. Sam is named after my dad. My dad was my best friend growing up. I learned a lot from him about hunting, fishing, and repairing things. I worked for him during the summers, and most weekends we were either in the woods or on the lake together. My dad died of cancer when I was twelve…an event that had a huge impact on my life. There was never any doubt that we were going to name our son Sam.

Isaac is a Hebrew name meaning “laughter.” It is a name that has continued to stick out to me over the last few months. As we were nailing down the middle name, I kept coming back to it. When I would look through a list of names, I caught myself just looking to see if Isaac was on the list.

Thanks again to everyone who joined with us in praying that Sam would hold off until Tuesday. That was a huge deal.

Another big thanks goes out to our moms. My mom has done a wonderful job of taking care of our daughters while we have been at the hospital…a job that she did when Marybeth was born also. That is a huge blessing to us. Thanks mom! And Julie’s mom has been in the delivery room at the birth of all of our babies. She is a tremendous help. We are SO glad that they were both able to fly in for this birth.

November 4, 2008 Posted by Jarvis | kids, life, pregnancy | 17 Comments