In case you missed or feel like a refresher, the first three parts of the story are linked below....
Quick Recap of the story so far…
- We failed miserably at our initial attempt
to fill a birthing tub in our living room and my wife was now very close to
giving birth in our bath tub after I almost flooded our house
- Baby Moreau was just about ready to enter
the world!
- All people’s names outside of my wife and
I have had their names changed to characters from Sex and The City. I am sure
they would not have wanted it any other way
It was
officially go-time as Colleen was in the water, albeit in our bathroom, and
there were three midwives, myself, and a doula all crammed in to our not-so
large bathroom with her. As Colleen entered the final 45 minutes or so, fatigue
was definitely starting to set in. It was now well after 1:00a.m and the midwives
and doula were working their magic. In between pushes, my now exhausted wife
was constantly asking “how many more pushes!?” and proclaiming that she
couldn’t go on. The other ladies in attendance were great at giving her vague
answers and offering her words of encouragement. Our doula Carrie had also been
tasked with photographing the experience by my wife so she was pulling double
duty while all of this was carnage was going on. The cycle of insanely loud
screams for a minute or two followed by my wife going dead silent and looking
like she was going to pass out were in full-on mode now.
And what was I doing during all of this you
ask? Why I was of course sitting on the toilet seat beside the tub with one
of those little nets you use to scoop dead fish out of your aquarium. And what was that net for you ask? Why it
was of course used for scooping the poo-floaters out of the water that inevitably
arise as a result of trying to push a human out of your vagina! Yes, my job was
to try and scoop up the poops! This is the part you don’t see in the movies. I
always just thought that the women give a couple pushes and voila(!), a baby is born. Nope, it can
be a messy affair. As a kid I had always
wanted to be a marine biologist (true story), until I had my own fish tank and
discovered that I didn’t like touching fish, even with a net. So here I was,
all these years later and fish-phobia still very present, but now I was using
one of those feared nets for something I never thought I would do. Surprising (or maybe not to women who have given birth!)
is the fact that the poo, or in this case poo water just becomes kind of an
afterthought.
After a few
minutes of trying to capture floaters I gave up as we were now getting very
close to delivering the sister our fur-son Milo never wanted and would come to
be jealous of. Colleen was rotating between pushing, screaming and appearing to
almost pass out, while the midwives and doula did their part to make sure
everything went smoothly. And there I was: holding
my poo net. In all seriousness I was super-proud of my wife and watching a
woman give birth will definitely give you a new-found respect for them. The pain that a woman’s body goes through is
truly something that I think no man would survive. If we men were the ones who
had to give birth the human race would have been extinct a long-time ago (see:
one generation)!
Shortly after
2:00am on December 1, 2016, Colleen’s contraction screams were reaching
Biblical proportions. I will admit that things started to get really blurry
around here, but all of a sudden, there was my wife in the bathtub and one of
the midwives was telling us that our baby’s head was starting to emerge. Sure as shit, I looked down and there was a
tuft of hair that wasn’t there a couple of minutes prior in the tub! As the midwives got in their positions, it
was time for one final push. I vaguely
remember one of them telling Colleen that she was going to “catch the baby” herself
and Colleen just kind of saying “ok”. This was definitely not something we had
planned on, but then again we didn’t plan on having this all go down in our 50
square foot bathroom with 6 people in it. And with that….the final push. Within
a matter of moments Colleen was having her final contraction and then in what
to this point was the most emotional moment of my life, Adeline Kennedy Moreau was in my wife’s arms!!! It all happened so
fast, but sure enough Colleen pushed out our amazingly beautiful daughter and even
made the catch unassisted! For the record, she was 7 pounds, 8 ounces, and was
born at 2:14am. She also looked like she had recently hit a tanning bed and an
all-you-can-eat buffet inside my wife’s belly.
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| Photographic evidence that it did in fact happen in da |
As Colleen
kneeled in the tub, holding her new found love, Adeline (aka Squishy Moreau), I
started shaking and crying. I will
admit, I normally only cry at sad movies (real sucker for Nicholas Sparks), but
seeing our daughter and my wife brought out a whole new set of emotions in me
that I didn’t know were there. It truly was the most magical thing and even
just thinking about it four-and-a-half months later brings a big smile to my
face. But alas, no time for me to cry,
there was still work to do.
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| Tough day being born. Better hit the hay. |
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| World Record Placenta (hope you're not squeamish!) |
As we moved
into the post-birth stuff, it was time to get Colleen fixed up. I was lying
beside Colleen in our bed with Adeline on my chest and a pile of meconium was
slowly developing (Google definition: the
earliest stool of a mammalian infant. Unlike later feces, meconium is composed
of materials ingested during the time the infant spends in the uterus). As
mentioned in previous blogs, one of our attending midwives was a student,
Charlotte. The two other midwives were getting her to do a lot of the “work” on
Colleen as she was learning and they were the teachers so-to-speak. Now
Charlotte was not completely new to this, as she had told my wife in previous
conversations that she had been a part of over forty births. She had been
super-awesome throughout the delivery and everything was going as well as we
could have hoped for. The next step in getting Colleen’s body back on the road
to recovery was for her to receive a couple of stitches to repair any “tearing”
that had been done. My God, I should just
stop there, but I won’t. Sorry Honey. As Colleen lay there, beyond exhausted,
the midwife team prepared her to get a couple of stitches done to her baby-making
region. I was kind of half-listening,
and my understanding was that the midwives were getting Charlotte to do the first
stitch or two and then the more senior ladies would take over. You know, just
your classic 4:00am on a Thursday learning experience. So, Colleen assumed the “stirrups”
position and it was officially go time on the stitching. With that, Charlotte
leaned in to Colleen’s nether regions to start threading the needle and all of
a sudden all Colleen felt was a big pile of hair on her hoo-hah and then…CRASH!!! Before we knew what happened, Charlotte was
passed out on the floor of our bedroom. Sure as shit, as she leaned in to
stitch Colleen up she had fainted right into her lady bits and then crashed to
the floor. This all happened rather quickly, and no one really knew what the
hell was going on! Here we were at 4 or 5am in the morning, and we have an
unconscious midwife on our bedroom floor. Samantha (our head midwife) started
calling out to Miranda in the other room as she attempted to do whatever the hell
it is you when your student midwife passes out. This also sent me in to a panic
and I started screaming like a little bitch for Miranda. Thankfully, Charlotte was not unconscious for
too long and came to pretty quickly. To
say that she was mortified after an unconscious muff-dive session on my wife
would be an understatement! It turns out that it was not the sight of my wife’s
vajayjay that had caused her to pass out, but it was in fact exhaustion and the
fact that she had not eaten all day. I mean, at least that it was she told us! We
might never know the truth…
And with
that, our family had a new plus one! The rest of the night and morning went off
without a hitch (I think) and as I write this I cannot imagine my life without
our daughter. It truly is life’s greatest gift. BEING A DAD IS THE GREATEST
THING EVER; WELL AT LEAST UNTIL SHE STARTS SASSING ME IN A FEW YEARS!
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| And that my friend's is how you make your dog hate you. |
In adding to
the comedy of errors that was the birth of our daughter, I would also just like
to add this as a quick footnote. We discovered a couple of days after the birth
that in all of the craziness and pandemonium of that night that we forgot to
put a memory card in our beautiful SLR camera that we were having our doula
take photos with. Naturally, the camera has no internal memory and all of the
photos were lost. What made this even more painful is the fact that the
midwives and doula were remarking during the birth how great the photos looked.
This still chokes my wife up brutally to this day. A few photos were taken with
a camera phone and I have shared some of those on here.
As a
secondary footnote, a big, big thank you to the midwives and our doula. You
guys were all amazing, professional, awesome, and on and on. Through all the
craziness it was surprising how “smooth” everything went. I can’t imagine our
life without Adeline.
Lastly,
thank you to YOU the readers! This blog series has far and away been the most
read (or at least clicked on!) material I have posted in the 10+ years I have
blogged and I appreciate all of the feedback. If I can make you chuckle even in
the slightest I feel like it is mission accomplished. And yeah, I know a lot of
my jokes are leaning towards the “shitty Dad joke” genre these days.
OH AND YOU MY
BEAUTIFUL WIFE AND DAUGHTER: I LOVE YOU BOTH IMMENSELY AND CAN’T WAIT TO SEE
WHAT THE FUTURE HAS IN STORE! ON TO THE NEXT CHAPTER!!!
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| Fresh out the oven! |
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| She'll grow into them (Update: has now outgrown all of them!) | . |
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| Who's in charge of the sizing around here?! |
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