It's a Boy!!

Gabriel Emerick Samuelson was born today (Sunday-4/19/09) at 3:27 p.m. He is completely healthy and handsome, even with a little bruising. He weighed in at 8lb. 6oz. and was 20 in. tall. Here are some more details though:

Last night while we were making home-made pizza Laura started having contractions pretty regularly. We were planning on having the baby later in the week, so this was the first time we actually considered having the baby very soon. After we finished eating the pizza (we weren't going to go to the hospital on an empty stomach!) Laura lay down and the contractions went away. "Whew, just false labor," we thought, and foolishly stayed up way later than we should have.

A little after 5:00 this morning Laura woke me up and told me the contractions were back--3 to 4 minutes apart, this time while she was lying down. We had procrastinated putting together a hospital bag for Laura, but the contractions didn't hurt too bad, so I threw one together and Laura even had enough time to have a shower like she wanted...for whatever reason. I personally could barely even eat breakfast. Anyway, my parents agreed to watch Ethan all day, so as soon as they arrived we gave Laura a blessing, then went to the hospital.

The contractions were getting pretty serious a while after we got to the hospital and Laura progressed from being dilated 3cm to 5cm within the first hour. They had a hard time finding Laura's veins when they wanted to put an IV in her. That's never fun, but after they got a liter of IV fluid in her, Laura was able to get an epidural. The doctor and the anesthesiologists that were on call this weekend came from home in their normal clothes, or from church in their church clothes--we kind of felt bad, but not really. Laura felt awesome after the epidural and we were able to get a short nap.

A couple hours later Laura wasn't progressing very fast, and the epidural meds weren't potent enough to completely kill the pain. Another anesthesiologist had to come in and reconfigure the amount of medicine. From 8cm to 10cm was the longest wait. We were both hoping that it would progress really quickly, but it seemed to take forever. The nurse tried shifting Laura's position to see if that would help, but all that did was lose Gabriel's heartbeat--he really wanted to play hide-and-seek there for a while.

Eventually Laura was ready to push. She pushed for 2 hours when Ethan was born, so we were surprised when after only 15 minutes the nurse told Laura to stop pushing or the baby was going to pop out. The nurse hurried and called the doctor, but she almost had to deliver the baby herself because it took him 15-2o minutes to get there. It seemed to go pretty quickly after the doctor got there, although there was a hold-up while the doctor made sure Gabriel didn't inhale any "bad fluid" let's call it. You can see how mean they were to Gabriel in the video and how bruised he got. Laura got torn up a little, but not nearly as bad as with Ethan, so we're very thankful about that.

Laura says they gave her "the royal treatment" with a big custom-ordered dinner, heated blankets, and a bunch of gifts for us to take home. I'm so proud of her--the doctor commented on how good of an attitude she had.

A shower, a new room, and visitors, but I need to go to bed because I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. I'm going to take Ethan to go visit Laura and Gabriel, but I also have to prepare a bunch of stuff for the classes I'm going to teach tomorrow. My syllabus is still a mess; I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to make tomorrow work. Oh well. Here's a little visual about how the day went: