Sage Nikolai

Hello! I know it seems like it took me five days to post about the birth, but in fact it only took me four. This would be due to the 26.5 hours I spent getting the baby to come out. Hence a birthday of Wednesday, March 6th, not Tuesday, March 5th as promised.

I had cervadil inserted around 9 am on Tuesday morning and started contracting about ten minutes later. For the rest of the day I had contractions which were mostly 2-3 minutes apart and fairly startling but I didn’t begin yelling into a pillow until late afternoon. They decided to check me around that time and found that I progressed ZERO percent. Fortunately I was psychologically prepared for that because Cervadil is not my friend. She will eventually make my baby come out but not without needlessly putting my uterus through a pasta machine.  So I continued to yell into my pillow for another eight hours. When progress was still at zero, I cried and took a shot of morphine and gravol. That gave me four hours of spotty sleep and twirly thoughts, for which I was very grateful.  The doctor checked me around 8:30 am and found that I had progressed to 5-6 cm.  J.D. gave me a high five, the doctor broke my water, and the action started. There was a couple hours of lots more yelling (at people, not just pillows) about 20 minutes dedicated to laughing gas, ten minutes of pushing, and at 11:32 am, Sage Nikolai popped into the world.  He was born perfectly perfect at 8.5 lbs, 21 inches.

We came home on Friday and so far so good. The boys have different ways of expressing themselves now with the subsequent decrease in supervision. For example, Jasper drew all over the wall downstairs with a dry-erase marker (which is not so dry-erase on a wall). James, on the other hand, comes to me and says things like, “Guess what? While you were busy I made your bed.” He seems to have matured about 65 years overnight which makes me want to choke on tears and dance all at once.

To Jasper’s credit, he remains jolly and will often climb into my lap and say, “I’m just SO happy, Mama.”    Me too, Jasper. Me too.