The Arrival

I don't have a lot of time so I will keep this fairly short. On Thursday, we welcomed our son, Iain James Gideon N. I was set for induction (on my due date) because of my blood pressure (I have terrible white-coat and it was all over the map). I think that my o.b. and I were more scared of his size than anything else but I believe that suspected "big baby" is not considered a reason for induction. Funny thing is, when we arrived at the hospital, my b.p. was actually low and while it wasn't a scary problem, it was closer to low than high the entire time. Anyway, on the way to the hospital, I started to feel a bit crampy and by the time the doctor got to me, it looked like I might be starting to go into labour on my own. They decided to break my water and hold off doing anything else to see how things progressed. I slowly progressed and then, just when they were thinking that they would have to start a pitocin drip, things ramped up on their own and I ended up not having to be strapped to monitors the entire time and on my back, which I had been worried about. I was also thrilled because my doula suggested that if I had a nurse I really wanted to ask for her and it just happened that J, the nurse who was SO fantastic when I had Pk, was on duty and she was my nurse. Between she and my doula, I have to say that it was a great delivery experience (as far as these things go) and while Iain did end up being HUGE, he was so much easier to deliver than Pk. The actual delivery took less than 10 minutes and the pushing was easy. The worst part was a weird pain in my hip that I had for the last 20 minutes or so (but luckily, my doula and the nurse were able to help a bit).

Iain James Gideon N was born at 6:41 p.m. on Thursday, June 17th at 10 lbs, 2 oz and 22.5 inches long. He was the biggest baby in the hospital while we were there. I had an epidural but we tried to keep it to as low as possible and I have to say, I can't believe how good I felt afterwards and I have been feel great since, other than the fact that Iain has hit the difficult stage of things - he slept wonderfully the first 24 hours (which I didn't really get to enjoy since there were no private rooms and my roommate's baby screamed the entire time) but overall, he seems to be fairly mellow most of the time. He's a tough little nut, which is great, since with his big size, there were things that had to be checked really carefully (they were concerned about his glucose and that he might need supplementation but his sugars were perfect and there was some concern that his bilirubin might be a problem, again since he was so big, but the numbers were really, really good and so far, no sign of jaundice).

Guess I haven't been so short after all - just a few other facts - Iain ("God is Gracious") is the Scots Gaelic spelling (we didn't make it up!) and is from John, my grandfather's name and a name that Michael's father had really been pulling for, James is after my great-grandfather and our church and Gideon comes from the Old Testament story when God has Gideon go into battle with only 300 men so that it is clear that the victory came from God - we feel like God has really been active in our lives in the last year or so.