philisha.net

Well, we finally have our baby boy here: Noah Obadiah Augustine Hagelberg. He really doesn’t look like the above; I just sketched that the week before he was born. He’s actually more like this:

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story’s kind of long, so grab a cuppa tea. We were planning on inducing through natural means on the 20th last week, but I was pretty sick as was our midwife Cindie, so it got pushed back to Friday. The natural inducing caused a lot of contractions, but they died away over time. So we planned on heading to the hospital to start inducing the normal way. Unfortunately the hospital was booked solid on Saturday and couldn’t take on any inducing patients.  We felt a little like there was “no room in the inn.”

Finally we made it in Sunday morning. Once we were all set up in the hospital, they needed to put Alisha on an IV for the Pitocin.  Unfortunately, she has extremely small veins so they had to bring in an anesthesiologist just to put the needle in her hand.  He used a size 20 needle which is normally used for young children. Finally, the drugs started flowing. They flowed and flowed, but the contractions just didn’t want to start. That evening, we were trying to decide whether or not to have an amniotomy.  While we were deliberating, Alisha’s water broke a little bit.  Since it didn’t start contractions, they decided to break it completely since they had to treat her carefully anyway since it had already started to happen naturally.  After then amniotomy, she was taken off Pitocin in order to get a good night’s sleep.  In the morning, she was put back on the IV.  Alisha officially entered labour at 11am on the 24th. The contractions were coming, but they weren’t making the labour progress any.  An epidural was then suggested to see if that would help the labour.  At this point, we were just eager to have our little boy arrive, so we decided to take this advice.  The epidural worked.  That evening, she finally dilated to 9.5 cm and was instructed to begin pushing.  The labour went on all night. She started pushing and pushing, but after three hours he hadn’t made any progress downward at all. So we ended up having to do a cesarean section to get him out. When he finally was delivered at 3am Christmas morning, we found out that his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck three times! So he never would have made it out if delivered naturally. We had a hard time making the decision since we wanted to keep things natural, but in hindsight it was very clear that was the only safe thing to do.

He was 8 pounds and 12 ounces and 21 ½ inches long at birth. (That’s 3.975 kg and 55 cm in base ten numbers.)

We were lucky enough to have both sides of the family in town for his birth. We spent Christmas in the hospital, but we were able to celebrate with them. We haven’t had the whole group together since our wedding, so that was a welcome treat. We were able to get a lot of help around the apartment cleaning up and getting food for us that really helped.

He’s five days old now, and he’s slowly getting into sleep patterns. We’re pretty happy about that. If you want to see the latest pictures we’ve uploaded, they’re always available at http://noah.hagelb.org.

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Everyone begins as a child by liking Weather. You learn the art of disliking it as you grow up. Haven’t you ever noticed it on a snowy day? The grown-ups are all going about with long faces, but look at the children—and the dogs? They know what snow’s made for.

— Arthur Denniston in CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength

We thought that we’d be done taking pictures for a while after last week’s prolific extravaganza.

How wrong we were.

Neither of us has ever lived in a place with snow before, so this is quite a treat for us. We’re still glad to have a fireplace though. Hopefully the snow will start coming down again when our families come up to see Noah.

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