Finally Home!

With a few days home finally under our belt, we finally decided it was time to update the old blog. As you probably have seen from the picture below, Aydan is here. He was born on Wednesday September 3rd, 2008 at 8:49 AM. He weighed 5 lbs and 15 ozs, and measured 19 inches in length. We are truly blessed to have such a handsome little boy that we can call our son.

While all of that is great and wonderful, it was quite a long road (or at least seemed that way) to get there. It all started last Tuesday morning, when while getting ready to go to our weekly doctor’s appointment Shannon feinted. Luckily I was next to her and caught her before she fell to the floor. Seconds later she regained consciousness, and straight to the doctor we went.

When we arrived, I told the nurse what had happened, and they whisked us off to an exam room. Twenty minutes later, we were sitting down in the doctor’s personal office, and being told that it was time. No more messing around, the doctor said, its time to get this baby out.

With that directive we headed straight to the hospital. Once we arrived we were taken directly into the labor and delivery room, where we would remain until Aydan poked his head into the world for the first time. After we got all situated Shannon was started on medicine that would begin to induce her labor, and then began the waiting game.

For the rest of the morning, afternoon, and early evening we just hung out and waited for things to happen. In the late afternoon we were joined by Shannon’s mom and sister and my brother. All three did a good job of keeping us company, and distracting us from the long night and morning ahead.

At around 6:00 PM, another family friend, Shannon Esparza, joined us. I can’t tell you how important this was. Besides her wonderful personality and loving spirit, the great thing about Shannon E. is that she’s a masseuse. She came specifically to help move Shannon’s labor along by massaging her and inducing special pressure points along the body that helped initiate labor.

By the time she left around 8:30-9:00 PM Shannon was two centimeters dilated. Up until that point, nothing at all had been happening. When the nurse called the doctor was shocked. From there things began to progress rather rapidly. Contractions were coming and going, like waves crashing into the sand at Huntington Beach.

Shannon began to feel lots of pain, but did a great job keeping her breathing techniques we learned in our Lamaze classes. The doctor had prescribed her some pain medication, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from feeling lots of discomfort. At about midnight, she was finally far enough along to get her epidural, which helped calm her down, and allowed us to get some much needed rest for what we thought would be the long morning ahead.

For the rest of the night we slept off and on, with Shannon waking with big contractions sprinkled throughout the night. Things continued that way until we were up for good around 6:00 AM. By that time we had gotten all the rest we were going to get, for the rest of the morning.

By that time Shannon had dilated to about 8-9 centimeters, and the contractions were coming about every 30 seconds. At one point, she had what felt like a contraction for 30 minutes straight. This continued until 8:00 AM when the doctor came in and decided it was finally time to begin pushing.

Along with the nurses help, Shannon began pushing, slowly moving Aydan down the birth canal. She continued this way until around 8:40, when the nurse called the doctor in and said it was time. With the doctor all scrubbed up and the nurses in place, it was go time.

After four pushes, Aydan’s little head appeared. My jubilation was quickly turned to worry however, when just moments after his head came out, the doctor told Shannon to stop pushing. I looked down and noticed what looked like three snakes wrapped around his neck. On his way down, he had wrapped himself around the umbilical cord three times, and cut off his air-way.

The doctor quickly grabbed three pairs of scissors, and cut all three cords off his neck. Sprung free from the cords Aydan quickly slipped out, into the doctor’s hands. The doctor quickly placed him on Shannon’s belly, but he wasn’t there for long. After what seemed like one second, the nurses whisked him away to the corner of the room, where they had all sorts of equipment set-up to help him make his way into the world.

With all the cord wrapped around his neck three times, Aydan wasn’t breathing and his heart had stopped. Three other sets of nurses quickly entered the room and ran into the corner where they were working on our son. During this whole time Shannon and I waited to here a cry or anything come from him, so that we’d know he was okay.

Seconds pass and we had heard nothing. With everything going on, time seemed to stand still, the only thing we could focus on was Shannon’s doctor saying that everything is going to be fine. He’s going to be all right. After what seemed like forever, the nurses reported that they had got his heart going, and that he was breathing on his own.

For the first few minutes of his life, he didn’t want to get going. As the nurses would say later, he was just a late starter. With things finally turning around for him, the nurses told us that they would be taking him up to the NICU where they would watch and observe him. So with Shannon still being worked on, up I followed our son.

Even in the elevator on the way up, things were looking good. He had good color, and his breathing was fine. It turned out he just wasn’t much of a crier in his first few hours in the world. Once we got the NICU the nurses said that things looked good for him, that he would probably only be there for a few hours, just so they could make sure that everything was all right.

With that news in hand, back down to the LDR I went to check on Shannon. After all of the chaos during the birth, Shannon was understandably upset and wanting to know what was going on. It was a big relief to her, to know that everything was going to be all right.

After a few more trips back and forth I got to take some pictures, and on Shannon’s way up from labor and delivery and into the maternity they let her stop in the NICU to really see her son for the first time.

After that it was into her room in the maternity ward, where we waited for the pediatrician to clear Aydan and let him “room-in” with us. After what seemed like forever, the pediatrician finally came into the room, and said that everything was fine with him, and that we had a healthy little boy.

Despite everything checking out, our hospital stay wouldn’t be over quite yet. As is normal with newborns and in particular pre-mature newborns, Aydan had a bit of jaundice. His numbers we’re pretty high in the first day, so under the “Billie Lights” he went. He would stay this way until Saturday, when they finally let the three of us come home.

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It’s now been a few days that we’ve been home and everything is coming along great. There are the usual ups and downs with a newborn (i.e. being fine all day long, and then deciding to be fussy at 3:00 AM J), but whenever we get the chance to just look into his cute face, we know that everything is fine. We’ll look forward to still updating this web-site from time to time with new pictures and new stories. Thanks again for all of your love and support these past nine months. Without them, we couldn’t have done it.