Early Bird Special

It was a dark and stormy night. I had gone to bed about 9:45, and 2 hours later I woke to a strong contraction. After two more spaced about 6 minutes apart, I decided to go downstairs to tell John, who was still awake, what was going on. I didn't need a doctor to tell me that these were different than the "practice" contractions I'd been having for about 3 months.

I had more contractions pretty quickly, and we called the doctor's office right away. We were advised to wait 30 minutes to see if anything changed, before coming to the hospital. Lucky for us, we immediately called our friend Beth and asked her to come over to watch Charlie. By the time she arrived at the house, I was in extreme pain with contractions 2-3 minutes apart, and barely able to walk to the car.

We arrived at the hospital at 1:20am, and I think the nurse at the front desk was surprised to see how far into active labor I quite obviously was. As it turns out, I was already 9 cm dilated. We later determined that it was likely that my water broke in the car.

To make a long story short, the doctor on call (who happened to be the same one scheduled to do my c-section a week later), convinced me to try to deliver vaginally. I agreed, on one condition-- that they could get me an epidural. Neither John nor I was prepared for this-- we had assumed all along that this baby, like the one before, would be delivered via c-section. So not only was he arriving early (10 days before due date), he was entering this world in his own way. Once the epidural had been administered, I was able to tolerate my condition. They let us both rest for a couple of hours before having me start to push.

Two and a half hours of pushing, with a little vacuum assistance at the end, brought Liam Overberg Robenalt into the world at 7:27am on October 28, 2009. He was 7 pounds, 4 ounces, and 20.5 inches long.

We apologize for the lack of blog updates along the way. Hopefully having heard the story, our readers will understand why the account of Liam's birth was not quite so real-time as that of Charlie's.