Sunday, March 02, 2008

The Greatest News in the History of Humankind!

Welcome to the world, beautiful baby!

The Adorable Progeny was born on Wednesday. He was 7 lbs. 9 oz., a little under 20 inches long, and a sporting inch-long strawberry blond hair. Geez-o-Pete, but is he good looking.

Skeezix was born by way of an emergency caesarean, which was pretty scary. His umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and head, and when labor began in earnest his heart rate dropped precipitously. The room was immediately full of people asking questions and issuing orders. Some blue scrubs were thrown at me and the Lovely Wife was whisked away. The twenty minutes or so before I was allowed to join them were awful. The only thing that kept me in one piece was knowing that I needed to look composed when I saw the LW again.

Once in the operating room, things went very quickly. Skee was dark blue when the pulled him out, and the split second it took for my brain to resolve the shape I was seeing as being separate from my wife's anatomy, as actually being a head with a face and features that were familiar but which I'd never seen before, was the most intense experience of my life. I wish I could describe it more specifically than that, but I don't know what I was feeling so much as how much I was feeling.

His color immediately went from blue to pink, and he passed his Apgar's with flying colors. The LW was not in a position to see any of this, and was asking me lots of sensible questions, like "Is he okay? Is he breathing?" But I was such a blubbery mess, I wasn't much help to her. I was blinded by tears and my surgical mask was full of snot, and I couldn't hear a thing that was going on around me. All I was aware of was this incredible little being that was suddenly in the world.

And, well, that hasn't really changed in the past five days.