We Have A Baby!

We have excitedly welcomed to our family Baxter Leroy Baumann! He is beautiful and so far seems quite the content little guy. He came into the world weighing 8lbs 10oz and 21 inches long; he also has QUITE the birth story. Below is the birth story from Aaron's perspective, my version of the events is MUCH longer. Something to note, is that my original due date was January 30th, so by this time I'm uncomfortable and pretty ready for the baby to be here!

Rachel had an appointment with the midwife at 4:30pm on Friday, February 4th. Everything was fine, but she was only at 2 cm. The midwife said that she thought the due date (which wasn't originally set by her) may actually have been February 6th. So, Rachel essentially left that appointment thinking "well, this could be another week."

That night at about 10pm she started having some contractions. Nothing big, maybe 10 minutes apart and they only lasted for about an hour. Eh, it could be nothing. So, we went to bed.

Rachel woke up at about 5:30 and got out of bed. This wasn't really a cause for concern for me. She had done it a few times recently. Back pains made it hard for her to get comfortable, so sometimes she would get up and just go read a book by the fireplace.

At about 6:45am Rachel came in and said "if you want to take a shower before your baby is born, you'd better do it now." I took a quick shower and got dressed. By that time her contractions were getting pretty constant and intense. We finally knew that we had to get moving. We called the midwife and I quickly got everything together. Rachel was moving very slowly, and not moving at all during her contractions. I kept poking my head in on Rachel and saying "Lucy! This is no time to be playing games!" We finally got in the car by about 8:05.

THIS IS THE FUN PART. Not many times does a man have a decent excuse to drive with purpose. Pop on the emergency flashers and just start swerving in and out of traffic. Rachel spent the drive alternating between yelling at me for driving erratically and saying "Shannon's not going to make it." Averaging about 60 MPH, we made it to to my in-laws at

8:15am.

I got Shannon on the phone as Geri came out to meet us at the car. Shannon told us to get Rachel into the house and have her lay on the bed to slow down the labor process. After a few contractions by the side of the car, we moved Rachel inside. Before she could get to the bed she felt her water break. She told us "bathroom" and we helped her in that direction. When we got to the bathroom, Geri said "we should probably get her pants off." I called Shannon to let her know that Rachel's water had just broke and we put her on speaker phone. My phone log tells me this was at 8:23.

Rachel got down on her hands and knees on the bathroom floor and Geri said, "you should probably switch places with me." I remember Shannon telling Rachel to "blow like blowing through a donut hole" but this baby was already on his way. I remember saying "i see the head" and then supporting his head as it came out, looking for an umbilical cord in case I needed to hook it out of the way. Rachel said "what are you doing?" I replied "It's the shoulders, hun. You just need to get the shoulders." One more push and I was holding my baby. 8:28 AM. 5 minutes after her water broke and less than 15 minutes after we pulled into the driveway.

Later, Rachel told us that she actually remembered dreaming that she was having a contraction. She probably went through 1/2 of the labor in her sleep!