Brother Meets World

As most of you have already seen from Facebook and email, our precious Little Brother has finally arrived!  Conor, Fionn, and I are absolutely thrilled to introduce Deaglan Stetson Crimmins, born May 8th at 6 pm on the dot.  He weighed 7 lbs, 12 ounces with a length of 20.5 inches at birth.

As you can see, Deaglan (pronounced DECK-lan) was born with a head full of black hair.  So delightfully unexpected.  We are so in love with our raven-haired little angel.  So far, Deaglan has shown himself to be a delicious little cuddler who loves to nurse.  Loves it.  We just introduced the pacifier about 10 minutes ago, and it has allowed me one of the first breaks I've gotten from nursing in about 12 hours.  No joke.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  Let me back up and tell you a little bit about May 8th and how it all went down.  As you know, we were scheduled for an induction on May 9th at 8 am.  I had resigned myself to the induction as you saw from my first post on May 8th.  Eviction was happening.  Yet again.  At least we knew we would be meeting our little guy soon, right?  It wasn't the end of the world.

Then around 4:30 am on May 8th, I felt it.  My first contraction.  I had been wondering if I would recognize it for what it was since Fionn's birth was through induction.  But oh yeah.  It was pretty clear.  Mild but still very clear.  I timed the contractions for about 30 minutes and determined that they were regular enough to alert my sleeping labor partner, Conor D. Crimmins.

"I think he's coming today," I said.  The words I had been dying to say for days (who are we kidding? -- weeks!).  Conor sprung to action and began readying our things for the hospital.  I called my midwife who said that it would be fine for me to labor at home until the contractions increased in intensity and became 3 minutes apart.

So labor at home we did.  Oh, friends, it was so nice.  Watching the Today show, walking around the block, eating some snacks.  I didn't want to leave.  However, Conor and I both had terrible visions of giving birth in the car dancing through our heads, so we decided to head to the hospital around 10 am.  I was also Group B Strep Positive which means that I needed to get two doses of antibiotics in my system before Little Brother arrived so that the bacteria wasn't passed to the little guy upon birth.   

Once at the hospital, we learned that I was still just 3 cm dilated (so no progress since Monday), 80% effaced, and my contractions were only timing in at about 8 minutes apart.  My midwife mentioned the possibility of letting me go back home for awhile, and my heart just sank.  Now that we were at the hospital, I was just so ready to stay and give birth.  So ready to meet our son.

Well, apparently Deaglan and I were on the same page, because he began to show some heart decelerations at every contraction.  Nothing that was too worrisome but enough that my midwife declared me to be a keeper.  "Let's have a baby today," she said.  More wonderful words could not have been spoken.

 

We were admitted to our L&D room, and that's where the fun began.  I'll spare you all the boring details and will instead provide a Cliff Notes version of my labor.  Rest, rest, rest, terrible PAAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNN, rest, rest, rest.  At 2 pm, my contractions were getting stronger and stronger, but they were still about 8 minutes apart.  My midwife mentioned the possibility of Pitocin to move things along, but we agreed to wait a couple of hours since I was making progress in terms of dilation (from 3 cm to 6 cm).  It's good that we waited because things started to move very quickly in the next few hours.  

I labored without an epidural until about 4 pm -- and that's when I cried "uncle."  Actually, I probably cried out some other choice things instead, but we'll go with "uncle" for now.  I'm not sure why, but I had a very tough time making the decision about whether or not to have the epidural.  I always assumed I would have pain medication with Deaglan since I did with Fionn, but when it came time to make the final call...I dunno, I found it very hard to walk away from the idea of natural labor.  During the contractions, I felt like I HAD to have the pain medication immediately (like yesterday), but once they subsided...it felt kinda doable.  Of course, right?  Anyway, at some point, the pain just felt like too much.  And I didn't know if it was going to last for another 2 hours or another 6 hours.  It was just impossible to know.  So I made the call.  Or the yell, as it were.

After the epidural was administered at 4:30 pm, things started to move very fast.  At around 5 pm, we learned I was at 8 cm.  About 30 minutes later, I felt a strong sensation of pressure down below.  My amazing midwife, Margaret, accessed the situation and determined that Deaglan's head was basically crowning.  Nuts.  She quickly paged for a nurse, and suddenly we were in business.  I literally pushed for 3 short intervals, and out he popped.  Easy peasy.  Haha.

I have to say that one of the best parts of the experience was being able to reach down and feel our little guy push his way out of my body and into the world.  I could feel his dark, thick hair and the soft, rounded top of his head.  Nothing could have provided me with a better incentive to push.  It was amazing.

Now, as you might remember, my dad and stepmom have been in town the last few days, taking care of Fionny.  Dad really wanted to be at the hospital when Deaglan was born.  We called him right before we started pushing, and he somehow managed to make it to the hospital right as Deaglan was entering the world.  In fact, I think I was lifting Deaglan up to my chest for the first time when I heard a familiar voice calling to me from the other side of the room.  "Is everyone decent in there?"  Of course, the answer is always "no" in a L&D room, but Dad entered a few minutes later anyway.  And met his grandson for the first time.

I accidentally just pressed "publish," so I'm going to sign off here for now since some of you might already be reading this post.  It's probably for the best because we should be leaving the hospital within the next few hours.  I will leave you with one more picture from Deaglan's birthday.  Of course, this family photo is not complete without our other fair-haired little rascal.  More on Fionn and Deaglan's meeting of the minds next time.  Until then...