Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Flying


They say your life changes once you have a child. Obviously, that's true, but so far, things are a little bit different than I had imagined the first day as a father....

Of course we're tired...getting only a few hours of sleep ensures that every new parent will be tired. But this first day hasn't been the mind-numbing day I thought it would be. I thought we'd be worrying about Sophia every moment whether we're awake or napping, but that hasn't been the case. As it turns out, newborns tend to sleep a lot in their first few days. We've certainly been keeping our eyes and minds on her all day, but we realized that we could talk, laugh, and even have visitors without too much trouble. The nurses here at Lucile Packard also make life so much easier. Besides great tips and advice, they also do their best to make the day as easy as possible for us. Whether it be monitoring Sophia to allow us 3 hours of sleep or changing her diapers for us while we relax a bit, they've made this first day oh so much better than expected.

The days ahead will be very different, I'm sure. We're going home tomorrow morning. No more nurses. Two dogs. And most significantly, two sets of grandparents! More on that as we get there.

In the meantime, I can't believe how fast time is already flying. I've got a 1 day old!

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Finally!

And so it's finally happened! I'm a daddy!

At 5:28pm PT today, the emotions pent up for so long just burst out as I saw my daughter come into this world. I saw how hard my wife had worked to give birth. I saw the doctor looking her over and cutting the umbilical cord, making my daughter a separate being. And the emtions just couldn't be held back longer. I found myself crying at this beautiful sight. I leaned over and hugged my wife and told her to look over at our daughter.

10 fingers. 10 toes. A full head of hair. And inquisitive eyes that looked us over, surely trying to match the new faces with the familiar voices which she had heard from inside the womb. As any parent would say, our child is perfect in every way :)

And so it goes. We're parents now. It's still sinking in, but we can't wait to discover what it means to be parents and to be responsible for our little one.

Counting Up

For nine months now, we've been counting *down*, but for the last 12 hours, we've been counting *up*. We came into the hospital last night around 12:30 for our appointment to induce labor. With the baby being one week overdue, we had scheduled a time to being the labor process.

It took a while to get checked in...we only got to our labor/delivery room at 1am. And after all of the questions and checks, it was closer to 2am. The good thing is Radha was already more than in the morning. So we skipped the drug meant to soften up the cervix and went right to the one which induces contractions. Even so, it was 3:45am before Radha was given the IV drip with the drugs.

We both got a couple of hours of much needed sleep and started the morning off bright and early at 6:30 with more checks. Things proceeded quite quickly from there. Before we knew it, the anesthesiologists came in for the epidural and Radha was 6cm dilated.

So we've now been in the hospital for 12 1/2 hours slowly counting up. The goal is 10cm dilated and then Radha can start pushing.

For the first time in a while, I'm actually feeling a bit nervous. So is Radha. We've been anxious for quite some time, especially since the due date was a week ago. But only as this "count up" is getting more intense are we getting nervous. I'm sure it's something every first time parent goes through. In my fitful sleep, of all things, I dreamt about the baby's first encounter with our dogs, Junior & Buddy. Strange how anxiousness about being good parents isn't coming to the fore. I think I dreamt about the dogs since the nurse told us about a good way to get them acclimated to the baby's smell. After the birth, I'll be taking the baby's newborn cap home and let the boy's sniff to their heart's content. I'm really looking forward to being a big family.

In the meantime, I'm still counting up.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Ready

I've been meaning to write for a long time. Not surprisingly, I put other things ahead of posting to this blog. But now I'm ready...


I'm sitting here in my office waiting to go to hospital with my wife. After nine months, neither of us want to wait any longer to finally welcome our baby into this world. I plan to post words and photos much more frequently now and this is just the start of a new stage in our lives that I'll be doing my best to document.

Some of the things I'm looking forward to...

Firsts...
- Seeing my wife smile at our child for the first time
- Holding my baby in my arms for the first time
- Having my baby sleep on my chest for the first time
- Pausing and taking it all in for the first time

And so here's I'm pausing as the last year has flown by us. It's been a long year and we can't wait for what lies ahead.