WOW. Guys… WOW. This has been the most insanely awesome week of my life. I don’t even know where to begin, so we will just start with a picture of the coolest little thing to ever fall out of my body:

Seriously HOW.

Last week Wednesday we left our house for the last time as a family of 2 humans. It was so surreal knowing that (assuming all went as planned), we would not return until we had a screaming sack of potatoes held in our arms. I was (as anticipated) sentimental about the weirdest things, including feeling so stubbornly sad that soon I wouldn’t be able to feel those annoying AF hiccups the squid bothered me with constantly anymore, and also that I was literally in the final countdown of being just me and not Mom… we were terrified and excited and giddy and silly and worried and anxious, and all the things you would expect to feel before plunging crotch first into one of the most life changing adventures ever.

With racing hearts we got to the hospital early and checked in for my appointment, which was booked in my chart as an “Evening Induction with Dr. Kristen O’Quinn“, which made me feel like we were off to see some Irish orchestra and not have cervical ripening agents inserted into my business. Induction is a funny beast. It can take days, or it can take hours. We had no idea what to expect so I hoped that my extremely intense regimen of trying to induce labor naturally – eating so much fresh pineapple my lips were a acid-wrecked mess and basically forcing Gates into intimacy (not as much fun for some gents when they can feel their unborn punching them during the deed) – had gotten us a head start on the birthing process. I had 2 goals heading into the night: 1) avoid Pitocin at all costs. 2) stubbornly refuse to lose my sense of humor, as Gates had read in his prepping Dads for labor book that I was bound to become a humorless monster at a certain stage in the game. Some may lovingly enter labor focusing on the prize at the end, the face of their newborn, the joy of their first breath… but we all know I march to the beat of a very different bugle.

Anyway, we arrived with determination in our eyes – and… we waited. Who knew labor and delivery units can’t perfectly predict how nights and schedules will go? So we kicked it in our cushy room for a few hours eating snacks and waiting for the docs to finish up a c-section so they could come in and get our own party started.

Dose 1 of Cytotec popped in around 8 pm. My parents arrived from Hayward somewhere in the middle of that and we were able to hang out with them and watch game 7 together, since nothing exciting was happening in my undercarriage. We were all extremely happy that they made it safe and sound to Milwaukee because they insanely just missed getting smacked by a wrong way driver on I-94 just outside of Madison. We didn’t know it at the time, but that driver went on to crash and kill 4 people just minutes after my parents swerved to avoid them… seriously insane. After 4 hours of the first dose of Cytotec and minimal progress, we started dose 2 and my parents went to our house to crash. The 4 hour dosing can go on for as long as is necessary to get the tiny parts of your body dilated into enormous parts, so we figured we had a long night ahead of us. But about an hour into the second dose contractions started, and by the grace of all things holy, my body went into labor naturally without Pitocin.

Contractions were exactly what I expected. Once labor got rocking it felt exactly like you’d imagine, which is to say, it doesn’t feel pleasant. Plus, every time you have to pee or want to move, you have to untangle yourself from a complicated harness of monitoring devices that are hooked onto your abdomen, making meandering about in various positions hoping to ease the pain of contractions pretty limited. We did the squatting, we did the labor ball, we did the rocking and the moaning and the breathing, and we did our own brand of labor – the joking and the goofing off, and making our nurses crack up. Gates was a phenomenal labor partner, and even now I get teared up by how grateful I am that he is the one I got into this whole mess with. After 6 hours of labor we were worn out and felt for sure that my next progress check would show baby was close to evacuation. But… not even close. So around 6 am with the warnings from the nurses that we might have hours or days ahead of us… I took the plunge and got an epidural.

That. Stuff. Rocks. Never mind my epidural only worked on one side. Never mind that the side it worked on had some bizarre reaction where my leg swelled and turned bright red and hot and was completely dead to the world and the side it didn’t work on turned an unsightly shade of white as was as cold as a corpse, the pain relief from even a lopsided epidural was instant and awesome. After that, I didn’t even care how long things took. We were golden. Around noon with still hardly any progress down there to report, the nurses suggested we take a little snooze to try to build up a little energy for whenever we would eventually need to push. Baby’s heart rate kept dropping with the contractions in literally every position they tried to put me in (and let me tell you, it is a very interesting experience being manipulated into positions such as “hands and knees” and “the throne” when you can’t feel half of your body), so I was only able to lay on a side with this little number going on to keep baby’s heart from freaking out…

But papa Gates jumped right into that bed with me and we dozed off. We were rudely awakened by the next shift of residents who wanted to check me for progress. She reached her hand up and I’ll never forget the look on her face… then she turned to the nurse with her and said… “I think that’s baby’s head”… and the nurse looked skeptical but reached up after her… and all of a sudden it was go time in the craziest way. The team was called in, my doc rushed over from her clinic – and Gates and I just kept staring at each other like… this is it. Doc told me they were going to move my legs into the proper pushing position to show me how it would all go down, and as they pushed my legs up and back, I kid you not the baby’s head started to crown, with not even a hint of effort from me. They pulled a mirror down so we could watch the magic happen, doc guided my hand down to feel the weirdest, squishiest, hairiest, moist thing protruding from inside of me (apparently the baby’s head), then with 3 pushes an amazingly gigantic, perfect, slimy, beautiful, purple, screaming, squid slid out into the world. Doc presented baby butt first to Gates so he could announce the gender, who, after a double-take, shouted “It’s a girl!” and promptly threw his hands in the air in celebration. Consequently, he had been holding my dead leg, which was incidentally chucked into the air and then crashed all the way to the floor. I realized none of this, nor the delivery of the monstrosity that a placenta is, nor the stitches necessary to tidy things up when a baby pops out in 3 pushes, because the second they placed that little wet squish on my chest my heart exploded into a billion pieces that I knew I would never get all the way back into place. All of a sudden we were three, and I was able to stare into a little face that was much less octopus and much more wonderful, perfect, miraculous blend of the person I loved the most in the world and myself… Pretty spectacular.

Soon we were wheeled down to the Mom/Baby unit to bond as a family, and we held that little baby between us and were almost too scared to blink, in case when we opened our eyes we’d wake up and find out she was just a dream. But then thanks to her amazingly quick exit from the womb, the yet to be named baby girl Gates started gagging up massive volumes of amniotic fluid and we crashed quickly into our current new stage of life which is called “Constantly Panicking that the Baby isn’t Breathing and that We’ve Killed Her”. Baby ended up needing quite a bit of suctioning in the early moments, leading to her being literally terrified of anything being in or around her mouth, which is a little bit of a problem when you need to get food in there to keep her alive. So for baby’s first few days, we literally fed her like a gerbil – dropping drips of hand expressed breast milk into her mouth through the nipple of a bottle. I am thrilled to say that eventually she blossomed from rodent to full fledged piglet, and was able to latch on and suckle away on her own. That first night in the hospital is a blur, but somewhere in there baby G met so many of our friends, family, and framily, and the longer we looked at her perfect little face and double chin, we realized that her name was Olivia, and so that’s what she became.

And eventually the nurses said, Ok BYE good luck keeping that teeny little nugget alive by yourselves! and pushed us out the door, and since then we have been figuring it out. And it’s more amazing and wonderful than I ever could have imagine. Oh and drinking beer again? Better than I ever could have hoped.

Some last thoughts: there is nothing glamorous about labor. NOTHING. But I found it to be beautiful in the most amazing way. Never did I imagine so many people would have their hands inside of me, so many strangers would see me naked and spewing liquids, so many of our friends and family would see one or both of my nipples, or that my husband would see me having to have my diaper changed when the epidural took ages to wear off… and never did I realize how very little I would care about any of that. It was all what we needed to do to get that 6 pound 11 oz bundle of awesomeness from the inside to the outside. I loved our experience. I’ve never felt closer to myself or to Gates, or so in awe of the strength of our bodies. I wish I could go back to last week and do it all again.

But for now, here is a billion pictures of the kid.