Baby!

Chase Jamison Bartlome was born on Sunday, January 20th at 6:46pm.

I had an unusual labor (for me) and I thought that some of you would be interested in the story. If you're not interested in contractions or pushing, skip to the part about the baby.

It was 4:45 on Sunday afternoon. I was lying on the couch talking to my mom on the phone. I had just finished telling her that I felt fine. I had had no contractions, no back pain, no labor signs. But I did have a lot of pregnancy aches and pains to complain about! What is up with pregnancy induced carpel tunnel? That is not even fair. Your wrist has nothing to do with having a baby. All of a sudden, my water broke. It was 9 days before the due date and 7 days before our scheduled induction date. I was a bit surprised and asked my mom if she could come over right away to watch the kids (she said yes). We got together some things and waited for my parents. I did not have any pain or contractions while we waited and we got to the hospital at about 5:45.

I got checked in and set up in my room. My nurse would be in shortly. It was about 6:00. I had my first real contraction. Usually they start far apart and gradually get closer together. I started having contractions about every 2-3 minutes. I sent Andre out to tell them that things were happening fast. It was 6:05. It was shift change for the nurses. My nurse would be in to see me in just a minute. At 6:12 I sent Andre out again to tell them that I was having contractions every minute and they needed to get in to see me now. Really this was 12 minutes. That is not an unreasonable amount of time for a nurse to not check on me. I am not bothered by that. However for this case- a lot of things could have happened if they had come in earlier. She checked me and said I was dilated to a six and that she would be right back. In 30 seconds we had swarms of people in my room with all the birthing stuff and baby stuff getting ready.

My doctor was out of town and I knew I would have the doctor on call- I was fine with that. However she was still at home because they didn’t page her until 6:15. The anesthesiologist- “epidural guy” came in a decent amount of time. He walked in the room about 6:40. Again, if he had been paged at 6:00 I would have had time to have the epidural. So in other words, the service from the hospital was fine. They waited 15 minutes to see me (not unreasonable). I walked in the hospital just fine, told them that I did not have any contractions yet and they had no reason to think I was going to go so fast.

So by 6:30 the nurses were telling me not to push. I told them that I was not pushing and that I had no way to stop the baby or the contractions from pushing. They told me to breathe. (How breathing stops contractions I don’t know.) Around that point the contractions were basically all one contraction that did not rest in between. This was the time that epidural guy came in. He said that if I rolled to my side that he could have the epidural ready in 3 minutes. I asked the nurses if there was time. They said that it was up to me to decide. I wanted the epidural badly- but I knew that there was no way I could roll to my side. So I never really decided- he just waited for me for the few minutes left of labor. All of a sudden Chase decided that he had waited long enough and he came out. So there was not time for the epidural anyway.

People ask me who delivered the baby. I don't really know. There were about four or five nurses in the room. There were only a couple of things I cared about. The baby cried, they told me it was a boy. After that I just relaxed. I asked Andre to go check on the baby and I was good- I didn’t want anything. I just wanted to lay there. One minute later the doctor walked in. She was great and nice and really did try to get there on time. I know that the baby would have come sooner if she had been there because I would have been able to push.

After that the hospital became a much nicer place. The baby is so sweet. My observations in the hospital were that he looks the most like Jaxon as an infant. He has darker hair like Jaxon had, but Jaxon’s fell out and blonde hair grew in. Alex had blonde hair from the beginning and Tanner had almost a silverish tanish color- it was a weird color. My mom says Chase looks more like me than my other boys did. He has a good disposition. He had shots right after birth and did not cry at all about them. He sleeps a lot and does not cry too much.

The older boys were excited to see him. They were at my parent’s house and came over on Monday. They were amazed at how small he was. We told Alex to look at the baby and he got a big smile and said “babe!” This was surprising because Alex does not talk a lot yet. Then the boys found their favorite things to do at the hospital that did not involve babies. The hospital has cable so Jaxon found a cartoon show that he can’t watch at home. Tanner spent the whole time pushing the bed buttons so the bed went up and down and Alex wandered the halls (with supervision) finding fish tanks and construction to look at.

Everything else is good. Andre has the week off and is spending most of his time playing with children. Tanner and I were sick before the birth and I definitely got worse after the baby came. But today (Friday) I definitely feel like I am getting better. I can’t believe it is already Friday. Next week is getting here sooner than it should!