How We Became Three: The Story of Ethan

Ethan was born because we had dinner at Outback Steakhouse.  At least, that's what we tell everyone.

He was born 8 days early and we credit it, only half-jokingly, to the large steak dinner my wife had earlier that night.  He simply just ran out of room!

The pregnancy itself went about as smoothly as possible: Her blood pressure was always perfect and she never exhibited any signs of any complications.  The ultrasounds always showed that he--and we knew it was a he... we wanted to know the gender--was growing as he should be and had the requisite ten fingers and ten toes. 

Outside of a brief stint of morning sickness at first and the normal discomfort of carrying an ever-growing parasite around for nine months, the only complaint I think my wife ever really had throughout the pregnancy was that toward the end her feet got really swollen. 

Kind of like this, minus the inexplicable willingness to cut off all circulation to her toes. 

And when I say "complaint" I don't mean that she complained about it, because she really was quite admirably stoical throughout the entire pregnancy, I mean that she made me rub them every night.

After our dinner that evening we went home and had a normal night with no hints that anything was going to happen, but early in the wee hours of the morning her water broke.

Well, she wasn't entirely sure it had broken at first, so she got up out of bed and Googled it to make sure.  For some reason the image of her sitting at the computer in a dark room in the middle of the night Googling about how to tell if your water broke, while in the beginning stages of childbirth, never fails to make me laugh. 

Once she'd researched her condition well enough to be convinced that we should maybe get to the hospital, she woke me up and told me the news.  I instantly hopped up out of bed, got dressed and was at the front door waiting, car keys in hand, within moments.  She watched me amusedly the entire time because in my pre-coffee haze and excited rush I'd overlooked a few minor details, like that she was still in her pajamas, we had nothing packed and the dog had to go out.

In short order we were on our way to the hospital, me, not having had the luxury of Googling water breakage, entirely convinced that the baby would be falling out onto the car's floor at any moment.  Luckily, he decided to stay in place for the short drive.

The next few hours went by in a blur, and my only memories are of random people stopping by our room every now and then to put their fingers in places I wasn't entirely comfortable with to gauge dilation.  I kept wondering why, with all of the marvels of modern technology, the best way to see if a woman's body was preparing to push out a baby was to repeatedly insert their finger to touch the cervix and guess how many centimeters it was dilated. 

Because I paid a lot of money to go to med school just so I could.  You're NOT going to ruin this for me!

Some hours and lots of ice chips later, the baby (with a little help from Pitocin) decided it was time to be born. 

All of a sudden there were half a dozen people in the room with us, all staring at my wife's hoo-hah and talking casually, like we were all mingling at a wine and cheese party.  It was a little disconcerting, especially since I was strictly forbidden by my wife to look at her from that particular angle during this entire event, but she was okay with it (the epidural may have had something to do with that), so I got over it.

There was a scary moment during the birth where every time there was a contraction the baby's heart rate would plummet, but they stopped administering the Pitocin and salad tonged him out.  It turned out that the umbilical cord was tied in a knot and every time he was being pushed out, the knot would tighten, restricting blood flow.

Suddenly he was there in the room with us, all covered in ick and oddly colored, and he was beautiful.  Except... he had a cone head.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that the first time I saw my firstborn son, my initial thought was that he looked like an alien.

I come from France.  And your wife's vagina.

And he was yellow.

Not as in cowardly (that would come later when, as a four year old, he would profess a fear of grass and leaves and refuse to walk on or near either), but as in jaundiced.

We were actually released after the typical three night stay despite his condition, but told to return the following day for some additional testing, which we did.  The tests showed that his liver still wasn't working as it should so they prescribed a night under the "bili" lights.

It was a harrowing night and very difficult to not be able to hold or even handle our newborn except to clean him--they wouldn't let him wear a diaper while under the lights so there were lots of bedding changes and wiping off of the pee-splattered plastic shield--but in the morning they gave us the all clear and we headed home, again, finally, as a family.

When we got home, again, we carefully undid his little carseat belt, gently lifted him out and ever so softly laid him down in his crib, holding each other and staring down at this tiny, peaceful little being that we'd made together.  Smiles on our faces, we gazed into each other's eyes and both said the exact same thing at the exact same time, "Now what?!"



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