Isabella Grace Creuzer was born on April 20th 2010 at 2:22 a.m. She weighed in at 8lbs 3oz. and was 21 and one half inches long/tall. Her mother was in labor for a little over 6 hours with no pain medications at Sherman Hospital in Elgin, IL.
It’s amazing how much the above paragraph means to me. Katie always gave me a hard time while she was pregnant that I wasn’t interested in the baby. I kept telling her that she wasn’t all that real for me as she was just creepy movements of the belly. Watching and helping her be born has no way I can convey what it meant to me.
I just have to say that I am extremely proud of my wife
Of course, with everything I do, there’s a story about it.
So… I’ve been trying to stay close to home the last couple of weeks being we have only the one vehicle. I didn’t want to leave Katie without a way to the hospital if the baby decided she was wanting to come NOW. The Monday before the baby was born I was down in Batavia giving a couple of presentations on web development stuff. The Sunday before she was born, I was down in Aurora co-demonstrating making Traps and Snares.
Monday the 19th I saw some aquarium fish offered up on freecycle. I seem to run an aquarium rescue or something. I offered to pick them up Monday night at 6. Other people had expressed interest in them, but I was the only one who gave a time. I had to run to storage to pick up my cooler that I use to transport fish in. Then off to Hanover Park. I picked up the fish – I think the guy only got 2 of the 5 types of fish he IDed correct HA!
I get home with my new fish and dinner is ready. Balsamic Vinegar Chicken. Katie had starting selecting menu’s based on folk lore saying that it would help kick off labor – like the Mac & Cheese with A1 for lunch – she was ready to have the baby. The chicken was wonderful, like usual. We finish dinner, and I start to get the fish ready to be moved into my aquarium. Katie put away dinner. She put something in the fridge and thought she had an accident. You guessed it, her water broke!
So, I have a wife leaking on the floor, fish in a cooler that need to be put in their new home, and mothers to call saying the water broke. Katie’s phone has a near dead battery. She’s on hers, I am on mine. Doctor is called, Mothers are notified. We get ahold of our Dula while Katie is in the shower as she refused to go to the hospital without the shower. The Dula says she will meet us at the hospital because Katie’s contractions have started in earnest by this point in time – about 15 minutes after her water broke.
After a brief gathering of stuff that couldn’t be pre-packed as it was needed for day-to-day living and couldn’t live for 2 months packed away, we where off. I calmly drove the 1 mile or so to the brand new Sherman Hospital. We walk in wheeling our bag and get all signed in. Our Dula arrives, so we sit and chit-chat and make sure everything is all right.
The nurse checks Katie – 3-4cm dilation 100% effacement. Basically, we are 1/3 the way done in an hour.
Poor Katie didn’t get but 2 minutes of rest between contractions once she started. It’s hard to get tweets in between contractions when they are that close together. I didn’t want to not hold Katie’s hand for every one of them. Midnight finds us at about 9-10cm dilation, and the doctor is called in. We start pushing in earnest at this point. The doctor arrives, and we start to collect nurses. By the time the baby is born, we went from 1 nurse to 4 plus a doctor. I think a fifth one snuck in after the baby was born and started to clean up the baby.
The baby is a little Houdini. The nurses never could keep a baby monitor pointed at her for very long. She kept moving around, and slipping out of range. It’s “Ok Katie, Push”, “Ok, Katie, Relax”, find baby with monitor, repeat.
At one point Katie says that she just wants to go home. The Dula got a kick out of that, saying every mom has said that at some point in the delivery.
After a great amount of pushing and straining, and one round of “I want drugs, give me drugs” the baby is born. The drugs where skipped as the nurse pointed out that they could repress the baby’s breathing.
No drugs. How hardcore is that? Again, I am incredibly proud of Katie. I also don’t think I ever want to get into a fist fight with her. I’d loose.
As was pointed out earlier, she was born at 2:22. It wasn’t until about 5am or so that the doctor’s gone, the baby’s cleaned up, the nurses left us alone, and our Dula leaves. We rest. I have this little chair thingy that folds out into a bed, not very comfortable. I want one for at home.
I get up again around 8am. Nurses coming and going. Get Katie fed breakfast. The baby’s doing good. So I wander home about 10am to take a shower, take care of the critters at home, grab the laptop from the office, etc.
I grab some lunch (taco bell) and get back to Katie and my daughter.
All kinds of people come in to see Katie and the baby. Pediatricians, nurses, doctors, nursing consultants, housekeeping, the kitchen. Nobody to see me! That’s not true, two people from work visited, so I can pretend they where there to see me.
Day two at the hospital was about the same thing. I worked on my blog (what you are reading now, notice it’s a lot different?) as I hadn’t had time to work on it for the last two months and Katie was hogging our daughter while she was awake.
I just puttered around, fetching stuff that was out of reach, smuggling in frostys, Mt. Dew and Fast Break candy bars. If it wasn’t for having my baby girl there, hospitals are kinda boring.
We left Wednesday night so we had a night to ourselves, the three of us, before family started showing up.
Not much sleep that night, Bella, again the little miss Houdini, kept escaping her cradle her grandpa and I built her and ended up in bed most of the night.
So, in short, I am lucky I was home when this all started, the baby, mom and fish all survived the ordeal. Brother is now a Big Brother to a human kitten – poor fella. I am now a proud husband and happy father. My life sure has changed the last couple of years!
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