I know, I know…

So, I go and start up a blog, tell everybody I know to please read it and then I miss a whole day of posting on day three.  But the thing is…I had a baby. So, please forgive me.  It will be at least 2 years until I use this excuse again – I promise.

Our second son, John Xavier, arrived a week and a half early.  He was born at 11:07 pm, Thursday, April 15th.  Not only is he a “Tax Baby,” but we are now two for two as far as our children ‘stealing’ the birthday of someone else in our family.  What can I say? We teach them to love to share at a very early age. Yes, we are amazing parents.

John Xavier is 7 lbs, 4 oz. (almost a full pound and a half less than Carlitos Eli weighed at birth!) and is 20 inches long.  He is itty bitty and gorgeous and perfect and amazing and…you get the point. Even though as a parent you can’t imagine it ahead of time, we adore him just as much as we adore Carlitos.  Your heart truly does have room to love them both equally.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to have the exact ‘birth experience’ we had hoped for.  We did all of the necessary preparation to give birth in The Birthing Center (which is located inside of a hospital), but we arrived at the hospital to massive chaos.  The Birthing Center was not actually conducting any births because the regular Labor and Delivery floor had to use all of The Birthing Center nurses due to the enormous quantity of women giving birth. No full moon, no storm, and it wasn’t 9 months after Valentine’s Day…nobody had a clue why there was this huge number of mothers all giving birth Thursday night, but we were all there and they had to face us.  When my doctor arrived she just kept saying “Why did you choose tonight? This is a nightmare! This is horrendous! This is total insanity! They are delivering babies in the OR {Operating Room} because there are no other open rooms!…”  You get the point. I certainly got the point. Did I mention that she was saying all of this while I was having a contraction? I’m not making this up – I checked the monitor after she left and that contraction was literally ‘off the charts,’ as in you couldn’t even see the peak of it because it was so strong. Needless to say, stress during contractions is not a good idea. Any readers going into the Obstetrics field, please keep this story in mind when speaking to your future patients.

Thankfully, despite this bump in the beginning, our doctor was fantastic. She managed to get us into a delivery room pretty quickly and was with us the whole time.   Mind you, the ‘whole time’ wasn’t really that long. We arrived at the hospital at 8:00 pm and as I wrote above, John Xavier was born at 11:07 pm.  Usually they say to stay out of the hospital while in labor because it will slow your labor down.  Being the apparent contrarian that I am, entering the hospital has sped up my labor both times.  I’m not going to give exact numbers or details (this just isn’t that type of blog ), but let’s just say that with both deliveries I have had the doctor and nurse thinking they still have several more hours and then suddenly scrambling (like literally yelling into the hallway and running)  to get gloves and that scary looking cart of ‘delivery tools’ in time to catch the baby.  Maybe next time I should warn them ahead of time that this is kind of my M.O.?

The benefit of all of the chaos is that they were happy to oblige us and let us out of the hospital in 12-18 hours (as it would have been in The Birthing Center), rather than making us stay until Sunday morning.  We arrived home last night in time to have a family dinner with Carlitos and all four grandparents.   It was perfect and I’ll leave it at that for now.

Welcome Home, Xavi!