My February Girls

Today is my wife, Corrie's, birthday. Yesterday she gave birth to a daughter, or second child. Now I have two February girls.

Having made it to the due date---January 30th---and sailed past it, was an accomplishment in itself. Our first baby, the extremely boyish boy Cassius, was five weeks early, and all the doctor-y folks we talked with mostly summarized our likely birth proceedings as, "Oh, don't worry, but that baby will be early, too."

That turned out to not be the case.

Not necessarily feeling it with our OB, we decided to change plans at week 37 or so, and had a series of "speed-dates" with a midwife we liked, and decided on a home-birth, mostly because our choices were limited.

The midwifery from 2016 that we'd planned to use with Cass had ended up not working out, and our opinion on the place had shifted by the end of it all. And since we were opting out of the OB and the same hospital that the Boy was born in, we were left thin of options besides home.

So, that was our new plan.

Sunday night rolls around. I finished my slides and papers for Monday, shaved, and joined a pregnant Corrie in bed. We went to sleep before 11:30. At 12:45 she was waking me up, asking me to get towels because her water had broken.

We got the bed ready for future amniotic leaks, I went back to my computer and set my substitute up, and we settled in to go back to sleep, Corrie pretty sure that we couldn't know how much time would be between the water breaking and the baby coming. It was now about 1:20.

As we laid back down, her body---which had been slowly cramping and contracting for weeks by this point---seemed to have a serious cramp, which was actually a real contraction. She breathed through it and said, "That...seemed like a real one."

Ten minutes later and another "real" one, and we texted the midwife. She texted back saying to let her know when they were five minutes apart. After another one, we started timing.

About forty minutes in, averaging eight minutes between contractions, a no-effing-around variety of contraction, they quickly picked up the pace, and started to come about ninety seconds apart. I anxiously texted the midwife again, asking her to head over.

She said she was a half-hour out. The time between her saying she was on her way and the next text, saying she was a half-hour out, may have been four minutes, but felt like twenty. I was standing around helpless, as Corrie was moaning and painfully uncomfortable for a minute every other minute. She said the contractions were getting "pushy," and there was some blood now showing up.

I texted again. The response I got was, "Call or face-time if it feels imminent and we're not there yet."

Okay. OKAY. I got this.

They arrived, Corrie moved to the bedroom proper, stayed on all-fours, and labored for about an hour before our daughter, Camille Adele, arrived. I caught her, but unassisted this time, and got to announce the sex.

Throughout all of it, Cass never woke up, despite being next door the whole time.

7 pounds 8 ounces, 21 inches long, grip like a welder and leg strength like a gymnast, our baby girl is something else.

Our Perfect Day

So, water broke at 12:45, baby came at 4:42, Cass woke up around 6:50. He was so excited; he'd been saying that he wanted a baby sister. We asked him if he wanted to go to school and tell everyone abut his new sister, or stay home with us and have a family day. 

We were ecstatic when he said he wanted to go to school. That time we needed. We spent the rest of the day taking turns cuddling and napping with the young lady. Eventually I showered and went to get the Boy, made dinner, and went back to cuddling and sleeping.

It was a perfect day, a perfect birthing day.