Sunday, June 10, 2012

Introducing Sullivan Sawyer Keith


Yesterday morning Stephanie and I (mainly Stephanie) delivered a healthy baby boy. What an amazing and humbling experience to go through. Now we can stop being concerned about whether or not we'd get to this point and start being concerned with normal parenting stuff.

Stephanie had been having contractions off and on for about a week. We knew that things were getting close so on Friday we went out on our last date where we wouldn't need a babysitter (at least for awhile.) We went to 5 guys, and then to a self serve yogurt shop. It was kind of funny being in line and Stephanie started having a contraction, we let people go around us. They looked a little confused.

I had a strong feeling I wouldn't be sleeping all night. We went to bed and I was able to sleep until about 3:00. The contractions were fairly regular at that point and so we called the midwife. She wanted us to wait to see how things progressed and at about 4:30 I knew that it was time. The contractions were much stronger and pretty regular. At 5:30 we met at the birth center and settled in to one of their birthing suites. Each of their suites has a large tub, ours was being filled when we got there. When it was time to shut the water off, Kyla, our midwife couldn't get it to shut off all the way. Apparently one of the handles was tricky to get shut off. Thinking that we were in danger of flooding I grabbed some tools and went to work to try and figure out what was going on. I could get the volume of water to decrease quite a bit, but nothing I did would shut it off all the way. I reassembled the handle, and was close to admitting defeat. I wanted to turn the other handle on and then shut it off to see how a working one worked. I soon discovered that the other handle had been turned on the whole time. Unfortunately by that time we were already draining the tub to prevent an overflow. There was no hot water left so Stephanie had to wait awhile until she was able to get into the warm tub.

Let me tell you something, I am saddened and appalled how a lot of men treat women as the weak or inferior sex. You see it everywhere how the man, being "stronger" has to come to the rescue of a woman. I hear stories quite often about men being abusive to women, probably an effort to keep "control." Well, the secret is that women are much stronger mentally and physically then men. Sure, we might be able to lift heavier weights on average, but that's only one aspect of physical strength. Watch a women go through natural child birth and you will have a whole new outlook on which sex is the weaker sex.

Stephanie was amazing and handled the delivery like a champ. What an amazing experience to be apart of. Sullivan was a hefty 8lbs 13oz and 21" long. Completely healthy and absolutely beautiful. We decided to give him Sawyer's name as his middle name. I have had a lot of conflicting emotions however. I was on facebook posting Sullivan's picture and I thought about changing my profile picture, which is currently a picture of Stephanie, Sawyer, and myself. I felt guilty that I had that thought, I don't want to diminish the memory of Sawyer by replacing them with Sullivan. It'll be a balancing act, and I don't really know how it is going to work. I am glad that Sullivan is a boy however. When I first found out we were pregnant again one of my first thoughts was how I would react to a new baby that was using Sawyer's clothes, stroller, and car seat. There still is a sense of attachment to those things, what else do I have to attach Sawyer to?

Scott

1 comment:

  1. Congratulations again. Babies are miracles. Give the feelings time to sort themselves out -- it's going to take a while.

    If you ever watched the movie The Right Stuff, there's a sequence when they show the kinds of tests they put the prospective astronauts through (Jerry Pournelle, who helped design them, admitted later that they just made stuff up, since nobody knew what an astronaut would need to be able to do) in the Mercury era. Secretly, NASA also put a group of women through the same tests, and found that the women (all of them) surpassed the men (all of them) on virtually every test.

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