Sarah and I are proud to announce that Madeline Eve was born on Sunday October 23rd at 7:18 AM. She was born weighing 6 lbs and 12 oz. and a full head of hair. Some pictures of her are available in the danhousman.com photo album from the last couple of days.

Things were a whirlwind of activity since 6:00 on October 22nd when Sarah began to deliver my birthday present. We had gone hiking in Dover with Lena and had planned a celebratory dinner with my family at The Met Bar at 8:15 PM. After the hike we stopped at the Shops at Putterham for some pastries, rugala, sugar cookies, and hamentashen and drinks at Starbucks. When Sarah went to the bathroom it took her longer than normal and she thought she felt different. She also felt some pain in her abdomen as we walked up to the peak in the woods. When we got back to Brookline we went to bed and then when Sarah awoke and took a bath she was feeling a pain in her side. She called Joyce, our doula, and Joyce gave her the advice to time her contractions.

Shelly had warned on Friday that sometimes you have false labor and contractions before labor so I figured the contractions would go away. We started timing in the kitchen on an old clock with a pen and an car insurance bill envelope. I thought I might be able to time on my cell phone but discovered that it doesn't have any way to present the seconds on it. So I hunted around until I found the watch that Ami had left with us when we cooked chicken together a week or two back. The contractions were very rhythmic, every 3 minutes ranging from 30 seconds to 50 seconds. Sarah has comfortable with the contractions at this point so we called back Joyce and she let us know she could arrive by 9:30 PM.

Sarah then began to rapidly proceed into a much faster paced labor. Her contractions got much stronger between seven and 9:30 while we were waiting to the point where they were lasting over a minute and a half and often were back to back with no break in between. Sarah was in enough discomfort to be vocalizing some Huh.Huh. sounds. Sarah's back hurt whenever the contractions started so she gave me the job of pushing against the base of her back.

When Joyce arrived she calmed Sarah and me down a bit. She had brought her baby monitor so we could measure her heart rate. The numbers were right in the healthy range. From 9:30 until midnight Joyce and I took turns helping to ease the pressure on Sarah's back by pushing on the back and her hips whenever a contraction came. We were able to move Sarah from the couch, to the bed, over the toilet, and into the bath to try various positions to move the labor forwards. At some points Sarah was losing blood and throwing-up into a bowl but I was proud to see how well Sarah was tolerating the process. She wasn't at all interested in going to the hospital when Joyce concluded that it was about time to drive to the hospital at 12:30. I called the hospital to let them know we would be over in about 10-15 minutes. Sarah was having very frequent double peak contractions which basically looked as though she was in a fight with an imaginary person or being tortured to tell some secret with the expectation that the contractions would stop if she just gave the secret formula for Coke to the Pepsi folks.

The weather on Saturday wasn't great during the day but was a cool comfortable drizzle. By the evening the rain had become loud and sounded outside like hail. Thunder strikes were coming down one after the other and I was worried that lightning might take out the power. It was a dark and stormy night.

At one point while Sarah was in the bath tub Joyce thought she heard a sound rustling in the kitchen. I told her it might be the mouse and when she went into the kitchen she saw the mouse run off behind the stove. I guess the mouse wanted to get involved in the action. Strangely the most disturbing part of the evening was knowing that the mouse was still living somewhere and wandering about the kitchen.

Sarah's general philosophy was that since the contractions were coming so quickly together that it was best to not move or go to the hospital. Since she couldn't move except between contractions we could only get her to shift from one room to the next. So while I though we were headed to the hospital at 12:30 we didn't end-up going until 4:00 AM when Joyce gave Sarah an internal exam and found almost no cervix left in the way of the baby coming out. Her basic message to Sarah was that Joyce wasn't prepared to do an unassissted home delivery so it was really time to go to the hospital or the baby was going to be born right away.

The whole time we never saw the water break so we were wondering when it would happen or if it had ever happened. Sarah had a lot of trouble getting through the process of going from the apartment to the hospital to deliver Madeline. Since she was having so many contractions she could only really walk in between them. So we just moved her one small bit of distance at a time between contractions.

When we got to the hospital it was tough for Sarah.... to be continued...