Our China Boy

You know how sometimes in movies they show a hospital scene from the perspective of an ER patient? The patient is on a gurney and all he can see is faces and things whizzing by?

That happened to me. Seriously.

The only thing is, I wasn't dying or anything. Mister and I walked in to the hospital around noon on Christmas day. We checked in at the ER. They took my blood pressure. We went to get in line to pay. Then a nurse came and told me to follow her. They had me lay on a bed while Mister got everything taken care of. When he was done they pushed me around on the thing! (for "safety")

I should have realized it was a sign for my stay in a hospital in China.

After being monitored for a while, getting an ultrasound, and getting an EKG (very interesting experience) they finally took us to our room.

The next two days were spent something like this:

-Being put on petocin
-being taken off at 6pm because there weren't any doctors working
-getting woken up at 6am by a lady cleaning
-being put on petocin
-getting taken off at 6pm because there weren't any doctors working
-staying in bed the whole time because they wanted to monitor the nothing that was going on

These two days also included some hospital Chinese food (mmm), oxygen, impatience, gesturing, Mister translating, and lots of time missing my little girl!

This was our room. Not bad, huh?

On Thursday morning they finally decided to get a little more serious about things. They gave me a different type of medicine and I told them I didn't want to be monitored as much so I could walk around. By 3, I was having pretty intense contractions.

I was planning on not getting an epidural, but was still open to it. When, at 5, the nurses told me I was only at a 2 I told Mister to get me the medicine! The nurses all tried to talk me out of it, but I was having none of that. Thanks to the fact that not many Chinese women get an epidural, the anesthesiologist was in my room within minutes.

I don't know what "2" the nurses were talking about...but I was definitely further along than that. Less that a minute after getting the epidural, my water broke. The epidural was heaven.

A little less than an hour later a nurse came in to check on us. She made a funny noise and ran out of the room. All of the sudden people were running around the room getting things ready. The doctor came in and told me I should push through my contractions. I didn't want to, though so I tried to wait. I finally decided to appease her and push.

5 minutes later, we had our China-born baby boy!

This baby weighed 4.18kg (9 lbs 3 oz)!

Oh what a crazy wonderful thing it is to hold a precious new child straight from Heaven.

This man is The. Best. He translated everything for me and was better than any doula.

and from Heaven he is.

Brother was born on December 27th at 6:05 pm--weighing 9lb 3oz and measuring 21 inches!