December 7th, 2011

I decided to take the day off work this morning. I was convinced that there was no way that Adriane was going to make it through the weekend and I wanted a day to help clean up the house and organize some things before the event. Woke up at 5:30 so I could go to a 6:15 Yoga class. Got home about 7:45 and Adriane tells me I better start cleaning, I’m thinking jeez I just walked in the door, I’m taking the whole day off to help clean the house… I was a little slow on the uptake; Adriane was in labor, she’d been having mild contractions since shortly after I left that morning. At this point she’s not sure if it’s real labor or false labor, but as usual she is taking care of all the details and has downloaded a handy contraction timer app for her phone. We take care of all the normal morning stuff, eat get dressed, etc. Adriane calls the midwife, still not sure if it’s actual labor or false labor, midwife says call back if the contractions start coming closer together and lasting longer. Little while later and they seem to be trending closer together and lasting longer, but not consistently, still not sure if this is actual labor, but I convince Adriane to call the midwife, Jenn. Jenn comes over to check Adriane to see if she is progressing; it’s about 11:00 at this point. Jenn says 8cm. For those that don’t know, when giving birth your cervix dilates, it starts at 0cm and progresses to 10cm. We didn’t even know that labor had really started and Adriane was almost finished! She is definitely an overachiever. At this point we called everyone that was supposed to be coming over. Adriane’s friend Kaila, the photographer Sarah, and the second midwife Amanda. It was a full blown labor party (not the political kind). Adriane wanted to do a water birth so she climbed into the bath tub and proceeded to make phone calls, write emails, and text message people between her ever strengthening contractions. Did I mention she’s pretty amazing? She was in the tub for about an hour and a half without dilating further, the contractions were starting to get very intense at this point and she was quite eager to get things moving so she got out of the tub for a little while. That seemed to get things moving again, and she was back in the tub just a few minutes later. That slowed things down again so a little while later she’s standing up in the tub holding on to me for support, she is holding so tight that she nearly pulled me in to the tub with her. I have no idea how long any of this is taking, once the contractions started getting hard for her I lost all track of time. All I really know is that what seemed like the better part of a day, was only a couple of hours. At 2:45 pm Adriane gave one last giant push and out popped a perfect little baby boy. I helped catch him and lift him up for Adriane to hold. I was really surprised that new born babies aren’t slippery, they are all sticky. They waited 20 minutes for the umbilical cord stop pulsing, then Oliver helped me cut the cord while he was still on Adriane’s chest in the bathtub.

Things we know about the new baby:
His name is Elliott James Villanueva, he was born 7lbs 6 oz, 20 ¾ inches long at 2:45 pm on Dec 7th, 2011. We chose his middle name after Adriane's godfather, Jim Baer. He was exactly 10 days early. As far as we can tell he is a perfect little boy. He looks a lot like his big brother. He is a champion nurser. He currently has brown hair but so did Oliver when he came out, so we’ll see if it turns blonde. The rest is to be discovered.

Kaila did an amazing job of taking care of Oliver, she played with him fed him, cleaned up, and took video. There is no way we could have done it without her. Sarah took 600 pictures which Adriane is eager to look through. Jenn and Amanda were both great. Even Penny was pretty calm the whole day. It went as well as we could have possibly hoped. And it was amazing to have it all happen in the comforts of our own home.