One week ago, Quinlan made his entry into the world.
The day started off pretty hectically. Gwen was trying to get to a conference down at the Wall Centre for 9am and Aidan was supposed to go to the Preschool Curiousity Club at Science World at 10am. Gwen’s mother was scheduled to fly in at 1:30pm. It was shaping up to be a busy day, but we didn’t anticipate just how busy.
As we were getting going in the morning, making sure all the bodies were up out of bed and on their way to being presentable and less hungry, Gwen came to me with one of those looks on her face. Immediately I knew what she was going to say:
I think my water just broke.
That was 8am. With Aidan, Gwen’s water broke the night before she actually gave birth the next night, so we didn’t know how much time we had until things got interesting.
She tried to convince me that she could still go to the conference (she had won a free pass) but I wasn’t having any of that.
At 9:30am, she tells me:
I think I’m having contractions, but I’m not sure.
With Aidan, the contractions were pretty obvious. And painful … a lot of back pain. The idea of not being sure about contractions was confusing at best. So we started timing the contractions. And we called our friends Tomer & Carla to put them on notice that we might need them to come and watch Aidan while we went to the hospital.
Now, I’d been stressing out over this for the past week. It was literally keeping me awake at night, worrying that we’d have to go to the hospital in the middle of the night and scramble to impose on someone to watch Aidan while we were there. We had a list of people to call, but I was hoping that we wouldn’t have to call anyone and instead Gwen’s mother would be able to watch him. Of course for that to happen, the hospital trip had to happen after 1:30pm on the 25th. Which was 5 days before Gwen’s due date. Aidan was earlier than that and I’d heard that the 2nd came quicker.
Which brings us to 11:30am on Saturday the 25th. Gwen’s contractions were coming at 8 minute intervals. At 11:40am, that had shrunk to 5 minutes, the magic number for going to the hospital. I called Carla and asked her to come, and um, could she come quickly please. By 11:50am, the interval had shrunk to 3 minutes.
We rushed to the hospital (a pretty short drive up the road) and entered the maternity admissions of BC Women’s Hospital at noon. It took us an hour to get through admissions and assessment, the whole time with Gwen’s contractions coming a mere 60-90 seconds apart. Assessment judged her 3 cm dilated (10 cm is the magic number when the tell you to PUSH!) but the baby’s heart rate was dropping (and recovering) with each contraction so they decided to not take us to the Cedar maternity ward with its primo private rooms where you deliver and recover in the same room. Instead we were taken to a standard delivery room on the maternity ward. At 1pm.
The nurse got us to the room, and started to get things sorted out. Then she checked Gwen again. 8 cm, and Gwen was involuntarily pushing. So much for the epidural. So much for the doctor that was supposed to deliver the baby. Instead there was a flurry of nurses and a resident paeditrician (the doctor made it for the very end).
At 1:10pm, Quinlan was born.
I knew #2 was supposed to be quicker, I think this was extraordinary.
For the next hour, the doctor busied himself with suturing.
And, keeping up with the theme, we were released the next day and were home less than 25 hours after leaving for the hospital!