Luke Thoreau Clyde Curtis has arrived!

We're happy to announce Luke's arrival--one week before his due date (I still feel like I won the lottery! As anyone who has seen me in the past month can tell you, I don't do that ninth month of pregnancy cheerfully or gracefully).

Should you care for the birth details: Monday morning around 5 am, I woke up to find my water broke, but I wasn't having any contractions. By 6, we were told to head to the hospital anyway. Unfortunately, Nate and I weren't the only ones who thought this baby wasn't coming early. Our planned Asher-watchers were all out of town (Starr and Judy in Las Vegas, Rachel and Evan at Disneyland).

But, Sharona and Dad saved the day, taking Asher for the morning. Then, Uncle Tom took off from school at lunch to watch Asher until Mom got done with work at 3. Hooray for accommodating family members!

Contractions started around 6 am. By 2 pm, I was 1 cm and 20% effaced, so we started pitocin. Having heard from friends that pitocin contractions are no fun (and frankly, the regular contractions were starting to get difficult to handle, too), I asked for an epidural. I have loved epidurals since having one for my colectomy, but now, I know why women love the anesthesiologist who gives it. I had a resident try 3 times to give me an epidural for Asher. After her third attempt, I figured I should just try to get through labor on my own (misplacing an epidural hurts worse than the majority of contractions I’ve felt). But, the Good Sam anesthesiologist did it so fast that I felt him taping things in place. I said, "Wait, you're done?!"

Another plus was the lovely anti-nausea medication I got. I threw up 6-8 times during labor with Asher. So, around noon when I started to feel nauseous with Luke, I told Nate to ask the nurse for a bucket. She rushed in and said, "Oh, no, why don't we just give you some Zofran?"

We continued to wait for the pitocin to do its job until about 6:30pm when I told Nate and the nurse they probably wanted to get the doctor right now. All of the sudden, I felt like if I sneezed Luke would drop out, which is pretty much what he did. Nate says I pushed for 20 minutes--I think it was closer to 10 or 15.

Nate and I were then pleasantly surprised to find out that some babies cry and are quite responsive when they're born. So, the nurse doesn't take them from you right away, and the room doesn't get uncomfortably silent.

My advice is that if you have to have one kid born with problems (like being unresponsive or having seizures), do it with your first one when you just don't know any better.

Now, we're home with Luke, and I feel like I'm a bit in uncharted territory--I haven't nursed a baby this young before or had one this alert (Asher was almost 2 weeks old when we got him home.). He's healthy and pretty content, but his face scrunches up into one of displeasure when his older brother comes around--you may have met his brother, he's awfully noisy and believes that Luke's primary purpose is to show where eyes, nose, mouth, and ears are.

Asher has done something very clever with our camera cable, so we still aren’t able to download pictures, but we'll find it sooner or later.