After nine months of waiting, Baby Lee finally arrived, and a little bit by surprise. On Tuesday morning, I was pretty much ready for work when Angela started having what seemed to be contractions sometime between 7:00 and 7:30. Not having been through this before, we weren’t sure if they were real contractions or just pre-labor contractions (we had seen the doctor Monday, and he said then that he expected Baby Lee to arrive the following Monday), but we started timing them. They ranged anywhere from 4 to 13 minutes apart, and seemed to be increasing in intensity. I decided to stay home and work from there, at least for the morning, until we figured out what was going on. At about 10:30, with the contractions continuing, we called the doctor and explained the morning’s events to his nurse. After a brief consultation with the doctor, she instructed us to come in for an exam. When we got to the office, we were ushered in for a quick exam, which showed Angela was indeed in labor. At that point, the doctor sent us to hospital, saying, "Let’s have a baby today!"
Luckily, Deaconess was just down the street, so we made it there quicker than the nursing staff expected. They got us all set up in a room, and the flurry of activity began. Monitors, wires, tubes, and a plethora of other devices and gadgets were wheeled in as the nurses took care of Ang. We weren’t sure about pain killers, so we decided that we would wait and see how things went. After a couple of hours, though, Angela decided that she wanted the epidural. That helped a lot. With the epidural in, we began the waiting game.
Later that evening, the nurses decided that it was time, so they had her start pushing while we waited for the doctor to get there. Dr. Sanger finally arrived, and began working on getting Baby Lee into the world. Finally, at 9:39PM, Baby Lee was born into the world, and he was big: nine pounds and four ounces. The delivery was tough on Ang, but that didn’t seem to matter much when she finally got to see him. While the doctor checked out Mother, the nurses wheeled Baby Lee, whom we named Andrew Daniel, off to the nursery for exams and a bath.
The next day was a busy one for Andrew. His Grandmother and I took prints of his hands and feet for the baby book. He also got lots of visitors. At about 5:00 on the 31st, we finally got to take him home.
