And then there were three! Welcome Samuel Carlton.

car seat sleepy, just born first bite, burrito

with dad week 1, happy baby, just born with Mom!

how cute am i?, just born with dad, happy in car seat

my downstairs bed, at home with mom, love me!

who says babies don't smile?!, first bath, photo-therapy for jaundice

BIRTH STORY

Samuel Carlton McCusker-Newman was born on Monday, March 14th at 5:40pm. Weighing in at 2.57 kilos/ 5.66 lbs. Samuel means "asked of G-d" or "G-d heard". Voila...ask and it is given! Carlton is the neighborhood where Sam was conceived, where Brendan and I used to live.

Samuel didn't wait for Mommy's scheduled surgery on Tuesday March 15th for removal of the cervical suture by her specially hand-picked high risk, high dollar OB/GYN whom she had been seeing throughout the pregnancy, the doc who in November 2010 put the stitch in. Instead, on Sunday night the 13th of March at around 830pm, Sam decided he would begin his break out. More than the usual amount of fluid leaked out of Deidre, prompting her to call the hospital delivery suite. Could this be my water breaking?? They suggested that I may have just "wee'd" on myself and directed me to put a pad in my underwear and check back in an hour". One hour later the pad was dry. I decided to go to sleep and that the baby would not be born until the scheduled surgery on Tuesday the 15th. A few hours later, however, at about 2:30am on Monday, March 14th, a crazy, giant, period-like cramp wrapped its jaws around my lower back and stomach and squeezed until I awoke gasping for air . Then 10 minutes later another breath-taking pain and another. Woah!! It took all of my concentration to breathe through them, so it was a good thing that they only lasted a minute each. I waited an hour to see if they kept coming; I was still clinging to the idea of everything happening as scheduled, not now. Maybe these were just gas pains? Woah! definitely not gas pains and a bit too coincidental that they were occurring every ten minutes. I guess this is it. Given that the date was Monday, 14 March, Labour Day (yes, really!) a public holiday in Australia, my doctor was away on vacation. At first I panicked then I thought c'est la vie. Nothing I could do to change things. Maybe the replacement Doc would be as good or better (all docs I would see would be from my guy's top-rated team). Nothing I could do to stop things, so, I took a shower and then woke Brendan. He was calm as usual, though a bit groggy given the time. We packed a few extra things to our already packed bags, grabbed the cord blood kit (we planned on storing baby's cord blood for future) and then headed to the hospital. We arrived around 5am and the contractions were 5 minutes apart at that point. The doctor turned out to be a gem. A completely approachable, talented, kind, professional: Dr. Salwan Al Salihi. He immediately acknowledged that my doctor was away, introduced himself and reviewed my history with me. He asked if there was anything else I'd like him to know, any questions I had, any concerns. My original Doc was concerned about the possibility of not being able to get the cervical suture out (that tissue may have grown over it) and in that case we would have to do a cesarean. My preference was to avoid a cesarean if possible. I reiterated this to Salwan (doctors go by their first names here in Oz) and he assured me that he would do everything he could for an outcome of vaginal birth. To really get in there and get the stitch out, he had to give me an epidural: he determined this after first having a quick feel around inside without anesthetic. Owwwww. The epidural was one of my biggest fears of the whole delivery experience--a giant needle in my spine that could potentially paralyze me or simply hurt like hell. TO BE CONTINUED...