John Matthew Jespersen

He's alive (lighting strikes)! Jack is here. And he is Jack (an issue Ella and I were still dithering about after he was born). He weighed 6 lbs 14 oz. The smallest fry possible. Let me take you through it all.

On Thursday morning, Ella went to see the midwives to have her membranes stripped. Apparently, having your membranes stripped is a way to induce labor, but I'm not sure I understand how. Ella said, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. She said it works if you're ready to have the baby. Come again? I thought being ready to have the baby made the baby come. And the term is as ambiguous as it's effectiveness. I had never heard of that term before about a month ago. But it sounds like it could mean anything. I feel like if I blow my nose, I just stripped my membranes. In any case, Ella came home with her membranes stripped, and she told me she thought it was going to happen any moment. Do you know how that made me feel? Exactly how I felt five months ago. Having a baby is the weirdest thing. It was the same with Jane. Right up until that little feller pops out it feels like it's still a good ways down the road. I think that's a natural feeling the Lord puts in dads' brains so we don't run and hide in a closet. We just kind of stumble excitedly to the hospital with a vague sense of future change.

So I went to bed that night but was soon awakened when Ella complained of contractions keeping her from sleep. Not close enough to merit heading to the hospital, but painful enough to make sleep impossible. I went back to sleep (because I was tired), but I was soon instructed that I had to stay awake, too. So I tried to sit with Ella and stave off sleep as she staved off major pain. When the pain became too great, it was time to call the midwife. Call her on the phone, right? Of course not. Doctors and medical personnel are the only idiots who haven't discovered the cell phone yet. They're stuck in the 20th century with their ridiculous pagers. (It reminds me of cop shows where the police still have to "get a trace" when the bad guy's on the phone while the rest of the world just checks the caller ID. "Just ten more seconds and we'll have him! Keep him on the line! Five more seconds!" And then the bad guy invariably hangs up right before they have the trace. It's weird how the cops and the bad guys all know exactly when the trace is going to go through, like they've synchronized their watches. Just look at the caller ID. But we were talking about pagers, right?) Why do doctors need pagers? Why can't we call their cell phones? Why do you page them in the first place? So they can call you back. And when you page a doctor, it means, "call me now!" Something big is going down. Then they call you and say, "What's going down?" Why not just call them on their phone and eliminate the redundancy? They're the only people left on the planet with pagers. So Ella "paged" the midwife a number of times, and she never got a call back. Well, that wasn't going to work, so before long, we were in the hospital.

So far things weren't looking so great. Ella picked a midwife this time around because of the horrible experience with Jane. (A quick recap: A Caribbean nurse was yelling, "Get angry, Mama!" in a calypso voice, while swaying and clapping her hands with an intense look on her face like a cornerman in a prizefight. The OB on call--who was ticked that Ella's regular OB didn't induce her when he saw her earlier that day--was literally rolling his eyes while letting out a "psss" sound when Ella tried to push as hard as she could. He said, "That's not going to do it.") So we were pretty worried when the midwife was not responding to this bastion of technology, the pager. The hospital didn't wait around. They hooked her up to some wires and gave her the proverbial cup of ice. Ella let them know she wanted an epidural sooner than later, and we were moved to a labor and delivery room where we waited for the anesthesiologist. And he gets his own paragraph.

We're sitting there, Ella braving her growing contractions, when the door opens, and a man who looked like perhaps he was an orderly, wheels in a table of medical paraphernalia and announces, "I'm Dan from Anesthesia." His hair was bleached blond and gelled into a faux-hawk. He had a soul patch, which was also bleached blond. He was well-tanned and his arms were shaved. He started to work and I slowly became accustomed to the idea that this was our anesthesiologist, though he could just as easily have stepped off the set of Baywatch. His own introduction demonstrated that even he didn't quite believe he was actually an anesthesiologist. "It is I, Dan from the island nation of Anesthesia." Great, Dan, that's the exact country my wife wants to visit. Show us the way. In spite of his unorthodox appearance, he actually had quite a wonderful bedside manner, and we liked him. Now that I think about it, anesthesiologists seem to always have a great bedside manner. Perhaps that's fitting of someone who is basically a legal version of a drug dealer. They know they're there to make you high as a kite, and they're going to get bank doing it. So they do it with a smile. When he left, Ella had a smile too, taking a vacation to Anesthesia:
And from there until about 7:00AM, everything was bliss. At 7:00, Ella's midwife walked in. We found out she wasn't avoiding us at all. Her pager simply dropped the last digit of Ella's phone number. What else is left to say about pagers? The midwife broke Ella's water. At 7:30, Ella started pushing. This was a night and day experience from Jane's birth. Ella was all business and 100% champ. The midwife, for her part, was fantastic. Jack wanted to come out facing up (like Jane did), but that is really hard on mommies, so the midwife worked hard to turn Jack around before he popped out (unlike the eyerolling OB from Miami), and she succeeded. She gave positive encouragement whenever Ella pushed (unlike the lead singer for the steel drum band from Miami), and by 7:54, Jack popped out:His head is considerably smaller than Jane's was, which was nice for Ella. (Jane was actually in the 100th percentile for head size. What that means, if I understand the math, is that Jane's head at two weeks old was larger than 100 percent of all two week old heads that have ever been on the earth. I find that an impressive statistic, if not perhaps a little difficult to believe, but that's what the doctor said. A different doctor with possibly zero tact once had this conversation with us about Jane's head. Tactless Doctor: "Oh boy, she's got a big head." Then she looked at me, sizing up my skull and continued: "She must get that from Daddy." Me: "I wear a normal hat size." Tactless Doctor: "We'd have to measure.")

Because Ella wasn't afraid she was dying this time, she was able to immediately enjoy the little feller:Sharon brought Jane to see him:We hope they're best of friends. If not, we hope they're worst of enemies. No middle ground.

We're so thankful to you all for support and visits and gifts in welcoming Jack into our lives. And now I have two people to take pictures of for the blog (and sometimes I get to throw Ella in, too).