She Has Babies On Fridays

Last Friday can be broken up into two parts; the first half where Laura gave birth and we fawned over him for awhile, and then bringing Yuula in to meet her new baby brother and hope for the best. Those two events with about 30 minutes of sleep in between and you start to understand where I've been for the past week.

So, Aesop was born. But not without a fight. His head was large indeed, 14 inches, and after about 25 minutes of intense laboring, the tension level was amped up to 11 for about two and a half wild moments of which I will never forget, resulting in seeing my boy slipping down his first slide and dangling by hook and by crook and slopped on Laura's chest in all his purple glory. And I mean purple. But before I could process the color it had already changed. Blue. Than dark blue. There was a moment of unease, medical jargon flying over our heads, in a room that had only moments later been just the four of us was now full of lab-coated strangers, all heads down attending to their distinct duties. 

Then he cried.

That seemed to please everyone else, but all I saw was my grape-flavored baby boy. They laid him under the warming lights and like the horse-of-a-different-color from Oz, he put on quite a show. All the colors of the rainbow and some  I'd never seen before. I was reluctant to ask the nurse vacuuming out his throat if he was okay. She said, very matter of factly "Oh he's just fine". At that point I began conjuring up something resembling the red lights on the back of hockey nets for delivery rooms that allow the poor clueless fathers to know whether they have a scored a goal or not. 

For Criminently Sakes!

After bring the chameleon child back to something slightly more reminiscent of human babies, he was handed off to Laura for his Welcome To The World gift bag. It seemed like little bits of information were dripping out here and there at that point, as everyone literally picked up the pieces. 10 fingers, 10 toes. Yes, his bruising would heal. No, his brain was not affected. Yes, his shoulder got stuck on a Laura's bone. I think in hockey they call that 'bar down'. And yes, he probably broke his clavicle. My oh my. Honestly after watching that color change technology, nothing was shocking me. What else ya got?

The nurse came and did his footprints and gave me a souvenir of the whole debacle. This is the only time Laura didn't give me a dirty look for sullying a clean white tee.

Another nurse offered to take the first photo of Aesop with his parents. It was an inopportune time to realize that I still hadn't taken my hat off.

Then it was my turn. I sang him a little singy-song. He didn't know the words to sing along, but that's okay, I'll teach them to him.

Here he is naked...

 clothed...

and packaged.

It was all fairly awesome.