Welcome Torin Isaiah!!!!

Saturday was a wonderful day. It was long day, but at the same time it flew by so quickly. Some pre-labor actually started Friday night, but we were able to get to bed around midnight. Sarah was using a Tens unit which applied tiny shocks to her lower back which allowed her to manage the pain from those contractions and fall asleep! Around 2am she woke up and turned it off and fell back to sleep.

We woke up at 7am to new, more intense, contractions. Sarah new this was something different this time. Around 8am I called Heidi, my sister, to have her come over, as she was to watch Ashen at home while we went off to the hospital. I also called up Kim, our doula, to let her know what was happening, and she came promptly over in 40 minutes. For the next few hours, Sarah labored from home, utilizing the Tens unit to make the contractions more manageable. With the contractions down to 3 minutes consistently, I called over to the hospital and requested a deep soaker tub room. Kim had said only some of the rooms have these tubs and thought that would be most beneficial for Sarah. Later, the nurse told me they had a laugh after I called because they thought they should have answered, "Hello, this is the Hyatt, what kind of room would you like?".

The drive over went well and when we walked into the birthing center, they gave us a nice room right away. Turns out room 334 was our lucky room. Kim gave birth in the same room, twice! The time was just before noon. For the next four hours, Sarah continued to power through her contractions. For the first couple of hours she enjoyed the deep soaker tub, this helped make her more comfortable and she progressed quite well. After the tub, we tried all the positions in the book, slow dancing, leaning over a fit ball, sitting on the fit ball, leaning to the left, leaning to the right, stand up, sit down, fight fight FIGHT! Around 12:30 the midwife, Ann, checked Sarah and she was around 6cm...doing great. Around 3pm she checked again and made it to 8cm. Sarah was doing really GREAT!! We were getting so close. She was very engaged and alert between contractions...noticing every detail about the room and everyone in it. I have to say, I'm very proud of Sarah, she did a wonderful job on Torin's birthday. She had amazing strength and stamina, a true athlete!

As 4pm rolled in, Sarah began feeling the urge to push. We were all very excited, we made it to the last stage!! After two hours of very hard pushing, the midwife thought Sarah's pushing was excellent, but the contractions themselves weren't lasting quite long enough. So she got an IV with pitocin to make the contractions longer and stronger, and very soon after we began seeing lots more progress. Since Sarah did not use an epidural, she was in a lot of pain, but was able to keep in close tune with how her body reacted to each contraction and push. Up to this point, we could just see the top of Torin's furry head, but now we could see it more and more. At 6:29pm, Sarah gave Torin one final push and the midwife and I had his head in our hands!! I rotated his head 90 degrees to get the shoulders out and then he got to rest Mommy! Turns out this little tiger was no little tiger at all, but a 9lbs-50z, 21-3/4" long big tiger! No wonder the pushing phase was such a chore compared to the rest of labor! Torin made little sounds here and there while resting on mommy, no big whines or crying until we put him on the table to get his dimensions. What was really cute was when I put my face down to comfort him, he grabbed my hair and pulled my face to him. So cute!!

I forgot to mention that the nurses and midwife were very impressed with Torin's strength, during the entire labor process his heartbeat kept a steady 145 beats per minute. They said they didn't worry about him a bit.

God has blessed us with two beautiful miracles, and we are so happy to officially be a family of four now. We couldn't ask for a better labor (other than the pushing phase), which started on a Saturday morning and we were back home by Sunday evening. What did you do last weekend?

Torin is Gaelic for chief. Isaiah means God is my salvation.