Moments After The Delivery

After Ashley was born, my memory and focus became super foggy. I followed her around the room with my video camera as they cleaned her off and weighed her. After the nurse confirmed the baby was healthy, she said "do you want to hold her?" I've never held an infant and have only held older babies a few times so I was apprehensive at best. But what was I actually going to say, "Nah, I'm cool. Just give her to momma and she'll take care of her. I'm calling my buddies to go celebrate at the local pub." Into my arms came this teeny-tiny person and into the pool of life I dove.

At this same moment, Kelly was getting instructed by the doctor to push through a contraction to give birth to a purple mass of nastiness called the placenta. Thankfully I missed all of these sites and sounds and was soley focused on the eyes of my genes staring back at me. At the time I didn't think anything of it but later in the evening when talking about the event, I couldn't remember anything after the doctor said "it's a girl". During the first few moments with Ashley in my arms, I felt a drop of water running down my cheek and thought the damn ceiling must have a leak. Nope, those were tears of elation. So I quickly wiped them off and pretended like nothing happened.

The contractions continued for Kelly as her body tried to stop the bleeding. Let me tell you there was a lot of blood. She'd attempt to stand up an hour later and blood would pour down her legs. And that was just an attempt to stand up which wasn't successful. She was so exhausted and fatigued from the birth that her legs wouldn't support her weight and she became light headed and close to passing out.

After a bit, Kelly regained enough strength to roll over into a wheel chair. We were being transitioned into a post partum room where we would stay until Wednesday afternoon. We come to find out that visiting hours are from 12:00pm until 7:30pm. Since both of our parents were in town and we knew about as much about taking care of an infant as we do about servicing an automobile, I was hoping someone would be able to be here the entire time. Thankfully, that is what nurses are for.

We're leaving for home right now so I'll post either tonight or tomorrow about our first nights alone with Ashley.