Corbin's Grand Entrance

Forgive me if this blog post is a little on the incoherent side, but as I write this, it's three o'clock in the morning and I'm literally too exhausted to sleep. Plus? I just ate some awesome toast, so my happiness is at near-delirious heights. (I know, you're thinking, "What's so special about toast?" - but all toast is classified under "awesome" when it's your first solid food in nearly 24 hours.)

But let me back up for a minute. Because I've got something even more awesome than toast: a brand new baby boy. Corbin Daniel, eight pounds and nine ounces and twenty-one inches of sweet, infant-y goodness.

When I came in for my induction on Friday morning, I was more than ready, since it had been postponed the day before. I checked my dignity at the door, donned the ultra-flattering hospital couture, fashionably accessorized with an IV and some lovely identification bracelets, and they started the Pitocin drip. For most of the morning, I was engaged in various activities such as walking around and bouncing on a birthing ball (presumably with my ass hanging out for the world to see). Labor was progressing at a decent clip. Contractions were getting painful. Water had broken. I was waiting on the anesthesiologist to deliver the nectar of the gods epidural. Everything was nice and normal.

And then? It suddenly got a little less so.

When my nurse Tammy checked for dilation, she frowned. "I feel ... some sort of hard little nodule," she said. "It may just be that a portion of his head has conformed to the shape of your cervix, but I'd like to get a second opinion." So in came the charge nurse, who fished around up in there briefly before saying, "We need an ultrasound."

I'll never forget the way she said it. Or the knowing look she gave Tammy as the words came out of her mouth. It was one of those moments where there was clearly something amiss, but nobody wanted to say anything. I began to get uneasy. Aw, hell, who am I kidding - "uneasy" isn't even the word for it - you just don't like to hear that there may be something wrong. I'd have probably crapped my pants with fear at that point, except I wasn't wearing any.

The technician came up to my room with her little portable ultrasound machine, and I tried to hold still through some increasingly-heinous contractions while she zoomed the wand around my abdomen. And then we had our answer: Corbin was breech. That "nodule" was a heel. At some point, obviously very recently, he had turned his little self around.

With each contraction, I was feeling more and more pressure. Like he was just about to roundhouse kick his way out of there, Chuck Norris-style. I had started to dilate really quickly, and I was petrified - because having been in labor four times now, I know one thing about myself: once it starts progressing like that, it goes fast. I seriously felt as though I could have reached down and felt a foot hanging out.

Which is why, before I knew it, Curtis was zipping himself up in a paper leisure suit and a shower cap, and I was being wheeled briskly into the cold, sterile operating room for a C-section. Everything was fast-moving and - for lack of a better term - official. Like something from a movie, people in scrubs all over the place, getting prepared, calling out medical terminology left and right. It was kinda surreal.

Anyway, I won't blather on about the details (gross) and the way I felt (freaked the eff out ... oh, and fat), but instead focus on the wonderful end result: our new baby boy.

Smile for the camera, Corbin!

I did say I wanted my last birth experience to be memorable, and oh, was it ever - even if it wasn't at all what I expected. It's kinda cool to say that I've given birth both ways, though. And despite the searing pain in my abdomen (yowza!), I'm definitely digging the fact that I'm not shredded to bits "down South," if y'all know what I'm saying. That's always a plus.

I can't help but wonder if this would have all been different had our induction not been postponed. But, things happen for a reason. And we're fine. And no matter what, at the end of it, I'm still the mommy of FOUR beautiful, healthy boys. So ends my childbearing years.

Now that's surreal.