So now with mommy resting after a long, long night of laboring it falls to daddy to take the reins of the Panning family blog.
I’m happy to announce that our son, Henry Philip, was born this morning at 9:47 AM weighing in at 7 lb 5 oz.
He’s a beautifully blond little boy with skin so soft that my grown-up man-fingers can’t even feel him.
He’s amazing.
Henry is a great, strong sort of name and it also happens to be my middle name. I like it a lot, but I haven’t gotten to use it as much as I’d like to. Now I’ll get to use it as much as I please. Moreover, we get to have a “Hank the Tank” of our own! Our choice may or may not also have had something to do with its affiliation with Henry Jones, Jr., Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. and St. Henry, Duke of Bavaria and Holy Roman Emperor (see below).
He is also named Philip, after Barbara’s father, a remarkable man who has given over every facet of his life to the Lord. I’m hard pressed to think of a man I respect more. I settled on the name at Mass on April 20. The Gospel reading that day is from John 14, just after Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and is betrayed by Judas. He tells the disciples that He is going soon to prepare a place for them in His Father’s house, but that they also know the way. This confuses Thomas, who figures that he couldn’t possibly know the way since he doesn’t know where Jesus is going in the first place. Jesus responds, “ I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Then Philip responds in a way that cuts right to the core of Jesus’ mission. Philip said to him, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” What a great thing to ask of our Lord! Jesus came precisely to reveal the Father and when you ask Him to do something that He loves to do, the Lord of Hosts doesn’t disappoint. I think there is hardly a better prayer a new daddy could pray than a prayer that his son would know the Father. Philip is a good name.
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So how did we get here? Barb had been feeling contractions sporadically for at least a couple of weeks and on occasion they were frequent enough to make us think that it could be time, but they always dissipated over the course of a couple of hours. In the baby class that we went to they told us that the rule of thumb is 5-1-1… Contractions 5 minutes apart, 1 minute in duration, lasting for at least an hour. Barbara knows all of this stuff cold, so she’d been somewhat cautious in her excitement whenever the contractions intensified. I, on the other hand, know the 5-1-1 rule… it’s the ONLY thing I know, so when she started contracting fewer than five minutes apart and at more than a minute apiece for two hours last night I made the call. The other thing they said at baby class was that first-timers usually show up 14 hours before the baby is born, which I conveniently forgot. We were encouraged by the fact that she was already at 3cm last Friday. Naturally I convinced her that if we didn’t get a move-on we’d be meeting Elmo on the apartment carpet. Rookie mistake. Little did we know that we had 14 more hours before Elmo would show up… and even that eventually required a little help.
We left the apartment at 9:00, got to the hospital around 9:30. Dr. Cvetkovich, who was also Barbara’s doctor in Michigan, checked her out and told us she could stay. By 10 PM we were walking the hallways and expecting Elmo to pop out at any time. Around 11:30 PM Barbara had not made a whole lot of progress… 3-4cm and 75% effaced with contractions not changing, so they broke her water and let us wait to see what would happen. Barbara‘s contractions became more intense and more painful a bit more quickly than she had anticipated. By 4 AM (or was it 6AM?) she had become 90 percent effaced but still only 4cm. They wanted to make her contractions more effective so they gave her pitocin, followed by an IV, an epidural for the pain and all sorts of other tubes going all over the place. It’s crazy how much the scene changes when you add all of these other things to the birth plan. All of a sudden Barbara was immobile, but at the same time her contractions were more effective and she could even doze a little bit. We both napped for a while. At 7 AM the pitocin started and by 9 AM she had dialated from 4cm to 10 cm. Just amazing. She pushed for about 25 minutes without much pain at all and out popped Henry Philip Panning. He was purple. It was cute. I cut the cord and he got to meet his mommy. Then they whisked him to a baby table (very scientific way to describe it, I know) and did all of the necessary things that doctors do with purple babies to make them pink like the rest of us. The rest of the day has basically consisted of cleaning up mommy and baby and taking vitals over and over and over. Mommy’s resting and I’m now working on informing the world.
I guess they want to keep her for a couple nights but we’d rather go home tomorrow. I’m looking forward to getting back to the comforts of home, because all of this hospital stuff is awkward for me. I’ll at least be taking the rest of this week off, but I’m also planning on doing as much work as possible from home over the next couple of weeks, since my company doesn’t give parental leave to employees of fewer than 6 months and we’d rather use my vacation time to bring baby home to Michigan for Baptism.
Barbara is going to have a blast being a mommy. I’m going to have a blast being a daddy. Family is an exciting adventure already.
