10 years ago

I am 7 1/2 month along. Tonight, I will be feeling huge and wondering how much larger could I possibly get. After packing a lunch for my sweet husband before he leaves for work, I will chatter with a brother-in-law who 'just so happens' to have a nasty cold. While piecing together a baby blanket that I'm working on there is a sudden gush of liquid which surprises me, it is warm and smells familiar. It dawns on me that my water had just broken.

The Nyquil induced fogginess of my B-I-L is totally blasted away after mentioning that;
1. My waters have broken.
2. It is a blizzard out.
3. I can't contact John.

He stumbles to the his car which doesn't start, runs ( still blizzard conditions) to his grandparents and borrows their truck only making it to the end of our driveway, with towel between my legs and winds yanking on my billowing dress we slip and slide our way to the truck. Totally youtube worthy, lemme tell you.

We inch towards Canton, nearly missing a Stop sign and driving off the road, make it to the mill and John covered in feed dust and unable to hear the phone with ear plugs in. We all make it to the Canton Hospital where they check me in and put me on a IV drip of something awful to try and stop the contractions, to no avail. There is talk of transferring to Syracuse and due to the bad weather it is decided, Watertown is the best they can do. Through all of this, in my naivete, my thought was; 'wow, this is easy!'. The contractions were easy, the hospital staff was wonderful and I can vividly remember calling my mom and telling her that this whole labor stuff seemed pretty easy, whereupon she assured me that it might get a bit harder before we were done.

Now, I watched all of my brothers come into this world. Mom had three at home, one in the hospital just to see what it was like and the last at home. Labor started slowly but quickly sped up and by the time the midwife arrived my seventeen year old self was getting scared that I would be 'catching the baby'. I remember now why the broken water smelled familiar.

We labored, for a while. Somehow my eyes latched upon Feb. 2nd as being Groundhogs day and determined I was NOT having a baby born then. The lovely lady Dr., her name escapes me, was wonderful. She came in and checked me and gave the go ahead to push, this was missed by almost everyone ( including me), except my mother. Who, after about an hour of her daughter being told to blow through the urge to push was at her wits end. The nurse again encouraged me to blow through the next contraction and my mother flipped. Not a crazy, all out flip but one of the highlights of when I look back. The ironic thing is, that once the Dr. and nurses were all on the same page, I was given the go ahead and started to push. 'Ouch. I'll just blow through, thank you very much.' Thanks be to God for a husband who had been up for many, many hours looking me in the eye and saying, "you are almost done, you can do this". We did too, Eathon came to us at a little after 10pm, almost exactly 24 hours after this whole story started. Our scientist, doctor, inventor, dreamer and serious boy was born.

For two weeks he stayed in Watertown while I cried for wanting him in my arms. His lungs were in need of just a bit more time and we were SO blessed with some wonderful nurses who cared for him. As we left the hospital I looked around, waiting for the manual they were going to give us. Or, better yet the nurse who was going to come along and help us at home. This was the first time I was scared.

It continues to happen, regularly. What do we do about this, or that? To raise a child? into a man? 'Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.'Proverbs - Chapter 22:6 What happens when I'm still in training, when we feel ill prepared to teach? Our heavenly and gracious Lord teaches us. The only thing that has happened over the last 10 years is we learn to cling closer to this truth, to Him. That in ourselves, in our naivete, life is not easy. But, with Him, all is possible.