It's a boy!

As I am sure most everyone has heard by now, it's a boy! His name is Owen Sherman Casanova and he was born Wednesday, March 9th at 2:35 pm weighing in at 8 pounds, 15 ounces and 20.5 inches in length. For those comparing notes, that's 1.5 pounds heavier and .5 inches longer than Elsie, and he was born 2 weeks earlier.

We dropped Elsie off early Wednesday morning with her grandma and grandpa Cox in order to be at the hospital by 7:00. My stomach was in knots - full of anxiety and a ball of nervous energy. Once we checked in and got settled, that subsided. They started the induction at 8:00 and by 11:00 I had an epidural and was feeling no pain. Around 1:00, I was 5 cm dilated and by 2:00 it was time to call the doctor back to the hospital to come deliver. It took pushing though 6 contractions for little Owen to arrive.

Side note - it's interesting, here you are, about to give birth up in the "pushing position"... You only push when there is a contraction and they are about 2 or so minutes apart. So you do your three pushes for a contraction and then there is this awkward down time of about 90 seconds where the doctors and nurses are just making small talk until the next contraction comes around. For some reason I found it quite funny. Back to the story.

Owen arrived at 2:35 pm, trying to cry on his way out. They quickly put him on my tummy to clean him off and it was very soon apparent that we were the proud mommy and daddy of a little boy. Up until the past few weeks, I was pretty sure that we'd be having another little girl. That all changed about the time our OB started talking about how big this baby was going to be - once we heard that, I began to seriously doubt myself.

Once he was out, they did all the normal tests and Owen seemed to be doing well, scoring 8 and 9 on his Apgar. Shortly after that though, the NICU nurse noticed that he was doing a lot of grunting and that his breathing was very rapid, up to 100 breaths per minute. Apparently when he tried to cry on the way out, he swallowed some fluid and while the nurses were able to suck it out of his stomach, they weren't able to do much for the fluid that go into his lungs. They called in another NICU doctor and over the next hour they continued to work on him, trying to get his breathing stabilized. They used a CPAP machine to help provide a little pressure on his lungs and to establish a better breathing rhythm for him. It was the longest hour and every thought imaginable was going through my head. After they got him stable, they let us hold him for a few minutes and we were able to introduce him to his big sister Elsie. After that, he went to the NICU nursery for a few hours so that they could monitor him and his breathing. Luckily he was in good enough shape and his oxygen levels were adequate enough that Ryan was able to take the grandparents in one at a time to say hi. At 7:00 that evening, he was doing MUCH better and we were able to put him in our room with us. It was certainly an unexpected speed bump, but all in all, we are very blessed to have a healthy and happy new little boy.

We came home on Friday morning and it's so nice to have our whole family back under one roof. We're working on settling in and getting everyone back on some sort of routine. Elsie's handling things pretty well considering all the things that have changed in her life over the past 4 days. She's vocalizing her opinions to Ryan and I a bit more, "No" is a word that has been thrown around a lot the past few days. Not sure if that's a sibling thing or the fact that she's just that age where she's learning to voice her thoughts on things. That said, she's always quick to bring Owen his toys and to try and entertain him. Although most times she says, "O-den's tired, he needs a nap" because he's sleeping all the time.

And now for pictures...

Father and son.

Cheering on the Tigers

Trying to burp.

Proud papa.

Our family.

Daddy and Grandpa Cox visiting in the NICU.

All ready to go home.

Dressed to kill.

Have a good weekend,

The Casanovas