Fatherhood: It's a funny thing

I became a father a few days ago. That is something kind of crazy to say. It happened like this.

I was really getting excited to go have a few beers and meet up with our friend Erin at a local restaurant to watch the Texas Tech v. Iowa State game. Diana hadn't been feeling all that great but seemed to be OK with taking the trip. We loaded in the car and I drove us down there. The place was packed. Parking was a madhouse and neither of us was too thrilled to fight that madness. She told me that we should just go home because she really wasn't feeling right. I obliged. I mean, what else do you do when your 39 week pregnant wife says she isn't feeling good?

We returned home and finished watching the UT v OU game and Diana stressed that she felt that the pain she was having was coming pretty frequently. We got my phone out and started timing what we later realized to be contractions. She had had some false pains a few weeks ago and they went away when she walked so we decided to stroll up and down the block to see if they would go away. The timing was fairly consistent and after about half an hour of 5 to 7 minutes spaces between contractions, we decided this might be a real thing we should really go get the car packed up.

I have to say I remained incredibly calm. I honestly thought it would be a false alarm. I was getting hungry and our route to the hospital is right by a Chick-fil-A so I weighed the options and asked, "Would it be entirely insensitive of me to ask if I could stop for dinner?" Diana let me and it turned out to be a good thing I did.

We got to the hospital and confirmed that we were in fact in labor and took our place in a room to wait out the inevitable. It was an exhausting night but I stepped up. I will go into some of the more humorous details in a later post but I was up the entire night and into the morning with Diana and after 3 hours of pushing it was determined that the baby would not come out by mere pushing alone. A C-section was in order.

I was nervous for the first time. We had been up all night and now at 8 A.M. we were being wheeled in to an operating room. My baby girl was born at 8:51 A.M. and I am now a father. Yep, still sounds crazy.

That is all,

Newt