At exactly 5:30pm, on Saturday December 13th, Caleb Michael Holloway was born!  He weighed in at 7 pounds, 15 ounces and measured 21 inches long. (This makes new Grandmom Holloway the pool winner as she guessed 7lbs 14oz and 21 on the dot!)

What a journey it has been!  We’ve been dying to post pictures and videos but between the hospital stay and the LONG first night and day home, there just hasn’t been a free moment.  Alas, Bri is now fast asleep as is Caleb, so I’ve decided to sneak out and post Caleb’s birth story and some pictures and video for friends and family eager to see the little dude.  Here’s how it went down:  (lots of pictures and video of Caleb at the bottom of this post)

Caleb’s Birth Story

We woke up Saturday morning and gave labor & delivery a call, who said we were set to come in at 6am.  We grabbed the last of our bags and took off for the hospital.  Between registering and getting set up, we finally were in the room by about 6:30 and they got Bri all set up with an IV and started pitocin at this point to stimulate more contractions.  At this time Bri was about 2 1/2 CM and 75% thinned out.

They gradually increased the dosage of pitrocin, and at about 9 our OB broke the water, and that really got the ball rolling.  Bri started getting contraction after contraction with very little time in between, and they increased in strength as well.  The nurse (who was amazing all day) said that Bri could get the epidural whenever she was ready for it, but that it takes about an hour to get it working between the time to put in and the time to work etc.  After a few hours “toughing it out” to try to speed up the delivery, Bri decided to go ahead with the epidural.  It worked like magic and Bri was feeling fine again.  We pretty much played the waiting game at this point, watching 70’s gameshows on the TV and scrabble on our iPhones.

The nurse checked her at about 3:00pm and was “hoping” for her to be 6cm.  She was 8 and completely thinned, so we knew it’d be pretty soon.  We had some fun drama with our OB because he had another patient at Arrowhead hospital 15 minutes away, who was progressing apparently the same amount as Bri, and he was in between hospitals back and forth.  He finally came in and Bri started pushing at about 4:40 and it lasted about 40 minutes.  Needless to say, I feel exceptionally lucky to NOT be a woman.  Yikes!  Bri was awesome however, and before you knew it little Caleb Holloway was born!  What an amazing moment that was.  It was such an intense array of emotions and senses, we both  instantly started crying.  We couldn’t believe how beautiful he was.

He took his first looks at mom and dad and then they took him over to be cleaned up (after his poppa cut the cord of course!).  Poor Bri was pretty beat up from the delivery so they patched her up for a while and swaddled up Caleb for me to hold.  He was super alert and just gulping in the outside world faster than I’m sure we can comprehend.  After about an hour and a half Bri was in better shape and we were able to usher in my parents and sister to see the new guy and give Bri’s parents a call.  What an awesome day!  Altogether Bri was in labor appx 9 hours, which was speedy!

Our Hospital Stay & The Drama

After a couple hours in the L&D room they moved us to our post-pardom suite, where we’d be staying the next 48 hours or so.  Nurses were in and out to check on Bri and Caleb and do the necessary tests etc.  They give the husband this fold-up bed that make cement floors look like Tempur-pedic.  It felt, as I told Bri, like a thousand pointy springs with a piece of tissue on top.  Never the less I wasn’t going to be complaining…I had the easy part today!

We had some drama rather quicly in the recovery room.  The nurse came in to give Caleb a bath and she kind of panicked or something that he wasn’t breathing.  She started rubbing him a lot and holding him up saying “take a breath” etc.  Streams of panic gripped us but he ended up taking a breath.  Needless to say we were paranoid from this point on as they left him alone with us, new parents, who have no clue what little baby sounds and faces are supposed to look like at this point.  Bri began feeding Caleb an hour or so later and he ended up in another spell that seemed like he couldn’t breath.  We called the nurses and they decided to take him to the “Stork’s Nest” where he could be monitored.  We were both happy to have him there as we know we never would have slept a wink and just would have stared at him all day and night worried.  They monitored his O2 stats and heartrate and reported to us that both were kind-of-lowish and they would need to run an EKG on his heart.

We visited him at various times of the night to feed and see him, and then tried to get an hour or two sleep here and there while we waited for the EKG to be interpreted by a cardiologist.  These were tough times for us as we had dealt with his arrythmia during the pregnancy and now were facing possible complications after birth which we had hoped there wouldn’t be.

We visited the next morning and they reported his O2 stats and heart rate had looked great through the night and morning.  This was awesome news.  Our pediatrician came in and said that perhaps he was simply choking/gagging on the amniotic fluid still in his lungs and said he looked great and could be returned to our room.

He did however, have to check the EKG and said it came back as abnormal, specifically a “prolonged QT interval.”  The doctor said that they can be transient, and go away within the first 7 days of being born but if it didn’t then he’d have to be on beta-blockers for the rest of his life.  We waited a while for the doctor to call back and when he did he explained that prolonged QT syndrome is what kids/athletes have suddenly died of when they’re in massive excitement/exercise, because a severe arrhythmia kicks in and sends the heart into a frantic state.  We were quite nervous at this point, simply because of the unknown of it all.  He said he needed a follow-up EKG to confirm it in less than a week and referred us to a cardioligist for it.

We were happy to have Caleb back in the room at this point and worked (hard!) at trying not to become anxious or paranoid about the diagnosis until it was further confirmed etc.  We both had confidence that God’s plan, sick or well, was better than our plan for Caleb.  We had an up and down first night with him, lots of feeding and not much sleep, but it was awesome to have him back in the room.

Caleb had no more weird breathing episodes and so we set out to head home on Monday afternoon.  We just had to wait for the pediatrician to do his final check and release us.  He decided to do another EKG right there in the hospital, just to see if the problem had already gone away - and it had! His second EKG came back “normal” and we were in tears once more.  We’ll be following up with a cardiologist still to confirm, but what great news that was to hear!  We are praising God for his abundant kindness.

To conclude this epic-post, I’ll just say we’ve been very very very very tired as Caleb and us adjust to being at home, but it’s been a tired-ness filled with a lot of joy.  We’ve been very thankful for the thoughts, prayers, sentiments, and love from all the friends and family - we feel so blessed to have the kind of support and help that we do…(special thanks to Grandmom Holloway…without her we never would have been able to catch up on sleep and food!)

Caleb Videos

Caleb Pictures

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