It's a BOY!!!

Gage William Engelbrecht has joined our family at 10:41am Sunday January 4th, 2009. Heidi and I are so proud. It looks like he might be our future basketball player coming in at 8 lbs 13 oz and 22 inches long. He is such a bundle of joy (at least right now when he is sleeping more than crying :-).

It was a long Saturday night and Sunday. Heidi started having some sporadic contractions Saturday morning. They became regular, every 12 minutes, around 4pm. By 5pm they were getting closer so Heidi called First Nurse to see if they thought it was real contractions. They thought we should go ahead and come into the hospital. Almost immediately after getting off the phone the contractions were only 5 minutes apart. So we scrambled to finish packing and head out into the ice storm and ice covered roads. On the way to the hospital it dawned on me that I was starving and I wouldn't have much of a chance to eat when we got there, so my wonderful wife allowed me to go through Burger King drive through to get some food. She is so great! We did arrive safe at about 6pm, just a little sliding on the way.

They put us into a "holding" room and hooked Heidi up to see if it was the real deal and or if we should go home for awhile. By this time her contractions were only 1-2 minutes apart but we found out that she was only 2cm dilated (a LONG way from 10). They went ahead and checked us in at 7pm but we knew we were in for a long night. Heidi was a trooper through the contractions even though they remained around 1-3 minutes apart for several hours. By 11pm she was still at 2cm so she decided to get an epidural.

She finally received the epidural by midnight to give her some relief of the continuous contractions. She was still at 2 cm so they decided to break her water and start giving some potosin to help her start dilating. By 1am Heidi was finally starting to nod off and get some rest and I was finally able to raid the vending machines to get some food again. We were fortunate enough to get the only remodeled room that includes a couch that somewhat fits me so I was able to get some shut eye as well. We got 20 min here, 25 min there of sleep for several hours.

At 6:55 am Heidi was finally dilated to 10cm but the doctor wanted the baby to drop some more before she started pushing. At 8am Heidi started pushing. Every 2-3 minutes until 9:55 she pushed. She was exhausted (so was I but what can I say when I wasn't the one trying to get a 9 lb baby out!). The doctor decided to let her rest for 10 minutes and she quickly fell asleep. At 10:05 she started pushing again. The doctor and nurse were out of the room at the time so I ended up being the only coach! When the doctor came back he said that at hour 3 of pushing (by 11am) if she wasn't progressing we would have to start looking at a C-Section.

Talk about motivation along with a little rest! With the words C-Section, Heidi started pushing extra hard and boy did her hard work pay off. At 10:41 we became proud new parents.

Wow, God is so good and amazing. What an amazing, intelligent design of a child. What an amazing gift from him. Praise and glory go to him.