Someone else’s baby

Chuck Wendig is a naughty, funny, dirty man. He writes very well (at about an MA standard).

On Friday, his son was born. He blogged about it here. This entry is PG.

Transmissions from baby-town

“I think something is happening,” my wife says.

She says this to wake me. At 1:30 in the morning.

The lights go on. Fan, off.

I don’t know what’s happening. Something. That’s what she said. Something is happening. Could be anything, I think. Leaky roof. UFO on our front lawn. Goblin invasion. Everything and anything.

“I think my water broke,” she says.

Oh. Oh.

She asserts that she has not peed herself. Which is always good news in any situation. I do this spot-check periodically in my day-to-day. “Did I pee myself? Mmm. Nope. Score!”

We call the doctor. They say to keep an eye on it. We keep an eye on it. The water, it keeps on coming.

Along with it: the mucus plug. Which has another name: “the bloody show.”

We have no idea how apropos that will be.

* * *

The wife, she puts on makeup before we go. I pack some bags, get stuff together: camera, chargers, reading material. Just in case, we think. We know this is not real. This is not really the something that’s happening. It’s two weeks early. And besides, conventional wisdom says: new moms have kids late. Everybody’s told us that. She just saw the Obi-Gyn Kenobi the day before and, in his words, “There’s no way this baby is coming early.” Except he must have — oh, just for a goof — put a small thermal detonator against her internal membranes, a detonator that went pop around midnight, because why else would her water have broken?

Thermal detonator, shmermal shmetonator. Baby’s not coming today.

We go to the hospital at 5:00 AM knowing full well that they’re going to send us home.

* * *

They do not send us home.

In fact, they inform us quite frankly: we’re having this baby sometime in the next 24 hours.

*blink, blink*

We’re in a little room. So small that the nurse is entering our information into a laptop, but her chair is a medical waste bin. Doctors and residents come in and out. The one doctor says, she’s not that dilated. And she’s not even having contractions. They say, “we’re going to get you started on pitocin.” We say, hold up. We’ve heard about that. If we need it, we want it, but we’re not sure we need it yet. We don’t want to get on the drug train, not so fast.

Read the rest here.