Margaret Grace

Our precious little girl was born on 9/27 at 12:03A. Maggie is 6 pounds and 20 inches long. She has dark curly hair and deep cobalt eyes. She’s beautiful.

We’ve been up almost four days straight, labor lasted 37 hours, Maggie was breach, and Debra had her naturally without medication. It was quite an adventure, but I’m too pooped to tell the whole story now. Maybe tomorrow. We’re off to bed.

Have a look at the complete Flickr photoset.

Update: Debra managed to get a little sleep. Thank goodness. Her water broke at 11A on Thursday. No real contractions at that point so our midwife told us to go about our usual routine. We walked and went to lunch. 2A Friday saw the first real contractions. By 11A Debra was in active labor. With the assistance of the midwives and a nervous husband, she labored at home until 8P. We found out then that Maggie was breach. We decided to push for a while to see how far we could get. Debra wasn’t able to keep anything down for most of the day so she starting pushing on an empty tank.

After an hour we realized she didn’t have enough energy left to push out a breach baby. We decided to head to the hospital. I can’t tell you how nerve racking that drive was with Debra laboring in the passenger seat. We were fully expecting a C-section, given the circumstances. The on-call OB, Dr. Lisa Jaacks, caught us completely off guard. She assessed Debra and said she was all for trying to deliver the baby breach. Debra’s eyes lit up. All along she’d wanted a natural birth with no anesthetic. That gave her the energy she needed to finish the job.

She pushed for another 3.5 hours through over 20 contractions. She was so tired she fell asleep between contractions. The baby started to crown. She was breach so she was coming out butt first. The OB joked that her first act was to moon the world. She definitely got the Baca mooning gene. Finally at three minutes after midnight she came. The room was full of awe-struck nurses. Jaacks is the only OB at that hospital that even considers delivering breach. I doubt many of them had seen one. I can’t describe the feeling I had at that moment. Maggie’s little blue eyes starring at us. We are so thankful.