Hello PCMech readers. The PCMech family just got one member larger. Yesterday, my wife and I brought Elyana Risley into the world.

A few particulars for the curious…

My wife went into actual labor Sunday evening at around 9:00 PM. She had experienced various cramps a few times in the days prior, but each time it went away. This time it was different. It didn’t go away and the pain was much more. We didn’t want to go to the hospital only to be turned away, so we tried to play it cautious. After talking to the doctor by phone, we elected to stay home and see what happened.

My wife woke me up at about midnight Monday morning. She said we needed to go. We got to the hospital at around 12:30-1:00 AM. Triage evaluated her and said she had dilated to almost 5 centimeters. By this time, we knew we were here until it was over.

We went into the delivery room and they started to get Malika hooked up for labor. After a couple hours, she elected to get an epidural. Those things work so well. In fact, Malika was able to catch some sleep while she was in labor, whereas I, as the man, was stuck on this crappy chair that was simply too uncomfortable to allow any sleep.

After several hours, she hadn’t progressed much more. So, they increased the pitosin dosage and broke her water manually. After about 2 hours longer, she had fully dilated. Time for active labor. It was a very interesting and surreal experience being in the room and participating in a live birth. My wife was such a troop. It is just exhausting work. She did such a fantastic job. Elyana was born at 10:38 AM Monday morning.

As you can imagine, we haven’t exactly gotten much sleep ever since. I’ve managed to get 4-5 hours sleep since then. Surprisingly, we’re both doing fine, though. We’re getting the hang of dealing with the baby, but of course hospital staff is helping.

As I write this, I am sitting in our recovery room. Elyana is in a tiny crib right next to me. We are going home tomorrow and then we will be on our own figuring it out. I expect we’ll be just fine, but not without a few confusions on the way. Last night we were both rather confused on how to get Elyana to stop crying. But, we found the right key combination. If only babies had a CTRL-ALT-DEL (Force Quit for you Mac lovers).

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