I actually have known for some time the baby was going to be a boy, but I thought I would hold out before alerting blogger-space.
It was a tough couple of days. I guess it started on Thursday night. I was happily sleeping away, and woke up and noticed Ritsy was no longer in the bed. I went downstairs and saw that she was lying in discomfort and couldn't sleep. But there was still no contractions. At that time I was really worried about the baby- but I decided to wait a bit and see how things progress.
I went back to bed and the next morning Ritsy was still in discomfort and was going to call the midwife to see what she thought. I went off to work expecting to maybe not finish my work day. I had a day of work where I left home at about 7 in the morning and wouldn't return until 9:30 at night because of the locations of the classes. She started to have contractions but they were too far between. She went to the clinic a few times and sent back home. I made it through my day of work without "the call".
I arrived at home at about 9:30 and she was sitting in discomfort. Her contractions were still about 8 minutes apart. When they came down to 5 minutes apart (around 11:30 pm) we called her friend Kurami that was going to help with the delivery (she is a nurse with her midwife licence). She came over and helped out with the contraction pain. They told me maybe in an hour they would go to the clinic and I could sleep for a bit. I woke up 3 hours later and thought maybe they had forgotten about me. They hadn't - still waiting.
I stayed up with them through the morning, when the contractions got close together and more painful, we called the clinic and were told to come in at 7. The contractions continued for some time but were still pretty far apart. Man, those contractions look painful, I remember thinking and Ritsy turned to me and said it's going to get more painful. I gained a lot of respect for every woman that has given birth naturally-- it's like watching someone get tortured.
Finally around 1pm they went into the delivery room and asked me to wait outside the room. About an hour later, they called me and I could see the little bugger was crowning. I don't know if I was shocked or in awe at the sight of the baby coming out. It was something I really thought I couldn't watch, but a part of me told me that I had to. I don't regret it, I was able to see them cut the umbilical cord and clear out his mouth, and he took his first breath and started crying.
His name will eventually be Ken Trevor Lowrey-Takasugi. For now it's Ken Takasugi-I'll get into the whole name fiasco in another post. He weighed 4.1 kgs and was healthy. Official Time of birth was November 24th at 2:02 pm. Welcome little guy.
Naturally, when Ritsy first saw him she was crying tears of joy and probably partly tears of relief. I was still in a dazed shock/awe but was pretty surprisingly emotional. I guess it all clicks when you see the little guy, eh?
Well, we were told to go home after that (Ritsy's sisters and Nephew showed up and
hung around for it), looked like everything was good. I was even thinking about hooking up with Chris and Peter for a beer after a nap.
But an hour later while sleeping, both my cell phone and home phone rang at the same time. I picked up the home phone and Ritsuko's sister was on the line and told me that we were going to the hospital (Ritsy was staying in a midwife clinic, so they have no medical facility) because Ritsy's condition was not good. That conversation was stressful, because I didn't understand at first and then when I did figure out, I was worried. I had to wait through the drive there and about 30 minutes before I saw Kurami again (who works at this hospital usually) and she gave me the okay sign- everything was okay. Thank god for Kurami- she was just amazing- she stayed up all night, worked the birth and hopped to the hospital as soon as Ritsy went. We definitely want to do something to show our appreciation to her!
Yep Ritsy is okay now, she suffered a pretty big laceration while passing that big boy- so needed to get sutured up at the hospital. She needs to stay at the hospital a few days while recovering and then she can rejoin Ken at the midwife clinic.
What an emotional roller coaster of a day! In the end everyone is okay but separate, that will all change soon enough!
This picture just worked better in Black/White
But we decided to lug little Ken out to Gansuiji temple on the 2nd. As I believe I mentioned, the temple is very popular for praying for babies, so it was a good fit. The other key point being that Gansuiji is so close to our home. Ken looked quite amused up to this point.
It was a pretty nasty cold day though, so we had to hurry along to do our business. At the front gate, they had their traditional New Years decorations out.
We went to the main shrine and said our Pleases and Thank yous. The shrine was decorated by a number of very colorful flags (not sure what the relevance is) and a thousand paper cranes as shown in the next picture.
Finally we had to hurry back to the car as Ken was not too happy about the cold weather, and I can't say that I blame him. It was pretty nasty.
