The Birth of Zyla Virginia Drake

Quoting John Prine for many months now had been a fun experience - seems like the little woman is getting bigger every day - but the most important day was steadily approaching. I was relieved when school ended on Friday, but less excited when a huge windstorm and a fire made the weekend a little less fun. We were relieved to see that the road was still open, but the large plume of smoke and the winds ripping away all weekend made us wonder if it would continue to be open. As the rain came down, Jacqueline awoke at 3:30am for one of her many bathroom breaks. She then said to me, I think my water broke. I did not believe her until the flood actually began. Then I was suddenly going a mile a minute gathering things together for our trip to the hospital. I threw as much as I could into a bag and we both made the trip to the hospital. It was pouring down rain as we hit Norwood Hill. As we drove through San Miguel Canyon, we could see the fire up on the cliff above us. 

This little girl was determined, so it did not matter to her that even though it was May 24th it was snowing on Dallas Divide, rather hard also. As we went down the pass to Ridgway, my speed increased and I flew through Ridgway. I was going much faster than the speed limit at times, not wanting to be the one to deliver the baby. I pulled into the hospital at a little after 5 am, happy to hand my wife off to the medical professionals. They got her all set up in a nice spacious room. Her contractions were not bad at first, but by 8am, they were getting worse. She tried many different techniques like walking around, sitting on a birthing ball, getting in the bath, deep breathing, etc... but soon the pain was so intense. 

She asked me what she should do and I told her that she could do whatever she needed, meaning that she was wanting some pain medicine. She tried some pain medicine that wore off after thirty minutes and finally she got an epidural. I was happy to see her more relaxed and in less pain as it is hard to watch her in pain without being able to do anything about it. After the epidural, though, you could see that our little baby was wanting to come. At 2:30 pm, Jacqueline began pushing. You could tell that this was a painful process even with the drugs. The amazing thing about it was that the doctor did not show up until less than half an hour from when the baby was born. 

All I could do was encourage Jacqueline by telling her that she could do it and how exciting it was to see our little baby's head coming out. Eventually she got enough of a push and the doctor was able to pull this little head out and the rest came sliding with her. She was born at 3:44 on 5/24, which I thought was cool because I was born at 5:44 on 3/24. The nurses immediately took her away and Dad immediately grabbed his camera to get the first photos of his daughter. She did not give one of those big cries when she came out, but was making little cries. She had been in the birth canal for a while, but it did make her cry when the nurse checking her out whacked her in the head with her stethoscope. 

They checked her out and then took her back to her mommy, so that she got to hold her for the first time. We already loved her more than anything and you could tell by the way her mom was looking at her. Those first few minutes with your baby are so special, but soon it was time to do the learning. Jacqueline had to feed little Zyla Virginia Drake, which we finally had the courage to name her. We both wanted to see her first and we decided it fit. We knew that feeding was going to be a challenge as we could tell that Zyla was going to be stubborn about it at times. They gave us a few minutes with her, but you could tell they had an agenda as they moved us into another room within the hour. This room had a big chair for me to sleep in and a television. Jacqueline and I slept very little that night, waking with every noise that Zyla made hoping that every time that she closed her eyes that she would continue breathing. Zyla was also feeding very frequently and we had no idea that she was hungry every time she cried, but we would soon learn that we had an awesome baby that seemed to only cry when she was hungry. 

We ended up spending a whole other day in the hospital learning how to be parents. In the two nights that we slept at the hospital, I think we both got less than 5 hours total of sleep. So when the day came to take Zyla home, we were nervous about the hour and a half drive back to Norwood just from shear exhaustion. We got her situated in her car seat and she looked so amazingly cute and tiny. We could not believe how tiny she was, especially since the doctors were telling us for so long just how big she was. She did not like getting in the car seat, but once she was in she was zonked out. I was such a proud papa carrying her from the hospital to the Xterra. As we drove home, we worried about her because we could not see her since she was facing the seat. The amazing part was that she just slept the whole time. We even tried to feed her once considering that she was feeding every hour and a half rather regularly. She did not want it though and we were able to step foot in our house with our baby for the first time and share our life with her. She is so precious and we were just so excited to spend the summer and the future with little lovely Zyla.