It's a Girl!

The last few days of uncertainty and fear have been very tender, beautiful, and filled with a peace that is hard to describe. We have been overwhelmed with an outpouring of emails, texts, and voicemails wishing us and our beautiful baby well. Those prayers have an impact so please keep them from coming.

As I am not able to call everyone back, I thought that many of you would like me to fill in the gaps regarding the last few days, and would like an update on Abigail’s condition. Some of the information and detail below may not be of interest to some of you, so I have labeled the text below with headings. I apologize for its length, as this sort of morphed into a journal entry of the first few days of Abigail’s life. Feel free to “cherry-pick” the information that you want to digest by skimming the headings first, and skipping to a section that interests you.

The Birth

Abigail Rose (there’s a story behind the name which will come later) was born at 2:08 p.m. on Monday, October 19, 2009 at Timpanogos Regional Medical Center in Orem. Somewhat ironically, this was without questions Lisa’s most pleasant and smooth delivery, thanks in large part to the surprise assistance of Kathryn (Hardy) Seamons, a close family friend who also happens to be a member of the practice of Nurse Midwives that worked with Lisa throughout her pregnancy. Kathryn just happened to be on call the day that we decided to induce Lisa (Lisa has only gone in to labor once in five tries without the aid of Pitocin, the drug that causes the Uterus to contract) and her cheery disposition was the perfect remedy to what is always an earnest affair. We arrived at the hospital at about 6:30, but we didn’t start the inducement till about 9:00. Fortunately, Lisa began contracting naturally an hour before she was given Pitocin, and she required relatively little Pitocin to set and carry the labor in motion.

By 2:30, I was texting friends various shouts of joy and exclamations of how great this experience was. As I have felt with the birth of each of my children, I was overcome Monday afternoon with a sense of wonder and awe, and a deep appreciation for the workings of God, who at times like this I think of as the greatest scientist in the universe. Abigail was seemingly physically perfect. During the pregnancy, I wondered in passing if it were possible to have yet another startlingly attractive girl—frankly, I could care less how she looks, but I didn’t want her to grow up with the pressure of having three very physically beautiful sisters and not be equally as attractive herself. Well, that concern was quickly erased, as we could immediately see that nature had been kind to this one, and that Abigail was another fine example of how well the Stoddard and Reeves genes mix.