Baby Jack!!

Our sweet little boy is finally here!!

Here is the email Ethan sent out after Jack was born:

Baby Jack was born February 8 2011 at 11:56 pm. He is 22 inches long and weighing in at 7 lbs 13 oz. He has beautiful red hair like his mom (although it is a bit darker) and has deep blue eyes like his dad. Luckily he has his mom’s nose. If he had a massive nose like his father he would be doomed for life. He has a lot of hair right now, enough in the back to make it look like he has a little mullet (a true Alabama baby!). He is doing well. He is nursing fine; mom and baby have figured things out and are working on a good routine. His and mommies vitals are stable. He had a few minor complications at birth (fluid in his lungs, common with a c-section) but the doctors and nurses treated him within the first few minutes so he was able to spend the rest of the night with his new family.

The doctor decided to induce Kelli Monday night because they were worried that the baby was too large. When we arrived at the hospital at 8 PM they hooked her up to the monitors. The nurses noticed Kelli was contracting regularly, every 2 minutes. However, Kelli didn’t feel any of these contractions. So, they began the induction around 10 pm. They gave Kelli 3 rounds of medicine throughout the night to get her labor started and progressing. When she entered the hospital she was dilated to a 1. Tuesday morning the nurse came in to check on Kelli’s progress after what we had hoped had been a productive night. She was still not feeling any contractions and much to our dismay she was only dilated to a 1.75. At 8 o’clock the doctor came in to break her water. After he left Kelli immediately began to feel the contractions. Things progressed extremely slowly from this point on. By 1 o’clock she was only dilated to a 2. Kelli’s contractions were so bad at this point however, and only about 30 seconds apart, they decided to give her the epidural. They hoped that if they could get her body to relax, things could progress quicker. She was much happier after the epidural, in fact we all were) J 7 o’clock rolls around and she had only dilated to a 3.5. The doctor decided if adequate change had not occurred by 9 o’clock then they were going to perform a C-section. This was because they thought he was too big to make it into the birth canal (after all she had been in labor for 24 hours at this point). We all had come to the conclusion she was going to have a C-section and had placed bets with each other as to how long after 9 o’clock Jack was going to be born. The nurse comes in and to our utter shock Kelli had dilated to an 8. So the doctor’s decided to see if the baby would move down naturally. He wouldn’t budge, so after an hour of pushing Kelli went in for a C-section. Kelli had a C-section because the baby was too large to come the normal way. She is exhausted after being in labor for 26 hours. She is fine, felt very nauseous all day Tuesday, but today (Wednesday) she is feeling much better. She even took a walk around the nurses’ station several times tonight. We should be out of the hospital by Friday.

Kelli’s mom came up to help out and it is good that she did because….well I am a Bennett and what do Bennett’s do in hospitals….well we spend a lot of time looking at the ceiling from the floor! Our doctor was fabulous, his name is Dr. Evans. If the name sounds familiar it is the same doctor that delivered the triplets so many years ago! He still remembers them and talks about them a lot. He kept making the joke that the c-section looks a lot different in the books he had read the night before. All is well. We miss you. And the words of Dr. Evans, “Onward and Upward.”