Introducing… Eve Marie Dalcher

The story begins on Tuesday night, when Tasha and I heeded the advice of many friends and family members to go and walk in order to encourage the baby to arrive.  I drove Tasha’s car to the mall, the first time I had driven a manual among other cars and traffic.  I still killed the engine often, but I got the job done.  Little did I know this experience would be immediately valuable to me later on in the evening.

I went home, where we spent the evening relaxing.  I had a bit of work to do on a side project, unfortunately that stretched out far into the night because Ed and I had some exciting new ideas to throw around.  I ultimately headed up to bed around 2 am, and right after I crawled under the sheets Tasha called me from the bathroom.  She wasn’t sure if her water broke or not, but she did notice (sorry for being graphic here) some green coloration that was odd and felt “leaky”.  We called the doctor’s office and they told us to head in to labor and delivery so they could check it out, and that green staining is evidence that the baby might be in distress and had pooped a little. (Probably because of my poor driving.)

And so it began.  We got to the triage room where they confirmed that yes, her water had broke and yes, that was merconium (poop) in the water.  So we would be at the hospital from here on out.  After about two hours of walking the halls (recommended to get labor going) Tasha was only 1 cm dilated at 30% effacement.  We did more walking which didn’t improve the situation by much.  They wanted to start Tasha on pitocin to begin labor progressing, so we started at a dose of 3 (I think it’s like ml per hour or something).  That got some stronger contractions, about 5-6 minutes apart.  The doctors wanted to gradually increase the pitocin to ensure that the medication was going to result in progress, so after a brief pause to allow Tasha to tolerate the pain a bit we were heading up the pitocin chain regularly.  We got up to 3 cm after about 8 hours of labor.

Before we knew it, five more hours had gone by and Tasha was having strong contractions right on top of one another (maximum of 45 seconds between them).  This was wearing her out fast, and the level of stress that she was under was alarming to me.  I was acting as a husband-coach, helping her to relax and try different laboring positions.  She was listening to my directions, but I could tell this was taking more of a toll on her.  The hardest part for me was to have to watch her go through so much pain for so little progress.  There were a few times when she told me that she didn’t know if she could do this and that she wanted to go home that I almost lost it myself, but I figured out how to be strong for her and held it together.  The doctor came in to check her dilation, and she hadn’t progressed.  Tasha had a pretty ugly cry about this, and we both agreed that she maintain this level of contractions for the amount of time that would be required to get her to 10 cm at this rate.

So after much discussion, we agreed that an epidural would be the best choice.  They administered the medicine quickly, and before long Tasha was pain-free.  We let this work for about an hour and the doctor checked again and discovered no further progress.  We elected to wait a few more hours to allow her to relax after the medicine took effect, and decided if no further progress was made then we would go for a c-section.  After the next doctor check the writing was on the wall: it was c-section time.

They prepped Tasha for surgery while they gave me a set of scrubs to change into.  The doctors noticed the music that we had playing in the background, and asked if we wanted to bring it into the operating room with us.  That was nice of them to have something to distract us from the intimidating operating room.  They wheeled Tasha in for further prep while I waited nervously outside for the 15 minutes it took.  I walked in, put on Andy McKee’s “Art of Motion” at Tasha’s request and inside of 10 minutes later, our darling daughter Eve was born.  The moment when we got to see her for the first time was incredible.  Tasha and I were bawling like crazy.

I got to go with her to get cleaned off, measured, bathed, and monitored while they patched Tasha back together. She weighed in at 7 lbs 2 oz, 19 inches long with blonde hair and blue/grey eyes.  They tell us the eyes may change color further down the road.  The thing that amazes me about this baby is how calm she is.  They bathed her, not a peep.  She fussed a little at the cold thermometer to take her temperature, but aside from that she has been really quiet.  Shortly after we got back to the room, my parents arrived from Illinois and we had a great time watching them get to know her.

My daughter is precious.  My wife is one of the strongest women I know (several doctors and nurses agreed with this after watching her performance).  I am proud to be a Dad, proud to be a husband and love both Tasha and Eve like crazy.  Tomorrow I will tell you all the story of how we arrived on the name!