I know this entry is a week late, but this past week has been sort of... busy. Well, that and the rat bastards at my work decided to block my access to Journalscape.

At 9:30am on Saturday morning, February 18th, my wife Jennifer gave birth to our son, Gabriel via C-section at Good Samaritan Hospital. He was 7 pounds, 12 1/2 ounces at birth, 19 1/2 inches long, and as healthy as we could have ever hoped.

I'm sure that Jen will be telling her side of the event on her journal when she logs on again, but here's my take on how everything started, as well as how I discovered a new high in absolute frustration.

On Friday night (the 17th), I left work a few minutes later than normal. Spoke to Jen on the phone, noticed it was raining outside, and we decided that the freeway would be nuts because of the weather and otped instead to take surface streets home. Well, surface streets weren't much better. I got about halfway home when traffic locked up completely, meaning I was crawling along at about 2 miles per hour in the rain, in a bumper to bumper sea of cars, with no real way to get out of it.

And my cell phone rings. Lo and behold, it's Jen.

"I just had a huge contraction."

Okay, cool. Just relax, I tell her, and start timing them if they keep coming... I'm on my way home now, albeit slowly.

Five minutes later, my phone rings again.

"Rob, I need you to get home right now. My water just broke."

In that five minutes, I had moved maybe one block. This, by the way, is where the frustration came in.

By the way, for those of you familiar with the L.A. area, I was on Highland Blvd. just north of Sunset when I got the call. Bad, bad traffic area.

Eventually, I managed to get through it and jumped back on the 101 (but not before pulling a somewhat illegal U-turn on a jammed side street, driving on the sidewalk to avoid a stalled truck, and swearing enough to make Andrew Dice Clay blush) and got home. We packed some last minute items - most of our packing had been done a week or so beforehand, just in case - and headed back to Good Samaritan.

Of course, our baby picks a Friday night to decide he wants to come. A Frdiay night, where we'd have to take one of the major freeways and deal with all the traffic involved. On the first night in months that it's been raining.

We got back to the Hospital around 7:00 at night. Jen ended up deciding on the epidural at 11:30 or so, since the labor pains were beyond excruciating (for her, and for me to watch). At 3:30 in the morning on Saturday, they tried inducing the pregnancy since Gabriel wasn't dropping any farther. Then, around 9:00, since there was still no progress, the doctor recommended a C-section.

And at 9:30 in the morning, our son was born.



I spent the next few nights at the Hospital (joined by Jen's mom on Sunday), learning how to do diaper changes and burpings at 3:00 in the morning. I'm really good at swaddling. :) Wednesday we all came home, and today... well, today, here we are. At home.

One big happy family.