Shelley's lying on the bed here in the delivery room doing her best to hold down the periodic waves of pain washing over her every couple of minutes. It's hard to watch that, especially when partly responsible for it.

Jenn's following the paper chart scroll out of the fetal monitoring machine to see how hard and long each contraction is compared to the others. Mom's down the hall calling my sister in Idaho to pass along the non-news so far. Kenny will come up to hang in the waiting room when we're closer.

The nurse just came in to tell Shelley to roll on her side, which they prefer her to lie on, although Shelley prefers to be supine. She's also very hungry at this point, but they won't let her eat anything more than ice cubes. She's on a pair of drips, one for inducing medicine and one for nutrition.

Watching videos didn't last long. Even Firefly didn't work too well – too much pain and distraction to enjoy them. Hearing and seeing the baby's heartbeat on the machine is pretty cool, I must say, since I never got to hear it during a doctor visit.

They've just put an oxygen mast on her, to drop the baby's heart rate some. It seems we still have a ways to go on this endeavor, probably at least several more hours of the same for us, but worsening pain for Shelley.




Near the beginning of the adventure.