The run-down

For those of you who haven't heard these stories yet, this is the run-down of how our beautiful daughter came into the world.

Thurs 6/5 9 pm - Kim and I sit down to watch a movie (MY KID COULD PAINT THAT). Neither of us slept well the night before so we figured we'd watch the movie and go to sleep early.

10 pm - We give up on the movie, not because it was bad, but because we were tired. We settle in to go to sleep.

10:30 pm - Apparently the old saying "man plans and Gd laughs" carries some weight, as our planned night of catch-up sleep turned into a labor night. Great.

Fri 6/6 3:15 am - After laboring for a while, the contractions were coming close enough together that we decided to go to the hospital. Since Kim was 41 weeks anyway, there was little doubt they would tell us to go home.

3:45 am - We're checked into the hospital in a Labor and Delivery room. Nice, but not the Julia Roberts suite with the gourmet meals etc. (Ironically, both Jessica Alba and Tori Spelling gave birth at Cedars this weekend, but we never saw them. We did see lots of paparazzi though. Our nurse Dionne later told us that the paparazzi were heckling her and trying to get her to tell them where the celebs were, and she responded by saying "I don't know where they are and if I did, I wouldn't tell you cause I'd lose my job." However, she actually did know where the celebs were; they had already gone home, and the paparazzi were wasting their time at the hospital! Moral of the story: LA is a funny place to live in). Kim continues to labor (3.5ish cm dilated); I try not to fall asleep.

8:15 am - The doctors break Kim's water in order to help the labor along, as she has been hovering around 4 cm for 4 hours. No gush though, as I was hoping.

10:30 am - The pain is too great and so Kim decides to get a drug called Fentenol (might be spelled differently) to help. Plus she is still at 4 cm and the drug might help things along. I continue to try to be supportive and not fall asleep, which is actually not difficult to do when your wife is screaming and you're in an uncomfortable chair.

11:45 am - The Fentenol basically does nothing so Kim gets an epidural. The epidural was probably the worst part of the whole labor experience because the anesthesiologist was a complete asshole. Now as the son of an anesthesiologist, I know a great many of their ilk, and think of anesthesiologists as affable fellows who enjoy ski trips, pool parties, the Super Bowl, joking about being "gas passers," and following the sex lives of their pets (though sometimes that can lead to great tragedy, like in the "Rape of Peaches" episode). This guy though, he walks into the room and immediately starts yelling at everyone including the nurses. Phones are ringing off the hook, he's yelling, food services are coming in every five seconds, meanwhile Kim is in intense intense labor, and they won't let me do anything (even turning off phones) because they need the room to be completely sterile (and I apparently am unclean). It was a very difficult 15 minutes, but once it was over Kim's pain was almost entirely eliminated, and we never saw the jerk again.

3:30 pm - More labor. 6.5 cm. Kim gets a fever, which is not uncommon in labor; I take a nap.

7ish pm - The labor has been going on for a long time now, and if it continues without much progress, we might need a C section. Kim desperately does not want a C section so this is a tough time. They give Kim a drug called Pitocin which is supposed to move the labor along. We hope that it does the trick so that we can avoid surgery.

10 pm - The Pitocin works! Kim is now at 9 cm, which is close enough to the magic number of 10 for them to rule out a C section. We're going vag, baby!

Sat 6/7 12 am - Kim starts to push. Now before this all started, I was planning on holding Kim's hand when she pushed out the baby but not look down there at all, as it's kinda nasty. But that all changed when I met Sameer, the UCLA med student who was helping out with the delivery. This dude (who was our age, if not younger) got me all fired up for the pushing. I grabbed one of Kim's legs, he grabbed the other, and we coached her through the contractions and pushes. It was kinda awesome; I felt like I was coaching an Olympic weightlifter, or at least a champion eater. After every good push I had the strong desire to chest-bump Sameer like we had just combined on a sack. It got to the point where I couldn't wait for the contraction to come because I wanted to get into it. To put it midly, I was fired up, and ready to go. (YES I CAN!).

1:30 am - Dr. Tsui shows up for the home stretch. The baby's little head starts peeking out and, seeing its curly black hair, I immediately deduce that a) it's my kid and b) it's a boy.

2:34 am - Kim has the baby, which of course is a girl (so much for my deductive reasoning). It was kinda gross as I expected, but also pretty cool; I mean, Kim had a human head sticking out of her hey-hole, and there was all this rad-colored fluid coming out as well. They clean the baby up and we get to hold her and see how perfect she is. And thus, the beginning of the rest of my life...

- Proud Papa