We Had a Month...

I’ll give you the brief snapshot from my perspective. Kim will fill in more details and story later. We went to church yesterday and all through the morning and after the service Kim complained that something felt different about the baby. That afternoon while I was getting ready to dig in for an NFL induced Sunday nap (the best kind) Kim kept feeling contractions. This was no big deal because we had a month before the little one’s due date (Feb. 7 to be exact). The contractions were pretty regular, but again, we had a month. After we talked with her doctor on the phone we decided that we’d head to hospital and check things out. Our friend Staci came over to watch the kids. I grabbed a book and my Kindle (most awesomest Christmas gift). Kim grabbed her purse and a few things. As we drove to the hospital Kim kept talking like this made sense because she’d been feeling things with her pregnancy differently over the last few days. She told me it felt like the baby had dropped. She cleaned those corners in our house that seem to accumulate stuff, you know the areas where you give yourself permission to just toss and worry about it later. You know when you clean those areas something’s going on. But I didn’t think this was anything because we had a month.

We talked about the class I was going to take in Atlanta next week. I’ve been busting my hump trying to get reading done beforehand. The book I grabbed on the way out the door was for that class. I figured if we were going to be waiting around for a few hours that I’d get some reading done.

Once we got the hospital they hooked Kim up to all the monitors and such. Sure enough she was in labor. They gave her some meds to stop it and I thought, we be home in a couple of hours because we had a month. The meds didn’t stop the labor. They started talking like we might have this baby today. All I could think was, “We have a month.” The started handing us paperwork. Paperwork?! That means you really think this is going to happen. But we had a month. They started asking questions about the birth. We didn’t have answers because we had a month to think about those things before we needed to answer them. They asked us if we had a name. NO, we don’t have a name…we had a month.

The doctor came in and sure enough, we were having this baby right now. They took Kim and got her prepped. I started writing down a list of stuff I’d need to get at home when I got a chance. We didn’t really bring anything to the hospital because…we had a month.

William Oliver Friederichsen was born at 9:00pm January 2, 2011. He weighed 7lbs 6oz and is 19.5inches. He is in the Neonatal ICU for now. His lungs are not filling like a full-term baby would. He’s on oxygen and we’re praying that soon he’ll be able to get off it and breathe all on his own. While it is a serious issue, it looks worse than it is. We haven’t been able to hold him much and that’s been pretty hard. Overall, though, Kim and I are doing pretty well. If you’re in the area feel free to give us a call if you want to visit and we’ll just be honest with you and let you know if you can come. You can drop Kim an email for encouragement, she’d appreciate it.