From Monday, November 10th

Ahh, the feeling of not having to wait any more for this baby is very relieving. It's similar to waiting for a mission call; everything gets on hold, nobody has anything else to talk about except for the “when” questions, and half of your friends think you've already left (or already had the baby) and it ruins the real surprise. Saturday morning found my wife in labor, so I called around a bit until someone volunteered to come replace me at work.
Stephanie was dilated to 5 centimeters when we arrived at the hospital; that was enough to make us cheer after all of our previous hospital experiences. We were in Timpanogas Regional Hospital, a nice little place that is clean and filled with nurses and techs eager to help in any way they can. We'd visited the hospital two or three days before when my brother's wife went into early labor, giving birth to a 10-inch long little girl who lived for 41 minutes before saying goodbye to her parents. It is always interesting to me how life comes and goes, each moment precious in its own right.
Anyway, the labor went pretty quickly; I was impressed by how deftly the nurse anesthetist handled the epidural, but on second thought realized that he's probably done it a few thousand times here in Orem and Provo, places inhabited by over a hundred thousand college students. Stephanie's water didn't want to break, so by the time she was pushing the baby out we were thinking that the amniotic sac might come with it! In a last burst of super-mommy strength, Steph managed to spurt a thick stream of amniotic fluid that went straight into the air and landed four feet away from the bed. Our nurse was really lucky, though, because the stream made a pit-stop on the way toward the opposite wall. She got nailed in the face with it, and spent the next few minutes trying to dry her hair out.
I was feeling pretty guilty by the time (about twenty minutes later) the baby decided to start showing his head. However, I have lots of faith that we will someday, in the heat of the moment, forget how painful and miserable childbirth really is and end up having another baby. Braeden didn't look too much like an alien, and he didn't have any serious facial deformities (that was what I had been worried about), so we were pretty happy. He cried for a while, his lip quivering faster than a hummingbird flapping its wings, and we got to hold him before they gave him a bath.
There weren't any problems with his eating habits because he's a Busey and always tries to bankrupt the local restaurant. He eventually made us think that he'd pooped, but we turned out to be wrong. It was actually some sort of black tar, you know the kind that they use when they put down asphalt.
Anyway, to make a long story short we were pretty exhausted by the end of the day. I went home for a few minutes to shower and eat massive amounts of S'mores before returning to Steph's hospital room. We left the next day.