Seth Neal (dotCom)

Wow… I’m really tired. I’m not sure we are even going to understand how our lives have just changed. Our little boy is so cute.  And now he has a name!

Introducing Carter Edwin Neal, born 6lbs 6oz and 19″ long and healthy as… you know, something we all think of as being very healthy.  Carter was my choice, Jill was more partial to Luke, but we agreed on Carter because if he turned out to be a she instead we would have gone with Jill’s name.  Marriage.

These were taken this morning.  Very cute.

So Jill wasn’t kidding!

At 5am this morning she started feeling contractions, at 9am I called the midwife on call, at 1pm we arrived at the U of U hospital (and Melissa, our favorite midwife was on call!) and Jill was 6cm, at 3pm Jill was at 9cm (oh, and I’m sick as a dog… damz…), at 5pm Jill starting going into hard labor and at 7.12pm The Little One was born!

OH!  And The Little One is a He!

That’s mom and The Little Boy about an hour after.  He went for food about an hour in… even though he doesn’t totally get it yet!  But he will.  He’s my son after all!

Oh, and here’s a picture of Melissa our midwife who stayed 3 hours after her shift had ended! I’m telling you, she is the best.

Oh, and one last story.  Or the first one… whatever.  Tonight was supposed to be our last hypnobirthing class!  Obviously we didn’t make it, but the class did a tour of the hospital so I saw them!  And, if you want to know, Jill did awesome and the hypnobirthing was totally the right way to go.  Obviously I’m not going to say something as stupid as “it was easy” but Jill was impressive even if was the hardest thing she’s ever done!

More later… I’m tired and a bit delirious!

So Jill says she is in labor…

…

Right now!

The Little One cometh.

OK, so Jill and I have been going to birthing classes as we anticipate The Little One.  And that’s exactly what we say.  And if people want to believe that means lamaze class or whatever that’s fine with us because truthfully we are a little embarrassed to be going.  If there is one thing good conservative Christians aren’t suppose to be about it is hippie-psycho babble.  Now, I know… there is already some debate about the whole “good conservative Christian” thing, but that’s another post.

Hypnobirthing is the birthing class Oprah would take if she were ever with child and in need of such a class. In fact, I would describe Hypnobirthing as more philosophy than actual technique.  For instance, there are “laws” we went over in our first class such as “The Law of Harmonious Attraction” (which of course gets back to the Oprah comment above).

But here’s the thing; we think we like it! Not so much the psycho babble parts; but the birth is a natural event not a medical intervention parts! Imagine that. Our midwife (Melissa, whom we LOVE) really encouraged us to participate and we are glad we did. It’ll be exciting to see how all this plays out as we await The Little One.

I’ve always had an over-inflated sense of what was right and what was wrong. Sometimes that served me well; like when my sixth grade friend said we should hide in a ditch and shoot at oncoming cars with his new bee-bee gun I said, “Hellz no, my dad will literally kick my ass into next week” or something like that. And when the cops handcuffed Bruce after he shot out the driver side window of an old VW bug and put some half blind guy in the ER for stitches I knew that my sense of right and wrong had done its job.

Its sometimes not served me as well… but that’s another post.

What’s harder though, is when I see injustice and I feel powerless to stop it. Big injustices suck, but so do the small ones. For instance, my wife and I are looking to buy a new (used) car in anticipation of The Little Guy. One ad in the paper caught my eye for a 2002 Corolla with 16k miles on it. The lady selling it was nice and even said that our baby was going to be a boy and very smart.  Which I thought was real nice.  But, she really wanted more than we could afford and so we told her we had to think about it. I decided to do my due diligence and looked up the car’s VIN on Carfax.com.

The short and long of it was that this car didn’t have 16k miles on it because it had been in a wreck in LA with 32k miles on it. I was pissed, but what really steamed me was I knew some sucker was going to get taken by this fortune teller and I was powerless to do anything about it save picketing her hair salon.  I don’t know why, but crap like this just pisses me off.

The good news is we got a car for The Little Guy. A 2002 Camry with 36K miles on it and only one owner! Sadly it was owned by this old guy whose kids decided dad wasn’t safe behind the wheel anymore, but we’ll take it still.