For those who are interested, here are some of the details of Jolie’s birthday…
We arrived at the Labour and Delivery ward at 8 o’clock in the morning and they administered the gel around 9:30.   Contractions began almost immediately and for about seven hours I paced the halls of the hospital and the surrounding streets of the nearby neighbourhood, trying to let gravity have its way with me and make the contractions more intense. At the end of the seventh hour my doctor checked my cervix and it was STILL posterior and only at a tight one centimeter. I was ready to scream. All that cramping and waiting and walking and tightening for nothing?! Then she proceeded to do a disturbingly thorough exam in which I am quite certain I felt her fingernails scrape the backs of my eyeballs, so high did she reach inside me. She really stirred things up down there and within a half hour of that painfully violating exam, the real contractions started. (That was around 4:30 in the afternoon.) By 6:30 I was at 3 cm and the contractions were intensifying. I told the nurse that I was fairly certain I would be opting for an epidural, so she called my doctor who contacted the anesthetist. We were told he would be there within the hour. He was a tad late but we went ahead with inserting the spinal needle.  My doctor said, “You should feel the epidural kick in within 10 to 15 minutes.”  Then she checked my cervix and I discovered I was already at 8 cm and I was starting to feel the pressure to push.  The contractions were so intense that the bottom half of my body was convulsing uncontrollably, I barfed up everything I had eaten that day, and it was all I could do to make it through.  It was a race against time to see what would happen first:  the numbing effect of the epidural or the ferociously fast birth of our daughter.  Jolie won out.  She was born about five minutes after the epidural was given, so I am fairly certain I felt 9/10ths of the pain of natural childbirth.  Wow, it was intense.  As soon as she was out, I was flooded with a supernatural sense of relief and peace and she let out a hearty cry seconds after being pulled from my body.  She was nearly two pounds bigger than Avelyn was at birth, so I actually tore worse this time around and had a rip that hit an artery that caused a lot of bleeding.  (You’re welcome for the details.)

Jolie was placed on my chest and she took to nursing with ease, which was a delightful surprise.  She is not even three days old, as I type this, and it feels like she’s been with us forever.  Her hair is dark, her feet are wrinkly, and her spirit is sweet.

We love you, baby.

*Alternate titles:  “There Will Be Barf”, “Is That My Blood On the Wall Across the Room?” or “Why I Am Suing the Tardy Anesthetist”.