To think, it was 6 years ago...

*above is one of my favorite pictures of him at roughly age 2
Zachary turned 6 years old yesterday. Its amazing. For some reason, this birthday truly seems to mark the end of his babyhood. He looked older when he woke up this morning and I was sad. I love that kid so much and it feels like each and everyday we just get closer to the time when he will leave us. Birthdays remind me to savor every moment while I have it. I made sure to take at least a few moments yesterday to recall the exact happenings of his birth......

It was a Sunday. I was nearly 2 weeks overdue in the dead of summer and about 2 seconds from reaching full blown pregnancy psychosis. I had already been out of work for 3 weeks waiting for this baby to come. I was quite tired of standing a foot from our window AC unit and staring at the stucco and lead paint ridden walls of our apartment. Sure enough, the moment I thought I would die an old pregnant woman, I began to have contractions. It continued through the night and because I was young and dumb and hadn't taken my birthing classes, I was in somewhat of a panic. Starting off 36 hours of labor with no sleep probably was the first of many dumb parenting mistakes I would make.
And so the story goes on and on through 3 days worth of contractions. My favorite moment had to be on day 2, rounding on 48 hours of straight labor in which I was not permitted to even have water, my young spouse walks in the delivery room eating Chick-fil-A and sucking down an icy coke. But then again, that moment was a close second to the moment a nurse walked in the room, checking some monitor that tracked my contractions, and exclaimed, "Holy crap! You have had SEVERAL contractions that literally lasted 5 minutes and then went directly into another one! You must be in a lot of pain!" To which I moaned, "yeah." through what was then the matted and ratted mess of my hair that was covering my tear -stained bloated face.
As the hours and days...and possibly years, wore on in that delivery room Zach and I noticed that one particular monitor kept beeping an alarm that we would have thought indicated something serious, yet somehow the various doctors we had over those days never seemed too worried. So, we carried on with the huffing, puffing, crying, and insanity until the time finally came that I could have an epidural and they could break my water. I honestly thought at that time the pain couldn't get worse, but it certainly did! I started to literally lose it at that point, and that darn alarm just would NOT stop beeping. I told my husband to get someone to pay attention to that thing before I injured someone. One nurse finally came in and said, "I have been trying to tell them this thing keeps going off and that you need a doctor to look at your heart, but they wont listen! Let me go get Dr So and So!"
Dr. So and So finally showed up, put some electrodes on my chest and determined that he thought my heart was just beating fast and to proceed. Okay. They then decided it was time to push, and if pushing when your heart is already vexed sounds like a dumb idea, you are right! After about 45 minutes that alarm got a lot louder and faster and that was when everyone panicked. As it turns out my heart rate was above 180bpm and Zachary's was well over 200. Doctors and nurses began running around barking orders, using the word "stat" just like they do on TV, and shoving all sorts of contracts in my husband's face to agree to surgery. In the end, they had RIP my uterus open to actually extract the child and forever changed the way I would have babies from that moment on. After that it was all a blur of blood, internal organs, and enough drugs to kill an elephant, but my baby boy was born at 7 lbs even. His apgar score was appalling, but he improved rapidly once he was out. I remember holding him for the first time and realizing very quickly that this parenting thing was not going to be what I had expected at all.
The whole event was quite an introduction to parenthood. But it prepared us. We anticipated a birth like you see on TV, and instead ended up with one of those stories you tell over and over just to see people's faces of shock and awe for fun(and heck, when I am feeling really squirly I like telling that story to my enemies over a dinner of raw oysters and liver). What I know now is that parenting is just that, a wild and unexpected ride with the good, the bad, and the ugly. There is a lot of humor, surprise, disappointment, happiness, and most of all love, and a miraculously unconditional one at that.