Welcome Nicolas!

One week ago we welcomed Nicolas Gabriel into the world. He was born on Saturday morning, November 30 at 6:34am. He weighed 8 pounds 3 ounces and measured 21 inches. The past week has been exhausting but amazing to spend time getting to know Nicolas. 

After eagerly waiting for him to come over the Thanksgiving holiday, we decided to do some Black Friday shopping. We went to NorthPark mall, which is an incredibly chaotic place to be any day of the year--it has twice as many annual visitors as the Louvre. I thought surely if anything would put me into labor this would be it. 

Sure enough, I started having contractions around 9:00pm that evening. Because I wanted to avoid having any drugs or medical interventions during labor, we had planned to stay at home as long as possible before going to the hospital. From what I learned in our childbirth classes, the more relaxed you stay during labor the faster things will move along. This was definitely true for me, thanks to all the breath practice from the yoga I have been doing for the past year I was able to breath through the back labor contractions and sleep between them. David was able to get a few hours of sleep also, until I woke him up around 3:30am to head to the hospital. When we arrived we quickly found out that I was almost 9cm dilated and nearly ready to have a baby. You probably do not hear this very often, but overall the whole labor/delivery experience was really amazing--it was very relaxed and under control, no screaming or profanity--I surprised myself that I was even able to be patient and polite to the nurses and David.  

The hospital required us to stay two nights, so we were home by Monday morning. Nicolas is doing great so far, he is eating and sleeping really well. He is very relaxed, and really only cries when he is getting a diaper change. David has two weeks off work, and then we will have family visit later in the month. We had a few beautiful days of weather last week, and then were hit with a major ice storm. We have been "iced in" for the past three days. I suppose its a good time for it, as we don't have anywhere to be! Without further ado, some photos of our first week. 

Fast friends!

Already enduring his first stressful Skins game.