Happy Birthday Moorea (pronounced Mor-A-ah)!

Well, friday night (May4th) was a sleepless one for Amy as she sensed something was different but couldn't quite put her finger on it. That was until 3am when the Braxton Hicks - the small "practice" contractions she'd been feeling for months - morphed into their bigger, greener, meaner alter-ego and the Hulk we now know as "labour" was born.

Amy woke me at an unusually early 8am Sat morning to inform me of this development, and startled me into a frantic panic of executing project "Emergency, emergency, where the hell's the checklist, we need to get to the bloody hosptial". She quickly and calmly told me to get a grip and "chill out man" cuz she could handle it and we could take our time .

As neither of us really new what the hell was going down, we consulted the doc and headed to the hospital for "monitoring". After 4 hours of beeps, and graphs we were advised to go back home and "ride it out until you're ready"..."Don't worry, you'll know".

Did I mention Hypnobirthing? Amy & I had great intentions to go drug-free and took a number of classes on a natural form of childbirth called hypnobirthing. The idea centers around the "Triangle of fear". It works like this; if you're afraid of something (like giving birth for the first time) you get tense. The more tense you are, the more pain you feel. The more pain you feel, the more you get scared...Fear, Tension, Pain, repeat & escalate. Hyponobithing attempts to control the fear by educating on the unknowns, and decrease the tension by providing tactical relaxation excersises.

When we returned from the hospital on Sat afternoon, we were told Amy was about 1cm dialated (out of a required 10) and the contraction pain was anywhere from 1/3 to 1/10 of what it would become. We hypnobirthed our way through about 17 hrs of continuous, ever-increasing contractions until we were sure we were "ready" and got our asses back to the hospital at 4am Sunday morning. If you're keeping count, Amy's been up for almost 48hrs by know, fighting the big green labour beast the majority of the time. To say the least, she's getting tired, and the contractions are getting much heavier and much more difficult to "relax and breath through". In fact, I beleive it was about 5am when the beasts were getting more powerful and painful that we learned we were only 4cm dialated, and had a long way yet to go. I decided to Hypno-through and figured one of our practiced "light touch messages" was the tool of choice to keep Amy going, when suddenly, the room transitioned into the set of the Excersist! Linda Blair had taken over the body Amy was once in and was screaching and spitting at me like a rabid dog to "stop rubbing her!" Hypnobirthing was out, Epidural was in.

This truned out to be a very good call as it all went relatively smooth from there. The drugs settled into Amy, Amy settled into the bed and from about 11am, Dr. Lucy Lord settled into barking comando-like encouragement to Amy who seemed quite comfortable being challenged in a physical excersize similar to hiking enourmous mountains or pushing the limits in the gym...just far more intense.

I was in awe watching Amy in action especially around noon when she was threatened they'd have to resort to a C-section if the baby wasn't delivered by 1pm. It was truly amazing seeing her dig down to a new level with each push and was certain her head was going to explode with each new shade of red it turned. I felt guilty that I couldn't do more than hold her hand or support her head as she laboured. But just then, at the height of it all, at the creshendo, at 12:33, when we were both concentrating on her struggle and keeping her head in tact, out it came! A new life. A tiny little 6lbs 13oz being. A screaming, kind of grey, kind of furry, gooey, sticky thing with a funny shaped head of what might be black or brown hair with red streaks. We were so surprized and amazed this little life had just come out of Amy's tummy we didn't think to ask the sex. We were much more surprized when the nurse proclaimed "Girl". With the Plested streak for boys, we were convinced otherwise. My immediately thought was of how happy my mom's going to be about this and how proud I am to be the one behind it.

We've named her Moorea Lin. Moorea is a beautiful French Polynesian island and a name I've always liked and Lin means both "forrest" and "Gem" in Chinese. We don't think she looks like either of us at the moment, which is probably a good thing, given the above description but pictures are enclosed for you to decide for yourself.

Moorea and mom are both in great health and high spirits and will return from hospital in the next couple days to disturb my evenings of eating cheese on the couch in my undies watching Guy Ritchie movies; and I can't wait. I can't believe how proud I am of this little beauty we've created.