Baby Pebble is a...

Baby Pebble has arrived, safe and sound!! We were very thankful to welcome into the world Alfred Allan Noell (Alfie), born at 9:11 PM on Wednesday, July 13th. He weighed 8.1 lbs (3.69 kg), 20.9 inches (53 cm) long.

As far as the story of how Alfie arrived, we had a false start on Sunday, July 10, as Tamara was having regular contractions all afternoon and evening. We had thought the baby was coming, so we packed everything up that afternoon and left Ralph with our friends for the night. However, when Tamara lay down for a rest that evening and fell asleep, the contractions stopped. We thought the contractions might start up again any moment, so we were waiting with baited breath the next day...and the next...and still no contractions! It was like living on borrowed time, as it were. But then Tuesday night& Wednesday morning Tamara noticed that she was having some small fluid leakage; the midwife recommended that she go to the hospital to check if it was amniotic fluid. It was, indeed; the midwife thought the waters behind the baby had been partially broken, leading to the slow leak. With that sort of leak, there is a risk of infection for the baby if the baby isn't born within a day or two of the waters breaking.

At the hospital, after the test results, the doctor recommended that Tamara stay there and they break her front waters and see if that would get labor going, monitoring her the whole time. If not, they would then induce her. Tamara didn't want to give birth in the hospital, especially because their rooms for inductions were already full and we had already planned on giving birth at the birth centre. Thankfully, Tamara's midwife (Jo, who has been really lovely!) was able to advocate on her behalf and convince the doctor to let us go to the birth centre, where the midwife would break Tamara's waters and see if that would start labor. This gave Tamara time to eat some dinner, say goodnight to Ralph, and pick me up from our friends' house.

At the birth centre, the midwife first gave Tamara some antibiotics to preclude any infection for the baby, then broke her waters. We thought that, if labor was going to start, it wouldn't start right away, so we had decided that we would walk down to a local ice cream place nearby to get some dessert (it was 8 PM) before heading back to the birth centre. As we were getting everything together to start walking out the door, Tamara had a big contraction that lasted a few minutes. Once it passed, she said "Maybe we should drive instead of walking." (It was a 10 min walk, 2 min drive). I said that sounded like a good idea, and we were about to walk out of the door again when she had another big contraction. After that one passed, Tamara said "Maybe we should skip ice cream today; can you call the midwife in here please?"

Within another 10 minutes of strong contractions, Tamara was starting to push already, so Jo and I helped her into the bath with some warm water. At 9:11 PM, a mere 1 hour after Tamara's waters were broken, baby Alfie was born! It was a very fast and intense labor process, as Tamara will attest; we all felt a bit in shock afterwards! Tamara's body was also feeling a bit in shock, as her uterus took a while to contract down after the birth and Tamara ended up losing over a liter of blood. Jo said usually women lose about 0.5 liters of blood after birth. The midwives were getting a bit concerned about Tamara because of how much blood she had lost, but after she ate some sugary foods and got some IV fluids, she felt a lot better.

We spent a total of two nights at the birth centre, with all our meals provided for us by the kitchen in the birth centre. Our friends kept Ralph the whole time and he was apparently an angel the whole time :-) Ralph has been very sweet with his new baby brother; when he sees Alfie, he often says "Oh, a baby!!" And he often asks to "Holda baby!" He likes giving him kisses and patting him; he's learning quite quickly that Alfie isn't ready yet for roughhousing, but I'm sure he'll get there!

The day after we brought Alfie home from the birth centre, on Saturday, my parents arrived from the US. We have really enjoyed having them here, as they have been a big help in keeping Ralph entertained, holding Alfie, doing dishes, making meals, etc. They will be with us a total of three weeks, so we are very thankful for that.

Alfie has been doing well; the first few days and nights were challenging, since he would get upset every 30 minutes or so, but the last few days he has been sleeping a lot more, especially overnight, and is mostly pretty content. We are thankful to God for the blessing of this new baby!

-Stephen, for the (4) Noells