Let me just start by saying that babies, like teenagers, do what they want, when they want, no matter what your plans are or how inconvenient and irrational their agenda is. The day before our OB/GYN was leaving on vacation for a week we had an appointment to see how far along Jackson was. In her words he was "coming, but very slowly." This was no big deal since he was still not due for another week and of course, being our first, was more than likely going to be late. So we set up an appointment for the day our doctor got back to induce labor.
That brings us to Saturday. This was the day we were going to get ready for Jack's arrival. Among the things on our to-do list was: Go to the auto dealer where we were going to have the car seat professionally installed, finish packing the go bag, buy the last few things we needed off our registry, clean the car out, fill it up with gas (because the light had just gone on), and Joe was wanting to try his hand at maternity photography. He bought a whole bunch of stuff for the photo shoot and even took a few initial photos a few days before just to see if he could get the right lighting (which he didn't). It was going to be an eventful day, but after that, we would be ready for parenthood.
But that was not Jack's plan...At 7 in the morning, my water broke. I woke Joe up and we sprung into action. After a quick pack of the go bag and prayer that we wouldn't run out of gas, we were at the hospital. Things seemed to calm down at that point, Joe's parents filled up on gas and got the car seat installed. Before contractions got too out of hand, I had an epidural and was feeling good. It turns out, however, that Jack only wanted to feel what contractions were like, he didn't want to come out into the world so he made me push for two and a half hours! But he learned a valuable lesson that day, that we can't all have the things we want, and even though he didn't want to come out we were able to get Jackson Fredrick into the world on October 9th at 5:20 in the evening. Joe's mom thought it would've been cool to have him wait until 10/10/10 to be born, but took back that statement after she realized how cruel that would be to his mother. He is the smallest (thank goodness) of Joe's family weighing in at 7 pounds 15 ounces and has a fantastic mullet. It has been a month now and we are so glad to have him here and are having so much fun being parents. Here are some picture we have of the little cutie.