Our First Baby

Our First Baby Erica: I think I assume that my pregnancy would be just completely awful. Randy: She and I thought the opposite. I always thought because Erica is very tough. She’s very athletic. She’s very competitive. I just have a feeling that your body would take well to it. Erica: Hello everybody. My name is Erica. This is my husband Randy. But the real star of the family is this little girl right here, Jocelyn Greer Berkelder. She was born about 4 days ago on Halloween. She’s our little pumpkin and she’s not crying for you today. Isn’t that nice? I don’t know, I thought that I would just really be uncomfortable for the whole nine months. But that really wasn’t the case, I loved it. I loved gaining weight. I loved that knowing that she was there. I loved everything about it. The last few weeks though, that wasn’t easy. Randy: Towards the end it was just stressful because as we’re getting to the point where the baby’s going to come every time we would to see the doctor. They’re saying that it’s just small. The measurements are small. You’re always waiting for that next piece of news and we’re kind of waiting to see, they were telling us to the certain point if the numbers don’t get better, we’re going to have to do an induction. Erica: Induce into a c-section. Randy: Yes because they want to hit that point where they think the baby is better outside than in. Erica: I was 5 centimeters dilated and 90% effaced at my last visit. And because the doctor said there could be complications, they worry about her growth. He had suggested that I’d be induced sooner rather than later and I negotiated with my doctor and said, can I come in for procedure called stripping the membrane and if nothing happens then I will get induced on Monday. The doctor said that I was 5 centimeters dilated and 90% effaced and how can I be walking around like this. When they were like, we want you to go to the hospital and we want to break your water, we were both really concerned. And Randy is like, “Really Erica? Well ask her why that’s necessary”. So I said “Doctor, why is that necessary?” “Because I’m concerned you’re going to deliver in your living room”. So I basically call them and said we’re going to the hospital. Randy: So as they broke out this water, we waited to get the contraction started and we try to walk her around to see what was going to happen on its own. Erica: And they came. As they came strong, I didn’t have any of that. Here’s contraction and then an hour later another contraction. It was basically 1 minute apart. That was the beginning and then they went almost, I thought there was no break in when they start getting really tough. Randy: Meanwhile the Pitocin level is going up and they’re trying to speed things up so she’s getting more and more Pitocin and she wasn’t getting anymore of the epidural that kind of balance out the pain. So that last hour of contraction, when you eventually got an hour from 9 until 10 was pretty painful. Erica: I had eight people in labor and delivery room, all with fantastic paninis and cookies and breads eating while I couldn’t eat. Finally my doctor clears them all out and Randy basically got me from 9 to 10 centimeters. I really could have not done it without him. He basically coached me through the hardest part of the whole entire pregnancy. And then 10 centimeters and — Randy: And then baby came about half an hour later. So I was very surprised as the baby starting to come out. You see a little bit and a little more and little bit more and she finally kind of did like a little spyro out. And as they caught her, I was just in complete shocked to see those girls like, it was amazing. It was an amazing experience. And it made it a lot more fun because I’d spend a lot of time thinking about the things that you do with a little boy and picturing the boy in growing up and everything and I got to do it all over again when I found out that it was a girl. That was fun. Erica is there any kind of another piece for this or is this supposed to—I think we should have pulled out this earlier. Erica: There’s so much of Randy that I hope that she has. I want her to be confident. One thing that I love that you do is that you never give up. If there’s a problem that needs to be solved, he doesn’t walk away from it. He’s just persistent and he enjoys the challenge and I hope that she has that. Randy: One thing I’m very happy about for Jocelyn is she does have a Mom as a role model. She follows her heart. She goes after her dreams and you want that. You want her to have the courage to be able to do that for herself too. Erica: We want to pass on what we know but we don’t want to stop her from being who she is. Randy: You hope that you can just try to help them get through some of the harder things and that you can teach them to be strong, to be confident and be who they are. And if they’ll find the wrong way in they’ll pick and chose the things that they want to do and be the person that they can be. A direct quote, not long after she’d been through the whole delivery process. One of the first things she said was, if the rest of them are going to be this easy, I’ll keep having babies. Erica: So the answer is yes. We definitely are going to have more babies and soon. It was all worth it.