This morning Sarah woke up at 2:15 with pretty strong contractions. She got me up soon after, and we called for Becca (her sister and doula) to come help with the labor. We looked out the window and saw that it had snowed quite a bit overnight, so the roads were pretty bad.

Becca and Jordan got to our house at about 3:30 — Jordan stayed with Adele outside in their van while Becca massaged, coached and generally doula-ed (very well I might add). Sarah started to have very strong contractions and we left for the hospital at 5:45. We didn’t think she’d deliver on the side of the road or anything, but we wanted to head in earlier than later just to be safe. It was snowing pretty heavily and the freeways were snow-covered. It took us more than 35 minutes to get from our house in West Valley to the new IMC hospital in Murray; Sarah was moaning with almost constant contractions all the way. Becca called Sarah’s nurse midwife Julie when we were almost to the hospital and told her we were headed in to deliver.

When they got Sarah checked into her delivery room, she was having very strong contractions — they weren’t even able to ask her the basic admittance questions until after she delivered. The nurse eventually did a pelvic exam and found that she was 9 1/2 centimeters dilated. She worked for another half-hour or so and they declared her ready to push. She was a little hesitant to do so because Julie wasn’t there yet — she had to drive all the way from Bountiful in a blizzard.

But when it came time to push, Julie showed up and Sarah did some great pushing. It was hard, but all of the nurses said she did a great job, that she was a champion — and I completely agreed with them. She got him out after about 5 minutes — he was born at 7:34 a.m. on Monday January 21st. Sarah wanted a natural birth and she got it.

He weighs in at 8 pounds 2 ounces and measured 20 inches. He started nursing pretty well even when we were in the delivery room, and he grabbed onto Sarah’s finger, which Audrey never did as a newborn.

I’ve been using the pronoun “he” so far — we hadn’t completely decided on a name until today. We’ve been calling him “Baby Brother” since we found out it was a boy. We semi-decided to call him Nathan Curtis Gibby a few weeks ago, but then I backed off of it, searching for other suitable names. We never did come up with anything better, so today when I called my mom to let her know he’d been born, she asked, “Does he have a name?” and I said, “Nathan?” So the decision has been made — Nathan Curtis Gibby.