The Boy You've All Been Waiting For

As promised, I am here to unveil the new addition, because I love you. Introducing:

Our little bundle of fun, Spencer Matthew Warner. Vital stats, so you can be in the know with celebrity gossip: 8 pounds, 3 ounces, born at 3:24 AM on February 16, 2012. 2/16/12. A plaindrome, incidentally, because Spencer is cool like that. We like him already. Except he's a punk. Normally I do not write birth stories, but I want to have a written narrative someday to embarrass Spencer in front of his girlfriends. We will attempt to keep things PG for the kids. But if words like epidural, dilate and adorable scare you, skip to the pictures at the end of the good-looking people I hang out with.

We could go into a lot of unnecessary detail of labor, but here's the gist: I had a doctor's appointment on Wednesday at which I was dilated to a 2. After the appointment, I had irregular contractions that came and went all day, which didn't alarm me because I've been contracting for three weeks with no birth story to show for it. So I ignored it. After we went to bed, the contractions kept going, so eventually I got up to time them. At which point they stopped completely, so I went back to bed. Twenty minutes later, I started getting contractions every two minutes, followed by a huge amount of bleeding, which caused me to freak out and wake up Jessie and demand we head to the hospital immediately. Because they know what to do with panicking hormonal women at the hospital. On the way to hospital, I all of a sudden started having extremely painful contractions extremely close together, and finally started to contemplate the theory that I was in labor. Upon arrival at the hospital, the nurses seemed remarkably less concerned about the bleeding than I was, and much more concerned about the fact that I was dilated to a 6. This seemed ridiculous to me, because obviously I had only been in labor about half an hour and there was no way I was that far along. But an hour and a half later, when Spencer was born, I was still trying to convince myself we were in labor. Talk about fast. I'm still a little shell shocked.

But, it's true, we're now a family of five. The girls were thrilled to wake up and discover their brother had decided to grace us with his presence. Madeline was especially thrilled to come see him, although she was worried about the hole in my stomach and was anxious to bring tape to fix it. She wanted to hold Spencer the whole time she was here, and alternated between calling him Spencer and Ali Baba. Kimberly really surprised me. She was neither jealous nor indifferent. She got really excited and said "Baby! Baby!" and even held him for a minute, looking very serious and grownup as she did so. Then she crawled into the bottom of a hospital cart and spilled my water cup. Jessie has been great. He's getting used to talking boy talk instead of girl talk. Spencer may get called a princess a few times before we're all on the same page.

Anyway, we're all adjusting and trying to get some sleep after a crazy night. We love our little guy, who thus far is pretty quiet and sleepy. I'll leave you with some pictures of the star of the day. Enjoy. Ooh and aww to your heart's content. Feel free to covet such an awesomely studly baby.