Ezra's Birthday

August 9, 2011

The day started out much like the previous day ended.  Even with all the inducement medicine the previous day and all through the night, I was only 1 cm dilated.  Around lunchtime the anesthesiologist came in to begin my epidural because Dr. Mitchell wanted to go ahead and break my water to get things moving more quickly.  The epidural was painless and I was so thankful for that.  Unfortunately after that, though, I was confined to my bed.  When Dr. Mitchell broke my water around 1:30 he said that it was dark, which indicated there had been some kind of a problem in the past few days.  He started me on pitocin at the same time and so I just had to sit and wait…and think.  People kept coming by throughout the day, but the nurses limited it to two people at a time.  The nurses were so nice to set up a special room for all our family so they didn’t have to be in the normal waiting room, so they waited in there for their turns.

Around 6pm things started moving more quickly and I went from 1cm to 7cms very quickly.  It made me panic as I begin to realize that my sweet Ezra was going to be leaving my belly very soon and I would have to begin the process of saying goodbye.  While he was still inside me, he was alive to me, even if he wasn’t.  Dr. Mitchell came to check again an hour later and I was ready to give birth to my little Ezra Gryffin.  It only took about 20 minutes for him to enter the world.  There were no cries that filled the room like there should have been.  The nurse asked if I wanted to hold my baby and even though it scared me because he seemed so tiny, I reached out my hands for him.  He was so beautiful.  His precious little skin was blotchy and brittle, but he was beautiful.  He was wrapped up in a blanket, so all I could see was his little face.  His little nose looked just like his daddy’s – tiny and turned up on the end.  He had sweet little red lips that were full like mine.  He was definitely a combination of the two of us.  The moment seemed so surreal because anyone looking from the outside would have thought that it was just a new mommy holding her baby.  But on closer inspection, those weren’t tears of joy running down my face – they were tears of agony.  Agony because I knew that I could only hold him for so long before they would be taking him away from me.  I wouldn’t get to feed him.  I wouldn’t get to change him.  I wouldn’t get to anticipate the minutes until I got to take him home with me.

I held him for not nearly long enough and then they took him to measure him, weigh him, and clean up his little body.  When the nurse brought him back in, we asked our parents to come in so that they could see their sweet little grandson.  We all told him that we loved him.  We looked at how perfect he was.  We cried together.  Around this time a lady from the group Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep came in the room.  We had contacted her so that we could get some photographs of Ezra.  This group also did family photographs, but I wasn’t sure at this point if this was something that I wanted or not.  The lady took Ezra into the next room and Randall went with them to help with the photographs.  They took about 10 pictures of him, some with our wedding bands on his little toes.  When they brought him back to me, we decided to go ahead and do some pictures with Randall, me, and Ezra.  I can’t wait to see them.  I got to see him for such a short time and I feel that I’m already starting to forget the little features about him that I thought I had memorized.  I miss him so much.

Everyone left the room again and let Randall and I have some more time with our little Ezra.  Again we told him how much we loved him and how we had longed to have him as part of our family.  We told him that he was our son and would always be our son.  And then we let him go back with the nurses.  That was the last time we saw our precious angel here on this earth.  The next time we saw him he was in a casket covered with daisies and blue flowers.