Life Post: Watching My Sister Have A Baby

In late 2018 my sister asked me if I wanted to be in the room when she gave birth to my nephew. I was excited to actually witness this in person and said hells yeah!

She wasn’t due until the end of February and so we were just chillin. She’d come to my house a few times a week and eat all of my snacks, but when my mom or I would ask her if she was craving anything she’d say no. She probably still doesn’t realize that she probably ate 37 boxes of cereal (that we kept replacing) and 7600 waffles in the last 4 -5 months of pregnancy. In fact, she ate so many waffles, that her work friends threw her a waffle themed baby shower at work lol.

So in January we threw her a bad ass bomb ass baby shower at a super cute venue. Pro Tip: invite your moms friends to the baby shower, they bring all of the best and most expensive gifts. We had a taco bar, a whole lot of cake, played some games and even though it was snowing like a mf outside, a lot of people still showed up.

I had been aggressively laid off from my job in October (more to come on that in another story) and my mom was living with me, so I was basically living the sleep all day stay up all night dream. Well, on February 19th ,2019 i started a new job, and went back to commuting from the burbs to downtown Chicago. Tuesday 2/19 I took the train, had my first day, and came home. On 2/20 i took the train, had my second day and came home. Around 8pm I took two melatonin gummies, because I was still trying to readjust my sleep cycle and got in bed.

I kid you not, at 8:19pm, my nephews father called me and said ‘your sister is in labor, we’re at the hospital and she’s freaking out, can you and your mom come up here?!’

Omg, what!? She couldn’t go in to labor before I took those damn purple gummies?! So I slowly get out of bed, open my door and yell down to my mom in the living room “MOM! Jasmine is in labor and we have to go to the hospital” I don’t think i’ve ever seen her move that fast in my life but, thats neither here nor there. So we jump in the car and zoom over to the hospital. Fortunately for us, they didn’t make it to the hospital they planned to go to so they were at the hospital down the street from my house. Unfortunately, for them, the post birth rooms in the hospital near me were tiny as fuck, but we’ll come back to that.

So, mom and I get to the hospital and go in to the birthing room where my sister looks like she needs a lot of help. But she looks momentarily relieved when we walk in. Moments later another contraction hits and I now understand why she looks so distressed. Y’all I have never seen someone in so much pain in my life. When it was over, she asked the nurse when the guy with the epidural was coming, and the nurse replied that they were on the way to which my sister replied “WHEN!!??”

After what felt like an hour to me, and must have felt like 5 hours to her the epidural dude came strolling in and put us all out. By this time more of my family and dad’s family had shown up and were outside waiting. The epidural took forever, but when we finally went back in my sister looked like she’d been given a hit of morphine. Total relaxation, i actually took before and after pictures of her, that are hilarious, but she’d probably kill me if i posted it here( i’ll ask her though).

I’m thinking, so this is clearly going to take a while, the dilating slowed down and every one left except me, the dad, and my mom. I ended up falling asleep on the couch in the birthing room and around 2am it was go time.

So these nurses come in with this damn table right. Looking like they’re about to make a hibachi meal. And they give my sister a quick finger bang and are like “oh yeah, this baby is coming” Jasmine’s heart rate goes up (poor thing) and then the whole world freezes as the doctor makes her grand entrance to deliver this baby.

I don’t know where the hell I’m supposed to stand, but I know i wanna watch this damn baby be born. So dad is standing up by Jasmine’s shoulder, holding her hand, im standing next to him near her knees and the doctor hands me a leg to hold, okay then, hold this leg, I can do that. My mom is standing behind me far enough away to be out of reach but close enough to kind of see whats crackin.

The doctor is standing in between the legs ready to catch, and two nurses are opposite me. There is some instruction given to my sister that I didn’t hear and then the pushing begins. I’m paying very close attention to my one job, hold this leg, for the first 3-4 pushes, and as we can kind of see the baby’s head, I start looking around. Here is whats happening:

1. Dad looks like he’s going to faint or throw up or both, his face is all twisted up in concern, disgust, or both
2. My Mom is behind me breathing like she’s in a lamaze class..hee hee hooo
3. My sister also looks like she’s going to fain from lack of oxygen
4. The doctor tells me I’m not doing a good job with this leg and I tell her my sister cant breathe, and then she instructs a nurse to put oxygen on her.

Okay, now were back to breathing and pushing and leg holding. And oh man I can see a baby head poking out! I’m looking back and forth between the baby’s head and my sisters face, making sure she doesn’t pass the hell out. In the midst of one of those glances I look over at dad and I’m worried that I might have to hold him up instead of this leg, he’s going to pass out and topple over at any moment. I position my self so that I can see him and the baby and a few pushes later, there is a big splash of clear baby liquid that hits me, the doctor, and dad, and I just knew he was going to lose his dinner on the floor lol. He held it down though.

Voliá now we’ve got a baby!

Dad cuts the cord, and they cart the baby off to the baby oven and wipe him a lot, I walk over there with them and watch for a minute then go back to look at my sister. She looks exhausted but asks me “is he okay” and I say yes, he’s fine and at that moment the baby started crying. They wrapped him up and put his little hat on and gave him to his mama. And he’s just staring at her and she’s staring at him and its all cute and lovey and the baby is super cute too!

Dad holds the baby and is just looking at him in disbelief, like I think dude left his body and was just memorized by this tiny human my sister just popped out. After a few minutes, I asked if i could hold him, and then handed him to my mom who I think was just as memorized as dad was.

By now its after 3 am and I’m supposed to be on the train at 8, and other than a 30 minute cat nap I have not been to sleep yet. So I made up some dumb excuse to call off work and mom and I went home so I could go the hell to sleep.

The end!