Week 0: Introducing Grant Michael and his AWESOME blog!

Week 0:  Sunday, October 5th, 2014

Welcome to the world Grant Michael Pearl!

Grant blessed my wife, Katie, and I with his presence on Sunday, October 5th, 2014 at 11:14 AM.

And welcome to my blog.  I am sure some of you are thinking, "Wow, Mike is writing a blog?  They really let anyone do that these days."  I am not now, nor have I ever been known for my amazing writing skills.  I have some old college buddies that still reminisce and make fun of me for the time I was writing a paper for a class, and after about an hour of having my laptop on my lap and 'writing' one of them came over and sat next to me and saw that all I had written to that point was, "Since the dawn of time..."  I like to think that I have come a long way since then...but we shall see.

Now, I am not writing this blog to become famous or brag about how many readers I have.  Although if I do get 100 'likes' or page views then I promise to do this every time:

The real reason I am writing this blog is to chronicle the life of my new son, Grant, and the beginning of our little family.  I want him to be able to look back and read about all of the fun things he did with his mom and dad.  And not just the big moments, but the week in and week out stories that could become lost and forgotten.  So, with that in mind, here are some of the aspects of my blog:

1.  I will only be writing one blog post a week.  If I wrote more frequently, then I am sure that I would bore you and you would stop reading.  I will aim to write it on Sundays, but with my busy life I am guessing that some posts will be a little late.

2.  I will be tracking Grant's life in weeks.  The other day Katie overheard someone tell another person that their daughter was 23 months old.  Katie whispered to me and said, "I feel like once they are over a year old then you should stop tracking in months.  Well I am going in the opposite direction.  I think it will be hilarious when Grant turns 3 and someone asks how old he is and I respond with "156 weeks old."

3.  This will not just be a blog to catalog everything that happens in his life.  I won't be listing how many times he has fed or how many bowel movements he had in a day.  Although I could do that, because I have been tracking those things.  But I am sure those numbers are more interesting to our pediatrician and less interesting to our family and friends.

Some of you are probably curious about my choice for the blog's title.  Daddy and the Doctor.  First off, I think alliteration is fun for a blog title.  The 'Daddy' part is pretty obvious, so I won't explain that part.  The 'Doctor' part is a little more confusing.  Some people have asked us where we came up with the name 'Grant' for our son, and I like to tell them that he was named after my favorite character from my favorite movie.  Dr. Alan Grant from Jurassic Park.  He is the grumpy paleontologist who doesn't like kids, but, after a crazy adventure traversing through Jurassic Park with two kids, saving them multiple times from dinosaurs, he realizes that he does like kids.  It is a fantastic movie.  So I think a fun nickname for my son is Dr. Grant, or the doctor.  Plus, when Grant gets a little older and gets into trouble, I can yell at him like this:

And my love of dinosaurs also inspired this picture.  Katie got this for Grant and me back in June for Father's Day, way before Grant had arrived.

However, as much as I would like to name my child after a character from a dinosaur movie, the name Grant actually is a family name on my wife's side.  Katie had an Uncle Grant who she was very close to who passed away a little over two years ago.  I unfortunately never met him, but from all accounts he was an amazing man.  I have heard dozens of stories about him ranging from the funny pranks he would play on the people he loved, the tough questions he would challenge his loved ones with, and the deep and spiritual conversations he would have with anyone who would lend him an ear.  I am comforted knowing that my son's namesake will be looking down on him from heaven.

So, this blog is for Week 0, or the day Grant arrived.  This first post should be the longest post I ever write, mainly because in the first half of it I had to explain the blog and why I was writing it.  In this post I will be giving an abridged version of Grant's birth story.

On Saturday, October 4th, around 11 in the morning we were heading over to Which Wich, one of our favorite places to get lunch.  When we pulled up, Katie stopped me and said, "Woah, I just had a really bad cramp."  So I asked her if it felt like any of the ones she had had before, and she said that it felt different.  I took out my phone and opened my contraction app just in case she had gone into the early stages of labor.  The app is pretty awesome.  It tracks the length of the contraction, the time in between contractions, the average length and time of the contractions over the past hour, and over the past 6 hours.  After lunch we got home and I started getting stuff together for the hospital, just in case this was the real deal.  Once we were ready we settled down and watched college football.  Throughout the afternoon her contractions, or at least what we thought might be contractions, went from 12 to 14 minutes apart to about 8 minutes apart.  However, there were a few times when there would be an outlier, like a 35 minute interval between contractions, so we were not sure if they were actually contractions or if they were just Braxton Hicks contractions.

Around 5:45 PM, during Notre Dame’s biggest game of the year up to that point, with Notre Dame tied with Stanford at 7 – 7 in the 3^rd quarter, Katie’s water broke.  We got in the car and drove to the hospital, calling Katie's parents, who immediately hopped in their car and started driving up to Virginia from Florida.  Katie's parents will be known as Nunu and Big Papi to Grant, so I will refer to them by those names on this blog.  When we got to the hospital, Katie first had to go to the triage room.  The nurse said that she would check Katie to see if they would admit her to her room.  We were both like, “Are you serious?  We might not get admitted?!?!”  But apparently some people go to the hospital immediately after their first contraction, and the hospital sometimes has to send people home until they are having contractions 5 minutes apart or if their water breaks.  Well, needless to say, Katie was admitted to her room and about five minutes after that the anesthesiologist came in and started prepping her for her epidural, which was great because the pain had started to really intensify.  The guy was a resident who had a slow and thick Russian accent, straight out of a James Bond movie.  Well he administered the epidural, and messed up, so he had to do it a second time.  Instead of saying something comforting like, “Don’t worry, this is very common and not a big deal,”  he was almost bragging about how he has done over a hundred epidurals and this was the first time that he had to administer it a second time.  His second attempt worked and they started to pump the epidural medicine into Katie.

We thought that we were in the clear for a while once the epidural medicine was administered.  We were wrong.  About ten minutes after the epidural was administered, machines started beeping and nurses and doctors started streaming into the room talking with urgent voices.  I looked at Katie and she was starting to pass out, and I had no idea what was going on, so it was a little scary.  They had me hold an oxygen mask to Katie’s face while they maneuvered her body into different positions, trying to stabilize her.  They were eventually able to stabilize her, and they gave her something to stop the contractions for a while.  They finally explained to us what had happened.  Apparently the epidural medicine relaxed her body so much that her blood pressure plummeted, causing Grant’s heart rate to plummet.  While still inside, his heart rate was supposed to be between 110 and 160, however, it dropped to the high 70s, which seems low to me, but I’m not a doctor.  After that episode it was around 8:00 PM, and Katie was finally able to relax a little bit.  She was still able to feel the pressure of the contractions, but she did not feel much pain.  The next 9 hours were pretty relaxing, watching more college football and getting some rest.  I also found out around that time that Notre Dame had beaten Stanford on a ridiculous 23 yard touchdown pass on 4th down with about a minute left in the game.  Not too shabby.

At around 5:00 AM on Sunday morning the doctor had Katie try and push for an hour.  It was pretty much useless pushing because Katie was in extreme pain, and the pushes were not effective.  Near the end of this hour of pushing, Nunu and Big Papi arrived, very surprised that they had made it there before Grant had come.  Little did they know that he would not come for another 5 hours!  The nurses and doctors were scheduled for a shift change at 7:00 AM, so after the hour of pushing they had Katie rest for a few hours before they had her push again.  Around 9:00 AM Katie started pushing again.  Again, the first hour of this round of pushing was extremely painful for Katie, so they finally called the anesthesiologist back and he determined that Katie's body was very tolerant to the epidural medicine, which meant that she was feeling a lot more pain than she should have been, so they gave her some more medicine, which allowed her to push more effectively.  She pushed for another hour and a half until finally Grant came into this world!  And he had a major cone head!

I did not expect to cry when he was born, but as soon as he came out and I looked at him I was overcome with emotion, and I was crying tears of joy for a few minutes.  He is such a blessing to Katie and I, and we are so thankful that God granted us with Grant.  We are also so thankful that Nunu and Big Papi, and my parents, who will be known as Papa and Grammy, were able to see Grant on his first day.  Here is Grant with his loving grandparents.  We think that he hit the grandparent jackpot.

And finally, ending the longest blog I will ever write (hopefully), I leave you with a picture of Grant waving goodbye, and a video of Kid President giving a pep talk to someone on their first day on this Earth.