The Day My Life Changed

So....May 3, 2008 totally rocked my world. That is the day that my life changed...forever.

I got off work a little early to go to the hospital with my pregnant wife on May 2nd (her due date), just for some monitoring of the baby to see how everything was going. We sat and talked to Amy's Grandmother for about an hour while the machines were taking their readings. When the nurse came back in she said something along the lines of "your amniotic fluid is kind of low, so we want to induce you now."

WHAT?!?! We were not ready for that! So much for waiting for her water to break, and going to the hospital with our bag of supplies (which had gotten left at home). It took a little bit for that to register. All of a sudden, it's really happening. We are having this baby....now! Ok, maybe not "now" since it took about 11hrs from that time until she was born....but you get the idea.

So we were admitted....and got comfy in our room. The first nurse, we'll call her "the devil" or Nurse D, was a crabby older lady at the end of her shift. We only had to deal with her for the first few hours thankfully, and then the best nurse in the world showed up! Now I don't remember her name, but I'm gonna call her DBN or Da' Bomb Nurse (old skool enough for you..??). DBN was awesome!! She stayed with us until Danica (nice name huh...? More on that in a bit) was born, even though she had to stay a little while past her shift ending.



The first few hours were fairly uneventful. We sat around and talked, Amy's mom, and sisters showed up, and we just chatted for a while. Then they brought the IV of Pitocin. This is the inducing drug. Once that was on for the next few hours contractions came sooner and sooner...and a little bit more painful....apparently. DBN came in every hour or so to check wifey's dilation, and see if we needed anything. Eventually it got to where it was pretty unbearable for the wife, so in comes the Anesthesiologist with the Epidural. After that took effect we both (wifey and I) took about a 3 hr nap. Amy's mom was watching the Contraction Meter while Amy slept and was pretty shocked to see the needle jumping and Amy didn't even stir.

Back to the name thing. We had quite a time figuring out what to name her. At first, before we knew we were having a girl, we had several lists of names to choose from. We would each make separate list's and then compare. We found out that I like strong traditional names, and Amy likes "weird" names. So she came up with Danica, and it has nothing to do with the NASCAR driver. Apparently she went to school with a Danica and liked it. I wasn't crazy about it at the time but it grew on me and now I love it. We of course call her Dani for short. As far as boy names go....we're glad we had a girl, because we couldn't decide on a boy name to save our lives. I wanted Jonathan Myron (Myron is Amy's grandpa's name), but she wanted all these weird names like Kayden, and such. We actually got mad at each other about it.... good thing she's a girl!

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled blog....

At about 3:30am the Dr. came in and woke us up, they checked the dilation again and said "well...it's time to start pushing." At about 5:45am I could see Danica's head, and at 6:01am on May 3, 2008 our first child, a girl named Danica Brooke Wyenberg was born. It was the most amazing experience of my life, and the next 2 days in the hospital was kind of a blur. Between my parent's (who were moving back to the area from Houston, TX) arrived in town that night and came by to see their first grandchild (she's the first on Amy's side too), and all the other visitors, it was an exciting couple of days.

Here are a few pictures of my beautiful baby girl:


at the hospital ...ready to go home:Me and her on a walk last weekend:
This is probably my favorite one of her so far (love that face, that's pure me!):
...and the happy new family: