Introducing...

Cole Willard Anderson!!

b. May 20, 2011, 1:38pm Mountain Time
Weight: 9lbs 5oz!
Length: 21"

(photos yet to come, don't worry)

I will let Jean fill you all in with details later (we got lots of pictures, thanks to doula/photographer Liz!), but it's late, and this dad is tuckered out. I'll give the very abbreviated version for now.

The induction began with the doctor breaking Jean's water, and ended about 5 hours later with a happy mommy, a proud papa, and a beautiful baby boy. The delivery went very very well, and Jean's recovery is going much more smoothly this time.

We lovingly nicknamed Cole "Sir Grunts-a-lot" because of his tendency to vocalize every exhalation, but we soon learned that could actually be an indication of ill health/infection (sometimes babies don't develop the symptom of infection-related fevers quite so early on-- or so it was explained to us). After some blood tests, they determined that he is showing signs of some sort of infection, and they ran another series of tests (one of which was a lumbar puncture, poor little guy) to determine where and to what degree he has an infection.

Unfortunately, it looks like the best case scenario is that he'll be in the hospital to receive the necessary treatment of antibiotics for about 7-10 days. If it is more severe, that could wind up being more like 20 days. We're glad that they caught the symptoms so soon, and we are optimistic that he will receive the proper treatment and help, but we're obviously sad that we won't get to bring him home right away. The whole situation is so new and is still currently developing, so we're not entirely sure how to react just yet. Please keep little Cole in your thoughts and prayers, and we hope to post some good news on here soon.

I'm sure Jean will address this in her more complete post later, but I want to take a second to thank Liz Johnson for all of her help during the labor and delivery portion. I think the word Jean used to describe her the most was "unflappable," and I will attest to the fact that she cannot be flapped. She was such a great help during labor, and she got some really great pictures that we would not have gotten otherwise. Her coaching and morale-boosting really helped things go smoothly, and I want to add my thanks to the gratitude that I know Jean will convey in her upcoming post.

By now, you're probably thinking that I have a warped concept of the term "abbreviated," so I'm going to wrap this up. We'll post updates as we get them, and again, we'd appreciate your thoughts and prayers as we figure out how to help our little Sir Grunts-a-lot.