My younger sister told me that my new baby is going to be bitter if I have an entire month of letters to his sibling and nothing for him. This is the plight of the second born. Nothing is new and no one takes as many photos or cares as much. Of course none of that is true but you do have less time because the second born is born into a different family. Your first joins you and your spouse and your second joins an already established family. It’s just different.
However, in keeping with fairness I’m going to try.
On September 19th we welcomed Baby Lucas (not his real name) into the world. Unlike his sister (27 hours of labor) he arrived in very short order. My water broke at 2am and despite not being new to this rodeo I wasn’t sure what was going on because I wasn’t having contractions. So I got back in bed. Twenty minutes later the contractions started and they were five minutes apart and painful from the get go. Our emergency middle of the night babysitter couldn’t come over because her husband was out of town so we woke N and took her over there before heading to the hospital. She was a trooper.
We walked into the hospital and I just kept repeating “I want an epidural” to everyone I met, which shouldn’t have been surprising since I was 8cm dilated when we got there. Forty-five minutes later my wish was fulfilled and everything was fine until the baby’s heart tones dropped and then all of the sudden the room was a flurry of activity. I was transferred to another bed and wheeled into an operating room. I’m pretty sure at this point I was ready to cry because all I had heard out of all that complicated medical jargon was that the baby wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Fortunately all the drama passed, I was transferred back to the regular birthing bed and we waited to get to 10cm.
At 6:57am after pushing for three contractions Lucas was born. This birth experience was so different from N’s. I could actually feel him passing through me and coming out. With N it was a blur of forceps and panic. It is always surreal to me that you can make an entire human in your body. I guess that is why it is called the miracle of birth. I got stitched up and a couple of hours later I was up and walking. I could sit on my tush without a donut, I used the bathroom like a regular human being and I managed with just a few doses of motrin and not vicodin. All this must sound very mundane but my only other experience was so different.
Its definitely different the second time around. In general you are more relaxed, the muscle memory comes back and you just get back into the swing of a newborn.
After a long journey to have a second child we are thrilled he is here and healthy.
Lucas is very sweet and cuddly and his sister is quite smitten. As are we. 
Parsingtime 