The emotional amazingness of the past 30 hours has left me with no real energy to do anything but copy and paste (virtually verbatim) the e-mail I sent last night to my family:

We woke up around 4 am with Maggie reporting that she was leaking a bit. Contrary to popular belief, water doesn’t usually break anything like it does on TV. Many women have to have their water broken at the hospital by their doctor, others seep more than burst. We were in that latter group.

Maggie passed her (and there’s just no non-gross way to say this) mucus plug around 6 and we were off to the hospital. After confirming with our doc that we weren’t too early, we checked into our VIP room (pretty much exatly like a hotel room, but with a weirder bed and no towel service).

The doc checked and found out Maggie was already a bit dialated but was concerned that there was too much blood in the “water” coming out of her. Because of this and the fact that the baby was still quite high up they decided to load Maggie up with Pitocin, a contraction-inducing drug, and get things rolling.

The drugs brought on some super intense and painful contractions (I’ve heard my mild-tempered wife curse before, but never with such regularity and conviction), but the monitors indicated that there was fetal distress (heart rate dropping when contractions are happening). Because of this Maggie wasn’t able to have an epidural, and so suffered through it full-force for a couple hours.

The baby’s position wasn’t changing, nor was his distress improving, so the doctor informed us that he recommended a c-section. He knew how much we wanted a natural birth, and explained we could continue with it, but that it could just amount to hours and hours of pain, and still end in a c-section. It was either that or Maggie screaming out “C-SECTION C-SECTION! I WANT A C-SECTION!” that swayed my (somewhat limited) vote.

An hour later I was a dad.

It all happened so fast, even the hour of standing in a waiting room with the family members of a bunch of other surgery patients flew by. Everything was behind closed doors, so I wasn’t able to be with Maggie during the caesarian, but I heard the baby’s first cries and only had to wait a couple minutes past that to meet the little guy.

The nurse wheeled him out and let me oogle over him for a minute (giving the waiting room crowd a moment to take in the half-breed) and then we took him back up to the VIP floor where he and I got to sit for about 20 minutes or so and wait for Maggie to come back.

It was surreal being alone with this baby, my son, just moments after his birth. I’ll never forget it, and I’ve not stopped staring at him since.

The c-section left Maggie stuck in bed, barely able to move at all. So, I’ve been doing double duty answering both of their cries. I’m not complaining though, I’m sure if Maggie was up and about she’d be handling more of the baby stuff, so this trial by fire is good for me (man newborn baby poop, ie. fetal tar, is sticky!).

And… drum roll please… I’d like to introduce you all to Casey Ryan McLaughlin, born 12:50pm (GMT+8) on May 4th, 2010 — almost exactly 7 lbs. He’s just awesome, in every sense of the word.

A bit about the name:

We had a hard time finding a name that fit both heritages and ultimately decided on Casey, as it suits his last time, transliterates pretty easily into his Chinese name (恺西), and we both really like it. His middle name was to maintain a multi-generational tradition from my side whereby the first born son is given his father’s name as his middle name. I have to admit though that considering his birthday, both Luke and Ryan Jr. (ie. R2) were front-runners. JK (sorta)

Subject: The perfect Mother’s Day present

If you’re anything like me, you’re thinking about something you can do for Mother’s Day next month. Well, I have a slightly different suggestion.

Next week, development ministers from G8 countries will meet to develop a plan to improve women and children’s health around the world. With more than 8 million children dying before the age of 5 and more than 300,000 women dying in pregnancy and childbirth each year, I know you’ll agree with me that this an important issue.

I just signed a petition asking the G8 to make sure they create a strong plan to ensure mums and babies around the world grow up healthy.

Please join me by taking action here:

http://one.org/international/actnow/mumsday2010/

Our best chance at impacting the process is by speaking together.

Thanks!

I urge the few people that still happen across this blog to head over to the link above and sign the petition. I may live in a country were petitioners are routinely ignored, but I’d like to think that I come from a country where that’s not the case. Being as close as I am to having my first child, it’s impossible not to read about the above issue and not realize how lucky I, my wife and our soon-to-be-born son all are. For all the benefits that he automatically has granted to him, and so many others do not, I hope you’ll take a moment and sign.

Maggie, Button and I spent most of the afternoon with our good friends, and about 1.3 billion others, down at the nearby lake. Between our big dog and their beautiful baby with big bright blue eyes, we grabbed a bit of attention — somewhat of a rarity in the expat-saturated neighbourhood we live in.

Aside from a nice stroll outside yesterday, I also finally got around to taking some pregnancy photos of Maggie. We’ve been talking about doing them for ages, but it always seemed to slip deeper down the “todo” list. However, about to hit week #35, the pressure to get it done or risk never having them gave us the kick in the pants we needed.

Having ventured out a few times now to check out our local maternity- and baby-goods buying options, I’ve seen no shortage of studios offering to take the photos for us. And while I’m sure they would have done a much better job than myself, the thinness of my wallet wouldn’t allow it. That said, I’m pretty happy with what we managed to take. As is Maggie, the proof being that she’s letting me share them

And what a bonus for us it is. So much advice, sharing of experiences, and a healthy amount of warnings. So, to help propagate that knowledge, here are a few links from around the China blogsphere talking about having babies in China that I’ve found particularly insightful.

Giving Birth in Chengdu – Chengdu Living: This excellent four-part series is penned by new father Sascha and offers a lot of advice and information. Though written particularly about giving birth in the capital of Sichuan, Chengdu, the series carries with it sagacity that applies to anywhere in China.

• Part 1: Giving Birth in Chengdu
• Part 2: Giving Birth in Chengdu – Selecting a Hospital
• Part 3: Giving Birth in Chengdu – the Cesarean Conspiracy
• Part 4: Giving Birth in Chengdu – A New Life

The hellish birth of a beautiful angel – Jakob Montrasio: My talented friend Jakob in Shanghai recently endured a rather terrible experience with the birth of his daughter at the hands of the Chinese medical system. He, his wife and his daughter all came out the other side relatively unscathed, but his account serves as an excellent warning for anyone planning to have kids here.

Adventures By Design – The Elbees: My friends Ric and Gin share their experiences (albeit not as often as they should) about having a baby here in China. Lots of cute photos of their adorable baby girl, Aria. These three people deserve much of the credit in preparing Maggie and I for parenthood and we love them for it.

“Foreign Baby in China” Category – ChinaHopeLive.com: Joel and Jessica, a couple in Tianjin, share their experiences and opinions on having and raising a baby in China.

Hao Hao Report “Babies” Tag: As might be expected, I get a lot of direction for China-focused information from stuff submitted to the Hao Hao Report, a Web site I run that is a human aggregator of stories about China.

Update 1

Having a Baby in China: a fantastic resource for parents having a kid in China — complete with a rather comprehensive Chinese-English pregnancy vocab list (complete with pinyin).

If you have any other good reads about having babies in China, please help me out and leave links in the comments!

However, in recent months, and much to the contrary of years past, I’ve found it harder and harder to share much personal. I hadn’t given much thought as to why, and assumed it was just because I’m busy. But I now wonder if it might have something to do with what I’m about to write.

Maggie’s pregnant and I’m going to be a dad!

Let me just repeat that… Maggie’s pregnant and I’m going to be a dad!

And with that, let me fill in a bit of back story. A few months ago now Maggie and I decided that we would start down the road to having our first child and beginning our family. We started talking to friends about their experiences and reading books on conception — I had thought it was a lot less complicated than it is. For instance, I was surprised to learn that there’s only about 40 days a year the average woman can get pregnant — or only about a 10% chance per month — being 16 and drunk seems to up the odds.

Anyway, with slightly more baby-makin’ education than my middle school’s “insert tab A into slot B” instructions, we set to it (snicker snicker). After no joy the first month of “trying” (a euphemism that I plan to continue using long after we’ve stopped trying to get knocked up), at the end of August Maggie’s pee delivered the best message urine has ever given me. She was pregnant.

As you can see from the picture to the right, the second line wasn’t reassuringly strong. The box indicated that while no second line didn’t necessarily mean “not pregnant”, even a faint second line meant “baby”. To confirm things, we headed down to the hospital and re-did the urine test and also got a blood test. She was definitely pregnant.

We had already told most of our family and friends that we were trying, and so were bursting a bit to let them all know the good news, despite us both knowing full well the percentage of pregnancies that miscarry. The miscarriage rate was really the biggest reason I didn’t want to announce it too early here.

At seven weeks we headed back down to the hospital for our first ultrasound. Most literature says that an ultrasound should be able to distinguish a heartbeat in the embryo between 6 and 6.5 weeks. There was no heartbeat. Like a cold slap our hopes dropped a few notches and we began to assume the worse.

The doctor told us that it was still early, and that we should come back in a week or two and check again. That led us into our recent trip up to Dalian, and then this past week’s National Holiday. Though impatient to know one way or the other whether everything was alright, we assumed a bit of extra time could only make the results more definite.

And so this morning, at 10 weeks into the pregnancy, we returned to the hospital and had our second ultrasound, which showed a perfectly healthy peanut-shaped smudge complete with heartbeat. A good thing too, as I’m not sure what Maggie would have done had she been suffering through rather harsh all-day “morning” sickness these last few weeks for nothing.

Now it’s real. Despite having planned this, and known about it for more than a month, today it’s really begun to stick. Maggie’s pregnant, and I’m going to be a dad. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath since we began this journey, and while tomorrow I’ll start holding it again, today… well… today I just simply can’t hold my breath, the smile on my face just won’t let me.