On June 7^th 2008, Snormi’s identity was revealed as…Everett Maxwell Barber Butson.  Until the moment he arrived we didn’t know boy or girl, and in either case we had to meet in person before choosing a name.  But it didn’t come right away.  We had a short list of girl and boy names, and we tried a few over the weekend before deciding.  We chose Everett Maxwell for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is fitting of a poet & explorer.  A close friend of ours said that his name is “on the hip side of nerdy”, and this is certainly good news to us.  Perhaps soon we will get him a pipe and a jacket with patches on the elbows.

Melissa’s labor was…much more difficult than we expected (Chris speaking).  It started at 5am on Thursday and she didn’t give birth until 1:24 pm on Saturday, during which her contractions were never more than 8-10 minutes apart and neither of us slept very much.  The midwife broke her water about 10 am Saturday and they noticed a lot of meconium, apparently more than most people had seen before.  Melissa felt an urge to push about 1pm and it only took her 24 minutes to push the baby out, at which point the midwife and neonatologist went about trying to remove as much meconium as possible from his airways.  We were able to spend a few minutes with him before they gave him a vitamin K shot and took him to the special care nursery for about an hour of observation, after which they decided that his breathing noises had diminished enough.  One major epiphany was when the nurse brought him from the nursery, opened the door to our room and said “Butson baby?”  She wheeled him in and left him with us.  This was the first time we spent alone with him and we will never forget it.

A couple hours after birth we were moved from the labor room to a post-partum room.  Amanda and Chris went home to let the animals out and get Thai carry out for dinner.  Then we returned to the room and everyone ate dinner together while we slowly adjusted to this huge change in our lives.  Amanda left in the evening to stay at our house.  Melissa and I stayed in the room that night and put Everett in the nursery periodically to get some sleep between feedings.  At one point he started crying and wouldn’t quit, and the nurse asked if his diaper was dirty, which had not previously occurred to us.  Clearly there is a fair amount of parenting common sense that we have to learn.