OUR JUNEBUG CAME IN MAY!

Rachel and I are proud to announce our new addition, Jonah Meyer Lukens, into our family. He showed up a couple weeks early and weighed in at 8 lbs 3 ounces, and measuring 22 inches!

I want to try and express my feelings towards my wife, Rachel, but there are no words I know of which will do her justice. She filled me with an immense amount of pride, love, joy, courage, and a true humbleness of what she did to bring Jonah into our world. I have a huge respect for all women who have given birth and I'm so proud to have witnessed Jonah's birth with Rachel...

Our Birth Story:

Things started to progress a week ago from today, last Thursday, when we went for her routine OB appointment and we learned she was already 2 centimeters. Realizing the labor had kind of already begun, our OBGYN, Dr. Gilberg-Lenz, threw out the good possibility of an induction. This was the first time we had truly even considered bringing on labor before Jonah might be truly ready and we were very hesitant about using any drugs...nevertheless this news did calm some of Rachel's fears that he would be too big for a vaginal delivery...Her mother had birthed two very big babies and unfortunately didn't have a positive experience with one..this along with other stories weighed heavy on Rachel's mind...

Onto the weekend, we left the appointment Thursday realizing she was much closer than we had expected (we still have to finish our house among other things!!) and patiently and anxiously waited for some contractions to begin...

Sunday morning around 7:30 am Rachel woke me up to tell me her water broke! We immediately called our doula, Ana Paula Markel (http://www.apmarkel.com) - an amazing woman, and our OB, who said if contractions didn't begin soon to be at the hospital by 3pm...fast forward....4pm, we've checked into Cedars (http://www.csmc.edu) -- contractions have begun, but Rachel can't feel a thing...we slowly begin to realize the induction will have to happen and the fact she'll have to take some pitocin (google it) and slowly try and bring on the birth and avoid a c-section, which Rachel was truly dreading....

Fast forward around 11pm...our Doula, Ana Paula, has hooked us up with a great room and great nurses on call as she knows many of them from doing many births at the hospital...Rachel has been on Pitocin for a few hours and still can't feel anything...we decide to send Ana Paula home as it could take hours before anything happens and we wanted her to be at her best...Rachel and I tried to sleep only to find at 3am Rachel's contractions had greatly increased and her pain went from a ".5" from the early evening to an "8". We called Ana Paula who came back and for the next two hours Rachel was such a champ diligently dealing with each contraction as they came on...as the next two hours progress Rachel's pain level had gotten unbearable. Worse, she was still only 2 centimeters (goal is 10). After a good fight with the contractions, Rachel looked me in the face and told me to order the epidural (google it)...this is coming from the woman who cries -- literally cries -- when she has blood taken -- the last month of her pregnancy she was informally diagnosed with gestational diabetes and had to take her blood 4 times a day...this was God's way of getting her ready for the big epidural shot!!

around 5:30am the head anesthesiologist came in with his resident and within 10 minutes Rachel had taken the shot with very little feeling...within an hour she wasn't feeling any pain and by 7am had gone to 9 1/2 centimeters!!!

By 8am she began to push...and push...for a woman who doesn't exercise regularly (but still looks amazing) she was giving any gym buff a run for their money!!! Ana Paula was awesome this entire time with her good spirit and good support emotionally...the nurses were great and at one point there were four of us all around Rachel cheering her on (picture any slow-motion scene in a movie i.e. Juno) ...around 9am our OB showed up...joking with Rachel she had to go out of town so to please hurry up!! All joking aside it was great to see Rachel in the height of all this she could still laugh and was doing amazing...By 10am...Jonah's head was starting to peak out after certain pushes and our OB and the head nurse whispered to each other and the next thing there was a little "vacuum" to help pull the little dude out...

I realize this sounds super freaky and scary, but we had scene it before and it doesn't cause any major damage and in our situation was needed since little Jonah's head wasn't positioned right to come out....long story short after three good tries --- he was out!!

The hospital post-partum --

Our post-partum experience was overall positive. The nurses were super friendly (mostly) and Jonah was a true champ with all the tests he had to do...I would definitely recommend Cedars to anyone looking to give birth in LA -- overall a very professional operation - great staff and quality people...after one night in the hospital we were ready to go home...in the end the constant interruption was grating on us all and home was where we needed to be...so we checked out a day early.

Rachel's parents have been with us since the weekend and have been amazing at fixing meals and running various errands for us. Ginnie is the head cook and Bernie is the resident handy man/engineer. We also haven't finished our remodel so we still have anywhere 4 to 5 guys over here each day finishing up the various things...fortunately our contractor is like an uncle at this point and his crew are great...we should be good to go by Monday's bris....

More to come later - enjoy the photos and please leave your comments!!

Much love,
Rachel, Clint & Jonah