In the end, it was just over an hour.

Just over an hour between being asleep on the floor of Auckland hospital, to standing, bewildered under the delivery suite lights, helping to dress my newborn son.

Mava had been induced on Sunday – the scans had suggested that all was ok but that our baby was small for his age. We spent an oddly serene day waiting for the induction medication to kick in. They give you a dose every two hours until you go into labour but sometimes it takes a few hours to work and sometimes it takes days. It was actually lovely, in a way. Mava and I both read for hours in-between the doses. We went for coffee and a stroll in the domain, Mava constantly assessing baby’s every shift and every hint of a contraction.

My goodness, though, when it happened... it happened. Zero to one hundred. A blur. 

I won’t labour you with all of the details but it’s become clear to me that there's a reason every parent has a birth story.  It was surreal. It just felt like a week’s worth of crazy experiences happened in the space of fifteen minutes. It was beautiful, wild, traumatic, thrilling... it was animal. All these things. 

Mava was incredible. I felt so proud of her, and yet so helpless at the same time. 

And weirdly through it all, I felt calm. I’m not bragging. I’m not saying calmness was a good response – honestly I was probably just a bit stunned – and it turned out our son was too when he came out. They hurried him off and chucked him on the oxygen and he regained his colour. I took my cues from our amazing midwife and the other hospital staff. She wasn’t freaking out too much and so I didn’t either. 

The scans were right – our son was small for his gestational age. But he what lacked in size he made up for in his capacity to feed. There can be no doubt he has inherited my skin tone, my hair colour, and my appetite. This morning is the longest I’ve been away from him in his life, but at five days old I know him well enough to know that right now he is probably feeding.  Isn’t it incredible how instinct works? Out of the womb, almost blind, and yet he absolutely throws himself at the boob. Head back, mouth wide, latch! Who taught him that?! 

A few random takeaways:

1) The placenta. Wow. That thing could feed a family of four. 

2) We had three nights in hospital and a couple more in Birthcare afterwards. If our experience of the New Zealand healthcare system this week is anything to go by, it is being completely held together by migrant workers: Indians, Filipinos, Europeans, South Americans, Pasifika... they were fantastic. For all the justified concern over the health care system as a whole, we had a really positive experience and felt so grateful to the people working in what are often very tricky conditions. 

3) Women's bodies, eh? To have the capacity to grow an entire human being, from his skinny little frog legs folded up at his belly, to his tiny little fingernails to the lightest fur on his pink little cheeks. To grow him, birth him, and then, having done it all, having done everything... to immediately switch to nourishing him day and night.

What can I tell you about our son? He’s got his mum’s eyes. He sucks his thumb. His first music was the Koln Concert and he made sure to stay up to watch Will Young and Tom Latham  score centuries against Pakistan. His name will be finalised soon enough. When he’s bulked up a bit, he’s got a long list of visitors waiting to meet him, too. 

After five nights away, yesterday I put our son in his carseat and drove him home. His older brother ran home from school and cuddled him on the couch. Through the madness and exhaustion of the week, running on caffeine, sugar, and love, we sat there together, a family. It was perfect.