The amazing, extraordinary tale of Luna's birth

It was 1:45 AM on the 18 of September when Gabi woke up after hearing what she thought it was the slight cracking sound of her water breaking. (She was right; I had no idea that one could actually hear waters breaking.) She immediately grabbed the phone and called the doctor's office. Gabi told the doctor on call (who was not her primary OB-Gyn, but someone from the same practice we've actually seen a couple of times) that her water just broke and asked what she should do next. The doctor asked how strong and frequent her contractions were; Gabi said something like "I feel fine, nothing too different from earlier today". So the doctor just told her "OK, it seems you're not ready just yet. Go back to bed and call me in the morning". So Gabi just came back to bed, but unsurprisingly, she started having frequent, strong contractions very soon after she hung up the phone.

We stayed in bed for a while until about 3:00 AM, when we decided to just run to the hospital without calling the doctor. But it seems that the business of taking showers, getting dressed, putting some stuff together, and calling our friend Diane downstairs took much longer than expected (we had asked Diane to come upstairs to our apartment and babysit Maia when the time came.) When Diane came in (dragging a pillow, virtually sleepwalking), Gabi was already in opera singer mode in the bathroom, which not only woke Maia up, but probably the whole neighborhood. Maia was actually not freaking out, but was clearly impressed to see her normally composed mother hitting high soprano notes like that. From that moment on, I did everything I had to do (the phone calls, the stuff-gathering, etc.) with Maia hanging from my side, running around like a cartoon character.

When Diane saw Gabi, who was simply holding on to the bathroom sink trying to deal with the pain, she immediately realized that it was too late to take her to the hospital. Although Diane is formally trained as a nurse, she has not actually dealt with highly gory stuff for a long time, let alone deliver a baby. "Call 911", she told me, "we need an ambulance, now". When I was dialing 911 from the kitchen I actually heard Gabi screaming: "I can feel her head, it's right here!"; that was the very first time that I came to realize that the baby would be born here at home. Holy crap. It was in that very moment that Diane's job description changed radically from "babysitter" to "midwife", just like that. So I ran downstairs to drop Maia off with Rob (Diane's husband, awake in the middle of the night like everybody else), so our little daughter would not have to sit through the whole show. I rushed back upstairs, and I saw Gabi down on her knees on the bathroom's rug, one arm on the bathtub, the other on the towel's rod, being embraced by Diane, also down on her knees. It's only been a couple of minutes, but it seemed as if the ambulance was taking ages. Then, I heard the rumble of a large truck's engine downstairs on the street. I ran the three floors downstairs in a wink, but when I got to the street I realized it was the curb-sweeping truck, not the ambulance, that was there. I ran back upstairs (again, like a maniac) and when I peeked into the bathroom, I saw Diane holding our little baby in her arms, right next to Gabi, just like that. Our daughter Luna was born, literally, in what it took me to go down three flights of stairs and back up running like a madman, which is less than a minute. It was 4:20 AM on September 18, 2008. Our baby Luna looked nice and pink, with her little eyes wide open, looking around. She barely made a sound, which kind of baffled everybody, as used as we are seeing screaming newborns in the movies. But she was fine, she was happy, she was great.

I grabbed the phone to call the doctor again. Obviously, I woke her up once more, and told her that the baby was already here, that she looked fine, that Gabi seemed to be alive too, and what the hell was I supposed to do next. "Oh, you're at the hospital?", she asked me. "No, we're at home, we never made it to the hospital." "What?!" "Yes, we're at home! What do I need to do now?" "OK, you need to cut the cord", she said. "Get a couple of shoelaces, tie them an inch apart, and cut." "OK, I'll call you back!", and hung up. Then I heard someone knocking on our door, and ran down to open it. Once again, it wasn't the ambulance, it was the cops, a guy and a woman that did nothing but look around and try to inspire authority; utterly useless. I let them in and ran looking for the shoelaces. It's funny, but the only shoelaces that came to my mind were those in one of Maia's toys, a box containing a series of cardboard shoes with holes that help kids learning to tie their shoes. Those shoelaces, naturally came in wild, crazy colors, which were somewhat inadequate for such a serious task. I'm not sure why, but I picked the red and the orange (maybe because they would go well with the blood?). When I came back to the bathroom Gabi was sitting on the toilet, grabbing Luna against her chest, with the cord hanging right there. I was about to do it when the ambulance finally came. The paramedics rushed it with all their tools and gadgets, and I was glad to put away my colorful shoelaces discreetly into my pocket. The EMS guys were very young but they did their thing in no time and did not mess up. Somebody asked aloud: "what time was the baby born?", and I replied "at 4:25!", very eloquently, like I was totally in control. But I was really a shaky, sweaty mess.

I'm not sure how many people came into our apartment, but it ended up being quite a crowd, at least 8 of them, EMS, paramedics, cops, etc., just like in the movies. If you haven't been in our apartment, then you may not know that we have quite a small, narrow bathroom that barely contains me and Gabi on a normal, loving day. This time there was a permanent rotation of 4 to 5 people at a time, which was kind of impressive. Diane brought us Maia from downstairs and I shoved my way through the uniforms in the bathroom so she could see her mom and brand new baby sister. She said to me: "she has very black hair", which was true. Then someone asked me for a large ziploc bag to put the placenta in; I looked in the kitchen and handed them a sandwich size bag, which prompted some jokes I don't remember (I looked again and found a larger one that did the trick.) They strapped my courageous Gabi onto a bulky stretcher, and I could hold my baby daughter for the first time, at age 20-or-so minutes. They took the stretcher down the stairs (we live in a 100 year-old building with no elevator) and the stupid police woman would not let me bring Luna down the stairs myself ("it's against the procedures.") When we finally got into the ambulance they gave me the baby back and I rode in with Gabi and two EMS dudes. It was about 5:00 AM in a beautiful, fresh and spectacular night.