Here are the promised pictures, for I am Dad, the Camera Dork. I’ve put them all on our Flickr page, here.  Special thanks to those dorkettes who helped by taking some of these: Tonua, and Shannon’s boss whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head.

And, because I will not rest until he’s truly and completely mortified in his teenage years, here’s a movie.

Baby came. Connor Loughlin Nitchie. Monday, 7/16/07, 19:58. 5 lbs, 8ish oz. I’d planned a fancy poety post about the labor and the birth, about how he wasn’t there and then he was and how it’s as simple and profound as that, but the theme of today seems to be that what you plan and what happens don’t always get along. True: he wasn’t there, and then he was, but then he wasn’t breathing. Or rather, as the pediatrician put it, he was breathing, but “not consistently.” As you might expect, something like that turns the supposed beauty of childbirth into the most terrifying pocket of time imaginable, and I’d rather not talk about it, because it was awful, and besides:

He’s fine. He’s in the NICU on a ventilator, and everything else about him seems perfect. He’s on an IV for antibiotics (he spent 17 hours in a ruptured sack, which introduces major possibilities for infection), and they said before I left the hospital at 1:30 A.M. that they may be able to wean him off of the ventilator by later this (Tuesday) morning, and get him out of the NICU in a few days.

Shannon’s doing well, though a bit fuzzy. The labor, though long (as Mike noted, the water broke at 2:30 a.m., and he didn’t come until nearly 8 p.m.), wasn’t one of those horror story births you hear about (epidurals are wonderful). When it came time to push, we went through maybe 12-15 rounds, and then out he came. Shannon rocked it. And now she’s a bit fuzzy, and hopefully sleeping.

Me? I snuck home for a few hours of sleep (currently on Hour 25 of consciousness after around 2 hours’ sleep), and am finally starting to come down off the adrenaline high. I left the camera at the hospital, so I don’t have any pictures, but they’ll be along eventually. But trust me: he’s beautiful.

Bed now. More later.