Princess BrideMarking out my life

The movie The Princess Bride has now marked a third major event in my life.

I have always enjoyed the movie, ever since I was a kid, but it is my wife Esther's favorite movie. Back in 2006, I had noticed that she didn't own it yet. Therefore, I had bought for her. When it was time to propose, it was one of the many gifts that I gave her (My proposal plan was fairly complex, involving gifts, riddles, and cherry limeade).

We got married a year later. We had a really difficult time picking out a song to dance to because we hadn't really had a song "moment". We ended up going with You Are So Beautiful, but the song didn't really mean that much to us. However, my wife's best friend mentioned to me in private that she had a copy of the theme song to Princess Bride. So we hatched a plot. At the reception, Esther and I danced to You Are So Beautiful, and then afterwards we were supposed to sit down. I stopped her, and then nodded to the DJ. He started to play Storybook Story. First time she cried as a married woman.

So this brings us to the third event marked by Princess Bride. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, Esther and I have been expecting a baby. In fact, Esther had been having mild contractions for the past month or so. Last Friday, Esther and I were watching Princess Bride, simply because we love the movie. Afterwards, as we watched the special features, Esther started to feel her contractions pick up in speed. After some phone tag with doctors and family members, we decided that even though she wasn't feeling any pain, we should still head out to the hospital.

Once there, we found that she wasn't actually into labor yet (April Fools!). However, the baby's heart-rate dipped a bit. Apparently this is quite common, being caused when the umbilical cord gets squeezed by the contractions, but they still wanted to keep him monitored. We had no desire to argue, so we ended up staying the night, often quoting lines from a certain movie to ease the stress.

At 3 am Saturday, things intensified and Esther went into labor. 7 am I woke up. That's right, I'm a terrible husband (actually, Esther didn't let them wake me because she is an amazing wife). The rest of that day was trying to balance getting the contractions moving with keeping the baby's heart-rate up, which ended up being a very delicate balance. My parents came out so we had some company most of the day, but they needed to go to bed by midnight. It wasn't until 3am Sunday that they determined that they needed to perform a C-section.

So, Martin the fifth was born Sunday, April 3rd, 3:42am. He's a strong healthy boy, and cuter then every baby in the place (I know because I'm objective). He was 8lb 6oz, and 20 1/4 inches. We are now home, and learning all sorts of new things about our new son. I wonder what his favorite movie will be...