Introducing Max, aka "Speedy"!

Baby Locke #2 had a due date of Feb. 12, 2010. I had planned to work until Feb. 5, 2010 to give myself a week of head room. However, as of Jan. 27, I was already 4cm dilated. We were preparing for baby to arrive any day. In fact, I was quite anxious for baby to come because I was getting increasingly uncomfortable. On Sunday, Jan. 31, I spent 1 hour on the elliptical machine at the gym, hoping to get things kick started! However, to my disappointment, there was no sign of baby and I begrudgingly went to work on Monday.

On Monday Feb. 1 evening, I went to pick up Jalen at Ricky's parents house in Seattle and we went to a Sichuan restaurant for dinner. Around 7:30pm I started feeling slightly painful contractions. I had been getting Braxton Hicks contractions for a week, so I wasn't sure if this was the real thing or not. After dinner, I gave Ricky a call at 7:54pm to tell him to come into Seattle just in case. I was timing my contractions and they were coming around 2 - 4 minutes apart. However, they were still mild and I didn't have trouble getting through them.

Ricky got to his parents house around 8:30pm and suggested that we leave for the hospital right away. I didn't want to be overreacting so I paged the oncall doctor. She suggested we come in after I told her the contractions were 2 to 4 minutes apart. The worst thing that can happen is that they'd send me home. So I said good night to Jalen, and Ricky and I left for the hospital. I figured that we still had plenty of time because these contractions were nothing compared to what I remembered from the last time.

As soon as we got into the car, around 8:45pm, my contractions all of sudden became really intense. It took a lot of cursing and screaming just to get through them. I was thinking, oh my God, how did I get through these last time? By the time we got to the hospital, I was hanging on for dear life. Then, something felt strange and I thought the baby was coming. I felt the urge to push. I yelled to Rick, "something is happening!!" He drove the car to the ER entrance where he quickly summoned help. That strange feeling I had was my water breaking. The ER staff brought over a wheelchair. I took one look at it and thought "you've got to be kidding me". Rick said, no we need a stretcher. I don't know how they got me onto the stretcher but I just remember being wheeled into the hospital and up the elevators. I was grabbing onto the sides of the stretcher as I screamed through my contractions. I was doing my best to avoid pushing.

The triage nurse examined me and said, "oh, there's the baby". They were going to try to get me to the delivery room but thought better of it. Because in the next minute, the baby slipped out. I was not even pushing! I was in such shock. They handed the baby to me and Rick said "it's a boy!" I was sobbing from shock and relief. I can't believe what a close call that was. I was officially checked into the hospital at 9:05pm and the baby was born at 9:06pm. If we were just a few minutes later, I could have had the baby in the car!

Rick and I didn't know the sex of the baby ahead of time. We were not so secretly hoping for a girl and had finally settled on a girl name just days ago. But we still had no boy name! After getting to know our new baby son for a little while, we decided to call him "Max". Just Max, not short for anything. We like that it's different sounding than Jalen so he will be his own little man.

Welcome baby Max, mommy and daddy love you so much already!