I remember that Sunday well. Kris had another difficult night on the 4th, so we found a sitter for Branwyn and headed down to USA Children's and Women's Hospital to have her checked out. After a few hours of letting us sit in a room, checking her for dilation (she wasn't), etc... we finally convinced them to check her with the ultrasound. It was around eight am when they did, and found that Collin had less than a centimeter of fluid left around him. Needless to say, we were admitted and they began the IV drip to induce labor.

That was a long day. At ten after six, she'd finally hit the magic number of ten centimeters, and they brought in a tech to put the epidural needle into place. And all the while, she's trying to tell them, 'He's coming; he's almost here'. But her warnings were met with calm answers of, "no, it's too soon", as the nurses meandered around slowly getting the room ready. Fortunately, the delivering doctor entered the room to check on Kris' progress, and essentially caught my boy with the one hand she'd had a chance to get a glove on. At 6:21pm, before they'd even administered a drop of pain relief through the epidural, Collin came forth into the world.

But, there's part of that experience that I don't speak of often. You see, there was a span of maybe two seconds where time slowed down. I could finally see my baby boy, but he was much smaller than his sister had been. He was also pretty purple - and he wasn't moving.

In moments like that, when time almost stands still, there is an eerie quiet that envelopes the moment, and all your senses dull, because you cannot process what your eyes are telling you. The incomprehensible thought that I'd lost my child was simply not something I could process, and while the smells and sounds of those two seconds seem to have never been captured in my memory, every detail of his tiny, motionless body is carved deeply in my mind's eye; placed somewhere on an ancient stone wall, in a room that I tend to keep closed. Words simply cannot capture the vast whirlpool of emotion I felt in those moments after Collin was born, but before he took his first breath.

Of course, as we all know, there was a wiggle, and a small cough as his airway cleared. Time returned to its' normal pace, and like a record being restarted in the middle of a track, sound and smell both wound their way back into being. There was a frantic rush to get the warmer in place, to finish putting the gown around the delivering doctor, to cut the cord, and care for my little sprout, all as his small, squeaking voice struggled to let the world know he was here, that he'd arrived, and he was alright.

That, my friends, was nineteen years ago today.