1 Year Ago…. Jones Hunt Gooden

In honor of Jones’ birthday a couple days go, I thought I’d repost the e-mail message that I wrote up and sent out one year ago about his actual birth.  We’ll soon be posting more about his actual 1 year birthday party and all the details of his special day, but I thought it would be fun to take a moment and look back to 1 year ago, oh how time flies……

 

****************SENT ON AUGUST 30, 2008 AT 10:20PM*******************

I wanted to officially send out the word to everyone that he’s here!  Jones Hunt Gooden was born on August 27th, 2008 at 7:08pm (local Manila time).  He was 6 lbs, 13 oz and 20 inches long (3,090 grams / 52 cm).  It was a long day and here are all the details…

Julie was scheduled for induction on the 27th (Wednesday).  I stayed home from work, we got up, got the kids ready for school, sent them off on the bus and then we headed into the hospital at 8am.  The hospital is called Makati Medical Center and is in the heart of Makati, just across the street from my office.  The facility opened in 1969 and unfortunately, it looks like it.  As Julie likes to say, “it looks a little rough.”  She says it looks like a 1960’s Army hospital….and it does. However, this is just the outward appearance as we found the quality of the professional staff to be excellent (although we had to get past the regular Filipino’isms with the admin staff).  One such odd requirement was that while in the “Birthing Room” with Julie the whole day, I had to wear scrubs over my clothes and little booties over my shoes.  This was very odd and supposedly it was for keeping the whole ward “sterile”, but it did make the day of waiting a little less comfortable.  In addition, I’m the only person who is officially allowed in the room with her. This made visiting by our friends very difficult, but with a little sweet talking and insistence, we were able to get a few people in to say hello and keep us company at times. To add insult to injury, there is a large new wing being constructed on the hospital which will be very nice and will house the labor and delivery wards, but it won’t open until December.  So, such is life and we deal with what we have…

Progress all day was slow, but we had a portable DVD player with us to pass the time and had some friends visit to keep us company.  Another very positive aspect of having the baby here is that our doctors spend much more personal time with us.  Julie’s OB (Dr. Henson) canceled all her appointments for the afternoon and dedicated herself to being at the hospital and spent hours in the room with us.  When I say she spent hours, I am not exaggerating. She had one hand on Julie's stomach manually tracking the contractions as the machine didn’t seem to be  picking them up as well all afternoon. As the hours passed, and more hours passed, and more… things finally started moving very quickly around 7:00pm when they wanted Julie to start pushing.  At that point, things happened extremely quickly and I was able to assist in delivering our new beautiful baby boy at 7:08pm. 

 

 

Both Jones and Julie did great with no issues.  After delivery, they did the normal checks, pokes, and prods (both in the room and in the nursery)  and we didn’t actually get up to our “recovery” room until around 11:30pm.  We had him “room in” with us (stay in our room as opposed to the nursery) and that is definitely against the norm here.  This sort of freaked out the staff and they really didn’t quite know how to deal with it as the standard here in the Philippines is the baby stays in the nursery until you get discharged from the hospital.  Needless to say, this meant the pediatric nurses were all in the nursery and the nursing staff on our floor weren’t all that helpful with the baby.  For his first night, Jones pretty much cried off and on throughout the night, so none of us got much sleep. When we were sleeping, we kept getting woken up by the nurses who came in to do random tasks that easily could have been done in the daylight hours (like stamping his footprints on the fake birth certificate you get to bring home for show). We couldn’t wait to leave the hospital and made it our mission to leave the next day!

 

We called the girls in the morning to tell them Jones had been born and Aleah  began asking all the important questions; “What’s he look like?  What color is his hair?” Ellery, on the other hand, said “Yahoo! Daddy, when are you coming to get us so we can go see the baby?” Man, they are cute! The next morning we had the girls stay home from school and I went home to get them.  They got to meet Jones in the hospital and they were both extremely excited.  It was very cute watching Aleah talk to Ellery about how to be a big sister since she’s the  veteran big sister after all.  Ellery wore out on the excitement factor a couple hours later and she went home with one of our helpers.  Aleah, however, did NOT want to go home.  She was loving it and wanted to stay all day, which she did.  Recovery went very well for Julie and Jones and our goal was to get out of the hospital and back home as soon as possible.  We ended up being discharged around 5pm and headed home that day (Thursday) which was about 22 hours after he was born (is that some sort of record?).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since we’ve been back home, we’ve been settling into life with 3 kids.  The first night Jones was up crying about every 30 minutes.  Then he slept all day yesterday and last night he slept wonderfully (up twice for feedings).  Our biggest challenge so far has been getting all the paperwork completed for his official birth certificate through the Philippine government and the start of the process for applying for his passport at the US embassy.  You would not believe all the forms and procedures and red tape you must go through when you have a baby in another country.  This has been quite the ordeal so far, but we’re making great progress.  The most difficult piece so far was getting his passport photo last night which took about an hour or more at the photo place trying to get a picture of his face unobstructed with his eyes open.  In addition, we hit a snag in the first step in the getting a birth certificate. It seems Julie’s occupation we listed as “Mother” is unacceptable to the Philippine government. The four copies of the hospital forms had to all be redone and resigned (by 4 different people) with “Housewife” as her occupation instead. This is just another example of what we deal with when we say “Filipino’isms.”

 

Welcome, Jones Hunt Gooden to our lives!!!!