Welcome, Asher!

Alright, here's the quick stats for those of you who are always desperate for the details:
8:33 am
7 lbs 11 oz
20 1/4 in
Oh yeah, and we went ahead and sprung for the "third lower appendage" option.

And for those of you looking for a little more narrative (ok, and maybe some pictures too), here ya go:
Our third breech baby -- and our second double footling. About two weeks ago he flipped head-down, but four days later decided that upside-down isn't all it's cracked up to be and flipped back to breech. So the C-section was scheduled for Tuesday morning.

Doctors, in their infinite wisdom, have determined that the best possible thing for an expecting mom, considering that she won't get a full night's sleep for months, is to cut her final night of sleep short by having you show up at the hospital at 5:30 am for your C-section. Mel was in the OR at about 7:30, but the spinal turned out to be quite the ordeal (45 minutes' worth) and surgery didn't actually start until 8:15 or so.

It is a truly amazing thing to watch a cesarean. On one side of the sheet is your wife's face, showing no signs of discomfort whatsoever. On the other side of the sheet is her body, with a gaping hole cut in it and several people reaching a variety of sharp and blunt metal instruments into said hole. The experience wasn't quite as surreal for me this time as last time -- maybe just because I knew what to expect to a greater degree. Still incredible to see though.

I went ahead and snapped away once the action got started... First out was one little foot, then one more:




The cord was wrapped around his neck (loosely), but once they got it untangled it was time to sit him up so he could see the world:




And that was one of the strangest sights I have ever seen. Less than 5 seconds after being pulled out, there he was, completely silent, just sitting calmly and surveying his new domain.

Over to the warming table we went to get him wiped down and checked out. Ten fingers, ten toes, and eyes definitely not adjusted to the light of "outside" yet. Once I shaded his eyes he was ready to look at me:




The rest of the surgery went perfectly fine -- once Asher had been given the nurse's seal of approval I brought him over by Mel and we waited things out together while the surgeon put everything back together:




After that was all taken care of they headed the three of us over to the recovery room, where we finally had the chance to meet the little guy and confirm our suspicion that his name did indeed have to be Asher Josiah Brewster.

Momma and baby are both doing well now. Mel had a bit of a time coming off of the anesthesia (she spent a bit of the morning puking), but since then things have been really really smooth. Asher has been living up to his name ("blessed"/"happy") and seems to be a pretty easy-going guy (although as I type this he is trying to prove me wrong on that count). He has taken well to nursing and even let us get some sleep last night.

Alright, here's the part where we ditch the yakkin' altogether and get down to that staple of parents everywhere, the gratuitous overload of pictures just for the sake of showing off the little guy:

Update: So apparently the "clear=left" attribute of the br tag doesn't work once you're seeing the post in google reader, thereby throwing off the alignment of text and photos. I'm too lazy to try to figure out what would work better right now -- anyody wanna fill me in on a better way to keep the layout the same even in an aggregator?