That was the absolute most incredible 18 hours of my life!!

I've been blessed to have been involved with and witness to many truly awesome events in my short 27 years....but NOTHING tops what I saw my wife do for the past 18 hours.

Cindy started into "labor" around 3:00 in the afternoon yesterday (Sunday, 10/19/2008). She wanted her mom there first so we called her and she came over and sat with us for a little while and when we clocked her contractions at around 3.45 minutes apart, we called Susan Hulet, our midwife to go ahead and come out to check Cindy to see where she was at at this point. Susan came over to the house around 6:00pm and when she checked Cindy she said she was at about a "4" so we knew we were definitely in labor, but it would probably be a little while. In the back of my mind though, I arrogantly thought it would be super quick and that would be that. Nine hours later Susan checks Cindy and she's at about a "7 or 8" she says. By this point we thought Cindy was transitioning because she was having such intense contractions so to hear that she was about an "8" was pretty frustrating. By this time we had our entire team at the birth (and had had them there several hours!). Even though Cindy did get frustrated, she birthed a beutiful, healthy 7lb 5 oz baby boy at 7:45 AM the next morning after 11 hours in active labor, 2 of those actively pushing!! His name is Harper Joseph.

Watching my wife go through that for the past 18 hours has literally changed my life forever. To watch her go through such trial, difficulty, dissapointment, pain, exhaustion, and "push" through it all to get to the other side and be the most hospitable person the entire 18 hours I could ever imagine and still have a smile on her face at the end, has made me fall in love with her all over again. Nothing I could ever say or do could ever match or top what I saw her do today. The amount of power and strength that God infused into her was so mind boggling that I'm still having a hard time sorting everything out. She went from being super confident, to totally destroyed and ready to transport, and all the way back to determined and hanging onto the promise God had made up about her birth from the beginning and persevering through to the end. At the end I literally burst into tears because I was so overwhelmed by the magnificent person that I'm blessed to call my wife. And to think, the entire time she was in labor she was only concerned about me and everyone at her birth. Wow, that's all I can really say right now because, for one, I haven't slept a wink in over 30 hours, and I just went through the most mind-boggling experience a person will ever have the blessing to go through once, let alone multiple times. So this post is to say I love Cindy Haggerton, my wife, and the mother of my son: Harper Joseph Haggerton. She blows me away in every way. Thank you God for blessing me so....