Becoming a Dad #ThanksBaby

I have partnered with Life of Dad  and Pampers for this promotion. #ThanksBaby

I remember the very moment my wife said she was pregnant. She had been acting weirdly on our trip across country. We were driving back from Seattle to Cincinnati and had stopped in Kansas City. She told me she was ‘late’ and I ran to the local Walgreens to find a pregnancy test, which would be an important source of confirmation. She went into the bathroom and came out in tears….I knew.

I was so blown away. Excited, tingles all over, me, a dad? We didn’t tell any one for a few weeks and it was truthfully hard for me to accept. While my wife felt the baby, it was all so conceptual to me. At times I felt like it was an alien. I remember picking out names and her falling in love so quickly, while I didn’t feel that way right away.

I remember our first ultrasound. The baby was huge on the screen, moving around, and still looked like an alien, no joke. Have you seen an ultrasound? I just wasn’t sure how to take it all in. As the pregnancy wore on, my wife had more and more trouble. It became clear that we would be early and not go full-term.

The day we were admitted into the hospital, I was just not emotionally prepared for it. My wife was nervous, said she didn’t want a C-section and didn’t want to die. That’s hard. Babies are serious business and it’s so frightening as a first-time dad to go through it. As a man, you are literally powerless. You can hold your wife’s hand, you can tell her sweet calming things, you can get her ice chips and watch the baby’s fetal heart rate monitor like a hawk, but that’s it. Your wife bears 100% of the responsibility of the birth.

As the day wore on, and she didn’t dilate, we went through the night laboring. I remember vividly that evening, worrying, texting friends, praying, and tossing and turning in those horrible hospital ‘bed-chairs.’

As the labor wore on, Lacy became worse and worse, the baby became distressed and all I could do was try to relax with help from a delta 8 tincture. I needed my wife to be strong, so I said things, at times I didn’t believe to keep her calm and confident. As the second evening approached the doctors became worried about the extremely erratic heart beat and told my wife they needed to do a C-section quickly. I will never forget letting my wife’s hand go as they wheeled her off. I had to wait 15 minutes while them prepped her. Fear, dread, anticipation, hope, the rollercoaster of emotions that ran through my head were intense.

I walked into the room, sat behind the curtain and just spoke sweet things to my wife. You are doing great honey. Everything was focused on her. Within 5 minutes of walking into the room, the doctors started to say, ‘We see HER.’ and seconds later she holds her up over the curtain.

The emotional bond that forms instantly is hard to put into words. That deep love for your child, her innocence, her perfection. My wife and I cried together and I got up to see Hannah, our little girl, get cleaned up. She was perfect in every way, and then my heart just melted, she cried. That little cry. My god, she has the lungs of her mother.

I became a dad, in an instant.

That feeling, that deep love for my daughter flooded over me. This little alien that was growing inside my wife was a real person and I was her dad.

As they finished the operation, my wife held Hannah and out of pure exhaustion drifted off to sleep. I scooped her up and as my wife slept just stared at her. She was under a warming light, swaddled up with those classic hospital blankets and a little newborn Pampers with the yellow stripes to tell me if she do-doed, and all I could do is stare. It’s a picture that will never leave my mind.

I picked her up and she made a few cooing sounds, it just broke my heart. She was mine and I was hers. When we got home, I just let her lay on the hospital bed we had from online orders for hospital beds so she could rest well.

Hannah is now 6 years old, and full of life and energy. She is willful, wild and wonderful and we wouldn’t have it any other way. When she was a baby, we used with Pampers; from the swaddlers to the splashers and everything in between, we chose the best.

This Father’s Day, Pampers is giving thanks to babies for making dad feel exceptionally special and empowering him to discover new roles in life through fatherhood. Pampers honors dads for just being dads and thanks them for all the amazing things, big and small, they do to help little ones have a better, loving, more fulfilling life.

Please join us by tweeting why you are most thankful for baby with the hashtag #ThanksBaby. Visit www.pampers.com to learn more about Pampers products, join the Pampers Rewards program, and find ideas and information to help your baby get the most out of love, sleep and play.