My wife Angela and I live less than two miles from the hospital where she was slated to give birth so when she started complaining of her first potentially real contractions late last night we weren’t too rushed to get to the emergency room.
Boy were we mistaken to wait! 
Within a few hours overnight, my wife’s contractions got progressively worse to the point that when I finally decided to rush her to the hospital the pain was paralyzingly severe. My wife didn’t want to move.
“It’s too late! I’m in full labor. Call 911! The ambulance has to come get me!”
My kids were now awake and I was totally frazzled.
“It will be quicker for me to get you to the hospital than for the paramedics to get here,” I told her. “Just hold on a little bit longer!”
As we opened the front door to leave, Angela’s water broke inside the house. Her screams now exploded even louder and stronger than they previously had. (Elena would later say “She sounded like an opera singer”).
On our way to the hospital, I called 911 to see if they could get the doctors at the hospital to wait for my wife outside the entrance to ER. The 911 dispatcher told me they couldn’t do that because they don’t communicate with hospitals for emergencies they don’t handle directly. Despite a horrible delay at a red light near the ER, we made it to the hospital just in time.
Less than 15 minutes after Angela entered the ER, at exactly 6:58 a.m., my wife gave birth to our daughter Naomi Ruiz. I missed the actual labor by two minutes because I got stuck filling out hospital paperwork. Noami weighed 6 pounds, 14 ounces and measured 19 1/2 inches.
First Moments and First Impressions
Upon seeing Naomi I had two reactions. “Dang, I don’t ordinarily say this of newborns but this one’s cute.” My middle daughter Briani and my son Jonathan were born with the alien look typical of most babies but Naomi came out with the blazing newborn cuteness of her older sister Elena.
My second thought was whether my wife was going to change her mind about calling her “Naomi” because she’s very picky about things like this and the last time we had a baby our child remained nameless for two full days.
Angela’s first reaction: “she’s got a lot of hair.”
The first sibling to hear Naomi cry over the phone was Jonathan. His reaction: “Is that really her? Already?”
Elena says her first reaction was to scrawl “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” on a piece of paper.
Briani’s reaction: “I want to hug my sister and I want to change my baby sister’s diaper.”
Night at the Hospital
The only thing that disappointed the kids ironically was that they didn’t have time to “wait” for their sister to be born. My eldest kids had set aside their Guinness Book of World Records and an iPad in anticipation for the hospital waiting game they experienced with Briani.
Given that the kids didn’t have the opportunity to “wait” for Naomi to be born, my wife and I have decided that we’re going to do a very Latino family thing to cap this great day off: tonight, if the hospital permits the three kids, my wife and I will sleep together with Naomi in our private hospital suite.
Until Naomi is old enough to be part of our famous PapiBlogger road trips, little sleepover adventures like this will have to do.
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