The Oldest Turns 16...

Today is my oldest child's 16th birthday. It's easy to look back and ask, "Where did the time go?" I'd like to tell you a little bit about what happened 16 years ago today...

First off, our son (and we didn't know he was a 'he' until after he was born...) should not have arrived on April Fool's Day. That was not the plan. The plan was to have our little bundle of joy earlier and that's why we were scheduled to begin the labor on March 30, 1995.

So, if you do some quick math, there's a couple of days between being induced on a Thursday and the baby being born on a Saturday. That's right! Two days of labor... We checked into the hospital at 6pm on Thursday evening and then the waiting began.

Since this was our first child, we really didn't know what was going on. Friday came and went and both my wife's and my child's vital signs were okay--they just said we should keep waiting.

After 28 hours of labor the doctors told us that if some serious progression didn't happen soon, then they would perform a c-section and get that baby out. Still we waited. About 11 hours later, they said we needed to prepare for surgery. Our son must have heard them and decided he didn't want to be born that way because that's when things really started to progress. Just after 10:30am on Saturday morning, just after the first session of general conference began and while the final four teams were about to play to see who would go to the championship game, we two became we three. And nothing's been the same since.

We gave him my mother's maiden name. It's not your average name, but, then again, he's not your average kid. My now 16-year old son just said goodnight and he said it was a really great birthday. Maybe we're doing something right after all...