Well…not really.

At the time it sure felt like it even though we knew other people had given birth before. We’d seen the training films in the mandatory child birth class. It was an eye-opening experience that left my wife trying to convince me to carry the baby to term. Her argument was that she’d carried the baby for five months, all she was asking me to do was carry it for four. Couldn’t I see how fair that was?

All I could see was that childbirth was no picnic and I wondered why they had they had the classes at all. The instructor assured us that the things we learned would come back to us when we needed them in the delivery.

She was wrong.

When the baby decided it was time to arrive — approximately sixty days after his due date according to my wife — I forgot everything including my insurance number, the location of the hospital, and my name. My wife evidently forgot my name as well because for the duration of the delivery she referred to me as “you.” As in, “you got us into this mess” and “what were you thinking” and “do you have to drive like a maniac.”

As it turned out, we really didn’t need to hurry. Based on what we learned in child birth classes, she was nearly ready to deliver at ten p.m. We checked our notes and all of the signs were right. Unfortunately our unborn son hadn’t paid attention in the child birth class and didn’t know what the signs were so he hung around for the next seventeen hours without doing much. After hour twelve my wife grew ominously silent while I stayed by her side trying desperately to remember any relevant information from the class. All I came up with was the teacher’s name and the fact that childbirth was a natural process that would take the time it took.

I reminded my wife of that and she was not encouraged.

Late in the afternoon the doctor came in and used a sentence that ended in the word pitocin. My wife replied “Epidural” which was encouraging because that was the longest sentence she’d spoken in hours.

Soon thereafter we had a brand new baby boy. The doctor offered to let me cut the cord and at that very instant I developed a deep and abiding respect for all living tissue and for not wanting to pass out. So I politely declined and sat on a stool in the corner with my head between my knees for a few minutes.

We’d done it. We’d had a baby. We were pros now, right?

You’d think so, but when the next baby came he caught us completely off-guard. For one thing he arrived early in the morning and for another he was three weeks early. My wife calmly informed me of his pending arrival by screaming in my ear at five one morning.

“I think I’m in labor!”

“You think?” I asked, trying to bring a little rationality to the discussion. “Honey, you’ve done this before shouldn’t you know? How far apart are the contractions.”

“It started at three a.m.,” she said. “When it finishes, I’ll let you know. Hospital. Now.”

“I don’t know…”

As an expression of opposition to my suggestion, my wife drove her fingernails through my bicep and into the bone beneath.

“Hospital,” I agreed.

After dropping the first child off with my parents, we raced to the hospital where a nurse examined my wife and said, “Try not to push we’re going to see if we can find a doctor. It might help if you pant like a puppy dog.”

While we were trying to take that little bit of wisdom to heart, the nurse-in-charge-of-asking-questions came in to the room.

“Insurance company?” she asked.

“Uh…” I replied. My wife normally takes care of all those details. I looked to her for help. She was too busy panting to notice me. If I’d known there was going to be a quiz, I’d have studied.

For the next fifteen minutes, I answered questions about my family’s medical history, my wife’s family’s medical history, I gave names and dosages for all the medicines that my wife had taken since getting pregnant, and (if I’m remembering this clearly) the names and birth dates of the first seven presidents of the United States.

The doctor arrived in the doorway wearing a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” sweatshirt and confident smile. One look at the glare in my wife’s eyes and he traded the smile for a business-like grimace and set to gowning and scrubbing up.

The door opened again and a medical resident bolted in. We later learned that he’d been sleeping in a staff room, had never even witnessed a delivery and was awakened with the words “You better get moving, this lady is about to pop and you have to catch the baby.” He stared at us wide-eyed and squeaked out, “Did they find a doctor yet?”

We pointed off to our family physician and suddenly the resident was all business. “I’m here to assist.”

Yeah. And afterwords maybe he could go back and repeat the class on inspiring patient confidence.

Within an hour we had our second, healthy baby boy and a future filled with all sorts of new experiences. If only we hadn’t been the first people in the history of the world to have children it might have been a little easier.