I received a promotion to Inventory and Purchasing Manager at the Verizon Wireless Indirect Agent that I work for, including a pay raise, as part of a company-wide restructuring. Basically, I'll be responsible for ordering, receiving and distributing product and office supplies to the stores as well as coaching sales reps on selling accessories.
On Tuesday, we had what everyone is calling Snowmaggedon 2011, or the Snowpocalypse. 14"+ of snow fell on the Northern Illinois area. Our VZW stores closed down at 5, and UPS actually called us and told us to stay home. That's only the second time that has happened.
On Wednesday, almost everything was still buried in snow and most of our stores stayed closed once more. I received another text message from my boss at UPS telling us that the Night Sort had been canceled, the first time I've ever seen it closed back to back days due to weather.
I was just about to go to bed, at around 1030, when I received another text message from my UPS boss: we had to go in at 430 to run a bunch of Illinois volume through the hub. So I went to bed and got up at 3am, went to work and suffered through a terribly unorganized sort.
I went straight to VZW from UPS and got the store opened and started finally working on my new job, getting some product together for one of our busier stores and a new location that they are opening nearby.
In the early afternoon, she called the bank and found out that my credit had finally been dragged up enough that we were preapproved for a home loan. She has had her eye on a house near our apartment that started at over 120K but has slowly been sinking since then. She said that as soon as we got the pre-approval letter from the bank that we could get with our realtor and start looking at houses in our price range.
At around 3pm my phone started ringing as my wife called me. I was with a customer so I ignored it for the time being but she called several times and texted a couple of times as well. When I had the chance I took a look at the text message and saw that she needed me to call her right away because the Doctor's office had called.
I stepped away and called her and she informed me that because of certain high risk factors, the doctor's wanted to induce labor and we needed to be at the hospital by 5pm! I made sure everything was in line and rushed home to help pack a suitcase and get the wife to the hospital.
I sent out a mass text to the whole family to let them know what was going on and of course hit up Facebook.
I called my boss at UPS to tell him that I wasn't going to be at work and he informed me that one of the other supervisors in my area was also having a baby at the same hospital, funny how things work out that way.
We got to the hospital around 5 and found that we weren't the only ones that were going to have a baby. All of the hospital's labor and delivery rooms were occupied with mothers getting ready to have kids so we had to wait in the waiting room for about half an hour before we finally got into a "Stage 1" room, where the early stages of the process would be handled.
We were there for around 3 hours before we were moved to a "Final Stage" room where they would administer the medicine to induce labor and where the baby would be born. At around 1030 they started the medicine and it became a waiting game.
I caught some nap time for the next few hours waiting for the real fun to begin. At around 6am, my wife was finally at around 4cm dialated and her water broke, a sure sign that our son would be around shortly. In less than an hour she dialated another 6 cm to "Full" and was ready to push, all we were waiting on was the doctor.
Once the doctor got to the hospital and got scrubbed in, it only took less than half an hour for Jaydran Alexander to be born at 726am, 6.6 lbs and 19".
The hospital staff got him all cleaned up and let me be the first family member to hold the newest Johnson.
In short order everyone else that was at the hospital was allowed to hold the baby. Both Grandmas, my dad, my sister and my sister-in-law all got their chance to hold Baby Jaydran.
