The call came in around 3:15 on Thursday, October 19, after I’d settled back into work after a game of basketball over lunch. Actually, it wasn’t a proper call, since the microphone on my phone had died a few weeks earlier, making having actual telephone conversations a bit of a challenge. So instead I got a series of text messages culminating in a definitive directive: it was time to go home, because the baby was coming. Here’s a look at what the exchange looked like:

I was a little surprised to be summoned because on that particular day because it was our actual due date, and both Julia and Joseph had been substantially late—Julia by nine days. But Julie was having regular contractions with increasing frequency, so home I went.

Naturally, then, things seemed to subside while I was en route from Palo Alto. Whereas I was pretty convinced that we were going to have a new baby imminently when I left the office, I was now mentally gearing up for a protracted period of false labor and fruitless late-night visits to the hospital, much as we’d experienced before Joe was born. Since I was home anyway, I took Joe to soccer practice and did my best to calm my nerves in the park while he scrimmaged and Julia socialized with friends.

After soccer, we headed home for dinner—it’s always a treat to eat with everyone else during the week, because my work schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to do so—and as we ate, Julie’s contractions started picking up again. She called the hospital to check in, and based on the information she was able to provide, they recommended we head in. We grabbed our bags, which we’d finally finished packing just a few days earlier, left the dishes and the kids’ bedtime rituals to Julie’s mom, and headed up to El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.

We arrived in the hospital in the early evening, around 7:30 or so. We went through what seemed like a lengthy check-in process and settled into our room in the perpetual twilight of the Labor and Delivery ward. Another couple had arrived at about the same time we did, but overall, the department seemed quiet. Thanks to the monitoring software running on the computer next to Julie’s bed, we could tell that there were only three other patients at the time, and most of them seemed to be further along in the birthing process than we were. I was tickled by the fact that the software seemingly hadn’t been upgraded in the nine-plus years since Julia was born, and it still included the adorable—and completely incongruous—train icon that had no obvious function. Unlike the last two times Julie delivered there, I owned a phone with a camera this time around, so I was able to capture a screen shot of the train for you all to enjoy in the album.

Now that we were in the hospital, Julie’s contractions started to decrease in intensity and regularity once again. Of course. I figured that this meant we’d be sent back home to try again another day, but the doctor noticed that Julie’s blood pressure was running a bit high. High enough, in fact, to cause her concern about pre-eclampsia, so she decided then and there that she would induce labor with Pitocin and keep us there until the baby was born.

Things moved pretty slowly the rest of the night: there was enough downtime that I had an opportunity to hop online right at midnight and place an order for a new iPhone to replace my dilapidated model with the broken microphone. As usual for Julie, her contractions didn’t show up as regularly and dramatically on the monitor as those of the patients in the other rooms. Also, the baby was wiggling around quite a bit, so the external monitors wrapped around Julie’s belly couldn’t get a consistent read on his heart rate. Over the course of the night and into the morning, each of the nurses that came on duty tried to re-position the monitors, but none of them could get things lined up quite right; at one point, we had four staffers in the room trying to find his heartbeat. Eventually, they gave up and inserted an internal monitor so that we could get a consistent signal, where by “inserted” I mean that they screwed an electrical lead into his head.

Once the internal monitor was in place, it quickly became apparent that the baby’s heart rate was a bit inconsistent: it seemed to be dropping fairly dramatically during contractions. As a result, and also because one of the nurses observed what she thought was meconium in some of Julie’s fluids, staffers from the NICU were on call to step in after the baby was born.

Finally, bright and early the next day, Julie started to feel the urge to push. She hit the call button, but when the doctor arrived, the baby was high up in the birth canal, and Julie’s cervix was hardly effaced. Julie gave it another couple tries without success; the baby just didn’t seem ready to come out yet.

By late morning, Julie’s sense of urgency came back with a vengeance. Her nurse checked and announced she could feel the baby’s head, but once again, he had receded back up the birth canal by the time the doctor made it to our room. It seems that he was coming pretty far down with each push, but then popping almost all the way back up whenever Julie relaxed.

The nurse stayed with us for a while to tabs on how Julie was feeling. Finally, she made a decision: we were going to have the baby right then and there. Julie started pushing again, and we were seeing definite progress: William was inching closer to freedom with every contraction. The OB/GYN returned and noted that the baby appeared to be turning while Julie was pushing; she concluded that this twisting, corkscrewing motion was helping him to pop back up in between contractions. Nevertheless, she seemed confident that we were on track.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, but probably wasn’t more than a couple dozen or so pushes made in earnest, William was born. At Julie’s request, I wasn’t supposed to look, but I did anyway. My first thought as his head emerged was, “Is he not going to make it?” In the seven years since Joe was born, I’d forgotten what babies look like as they come into the world and how incredibly malleable they are.

Of course, he was fine. The NICU staffers were sent away, and William slowly acclimated to his new surroundings. His color seemed a bit off to me, but the doctor was unconcerned, though she noted that the heart rate issue we were so worried about had been caused by his umbilical cord, which he had cleverly wrapped around his neck. William got to spend some quality time with Julie before one of the nurses took him aside to administer a few vaccinations, take prints of his feet, and give him his first bath. Interestingly, one thing that had changed since the last time we were there was that all of this took place in the delivery room, whereas for Julia and Joe, the kids were whisked off the the nursery while Julie was moved to the maternity ward. The hospital is placing a much greater emphasis on keeping mother and child together nowadays, so William was rarely out of our sight while we were there.

One time they did take him away was when the time came to have him circumcised. After the experience we had with Joe, Julie was certain that this was the right thing to do, and I found it hard to disagree. Even our pediatrician, Dr. Kim, mentioned early on the pregnancy that he assumed we’d have it done when William was born, rather than opting out. The jury still seems to be out regarding the benefits and tradeoffs associated with the procedure—there are a lot of people with extremely strongly held opinions on both sides—and I realize that it’s largely irrational to base our decision for William on the exceptional circumstances Joe faced, but neither of us wanted to go through that again.

The remainder of the hospital stay was largely uneventful. I spent most of my time shuttling back and forth between the hospital and the house helping Grandma Flack get the kids to soccer and other activities. Julia and Joe visited for the first time Saturday morning after soccer, and their excitement and joy could be plainly read on their faces. The one hurdle we had to overcome was one Joe had encountered as well: jaundice.

We were due to check out of the hospital Sunday morning, but William’s bilirubin levels were still a bit high, so he ended up spending more or less the entire day under the bill light, only taking breaks to be fed and changed. The staff was anxious for him to have bowel movements to help clear his system, so they closely monitored his feedings, concerned that Julie’s milk supply might not have been high enough to push things along; at one point, they even asked us to supplement his feedings with formula. Given her experiences nursing the older kids, Julie was completely unconcerned on this front, but she went along with it anyway, figuring the last thing she wanted to do was to appear resistant to accepting medical advice. Once she started pumping and the nurses saw how well she was doing, it became a non-issue anyway.

As the day wore on, were waiting for a positive blood test that would clear us to go home. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, a tech arrived to take a blood sample to be sent to the lab. For reasons we were never able to determine, she had a very hard time getting the blood from William’s heels, needing several apparently very painful attempts to get a sample. We were very happy to see her go (though William didn’t seem particularly thrilled to go back under the bill light), and then we waited. And waited. Dinner came and went, and we were still waiting. Finally, one of the head nurses came back with bad news: the blood sample had hemolyzed and was unusable; it’s unclear why it took so long to figure this out. A new tech took another sample—getting it right on the first try this time—and ran it down to the lab. And then it was back to waiting.

Finally, around 8:00 that evening, we got the news: William had been cleared to go home. We packed up our things, dressed him in the very same outfit that Joe had worn when he came home, and piled into the minivan for the drive back to San José.

Gallery: Meet William Wong