MARK MY WORD: WELCOME TO THE WORLD, BAILEY CAITLIN

Wow, she has hair! Look at those tiny fingers and toes.

When you're the father of a new baby girl, you say stuff like that. Then you go deer hunting.

For those of you interested in tax deductions, Bailey Caitlin Bliss arrived Dec. 8, along with the snow storm.

As Joni can attest, there is nothing quite like child birth. Bailey was a scheduled C-section.

This meant that we had to check in at the hospital in the middle of the night. Actually, it was early morning, 3 a.m., when we arrived at the hospital.

You have to arrive early so you can fill out all the paperwork, and nurses and lab technicians can stick mom-to-be with needles and hook her up to various tubes.

After the paperwork was done, we were ushered to a room in the obstetrics wing.

Joni got to put on one of those blue hospital gowns, which are about as fashionable as a potato sack.

Over the years, hospitals have done a lot to spruce up their decor. But hospital gowns haven't changed.

Whoever makes these things seems to have fallen several yards short of finishing the garment. There's always a draft in back.

"Now, the humiliation begins," observed Joni, casting a sharp look my way from her hospital bed.

At this point, fathers-to-be aren't real popular with mothers-to-be. After all, we're the reason they are stuck in the hospital in the first place.

Humiliation, pain and suffering tend to do that to people.

The hospital staff told us to get some rest. Then they proceeded to keep us awake.

First, a lab technician came in to draw blood. That way the hospital could be certain she was alive. The lab technician then turned off the light and left.

A few minutes later, a nurse came in, turned on the light and inserted an IV tube. This required the nurse to stab Joni several times in each hand until she could find the vein. After hooking Joni up to the plastic bag of fluid, the nurse turned off the light and left.

Then another nurse entered and turned on the light so she could hook Joni up to some more tubes.

Around 7:30 a.m., they took Joni to the delivery room where they gave her drugs. This is the reason why women go to the hospital to give birth.

I don't blame them. If someone were cutting open by belly, I'd want drugs too.

Normally, they give you a drug in your spine that allows the husband to come into the delivery room, along with the doctors, nurses, mailman, and anyone else who cares to drop in.

But sometimes the drug doesn't work well enough so a general anesthetic is used.

This pretty well knocks out the pregnant woman. The husband doesn't get to witness the birth.

Instead, he must stand in the hallway outside the nursery, surrounded by friends and family.

Soon, a nurse brings out your baby for you and everyone else in the same zip code to view.

Virtually everybody in town sees the baby before your wife. That's because she is in the recovery room.

I had been watching my baby through the nursery window and getting congratulations from friends and relatives for some time before I saw Joni's doctor.

"Have you seen her?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied. "I was in there when they weighed her."

"No, I mean your wife," he said.

"Oh, no," I said.

The doctor showed me to the recovery room where I stopped in long enough to see that Joni was alive and still on drugs.

Then I went back to the baby. Men are fickle that way.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.