Thursday morning, September 12, 1957 at just after six o'clock, Diana Richards awoke from a disturbing nightmare and with a funny feeling. She lay in bed for a moment trying to figure out what it was besides the dream that woke her up. Then she felt it... the muscles of her abdomen contracted harder than she'd ever felt them do so before. Dr. Hamilton had told her she would probably be feeling these "false labor" contractions during the last few weeks of her pregnancy as her body readied itself for "the real thing."
She frowned as she thought about the nightmare... She was holding her baby boy and singing to him... only the voice she heard was not her own. Then she was outside playing with him as a toddler, chasing him around the yard, and as the chase went into slow motion, she saw her boy getting bigger... growing up right before her eyes. The next moment, her teenaged son disappeared around the corner of a building ahead of her and when she reached the building, she stopped dead in her tracks and screamed...
Her son had disappeared and waiting for her around that corner was Edward Hood...
She tried to shake the unease and ignore the contractions and go back to sleep, but they kept happening every so often and they were uncomfortable enough that they prevented her from going back to sleep. Diana sighed wearily and got out of bed.
No sense in just laying here... I'll only wake Charles with my tossing...
She went into the bathroom to use the toilet and felt something strange... almost like a "clot" or something had passed while she peed. She looked in the toilet when she stood up, but she didn't see anything that looked like blood. She frowned and shook her head as she flushed the toilet.
She went back into the bedroom and picked up her husband's bathrobe and put it on. His was the only one that could wrap all the way around her. She felt... and her boobs and belly looked... almost as big as a house, but her arms and legs were like sticks! She winced every time she waddled past a mirror...
But Charles still looked at her the same as he always had... the flames of his love and desire for her still burned in his gray blue eyes. He lovingly held her every morning and every night before bed and gently rubbed lotion over her entire enormous midsection.
And he talked to her stomach, telling their babies how anxiously they were waiting for them. The dimple would appear in his right cheek when he grinned as he watched lumps traveling under her flesh across her tightly stretched abdomen when the babies tried to move. He would smile up at her as he put his hand on her to feel them moving, and he would lean down and gently kiss a spot where an elbow or heel was trying to poke through.
Sometimes Diana would wince in pain when there was too much movement and poking of her flesh from inside. Then he would lean down and admonish them, "OK, you two...that's enough! Give your mother a rest already!" The amazing thing was that they seemed to hear him and would calm down!
When Charles woke up a couple hours later, he found Diana lying on the couch in their living room watching television. "Is anything wrong, pretty lady?"
She smiled tiredly. "No... I'm just having some really strong false labor contractions this morning and I didn't want to wake you. I'll be fine. Do you want me to fix you some breakfast while you dress?"
Charles leaned over and kissed her forehead. "No, my love. You rest and I'll fix us something to eat. I don't have to be at the office first thing this morning. Tom and I are due in court late morning for the sentencing hearings on Donald Price and Harold Green. We thought we'd lend Lisa and Robert some moral support and we want to make sure those bastards get appropriate punishments!"
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By two o'clock in the afternoon, Diana realized that she was not having false labor pains... she had gone into labor. But her labor was not progressing very rapidly at all... her contractions were still very irregular as far as timing was concerned. They would occur anywhere from two to ten minutes apart and last from thirty seconds to over a minute. The only reason she knew she was in labor was because they were increasing in intensity...
The contractions were beginning to get pretty painful and by the time Charles came home that evening; they were causing her to bend over and moan. Finally, at about eight o'clock in the evening, Diana asked Charles to take her to the hospital because she couldn't handle the pain any longer.
When she arrived and was checked over by Dr. Hamilton, he advised that her labor had progressed just enough that they could give her something to help her through the worst part of it since it was progressing so slowly. But he had to manually break her water to make sure the drug would not slow down or halt her labor. Diana was grateful for that because she was already exhausted from not having slept well the night before. And whatever the doctor gave her seemed to knock her out completely...
Charles stayed with her in the labor room as much as he could but the nurses advised him it was going to be a long night. So he went out to the waiting room and told all of their friends who had come to be with him that it was going to take a while and he urged them to go home and he'd call them if anything happened. They all left, telling him they'd be back first thing in the morning to check on them before they went in to work or to stay with him if they didn't have to work. Charles advised the nurses that he was going to stay in the waiting room and rest on one of the couches and asked them to let him know as soon as anything changed.
He managed to catnap in the quiet room off and on, but he couldn't get comfortable enough to sleep restfully. Finally, around 5:30 in the morning, one of the nurses popped in to advise him that Diana had come out from under the effects of the drug and she was in the final "pushing" stage of labor... it wouldn't be much longer.
At just after six o'clock Friday morning, September 13, their son was delivered... a healthy boy weighing in at six pounds, eight ounces. About ten minutes later, his tinier sister followed, weighing only five pounds, four ounces. She looked perfect, yet fragile, and her cry was not as strong as her brother's, so the doctor ordered that she be given extra oxygen and instructed the nurses to get her to cry as often as possible so she could exercise and strengthen her lungs.
