She weighed in at 8lbs, 5oz. Labor lasted over 16 hours. Momma and baby are both doing fine and sleeping peacefully. Tara made it through the experience demonstrating incredible amounts of strength, humor, and courage. I love her so much.
I would write more, but I’ve been awake for almost 23 hours. Tomorrow (well today, I guess), I have a million phonecalls to make and e-mails to write. I’ll also have pictures to post! But I wanted to get something up online to reward all you faithful blog-checkers.Check back later!
In seven hours, our alarm clock will ring. And despite the ungodly hour, we will get up and make our way downtown to the hospital. There, with the help of Western medicine, we will have our baby.
Tara and I have spent the past few days taking turns freaking out. It still doesn’t feel real. It just seems completely incomprehensible that people will extract a person from inside my wife, give her to us, and then send us on our merry way. It utterly blows my mind.
But I take comfort in knowing that people have been doing this for an awfully long time. And while the birth experience is sure to be a life-altering event for us, it is actually the most common things in the world. The event of birth has happened to every single one of us. In some ways, having a baby is the most pedestrian thing you can do.
Nevertheless, this will be our birth and our baby. Something (and someone) we’ve wanted in such a visceral way for years now. There’s no way to calculate what tomorrow will mean to us on a personal, emotional, and spiritual level. This will be the culmination of so many threads in our lives.
In a couple days, we’ll be coming home with a new person. I, for one, cannot wait to meet her!
Still no babies here yet. Tomorrow remains the scheduled day.
I made a couple small site updates to keep things fresh around here. The first is a contact form over on the right which can be used to send us messages. You might have noticed that no e-mails appear anywhere on the blog. Neither do our last names, home addresses, etc. I’m pretty paranoid about giving out too much info and/or getting unnecessarily spammed. So the anonymous and hard-to-abuse contact form is the way to go.
The next addition is much more fluffy in nature. The link on the front page of Swordplay.net formerly know as tripout has been changed to a more broadly defined illusions page. On it, you’ll find a randomly selected optical illusion for your enjoyment. At the moment, I only have 6 illusions in rotation… but I will hopefully be adding more in the near future.
That is, assuming I have time for such little projects after Baby get here. We’ll see!
Our doctor wants to induce labor in the very near future. So if Tara has not gone into labor by Tuesday, we’ve got a 6:30am appointment at the hospital.
This baby’s a comin’. The following picture pretty much sums up my state of mind right now:
Today is our official due date. We’re at 40 weeks, which only actually counts as about 38 weeks of gestation. Doctors have a funny way of doing math.
Tara is uncomfortable, tired, and the size of a small planetoid. Not unexpected, seeing as how there’s a person living inside her. But I truly admire the stoicism and grace she continues to exude throughout this entire process. I know I’d be terribly grumpy and out-of-sorts were I in her shoes.
We’re going for a doctor’s appointment at 2:00pm. Hopefully we’ll get some idea when the little potato will be ready to come out of the oven.
I realized that I never posted two baby-related items here on the blog which might be of interest. First is an actual sonogram snapshot of the baby, herself, taken at 20 weeks. So technically this is from half her lifetime ago. She hits 40 weeks on Thursday — our official due date.
Next is a little video clip taken the night of Tara’s baby shower. It depicts the incredibly massive amounts of baby paraphernalia we received. And it’s only gotten worse since then. Obviously, we realize that we are very much blessed to have so many people who want to help us and give us things. But at the same time… crimony! We’re drowning in baby junk. How can something so tiny require so much equipment? Anyway, here’s the video:
I’ve said those words about nine hundred times over the past few days. And yes, I am guilty of giving the impression that the baby’s arrival was imminent. I believed it, too. But that appears to not be the case anymore.
One week ago our doctor told us that Tara would likely go into labor within a matter of days. That, or she would need to induce. Well, we had another appointment today and she apologized to us for prematurely raising our prenatal hackles. Apparently everything is normal again, so we are back on our original timeline. Tara’s official due date isn’t for another week, and we might very well be late (as are most first time first-time mothers).
So I can now look forward to yet more probing, anticipatory questions day in and day out. “No baby yet” shall continue to be my mantra for a fortnight. Tara suggests I get a pin to wear saying that. Perhaps I’ll start referring people to my blog for the full story.
And speaking of the blog, I’ve finally gotten it pretty much where I want it. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, so under the hood, it’s functioning efficiently. I’ve added in the “Currently…” sections over on the right, and I’ve even set up a “Previously…” page for archival purposes. There is also now a “Links” page, too… although it still needs some more bulking up. But basically that’s it for the major features I wanted my blog to have. I wouldn’t mind sprucing it up a bit, however. I may try to figure out an attractive way to throw some subtle graphics on here. But I want to keep it rather minimalist and clean. We’ll see what I come up with.
I’m sitting here trying to figure out why I named my previous post We’re at 90%. I have no idea. I know I was interrupted while writing it, and then went back and finished posting. But I obviously was going to say something else. For the life of me I can’t remember. Oh well. Life goes on.
Tara is going to give birth any minute now, so to speak. We really thought our doctor was going to induce labor yesterday, but she decided not to. She said Tara was far enough along naturally that we could get away with waiting. We’re thinking it’ll be this weekend. (!)
The impending birth of our daughter is the reason I created this blog in the first place. I wanted a way to keep family and friends up to date. So expect updates to appear with more regularity. I promise there will be cute baby pictures!
I’m sitting here at my last SAT administration of 2005. One of my proctors showed up over two hours late, and another didn’t show up at all. I had to scramble and redistribute kids so they’d all fit in someplace. What a pain!
Sometimes it feel like half my blogging is about the SAT’s. I guess that’s because I’m often left with nothing to do except think up posts while the kids are all taking the exams. Oh, I’ll have plenty of tedious paperwork to do once they are done… but for now I’m just sitting here doing Sudoku puzzles.
But thankfully, this should be the last testing-related post for quite some time. The next test date isn’t until April. And I’ll probably have other stuff to write about between now and then. Y’know, little things… like having a baby.
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