Baby Catherine is Here!

And she is awesome. The short stats: Catherine Rose (Cate) arrived at 7:53pm on Sunday May 30, 2010. She weighed 7lbs 8oz and was 20 inches long at birth. As you can see in the photo, she has a fair amount of brown hair and is a very sleepy girl. We love her very much and are so excited to have her in our lives!

For those of you who have asked, the longer version: After being asleep about 40 min, at 12:20am on Saturday night/Sunday morning I woke up and realized that my water had broken. I woke Chaz and after a bit of last minute packing, we headed to the hospital. We were checked in by 1am. For those of you who don't know, once your water breaks, most hospitals require the baby to be delivered within 24 hours (to reduce the risk of the baby getting an infection without her protective home). So, we spent the next 9.5 hours trying to get my contractions to be productive (e.g. I walked more laps of the Labor & Delivery Floor than I could count). They were very painful but irregular (I would have three with less than a 30 second break in between and then none for 4-5 min), so at 10am they decided to administer Petocin via IV to regulate and strengthen the contractions. Even then, progress was quite slow. It took another 8.5 hours before she was ready to be born. Even once ready, however, she decided to demonstrate her stubbornness by turning her head in such a way as to cause her to get "stuck". So, it wasn't until after more than an hour and a half of pushing that she agreed to show up and meet us all. In all, she was born about 20 min. shy of 20 hours of labor. Good thing she's awesome.

Since last night, the three of us have been enjoying adjusting to our new lives together. We eat, sleep, play and cry (yes, I've cried too). Chaz's folks were able to stop by briefly on their way to Chicago to meet Catherine's new cousin (born to her Aunt Deb and Uncle Joe the same day!), and we are looking forward to leaving the hospital tomorrow and having my mother (now Grandma Jill) arrive for a visit on Wednesday.

I promise many more cute pictures when we've all had the chance to shower/bathe!

"Due" date

Okay, so today is the baby's official "due date" and there is little evidence that our little one plans to show up any time soon. To celebrate, here is her picture. I feel like she looks a lot bigger than last week, though I suspect it is in part the shirt that makes her look huge.

At the doctor's appointment yesterday, the doc again confirmed that the little one was doing great (heart beat in the 150's, measuring "tall" but otherwise good, etc). I've lost a pound or so from last week, but apparently that is to be expected at the end of the pregnancy. The good news is that puts me at 15 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight, which was my goal for the 40 weeks. If she still hasn't shown up by next Thursday, the doc will do a "non-stress test" (basically just a way of monitoring the baby) and decide when/if to schedule an induction. Hopefully she'll cooperate before then so we won't have to resort to that.

Otherwise, we've just been enjoying the start to summer here. We went to our first minor league baseball game of the season last night and had a lot of fun - perfect seats, great temperature, and a win for the Saltdogs. Now we're going to enjoy the long weekend and look forward to having more exciting pictures to share in the future.

Our New Adventure - 39 weeks pregnant

Hello and welcome to our blog about the addition of our first kiddo to our family. Hopefully we can use this blog to help keep our friends and family who are spread all over the US updated about the exciting developments (well, exciting to us) in our little-one's life.


Our family for the past 3.5 years...


Well, actually, our family wouldn't be totally complete without this one...

As of 38 weeks, 6 days (last doc appointment) our little one has a heart-beat of 150 (nice and strong) and she's (yes, they've predicted a girl) measuring "long". Well, as the doc said, a nice tall baby isn't so bad as long as her head isn't huge, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a tall, skinny baby. Actually, we're all just hoping for a healthy baby, whatever size her head turns out to be. I'm now at 39 weeks, 1 day pregnant, and I'm certainly ready for her to arrive in the not distant future. Her "due" date is May 29th (of course, less than 5% of babies are born on their due date), so we're taking bets at to whether she will be a May or a June baby. Anyway, here are a few 39 week photos of the little one....

Hopefully we will have much more to update soon.