Hospital fashion can be so drab. It’s a good thing Josie has the hat her auntie gave her to liven things up.

We’ll hopefully be leaving the hospital tomorrow. A night in our own bed will be so nice. Even if it might be a sleepless night.

Please welcome Josephine Lucia Albornoz Mulligan. She was born April 29th, at 6:39pm weighing 7 lbs. 6.6 ounces and measuring 20 inches long. Mom and baby are happy, healthy, and beautiful. Enjoy some photos.

Our cell phones have been off due to hospital policies recently. We’ve received all of the messages. Thanks for the wonderful thoughts and wishes. We’ll be more in contact soon.

Soon after Jen’s last post, contractions became strong enough to keep her from concentrating on anything else. Since then, labor has progressed and a lot has happened. Mom and baby are doing well still but our baby has not yet been born. I’ll write more another time but for now I wanted to just let everyone know that we’re all well.

Well things have been going soooo slowly that I am now subject to a Pitocin drip unfortunately. I’ve been going for about 3 hours and contractions are about 2-4 minutes apart lasting for a minute and a half. The biggest concern now is infection and we’ve successfully kept their dirty hands out in order to avoid that! Of course that also means we don’t know where I am exactly. But I am coming up with new swears for the machine dispensing the Pitocin. Below is a picture from the postpartum wing’s window. Our current view isn’t much to write home about as it is of the construction site.

It’s looking like a long slow labor for me. We’ve been at the hospital since around 3am and while contractions are slowly picking up in speed and intensity, I am still able to sit here blogging. Jordi is out cold asleep, which I would be too if these contractions would let me. Plus the bed is seriously uncomfortable. I’d take a picture, but he has the camera attached to his waist and it would wake him up.

My water broke! We’re headed in to the hospital.

You could be here on a beautiful spring day. You didn’t get to meet the sheep, or the alpacas. You definitely would have liked the horses and the sheep herding dogs. But…you’re still not born yet. Four days late so far.

Turns out we are very very bad at remembering to bring our cloth grocery bags into the grocery store with us when we shop. One of our bags had to be washed because of a cat incident and the sock had gotten stuck inside of it! Monday night we finally remembered the bag and now have our full set of matching socks. We are also awaiting the arrival of our cloth diapers this evening and a demonstration! Still no baby though.

I started having rather consistent Braxton-Hicks contractions about two weeks ago. Some nights they even seem like they might amount to something, but then they fizzle away eventually overnight. So we continue to wait on pins and needles, but have no baby yet. She’s not officially due until Tuesday anyway and first babies are on average a week late. We’ve finished up our baby preparation activities but I’m a little behind in my pictures. Below you’ll see the complete set of matching baby decorations I made, the nightlight, the quilt, the lamp, the curtains and the changing table. My dad originally made the changing table for me when I was born (albeit a few weeks late) and he recently updated the fabric to match my color scheme! Mio is on the right of the changing table, George is on the left. Mio is in the windows, while Fred is in the lower right hand corner.

For the last several midwife appointments they have been concerned when they measure the outside of my stomach that the baby is getting “too big”. Despite the fact that they say that babies are generally within 20% of their mother’s birth weight (mine was 6lb 3oz and Jordi was small too). I really didn’t believe her though as their tape measure was obviously measuring belly fat too. After several weeks we relented to an ultrasound to check on this as they started to voice concerns about me using the tub for labor and delivery and shoulder dystocia (shoulders getting stuck and broken on the way out).

The results are in, and we were right, she’s completely on track. On Thursday at 37 weeks, 2 days, she is at the 49th percentile for weight, 6lbs 13 oz. Plenty of fluid and the best possible position, LOA (head down, back out and on the left side). Hopefully she won’t change positions in however many days we’ve got left. And they still say she’s a girl.

Gratuitous cat photo: