4 Hours Old

Hayley is now over 4 hours old! She is doing really well, they did a bit of blood work and her glucose levels came back very good, which means she is getting some good nutrition from Mommy.

She was a little cold due to being born a little small (weightwise, anyhow, she is good and long!). This was remedied by letting her have a nice sleep under a heat lamp. She really seemed to like this, and it brought her temperature right up to where it should be. I've attached a picture below of Hayley under the heat lamp doing a bit of sunbathing.

As you can tell from the picture below, she has a little bit of a cleft lip, though her palate is perfectly formed. The doctor said that a surgery done a little bit down the road should fix her lip right up. She is doing great though, she is feeding well and is very alert and active. Probably we will be allowed to go home Saturday morning, I think.

Hayley Anne Hacker

Born at 7:39 pm, December 3, 2009.
6 lbs, 7 ozs. Mom and baby are both doing great.

So It Begins

The process has begun. We are at the hospital, in our room. Melissa is hooked up to the IV and they have started her on a small amount of oxytocin. We have met our perinatal health nurse. Her name is Lisa and she is very helpful and encouraging. She will have to leave when her shift is over and tag the next nurse in, but for the time being we are happy to have her. One of these nurses stays with us at all times.

I will send another update when there is more news.

6 Days Late... And Counting

In typical Hacker style, our baby is fashionably late. Here is a little update of what has happened over the past few days. My apologies for the long post, but as usual, I just don't know what to cut out. :)

Friday night, just as I am sitting down to enjoy a celebratory mug of beer (we just reached a major milestone on the project I have been working on all year) with my work colleagues, Melissa calls me. She's visiting at her parents, and her cramps/contractions(?) are back, they are stronger than before, she's been timing them, and they are about 7 minutes apart. Cool! She says not to hurry, but come over as soon as I can. So much for celebrating with the guys... so I head on over to Melissa's parents.

First thing I notice is that the baby has definitely dropped quite a bit. At the top of Melissa's belly, where there used to be baby, there is now this squishy empty space. Very cool. :) So I fire up the trusty Android Stopwatch on my phone, and yep, contractions are consistently 7 minutes apart. While we are waiting for dinner to be finished, I suggest we go for a walk, as that is a typical method of progressing labour and keeping your mind off the pain. So we go and walk around the block a few times, slowing down for about 1 minute in every 7. I can tell that they are worse than before, but from watching her face I am thinking about a 4/10 on the pain scale. Okay, so not so bad. No emergency at least, so we walk for a bit more. The contractions continue throughout the night, but are very manageable, so eventually we go home and have a good night's sleep.

Saturday morning, Melissa wakes up, the contractions are gone. Doh. Okay, well Melissa's Mom has offered to come over and help do some cleaning, so after the 3 of us head out to our favourite breakfast place, Cora's, she comes over, and we get a ton of things done. I finally, spurred on by Friday night's events, get the infant seat base installed in our car. It's soooo easy, new cars have these UAS brackets that you just snap the mounting straps for the base into and tighten. We also, among other things, work together to get all of our windows cleaned. That was great, we don't do that very often because its such a pain.

So Saturday night, we decide that we need to go and buy some groceries, so we head over to Metro, because everywhere else is closed. Just as we are heading into the store, Melissa tells me that her contractions are back and they are a bit stronger than last night. Again, clearly not tear your head off pain, but you can tell that she staggers a bit more when one comes on. So again with the stopwatch. 5 minutes apart, and each longer than a minute. Whoh, this the threshold that the doctor has given us. The only thing missing is Melissa "huffing and puffing like a freight train," as the doctor so eloquently puts it. So we start to question ourselves, should we go to the hospital? These don't seem that bad, but maybe Melissa has a high pain tolerance. We head on home, but keep on timing them for a bit. After we get back to our couch, they all start coming at around 4 minutes apart. This goes on for over half an hour, getting a bit stronger as they go on. So, that's it, we figure, maybe we should go to the hospital, just in case, after all, they seem to keep getting shorter.

So we head up to the hospital at around 9 pm. They check the baby and check her cervix. Baby is great, still moving around and heart beating strong. Her cervix is still just over 4 cm, just like on Thursday. So, they say, that doesn't mean that something isn't happening. After all, the contractions are still going the entire time, but they aren't as strong as they would expect. So they send us for an hour walk, to see if things will progress. Along the walk, we meet another couple who are doing the same thing. She is only dilated 3 cm, but when she had a contraction, you could clearly see the huffing and puffing that the Doc was talking about. After an hour we head back for another check. Baby's still doing good. The nurse said that her cervix has only dilated a bit, maybe a bit less than 0.5 cm, but it was getting more stretchy. Okay, well, stretchy sounds good.

They send us out for another hour walk, our friends are doing the same thing. Good news from the other couple, she's up to 4 cm now! That's good news. This entire time Melissa's contractions keep going, getting a bit stronger, but during the second walk, the times start jumping around a bit. 3.5 minutes apart for about 5, then 2.5 minutes apart for about 5, then back to 4 for a while. Very odd. So, we finish up our second walk and head back. Baby's still great, but her cervix hasn't dilated any more at all. They say that the contractions are well spaced, but aren't strong enough yet to do the hard work of dilating the cervix past about 4 cm.

They give us a choice, go for a 3rd walk, or head on home to get some sleep, pending doctor approval. At this point (somewhere after 3:30am) we are pretty tired, we'd have no trouble going on if we were getting somewhere, but at this point we go for the sleep option. :) Doctor approves, and we are on our way. They tell us to come back if there is significant bleeding, her water breaks, or the contractions get hard to manage. We go home, get some sleep, and the contractions end up stopping completely Sunday afternoon sometime. Definitely glad we took the "go home" option.

As an aside, as the nurse was checking with the doctor if we could go home, we heard the one nurse report the other girl was up to 5 cm and they were being admitted. We were quite happy for them. Later we realized, the funny thing is, we probably walked around with them for well over an hour, but we have no idea what their names are. All the time we were walking around, we were focused on the task at hand, and talked about pregnancy, labour, devliery, babies, etc. It was really great to be able to talk about the situation with someone else going through it at the same time.

Anyway, the only other event was that Melissa woke me up last night around 3:30 am with a very strong contraction, which was hopeful, but the only thing that happened after that was 2 minor little echoes. Back to sleep. This morning Melissa called the doctor's office to let them know what the current state of affairs is. They call back and let her know that since she has been having something resembling contractions and the baby is still quite active, they don't need to do another ultrasound and they are just going to schedule her to be induced on Thursday. So either way, the baby should be born by the end of the week at the latest! In the meantime we will continue attempting to induce labour in our own way... (by this, we mean long walks, of course).

So, anyway, I'm back to work today, and Melissa is at home getting some extra sleep. At least one of us will be rested for when the baby actually starts coming. And really Melissa is the one who will need all of the strength and energy, so I'm glad she is getting her rest.

Whew, what a long post. I don't mind making a bit of a longer one, hopefully you don't mind reading it. At this point, I don't expect I will make any more posts until Melissa is admitted to give birth. At that point, I will use the handy email gateway that I posted about a week or so ago to keep you all up to date. But in any case, for the time being, take heart, one way or another, Baby Hacker is coming soon!

Next OB Visit

Well, a few things to report. Last night Melissa was having some mild-ish cramping, which was occurring at regular intervals (about every 12-13 minutes). This went on for a few hours, and then stopped. So much for going into labour last night.

This morning when Melissa woke up, she noticed a bit of spotting. We were warned about this ahead of time, so we weren't all too concerned. So, we went to her OB appointment today. We told him about the regularly-spaced cramps and he said that is a good sign that labour may be near. (Always 'may' with him, haha. I guess nothing is completely predictable.) We told him about the spotting and he exclaimed, "Bloody show! Another good sign." Gotta love the doc's getting all excited about cramping and blood.

Anyway, he did the usual checks (weight, belly measurements, baby's heartbeat, etc.) Everything looks good there. He checked her cervix, and said it was a tiny bit more dilated than last time, but still not much more than 4 cm. He suggested that he could do something called a "Stretch & Sweep", which MAY help progress labour. (Again with the may, haha.) So we agreed. Melissa said it was a bit uncomfortable, but not really too bad. Basically the idea is that the doctor inserts his fingers, manually stretches the cervix a bit, and sweeps his finger around to basically of separate the amniotic sac from the lower wall of the uterus. This will usually cause a certain type of prostaglandins to be released, which are involved in causing uterine contractions. To me, it kind of sounds a bit like relieving a wedgie. :-)

That's it for now. These are exciting times. As soon as there are any new developments to report, I will be sure to post them here! Stay tuned.

Nothing Much To Report

Well, yesterday has come and gone. The only thing Melissa has been saying as far as contractions go is that she has more pressure in her pelvis than she had before. A few cramps in her back, and a few in her front, but nothing regular. We even tried timing them, but gave up after 15 minutes passed with no repetition.

Melissa is up in the area near my office visiting with friends today, so if she does go into labour today, I won't need to go far to get her.

On a side note, we are pretty sure we have one of the recalled cribs! Of course we don't need it for a little while (we are using a bassinet for the first few months) so we aren't panicking. In fact we haven't even unpacked it yet, as we just finished the flooring and until that was done we needed the extra floor space. So we will figure out what to do with the (reportedly) unsafe crib at our leisure.

Due Date

Today is the due date! Still no baby, although the day is not over yet. We have another appointment on Thursday with Melissa's OB. Only time will tell if we actually make it to Thursday or not.

Upcoming Updates

As we approach the time that our baby will come into the world, I need a slightly more convenient way to make quick posts. Therefore I have set up an email gateway so I can easily provide updates without waiting for my phone to load web pages.

I am getting so excited at this point, can't wait for our spawn() ;-) to join us in the world outside.

Updates!

Okay, well sorry I haven't updated in a little bit, but its been busy at work, and exciting times at home!

First of all, at our last ultrasound, we finally managed to get a good look (haha) at our baby's sex. It looks like it's going to be a girl! :-) These things aren't 100% foolproof, but it definitely looked like a girl to us.

At home we now have the baby's room and our master bedroom converted to laminate flooring, to cut down on the dust coming from that 15 year old carpet. We love it, and its much, much cleaner.

And finally, we went to Melissa's (weekly, at this point,) checkup with her OB, and she is about 4 cm dilated and 90% effaced. Last week it was 2 cm and 80%, so things look to be progressing towards the baby being born! We are getting so excited now. It's still anyone's guess on when the baby will come, but it looks like it could be any day now!

When I get home today, if I can remember, I am going to try and take one last picture of Melissa's belly before the baby is born. At this point, its hard to imagine how it could get any bigger. It's still so cute on her, even coming up to 40 weeks. I think we are both going to miss her being pregnant a little bit after the baby is born, but then we will have a wonderful little baby to focus on, so I'm sure it won't be too bad on that front.

We went and ordered a Canon camcorder last night. Nothing like waiting until the last minute. Hopefully it comes in before the baby is born, but in any case, we have our other Canon cameras as well in case she goes into labour and its not in yet.

Anyway, I will try and post the picture if I get around to taking it, or otherwise, my next post may be from the delivery room. :-)

Photos!

So, as you might surmise by the lack of a post, there was no luck on determining the baby's sex. Oh well, it will probably end up being a surprise after all.

Anyhow, I've finally managed to upload some photos of my lovely pregnant wife for you all! Here they are, in chronological order (the times are based on Gestational Age, which is actually 2 weeks older than the developmental age of the fetus; however this is how you usually hear pregnancy progression quoted, i.e. a full 40 weeks):

Melissa @ 14 weeks:

Melissa @ 17 weeks:

Melissa @ 23 weeks:

Melissa @ 25 weeks:

Melissa @ 28 weeks:

Melissa @ 29 weeks:

Ultrasound today!

We are going for an ultrasound this afternoon to check on the baby's position, etc. So, there is a possibility that we will find out the sex of our baby today! We had all but given up hope of finding out at this point. I don't want to get too excited, who knows whether we actually can or not, but we will keep you posted, and let you know how the ultrasound goes in any case.

First OB Appointment

Today we went to Melissa's first appointment with her OB/GYN. He is a very nice man with a great sense of humour. He had lots of useful information for us about childbirth and today we heard the baby's heartbeat for the first time. It was an incredible sound, really hits the point home that it's really a new life growing in Melissa's uterus.

We left the office on a huge high, excited about being new parents. We also stopped by the Blood Collection Services office at the hospital so Melissa could get bloodwork done for her next Rh(d) immune globulin (Rhogam) shot. This is because I am Rh(d)+ and Melissa is Rh(d)-. Rhogam is given as a precaution to most Rh(d)- mothers in the 28th week, because there is a possibility of Melissa developing antibodies against blood from an Rh(d)+ baby, which means Melissa's immune system could attack a second baby if significant levels of the Rh(d) antibody build up in Melissa's blood during this pregnancy or during childbirth.

Anyway, a bit of a tangent, but important information if you are a female of childbearing age and you have one of the negative blood types!!! (i.e. A-, O-, etc.)

My apologies for not getting pictures up yet, I have even more now! I will get them posted soon, I am just trying to figure out the best way to post them.

5th Prenatal Check-up

We went to Melissa's 5th and final prenatal check-up with her GP last night and everything went well. Her weight and abdomen measurements are right on the mark for this point in her pregnancy and there are no signs of pre-eclampsia.

The doctor also listened to the baby's heartbeat with the stethoscope and said that it sounded healthy. So everything looks to be going great. We're very excited to go see her OB next month.

Blog spawn()'d

No, this blog isn't about the POSIX spawn() call, really. I have created this blog to keep interested parties up to date on our growing family.

Just to bring everyone up to speed on where we are now, Back in early March, Melissa and I "spawn()'ed" a child process (horrible computer joke, yeah, I'm a geek, live with it), and it's now in its 7th month of development. :-) The baby has been growing steadily and Melissa is now feeling very pregnant.

Back in late June, Melissa had an ultrasound, which was very cool. As soon as the ultrasound tech let me come into the room to see our baby (well fetus, technically, but I digress), it started moving around and seemed to respond to the vibrations of my voice. It was one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Of course, being the n00b parents that we are, we forgot to ask for ultrasound pictures to take home, so the memories of this joyous experience exist only in our mind. Oh well... live and learn.

Today we go for Melissa's fifth and final pre-natal appointment with her GP. Stay tuned for more updates. I'll post some pictures of Melissa and her ever expanding abdomen soon.