Photo Gallery (14 photos)

Katarina movie (Quicktime, 14.2MB) If your computer is unable to play this movie, please see the free Quicktime download at Apple.com’s Quicktime download site

Although she came a bit late–6 days after Margaret’s due date–we were excited to have Katarina Emilie arrive on Friday, Nov. 10th, 2006 at 6:14pm EST. Partially due to being a bit late, she turned out to be our largest baby yet, weighing in at 9 lbs. 15 oz., and was 21 3/4 inches in length.

Margaret had an interesting week of waiting after the due date came and went, including several nighttime hours-long sequences of real contractions that led to nothing. But finally on Friday, after contractions that started in the middle of the night, Katarina had had enough and was ready to come out. She did most of the hard labor at home; then we finally went in to Margaret’s doctor around 5pm to see if progress was happening, and needless to say they quickly got us over to the hospital when they found out how far she was along.

At the hospital we were told that all the birthing suites were full, but they were looking for a room for us! It turns out we were put in the “PACU”, which after some googling I found out is the “Post Anesthesia Care Unit”–usually used for a minor recovery room [Note: it's also a kind of fish..learn something new from Google all the time!]. It mostly looked like a large closet to us and had a couple standard gurneys in it as well as the medicine dispensing closet for the whole ward and no bathroom! Thankfully, everything went very quickly from that point and Katarina arrived barely one hour later, delivered by a doctor sitting atop a standard gurney since a birthing bed wasn’t available.

Margaret and Katarina are doing wonderfully. They came home from the hospital yesterday and are settling into life here at home. The kids were really excited to get to “meet” her at the hospital on Saturday. At the top of this post are links to some photos from the weekend as well as a video I put together of some footage (all of it post-birth–don’t be worried!) we took over the weekend as well.