Thursday, November 09, 2006

Father to None, Uncle to Many

Uncle to fifteen, in fact.
-- As of Tuesday.

Congratulations to R's sister J, who had a new baby boy on Tuesday. That's their second (first was a girl). In addition to these two, we have four nephews and nine nieces on my side of the family.

We happened to speak to J (and her husband L) Sunday night, less than 36 hours before J went into labour. She said that her due date was Tuesday, but she was predicting that it would be another week before the delivery. She was counting on having a few extra days to get ready. No such luck, the baby came right on her due date.

While she was in labour, we happened to be visiting with our doctor, as I noted before. The doctor pulled out his little calendar-wheel to confirm that May 7 was the predicted "big day", but he also mentioned that only three percent of babies are actually born on the due date. According to one site, 80 percent are born with 10 days of the date.

You basically have a window of 20 days when the baby is likely to be born. That's almost a whole month! When people ask us when R is due, I might as well just say, "spring-ish 2007". Maybe I will.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

While we were in the hospital giving birth (well Jenny, not Luke) our nurse told us that if you make purchases using your Sears card and you have the baby on your actual due date then you get all your purchases for free. We were tempted to run out and do a quick shopping spree, but alas we missed our chance!!