The rightmost picture marks the first time she actually showed interest in a toy. It’s my desktop wallpaper now Yay for silly firsts!

Alanna’s doing wonderful, even managed to sleep through her first car ride

Penny’s recovering rapidly, but I still have a shopping list of things to pick up for her (yay, vicodin!) later tonight.

But first! I get to take a shower and change clothes for the first time in what feels like weeks (It’s actually only been since Wednesday morning… but still…)

Born 11:34am, April 5th, 2007

6 lbs, 14 oz – 19″ length – reddish hair

I’ve got a camera and I’m not afraid to use it.

Short version of the story:

We were due last Thursday and nothing happened. So, we scheduled to induce today (Penny’s doctor said she would have been worried if it took past the 9th or so).

At or shortly before 12 this morning, Penny started having contractions and didn’t tell me. I laid down to sleep… and she “woke” me at 1am (I can never actually fall to sleep in that short of a time). We walked around the apartment until a bit before 4am, when it was decided to head on in to the hospital.

6am, it started to get bad, so it was decided to get an epidural… which finally happened around 8am because of emergencies tying up the anesthesiologist until shift change. Epidural didn’t really work. Wound up pumping an enormous quantity of stuff into Penny’s back – calling anesthesiologists back into the room no less than 5 or 6 times to attempt to make things more comfortable.

11amish, things were pretty much over. Started pushing, called doctor into the room, baby was out very quickly. Washed and weighed her while Penny was taken care of.

I took first pictures and started with the phone calls. Penny’s parents arrived while I was on the phone with my mom. Around 2pm, Mom and Dad left and we started getting ready to relocate into our actual room. 3:30ish, we dropped Alanna off in the nursery for some monitoring.

4:30, they brought her back to us, and she’s been here ever since. Mom and Dad came back around 6pm with some Wendy’s for me (hospital provided Penny with some 3 meals this afternoon/evening but I was left to scavenge for myself).

I have a fold-out couch to crash on in the room tonight. Hopefully, I’ll even be given a blanket if I can behave myself.

Go figure. We were scheduled to go in to induce at 8am today. With any luck, we’ll be done before then

Either way, if she behaves herself and comes today, she doesn’t have to share her birthday with the likes of her Aunt Stori.

Mostly, we enjoy the confirmation that we’re not pulling some enormous prank on people. She really is expecting and there really is a human shaped person in the tummy that’s only just barely started showing.

I am amazed at how far the technology has come with this sort of thing. It was nothing like the chicken bones and tea leaves that I have previously associated with sonograms. The image resolution was incredible. We could see very clear and distinct features. The machine was even able to render the direction of the child’s blood flow.

They gave us four pictures, and if Penny doesn’t, I’m going to have to be the evil one and upload them.

Oh, and apparently, it’s probably a girl. Obviously we’re not 100% certain here, but when the pictures start backing up the gut feelings and dreams I’ve been having for over a year now… that’s good enough for me.

update

Penny has scanned and posted the pictures in her inaugural blog post.

I am sore beyond reason after yesterday’s festivities. Penny’s father (Kirk) has been wooed by the siren call of the paintball gun (his best friend is something of a junkie for that sort of thing). I was somehow caught up in all of this and got to spend the majority of yesterday afternoon running around in a sandy river bottom getting shot at by people in entirely better shape than me. Most notable injuries include an almost point-blank shot to my left shoulder (golf ball sized bruise) and a series of three shots to the back of the head by some dufus who didn’t hear time out called (one kid twisted his ankle and we were seeing if he was ok). But mostly, I’m just sore from using muscles I’ve not used in a while – I’ve not done any sort of good simulated combat in about 10 years.

Oh, that and Danny (brother-in-law, ArbyFish person) almost killed everyone with his attempt at building a model rocket. Kirk had an evil idea for uses of their leftover wrapping paper tubes… we spent most of the time leading up to Christmas in figuring out how to launch the things. Eventually a standard design was settled on:

• Cardboard tube from wrapping paper for body
• Hard styrofoam ball for nose
• Cardboard fins glued on tangentially to the tube for stabilization and stuff
• Pipe insulation to hold the motor in place
• Motors of size C through E, because overkill is not enough

Our first successful launch was interesting in that it ejected the foam insulation and motor out the back two seconds after the engine cut off – leaving a sulphurous crater in the neighboring cotton field. Our funniest launch (with the exception of Danny’s) was tantamount to a declaration of war on our neighbors (the Bishop) as rocket bits rained down on his house.

Danny… built a little rocket (10″ long or so) and named it Gimpy. He put three huge fins on it and tried to attach them perpendicular to the tube in stead of tangentially. He stuffed an E9 in the back. Upon ignition, the rocket got about 6 feet off of the ground before one of the fins was torn off, at which point, the thing began spinning in loops. The overall flight path took it barely over the house and dove it into the ground on the other side. There was much fear that one of its revolutions would take it in the direction of the spectators. Once catastrophe was acknowledged as averted, there was much hilarity and rejoicing.

I’ve given him the assignment of writing a little four function calculator application. So far, he’s got most of the gui options figured out, but I needed to give him a nudge. We’ll see how long it takes him Tonight I will probably be teaching him how to write the events that make the buttons do stuff.

I also looked up the lyrics to Phantom music (since I can’t find my sheet music right now). And I sung my brains out. I need practice so badly. It was a good experience, but wow… is my voice out of shape. These are songs I have practiced and performed hundreds of times, and I am having so much trouble with them.

My range has shrunk dramatically. I think I’ve lost about an octave on the top and half of one on the bottom. My falsetto is still basically fine, but since there’s no real overlap any more… the transitions are way more difficult now. I am going to force myself to sing something at full volume every morning until I’m back to tolerable again. Then, I browbeat Kyle into making some recordings with me.

Talked to Elijah for a few minutes. He seems to be doing better now, is going to work today.

Speaking of which, I need to finish up a few things real quick and head in myself. Maybe they will have a verdict for me this afternoon? I need this job.

Anyhow, today started off normally enough – Penny got up and left for work and assumedly she set the alarm for a bit later in order to nudge me out of grogginess resultant from my inability to fall asleep at a reasonable hour last night. However, I did not get up when the alarm went off – for the alarm never rang. There was apparently a power outage a few hours ago that wreaked havoc on all of our wall-powered clocks. Rincewind decided to reboot as a result of this, so I know the outage lasted for more time than the UPS could handle.

Stephen and Nicole are en route to the house now, with Amber (potential new sister-in-law type person) in tow. I was supposed to be at work by now, but well, stuff happens, ne? Either way, nobody was really expecting me to get anything done in the office since the whole family run-around thing was planned in advance.

We had wanted to go to the Gaslight, but it looks like we’d have had to made reservations a few weeks in advance (normally we have done so in the past, but the only times we’ve ever gone were in result of Penny’s having won a contest at work, so things might have been different). I have no idea what exactly is going to happen this afternoon/evening.

I have homework for CS460 due tonight, but it shouldn’t take me very long, once I convert my knowledge of MySQL into Oracle.