Hello, world. We’ve been offline for a few days; sorry about that. I managed to get a quick announcement via text message out to Twitter late Thursday morning, and eventually a quick post to FaceBook when I’d had the time to sit back and buy data access for my iPhone on Thursday night, but this is the first chance I’ve had to sit at my computer since we got home late Friday night to acquaint you all with the lovely news of our daughter’s birth and shower you with photos.

In a delicious show of irony, the Owlet decided to hatch on the estimated due date I’d been using from the beginning before my doctor adjusted it back and forth. To the medical community, I say Ha, and Ha again.

Thursday morning I woke up just after 4 AM and thought to myself, Hmm, that’s probably another annoying prodromal labour contraction. And really, there was no reason to think otherwise, seeing as how I’d been handling two weeks of prodromal labour on and off. I got up to walk around as usual, and started timing the contractions just out of habit. Good thing I did, because it turned out that they were getting more intense, were lasting about ninety seconds, and were coming between two and four minutes apart. After a solid hour of timing them to be extra-sure I woke HRH, who called his parents, and we threw the last few things we needed into bags. The boy woke up just before his grandparents arrived and we gave him hugs and kisses and told him his sister would finally arrive that day, and that he could come meet her that afternoon. The roads were beautifully clear at six-thirty in the morning, and we got to the hospital in record time. Good thing, too, because when they checked me out they discovered I was just passing 4 cm, and the contractions were getting stronger. They let me move around with the monitors strapped to me, thank goodness. Within an hour I was at 8cm, and then suddenly 9+cm, and the doctor was there and they made me get on the bed to push ( “Please don’t make me get on the bed, I hate the bed, the contractions are worse on the bed,” I remember saying). After fifteen minutes of pushing (which certainly felt much longer than that), and a grand total of four hours of labour (a time span which I certainly do not recommend in general, because yes, that was about fourteen hours of work compressed into a quite intensified four hours), Bria Elisabeth was born at 08:13, weighing 7 lbs 12 oz and measuring 51 cm long.

Our first family picture, post-birth:

Baby!

A close-up of the baby!

True to our word, the boy was the first person to hold the baby after HRH and I, and he got a little teary about it:

And then he began gifting her with all the little toys he’d chosen and bought for her:

Culminating in the ceremonial Passing of the Bunny, one of the boy’s special favourite toys when he was just a tiny thing:

We were released 36 hours after the baby’s birth, and only that late because they weren’t allowed to release us any earlier. Both baby and I are in sparkling good health, eating and sleeping and settling in well. Today the hit-by-a-bus feeling that lands a couple of days after a major physical undertaking arrived, and Tylenol is my friend, because everything everywhere hurts.

For those wondering, Bria is pronounced BREE-ah, and yes, it’s Elisabeth with an S instead of a Z.