Welcome Jacob Arthur

Jacob Arthur Gerhard arrived this morning at 6:58am, after about 10 hours of labour and 20 minutes of pushing. He is 5 pounds 12 ounces and absolutely beautiful. Everything went as it should and mom and baby are recovering well. Daddy is now at home cleaning up some very last minute work things that are due before month end.

I was at the united church national camping event this past weekend, and I would tell people that we were expecting our second child "any day now". I felt like I was being a bit dramatic, though, because it's still a week from his due date, but as it turns out the timing was really close. My plane out of Toronto was late by 20 minutes, and by the time it landed in Regina, Tricia was already starting to have contractions. In the airport. As she was waiting for me to land! We got home at abut 11:00 and at 1:30 we went in to the hospital with 30 second contractions 4 minutes apart. They had a look and sent us home. At about 5:00am, Tricia woke me up with much more pain and the contractions were still 4 minutes apart but they were 60 seconds and much more intense. We went in and were assessed (7 cm) and went straight to the delivery room. That was at around 6:00. Her membranes ruptured at 6:30 and by 7:00 we had Jacob in our arms.

So all is well and we will report more as things happen. We've told Sophia about it and she was very interested, I showed her some photos and she was interested, I told her we would go visit later this afternoon, and she said "Car ride?" so clearly that's the priority, to go for a car ride. It will be exciting to see how she reacts to the baby brother.