And so it begins!

She's here!! Baby Meha took her first breath at 11.10pm, Saturday, April 16th. The labor went amazingly smoothly (so says the dad). At about 9.30 at night, which was about 3 hours after arriving at the hospital, we hunkered it for what we thought would be a long labor. The lights were dimmed, as we were told to get some rest. (For the record, iPad won over the Kindle in this situation as the backlight came in very handy for me to read to Joanne.) Before we fully knew what was going on, we were told to start pushing and Meha entered the world about an hour later.
Here's Meha at age 30 minutes:

And here she is at 30 hours:

She had a huge face-scratching issue when she first came out (she still does to some extent). My guess is that she had her hands close to her face in the womb, and that's her comfortable pose. So, we placed mittens on her little hands. Within half an hour, she had figured out that if she bit down on the glove and pulled down on with her hand, she could break free of the mitten trap. Just as we were admiring the precociousness of our newborn, she proceeded to stick her finger in her eye. Lots to learn.

Twiddling thumbs ...

All the bags are packed, we're ready to go ...
In the meantime, Joanne's dad and I have been busy putting some finishing touches on the baby's room. Here's a picture of the room, upgraded to include curtains and a poster.

Now for some last-minute cramming on occiputs and transitions ...

Amma's embroidery and Vasantha Aunty's quilt!

One of the nice things that came with Jo's parents this week was the baby quilt from Amma and Vasantha Aunty, here spread out in our crib! Amma picked out the cross-stitch design in Kuala Lumpur and we have been following her work on the pattern over the last few months, so we were very excited to see the finished piece :)  As you can see it is a very sweet baby girl fast asleep (cross our fingers the baby chooses to follow this excellent example...) Vasantha Aunty did the quilting, which is super-soft. We love it, and we know the baby will too. We'll be seeing Appa and Amma in May, so the baby can thank them in person!

Pictures!

Today was a hectic day. Left for New York at 5am to renew my passport (boo!) and catch up with Nacho and Ceci (yay!). Passport renewal was successful ... in some future blog, I will have to rant about this process a bit more.

But for now, we have pictures! The baby room is just about complete (about time!). Here's the view when you come in:

Here's a beautifully-sized loveseat that we bought so that I can hang out in the baby's room as well:

And, here's the crib and the baby's bookcase (I added a couple of books to her library from my trip to New York including Neil Gaiman's "Blueberry Girl"):

And, finally, here's the remaining corner where we've placed the changing table, laundry hamper and a diaper-disposal device:

We're still undecided as to the ultimate layout of all the furniture. Suggestions welcome!

We got a yellow loveseat for the nursery and the little toddler bookcase today, but then got a little bit stuck trying to figure out how to get them up our stairs. So this is a picture of our invisible hero, Fabian, whose right hand you can just about see at the bottom of the sofa box on the stairs on the right side of this photo.  You can much more clearly see the box giving PK a bit of a hard time....Thank you Fabian!

Jo's parents are arriving Friday! And we are both so far from being done with work and immigration stuff not to mention pre-baby stuff, yikes. Still racing against the baby!  Anyway, PK (the instigator of this entire scheme) feels very remiss about his lack of posting but promises his public a full-on, photo-heavy, baby-full post tomorrow after a last-minute dash up to NYC to get his passport renewed (!).

Another weekend down the hatch....

An action packed weekend! Firstly India beats Sri Lanka in cricket and then Manchester United beats West Ham. Getting those key updates out of the way, what else ??


We both spent a half day at work, did taxes, built the last of the ikea furniture, laundered the car seat and bassinet and moved more furniture out of the study, which completes the transition from very bare study to overcrowded study/nursery to very bare nursery :) We had two guests and went to a lovely housewarming dinner. And....in between..we had FALSE LABOR.Ow! Now you'd think it would be easy to figure out whether one is in labor, but this turns out to be untrue because so many weird pains and aches happen all the time. In this case, suppose you have a quite nasty Saturday night followed by a grumpy morning and it suddenly belatedly occurs to you that these new pains really are quite particularly regular and hey wait a minute this is a contraction! So here you are already feeling sheepish...."hm yes, i suppose this has been going on a while" but it is more embarrassing to get your nice husband all nerved up and pulling out the contraction timer and talking about going to the hospital after which things sort of slow down and stop, and then you end up feeling even more sheepish. Ugh.
Thank goodness for understanding husbands..

The end of March madness...

Well, we have ordered new curtains so that's one thing down, only a few more to go!  With two weeks left to D-Day, we need to pack our hospital bag and get ourselves in order. We're still waiting on the nursery chair, a tiny sofa and a ton of odds and ends (although as of today, I am happy to report, we do have diaper cream)  Hm. I probably should do my taxes  this weekend before it gets too late! It's also a bit of a race against baby to close shop at work, which is not easy to do when you're not really sleeping much at night, leading to very slow workdays, ugh.  Thankfully, PK is a rock of stability and heroically puts up with all the craziness :)  I have no idea how people who are not married to him can possibly  manage this process...

Hang in there, baby! You can be a bit late! Your mum usually is! Your dad on the other hand, among  his many stellar qualities (such as making a very good dinner tonight and then washing up), tends to be punctual, but you can learn that type of good behavior later in life....