The baby and Nam are fine. He is 2,500 grams of red-faced crying glory. I put my hand on his head and he immediately stopped and went to sleep. Life is good. Thanks for all your prayers!

Just a quick notice: Nam’s water has broken. I am sitting in a VIP post-op room by myself, as I am not allowed in the maternity ward. This hospital has a strange policy of not allowing husbands into the delivery rooms. It’s a policy we came asking about just yesterday in anticipation of the baby’s target date of May 11. It’s this policy that started us planning on checking out hospitals in the big city of Khon Kaen, an hour away. We were going to go this weekend, when a doctor we saw before is on duty. Hell, we were talking about going today after lunch. Then her water broke.…

I forgot to mention that when the nice lady doctor at the clinic was viewing with ultrasound a couple weeks ago, the baby let loose with a spontaneous boner. He didn’t seem overly concerned to have observers, either. For some strange reason, I felt very proud about this magnificent display. Heh.

Clive Thompson (the Giant Squid Overlord) has just put up a very interesting post: Why C-section births might cause eczema in babies Now, in the midst of making some very important choices about how our boya is going to be born, this type of information is key in confirming our choice in a natural birth, if at all possible. We know that the C-section is a valuable tool, indeed a life-saving one as proven time and time again, but the reasons we have heard for having one out of want instead of need recently really cause some concern. Some women who have had them (numerous times in some cases) claim…

I first felt the baby moving a few weeks ago. Nam first felt it a month or two ago; it’s apparently hard for a first-time mother to tell movements of the fetus apart from digestive and other normal movements. Now, though, there is no mistaking it; he wakes his mom sometimes by moving around so much. Sometimes if you tap or pat lightly, he taps back from the inside. He grooves to a good beat and seems pretty chill when something soft is on. Sometimes when I sing him a song, he pounds the walls for an encore. (So far one little, two little, three little Indians is his favorite…