The pink clothes win!

It’s a girl!

Elizabeth Margaret Davis was born on December 8th, 2012 weighing in at 7 lbs 8 oz. You can see the meconium in the hair still.

The boys were very good the and were in the birth room for the critical moments. Meg, as we are calling her, seems to have inherited my loud voice.

Nice capillary action in the finger tips.

Luke got to cut the cord. But they spend most of the time in the muscle room with the doula Shayna.

The placenta actually had some anomalies with the structure of the blood vessels. Normally the main artery connects directly to the placenta and the sub-arteries branch out from that contact point. But in this one, the arteries are connected to the sack that surrounds the baby instead and branch out from the sack. This can sometimes be a serious condition.

The boys still thought it was cool. I don’t actually know whether this bunch of blood vessels (left) goes to the mother or to the baby, but I do know that the placenta is the interface between the mother and baby (admittedly, I don’t know much about the placenta).

We call her Meg. She is the first of our children born at the new Juneau Family Birth Center—A beautiful facility staffed with wonderful folks.

She sleeps wonderfully and doesn’t seem to have inherited my sinus problems, like J.C. did. Although she did get my turned up nose, and perhaps Holly’s smile.

This is a precious moment below. All that vomiting, all that discomfort, the pain of labor, the swollen feet, the selling of the cabin, the purchase of the mini-van, the move to the new house… was it all worth it? Yes.

You can tell Meg gets her hair from me.

Nana and Grandpa John showed up shortly after the birth from Indiana along with my niece Joy who was in town for the youth basketball tournament.

Joy and I almost immediately went out in search of baby clothes. We found Mommy and Me near the airport and by Alaska Industrial Hardware.

We bought two large bags full of clothes for $80. Half or them were for 0-3 months and the other half for ages 3-6 months. Joy picked out a number of outfits and I picked out anything that was a good deal.

 

Mom and Dad stayed in the basement of this church using pads and sleeping bags we brought from Haines.

There’s a basketball hoop right outside the Cosgrove’s house and Mark spent most of his spare time shooting and doing layups there. There was actually not much traffic there, contrary to the way it looks in the picture.

The boys actually got along really well and were able to share and have a fun time working together on most things

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Holly spent 2-3 days holed up in the Cosgrove’s upstairs room where we all slept, basking in the glow of maternal love and peace, eating grapefruit and cucumbers and water.

We came home together on the ferry along with my parents.

This rather artistic shot of the final stages of a diaper change show a neat reflection off the bottom side of the table.

Bob and Margaret met us in Haines at the terminal and then we ate a meal that Margaret had made.

Luke was quite a pack-mule, lugging the same diaper bag that all the boys have used, the little yellow and blue one.