Chris Chen dot See Eh!

I was right! For the past 40 weeks, Alex was walking around with our baby girl in her tummy, and I called it! It’s nice to be right since it doesn’t seem to happen as often as I think it should

Sarah was born April 3, 2010 (a full ten days late) at 12:50pm, tipping the scale at exactly 8lb, 6.9oz, 53cm long, after few hours of really hard labour and 10 minutes of amazing pushing! Ladies, I don’t know how you pop those kids out, but I take my hat off to each and every mother.

Our morning started off casually as we knew Saturday was induction day. We planned to wake up, have some breakfast, drop Thomas off at Grandma & Grandpa’s, then make our way to Lions Gate Hospital to get the show on the road. But after all the waiting for Sarah to kick the contractions into gear, Alex’s water broke around 3am Saturday morning, and our casual morning turned into a flat out race to the hospital. Our doctor advised us that after the short labour with Thomas, should Alex’s water break this time around, things would likely happen very fast. So we made it to the hospital in record time (about an hour), this included getting Thomas and ourselves ready to go, dropping Bubba off at my parent’s place, then ripping off to the hospital. I felt like my years of watching auto racing and episodes of Dukes of Hazzard, A-Team, and Knight Rider were all for something after all!

After getting setup in the delivery room, it wasn’t long until Sarah came into the world wide-eyed and curious, barely a whimper or a cry, and very hungry — a stark contrast from her big brother Thomas. She took to Mommy immediately and it seemed like she was really checking out the faces of her family present in the delivery room: Mom, Dad, and Aunty Allison. Shortly after, I was on the phone to relatives and text messaging Jeremy, Scarlett and Xavier who were in Philly on vacation.

We hung out in the delivery room for a few hours then made our way to the Maternity ward and our new room for the next 24 hours. The evening and night went quite well, compared to our experience with Thomas. I think this was partly because of our past experience and partly because Sarah is more developed than big brother Thomas who was three weeks early.

We’re now home and settling into life with a newborn again. It was a real whirlwind few days, but we’re trying to find our groove and look forward to introducing the little one to friends and family in the coming weeks.

And as always, future pictures of Sarah and the rest of the family are on our family album at http://www.chendynasty.com