For anyone expecting a baby on the peninsula, I can highly recommend delivering at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. The staff is friendly and well trained. All the doctors we talked to were nice and answered all our questions. We received excellent care throughout the process. Labor, delivery, post-partum support all were very good. What we had heard before we went there was that it was the best place to deliver a baby if there was a problem, but other hospitals treat you better. A private maternity room, better food, and a couch/bed for me to sleep in would have been nice, but those are things I can easily put up with.

They also had nurses checking every couple of hours on the babies and a bunch of available lactation consultants and classes. And of course there were some newborn screens and vaccinations.

Being a father for less than a week has been interesting. I’m already more helpful around the house than I used to be, which isn’t really saying much but Tracy has never really complained much about that.

Especially this early on and being first time parents, we are hyper sensitive about everything. We don’t know how much he should eat, sleep, or poop and I’m afraid of Lucas choking or something random like that. It’s especially odd for me because I’ve never been paranoid about that kind of thing until now. I think it will pass with time.

Other than those things we’re really happy, Lucas is doing well and he is sleeping pretty well which is good.

I put up more pictures at Shutterfly. Go to http://lucaschen.shutterfly.com to see them. I’ll be adding more pictures there as they come, so you can bookmark it and check back there later for more.

Here’s a couple more pictures. Lucas’ first car ride. And
Lucas and me.

Here’s Lucas William Chen. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that he is the best baby ever. I’ll upload some more pictures when I get the chance.

Tracy delivered a baby boy of 6 lbs 12 oz and 20 inches at 4:09pm today. We are still undecided on the final name, that will be today. The labor was kind of tough for Tracy even with the epidural. She got the epidural at about 5am after some late night discomfort and that helped out a lot. The delivery wasn’t proceeding as quickly as the doctor wanted, so there was talk about a C-section, but Tracy did a great job and got baby out before the doctor had to resort to it. I’ll try to post some pictures tomorrow or the next day.

Still here. Tracy’s not in labor yet, although I think she’s getting there slowly. The fetal monitor claims that she’s having contractions, but she doesn’t really notice them distinctly. She says she’s just sort of feeling a constant slight discomfort.

We’ve been in the hospital for the full day and there’s not a lot going on. Tracy started this morning on the starter drug I forget what it’s called, miso-something at around 9am. The monitor shows some contractions, but Tracy hasn’t felt a thing. She just started on pitocin and we’ll see how that goes. She’s not very dialated. Our doctor said that worst case, if there is no progress by tomorrow morning, she’ll send us home for a day or two and see if things progress naturally. We’ve spent the day doing a lot of nothing, watching a dvd of Scrubs season 1 and me going out and doing some random errands. All in all, not very exciting.

Tracy is 8 days overdue so tonight we are headed to the hospital and tomorrow they’ll start inducing labor. With luck we’ll have a bouncing baby boy tomorrow. If we aren’t lucky it might be the next day. I’ll try and put in an update in from the hospital tomorrow.

I forgot to mention this, but we are doing quite a bit of hiring here at Shutterfly and if any of the jobs look interesting to you tell me. I’ll be happy to share a cut of the recruitment bonus with you.

In a random coincidence today, a guy asked me for a password reset today and looking eerily familiar I recognized Andrei as a guy who I had played poker with who I had played with at Patri‘s poker game and/or Yacht. I guess he does some contract design work for us. I sense the makings of a game at Shutterfly. One of my co-workers already invited me to a small game, but I’m not sure I’ll have time baby on the way.

I have made approximately 6 sports bets against friends this year and I’m perfect, even pulling off an unlikely 3:1 parlay payoff. They have all been NFL games bet against the over/under(the parlay was a combination of two o/u bets). I might bet a bit more frequently, but the problem the NFL is the only league that I can even sort of claim to understand, and I don’t really follow the pre-season and early season. That leaves me with about 2 months of games to wager on. I personally feel like the over/under has the most potential to be bet successfully but it’s hard to quantify why I feel that way.

It looks like my Seahawks could finally go all the way this year. I was kind of afraid of the Patriots and Colts, but I think with both those teams, the Seahawks are the favorite to win it all.

Baby note, we are now 3 days overdue and are thinking inducement.