Saturday, April 21, 2007

And Baby Makes Three

This blog now has a new character: The Baby.

The Baby, as it happens, is a boy. But since this blog already has a Boy and a Girl, he will have to remain The Baby for now. He was born on April 19, after a day spent walking around the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum with The Boy and The Girl. We played in the slide area, the river area, went up and saw the butterflies (The Girl calls them "flies!") in the Butterfly Haven, had lunch, and saw a turtle, a frog and a few snakes up close when a handler had them out on a table along the swamp exhibit.

The staff at the Notebaert were unusually friendly that day, perhaps because I was walking around the museum at nearly 40 weeks pregnant and looking quite as if I was going to pop. Whenever anyone inquired when I was due and learned the answer, she was quite taken aback at the answer and looked scared, as if I might have the baby within the museum itself.

Such was not the case. Although there is a hospital only one block north of the nature museum, I did not need it. Instead, I delivered The Baby at Swedish Covenant Hospital. Delivering at Swedish was a world apart from delivering at Northwestern Memorial Hospital downtown, where both The Boy and The Girl were born. I highly recommend it, and the midwives associated with the hospital, one of whom delivered The Baby.