9:15pm -- Shannon is increasingly uncomfortable. I guess contractions will do that to you. She rates her pain at a 6/10. Shannon is still chugging a long pretty well, considering. She's dilated to about a 3. She's had some broth and jello to keep her going, but we all know that a hungry Shannon is not a happy Shannon.

6:45pm -- The OB came and checked Shannon. She is dilated to 2cm, 80% effaced, and the baby is sitting at -2. (This is a measure of how low the baby is in the pelvis, where positive numbers mean the baby is deeper in the pelvis.) We'll be doing a third dose of cytotec in just a few minutes. Then waiting for a few more hours. Hopefully the cytotec puts her in real labor and things progress more quickly. If they don't, we'll switch to pitocin to help out. Regardless, it looks quite unlikely that Wombsly will be making her appearance any time soon, or before midnight. It looks like we may need to be thinking about trying to get some sleep so we can be of some utility tonight when the real action starts.

6:00pm -- We've got 30 second long contractions every 3 minutes or so! It's actual labor! Up until now, this has been pretty boring. (Shannon agrees with me on this one.) We've just been sitting around and waiting and waiting until this recent progress.

4:00pm -- Shannon just received a second dose of cytotec which softens the cervix and starts dilation. She'll get checked in another 3 hours, at which time it is likely that she will start getting pitocin which should get the contractions started.

1:45pm -- Upon arrival at the hospital, the nurse said Shannon was dilated to 1cm. A new record! They've got her hooked up to the IV, EKG, pulse oximeter, blood pressure cuff, baby heart monitor and the contraction monitor. They've given her a drug that is supposed to get things moving and we're just waiting around for a while now. We've got Wifi at the hospital, but gmail chat doesn't seem to be working for me.

Baby Update Center

It is 11:15am, April 16th, 2008. We're heading to the hospital to have a baby.

This is now the baby update center. We'll see how many posts I can make in the next 24-48 hours, so check back often.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations

Another book is finished. This time it is "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman". Yes, I've gone somewhat Feynman crazy lately. Since Feynman himself published all sorts of accounts from his life of funny stories, you'd think reading letters he wrote would be pretty bland. But for the most part, the book was quite interesting. To me, at least. Being from a much earlier generation, Feynman wrote letters, not 13 word text messages, which his daughter has read through and condensed to a scant 416 pages. Feynman is the American physicist of the middle of the 20th century. In the continuum of notable physicists he occupies the space between Einstein and Hawking. And he'd completely hate that I just wrote that. He routinely asked to not be described as a Nobel prize winner, not out of disrespect for the prize, but because he didn't like the way everyone's reaction to him changed because of the prize. He learned to draw later in life, and refused to sell work to anyone who was looking for a drawing from a notable physicist; he would only sell his work to people who liked it for what it was.

Feynman lived in the middle of all the big events in physics in the middle of the 20th century. As a winner of the Einstein award, he was contacted for his opinion about a potential recipient of the award: Stephen Hawking. At a conference, he was talking to another physicist when a young man came up and asked the other physicist what he thought of his new theory to describe super-conduction. Feynman says he didn't understand any of it, but that the other guy was impressed. His letter on the subject just comments "Could this have been Cooper?" Um, as in "Cooper pairs" Cooper? It's a nerdy book. But me and Feynman, we're nerdy guys.

Super Dumb

From last nights NCAA championship game (more or less accurate): "Kansas knows what it's like to be in an championship over time game. They lost a game in triple overtime to North Carolina in 1954."

Yeah, because that game 54 years ago really helped them build character and maturity that they've been saving up now for over half a century. I don't suppose there is a single individual who was a student at or employee of Kansas for both championship overtime games. It must be the physical campus that stored up the experience, waiting until the appropriate time to bestow it upon the right basketball team.

Season Finale

Ward basketball ended last night, for my ward at least. We lost by half or a dozen or so, and committed about 50 fouls in the last 2 minutes trying to extend the game. The other team hit enough free throws to hold us off. I think I ended the night 2/4 from the field and 1/2 from the line. I also had what I am calling a "mind numbing block". You know, the kind where the ball never really makes it out the guys hands and you send it flying out of bounds? Yeah, that kind. It felt good. And if I'd had a dozen more of those, we might have won.

Jack Sprat

As the devoted readers of my blog that you all are, you've no doubt thought that I read books that you would never read. A book about the number zero, the number e, and even 1,100 page books about physics. You have haven't even begun to imagine the books that I read that you never will, because last week I finished off "Lean Transformation: How to change your business into a lean enterprise". As you might have guessed, I didn't really read this one for fun. At work, people are always talking about being "lean" so I thought it a reasonable idea to read a book on it.

It turns out that "lean" is a pretty simple idea. Basically, the book was 200 pages of "don't do stuff that you don't need to do. Look for ways to cut out the unnecessary stuff." Simple idea. And yet, most companies to tons of stuff that they don't need to. So, it's good to think occasionally about how to be more efficient.

Of course, the book is unnecessarily full of claims like "once your factory becomes lean, you will make 11 times as much stuff per day, and it will only take 4 minutes to fill a new order." And half the suggestions they make really wouldn't work at my work. But still, there are always useful ideas mixed in with the silly ones that don't apply.