27 minutes

I’ve got my computer in the hospital with me but only intermittent Internet access; R and I are sharing a network card and he’s got it in Zurich with him now. Does it count for NaBloPoMo that I’m typing this on Tuesday and will post it Wednesday when I get my crack at the network card? (R skipped Zurich Monday, went Tuesday [today], will skip half of Wednesday and probably all of Thursday and then go back to Zurich on Friday. Probably. This works fine for me and the Boychen since we’re just hanging out in the hospital all week anyway; but Small Boy is getting shuttled between home and The Farm more than we had hoped would happen.)

So far Boychen is a sleeper but they always are the first day or two so we’ll see if that changes. And early babies tend to be big sleepers, too, although thanks to those 27 minutes past midnight he is not, technically, preterm. Monday, the day he was born, marked 37 weeks and 0 days – medically, the definition of a full-term pregnancy. Had Boychen arrived just an hour earlier – just before midnight instead of just after – he would have arrived in the 36th week of pregnancy and technically would have been considered pre-term. Clearly a matter of an hour is meaningless in terms of his physical development – the closer you get to the 37 week mark the more arbitrary a line it seems, really. In Boychen’s case – will he emerge just before or just after midnight? – it was a truly arbitrary marker but not one without meaning. Had he arrived just an hour earlier, had he arrived any time on Sunday, the hospital would have been obligated to classify him as a pre-term baby, which in turn would have obligated them to run a few additional tests on him and to monitor him more closely and more frequently during our hospital stay.

Those 27 minutes – which were completely meaningless in terms of in utero development – put him on the other side of the line and gets us out additional testing requirements.

Random, no?

And yeah, how huge is he for 37 weeks? Had we gone to 40 we’d have been looking at C-section for sure. As it was…well, I’ll attempt the labor and delivery story when I can face it. But let me just say for now that I’m a good mother, and I rock at breastfeeding, but apparently I just suck at labor and delivery.