Catherine is currently enjoying what should be her last night at Brigham and Women’s. She is scheduled to make the trip back to Beverly tomorrow morning. Though she has come a long way since last Friday, she still has a ways to go recovery-wise. She’ll stay in the hospital until she can eat on her own. Hopefully that won’t be too long!

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We had a great visit with her today and were able to hold her the whole time we were there. The change in her in the last few days has been so wonderful to see. Every day she is so much more improved. Take a look at the pictures from today and see for yourself!

We had a great day at the hospital today! Grandma and Grandpa Wood and Aunt Kirsten and Uncle Mark came in to say their farewells before heading back to Ohio. Catherine rose to the occasion and was without the breathing tube in her lungs. She now only has a little help from a tube in her nose. What an improvement!

She is also off the sedation medication, so she was moving around a little more like a newborn; waving her arms and legs and sticking her tongue out. Because she was no longer using the breathing tube we were finally able to hold her! What a great feeling. She and I settled into the rocking chair and were quite content for a while. By the time Peter got his hands on her she was a little frustrated with the tubes and decided she’d rather be back in her little isolette.

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Mother and Daughter

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Father and Daughter

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More Pics are here.

Here’s the update on Catherine, after 66 hours:

* She is still at [Brigham and Women’s Hospital](http://www.brighamandwomens.org/) in Boston.
* She is currently on a ventilator to assist in her breathing. She was on a higher-grade ventilator, but they were able to take her off of that late on Saturday night. This is good. It means she is able to breathe more on her own, though she does still need some assistance.
* She is still receiving a high concentration of oxygen, as well as various drugs to help keep her comfortable, fight infections, etc.
* We haven’t been able to hold her, and we can’t touch her a whole lot, but we have certainly been able to look at her.
* We don’t know when she will be able to come home. The doctors say that she is doing well, and that she is making good progress, but they really can’t say how long she will need to be down there. They have to take things slowly to minimize the risk of setbacks, so they can’t just put her on a schedule of “change X every Y hours for Z days” and calculate when she will come home. After each change they make in their therapy, they must carefully evaluate her response and keep her stable so that she can regain strength and continue to heal. It is frustrating to be a new parent and to be unable to take her home or even to hold her. But we know that she is in capable hands and we don’t want her to come home one minute earlier than she needs in order to fully recover.
* Finally, we have some [more photos from our visit to the hospital on Saturday](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/catherine_day_2/).

Thanks to everyone for their continued prayers, thoughts, support, and concern. As Becky mentioned, you are always welcome to call or email us if you have any questions or just want to chat.

Welcome to Due Date Plus One! No, I’m not planning on doing this for every day past the due date… 🙂 Tonight we ate at [Taco Bell](http://www.tacobell.com/) – yes, two people can eat a filling dinner for $4.99. 🙂 Then we did some grocery shopping at Market Basket. I brought along the BeckyCam to [document our outing](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/due_date_plus_one/). Check out the photos to see what Market Basket deems as appropriate punishment for evil chickens…

Today is Becky’s ‘official’ due date! As of 2:30 p.m., there’s no baby. Most babies aren’t born on their due dates, and most first time mothers give birth after their due dates, so we weren’t really expecting BabyWood to come today. So, what did we do for fun on the due date? We headed over to Lynch Park for a picnic!

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It was very sunny and warm out early on, but then it started to get cold and overcast. We had lunch, looked at the newspaper, and played a game of cribbage. Now we’re at home just hanging out. Doing a bit of cleaning and organizing and preparation, but generally just trying to rest and relax.

As of Becky’s last prenatal appointment (last Tuesday), she was 1 centimeter dilated. That means she was roughly one third of the way through early labor. It’s quite possible that she is currently going through early labor without even being aware of it – she hasn’t reported having any of the typical noticeable symptoms of early labor. Her next prenatal appointment is on Tuesday, so we’ll either have the baby before then, or we’ll at least find out how things are going. 🙂

This morning, we finally got around to test-installing the car seat in both of our cars. It is very easy to install in my car, because the Corolla has the [LATCH](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LATCH) system. No need to use the seat belt, you just use the LATCH belt built into the car seat and hook it to the anchors built into the car. Becky’s car was a little bit trickier. It doesn’t have LATCH, and so we had to use the traditional seat belt method to attach the seat. The hardest part was that we had to install a locking clip on the seat belt so that the lap belt wouldn’t retract.

Now we can legally take our baby home from the hospital… when the baby arrives, that is! (Sorry, no news on that front yet!) In the meantime, here’s some photos of the [car seat installation](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/car_seat_installation/).

P.S. — We have consolidated all of the baby-related photos into a new top-level album: [Baby](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/v/baby/). Hopefully we will be filling it up with lots more photos very soon. 🙂

So here we are… one week to go until Becky’s calculated due date, May 21. I know that we had told many people that our due date was May 18, but for the life of me I can’t remember how we came up with that date. May 21 is the date that we and the doctors calculated based on Becky’s last menstrual cycle, and it was confirmed when we had our prenatal ultrasound. It’s also the date that Beverly Hospital has us tentatively registered for admittance. Of course, there is no way to know for sure that our baby will be born on the due date, but we can be reasonably certain that it will be plus or minus a week from that date. Based on Becky’s current symptoms, and based on her doctor’s opinion after her exam last week, I tend to think that the baby will be born *past* the due date. It is pretty common for first-time mothers to go past their due dates. According to What to Expect When You’re Expecting, however:

Studies show that about 70 percent of apparent postterm pregnancies aren’t postterm at all. They are only believed to be late because of a miscalculation of the time of conception, usually thanks to irregular ovulation or a woman’s uncertainty about the exact date of her last menstrual period.

Becky and I kept pretty close tabs on such information while we were planning to have a baby, thanks to another great book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. So we can say that the information we used for our calculations is about as accurate as we could get. That’s not to say that Becky won’t go past her due date, just that if she does, it’s most likely going to be true postterm pregnancy and not a miscalculated due date.

Becky has another prenatal exam on Tuesday, so we’ll get some more up-to-date info. With any luck, there should be a new Wood in our house within the next couple of weeks!