Heather Londyn Taber

Please join us in welcoming Heather Londyn Taber to our family.

Heather Londyn Taber

I'll let Anne post the rest of the details tomorrow or Saturday, but for now, here are the basics along with a few photos.

Name: Heather Londyn Taber - We had originally been leaning towards Londyn Heather, but everyone, from Chris down to Chase said when they held her that she just seemed more like a "Heather Londyn" than a "Londyn Heather"

Born: 3:50 am on 11 September 2008. After a 24 hour delay due to no beds available at the hospital (first 12 hours of delay), then not enough doctors available if Anne's labor progressed quickly (ha! not this time! - second 12 hours of delay), Anne got started at 7:30 am and labored until almost 1:00am. Thankfully, she got an epidural at about 6:00pm and had a much better time of it after that. I'll leave the rest of the details for one of Anne's posts

Weight: 4.514 kg, or 9 lbs 15 ozs. For those keeping score at home, this is slightly larger than Isabelle (9 lbs 6 ozs) and much more than Chase (6 lbs 15 ozs).


Length: 22 inches. This is an unofficial measurement, since they don't measure length for babies born in the UK - they measure the circumference of the head - which I suspect most Moms would find a more useful measurement than length, but what do I know? (Of course, I forgot to write down the circumference measurement, so I'll leave that to Anne to share)


Hair: Yes. Lots of dark brown hair, similar to Isabelle when she was born. In fact, see if you can tell which is which from the photos below...


Eyes: Dark brown, though Chase and Isabelle are convinced they are dark blue. I will say that the light in the room where we were when the children came to visit was not the greatest, so this "stat" should also be considered unofficial.


Now a few FAQs from some of the emails and Facebook responses I've been getting from people over the past few hours, so I don't lose track of who asked which question when:

1. How is Anne doing? She's doing well - exhausted, but well. I took the children over to visit from 10:30 or so this morning until about 4:00, and then left for the day so that Anne could get some much-needed rest. I then fell asleep on the bus several times and Isabelle and Chase had to keep waking me up to ask if we had missed our stop - we hadn't. I'll go back in the morning after taking the children to school (they didn't go today) and hopefully they'll be able to come home then.



2. What was it like giving birth in the UK vs. the US? I'll let Anne give more details if she likes, but overall I think Anne had a fairly positive experience, though being far from family and not having any of them here this week meant that we had to rely on our extended ward family to help us out with taking Isabelle & Chase to school, letting them stay overnight, etc. - even laundering their school uniforms when we they had to stay a night longer than expected. They were absolute lifesavers!



3. What's the standard of care like in the NHS? Again, Anne can share her opinions, but one thing we were really grateful for was to be able to deliver in the newer Queen Charlotte's & Chelsea hospital rather than the older Hammersmith hospital which adjoins it(and we're talking WWII-era and looks like it hasn't been updated or cleaned since then). Probably one of the biggest adjustments was adjusting to the different names and terminology used. Anne's diabetes management had to switch meter readings from mg/deciliter to mmol/liter, two totally different scales where the adjustment factor between the two is to multiply the latter by about 18 to get the former, so lots of mental math involved. Diapers are nappies. Finger sticks (to check blood sugar levels) are referred to as BMs...took me awhile to figure out why they kept asking about that once an hour or so. Not all "doctors" are referred to as "Dr." So-and-so, but some are "Mr." or "Mrs.", while others are "Dr."... The doctors refer to the midwives as Sister So-and-so, even though this was not a Catholic hospital.



4. How do British and American hospitals differ in their philosophies on childbirth. Agin, my male-oriented observations only at this point, but it seemed to me that this time around, Anne was really encouraged to take things as slowly as possible, whereas in the States, sometimes it seemed like "OK, we need you to move along now, so we're just gonna do this with your medications, etc."



5. Will the baby have dual US-UK citizenship? Most likely not. Everything I've read seems to indicate that since 1983, the UK does not automatically grant citizenship (or the right to dual citizenship) to babies born here. In order to claim dual citizenship, we'd have to either show that the baby's grandparents were British Citizens or that we had a reasonable expectation to remain in the UK indefinitely, neither of which are true (though my father's mother was born and raised here)

I think that covers the most frequent questions we've been getting, so if I missed one, leave a comment and I'll try to respond.