Delia Ellen Schmitt

Around 2am on Monday morning Allison began to feel a couple contractions. Recognizing that the entire family would benefit from a whole nights sleep, my wonderful wife let us sleep until 7. I was planning on working on Monday (no disrespect to Dr. King, but I had been out of the office for a week already) but I knew very quickly that we were going to have a busy day.

Rewind to August of 2006, we spent over 13 hours in the labor and delivery room because we admitted too early, we were sure to not have that happen again. We were not going to step foot into a hospital until we were well on our way (contractions 5 minutes apart). Throughout the day on Monday we watched some movies and walked... a lot. We walked through Target and most of the Short Pump Town Center. A highlight had to be when the lady at the Crate and Barrel was asking Allison when she was due right in the middle of a pretty severe contraction. My ever polite wife still stated the due date of January 24th, even though delivery was immanent. Around 3:30 we called the doctor and they brought us in. This is when things started getting a bit hairy. He brought us into the office first because he did not want to send us in unless it was the real thing. Something that he did while checking Allison's progress kicked off a quite the chain of events.

4:30- We walk to the car to get Allison's bag and the labor stuff.

4:50- We are shown our labor and delivery room.

5:00- John unpacks thinking we will be there awhile (note the previous long labor)

5:10 - Allison grabs John's hand

5:30- Allison requests an epidural, but she has to put down a bag of IV before this happens

6:00 - Allison nearly breaks John's hand

6:10 - Allison's body is saying push, the Dr. is saying no, and the other doctor is trying to put in an epidural.

6:30 - Allison releases John's hand, pain has subsided (for both Allison and my hand)

7:20 - We are informed that our little girl is facing the wrong way, are told this will be a tough delivery

7:40 - We start some pushing

8:20 - Delia Ellen Schmitt arrives!

I guess we shouldn't have waited as long to show up, but it was quite exciting nonetheless.

Vital Stats:
Birth Date: 01/19/09

Birth Time: 8:20pm

Weight: 6lbs 12 oz

Height: 19 inches
Health: Perfect

Name Origin: Named after 2 of her great grandmothers, Delia (Allison's Maternal Grandmother) Ellen (John's Paternal Grandmother).

On Tuesday afternoon Delia got to meet her big brother. She was so excited! She even went out beforehand to buy him some gifts to ensure that he would know that she loved him and meant him no disrespect. At first JGray was pretty confident that Delia would want to play with the Dragon that she bought him...

... unfortunately she was not too interested in that. Ok, if she was not interested in Dragons, she had to be into Monster Trucks!


Once again, she was not too interested. Realizing that it was going to take awhile before she could convince her to play, he settled down to hold her. He assured us that he could do it on his own.

He did a great job with her. We could not have asked for him to be any better. It was shocking for both Allison and I to realize how big he has gotten as we saw him there with a little baby.