Hello World

Mona Sophia Friedland was born on November 26, 2010 at 1:26pm in San Francisco CA with a weight of 7 lbs 3 oz (3260g) and length of 21.5 inches (52 cm).



The first contraction I had at 2pm on Thanksgiving. But at the beginning I wasn't sure if this is the real deal, so we continued watching the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, which we had recorded that morning. After that I was pretty sure it started, so we called our doula Conny to let her know that we will need her soon. We decided to spend the time like every Thanksgiving, which means going to our little movie theater watch a movie and have a pizza.
We watched Burlesque. It was the perfect movie, easy to follow even when you are in pain.
After the movie it was time to call Conny again and tell her to come by. Around midnight we decided to drive to the hospital. There was no traffic so my biggest fear having the baby on the Bay bridge didn't come true.
Also the hospital was very quite, we got a huge room which even had a jacuzzi tub. From that moment on my memory is a little bit blurry, but I spend my time in this room somehow and then gave birth at 1:26pm to a healthy super cute little girl. I did all natural, meaning no pain medication or intervention.
Gerald and Conny were the whole time with me and helped a lot.
The rest of the day Mona slept almost all the time:



But every now and then she was awake:



The second day was busy with a lot of feeding. I guess that's how it will be for the next weeks.
In the evening we had our celebration dinner in the hospital: Filet Mignon:



Right now it's 2:26am and I'm feeding her with one hand and typing this post with the other hand on my phone.
Here's a last picture:

Maternity leave

I'm in the third week of my maternity leave. And more then ready for our little girl. It's only 8 days until the due date, but we really hope she decides to come early.

On my first day home I met with my friend Allison. She's doing professional photos of people. We took a lot of photos and they worked out great. You can see all of them on our website.


I was also busy preparing the nursery, washing all the baby cloth, etc. I think the wall stickers are really cute.



I also met with friends and yesterday I went back to the office, to be in the staff photos, they took for the holiday card. It was nice to see everybody.

And the rest of the time I'm relaxing :-)

Halloween

A little bit late, but finally here is my Halloween entry.
Like I told you in the last blog entry Gerald went to Italy the week before Halloween, so I had a lot of time to carve some pumpkins. Here are the results:



The Friday was my last day at work before my maternity leave and also a Halloween party in our office. I dressed up as a white cat which had a fish bowl in her hands:



Margaret, our office manager, had decorate the kitchen with spider webs, pumpkins and homemade spider, mumie and ghost cupcakes.



Saturday evening I went to a Halloween party at Rob's and Emily's place. The theme of the party was black and white ghouls. My cat wasn't very ghoulish but at least white. I had to leave the party at 10pm to pick up gerald from the airport. People looked a little bit strange at me, I guess because of the costume ?!?



Sunday was really Halloween and we prepared during the day for all the trick and treaters.
We didn't have as many kids coming over this year as last year, probably because of the World Series.