Alain and I are pleased to let you know that Hap is finally home!
She was delivered by C-section on the 25th of September at 13:31 and weighed 1.49 kg. Her name is Sarah, though we still call her Hap.
Here is a photograph of her about an hour later, before all the tubes and wires were attached.
She spent the next 3 weeks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at St Peter’s Hospital, and came home yesterday afternoon. Here is a photograph of her sleeping peacefully in her Moses basket this morning.
Because Nature Network is supposed to be a scientific place, let me include a graph!
Many happy Hap days to the Dekkers !!
Many congratulations!
Fantastic!!!! Go ahead and put on more weight, Hap!
wow. How lovely! Congratulations and hope the three of you will have a good time now that she is home from nicu. The weight graph looks good :)
Congratulations! Hap is cute =)
I like the weight graph – you should keep doing that. There’s a website/software that lets you track all kinds of baby data, like naps and diapers. (If I had a kid I would graph every single aspect of it, all the time. This is why I don’t have any!)
Hap is beautiful, Bronwen!
If I had a kid I would graph every single aspect of it, all the time
In my high school and undergrad years, I worked as an office assistant for a pediatrician, and one of my duties was to weigh and measure (length and head circumference) the babies. I really enjoyed that job!
Hello, and thankyou for all the kind comments!
Eva: That Trixie Tracker looks great – will look at the tour in some detail and start an excel sheet (I don’t think that I will buy the software…). The Sleep Probability Chart definitely looks like a good thing to generate. At the moment Hap usually gives 2 h 45 min “silence” between change/feed “requirements”, though there have been some interesting anomalies that seem to occur in the early evenings though I have not been able to work out the precise pattern. Perhaps I need more and more accurate data.
Massimo, Asa and Kristi: Wrt the weight gain. At the moment she is following (and just higher than) the 0.4 percentile growth curve so we are hoping that she will creep up to somewhere closer to the 50 % curve (of course she might always have been a slight person).
Alain and I had bets on her what her weights at the different time points would be, and I won! The prize for me was that Alain would buy me some Yeo Valley Vanilla icecream. In one of those co-incidences, I put on the radio this morning and it was a program featuring the lady farmer (Mary Mead) who started Yeo Valley yoghurts this morning – she is one of three runner ups for farmer of the year. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, you can read about it here. Talk about a super-successful woman in a male-dominated profession!
Lovely news, Bronwen, and what a beautiful baby! She is so adorable. I am glad you chose that name, or at least, not the name that I heard was being considered ;-)
So glad to hear all is well with you, and looking forward to further updates. Congratulations to you and Alain (and of course little Hap).
Congratulations Bronwen and Alain, and all the best for Hap! Thanks to Facebook I’ve already some more Hap(py) pictures.
Congratulations! What a beautiful baby girl :-)
May I be the latest to offer congratulations. I love the way you’ve left a picture of a rocket next to her.
Hi, and thankyou all, again.
Maxine: The name was a difficult decision! Sarah Natalie seemed to suit her slightly better than “that one”, though I have such positive associations with the latter. :)
Matt: We have to start the subliminal messaging early… We showed it to her on Sputnik Day and she swatted it – we have taken this as a positive sign. :)
Great news! Congratulations all round.
I just stumbled across this, and as a mother of two have to add my congratulations and best wishes. Those must have been long and excrutiating weeks for you until she finally came home – good luck for the future!
Ulrike
Congratulations! What a cutie!
Thanks to everyone for the very nice comments. While I’m not a regular here at Nature.com I do think its appropriate to announce that today Hap became an official person (!) at the Surrey Registry Office (in Weybridge) and her name will be:
Sarah Natalie Hap Dekker
and “Hap” to us forever. I’m a very happy biped.