An interesting day.

Sunday. I wake up about quarter to nine. (Kim was already kind of up, I believe.) Soon after, I go to take a shower, leaving the door to the bathroom unlocked. Maybe five minutes into my shower, Kim comes in to the bathroom and says, "Um, I'm pretty sure you didn't make the finalists in the Turner Classic Movies Scorewriting Contest. My first thought: They just called and left a message saying I lost. But then Kim asks me what the name of the movie is I had to write a score for, and I say, "Now see here, what's all this about?" (Or something.) Kim tells me that on CBS Sunday Morning, they just had a promo for a segment that's going to profile the five finalists in the TCM Scorewriting Contest. Immediately I know something's wrong, because they were supposed to announce the 10 semi-finalists around April 20th but not announce the five finalists until sometime in May. Turns out that for reasons unknown, CBS Sunday Morning choose to do two segments on last year's finalists at virtually the same time as this year's first round judging. (Last year's winner has been known for months, so I'm not sure why they decided to run these segments now.) The surrealism of seeing a contest I entered aside, it was actually a pretty interesting segment from my point of view, and I learned the following things:

(a) There were more than 600 entrants last year, about twice what I projected for this year. (I vote for my projection being wrong rather than the number of entries dropping by half.)

(b) One guy gets whittles down the original 600 entries to 30 semi-semi-finalists, which means that 570 of the scores get heard by no one but him.

(c) The five finalists' scores were all very good without being exceptionally so; it gives me slightly more hope of winning it all than I had before (discounting the doubling of my projected number of entries, of course).

I go to church. I hear one of the worst sermons I've ever had the pleasure of listening to (by a guest preacher -- the grandpa of a child being baptized), culminating in the (I think word-for-word) statement, "Abusing the ten commandments is almost as bad as drug abuse." (He also had the strangest use of phrase repetition I've ever heard, throwing in "That's just the way it is" at numerous times in the sermon, even when it didn't make sense.) (He also spent the first ten minutes of the sermon talking about how cute his wife and kids and grandkids were/are.)

Such was this day that I didn't even have the opportunity to mention this to Kim, as when she gets home she says that our pregnant friend Annette, who is three weeks from her due date and whose baby shower we were supposed to attend that afternoon, said at church that she thinks she might be having labor pains. (To clarify: Antecedent of "she" is Annette and very much not Kim.) We leave for the shower, and when we get there Annette is still very much pregnant, and she thinks she's doing better (or at least no worse). As the meal part of the party goes on she starts to get what she's pretty sure are contractions, perhaps 15 minutes apart. She's pretty convinced they're Braxton Hicks -- after all, the due date's 3 weeks away and, as she mentions many times, she still has so many things left to do! -- but others convince her that maybe you should go inside and open presents, just in case. The two dozen of us go inside. As she's opening presents the contractions get closer: Some less than five minutes apart, almost all less than 10. She's starts getting a little more convinced that, um, maybe these are real contractions, but no, because "I am not having this baby today." A woman at the party named Nancy mentions that just in case, she's delivered a baby calf before so, y'know, no worries if it comes to that. Annette starts thinking that, hmm, maybe I should at least consider going to the hospital. But she has work at church (she's the music minister) that absolutely needs to be done by tomorrow morning, and if she's in the hospital today and tomorrow... So Annette gets together a list of all the things that needed to be done ASAP (my suggestion, which she would not write down: "have baby"), and while she and another woman at the party go to church to finish her work, Annette's husband and the other four of us that hadn't yet left the party split the duties on the list -- washing clothes to take to the hospital, putting bags together for the two of them and their two kids, getting clothes together for the new baby, getting out the bassinet from the attic, finding the baby car seat, distracting the two kids while all this was going on (my job), etc. Annette gets back about an hour later, still having contractions 5-10 minutes apart, still not completely convinced it's time to head to the hospital. I fall down on my job of distracting the kids, and Isabella (age 6) realizes that if mommy and daddy are going to be at the hospital tonight, neither of them is going to be at home and that's really scary and I've never been at home without mommy or daddy and I don't know grandpa (who was going to take care of them the next two days) well at all and [much crying]. I let her and her younger brother Alex (age 3) both ride me as horsey at the same time. That helps. Despite the consistent contractions, Annette's still not convinced, so she calls the on-call doctor and gives him her symptoms. He says, yeah, you had better come in soon. An hour later, we are still all at their house, with Isabella back to crying, and Kim practically pulling Annette (still not convinced she's having this today) out the door into their minivan, where her husband drove her to the hospital.

6 pounds, 10 ounces.