The Baby!!!... IS here!

Ginger Marie Johnson was born Friday November 14th, 2008, 11:17pm. She weighed in at 7 lbs, 2.8 oz at birth, and was 21 inches from head-to-toe. you can see here a picture of Erin the day before the birth (Thursday). As you can see, she is was not happy about the baby being late. That night, Erin did not sleep much because she was having contractions all night. She also felt her water break around 2 am. She had an appointment with here midwife at 11:00 am on Friday and when we got there, the midwife said she was dilated to 4 cm and told us to go straight over to the the hospital. Erin had contractions until about 4:00pm when her midwife came over and checked to see how dilated she was. After 5 more hours, she was only at 4.5 cm, so the midwife broke the bag of water that was below the baby's head and then contractions came a little quicker. At that point, Erin decided that this natural birth idea wasn't as cool as she had thought. So she got the epidural. At that point, there was no more moving around, and Erin was wired to every machine in the room. Here's a picture of Erin with her machines.
With the epidural in, Erin was able to relax and conserve her energy for the pushing. which was good, because she was able to push the baby out in just 30 minutes, which is pretty quick for a first baby.
As a side note here, I'd like to say that, despite the fact that I had felt our baby kick thousands of times, and despite the fact that I knew perfectly well that there was a baby in Erin, it was an amazing experience to actually see a baby come out of my wife. It's a hard thing for me to explain. I suppose that in my mind I had kind of thought of Ginger as this thing that was just a bump in my wife's belly that often kicked and squirmed, and when her head and her body came out she had just become a human being, and she had just come out of my wife. I suppose that that is what is meant by the miracle of child birth. Anyone reading this at this moment might think that what I just explained is strange or silly, but prior to Friday night, I had never seen a person be born before.
Anyways, enough of that. Here are some pictures of Ginger. Her with Erin right after birth, her on the scale just seconds after she was born, her with her Great-Grandma and Grandpa Badger, and then the most recent picture I took of her about an hour ago with her mohawk.