Every year for Christmas, we get scratch tickets in our stocking!!  All of the Smyth kids sit around the dining room table – silver shavings scattered everywhere – waiting to see if any of us are going to win big!  I never do!!!  I don’t really win contests at all really.  I’m okay with it though.  As far as I’m concerned, I won the jackpot in regards to handsome husbands and adorable children…they are easily worth their weight in scratch tickets!!!

But baby pools are always the worse.  I fail at them epically!  I’m always the one who ends up in the wrong month of birth or guesses that your belly is seven inches larger than it actually is.  It’s humiliating really.  So when we found out that we were expecting Hudson, I obviously insisted on putting all of my beloved friends and family through their own agony!  The baby pool was easy though…date and time.  The winner would walk away with a prize worth waiting for.  My initial thought was to bless whoever guessed closest with the honour of putting Hudson through University…but then I reconsidered and came up with something that didn’t require any RESPs!  Aren’t I a doll?!?!

Alas…I digress…

So, Hudson’s due date was March 5th and on the evening of this very night, Steve and I found ourselves at the maternity triage being monitored for my contractions {which were happening every five minutes}.  After a number of hours of waiting around and reading far too many entries from damnyouautocorrect.com, we asked if we could go home and wait the rest of this out in our own house.  After much resistance from the triage nurses, the on-call doctor {knowing that we lived less than a kilometer and a half from the hospital} let us go home.  I was, however, already registered and ready to be admitted because all parties involved {ourselves included!} were certain that our little man was arriving that night!

Well, despite all indications to the contrary…it was another six days before he made his grand arrival.  And after thirteen hours of labour and two broken finger nails from squeezing the bed too hard, Hudson was born at 2:18pm on Thursday, March 11th, 2010.  It was an amazing day!

What made it even more amazing was the fact that – even though I was completely skeptical about anyone in the baby pool coming even remotely close to his birth – not only did someone nearly nail the exact time…but it also happened to be one of the most important people in the entire world to me!

My amazing and dear friend, Marilyn, had guessed 2pm on March 11th.  A mere eighteen minutes early.  Incredible!  Her guess also happened to be her own son’s birthday {albeit a couple of decades apart!}!  Everything about this makes my heart happy!  I love that she won…I love that our son’s share a birthday…and most of all, I love that her son is about to become a father as well!!

In about a month or so, Whitney and Sean are going to be welcoming their own little munchkin into world!  It’s so fun to see the anticipation of first time parents!  I love the sense of excitement…nervousness…and uncertainty that comes with the last little while before it all happens.  Before life changes.  Before it becomes exponentially better.

Whitney and Sean, I’m so excited for you!  Thank you for being such troopers in the snow and for sharing this amazing time in your life with me!  I can’t wait to meet your little one very soon!

I’m putting my money on March 11th!