It was 3:12 am when my wife woke me up. She was standing, silhouetted in the doorway from the hall light, and my eyes weren’t focusing yet. “Kevin, I think we need to go to the hospital,” she said. “My water is leaking and the contractions are 9 minutes apart. I’ve been timing them.” That’s when she pulled out her iPhone. In my semi-conscious state, the only thing I could think was, “Really? There’s an app for that, too?”
Yes, there is, and it’s called Expecting. At $4.99, it’s not super cheap, but considering how much it helped to calm my wife down, it’s worth every penny. Yes, it measures your contractions, but it also helps to organize appointments, gives the mother information about what stage the baby is in, has a hospital packing checklist, plus a contact list to refer to in that confusing time. In our case, we really only needed the contraction timer, but that was good enough for me. As you can see from the picture above, she progressed pretty quickly.
My first child was born on February 8th, around 3:45 or so in the afternoon. Kevin Whipps Jr – or KJ for short – is doing fine, and sometime today we’ll be shuttling off from the hospital to start life at home. It’s kind of weird to think that in one of the most important moments of my life, a situation where I’m going to remember every detail, that an iPhone App was front and center in the process.
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