I’m taking advantage of a few minutes of rest here at the hospital… We came in last night after Mal started having regular contractions that hurt a little more than she was used to. I had to use a lot of self-control to drive close to the speed limit.

Once we were all checked in and she got hooked up to the machines and they watched her contractions and baby MacGyver’s heartbeat for a while. We had nothing to do but sit around and stare at each for a while, so we got the computer out to check Facebook and email and stuff. Apparently Catholics hate photographs, because their network blocks access to Flickr. Oh well…

Things slowed down a bit, so they let Mal sleep for a few hours. Her rash feels better with cold air, so she cranked the air conditioning down to about 50 degrees… which wasn’t fun for me with no blanket.

She woke up around 5:00 this morning and the nurses gave her some drugs that sped her contractions up. She’s been doing great through everything… just like I knew she would. After going for about 10 hours through what I’m going to guess are “mild” contractions she definitely went into frowny-face territory. I go into frowny-face mode if I stub my toe, but I can’t imagine what she was going through during this whole thing. After some good backrubs and giving her a hand to squeeze she fought through the harder ones until the doctor came to put her epidural in.

Mal’s been enjoying a “delicious” liquid diet of broth and tea and ice-chips… I feel bad for her there.

Thanks to everybody for the support and messages and encouragement on Facebook and Twitter… Mal and I appreciate it more than we’ll ever be able to show. It was nice to see her smile for a second, or almost smile during hard contractions, when a new message would pop up on my phone or computer.

She’s definitely back in the land of smiley-faces for a while so I’m going to try to enjoy it before the crazy lady starts yelling profanities at me… will update after MacGyver makes his debut.

I made a mix of music for the baby to listen to a couple months ago and it’s been kind of interesting to see how he reacts to different songs.

It’s a pretty diverse mix… somebody somewhere decided that classical music was a good thing for babies, so I put some random stuff I had floating around my hard drive in there. I’m a big fan of acoustic stuff, so there’s a good chunk of Dave Matthews, Coldplay, Aqualung, Teitur, Howie Day, Jack Johnson, Matt Wertz, Snow Patrol, and others. Mal listened to a lot of rap when she was younger, so I threw in a couple of songs by Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z. Mal and I both like a lot of the current top 40 stuff so there’s some Justin Timberlake, Fall Out Boy, Bush, Daughtry, Flobots, John Mayer, etc.

Mal also likes country, but I couldn’t subject my son’s ears to that twangy crap. I control the iPod, so somehow the country music got left out. He probably hears enough of it during Mal’s commute back and forth every day.

He gets excited and bounces around with Dave Matthews stuff and Jay-Z, which makes him a pretty good mix of his parents’ tastes. He also grooved around a bit when a song from my old band was playing, but Mal said he was probably trying to get away from the noise. (Thanks, dear.)

I’m excited to see how he reacts to the music out in the world…I’ll find out soon enough.

(We’ll have to hook some speakers to the iPod or keep the laptop handy since Mal is getting ready to lose her built-in iPod shelf.)

A lot of people ask us what we are naming the baby when he comes… and today I’m giving you my answer.

MacGyver.

Mallory thinks that she can veto my choice, but I think she’s crazy.

MacGyver was one of my favorite shows as a child. Actually, I just finished watching an episode on YouTube while eating my lunch at work (that’s the picture on my screen above).

It makes perfect sense to me… Not only is it a sweet Scottish name, but almost everyone knows how to pronounce it. He’d get automatic respect for being a thinker, not a fighter. He’d be resourceful with whatever he had at hand, which is very important in this economy. And, last and most important, he has his own theme song. Do I have a theme song? No. Does Mallory have her own song? No.

I’m pushing and pushing for it, but she still won’t budge. She already voted against my other picks of ChuckNorris (one word) and Mister T. Haas… how many votes does she think she gets? I’ll remember this if we have a girl down the road and she wants to pick an equally-awesome girl name like Polly Pocket Haas or Cinderella or something.

OK, so maybe I don’t get to legally name him MacGyver, whose first name on the television show is actually Angus, but I still like calling him MacGyver while he’s hanging out in the womb.

Truth is we do have a few names picked out that we like and will make the final decision after we get to see him for the first time… we also aren’t telling anyone what the picks are because we want to make the decision without any interference from third parties. Luckily people have been pretty cool about that. I honestly expected a lot of resistance from people (and just got a little from a co-worker who came in as I am writing this). No offense to anyone who thinks we’re keeping a big secret or leaving them out of the loop, we haven’t told anybody. One of my sisters asked if we thought the names were so awesome that we were scared someone was going to steal them… don’t know if I’d call the names “awesome”, especially compared with MacGyver, but who knows.

Well… I haven’t told anybody, and I’m guessing Mallory hasn’t… I suppose her entire office could know before I do. Either way… our friends, family and internet stalkers will know the name soon enough. He’ll be making his appearance any time now.