UPDATE: Thank you for stopping by. Our daughter was born on December 30, 2006, and is a very healthy and very happy little girl. Please check out the other posts labeled “Baby Pool.”

Here’s the scoop:

My wife (The Most Beautiful Woman in the World) is pregnant with our first child. It’s going to be a girl, and the projected due date is December 25th, 2006. As of Monday, September 18, 2006, she was 27 weeks along.

(Note: click here for simplified instructions, thanks to prodding from Ebyjo)

I have started a Great Big Wonderful Baby Pool Contest for the day and hour that our little bundle of joy will join us. I have a number of BlogMad credits that was given to me by prying1, and I can’t think of a better way to use them. The prize pool starts at 250 BlogMad credits, and will increase with each entry. There is a small catch – you need to be registered with BlogMad to join the pool. Here’s a nifty part – just by registering with BlogMad, you will receive twenty five BlogMad credits – however, you must be a member for more than seven days, and you may not transfer if the transfer will leave you with less than 25 credits – so you’ll have to do some blog surfing first.

Each entry will cost you five BlogMad credits. Out of each entry “fee”, three BlogMad credits will be added to the first place prize, and two BlogMad credits will be added to the consolation prize. The person who comes closest to the actual day and hour will win the first place prize credits, and the person(s) who comes second closest will receive the consolation prize. In the event of two consolation prize winners, the consolation prize will be split. (I was going to say “as evenly as possible” but then my miniature mathmetician woke up and pointed out the obvious)

To enter, transfer five BlogMad credits to my BlogMad account. Send me a note indicating your choice of day and hour for the birth. Please note that an hour begins and ends at the actual hour mark, so if you enter for 1300 hours on December 24th, you will win if the birth occurs anywhere from the start of 1300 hours but before 1400 hours. Yes, the entries will be in military or twenty-four hour time to eliminate confusion at noon and midnight; and the official birth time will be recorded in Arizona time, which does not have Daylight Savings time. If the time you would like to enter is already taken, I will send you a note indicating such, with the four closest times (two before and two after) available around that time frame. You will have 24 hours to resond with a new time entry, or I will refund your BlogMad credits, for the contested entry only, in full.

I don’t know how to show the amount of BlogMad credits in my account, so you will have to take my word for it. You could ask prying1 if he did, indeed, transfer a large number of BlogMad credits to my account a while back, and while I have used some of them I assure you at least 250 remain to be the basis of the first place prize. I will match each transfer with the e-mail (or accompanying note, if that is possible) to ensure a fair and accurate entry list. Time-date stamp on the transfer will rule on who gets a time slot in the event of two or more people wanting the same time slot.

I will be keeping track of the entries in a spreadsheet. I don’t know how to link to this spreadsheet from my blog, or how to post the spreadsheet to the blog (is that even possible?) but if anyone can show me how to do it I will be more than happy to include the spreadsheet for public viewing. If you want a copy for yourself, please let me know and I will e-mail you a copy of the most up-to-date listing at the time I reply to your e-mail. Obviously, only my copy here on my PC will be used to determine the winner; if you like you can ask for as many copies as you care to, but only one copy will be sent to each e-mail address per day. If you request forty seven seperate times in one day, then I will send you one copy. No sense clogging up the bandwidth.

Ready? I will accept your entry as soon as you finish reading this blog.

God bless you all, thank you for reading, and may the best guesser win!

Update: It seems there is a slight side effect to you being referred by me to BlogMad – I get referral credits – 45 of them! Here’s what I’m going to do, so it’s not an overly mercenary attempt to get more credits for myself: I will add thirty five credits to the first place prize and ten credits to the consolation pool for every referral I get through this setup, OK? That way, someone wins real big, and it won’t be me, because I want you guys to have fun with this. I’m not in this for the BlogMad credits.

Go here. Buy a shirt. While you are at it, grab the logo above and freely spread it around while pointing people to the web site.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I have my new red shirts. I had a tough choice to make this morning, but I ultimately went with Rolling Thunder. I may be biased, but it looks gooood.

Sues – we will be sending you a picture or two soon. I swear, this shirt makes me look sexier (if that’s even possible), run faster, and jump higher. Just like my Keds when I was a kid…

Thank you, and God bless you all!

Hello!

Did you miss me? I know that I missed being able to read all of your blog entries. In case I didn’t manage to see your latest entry, I apologize. Some of you know that I lurked a bit over the last few days, but not much.

Why not, you ask?

TMBWitW has been very emotional, what with being pregnant and losing her mom. This has created a bit of an issue for me, since I want to be there and hold her for everything she wants/needs/desires to say or express, but my company does not offer bereavement leave (one more on the “con” side of the ledger, by the way…). She does have that benefit, and is using it, as she should.

Have I told you that TMBWitW has a fraternal twin? Oh, yeah – in the updates. Anyway, M has been missing their mom even more than TMBWitW has, if that’s possible. M is mourning what was, TMBWitW is mourning what should have been. Grace’s husband was less than nice to all three girls when they were growing up, and was more than that to TMBWitW, which is why she left the house as soon as she was legally able. It’s also why she had not had conntact with her mother for the few previous years, since the husband (did I tell you he wanted to bring mom back to Kingman from Vegas in the Jeep?) was in and out on an irregular schedule and that made it nearly impossible to keep in touch. M pretty much told him off, and called every other night anyway; A, their older sister, dealt with him and visited mom every day, since they lived in the same town. But TMBWitW lives in Phoenix, which is about three hours by bad road from Kingman (two and a half if you are trying to race a storm) and she couldn’t stand to accidently talk to him if she called.

It’s been a tough week, and in some ways it seems like much longer.

On the good news side – I got my Red Shirts today – they look spiffy! I’m going to take a picture of us in them and send them to Sues and Jarhead.

Well, I’m going to try to get a few things accomplished around the house here. I’ve got some research to do for a side project that I will tell you all about soon, and I need to get the Baby Pool going – anyone with advice for how to upload a spreadsheet? I could really use some help in that department…

God bless you all, and thank you for your patience. TMBWitW says thank you, also.

Go here. Buy a shirt. While you are at it, grab the logo above and freely spread it around while pointing people to the web site.

Thank you, and God bless you all!

Full Disclosure (again!):

I am a slacker, as I have said previously. Today, having lost time in my mind due to events of this week, I forgot to wear a red shirt. How could this happen? Well, Monday was a holiday. Thursdays are normally trash day, unless there is a holiday earlier in the week. Today, I put the trash cans out, and totally forgot that it was Friday. Also, I spent yesterday comforting my wife, instead of at work, so that threw off my sense of day also. I rpomise to do better in the future. I’m sorry, Sues. It won’t happen again.

I have edited this to allow continued privacy:

From TMBWitW:
Love and thanks to all of you,

[TMBWitW] & Cary