Monday, August 7, 2006

Slow-growing Family

All babies drop a few ounces. They tell us that's normal--a typical response to the exhausting otherworldliness of post-utero living. But babies shouldn't lose length. Their heights, that is, ought to be stable and then increase gradually. I mistakenly reported Is.'s height to be 19" (or 1-7 if format makes any difference). But her official height, it turns out, is 17.5" or 1-5 1/2. Nothing much to it. Good news: she's not shrinking. Instead, it was a case of whisper game in the delivery room. And maybe it's also a symptom of my few years handling sports information. Even in my own basketball days, while I never topped 6-5, the program listed me as 6-6. Maybe because I dominated like a giant one-inch taller than me would? Maybe not.

Is.'s measurements were rendered official for us yesterday, the 6th, a full five days after she was born. Yesterday, along with birth stats, her "first photos" finally showed up on growingfamily.com. There you'll find four of the photos taken on Wednesday by a staffer for growingfamily.com who, because the hospital farms out baby photography, wheels a camera- and computer-mounted cart around the maternity ward snapping photos and taking down details about newborns. Growingfamily.com handles the production and circulation of non-medical photographs, and pictures of babies are a sure bet. But I can't understand the delay in getting the pictures to the site (unless it has something to do with stabilization). I know that Crouse Hospital was busy; there were 16 babies in the nursery on D. and Is.'s last night there (not to mention the other tots who were in rooms with their mothers). But I can't figure out why Growingfamily.com waited five days to put "first photos" on "baby's first web page," especially given their efforts to sell "baby's first photos." Given that the biggest rush of interest comes just 24-48 hours after delivery and given that inexpensive digital cameras and flickr accounts cut the time-to-web down to mere minutes, it doesn't seem like GF is keeping a contender's pace, vying, that is, for the sales-due-to-excitement during the most intense hours of attention following delivery. Even if timeliness only meant an increase in site traffic (which could then be used to pitch future accounts with other hospitals), it seems to me like they'd do themselves a favor to upload the photos the same day they take them.

Posted by Derek Mueller at August 7, 2006 8:30 AM to Under a Bushel