Bob and Lauren Hay

We have a new Photo & Video Gallery

2011-11-23T10:26:00.003-05:00

We've decided to use a Shutterfly Share Site instead of Apple's MobileMe Gallery. You can access it here. You can still upload your own pictures or videos of Audrey but you can now make comments and also read our family updates and other content. Enjoy!

Photos of Audrey!

2010-10-02T11:56:00.005-04:00

We've finally decided where to post our photos. Check them out here on our Apple MobileMe Gallery. You can even upload photos you've taken of Audrey (hint, hint, Ali and Travis). Just select Guest Album and click on Upload at the top of the page. (You can't create your own album, you have to add to an existing album.) You'll be asked to enter your name and email address and to enter a verification code. Then click "choose files" and you can select photos from your computer.

You can also email photos to an album. Just click on the "send to album" button at the top of the page and a new window will open with the email address to use. If you love all the photos and want to download the album to your computer you can click "download" at the top of the page.

To view the pictures you can also choose different formats at the bottom of the page: grid, mosaic, carousel, and slideshow.

Let us know what you think!

The Baby is Here! Long Live the Baby!

2010-06-27T22:49:00.011-04:00

Audrey Penelope Hay was born on June 22, 2010 at 8:31 pm. She was 6 lbs 14 oz, and 19 inches long. In the above picture, she is just a few minutes old.

She was born in New York Downtown Hospital in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. The delivery went according to plan, more or less. The contraction phase lasted long than we would have liked (about 35 hours), but the pushing phase took less than an hour. Everyone's home now and both mother and baby are healthy and happy.

Click here for a full gallery of Audrey's first few days of life. For now, we will keep all baby pictures at that Flickr site, but we may expand to another location in the future. We will update this blog with any new information as it develops.

Audrey was born about a week and a day ahead of the expected due date of June 30th, but she was still term and healthy at birth. Lauren was certainly happy for the pregnancy to finally be over. Here she is on May 26:

And on June 17, five days before birth:

Is that excitement? Or fear? We cannot say for sure.

Baby Registry

2010-05-02T16:25:00.003-04:00

We have registered our baby. If you are interested in buying presents for the baby, you can do so at amazon.com here or at Buy Buy Baby here.

More Belly Photos

2010-04-24T22:33:00.007-04:00

Hello, friends. The baby continues to grow at a frighteningly quick rate. Here is my evidence.
Here she is on March 16:And on April 5:
And on April 13:
And on April 24:
And here she is in fifth-position croisé:
And in écarté:
Ballet is good for baby's development.

Belly updates

2010-03-06T10:40:00.017-05:00

Here are some before and after photos documenting the expansion of Lauren's belly.

These were taken on February 2nd (19 weeks gestation):

And these were taken on March 1st, Lauren's birthday (23 weeks gestation):

If this rate of growth continues, it will soon engulf us all.

Kick!

2010-02-18T21:25:00.001-05:00

I felt a kick tonight!

Lauren's been feeling some movement in there for quite some time now. But tonight I could feel it from the outside. It was slight, but it was unmistakable.

It... is... ALIVE!

Video 4: Hands and Face

2010-02-09T11:48:00.002-05:00

This video contains the images that were used to make the most recent printouts shown in the post with still images below.

It starts with a split screen showing the baby's robot hands. Then it moves left up the baby's body to the head. The head is in profile with the face up. Occasionally, you can see some straight lines behind its head; those are the bones of the left hand. Finally, there are some shots of the ribcage with the heart beating inside.

Technical difficulties

2010-02-08T11:03:00.004-05:00

It seems that the videos do not always load properly. If you get an error message when trying to play a video, try again later. The mystery error should mysteriously fix itself, eventually.

You may also have noticed that the videos here are a bit small. The original files are actually larger and higher quality than they appear on this blog. I've loaded (some of) them at my account on flipshare.com, the website of the company that made the camera. However, it seems that for you to view them, I have to specifically invite you by email. So if you'd like better quality videos, send me an email or make a note in the comments, and I can hook you up.

Video 3: Gulp!

2010-02-06T19:45:00.005-05:00

More videos? More videos.

The still shot left side of the screen here looks sort of like a face (or perhaps like the eyeball monster from Big Trouble in Little China), but it is in fact a cross section of various abdominal organs. On the right half, at the very beginning of the video, you will see the baby's mouth take a gulp! It's drinking the water! The arrow is pointing at the mouth and the baby's left arm is raised up to its head. After that, we get some more closeups of the heart, beating away.

Video 2: head, face, arm

2010-02-05T20:24:00.007-05:00

Another video from the same session: the baby's face emerges...

In this video, we start with the baby's head. The ultrasound allows us to see inside to the baby's skull. But I must emphasize: The baby is not a skeleton. It has flesh. In fact, on the right side of the split screen, you will be able to see the baby's lips and the tip of its nose, starting about the :10 mark. The technician indicates it with the cursor.

Starting around :35, we get a good view of the baby's left arm, wiggling. At :43, one knee and part of a leg stick up. And at 1:05 we can see a little bit of the heart beat on the far right (though we have better views of it in other videos)

Let's try posting video!

2010-02-05T16:07:00.005-05:00

We love that the doctors give us actual sonogram prints, but they're invariably less impressive than the live ultrasound, both because it's harder to interpret the shapes on the stills and because it doesn't capture the motion of the baby. Therefore, I brought my Flip Mino HD to the anatomy ultrasound to get some video. Technically, this isn't allowed, but the technician turned her back. So let's see it!
Here are the baby's legs:

During the scan, the technician periodically takes stills so she can measure various babyparts. That's why there's a split screen here. Some of the motion you see is because she's moving the sensor and some of it is baby wiggling. In each image here, the pelvis is on the right and the babylegs stretch to the left. You can see the leg bones quite well.

Ultrasound images

2010-02-05T13:18:00.030-05:00

Here are some prints from the ultrasounds we've had so far. Click on any image for a larger version.

7 weeks:

The dark kidney bean is the uterus. There are two clumps on the left side of the dark shape. The left shape is the embryo, the right is the yolk sac. The embryo is about 1 cm long, the size of a blueberry. It's not very baby-like yet, but we could already see the heart fluttering.

9 weeks:

Here we can start to see the shape of the fetus (though I think at 9 weeks it was not officially a fetus yet). The dark oval in the center is the boundary of the uterus. The grey area within the dark circle is the fetus. The two white crosses were added by the doctor to delimit its length. The head is on the right. On the left, you can see two smaller lighter circles on top--those are the feet. At this point it is an inch long, the size of a grape. During this scan, we could see it squirming around.

10 weeks:
Here, its back is to us. The doctor put crosses to mark the head and tail, which are connected by a dotted line. The head is on the left. Size is now kumquat.

11 weeks:
This was done with a machine that gives a bit more of a close up, so it should be easy to discern the head on the left, though the lower half isn't as visible here. Note that there's a stray mark sticking out from the face (noticeable more on image B). That's not it's nose; that's its arm, which is behind the head but not visible in this image. Size is now fig.

15 weeks:
This is one of the poorest quality still images, sadly. In the center of the image is a white circle, that's the outline of the head. The fetus is upside down, so its spine is a white line extending up and to the left from the head. That connects to the grey area of the pelvis, from which a shape extends to the right. That's a leg. So the fetus is curled into a C shape, with its back on the left and its head and arms pointing right. Size: apple.

18 weeks:
Now we can see some serious baby shapes. This was the "anatomy" scan that revealed the baby's sex (Spoiler alert: girl.) Size is now bell pepper. The top image is clearly the head, and you can see some face detail. The sonogram lady said that the baby's upturned nose is indicative of a girl (or so they believe in Russia). The bottom image is a double shot of the baby's right hand. We have been assured that, despite appearances in that image, the baby is not a robot--it's just that we can see through to the baby's bones.

That brings us to the present. We're currently at Week 19. We'll post some of our ultrasound video later, if the Internet allows it. And of course, more stills as they develop.

Well, hello there.

2010-02-05T09:21:00.013-05:00

We've reanimated this blog as a method for disseminating photos, videos, and information about our forthcoming child. As time passes we may wind up moving to a more media-friendly environment, but for now this will suffice.

Here's what we know so far:

Baby is due on or around June 30, 2010.
We can say with 95% certainty that it is a girl. The ultrasound lady said there is a small chance that it's a boy and it was just hiding its boy parts. But she was confident it's a girl. ("The machine is 95% certain, but I am 100% certain" she said in her Russian accent.)
No name has been chosen, nor do we have even a preliminary name list. We are taking bids.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Honeymoon photos

2008-06-23T07:49:00.007-04:00

View Larger Map

For your viewing pleasure, we have posted our honeymoon photos
here. They are grouped by city and presented in reverse chronological order.
Within the each photoset on the Picasa website, a select group of photo highlights have been placed on a map, so you can see where these photos were taken.
You may also zoom in on the embedded map above for a more detailed look at our walking routes in the cities.
That is all.

Wedding Speech

2008-06-09T22:14:00.012-04:00

We are back from Scandinavia. It is truly paradise. We basked in 18+ hour sun under a cloudless sky, walking among cute old wooden buildings, narrow streets and lazy, lazy ducks. We learned much about these strange lands with their strange histories that we weren't taught in school, about the Kalmar Union, the Hanseatic League, and the Troll Wars. We also learned the following:

There are Norway maples in Norway, but they're called "Spisslønn" (lit. pointy maple).
There are danishes in Denmark, but they're called "Wienerbrød " (lit. Viennese bread).
There are swedish fish in Sweden, but they're called "Pastellfisk" (lit. pastel fish).

Commemorative materials from the wedding and honeymoon are being collected and processed as we speak. In the meantime, some people have requested the text of our speech from the wedding. So here it is:

****************

Good evening, and welcome to the wedding of Robert Kenneth Hay and Lauren Anne Feldman. I am Robert Hay. If there be anyone here tonight who objects to our union, you are already too late. According to the laws of the City of New York and the Honorable Mayor Michael R Bloomberg, this is not our wedding. Lauren and I were married on Wednesday in a private ceremony at the Office of the City Clerk, so we have technically been husband and wife for three days now. This is a sham wedding.

You may ask yourself: what are we doing here then? Why the sham wedding? What is all this for? These are natural questions.

Lauren and I have been friends for twelve years, we’ve been dating for five, we’ve been engaged for two, and we’ve been married for three days. So we ourselves are faced with the question: How do we decide when to celebrate our love? We met on August 26th, 1996; we began dating on July 7th, 2003, we became engaged January 24th, 2006, and we were married on May 21st, 2008. Each of these dates holds significance to us. But it is today, May 24th, that will be our anniversary. What, then, makes this day special?

We should start with a look into our history. I’d like to be able to tell you a story here, a romantic story about the birth of our love, about our chance encounter, guided by the hand of Fate, on a starry moonlit night on a boat on a river in Paris or Venice or Pittsburgh, an encounter that left us speechless and breathless and madly, madly in love. But I’m afraid that’s not exactly how our story goes.

Lauren and I met on our first day of school at Columbia University in August of 1996. We were both assigned to the same floor of the same dorm. I remember distinctly the first time we met, in a freshman advising group, sitting on the grass in front of the library. Lauren was one of the first students I met at Columbia, and certainly one of the most beautiful, second only to Malcolm. And so, it was in college, while living on the 11th floor of Carman Hall, that I first got to know Lauren, by dating her roommate for two years. Thankfully, that relationship dissolved, and while it may have taken ten years, I finally pulled off the roommate switch. However, I do freely admit and vividly remember: I was attracted to Lauren from the very first day we met. (Lauren, on the other hand, has never been attracted to me.)

For seven years we remained friends and nothing more. Until one day in mid-2003, on the eve of the smoking ban in New York City bars, we realized that we might have feelings for each other. Lauren courageously asked me if I would be interested in starting a relationship, and I said no. It’s not that I didn’t have feelings for her—I certainly did—but I was uneasy about starting a relationship with someone with whom I was already friends. Years of trite pop culture had warned me that such relationships are doomed to failure and deepest, deepest awkwardness.

After a few weeks, however, the thought germinated inside me: why shouldn’t we be dating? I like her, she’s beautiful and fun to be around, I’d be foolish to deny myself this opportunity. So one Friday evening, we went to a Fourth of July party and afterwards we sat around her apartment watching Legally Blonde on television. I was terrified, but I courageously told her that I want to give a relationship a try after all, and she promptly rejected me.

I don’t know what exactly made her reject me that night. I haven’t asked because I’m afraid that if I bring it up, she’ll remember why she rejected me, and reject me again. So please don’t bring it up.

(On second thought, bring it up all you want. We’re already married; there’s nothing she can do about it now.)

So. I went home disappointed and slightly embarrassed, but I comforted myself in thinking that this was what I had wanted in the first place. But then unexpectedly, she called back that Sunday and said she wasn’t sure anymore, and she might be amenable to considering it after all. I suggested we meet to discuss it. We went out for dinner in the Lower East Side. We made small talk for a while. Eventually I asked, “So. Are you up for it?” She said she was. We high-fived in celebration, and finished dinner.

While the origin of our relationship may be a bit awkward and halting, its development was not. I had originally been concerned that our having been friends for so long would make the transition into a relationship awkward, but I was exactly wrong. Having known each other for so long, we were able to bypass the awkwardness that comes with a nascent relationship. After a few months, it had already felt as if we’d been together for years, and our love grew exponentially stronger as we spent the next few months and years together. It was somewhat frightening and exhilarating.

The idea for marriage came to me as abruptly as the idea to start dating. I was tutoring a student and mentioned Lauren in an anecdote. The student asked about us.
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend!” she said. “How long have you been together?”
“Two and a half years,” I replied.
“That’s a long time. Are you going to get married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“…”
Why not, indeed? The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but the more I dwelt on it, the more the idea appealed to me. (As you can tell by now, this is how my decision-making occurs.) After some deliberation, I decided the move was right. On my 27th birthday, she took me out to dinner at Barbetta on 46th street. We were each living off 105th street at the time, so I made a point of requesting that after dinner we take a walk by the small pond in Central Park near our apartments. Lauren was not terribly amenable to this idea, as it was January, it was cold and windy, and she was wearing uncomfortable shoes. But it was my birthday and I insisted. We walked a bit before her feet got tired so we sat on a bench. There in the darkness by the water, with the same trepidation I’d felt in her apartment years earlier, I gave her a ring. This time she accepted.

The love that we share is the strongest emotion that I have ever known. But we are not here to celebrate our love, we are here to celebrate our marriage. There is an important difference. We do not spend thousands of dollars on ceremony every time a person falls in love, else we’d all be broke and cake designers would be kings. Love can be a wonderful state, if all goes well, but it is still an emotion, ungoverned by reason. As such, it occurs outside the bounds of our control; it is not something we choose, it is not something we do, it is something that is done to us. It can creep up on us slowly or it can strike us suddenly and without warning, forcing us do things we would not rightly otherwise do. It can be a beautiful ecstasy or a terrible affliction, bringing us the purest joy or the greatest despair imaginable. But no matter how we experience it, it is a something that is thrust upon us.

Marriage, on the other hand, is an act we choose for ourselves. It is love shaped and shackled by the expression of human Will. Some pessimistically view marriage as a cell, as an enclosure that we trap ourselves in, unnaturally binding us to a single person for the rest of our lives. But it is our emotions that bind us, that control us beyond our reason. Marriage is a way to free ourselves from those emotions, and actively commit ourselves to each other, thereby both endorsing the emotions that we feel and protecting against their inherent capriciousness. Too many times we’ve heard people talk about marriage being serendipitous, guided or determined by Fate or by Chance or by Divine Hand. We reject that idea, as it diminished the importance of our own agency, of our own power to determine our lives and our families.

The Will has always played a central role in a marriage, as every marriage begins with a literal assertion of complicity, “I do”. The act of speaking these words aloud tonight is the act of creating of a family. Marriage is the only time we have the ability to shape our family. Our spouses are chosen by heart and mind, a chance to create a family in our image. That choice is what we celebrate here tonight. Yes, my love for Lauren is greater than any love I’ve ever felt, but that love is not what we are celebrating here tonight. We are celebrating the transformation of a love into a marriage.

So. If marriage is what we celebrate, again, why the sham wedding? If marriage is the choice to ratify our love, then a wedding is the pronouncement of that choice to the public. If a wedding is the pronouncement of our choice to be together for the rest of our lives, we don’t want it to be overseen by some stranger we’ve never met before, assigned randomly by the city or plucked from an internet search. What gives that officiant the power to marry? We do not recognize that power. If marriage is about choice, we want to choose its terms. We want our ceremony to be for the benefit of our friends and family, nor for the state. A legal ceremony is just paperwork. It’s a loan application or a driver’s license. Ceremonies that we choose for ourselves are the most powerful.

The love we feel is real. The bond we have chosen for ourselves is real. The wedding may be a sham, but the marriage will be real.

And now, the Honorable Alan Duke will preside over the ceremonial reading of vows. I must remind you that this is a purely ceremonial sham wedding; Mr. Duke does not actually possess the power to marry people. However, he has said that tonight after this ceremony he would be more than willing to sham-marry anyone who asks.

And now, the Honorable Alan Duke.

DUKE: Thank you.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the sham wedding of Lauren Anne Feldman to Robert Kenneth Hay.

Lauren, do you take Robert to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better and for worse, in richness and in poorness, in sickness and health, until death do you part?

LAUREN: I do.

DUKE: Robert, do you take Lauren to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better and for worse, in richness and in poorness, in sickness and health, until death do you part?

ROBERT: I do.

DUKE: Lauren, as a token of your promise, please place the ring on the third finger of Robert’s left hand.

[she does]

DUKE: Robert, as a token of your promise, please place the ring on the third finger of Lauren’s left hand.

[he does]

DUKE: By the power that I do not possess, granted to me by Robert and Lauren, I now declare you to be husband and wife. You may kiss.

[kiss]

DUKE: Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Robert and Lauren Hay.

Thank you all

2008-05-25T13:56:00.004-04:00

We had a fantastic time at the wedding and we hope that you did as well. We'd like to thank every one of you for making our day as special as it was. We are glad that you came.
We will now go to Scandinavia for two weeks. Upon our return, we will continue to post to this blog with pictures and updates as they become available. So keep your internets tuned to this station.
If you yourself have any photos or other items you'd like to share with the group, please email Bob (rkh5donkey at yahoo dot com) and he'd be glad to post them.
Thank you again. We will see you very soon.

Invitations

2008-04-08T11:49:00.000-04:00

Invitations were mailed on or around March 20th, so all of you should have received yours by now.

For your reference, they look like this:

with an informational insert:

and an RSVP postcard:

(Guests who do not live in the United States may not have gotten a snazzy Florida panther stamp on their RSVP cards.)

The invitation and postcard were designed by the good people at Greenwich Letterpress , whom we adore.

If you have not received your beautiful invitation by now, then please let us know. Most likely, we have the wrong address for you, and a replacement invitation can be sent. However, it is also possible that we simply did not invite you, Ryan.

Accomodations

2008-01-26T08:54:00.000-05:00

It has come to our attention that some of you do not live in New York. Some of you out-of-towners may have friends in the city you'd like to stay with. Some of you may not have friends. We hope that will not affect your ability to come to our wedding.

Therefore, we have reserved hotel rooms for you. We have blocked off rooms in two hotels:

1. The Milford Plaza
700 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10036
1-800-221-2690
A nice old hotel just off of Times Square, with easy access to almost all subway lines. It's on 8th Ave at 45th st, very close to our apartment. Actually, it's across the street from our apartment. This is what we see out our window when we lie in bed:

Like living in a 40's noir film.
We've reserved 20 Double rooms for $219/night. A third person can be added for an extra $25/ night. Infants do not count as people.
To ensure this rate, reservations must be made by April 15th. Reservations should be made directly with the hotel by calling the number above. Our group code is "WHAYFELD"

2. Cosmopolitan Hotel
95 West Broadway (at Chambers)
New York, NY 10007
Telephone: (212) 566-1900

A cute hotel nestled between downtown and Tribeca with a nice cafe and an old-timey candy store on the ground floor. Close to the Chambers Street subway stops for the 1,2,3 and the A, C. We've reserved 10 rooms in a range of sizes, with prices from $195 to $225 per night.
These rooms were reserved by us directly, so if you're interested, you must contact Bob or Lauren to get a confirmation number. Reservations may be made until a week before the wedding.

If neither of these hotels is what you're looking for, let us know, and we can recommend an assortment of other options.

That is all.

Our registries

2008-01-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

Would you like to buy us things? We're registered at Crate & Barrel, Macy's, and Amazon. If you do not buy us these things, we will still love you. Probably.

Maps of our locations

2007-12-03T21:58:00.000-05:00

View Larger Map

We are Bob and Lauren. We will be married.

2007-12-03T19:03:00.001-05:00

Thank you for your interest in our wedding. We are planning two events:

1. Rehearsal Dinner
Friday, May 23rd, 2008.
8:00 PM
Bubby's Pie Co.
1 Main Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Join us for barbecue and pie.
To our knowledge, nothing will be rehearsed during dinner.

2. Wedding Ceremony and Reception
Saturday, May 24, 2008.
6:30 PM
Alger House
45 Downing Street in Greenwich Village, NYC 10014
Ceremony, drinks, dinner, more drinks.