Yesterday my wife gave birth to our fifth child.  Mom and baby are healthy, and we feel very blessed.  

I didn’t intend to share much about what was going on, as we’ve chosen to keep our personal life fairly personal… so all I did was write a blog post about going to the hospital (just a few sentences).  

When we got to the hospital, however, I found out we had a really nice internet connection. So I jumped on my email.  And I got on twitter.  And I had the crazy idea of sharing more than I intended about the birth.  Of course, I wanted to tie it into me, and my business, which is our life, and how we’re going to pay for this kid :p  here’s what I tweeted:

I wondered if I crossed a personal/private line, but the reactions I got were terrific!  It was fun, and I started to get some phenominal responses… you can see the thread at either of these (see jasonalba or #babytime (which has less)).  Really fun stuff, as you follow my tweets and some of the responses I got from others.

I was amazed, also, at how many Facebook responses I got.  On Facebook, I am Friends with a lot of people who know my wife… and I’m sure they were happy to get the news and updates.

I just spent an hour going through the reactions, and for the sake of recording history, I grabbed a few screen snippets of a few of my favorite parts of the conversations…. enjoy!

Here’s all of my tweets from the hospital… notice I tried to not flood the twittersphere with too much info.

An otherwise brilliant person, Mr. Druid (a good friend) was the only person who didn’t quite get the contest and submitted a guess on weight instead of time… !

Accused of not being supportive? Nah, not me :p

We kind of had a funky-cool communication thing going on… still, I wondered how many people (mostly women) would have echoed Gayle’s sentiments? (Gayle is a JibberJobber partner)

LOL – I thought my wife might not be too keen on this, but it worked out for us (maybe if I tweeted more she’d have been livid… )

After much frustration with all of the chair-things for me, I broke down and CUSSED!  Robert’s reply was classic 🙂

This was hillarious – advice from the wife of a guy who I used to work with.  I read this and then headed out for food :p

My coauthor, aka Mr. Sensitive, offering to help kill some time at the hospital.  I kindly declined his offer :p  ROFL

Al summed it up, and helped me realize there were people who were actually reading all of the updates!

This was a cool affirmation from Mari, queen of Facebook.

I was hopeful that @cnn would have picked up on this – alas, apparently they hadn’t 🙁

Hillarious.  If you have a fifth because of this, you have to name him Jason.  Or her Jason.  

Here’s the winner – he beat out the next closest by 3 minutes!

What started out as “should I??” became a really fun way to get to know my contacts and friends better!