A note to our friends and family

To our wonderful family and friends:

We are so, so grateful to have so many wonderful people around us for Emmersyn's birth. We are excited to meet our daughter, and are thankful that she is already so well-loved. We have had nothing but wonderful support in our journey of this pregnancy.

We wanted to share a little bit of our plan surrounding her birth, so that all our friends and family can be on board, and can help support us. We would love to have you all visit and see her right away, but that's not feasible or practical, so we wanted to share the general timeline of visiting/etc to help ease the transition.

Birth:

We are delivering the baby at Providence Medford, barring emergency complications that would send us to Rogue's more advanced NICU. We are having a private, natural Bradley birth, and we ask that visitors not "drop by" during this time. We will not be sharing information on Facebook or Twitter until she is born, to lessen distractions during labor. Please know we will post information in the event of an emergency, otherwise we are focused on the baby and labor. If you call or text us for updates, Drew and I will not have our phones available during the labor. For the first two hours after her delivery, we will not be seeing any visitors as part of our birth plan. After two hours, we or my parents will begin calling/updating our loved ones and friends via Facebook/twitter/phone (barring emergency problems). We ask that you not drop by the hospital unless we call you to let you know it is an appropriate time. Drew will be greeting all visitors at the hospital, and we ask that visitors leave all little ones at home because of flu season. Thanks for understanding! We love your children, and would love our tiny girl to meet your sweet kids when she is a little bigger/stronger :) Please do not come to the hospital or visit if you have been sick with a cold recently.

After we go home:

We surely will love for you to meet our daughter! Please allow us time at home as we adjust to being parents of a newborn. Please text Drew or I before dropping by the house. We would love to see you at appropriate times when we are feeling up to it. If we don't answer, please know we appreciate you and will return your call/visit when we are able to. We will be doing the "babywise" type scheduling for our little one, and appreciate flexibility and understanding for her schedule after she is two weeks old. This may mean she will be nursing/sleeping when you drop by, thanks for understanding and being flexible :)

Many of you have offered meals and you have no idea how appreciated that would be! Thank you for thinking of us in this very practical way. Please know even if we can't visit when you arrive, we are thankful for any meal. You can text us or my mom to coordinate a meal. We would love that.

Most of all, THANK YOU for loving us and our little one so well! We consider ourselves SO blessed to have such wonderful friends and family, and hopefully this helps you understand what the first few weeks may look like for us.

Love,

Grace, Drew, and soon to arrive Emmy Aspinwall