Will Baby Jones Arrive on the 4th of July?

    4:13 am, 4th July, 2008 - the phone rings and one of our teammates, Mark Jones, is calling.  Andrea is having contractions that are hard and sustained about every 15 minutes.  Time for Kathy and I to jump out of bed and begin the 30 minute trip to North Dublin!  We have been waiting and waiting for this call - we knew it would be in the middle of the night (isn't child birth always in the middle of the night?), and we are especially excited that today is the 4th of July.

    Mark and Andrea have three other children and we are being 'fill-in' grand parents until Andrea's folks arrive on the 12th.  The last couple of weeks have been filled with wondering 'maybe tonight will be the night!'.

    4:55 am, we arrived at the Jones' house.  Everything  seems ready to go, contractions are now every 7 minutes and very hard.  At 5:30 am Mark and Andrea leave for the hospital, not far away.  Kathy and I are ready for the kids but it's still a couple of hours before they wake up.  So we nap a bit; then, around 8:00 am Mark shows up at the house again - whoooaa, what are you doing here?  He explains that in Ireland, visiting hours for fathers is strictly 8:30 am to 9:30 pm - so he was told to go home and plan to show up again around 9:30 or so.

    5:07 PM - well it now almost 12 hours later and not much has changed.  Mark and Andrea are still in the hospital waiting for something 'serious' to happen.  In the mean time Tom and Karen from our sending church in Kentucky have arrived on holiday here in Dublin.  So they are coming over for a BBQ while we wait!  Mark and Andrea won't be here, but that's no reason to waste a perfectly good 4th of July evening, now is it!  The kids, Grant, Luke and Aislinn, can tell them all about it later.  Maybe the wonderful aroma from the grill will start something in the labor ward! Thanks for praying for the Jones family!! 

   Mark looks a bit concerned, but  Andrea and Kathy are both doing great!