Hey! Kris and I in the news!

As most of you know, Kris and I are expecting a baby come August. Apparently, we're not the only people John Lamb knows.... and, in actuality, we know a quite few people due around August too.

Woot for hope!

O baby! Is election linked to baby boom?

First came hope. Then came change. Then came … an Obama baby boom?

By: John Lamb , INFORUM

First came hope. Then came change. Then came … an Obama baby boom?

Three months after Barack Obama was elected president, those changes are taking hold – in some women’s bellies. But is this just nature taking its course, or were some people casting a vote for more than a new president on or around Nov. 4?

Kris Kerzman and his wife, Britta Trygstad, were planning to start a family before the election, but when the baby was conceived the week the Moorhead man called his first-born child “An Obama Baby” in the title of a mash blog posting to the Romancer in Chief.

“There’s something coursing through people of child-bearing age, a good portion of who were of Obama’s voting block,” Kerzman told me. “To what degree that’s a cause, I don’t know, but it doesn’t hurt, either.”

I can count at least 15 female friends who either have or will give birth between November and August. The one thing linking them all is support for Obama.

The first to sound the Obama baby alarm was Dr. Manny Alvarez, managing editor of foxnewshealth.com, who predicted a boom one week after the election.

“As someone who runs a hospital that delivers more than 6,000 babies a year, I have a pretty good idea when we can expect our birth rates to go up,” he wrote.

Newsweek jumped on the Obama baby bandwagon, but that article, “Change you can conceive in,” was mostly anecdotal accounts from unnamed people who claimed to have been swept up in Obama aphrodisiac.

Brady Hamilton at the National Center for Health Statistics said there’s not much evidence to support baby booms coming from singular events such as blackouts or blizzards.

But Hamilton said his organization doesn’t have

up-to-date numbers on babies born or on expected deliveries. Besides that, the fertility rate is very high.

So an Obama baby boom isn’t quite a bust.

A spokesperson at Fargo’s MeritCare said they show no signs of a baby boom to date, but that numbers of expected deliveries through August are unavailable. A similar request to Innovis Health of Fargo was not returned.

Even some babies conceived well before Nov. 4 were still born with Obama in mind.

James McMullen-Wendt and his wife, Katy, briefly considered delaying her cesarian section a day, from Jan. 19 to Jan. 20, so their first baby wouldn’t be born under a bad sign – during the Bush administration. Instead, they stuck with their doctor’s advice and baby Henry experienced the Obama inauguration.

As for those babies born exactly nine months after Obama was elected, well, they would share a birthday with the man who so moved their parents. Barack Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, exactly nine months after John F. Kennedy was elected.

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Readers can reach Forum columnist John Lamb at (701) 241-5533 or jlamb@forumcomm.com