Bed Rest

TigerBlog's cousin Jill and her husband Dan are expecting their first child. She's at almost 33 weeks, so the big day is rapidly approaching.

It hasn't exactly gone smoothly though.

Jill went into labor at 25 weeks, and the result was that she was put on full bed rest in New York Presbyterian Hospital, which is affiliated with Cornell University.

Jill spent seven weeks in her room, in bed, able to get up only to go to the bathroom and twice in that time for ultrasounds.

The goals were to 1) stop labor, which is a relatively uncertain outcome at that point and 2) to have her in the hospital in case of emergency.

In such cases, if the mother-to-be can get to 32 weeks, she gets to go home and continue to be on bed rest.

And so that's where Jill is now. After seven weeks of arguably the nicest spring weather ever in which she was not permitted to leave her room on the seventh floor (TB is pretty sure it was the seventh floor), she's now at home in Manhattan, unable to leave there either.

TigerBlog stopped by on his way back from the Harvard-Princeton men's lacrosse game, and Jill's room had an amazing view of the East River facing south from 68th Street or so.

TB hadn't spoken to or seen his cousin Jill since she was a Cornell student and he used to stop by when Princeton would play games there, back in the early 1990s, when she was one of the editors of the Cornell Daily Sun. She went on from there to a career in TV, first as a producer with Dateline and later as an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporting producer for ABC News.

BrotherBlog, who manages to know everything about everyone in the family whether they're a baby or in their 90s, mentioned to TB that Jill was having a baby, so TB got her email address from BB and sent Jill a congratulatory note. It just so happened that that was on the day that Jill went into labor, at 25 weeks.

His response came a few days later and mentioned the predicament of full bed rest. And so TB embarked upon helping her about the only way he could - by playing hundreds of Scramble Words games on the phone with her.

Now that things are looking up for his cousin, TB feels better about pointing out to her that Princeton, with its men's track and field title this past weekend, has now done something 20 times that her alma mater has never done.

And what would that be? Reach double figures in Ivy League championships in an academic year.

Princeton first did so in the 1979-80 year, and so the Tigers have done it 20 times in 33 years.

The only other league school ever to do so is Harvard, who has done it four times and only once (2004-05) since 1989-90. Harvard could, in the interest of full disclosure, reach double figures this year by winning all three of the rowing championships, the only remaining league titles.

Princeton has the most Ivy titles all-time with 405, 55 more than the second-place Crimson.

The first goal every year for the teams that compete in the 33 official Ivy League sports is to win the league title, even if that team is a prohibitive favorite and is looking to go deep into the national postseason.

TB has been around teams that had next to no chance of failing to win the league title in any given year, and yet none of them have ever taken it for granted.

The Princeton Class of 2012 will graduate having reached double figures in league championships each of its four years. Considering that every other school in the league combined has done it four times, that's not too shabby.