Today I sent my last payment to the hospital where I delivered Emily and so you know what that means: she’s officially ours! She’s almost 16 months old now, so you can see that it’s taken us some time to achieve this milestone.  I am so very grateful that my insurance covered quite a bit because the bill was a shocker when I first got it in the mail. If you haven’t had a baby yet, but one is on the way, brace yourself for the following information.

According to this chart (click me!), the 2010 average cost of a traditional delivery without complications (such as mine) in a California hospital was $15,760! (Emily was born in 2011, but 2010 is the most recent data I could find.) For the hospital in which I delivered Emily, it was almost $10,000. My OB/GYN was another $2,000. If you tack on the bills for all the blood-work and tests (like the glucose tolerance test) that I had to get done at a lab, that’s probably another grand. So all in all, just to grow a healthy baby and deliver her into this world cost us about $13,ooo! And you know what?  She’s worth every penny.

Image Credit: M&M Photography