My husband sent me a link to this NYT article:

"To-Do List: Wrap Gifts. Have Baby." - 12/20/06

Instructions he's been giving me for two weeks!

There is a good chance that National Birth Day will take place a week from tomorrow, on Thursday, Dec. 28.

That's my due date!

There has been a huge increase in the number of births that are induced with drugs or come by Caesarean section. Parents or doctors can often schedule a baby’s arrival on a day of their choosing.

They tend to avoid weekends and holidays, when doctors have other plans, hospitals are short of staff and the possibility of an unfortunate birthday — Christmas Day, anyone? — looms. During holiday weeks, births have become increasingly crowded into the weekdays surrounding the holiday.

Over this same period — since the early 1990s — the federal government has been steadily increasing the tax breaks for having a child. For parents to claim the full amount of any of these breaks in a given year, a child must simply be born by 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31. If the baby arrives a few minutes later, the parents are often more than a thousand dollars poorer.

September has lost its unchallenged status as the time for what we will call National Birth Day, the day with more births than any other. Instead, the big day fell between Christmas and New Year’s Day in four of the last seven years — 1997 through 2003.

“It’s phenomenal what’s happening in late December,” said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard economist.

I must say that the economics of it all, the "tax break", wasn't even a consideration.

Now, I gotta finish wrapping presents!