11 months

This morning, I walked in to PB's room and he stood up in his crib when he saw me. He'd been relaxing and babbling to himself, already awake but not feeling impatient. He reached up for me and I hefted him up and had the same thought I've been having each morning for the last couple of weeks: you're not a baby any more. PB is big. Picking him up is not like picking up a baby, it's like picking up a little kid. And now we're a few weeks away from a first birthday party, and he's starting to take steps and he's approximating words, and he's so much more like a walking, talking toddler than a little lump of a baby.

I don't get sad about this the way I thought I would. When I anticipate changes in him, I do get sad: I still remember thinking "I know I'm going to miss his gummy smile" when he'd beam at me around three months old. But then each thing I love about him gets replaced with something of equal or greater loveability. His toothy smile is adorable, and I love the way he plays with his teeth when he's eating, trying to chew a sweet pea with just his three lower teeth, for instance.

As we prepare to cross that one-year threshold, I find myself doing a lot more looking forward and a lot less looking back than I expected that I would. PB will always be my baby boy, even when he's 6'4" tall and can pick me up. So he doesn't have to remain an infant.

Weight: According to the scale at home, roughly 26 pounds.

Length: Tall.

What he's eating: He nurses in the morning and at bedtime. On weekdays he has three 5-ish ounce bottles during the day. And then he has 3 meals and the occasional afternoon snack. On weekends we still basically nurse on demand, bit it's about the same: 4 or 5 times a day, total.

Physical skills: He's practically walking. He will take about 2 steps unsupported, from the table to the couch, for instance. Much more than that and he falls down... which means he falls down all. the. time. I've seen him get frustrated about it a couple of time, which is a sign that he's about to take off, I think. If he wants to get somewhere in a hurry, he crawls, but he is really working hard on the walking.

He's also getting better at doing things like taking apart his Mega Blocks and he's starting to figure out how to put them together.

Teeth: That fourth one on the bottom still hasn't shown up.

Favorite toys: The remote control (DH found an old remote and took out the batteries, so now he plays with that), mega blocks, anything with wheels.


Verbal skills: He's playing with sounds a lot these days. Over Labor Day weekend, DH's mom was in town so we left PB with her for a day while we painted our kitchen (this was something we needed to do before the days started getting darker - the kitchen is so much brighter now!). Then we went to visit with various in-laws for a while after a long day of painting. When we walked in to the room, PB was standing up in front of a chair and looked at me, smiled, and yelled, "MAMA". The whole room stopped, and then everyone repeated it: "mama! He said mama." So I think that counts. He's also had a few moments with me when he's said (and, I think, asked for) "dada" or "daddy". Once was at bedtime about a week ago when I was nursing him. He heard footsteps in the hall outside his room, and he stopped nursing for a moment to listen, then looked at me and said, "daddy", and pointed toward his door. That level of comprehension and communication is pretty cool to see.   

I do think "mama" is sometimes his sound for milk, and sometimes for me, but half the time the desire for the two is basically the same thing.

  
Social skills: PB likes to point at things, and sometimes he'll point just so DH or I will turn to where he's pointing. He's mimicking us a lot these days, including doing a big, loud fake laugh if we laugh at something. So, sometimes I just fake laugh to make him fake laugh.

Sleep: It got much cooler this week, and PB started pretty consistently sleeping through the night, 7:30pm to 6:30am, once it cooled down. I'm not sure if the correlation indicates causation, but I'm sure cooler weather and snuggly pajamas don't hurt. Except for one recent rough night (teeth? Overstimulation because my parents were staying with us? A random day? Who knows?) last weekend, he's sleeping either all night long or with one wakeup at 5am for nursing. 

His naps have just shifted completely: about a week and a half ago, DH told me he put PB down for his morning nap, and the kid just didn't sleep. By the normal time of his afternoon nap, he was beat. After a couple of days of transition, PB is now down to one nap that starts around 11:30 or noonish and is generally around 3 hours long (unless he poops himself awake, which happened yesterday). This has shifted our schedule so we can't really be out and about at lunch time any more, but that isn't a huge deal.

New category! Potty time: We know a couple of people who have done the potty training boot camp 3 day process, and it sounded both exhausting and ineffective. One of the moms involved said potty training (using the 3-day program) was the absolute worst thing about parenting for her. So I asked myself: "what is the opposite of that approach?" and without too much effort I found a wealth of information about what is variously called Elimination Communication or Early Potty Training or the like. We checked out Diaper Free Before Three from the library, and DH and I both read it. We like the approach and the philosophy fits with our lives. So we're trying it.

Side note: My mother has already pretty much told me I'm stupid for doing this, but I think she sees this as a referendum on how she potty trained us. Note to grandparents: it's not. There's more than one way to parent and most of them are fine.

Anyway, the gist of this is, we have a little potty chair (like this one) and a few weeks ago we started sitting PB on the potty a few times a day when we change his diaper. This is nice because it gives one the chance to tidy up a bit and prepare the clean diaper while PB sits and "reads" a book or plays with a toy. In his usual easygoing fashion, he enjoys sitting on the potty. He's taken a pee in the potty a few times now, and each time he's been praised, but there's really no pressure to do anything at this stage in the game: we're just getting him comfortable with the potty and showing him that this is what folks do in the bathroom. (We had already moved his whole diaper-changing station in to the bathroom, so we were unwittingly primed for this)

Frankly, if we do things this way and it takes a year and a half to have him fully "trained", that is completely cool by me, because this doesn't feel like training, it's just establishing another pleasant little routine in PB's day (The book claims kids will be fully trained by 18 months! But the book was written to... sell books). My aim is to avoid tantrums, battles, screaming, and feces everywhere, all of which is the experience of folks I know who have done (and redone and re-re-done) the boot camp thing. So, pleasant potty time is here for now, and I suspect it's for keeps in our household.  

6 months

SIX MONTHS? Half a year? That was fast. And PB decided to get a lot accomplished in the past month. Meanwhile, everything's still crazy (good crazy! Very good crazy!) with job/housing stuff, so I am yet again late with this update. But here it is. He had a doctor's appointment on the day he hit the six-month mark, so I have real stats! 

Weight: 19lb, 9oz. (90th percentile)


Length: 27.5 inches (90th percentile)

Head circumference: I never pay attention to the actual numbers, but he's also in the 90th percentile here.

What he's eating: He started solids! On the morning of April 2, I was sitting with PB on my lap while I ate breakfast, which included a banana. PB was reaching like crazy for the fruit, so I broke off a small piece and held it in front of him. He nabbed it and popped it in his mouth immediately. I couldn't really see his face, but DH said he looked very thoughtful for a moment. He s-l-o-w-l-y chewed it, and we kept expecting him to spit it out, but nope!

Since then he has tried oatmeal, pears, pineapple, green beans, a crust of bread, and red bell pepper. We're doing this Baby-Led-Weaning style: we put food in front of him (the fruits and veggies are cut up in to easy-to-grab stick shapes) and let him play with it, basically. Sometimes it winds up in his mouth. So far he seems to like everything he's tried.

All his actual nutrition is still coming from breastmilk. The solids, at this point, are basically a fun toy, and we've been getting him used to sitting in his high chair with us when we're eating breakfast. That's given us a fun preview to family meals in the future.

Physical skills: He is SO CLOSE to crawling. He now rocks on his hands and knees all the time. Even without formal crawling skills, he's really getting around: he'll get himself across the living room in under 2 minutes, especially if something dangerous/electrical is in his line of sight. This is correlating with an increased difficulty in the diaper-change department, because now about half the time I try to change him, he flips over on his tummy and starts trying to make quick with the getaway. It's becoming a wrestling match. 

NEW CATEGORY! Teeth!: He has two teeth now! April 2 was a big day - first the banana, then DH called me at work that afternoon and said he felt a tooth coming through. Over the next few days, we started to be able to see them. PB handled them pretty well - he mostly kept chawing on everything. There was one night when he woke up abruptly, screaming (very out of character for him), and looking back we think that might have been the night when they actually cut through his gums. It was a bit scary for me, as he generally just makes enough noise to alert us that he's awake, but he was really hollering, even after I picked him up. He didn't really calm down until he was nursing. But I think that was because his gums hurt.

As DH has pointed out, we're spoiled: if PB cries for a half hour, we're both freaked out that something's really wrong.

Favorite toys: Blue car, anything made of paper (he has attempted to eat at least one library book), sock monkey, O-Ball, the toy from his high chair, food.

Verbal skills: He babbles all the time now: "mamama" and "babababa". He does this cute thing where he babbles while chewing on something, which is handy when I turn my back and he scoots over to DH's slippers and starts gnawing on them. (Yes, sometimes we're convinced we managed to produce a puppy).

Social skills: Happily, he's still a really sociable little guy. One of my dearest friends and her husband were in town for a few days, and PB took to them right away: all smiles and babbling (and drool! He likes to share that, too). The day he turned 6 months old, he got to spend a little time with his 10-month-old cousin. I think he's not entirely sure what to do about other babies, but neither is she: she kind of bapped him in the face a few times, I think to see what he would do. He mostly took it in stride, though he looked a little surprised.

Sleep: Still generally waking up once, between 4 and 5am. We've made an attempt at not getting up, to see if he'll just settle himself back to sleep, but the result of that has been that I'm awake from 4:30am until my alarm goes off, sitting in bed, just listening to him make noise in the other room. And then he's crazy-tired when his normal morning nap time comes around. And I'm getting even less sleep than I would if I got up with him. So this is perhaps not the best solution. Beyond that, though, he's sleeping pretty consistently: bedtime by 7:30pm, sleeps through to that one wakeup, otherwise (if I get up when he does and change/nurse him) he sleeps until 6:30 or 7am. Two to three naps per day, not on any kind of real schedule. 

5 months

I'm a couple of days late with this because cool stuff has been developing behind the scenes here in Schmeiland, both with possible future housing and with my job. But all this means I have had less spare minutes of late, and I'd rather spend them snuggling PB (or catching up on one of the inevitable chores he creates) than sitting at the computer. So: delay. But here's the update:

Weight: 19.6 pounds on his 5-month birthday, according to the bathroom scale.

Length/ Head circumference: No appointment this month, so no update here.

What he's eating: Still strictly breastmilk. We've been having a terrible heat wave (in March - damn global warming) and I don't know if it's that, but he's been drinking less at a time and asking for milk more frequently these days. My theory is that he's thirsty (rather than hungry) from the heat. I don't know. In a given day, he still eats about the same amount as he did before.

He goes to bed by 7:30 each night, and I pump before I go to bed. Lately the late-night pumped milk has been going straight in to the freezer because we don't need a bottle overnight, so our freezer stash is starting to look good.

Physical skills: He's gone mobile. Whenever I say or think that, it's in the same tone one would use to say "Skynet has become self-aware". Fortunately, it's still pretty limited: he moves around by flipping over one way, shimmy-pivoting, then flipping over the other way and repeating. But he made it halfway across the living room in a matter of minutes... so it's happening!

He's also started reaching for food - especially drink glasses - when we're eating. His aim is getting more accurate: any day now he's going to slap the drink out of my hand.

Additionally, he's getting good at grabbing anything about the face: hair, earrings, glasses, etc. He's a fan of DH's beard, and he's managed to fling my glasses to the ground a couple of times now. His default mode is this repetitive grasping motion with his hand: he's constantly palming a surface and then bringing his hands together. If he grabs something, he'll explore it (usually by bringing it to his mouth), otherwise he keeps on searching.

We've seen him stick his rear in the air a couple of times when he's been on his tummy. I think he just has to put all the component motions together in the right order, and he'll be crawling.

Favorite toys: Sock monkey, burp rag, blankets, anything chewable. No visual or tactile signs of teeth yet, but he's all about chewing everything, including the fingers of whomever is holding him.

Verbal skills: The "tugboat" sound, which I worried was fading away, has come back with an adorable vengeance! And now he's doing it while changing the tone of his voice, and it sounds like he's trying to sing. Gah. Kills me. Otherwise he's making occasional consonant sounds: "ma" and "ga" here and there. Sometimes he says "mamamama..." and I act like he's referring to me. I know he isn't yet. But it still makes me happy.

Social skills: No sign yet of any fear of strangers. If PB is met with a new person, he often starts out quiet, but curious. He generally spends a few moments kind of taking it all in before he makes any noise or tries any interaction. One exception is PB's Uncle Adam (DH's oldest brother) who lives overseas. Adam visited last week, and the kid was all over him. I suspect the fact that Adam bears a striking similarity to his dad (PB's very doting grandfather) helped PB feel at home with him, but I was surprised at his complete lack of hesitation: as soon as PB saw him, he reached out to grab his facial hair.

Sleep: For two nights the week he hit 5 months, he slept for 11 hours straight: 7:30pm to 6:30am. Now that I've typed it out, it won't happen again, but he picked days when I really needed some sleep, and I feel fantastic in the morning if I'm not getting up at 4am to feed him. The norm is still one wake up, around 4:00, which is totally doable (and I'm generally happy to offload some milk by that point, anyway). His bedtime is now pretty consistently between 7:15 and 7:30pm. Naps are slightly more regular, now that DH figured out that the kiddo tends to want to go down for his next nap around 3 hours after he went down for the last one. That formula has held for a couple of weeks now, and PB sometimes naps for as long as 2.5 hours... though 1 hour seems pretty standard.

Now to post this before I need to start on the 6 month update! I can't believe this kid has almost been around for half a year already...

4 months

PB is already four months old, and I realized with some sadness that I'm already starting to forget things from when he was a newborn. Of course we were all pretty tired in the first few weeks, and that can lend a haze to the recall function, but still - it's nice to remember these things.

I'll try to be better about a monthly update from here on out, since he changes so much these days. So here's what's up with him at 4 months old - and it's pretty wordy, since this is the first of these I've done:

His 4-month appointment was on 2/22, two days after he turned 4 months old.

Weight: 17lb, 10 oz (90th percentile)

Length: 26.5 inches (95th percentile)

Head circumference: 98th percentile

So... he's pretty big!

What's he eating: Exclusively breastmilk, approximately 24oz from bottles while I'm at work, and then three nursing sessions per 24 hours. On days I'm home he gets almost all his milk from nursing, though there's an occasional bottle if I'm out running an errand or something. So: easily over a quart of milk per day. We're putting those Poly-Vi-Sol with Iron drops in one bottle a day (99% of the time DH is the one who remembers/does this, thankfully). They make his poop stink like metal. But I guess that's good.

Physical skills:

* Rolling from his tummy to his back is old hat for him.

* He's found his hands, and they are usually in his mouth, except when they're grabbing toys/burp rags/ his dad's beard or mom's dangling earrings. I can't believe there was a time when he didn't grab everything, but that was actually just over three weeks ago.

* Sometimes he just chills on his tummy during his tummy time, and while he's doing that he does a sustained pushup while moving his legs in a very pre-crawl kind of way. His neck is quite strong now and he will also look around a lot while he's on his tummy - if one of us is walking around the apartment he'll just track us, and then smile if we stop and say hi/make a face/ do something goofy.

* Lately he's also started rolling over on to his back and then figuring out how to do a Stooge-esque move wherein he wiggles himself around in a circle, with his head at the center. He does that in his crib, too, so sometimes when he wakes up from a nap he'll be facing the opposite direction from the way he was set down. That's all recent - within the last week.

* Overall, the dude never stops moving, and he is STRONG. He wiggles so much during diaper changes that it's becoming something of a wrestling match, and he's thwacked me in the face with his head so hard a couple of times that I've had actual concerns about chipping a tooth or breaking my nose. Neither has happened yet, fortunately.

* The amount of drool he produces in a day is astounding.

Favorite Toys:

Sophie the Giraffe, The Sqwish, The OBall, and burp rags.

Verbal skills:

* He's definitely laughing now, though it's at kind of random times. Often when he gets placed on the changing table, he does a giggle-SHRIEK combo that encourages me to do a lot of silly stuff to draw out changing time because it's a lot of fun. Of course, changing diapers takes twice as long now, anyway, on account of the wiggles, so I'm glad he's happy there.

* When DH plays his guitar, PB likes to babble along. Sometimes he makes extended "aaaaaaa" sounds, almost like singing. And sometimes he makes that noise while holding his hands up like he has a harmonica, so it looks like he's accompanying his pa. Cute!

* He's also making a cute "bppppththtt" tugboat-type sound. He's been doing that for a little over a month now.

Social skills:

* PB is really a happy baby, though he's definitely a morning person. We had a family funeral this past weekend, and he didn't handle the visitation well (I would normally not take a 4-month old to a visitation, but there were automobile logistics involved) because it was late in the evening, he slept in the car on the way there, and when he woke up there were 4 complete strangers (excited cousins) looming over him, so he was kind of overwhelmed. On the other hand, the church service was the next day at 11:30am, and he did wonderfully: he quietly sat and watched the ceiling fans, chewed on his hands or a burp rag, and played with his great uncle's glasses for the hour. He babbled a little toward the end of the service, but several people actually thanked me afterward - they said hearing a baby in church helped remind them that life goes on. I was concerned about the lunch after the service (the funeral was for DH's 90-year-old grandfather, and nearly all of his very numerous descendants were present), but he handled the crowd well, and did a lot of smiling and looking around while he was passed from relative to relative. He definitely recognizes the voices of DH's parents - he generally reacts with a smile when he hears them, especially his grandmother, who's crazy about him.

Sleep:

I'm going to be very wordy about this, because in the last month or so this has changed drastically for us.

* We're settling in to a decent nighttime sleep routine. Bed time is 7pm, so around 6:15 I start to draw a bath. I give PB his bath in the bathroom tub (dude's too big for the kitchen sink now!) in his green foam baby tub, which is not ideal but we only really need it until he can sit up on his own. I just climb in to the tub barefoot with shorts on and crouch over him to bathe him - it's the easiest way to manage bathing him at this point - again, when he's a little bigger I'll probably kneel next to the tub, but at this point I have to support him somewhat, so I'm often using my foot to keep the little tub propped up while I use my hands to bathe him. (I've heard of people just taking a bath with their baby, but then isn't the aftermath too slippery? How do you get both of yourselves dried off? I don't know how well that would work for us.)

PB used to not be a big fan of the bath. Now he's OK with it, and sometimes I get a few smiles. If he has a washcloth to hang on to and chew, he's pretty content. After the bath, he gets a triple-stuffed diaper (just started tripling 2 nights ago, with good results), PJs, a sleep sack and hat, and then we enjoy a nice long nursing session in the chair in his room. His room has a dimmer light, which is perfect because I can set it to almost-off and help him get drowsy while he eats. Half the time he falls asleep at the breast, which they say isn't the best sleep training, but "they" can deal - it's adorable and he's happy. The other half the time I'll put him in his crib drowsy and he might complain for a few minutes, but it's rarely longer than 8-10 minutes, and his heart isn't in it. He wakes up once or twice a night. If he's up before 1am, DH gives him a bottle of milk and puts him right back down. If it's after 1am, I nurse him. If he sleeps that long (which he's been doing more often lately), I usually have to change his PJs, and sometimes his crib sheet, because he's peed through everything - hence the triple-stuffing, which has helped this problem. I get all the fabric changing out of the way first so he can nurse himself back in to a stupor afterward. He generally looks wide awake when I put him in his crib after a night feeding, but he doesn't make much noise at all, usually just a little chatting to himself before he drops back to sleep. He wakes up for the day between 6:00 and 7:30am (though this weekend after a particularly tiring day he slept until 8:30! On a Sunday morning! I was in heaven).

* Side note: Evenings are nice. DH and I have our dinner after PB is in bed - often DH is cooking while I'm doing the whole bath/bed routine - so we have a couple of hours of just-the-two-of-us time to eat and chat and watch a little TV or whatever. I'm not sure why, but I didn't expect that perk.

* Naps are not completely consistent, but it often seems to hinge on the morning nap: if PB gets an hour or more at the 9am nap, he's pretty happy for the rest of the day. If the 9am nap doesn't work out well, the rest of the day's naps are usually crap, and he's a crank by the evening. On good days (which are more common) PB takes 2 long naps (1.5 - 2 hours each) or 3 shorter (45 minutes - 1 hour) naps. The longest nap he's taken when I'm home is an hour and 15 minutes... I think the dynamic is just different if I'm around all day and he's nursing, rather than getting bottles.

For naps, we're generally just following the guidelines in "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" that say an infant shouldn't be awake for longer than 2 hours at a time. PB gives pretty clear cues that he's getting sleepy, though: starting to whine (annoying) and rubbing his eyes (adorable).

All this wordiness may convey that I was a little bit obsessive about sleep. When PB was almost 3 months old, I read in Dr. Spock that children should be able to go to sleep on their own when they're put to bed "drowsy but awake" by 4 months of age. This freaked me out, because at the time we didn't have a consistent bedtime or routine, and putting him down for his long (maybe 5 hours) sleep at night involved a long time (sometimes upward of an hour) of rocking/bouncing/shushing/etc. to try to get him to sleep around 11pm. I'm a little stunned to realize that a month ago we were still doing all that - and still wrapping PB up in a swaddle blanket at night. And only a couple of weeks before that he was doing all his sleeping in the swing.

I checked out probably 8 different sleep books from the library. Part of the reason there are a zillion sleep books to choose from is that every baby is a bit different... so we just decided to pick and choose what sounded reasonable for the baby we have. In the end, I think the folks who needed the most "training" were DH and me. Once we tried a routine, PB took to it right away, and now, as Dr. Spock predicted, we can put him in his crib still awake and he will go to sleep.

* The night after his 4-month shots, PB went to sleep just before 7pm (he fell asleep at the breast - he was pretty tired) and slept for TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT. He has never done that before, and I'm sure it was because of the shots, but wow... I felt so well-rested.

I also felt like my chest was going to explode, but such is life.

Things change so quickly with this guy. I wonder what I'll be writing about him in another month!

A list

1) I did a little math and realized I am producing a quart of milk, give or take, every day. A QUART.

2) You'd think that would mean our freezer is full of backup milk, but nope! I'm barely keeping up with the kid's daily needs.

3) We weighed him like a turkey (or a camping backpack) the other day, and our home scale says he's pushing 17 pounds. Not surprising, since he's drinking A QUART OF MILK EVERY DAY.

4) I'm hungry all the time, and I'm drinking - no lie - about 100 oz of liquid per day. See #1.

5) I threw out my shoulder/neck a few days ago. See #3. Also: cribs are not ergonomic, especially not for short women... which is, like, half of all parents. OK, I guess there are tall women out there. But I'm not one of them.

6) The little guy is learning how to laugh. I'm grateful for this intermediate stage, where his laughs are kind of tentative, because they make my heart aaaallmost explode. He's giving me a chance so I'll survive his first belly laugh. Hopefully.

7) We are doing some gentle sleep training. It is working, for the most part: he's been going to sleep at 7pm and sleeping until roughly 7am (the range is from 6am to 7:45 so far), with one to two wake ups during the night for a snack and a diaper change. It's a very livable routine for the whole family, especially now that DH and I have worked out the nighttime feedings so we both get a solid chunk of sleep. I think the good sleep is 30% our doing and 70% just that the universe blessed us with a relatively chill baby. We're doing sort-of cry-it-out stuff. He generally cries for 10 minutes or less, and it's totally an "I'm sooo sleeepy..." kind of cry. And then he sleeps for hours and wakes up super happy.

8) He could also be sleeping well because of #1 and #3.

9) I keep hearing that all the sleep routines go to hell at 4 months, so... one day at a time.

10) Almost every time I pump at work, someone knocks on my office door. Inconvenient, because I need to pump relatively frequently (see #1), and seriously? You don't want me to answer the door. We'd all be traumatized.

11) Because of #10, I am now having anxiety dreams about pumping at work, similar to those dreams you have as a kid about showing up to school naked. In the dreams, I'm pumping, with the office door open, without pants on, and there are like twelve people standing in my doorway. What I want to know is, where did my pants go?

12) I've decided to refer to the kiddo as PB on this blog, because I'm tired of calling him "the kiddo/kid/baby/dude/little guy", and I was so focused on protein when I was pregnant that he is probably 30% composed of peanut butter.

13) Last night PB only woke up once, around 2:30am. I nursed him on one side, then changed his diaper, and then was about to start nursing him on the other side when he spit up on my neck, purposely missing the burp rag. When I pulled him back to wipe off his face (and my neck - ew), he gave me a huge, gummy smile in the dim light. Which just made me hug him. Who else gets a hug for horking part of their meal on to my neck?

14) A year ago today I found out I was pregnant. That's nuts.

Boob Juice: I love it/ I hate it edition

So it's been three months of exclusively breastfeeding the little guy, and now I'm back at work 4 days a week (I work from home on Wednesdays).The situation has changed, once again, so I thought I'd record the recent changes - both in circumstances and in my attitude - in list form.

Stuff I love about breastfeeding:

- Nursing is a really snuggly time. I have a super-tall baby, so he wraps himself almost all the way around me when he's nursing, which keeps us both warm on these chilly days. When I burp him after he nurses, he likes to snuggle and chat, too - it's great quality time.

- As the kiddo's personality is coming out more, he gets really cute mid-nursing session: sometimes when he's no longer starving but he's not finished with his meal, he'll take a quick break to look up and me and smile. Sometimes he does this three or four times in a row: it's like early peek-a-boo. When he sees I'm still there, he looks SO HAPPY. Bonus cute points are earned when some milk runs down his cheek while he's making faces at me.

- This is selfish, but holy crap, this is the best weight-loss plan ever. I'm within 5 pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight, all my pre-pregnancy pants fit, and the only exercise I've done since giving birth is walking around. All this despite the fact that I'm hungry all the time and eating like it's going out of style. This is a very nice side effect of being a nursing mom.

- So far, I haven't had an issue with supply. I built up a stash of freezer milk before I headed back for work, which has helped while I've figured out how much I need to pump in the office. Now that I've been doing it for a couple of weeks, I think things are starting to regulate, and I'm grateful we haven't really had a panic about what the kid will eat.

- Dude is growing in leaps and bounds, and everything he's eating comes from me. It seems arrogant to be proud about that, but... whatever. I'm proud of it.

- I'm a D-cup. Va va va voom.

Stuff I don't love about breastfeeding:

- I'm a D-cup. Yeah, that's hawt and all, but the need to wear industrial-grade underwire bras all day makes it a little less awesome.

- All those nice things about nursing? Yeah, that doesn't happen during pumping, which I do 3-4 times a day on office days and once or twice on days I'm home. Being attached to a milking machine feels very bovine, and a little sad because I know what I'm missing (see snuggle description above).

- If I go more than about 4 hours without either nursing or pumping, I get uncomfortable. If I go more than 6 hours, I start to feel like my chest will explode. This is a bummer, because on the occasional night when the kiddo sleeps 8+ hours, I don't get to sleep that long: I have to get up at some point and pump. And it's not like, "oh, maybe I should pump", it's painful. So some days I feel like I will never ever sleep more than 7 hours straight ever again. I know this isn't true, but it will be several months, at least, before I'll have that chance.

- My kid is great about taking a bottle, but he prefers nursing... which means he likes to make up for lost time on days I'm away at the office. Lost time gets made up at 2am. Bleh. At least I don't have to wake up at 6 to pump?

- I am concerned that one of these days I'll forget the bottles or pump parts I have to tote back and forth from home to the office... and then I'll have to take the 30-minute train ride back to pick them up. Hasn't happened yet, but I've only been doing this for a couple of weeks so far.

I will say that, on balance, things have smoothed out, and I can see continuing this nursing relationship as long as the little dude would like (or until he's 2 - that's my limit). My advice to new moms who are considering it remains that it's worth a try and it's best to ask for help BEFORE you're crying about it. Because you'll get to the point when you look forward to nursing the tot, and you kind of feel like a superhero for being the source of his food and a major source of comfort, and contented post-nursing snuggles are really the tops for both parties.

The Birthening, Part 1: Induction

It's taken about two months to write this. Babies are a bit more work when they're out of the womb... and they're distractingly cute even when they're not being work. So I don't apologize for the delay. :-)

I had had my usual appointment with the midwives on Thursday, October 13. At that appointment they had told me I should come in over the weekend to do a quick blood pressure check. I had initially agreed to Sunday, but the prospect of one last weekend at home, just me and DH, without a 2-hour round trip drive to the hospital, was much more appealing... so I called on Friday and said I would come in on Monday, the 17th.

I went to work on Monday and had difficulty concentrating. I think, in the back of my mind, I knew I wasn't coming back in for a long time. Rather than spur me to productivity, though, the thought just made me listless. Since I'd already trained the part-time temp who was going to cover much of my job, I was mostly tying up small loose ends, anyway. I left a little early so I could take the el train to the hospital and be there by 4:00.

When I got to the midwives' office, there was some confusion: apparently someone had written me down for a noon check-in, when I had explicitly told the person on the phone that I would be there at 4:00. So I ended up twiddling my thumbs in the waiting room for some extra time, telling myself to be calm.

That was the whole problem with the blood pressure stuff: it got more tense each time I got checked, because I knew they would want to induce me, and I didn't want to be induced for a million reasons (including my sister's terrible failed induction/ c-section nightmare), so I had to stay calm. But telling yourself, "STAY CALM!" doesn't really, uh, work.

Finally, I was called back to an exam room and a nurse checked my blood pressure. I tried so hard to take deep, slow breaths while she was doing it, but my heart was racing.

150/80. Way too high.

In the past, they'd let me sit for five minutes and check it again. I naively thought they would do this at this appointment, too. They were also planning a cervical check and everything, so I de-pantsed myself and sat in the room with that big paper sheet over my lap for a moment and then Midwife Amy came in. She did a cervical check and declared me completely closed.

Here's where I was clearly just in denial: in my mind, what she told me ("completely closed") was that my body just isn't ready to have the baby yet, so they're going to send me home, tell me to relax, and they'll see me Thursday at my regular appointment.

Amy didn't see it that way, and the tone of resolution in her voice made me break out in to a sweat. She was giving me two options: be admitted to the hospital right now, or go home and pack a bag and return with DH tonight. Being completely closed just meant they'd have to do more work to get me ripened up.

I felt a little thick-headed: both options sounded like an induction would be starting within hours. But she just said my cervix is closed. After months of focusing on medication-free childbirth and hoping to let labor happen naturally - the whole reason I was working with midwives - this just puzzled me. At one point Amy said, "were we not clear that this was probably going to happen?" And I had to admit that, yes, they'd been talking induction for weeks. I just hadn't been listening.

Of course, I was also alone. This was the only appointment throughout the course of my pregnancy when DH hadn't accompanied me. Amy let me get dressed and call him before I had to make a decision.

My hands were shaking when I dialed home.

I explained what the situation was, and we agreed that I would come home, we'd eat a little dinner and pack up, and we'd come in to the hospital that night.

When Amy returned, I told her the situation, and she said she'd let Labor and Delivery know I was coming in. I explained how far we lived from the hospital and that it would likely be late - after 9:00pm - and she said that was fine.

With that, I left. As I walked toward the train, looking down at my big pregnant belly, I told myself that this was a lucky thing - I was getting one last chance to be on my own before I have this baby. A little time to myself to think.

In reality, I was scared and upset. This was all going wrong. I'd managed to carry a baby for 39+ weeks, but I was doing something wrong and now they're forcing the kid out when he's not ready. My hands were still shaking. I wanted a hug. (To be fair, Amy could see that: she gave me a big hug before I left and told me everything would be fine).

So I called my parents.

Parents of adult children: if your daughter calls you and says, with a nervous voice, that she's about to be induced, the first response you give should be "Are you OK? How are you feeling? Everything is going to be fine."

Despite your overwhelming excitement about the impending birth of a new grandchild, your response should not be: "GREAT! We're getting in the car RIGHT AWAY!" Which is precisely what my mother said.

My mother's enthusiasm didn't help. I was fighting a lump in my throat, and now I had to tell her to cool her jets, I'm completely closed, this is going to take a long time, et cetera. I had expected that she would remember how long my sister was in the hospital during her induction before they finally pulled my niece out via c-section, but apparently all that stuff about forgetting labor extends to grandmothers, too.

I don't blame her for being excited, of course. I just wouldn't have minded some reassurance. But she'd never been induced, anyway, and the one time she was threatened with it she was 42 weeks pregnant and it was a very hot August and she was SO DONE with being pregnant. I had not yet reached that point.

My parents insisted they would be leaving after dinner to drive halfway to Chicago (this panicked me. In hindsight, I shouldn't have called them until at least 24 hours later, or maybe even until after the kid was born).

My next call was to my brother, who had told me weeks earlier that he was keeping his phone by his side 24/7 in case I needed anything in the last days of pregnancy. His response was pretty much exactly what I needed to hear. He started with "Is everything OK? How do you feel about this? Is there anything you need?"

As my sister has said, our brother is rare among men. He absolutely loves being an uncle and was very excited about meeting his nephew, but he didn't let that get in the way of taking care of his lil' sister.

By the time I finished talking with my brother, I was on the el train, and I didn't want to be discussing the state of my cervix within the hearing of train strangers, so I moved to texting people: first my sister, then a few close friends and one co-worker. The slow process of sending text messages on my clunky phone helped distract me from the sweat that was developing in my armpits. As encouraging/excited responses trickled in, they helped me feel a little better.

I was on the train over an hour: first the brown line, then the green line. It felt like a year. I felt alone, detached from all the people around me in a completely different way than the usual commute. I wondered if they could tell what was about to happen to me.

When I called DH and told him I was almost home, he suggested he'd order a pizza for delivery, and then he would come meet me at my train stop. That sounded good to me.

When I finally got off the train and saw him walking toward me, I kind of started to lose it - I realized I'd been mostly keeping my cool in public but was really, truly freaked out. As he came closer, I started to cry. He gave me a hug and we walked through the dark together to our home, our last time doing something like this without worrying about the kid.

Once I was at home, my sister called. She, also, was very reassuring, and told me that her induction had been earlier in her pregnancy and it was really unusual, and that mine would go much more smoothly, and a million other kind things. I was gathering up things to pack while she talked to me, and then DH started badgering me about cash for the pizza delivery while I was still on the phone with my sister, and then my sister started asking about when she could visit in January, and I felt myself starting to crack: "You know, we still have to get packed up for the hospital, it's a little crazy here right now..." I was starting to cry again.

I got off the phone with my sister, and I - proud moment here - screamed at DH. But seriously, I felt like I was about to cede all control of my body and our baby to a bunch of doctors, and he can't get eighteen f***ing dollars together? And he didn't so much as wash a dish while I was trapped on the train, even though he knew we'd be in the hospital for days? I was pissed. Then it turned out I didn't have enough cash, and I really lost it. The stupid pizza was supposed to simplify things, and now I could feel my blood pressure going through the roof, and it was clear that I had to fix the situation even though my brain couldn't handle anything additional at that point. I told DH to call the pizza place and give them our debit card number, which for some reason he thought wasn't possible.

He called. It worked. We got our pizza. Things went a little better once we ate something.

We packed up the bag, and headed out in to the October evening, late enough that traffic wasn't bad.

We got to the hospital around 9:30pm - after hours, so we had to press a special button to be admitted to the main doors by some remote security person who buzzed us in. We carried all our stuff up to Labor and Delivery, and between the two of us we looked like we had planned to spend a month: we had bags of snacks and drinks, my body pillow, a laptop, and a million other things.

When we got to the secure L&D doors, I picked up the phone on the wall and said, "we're here for an induction", and they let us right in, no questions asked.

We schlepped up to the nurse's station with all our bags. The nurse at the desk did not inspire confidence: she acted like she had no clue who the hell we were. I had to repeat my name several times, and repeat that I was with the midwives, and it was an induction, over and over again. I was so ready to bolt back out the door at that point. Had I known what the next few days would be like, I probably would have. Finally, the nurse (who still kind of looked like she was just making things up) admitted us to L&D room 311.

I thought to myself, "this is where it's all going to happen. I'm going to meet my son in this room."

I changed in to a hospital gown and climbed on to the hospital bed. Another nurse came in and gave me an IV hep-lock and a hospital bracelet, and hooked me up to the continuous fetal heart rate monitor. The kiddo's heartbeat was nice and steady. Since I was going to be on medication, I had to have the monitor on all the time. Fortunately, I could still walk around: if I had to wander further than a few feet from the bed, I could just unhook the monitors, toss the cords behind my neck, and walk over to the bathroom or whatever. I was pretty happy about that.

Then Midwife Kim came in and talked with me for a while about the next steps: I'd have a dose of Cervadil that would stay in for 12 hours, then they would assess me. If I wasn't quite ripe yet, they'd give me another 12-hour dose of Cervadil. After that, Pitocin. She told me that sometimes, Cervadil is enough to just get things rolling on their own. I hoped for that outcome, because I'd heard some bad things about Pitocin.

She then gave me the first dose of Cervadil, which is a suppository-type thing that gets inserted in to the cervix. Oh lordy, was that unpleasant. I knew Kim to be pretty skilled when she has to deal with the nether-regions, so I think Cervadil just kind of hurts. Once it was in, though, I couldn't really feel it.

Around 11:00pm, we settled in for the night. DH pulled out the chair-bed thing in the room and put on some pajamas, and I reclined my hospital bed. We turned down the volume on the fetal heart rate monitor, turned down the lights, and waited for things to get started.

Boob Juice: the situation so far

One of the reasons I haven't finished the birth story is that my hands have been full, in a very real sense, with feeding this baby. With the exception of three days, my 8-week-old son has been fed only breast milk, and he's thriving: he's over 12 pounds now, and is big and strong (95th percentile for length! And he can already roll over! And... I'll stop. But I'm very proud of him). After the first five days of his life, my milk supply has kept up with his demand pretty well; the "girls" are producing plenty to keep him fed.

Easy peasy, then, right?

Not exactly.

About two weeks ago, as I was struggling through yet another excruciatingly painful nursing session, I was composing a blog post in my head entitled, "Breastfeeding is An Enormous Pain in the Ass". I felt duped, and I felt like there was no getting out of the hell I'd gotten myself in to: my child was thriving on my plentiful milk, but I was crying at the end of (and sometimes the start of) each nursing session. This was clearly great for him and awful for me. Everyone had told me that the first two to three weeks would be difficult, but things shifted from challenging (i.e., figuring out the mechanics of nursing a new baby) to painful after those three weeks. I kept thinking I needed to tough it out, or maybe I was just more tender because I had a big, strong baby who liked to eat in gulps, or maybe I was doing something wrong... it all boiled down to something being flawed with me, or with my approach. I just had to figure out what it was.

Thanksgiving week was when it finally hit the fan; when I was sobbing in bed while my son was contentedly nursing. I was sobbing for two reasons:

A) The unending, burning, stabbing pain while my son nursed, and

B) The need to stock up on milk so I could go shopping with my mother that Saturday.

Item B is probably the topic for a separate post about difficulties with my family and their growing tendency to ignore my needs, but it did mean that I was pumping milk after each nursing session, trying to glean enough extra so I could spend precious hours away from my month-old son, shlepping around in a crowded shopping mall during Black Friday weekend. This was creating additional stress for me, which wasn't helped by item A: pain.

DH made the suggestion, while I was weeping, that I just start pumping until I could figure out what was going on. We had both given up on what we thought were La Leche League lies ("breastfeeding should never hurt!"), but he offered that perhaps it shouldn't actually hurt this much. And pumping was less painful.

The Sunday after Turkey Day I began exclusively pumping, and our baby started getting all his milk from bottles. (Side note: He is so easygoing. As long as there's milk, he doesn't care where it's coming from. I love this kid.) While I pumped, I Googled things like "agonizing pain while breastfeeding". And I learned a few things:

First, I learned that, while "breastfeeding should never hurt", it often does, especially in the early weeks. I found a message board of women describing the pain when their babies initially latch on as being equal to or worse than labor pains - and I nodded in agreement. And while I was told to expect "discomfort" for 2-3 weeks, several of these women said it took two to three MONTHS before that latch-on pain dissipated.

And by "latch-on pain", I mean take-your-breath-away, toe-curling, 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 pain.

Second, I learned that, though it can (and often does) hurt to start with, what should never happen while breastfeeding is a burning feeling, like the intense burn I would have for about 30 minutes after each feeding. That's a sign of a problem. Other chest-area problem signs I had: urgent itching during a nursing session, occasional shooting pains at any time, and, yes, pain intense enough that I cried while feeding my son.

Dr. Google told me I might have thrush, which hadn't occurred to me. OK, it had, but I kept checking my baby's mouth and he had none of the fuzzy white spots I knew to look for, and he never acted irritated when he nursed. If he didn't have thrush, how could I have it?

That Monday, I relayed my concerns to our pediatrician at the kiddo's one-month appointment. The doctor checked him carefully and told me she saw no signs of thrush in him, but it was possible - especially if I'd been given antibiotics and he hadn't - that I had thrush but hadn't transmitted it to the baby. She suggested I use Lotrimin (yes, the athlete's foot medicine) 3 or 4 times a day and see if that helped.

She also did what all the health professionals do, and complimented me on my milk supply. Thanks, but I would enjoy being able to give the milk to my child without the delivery of said liquid being such an issue.

After a couple of days of only pumping and using Lotrimin, I didn't feel like things had improved markedly - I was crying less, but only because I wasn't nursing. And I was sad about not nursing.

Also, all the dealing with bottles and the pump actually created a lot of friction between me and DH: when I exclusively nursed, I just took charge of the kid for an hour at a time, no fuss, no muss. I was forced to put my feet up and DH had some time to do what he wanted. With the exclusive bottle feeding, DH would feed him while I pumped, or else I would feed and burp the baby and then hand him over to DH so I could then pump... and then one of us would have to wash all the pump parts and bottle apparatus every day or so. It was a huge hassle, and felt like way more work for both of us.

So on that Wednesday I did what I should have done probably two weeks earlier: I called the midwife's office. The triage nurse who talked with me was awesome - she immediately made it clear that I shouldn't be in this kind of pain, and she made me feel, for the first time in a long time, that I wasn't inherently flawed or doing anything wrong. After a couple of conversations with her, I had a prescription waiting for me at a local pharmacy: two doses of Diflucan and a tub of All-Purpose Nipple Ointment. I'd heard of APNO several times, and it kind of sounded like a wonder treatment. Diflucan was referred to in a lot of the search results I found when I Googled around about thrush.

The nurse also told me that as soon as things stopped hurting terribly, I should get back to nursing the kiddo - there wasn't a big concern about giving him the thrush.

So a third thing I learned is something plenty of people have told me: ASK FOR HELP. If something hurts? Ask for help. If you feel like something's just not right? Ask for help! If you're crying while you're feeding your kid? Ask. For. Help. Or clarification, at least. I got really invested in toughing it out when what I needed was a prescription.

And a fourth thing: if you're sore (and if you're nursing, you will be, especially if you give birth to a mini-Hoover like my son), use these Soft Shells. They were recommended to me by a new-mom friend of mine and they work beautifully. Between these and my prescription ointment I started healing noticeably in a couple of days.

We're up to the point now that I'm nursing the kiddo about half-time, and the other half of his feedings he's getting bottles of pumped milk. In the last couple of days, I've had several nursing sessions when latch-on pain was minimal, and the rest of the feeding was essentially pain-free. It's amazing, and I think I can see where this is going: I'm back to hoping I'll be able to breastfeed this kid for a solid year, whereas a few weeks ago 12 months sounded like a lifetime of pain and suffering.

When it doesn't hurt, I have to say that nursing a baby is pretty awesome, in the true sense of the word. I gestated this baby, and now I'm still sustaining him with my body. I love the snuggle time that is guaranteed during a nursing session, and generally extends for a while afterward when I'm burping him and he dozes off on my chest, content with a full tummy. Nursing can certainly feel like the best kind of tender loving care a mother can give to her child.

But while I already stated for the record that I would be completely fine with some formula supplementation - which is exactly what we ended up doing in the first few days of his life, when he had jaundice, my milk hadn't yet come in, and he needed to poop out that bilirubin - I will now say, after two months, that I certainly don't blame women who don't stick with breastfeeding. If I hadn't had two solid months off work and a spouse who was home with me full-time and a health care professional who was extremely supportive, I don't think I could have weathered the learning curve. Of course now I know I had some issues that were unaddressed for too long (ASK! FOR! HELP!), so my case was probably not typical.

So, yes, so far we're exclusively breastfeeding, and as we come to the 2-month point I anticipate that will continue to be the case. But just because it's "natural" does NOT mean it's easy, not in the first two months, at least. I'm becoming convinced that anyone who says it is must be trying to sell you something.

Thanksgiving

Yes, I'm still writing out the birth story, and it's three parts so far, and maybe I'll finish it or maybe it will stay an unfinished tale like that triathlon I never wrote about (the short story on that: it was fun. And now that I've given birth, it's no longer the toughest physical thing I've done).

But it's hard to fit in any writing - or anything - with a baby around. Yes, even though he sleeps approximately 16 hours a day, according to the books. And yes, even though DH and I are both home full-time together during leave. And, yeah, even though right now the kid only needs about three things in rotation: milk, diaper change, sleep. You'd think a couple of people with graduate degrees could manage that AND getting the dishes washed in the same day, but you'd mostly be wrong. So creative pursuits are not getting the attention they may have otherwise.

I'm not complaining, though. Despite fatigue and occasional frustration (it's a weird frustration, too - I'm frustrated for... getting frustrated. Like I should be able to handle it when the kid has a full tummy, a dry diaper and a comfy place to sleep and is screaming his head off at me for no apparent reason. DH reminded me that it might be normal to find that frustrating).

Last Thanksgiving I honestly wasn't even thinking about having a kid. When I realize just how quickly we shifted from "not yet" to "why not?" with the baby question, it's a little stunning. This time last year I was not only not pregnant, I didn't think I'd be having a baby any time soon. Certainly not while still in my 20s, anyway.

But our minds changed, and then we got ridiculously, stupidly lucky and I was pregnant much sooner than I dared to hope I would be, and here it is, Thanksgiving, and we have a one-month-old son. And holy crap, people, he is cute. He's starting to smile sometimes, and use his voice - he likes to say "ow", very cheerfully, sometimes very loudly in the middle of the night when I'm burping him and DH is trying to sleep - and he reacts to different voices in the room, and he's starting to see things like the shapes of the mobile that hangs over his changing table. He's also growing like crazy, and we're pretty sure he'll weigh over 12 pounds at his one-month pediatrician appointment.

So, clearly, there's a lot to be thankful for here:

We have a beautiful, healthy son, and somehow we've picked up the basics of this parenting gig without freaking out so far. (The very short list of needs he has is helpful). Also, let me repeat: he's beautiful. The whole time I was pregnant I was prepared for a weird-looking kid, because we're a little weird looking, ourselves. And then he was born, and... wow. He's objectively cute. I spend a lot of time staring at him and feeling amazed.

I'm healing up and feeling more like a human (OK, most of me... my "girls" are still feeling a bit battered - the kid's massive weight gain is all due to mother's milk. This kiddo inherited the appetite enjoyed by both his parents. This is great for his sleep, but tough on my mammaries). I can do things like take long walks outside now, so I don't feel like an invalid like I did the first couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to being cleared to do things like jogging and lifting things that are bigger than the baby (though, hey, he's big enough that I'm less limited all the time!).

We're surrounded by supportive family, friends and neighbors who have been fantastic about stopping by with meals, calling and e-mailing to see if we need anything, and appropriately fawning over our beautiful baby.

With the extra leave due to my c-section and the timing of winter break at my work, my maternity leave is basically 11 weeks long, which is awesome.

We have health insurance. I seriously don't know what we would have done without it, because according to the statements I've gotten in the mail so far, our week in the hospital cost $35,000. Do what?

We live in a friendly neighborhood, full of folks who will strike up a conversation with a couple walking around with a baby. We're still not used to it, but I like the surprise each time.

And... well, I'm sure there are things I'm missing. But that's sleep deprivation for you. I hope all three of you readers out there have a beautiful holiday. We'll get to see a whole lot of both of our families, with a minimum of travel on our behalf, which is wonderful.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Birthening: the prologue

Over the last several years, I have read many, many birth stories, and I know that there is often an unexpected thing that happens during labor and delivery. Birth plans are just plans, and they need to be flexible. My whole approach to labor took that in to account: we took a childbirth class focused on unmedicated childbirth, but I was clear with DH that if things took a long time and I needed to conserve my energy, I was open to the idea of some pain relief that would help me rest.

We didn't even write out a birth plan, actually: we talked the whole enterprise over with the midwives, and everything that really mattered to me was just standard operating procedure. The most crucial aspects of any plan we would have written were the moments just after birth: I wanted immediate skin-to-skin contact with my baby, I wanted the team to wait until his cord had finished pulsing before it was cut, I wanted to try breastfeeding before they gave him any shots or weighed and measured him. The midwife said this is all standard - we would need to write out a special request NOT to have these things happen.

Well, none of those things happened. My son was born in a freezing operating room, via caesarian section, after a failed induction that took over two days. I didn't get to touch him for almost 4 hours except for a quick kiss on the cheek before they whisked him away to the nursery while I was sutured up and rolled back to a recovery room, without him. DH spent some time in the middle of the night pacing the hall between his post-operative wife, his baby in the special care nursery, and all his in-laws in the waiting room, waiting for news. The final process looked nothing like our general plans.

I am 100% OK with all of this.

I used to think that the people who had experiences like mine who said things like "at the end of the day, I have a healthy baby and that's all that matters" were just making themselves feel better about a situation over which they lost control. Maybe they were, but I seriously feel good about the way my son's birth panned out. He's huge and healthy and beautiful, and I never felt like I had lost what small amount of control I ever had over the process. It's just that the plan had to be even more flexible than we realized.

In part because I feel like I owe it to all the bloggers who shared their birth stories, and in part because now, only a week later, certain details are already starting to elude me, I'm planning to write out my son's birth story. It will likely take a little time between feedings (oh man, does this kid like to eat) and naps (his and mine), but I'd like to write it down. Because what happened was basically my nightmare scenario, but it wasn't terrifying at all. Through the whole process, which lasted over three days, I felt supported and listened to, and I felt like all the options were being laid out fairly to me and DH.

And, yes, at the end we have a healthy baby. I think I had to grow up a little and realize that seriously? That is the point of this whole thing.

Before I get in to the long story, however, here are the details: the kiddo (sorry interwebs, you don't get his real name) was born at 1:48am on Thursday, October 20. He was 21.25 inches long and weighed 8 pounds, 15 ounces. The midwife on call noted that this was after he pooped several times immediately after delivery, so she insisted that he was at least a nine-pound baby. And yes, his size was part of the reason we ended up in the operating room.

Oh, and we love him to bits and pieces. I'll have to write a separate post about how my feelings toward newborns have changed, because this particular newborn is just the tops.

"Mr. Mom"

Though the connotation of the term can rankle me, I'm a feminist.

I didn't have a great deal of choice in the matter, really. My mother was the primary breadwinner of the household when I was growing up - she was, and still is, the only female judge in the county. My mom, my sister and I are all lifetime members of the Girl Scouts. Sis earned a PhD in physics and is now working in the boys' club of hard sciences. While I definitely veered more toward the education/social science world that is populated by more women, I still plan to work outside the home and support my family financially, no matter how many kids we end up having. For some reason this feels more important to me now that I know I'm having a son - I want him to know that Women Work.

With all the decisions I've made about my education and the work I do, though, probably the best choice I made as a feminist was my choice of a mate. Because, while I joke that I didn't have much of a choice in being a feminist, most men do have something of a choice. Men have the luxury of ignoring the challenges women face just because we were born women - they don't necessarily need to deal with them head-on.

I didn't fall in love with DH because he's a feminist - that would be pretty unromantic - but over the years of living with him, and especially as we've been thinking about what our lives will look like as parents, I keep being struck by the unwavering conviction he has that the roles we'll take as parents should reflect our skills and personalities rather than some outdated notion of nature.

Which is why, when we decided that one of us was going to "stay home" (more on that later) with the baby, while the other works outside the home, there wasn't really a discussion about who would do what: I'm an extrovert who thrives on dealing with assorted people in a busy workplace, and I'm married to an introvert who just finished a years-long writing project that required patiently slogging away each day at home. Had we exchanged places, we both would have gone nuts.

So, in many ways, we'll each keep doing what we did before: DH will be the daytime caregiver for our son while I return to the office. We're both happy with this arrangement: I can go back to work, earn a paycheck, and trust that my kid is in the best hands possible, and DH gets to help mold another human being to be as interesting as he is. It feels like each of us thinks we're getting the better end of the deal, but that's how a lot of our marriage has felt already.

Stay-at-home-dads aren't as unusual as they were, say, 20 years ago - good friends of ours who are due the same week as us are planning a similar arrangement - but they're still met with reactions that raise my blood pressure. When we were talking with DH's extended family about this plan, one relative (a great-aunt in her 80s, so allowances should be made for generational differences) said, "oh, so you're going to be the mommy?"

DH's response was, "I don't think that's physically possible."

Several others - cousins our age, even - referred to him as "Mr. Mom". As these are my in-laws, and not my natal family, I restrained myself from shouting, "NO, he's NOT Mister Mom, he's DAD." I find myself getting defensive about it, angry when there's a suggestion that he should be looking for a "real" job, pissed at the implication that, while it would be fine if I stayed home, this whole gig is beneath him.

Part of the confusion from folks is financial, I'm sure. No one has asked it outright, but people wonder: how are you going to support three people on your little income, Schmei? Well, by living within our means. When we had two incomes, and then one and a half, the extra money was going to pay off debt. Now the additional income is gone, but so is the debt, so not a lot is going to change for us, really. This gives us the luxury of having one parent at home, rather than shelling out ridiculous cash so someone I've never met can spend all day with my firstborn child.

I mean, seriously, have you seen how expensive child care is in Chicago? Ridiculous.

In this economy, I honestly don't know why having a parent stay home strikes people as strange. I know plenty of people who are living on less and have had no choice in the matter. We had the luxury to choose this life. Yes, we'll have to live with our 2000 Honda for a long time, but that ride is my dream car and I want it to live until my son is learning to drive, anyway. And we won't be able to take European vacations, but we have all the camping gear we need for fun family trips. Plus with the handy/crafty parent at home, I think we're going to save money in all kinds of ways that probably haven't even occurred to me yet.

A few folks - especially my mother-in-law - have shared concern that DH will go crazy if he's stuck at home all day with our small fry. We are both legitimately worried about how we'll handle those first weeks with a newborn, but we've been talking about that and we have family who will be stopping by to make sure we haven't lost our minds.

After I return to work in January, though, how will DH handle it? I think he'll be fine.

For one thing, as I mentioned before, he just spent years working from home on his dissertation, which was a frustrating project. Now he has a new little project that will likely also be frustrating but is hopefully more rewarding in the long run. For another thing, he won't be "stuck at home". There's this rumor I've heard that babies are actually pretty portable, and we live within walking distance of more than one library, parks and playgrounds, grocery stores, and just all around nice neighborhoods. He'll also have access to our car, and much of his extended family is a short drive away, so if he needs some daytime company he'll be able to find it. And, while he'll be the daytime caregiver, I'll still be home during evenings and weekends (and if I can rig my schedule, one weekday each week) and for the first months I'll be the sole source of food, as well, so I anticipate taking the kid off his hands as soon as I walk in the door in the evening so we can nurse.

[In my mind's eye, the kid is always happy when I come in the door. I suspect that in reality he'll be cranky because he's hungry, but I'm taking my fantasy life while I can.]

Here's the other thing about going the stay-at-home-dad route: I think it will make it much easier for me to return to work when my leave is over. The idea of leaving my firstborn with some babysitter kind of gives me hives. Instead, our son will be spending his days with his father, who loves him to bits already and is already good at taking care of me, an often-needy person who doesn't always know what her best interests are.

I've spoken with other women who cried on their first day back at work. Maybe I'll cry - I'm sure it's going to be a huge adjustment - but I think I'll feel a thousand times better about the situation because my son will be in the best possible hands.

So, besides living on one income, what are the downsides to having one of us stay home? I've been thinking about this for months and haven't come up with anything, especially because the setup works so well with our personalities. As our friend T, who is also planning on being a stay-at-home dad starting this fall, said, "this is an amazing opportunity!"

That's how we feel about it. I'm excited that we have the chance to start being parents this way. It might be temporary, depending on countless factors, but for now I'm grateful that the daytime hours of the first year or so of my son's life will be spent at home with his dad.

NOT Mr. Mom.

That other project

So I mentioned that I have another project that I picked up a little while ago, and it's been taking my time and energy. Then I did the predictable thing that happens and disappeared for a while.

So, the project is large enough that it's been producing its own urine for a few weeks, which makes it high time I posted about it.

Dear readers: I'm knocked up.

I've been writing about this offline, but I feel like this is the stuff blogs are made of, anyway: pregnancy is temporary and prone to changes each day. I don't want this to become a strictly baby-centric blog, but at this point I've followed enough blogs that I know what the pattern is:

A) Hip young female writer starts a blog, just writing about LIFE, man!

B) HYFW falls in love

C) HYFW gets engaged and starts planning a wedding. But "this isn't a wedding blog".

D) weddingweddingweddingweddingweddingwedding

E) HYFW gets marrrrrieeeed!

F) long pause

G) HYFW returns! With wedding pictures and recaps!

H) OK, seriously, back to life. HYFW begins posting more of the stuff I liked to read in the first place, with the occasional relationship post.

I) Long pause out of nowhere.

J) I've probably unsubscribed because the pause was months long.

K) I psychically check in to HYFW's blog on the day she announces that she's PREGERRRRS! Often complete with an ultrasound picture. But "this isn't a baby blog"

L) It's totally a baby blog. For good.

Now, to be fair, I have kept reading one or two blogs that have done this to their readers, because they did keep posting interesting content even after having a child. (And YES, of course I think child-related content can be interesting: A child is residing in my midsection as I type). And I know that bloggers have zero obligation to make stuff up for their readers. If I don't like reading about poop and boob juice, I can go elsewhere, and they know that and so do I.

So I'm not going to say "this isn't a baby blog". I am going to say that I'll be writing about what the hey is going on in this body that, up until a couple of months ago, I thought I knew pretty well. I've already been surprised by all this pregnancy stuff in a lot of ways, and writing is kind of how I work through things, so maybe instead of a baby blog we should all just think of this as my really cheap, overly public therapy. Or something.

Anyway, the answers to the usual questions:

Due date: October 21, 2011. DH and I love October, so this is really exciting. Birthday pictures in a pumpkin patch, baby!

So, how far along are you? I'm at 16 weeks, 4 days. 16 weeks in the normal world is 4 months, but in pregnancy world it's 3.5 months, sort of. For reference, full-term is 40 weeks - which sounds like 10 months to me. But whatever. So I'm almost-four-months along.

Gender: Yes, despite my entire family thinking I'm RUINING the surprise, we're planning to find out some time in June. I'll write more about this.

How are you feeling, Schmei? Physically: Better. I think I had it relatively easy, from what I hear, but the first trimester landed me on my ass. All-day nausea (only puked twice so far, fortunately), exhaustion, crankiness, and a sense of smell that could detect a stale cigarette from four miles away... which contributed to nausea and crankiness. The last few weeks, though, my stomach and I have gotten back together. We're making up for those weeks of estrangement by the stomach being constantly hungry and me constantly feeding it. Beyond the occasional insomnia, I'm feeling pretty good.

Emotionally: all over the place. I still can't wrap my head around this being real, most days. I honestly think it's going to hit me when I meet the kid this fall. (Or maybe when I get cankles this summer. That will be a treat.) But then I get worried about the kid, which tells me that the instinctive side of me is pretty aware of what's going on.

Weight gain: 6 lbs so far. My goal, per the midwife, is to gain 15-25 total. I'm not sure if my ravenous hunger agrees with that goal, however. The second three pounds happened a lot faster than the first three - I'm worried it's exponential or something.

Midwife? Are you doing a crazy home birth? No, though I think home birth makes sense for a lot of folks, the idea of all that cleanup is not appealing to me at all, while the idea of having someone take complete care of me for a day or so after I give birth is appealing. We found a really cool midwife group at a nice hospital. I'm sure I'll write more about the midwives. So far I'm very very happy with that decision.

Are you still running? Eh, no. I had signed up for a 5K on May 7 which I planned to run-walk with DH. We ended up sleeping through it, which was the right choice for a lot of reasons. I was so out of it during much of the first trimester that long walks were the best I could manage, but now I'm really in to walking: aiming for 5 miles a day. It's something I know I can do until the end, and afterward, and it really helps me when I'm feeling down, which these damn hormones do more often than I care to admit. I got a prenatal yoga DVD, too, with some intense stretches and squats, and I'm aiming to do that at least three days a week. But yes, running and triathlon-ing are hopefully going to return in 2012 some time.

Do you have a bump? I'm getting the start of one... it depends on the angle and what I'm wearing and whether I just ate. That probably means not really, but my midsection certainly has more density than it used to. Most of my pants are still wearable, especially with a Bella band. I'm enjoying my non-enormity while it lasts.

Where's the ultrasound picture? I don't have one yet - this will likely be its own post soon - and I'm not planning to post it here when I get one. I've found myself feeling very strongly about this kid's privacy, which is pretty silly when you think about an ultrasound picture, since they all basically look the same. I will probably follow in the footsteps of Molly and not post any identifying pictures of the kid, since this is a public blog, and I think I may just start that from, well, the start, and not post the ultrasound picture. I know that's dumb. Blame it on hormones.

Have you felt any kicks? I think I have - it's tough to distinguish, but last night we had root beer floats for dessert, and about an hour later I was relaxing in bed with a magazine when I'm fairly certain I felt two little thumps in my lower-front midsection. Maybe the baby likes root beer? I know I do, so the kid should get used to that.

How is DH doing? Well, he's DH, so he's awesome. He's very in to brainstorming names, going to all the midwife appointments, giving me the occasional belly rub, dragging me out for long, restorative walks, and when I'm pooped, making me relax and drink some water. Menfolk should take note that no matter how horrified I am about some change my body just made, he acts like it's attractive. This is crucial to domestic harmony with a pregnant partner. Honestly, he's excited about the whole prospect, which is darn cute. I'm lucky.

And the question I can't wait for someone to ask me in real life:

Were you trying? Well, we were trying for a puppy. Turns out that's a different process, so... baby! Also cute and will hopefully chew the furniture less.

I am still working on my thesis, which was further delayed by being basically out of commission through late February and much of March, so posting will be light for the next month or so. But not as light as it's been of late - I have a few posts up my sleeve.

I have found that I like answering people's (polite) questions about this process, so if you have one, shoot!