But, but what about the baby? What about the baby?

The baby is fantastic. He’s like this amazing, weird little puppy that just loves us because we feed him and talk to him and play with him.

He eats a lot.
I don’t really know much a newborn is supposed to eat, but I’m pretty sure Nicolaus eats twice that much. He gained over a pound in one week – that’s over 15% of his bodyweight!

He makes weird little puppy noises.
He snores when he sleeps, makes these grateful little gulpy noises while he eats and funny little grunts and huffs when he’s trying to do something. And he pants just like a dog when he’s trying to get something in his mouth.

He is freakishly strong.
The day after Nico was born he started trying to lift his head, and for over a week now he’s been able to hold his head up and look around. I didn’t know but apparently that’s weird.
If you put him on his stomach, he not only lifts his head but sometimes he starts pushing himself forward. To call it crawling would be an exaggeration but it is definitely… scooting. Actually what it looks like is swimming, like he’s trying to dogpaddle.
And this morning he turned over from his stomach onto his back. I’m really not trying to be one of those braggy my-kid-does-everything-before-your-kid moms – it was probably a fluke thing – but supposedly it’s impossible for a 2-week-old baby to do that. *shrug* He doesn’t care what he’s supposed to be able to do. He did it.

His hobby is…
His favorite thing to do besides eating and curling up like a little frog on your chest is
looking at stuff. There’s a lot of stuff in the world, and he intends to look at all of it.

He’s beautiful…
I know every mother says that, but I believe my degree in art uniquely qualifies me to objectively assess the aesthetic appeal of my child. He looks exactly like Kevin except he’s less than two feet tall with giant long feet and freaky long fingers, chubby cheeks, and what looks like a receding hairline. But really. I swear. Beautiful.

We love things that are waterproof.

Anything that doesn’t soak up urine, breastmilk, formula, spit up, or bright yellow baby poo is fantastic. Our bedspread absorbs all of these things. We hate the bedspread. And the sheets, pillowcases, couch cushions, baby clothes, and my stupid thin cotton nightgowns. I want to live in a house where everything is made by Rubbermaid. And we’ll all be nudists. And the floors will slope down to a drain in the middle of the floor, and every hour or so sprinklers will come on and rinse everything down with nice clean hot water.

Yes, there is the concern that growing up in a house like that could make someone grow up to be a little weird, but you see we’ll save i>so much time on doing laundry and changing crib sheets that we can devote many more hours to teaching him about normal things like baseball or macrame or whatever it is that normal people teach their kids about.

It’s a brilliant plan that cannot fail.

I’ve been sick all weekend so I was afraid to touch Nicolaus. It’s amazing how nature has already made me fall so totally in love with this weird little person to where staying away from him for 48 hours is making me crazy.

But now I’ve been fever-free for 24 hours and we’ve been feeding him pumped breastmilk – chock-full of magical antibodies – so after my shower I’m going to run downstairs and pick him up and cuddle him and pet him and shower him with love. Because being a mother means being the biggest dork ever, only you just don’t care if everyone knows you’re the biggest dork ever (not like you didn’t already suspect, right?)

“Well if loving my kids makes me lame then I guess I’m just a big lame.” – Marge Simpson

Ack, no time to write in journal! Must go play with baby!!

Breastfeeding is the absolute weirdest thing you can possibly imagine. Being pregnant was weird, mainly because of the giant gut and being kicked from inside, but this is seriously from another planet.

I don’t want to gross anybody out but it’s just fascinating how this works. Did you know that just thinking about your baby makes milk start pouring out of you? See, dangit, there it goes.

I’m only doing it because of the antibodies. During the first few weeks your body gives the baby immunities to everything you’re immune to, even if you just now get exposed to it. The cool thing is, if your baby is exposed to something you’re not immune to, just touching him throughout the day is enough to make your body produce the antibodies he needs to fight it off. Pretty amazing, huh?

On the downside however, it hurts and it makes me feel about as unsexy as possible… plus this child wants to eat continuously. If the antibody thing weren’t so cool I would quit. In a few weeks I might quit anyway, and hope that I did enough good in the beginning to offset the guilt I’ll feel over quitting.

And if he’s good, I might even give him something else to eat instead.

Late Monday morning FedEx brought me a CD of music recorded by dad, Looie, and Tony – over an hour of songs to play in the delivery room to welcome our baby into the world. They live in Dallas, 800 miles away, but I spent the morning listening to their voices through a little boombox on our dining room table.

I didn’t feel well. My stomach had been upset all weekend, and my back and hips were killing me. Too much walking this weekend. Still, I had to go to the doctor so I couldn’t laze around in pajamas all day. I changed into my frumpy denim dress, pulled my hair into the best pigtails I could manage, and put a little makeup on. My mom insisted on going with me because people that pregnant shouldn’t drive alone.
***

At the doctor’s office they weighed and measured and asked their questions and did all those lovely things that doctors do. My appointment was with Kerrianne, my favorite nurse, who was cheerful like always but didn’t have good news – everything looked fine but my body didn’t appear to be making any progress towards labor. Not dilated at all, a little thinned out but that was it. The same thing they had said the last two visits. Her bet was that in two weeks we would be scheduling an induction.

I was disheartened but not surprised. My body is slow and stupid about a lot of things.

Which is why, when less than four hours later I felt an indescribable pop and watched 37 gallons of clear liquid pour out of me onto the dining room floor, my reaction was to die laughing. I’m told I also said “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” which is weird because it didn’t hurt at all.
***

When we got to the hospital they didn’t have a room ready, so I had to sit in the lobby feeling ridiculous. I had changed into dry clothes but by then it looked like I had wet my pants. Lovely. Finally, they took me back and hooked me up to a monitor that charts the baby’s heartbeat and my contractions. I was having mild contractions in my back, but they weren’t enough. The nurse started an IV with Pitocin and an antibiotic. She asked if I wanted an epidural or any pain medication and I said I wanted the option at any point but that for now everything was OK.

And so off we went. Pitocin is basically a hormone that makes you go into labor, and it worked. The contractions became much more regular, stronger, and now I could feel them all the way around instead of just in my back. Some of them were horrendous, a few were so minor I almost didn’t notice them, but most were in the middle. I’m normally such a baby about pain – if I stub my toe I yell “goddamnmotherfuckingassholesonofabitch” without even thinking about it. But through hard labor, the word I used most often was apparently “Eeeek!” Go figure.

Now here the details get a little fuzzy. Nicolaus wasn’t born for another 16 hours, but in my mind the time passed very quickly. It’s a blur of breathing through contractions, watching the monitor create a little mountain range, the complicated task of getting up to go pee with an IV and blood pressure cuff attached, listening to family talking and focusing on music, and sometimes sleeping in 6 minute increments between contractions. Every once in a while a nurse or my midwife would come in and say “How we doing?” and I would tell them I was starving and they would say ha ha too bad for you. Sometimes there was an awkward pause where they seemed to be waiting for me to ask for pain medicine, and they actually seemed a little annoyed when I didn’t.

It went on like this all night, until sometime the next morning when I hit transition. I started feeling nauseous, shaky, exhausted, scared. I wanted to go home. Someone came in and asked “how we doing?”

I said, “I feel nauseous, shaky, exhausted, and scared. I want to go home.”

“Sounds like you may be in transition,” she says, “If you start to feel pressure, tell us because that’s a good thing.” She got the midwife to check me, and they said I was only at 6 cm, aways off from our goal of ten. At this point I said “OK, let’s talk about pain medication options and stages of labor.” I asked her whether this was as bad as it was going to get, or if we were headed for something much worse – because if so I wanted drugs. I think she said that this was hard labor now, I was getting the max dose of pitocin they ever give anyone, and that the contractions wouldn’t get any worse. Based on that I decided to hold off a while longer. It sounded like we had several hours left anyway.

The next thing I remember is being curled up against a vertical wall of pillows, crying and begging “Please just stop. Just make it stop now.” I wasn’t talking to the nurse or the midwife. I was begging the baby to sympathize with me and stop pressing downward. The nurse came in and I whimpered that it hurt really bad and I felt like I needed to push. She instructed me not to push because it wasn’t time. Something about if you push before you’re dilated enough and you can tear your cervix. She sounded like a grownup in a Charlie Brown cartoon. WawaaawaWaWahwahwawa… All I heard was “don’t” and so I tried not to, and asked for a small dose of something for the pain.

They put a half dose of something in my IV, and it did nothing other than make me feel light headed. All of the pain was still there, coming in horrible waves of intense tightening and pressure. So I surrendered. I wanted an epidural. Immediately.
***

Kevin can fill you in on this part. I don’t remember anything but being sick of the sound of my own whining, and feeling guilty for pushing when I wasn’t supposed to. I couldn’t help it, I was just too worn down to fight it any more.

I don’t know how long it took them to bring me the nice Black man with the soft hands and friendly voice who promised to make it all better. An hour? But I do know that it didn’t work right away like I had hoped. The pressure was still there, still unbearable. I started to push a little again, secretly. Anything to make it stop.

After the epidural man left, the midwife decided to check and see if I had made any progress. She sounded surprised, “Tiffany, what would you say if I told you you were ready to have this baby?”

No fucking shit is what came to mind, but I think I just said OK, or whimpered or something. I was just relieved because now they were going to let me push.

Suddenly the room was a circus of people and activity. They put a mirror up in front of me and made me put my glasses on. Eeek! I don’t want to see that! I threw my glasses off and squeezed my eyes shut. Everyone started yelling at me to push and not push and breathe hard, and breath slow and fast and hold my breath. It was very stressful.

I tuned all of them out and listened to three things: My mom’s voice, Kevin talking quietly into my ear, and the sound of my dad singing in the background.

And I pushed. It hurt and it stung like hell and I wondered what the epidural had been for. Nevermind, though. I pushed.
And by the end of the next song, Nicolaus was born.