Rockin' with the developmental milestones.

So, Lea rolled over last week (on her 3-month birthday, in fact). It took about 15 minutes.

She had been arching her back and turning sort of sideways for a while, and this time she was able to get her shoulder up underneath her-- the first of two critical arm repositionings (the second being to move the lower arm totally out of the way. This is the part that took 15 minutes).

Step one: Arch the back and lean. Pause a while. Swat at dangly toys.

Step two: Swing the left arm over. Hang out and contemplate.

Step three: Scoot shoulder further back.


Step four: (And do this while parents have looked away so they can't figure out how you finally managed it, and then get flustered and take the picture with the entirely wrong zoom): pull arm underneath to the other side of body.


Step five: Lift head adorably. Make parents realize that from here, the road to crawling is a short one.



Step six: Exhausted, bury face in floor.

Flying baby

I'm learning that "playing" with a very young baby is kind of a strange concept. For starters, I never thought too much about the fact that for a good long while, Lea would basically not do much of anything. Sure, she kicked her legs like crazy pretty much from the start, but as far as interacting with the world, even a little bit-- that took a few months. So one of the first "games" I created, partly at the urging of doctors and books that suggest scheduled "tummy time", was to position her on my shins, facing down, like this:


Of course, this puts me in a bit of a vulnerable position.





Sure enough, thrice this weekend, I was forced to change my shirt after a 2-foot-long slimy spit-up strand made its way from Lea's mouth to my chest. I swear, you'd think this kind of digestive trouble would upset her, but she always flashes the biggest smile right after she's barfed a little. Awesome.

But what's really amazing is how quickly we can introduce new activities. In just a few weeks, Lea's head control improved so much, she was able to progress from lying on my shins to "flying" on just my hands.


It's fun.

Country roads, take me (to my new) home

I've figured out over the last year that I am officially a homebody. Not only that, but I consider my childhood home to be a pretty excellent place. So I think it's pretty likely that I will continue to think of the greater Downingtown area as "home" no matter where I'm living.

At the same time, I've been known to say things like "my heart and soul are in the mountains," and, "Appalachia is an incredibly special place to me," and "I love Sonic." So this (very recent) move to Abingdon brings a lot of excitement as well. We're under an hour's drive from Johnson City, home of the organization that brought us to one another. We're just a few miles from the ASP center where I decided to apply for staff, and where I took my first leadership role within my church. Plus, it's really stinkin gorgeous here. What better place for a full-blooded ASP baby to spend her first formative years?

Let's rewind to the beginning of this odyssey. For starters, you should know that at one point we were legally tied to three different properties. (1) The house on Milne St in Germantown, which we had rented a year ago and fled in August when my pregnancy-induced pity party required that I get out of the city immediately. We found a (slightly sketchy) sublettor, and rented (2) Our apartment in Exton, a nice, comfy one-bedroom with a shaded patio, quick access to Babies 'R Us, and a fantastic pantry, but which we knew we'd only be in for six months while searching for (3) Our house in Abingdon, which we made an offer on and signed a contract for a few weeks back. Land barons, we are.

So the odyssey began with cleaning out our Milne street house, a task complicated by the fact that our sublettors had left several rooms' worth of furniture, clothing, and baking supplies. Some of the furniture was worth keeping, so we loaded it all up in several Jeep runs and cleaned like the dickens. My dad was on hand to help for two days, and I was happy to encourage him to take baby-entertaining patrol for most of the second. Lea was pretty stoked about that too.


Monday, 2/12, should have been a day to start packing, but instead I bummed around with Jenny all day and Brian played some solo Strat-O-Matic baseball, bringing us to Tuesday, which felt successful. We packed a whole lot and cleaned, and it seemed like things were pretty efficient considering it started to snow very hard and we were trying to get all of our personal things transferred to my parents' so we could spend the next day and a half with their house as our base. Anyway-- to get to the point-- we still had a whole lot to do Wednesday morning, when we woke up to lots more snow and the realization that we wouldn't even be able to get our truck until after we dug out our car, shoveled the driveway, and got the go-ahead from the rental company (who, understandably, do not like to hand out trucks during dangerous road conditions).

All of this was achieved by midafternoon, and we still had all of our loading and cleaning to do. Plus, we had all those baby-in-a-snowsuit pictures to take!



We did as much loading of the truck as we could Wednesday evening, awarded ourselves a break to watch Lost (side note: what the...??? I don't even know how to begin to understand what happened last week.)

Thursday was stressful because my mom had to go into work (after Wednesday's snow day, which allowed her to babysit). So we thought it might be a very, very long day until I spotted these words on the crawl beneath Hurricane Schwartz's cute face: "Octorara Schools now closed." Sweet! Approximately three seconds later I had Jenny on the phone, who agreed to watch the kid while we finished packing. It was great to spend time with her on my last day in town, and it helped us a ton. We left town around 2:30, landed in Abingdon after midnight, and crashed.

Friday we became homeowners! The process was pretty simple, and the attorney befriended us when he noticed our political leanings on our voter cards. Plus I met a woman at the attorney's office who had grown up in Chester County and gone to camp Tweedale. Already Abingdon was feeling like a friendly place.

My dad arrived while we were at settlement, and we all started unpacking shortly thereafter. Eric and Holly got into town later that evening, and my mom finally got there after midnight, cats in tow, after a long drive that began with a nightmarish closing of the PA turnpike just minutes after she got on. Everyone was enormously helpful. This computer would probably be under piles of boxes if they hadn't been here to aid in the unpacking process.

The weekend was awesome. I love my family. It's so good to spend low-ley time together, and even better that I get to be related to people with whom the process of moving can feel low-key. It was especially good that mom got to stay an extra day and help us get settled. Plus it's incredibly fun to watch her with my daughter.


Thanks Jenny, Eric, Holly, Dad, and Mom. And thanks to my fellow Camp Tweedale-ite for making me feel like we're not so far away after all. Pictures of the house, and our delightfully Stars-Hollow-esque town, coming soon.

Channelling her Stoltzfus roots...

Her father has no such excuse for his hat.

Get something on your feet!

Lea makes my dad happy. With her commitment to sock-wearing, among other things.

Milk junkie

Our newest breastfeeding challenge: Lea has figured out that it's me feeding her. Yes, the very same me that gets up in her face and grins and squawks like a crazy person until she smiles. So now, every once in a while, she will totally lose her focus on eating and make eye contact with me with a puzzled expression. It is as though, as someone put it on a message board I frequent, she is thinking, "Hey, what are you doing at the milk station?!" And then a smile. So sweet.

Two months later...

... the shirt fits a little differently.

More yellow blanket time

Hey there, sports fans!

Sleeping through an Eagles game...

But lovin' those lady Whippets.

In fact, go here.

She's got personality!

Just after Christmas, we started to get our first honest-to-goodness smiles. Of course I could never catch them on camera, until she was having a particularly happy afternoon and I just decided to snap away until I got one. The results:

And finally...

Christmas!

We thought we'd make a family Christmas card with a picture. Since I've always felt that trying to hold a brand-new baby upright for a traditional picture tends to make the baby look weird and lumpy, I tried to get creative.

But it just wasn't going well. So we tried this:

See? Weird and lumpy.

Our travels over Christmas spanned several states and several more "My First Christmas" outfits.

And, fittingly enough, Lea also discovered toys.

Bring on the plastic things!

Continuing to catch up...

Morning two.

After her first 24 hours at home, Lea surprised us all by sleeping 6 straight hours her second night of life. Happy Thanksgiving! I woke up at 7:00, astonished that it was 7:00, and started snapping pictures. We all woke up, had breakfast, and started to watch the parade. Then we remembered that those 6 hours of sleep were the first we had gotten in about the last 72. So we went back to bed until noon. Happier Thanksgiving!

Later that day we tried to get some more pictures but our model was uncooperative and kept dozing off.

Oh, who am I kidding?

People want pictures. I don't have to wait until I have lots of fabulously interesting things to say. So, let's catch up:

Here is the story of Lea's birth. (Come to think of it, this particular post might actually be interesting. It's also going to be long.)



My due date of 11/11 came and went without any sign that things would be progressing anytime soon. I had done all my prenatal care and was planning to deliver at the Birth Center, a midwife-staffed facility just across the street from Bryn Mawr hospital (so the best of both worlds). I went in for an appointment on 11/14 and the midwife that day, Julia, checked and found that there was really no sign that labor would begin anytime soon. She laid out the timeline of how we'd have to prepare for the possible eventuality of an induction at the hospital at 42w1d, if we got to that point without delivering. I knew I didn't want this; I knew introducing Pitocin for a medical induction would make it way less likely that I could go without anesthesia, which is what I was really committed to. Julia was encouraging, though, and also suggested that I try "pulling out all the stops" and trying lots of natural induction techniques, including acupuncture. She recommended a husband/wife acupuncture team who'd actually had their baby at the Birth Center a year ago, and we got in touch with them to set up a series of three appointments.

At the first acupuncture appointment, on 11/16, Dawn, the practitioner, just did "general acupuncture" (rather than anything to induce contractions), with the hopes of balancing me out and releasing tension to possibly help my body do its thing naturally. This was a relaxing experience, but nothing happened until Saturday night when I had some regular contractions for a few hours, which was exciting but then they stopped.

The next appointment was set for Monday, 11/20, just after another checkup at the Birth Center. We saw Julia again, and she was excited to report that I was 2cm dilated and 50% effaced. She stripped my membranes (a process to separate the amniotic sac from the walls of the uterus) and expressed her confidence that I'd have a Birth Center birth within a few days (but again, we had to make some hospital-induction related appoinments just in case, which was stressful). We then headed over to Dawn for more acupuncture. This time, she did some work to actually induce contractions, and sure enough I started contracting right there on the table, and felt what I can only describe as the baby growing "heavier." I was in a great mood and we went out to dinner on our way home, feeling excited that things would probably progress on their own.

Sure enough, I started having some more regular contractions-- mostly of the Braxton Hicks variety, which I described as "invigorating" and sort of breathless, kind of like the wind being knocked out of me in a good way, if that makes sense. But I couldn't even time them, really, because they didn't have a distinct start or stop, and some were just sort of a general crampiness that came and went gradually. Then the contractions stopped entirely. We got ready for bed, set our alarms for the next morning (we had set our 3rd acupuncture appointment for then), and turned out the light. Within seconds I felt myself having another contraction, which started like a Braxton Hicks but instead of fading away, it intensified rapidly until I felt a sudden squeezing pain and knew-- before I even felt fluid-- that my water was breaking. I jumped up and ran to the bathroom to try to clean up (which was dumb-- I didn't realize that the fluid would just keep coming). We called the Birth Center answering service; after hours, you leave a message and they page the midwife on call who will immediately call you back. We didn't get a call back, but didn't worry too much because we assumed I'd have a very long early labor. Although contractions had begun and were somewhat uncomfortable, they still didn't have a distinct start or stop. Finally though, after 45 minutes of this, we tried the answering service again, and Betsy, the midwife on call, immediately called back, having never gotten paged the first time. But after we talked and I didn't know how to describe my contractions, and wasn't in a ton of pain, she said not to come in yet, and to wait for the 4:1:1 rule (contractions every 4 minutes, lasting a minute, going on for an hour).

After that things got confusing because my contractions started to get way more intense pretty much right away-- but although they were immediately 2-3 minutes apart, they only lasted 30-40 seconds. I didn't want to be a bother to Betsy so I waited until I was REALLY in pain (what felt, as expected, like severe menstrual cramps) to call back at about 2:15. She told us to come in so we threw our stuff in the car and headed out, arriving at the Birth Center at exactly 3am.

It turned out Betsy was being shadowed by Kathie, the student midwife, who ended up being the one to care for me through the first part of my labor. She checked me and found that I was 6cm dilated. In my nerdy, purely mathematical thinking, I figured this meant I was 60% through my labor, so I was pretty excited. Kathie suggested I get in the Jacuzzi, and that sounded good to me (mostly because for some reason I was under the impression that the Jacuzzi is for the very end of labor). In retrospect, I think this actually slowed my labor down, but at least I was able to get some pseudo-rest for about an hour and a half because of it. After a while though, I got really uncomfortable because my body was telling me to move, and I ended up throwing up a couple of times before finally deciding I needed to get out. I walked around for a while and then Kathie checked me and said I was at 7-8 cm. The pain was getting really bad at this point and I was so tired, so Kathie had me get in the bed. Lying there was so painful, and I hit my low point just as Kathie's shift was ending at 8am. I was saying some really crazy things like, "I'm dying" and "Just knock me out and take me to the hospital." I know that if the epidural had been available to me, I would have begged for one at this point.

The shift change brought in midwife Gazelle, who is probably the most experienced one on staff [she has actually since retired!], and she immediately got me out of bed and had me rock back and forth on Brian's shoulders while she put counterpressure on my back. I don't even remember telling her that my back hurt, but sure enough this provided almost 100% relief for quite a few contractions. But then they got so much worse, and I started panicking again and saying I couldn't do it. So we tried something new-- Gazelle brought out these straps that hook over the door with handles on the end for me to grab and lower myself into a squat. I found that while descending into the squat, the pain would go away, but once I got down it hurt like crazy so I would try to pull myself up to do it again. But Gazelle promised that it would be more efficient to stay in the squat and curl myself forward. This was the hardest thing ever-- the pain in my back was indescribably bad-- but I managed to do it with most of the contractions.

Finally at around 9:45 am I was begging to do something different, and she said she'd check me at 10:00. I remember saying, "No, that's not good enough, something needs to happen NOW!" So she checked me right then and found I was at 9cm. For whatever reason, I was still so pessimistic and didn't realize that 9 is such a big deal and really, so close. I did some more squatting and spent a while standing next to the bed draped over the exercise ball (which was on the bed). When she checked me again at 11am she found that there was only a little lip of cervix left and I could try to start pushing if I wanted. Even though I had no urge to push, I wanted so badly to be onto the next stage so I said yes, and I got into the traditional lying on my back, propped up in bed position. But I was too weak to even hold my legs up, and we knew that this was an inefficient position, so I got up onto my knees and leaned over the ball and pushed for a while like that. This turned out to progress things REALLY well, because when she checked me again, the baby was basically right there and the next thing I knew, Gazelle was paging the nurse. "You know what that means, right?" she asked. I knew that meant I was about to deliver, but for some reason I was still really negative and assumed it would be a while. I turned onto my right side for the final stages of pushing.

The pushing stage felt NOTHING like I expected. I thought I would feel a burning/stretching feeling, but I didn't-- the sensations were much deeper within me, almost like in my lungs or sternum. Even as Gazelle and Patti, the nurse, were telling me the baby was right there and they could see hair, I didn't believe it until I saw Brian's face and saw how emotional he was. That's when I realized the baby was crowning, and that the pushing I was doing was actually working! There were several pushes where the sensation was so intense, I was CERTAIN the head was out, but it wasn't yet. Finally when it did come out, the feeling of relief was so extreme I couldn't believe it. The shoulders came out easily, and I could actually feel my perineum shrinking back into place. I heard Gazelle say "Oh, we've still got a leg in there!" and I remember thinking, oh, no sweat, the leg coming out won't hurt at all! And it was like all the nerves in my perineum re-awakened because I suddenly could feel the little leg in there-- pretty much exactly like you could imagine a little leg would feel like. The first thing I said when I saw the baby was "Oh! You exist!" over and over, which Gazelle got a real kick out of. I remember seeing Brian looking back and forth between me and the baby, and seeing tears in his eyes when they held the baby up and I announced, "Oh, it's a girl!" They put her on my stomach and she immediately started wiggling her way up to my chest, and actually latched herself on with almost no assistance. Amazing.

As they cleaned her up I remember being in a total daze and feeling like the whole thing had been an out-of-body experience, but just feeling so astonished that my body had been able to do it. We had some quiet time as a family, interrupted only when they weighed her-- 9lb7oz, cleaned her up and did a few tests. Later that afternoon, my mom and dad came to visit us for a while in our little suite, where we stayed until 11pm and then came home, 24 hours after the whole thing had begun the night before.

Eleven weeks ago, our first photo shoot.