Susanna's Birth Story, Part V

“Oh, Paige!” I heard Brian say. “Oh Paige, it’s a girl!” and this tiny purple mess of limbs was placed flailing in all her sliminess on my chest. “You’re here!” I wept. “You came, you came just when I needed you to!” Donna put a warm towel over the baby and me, and then a heating pad behind that, as I rubbed the towel and patted the baby’s back, staring at her face while she gurgled and sputtered, all squinty-shut eyes and wide, wide open mouth. Her gurgles slowly changed to a lusty cry and she turned from purple to pink, her limbs slowing to occasional jerks, settling, calming. We kept her at my chest for a long time, as she became aware of my nipple and gradually figured out what to do with it. When she finally latched on, we rested, and told her her name—Susanna.

Soon after that, I delivered the placenta—no big deal—and Donna realized that the baby had passed a huge amount of meconium all over me and our bed. This was the first of quite a few indications that even though she was only two days “late,” Susanna showed evidence of some degree of postmaturity. Besides the meconium, she also had very dry, wrinkled skin (particularly her feet, which had deep cracks), long fingernails, and the appearance that she had sort of shrunken back in her own skin. Still, everything appeared to be perfectly fine, and after she had been latched on for a while, we got up so that I could shower, cleanup could begin, and the baby could be given a more thorough examination.

Once showered, I climbed back into my freshly made bed and held Susanna so that her big sister (who had slept through the entire delivery and only recently woke up) could meet her. We had prepared Lea as much as possible, and although she seemed somewhat bewildered by the whole thing, she greeted Susanna with a smile and a kiss on the head. Then she got to help give Susanna a bath while I sipped juice, listening to my sweet daughters get to know each other. “She needs fishies,” Lea offered, pointing out her collection of bath toys. When Donna told her that Susanna wasn’t quite ready for bath toys, Lea said, “Oh. Next time, she takes a bath with me!”

Lea also helped get Susanna dressed, and after Susanna was weighed and measured (8lbs 1oz, 20.5 inches long), we all climbed into bed for a family picture. I consider it to be a very good sign that Lea quickly got bored, acting more interested in the bottle of lotion next to my bed than either me or the baby. Since then, the pattern has held: alternating fascination with the baby and preference for doing her own thing. She’s an amazing big sister. I love watching them together, and I love our new family of four.

I am so grateful to my husband, who read extensively about being a good birth partner, and to my caregivers, who never missed a beat—who encouraged me with their kindness and confidence, and who instilled confidence in me through their professionalism and expertise. I could not have asked for better care, from anyone. I am proud of myself, too, but mostly I consider myself very blessed that Susanna’s entrance into the world was so peaceful, an act of creation, an act of life—uncomplicated, but beyond any words I can muster.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part IV

By 3am I was 9cm and starting to lose my cool. Mostly, I was scared, scared, scared of the actual delivery, but even so, I remember commenting that the fact I could even conceive of a tangible emotion like “fear” represented a big difference from my first labor. I had so far refrained from making much noise, which would have been an absolute impossibility with Lea.

I started to sing a descending 5-note scale in as low an octave as I possibly could. The idea behind that one is that singing low prevents you from basically screeching, which is a huge waste of air and energy. I was getting tired, and tired of laboring. I wanted to be done. DeEtte recommends only pushing when you have an urge; in other words, 10cm does not magically mean it’s time to push, and she doesn’t typically direct her patients to push to a certain count or anything else. In her experience, pushing works best when you absolutely can’t help it. But I was getting impatient, and I told DeEtte—“I need to move on, I just want to be at the point where I can push.”

She checked me again—9cm still, no! I think I pouted a little, and a huge contraction hit me like a brick while I was still lying down. This was the first big one I’d experienced while reclined, and felt so grateful that I’d been encouraged to labor upright all this time. Contracting while horizontal was NOT a good recipe for me. This is when I started to get loud, but DeEtte convinced me to let her check me during a contraction to see if I got to 10 in the midst of one. I did, with the exception of a lip of cervix that remained. She suggested that she try to move it away during the next contraction. This was excruciating, and the beginning of the screaming. I’m not proud of the amount of screaming, actually. I wish I was one of those people who could surrender control, but I am not. It was bad.

But, DeEtte was able to massage that lip of cervix away, and said that if I wanted to, I could start to try to push, urge or no. So yes, I would push. I wanted to be in charge. (At this point, it was about 3:45 and I felt very strongly that we should call Lindsay because I felt so sure I was going to wake up Lea. Brian called her and she arrived, waiting downstairs in our living room, ready to respond if Lea awoke.)

I tried to push on a birthing chair (a c-shaped stool that some people actually deliver while sitting on), but it felt all wrong. I remembered that with Lea, pushing felt automatic. I didn’t have an urge then either, but pushing brought great relief and felt enormously productive. I loved it. This was different. Something about bearing down felt like the opposite of what my body wanted to do, and for the first time in the whole labor, I went completely tense and practically refused to let myself even breathe or move during a contraction. It was, needless to say, not a productive way to approach the situation.

DeEtte wanted to check me one more time to make sure the lip of cervix was totally gone, because she thought that might be what was feeling so off. She confirmed that it was gone, and decided that it would be best at that point to break my water, because even though no cervix remained, it seemed like the baby’s head would not descend any further. Very little water even came out, but I found myself remembering stories of second labors in which the baby is out within literally seconds of the bag of waters breaking. I decided to continue pushing right there on the bed.

Like I said, with Lea, I suffered through the labor but thrived while I pushed. This would prove to be the opposite. With the beginning of every contraction, I tried to push. I wanted to push, and in some ways, my body really was giving me the signal to push. But each push brought an extra jolt of pain, grinding, mind-erasing pain. (I found out later that the baby would be born with hand pressed to face, which is probably what caused this mixed signal, as the descending head encouraged the pushing instinct, but the totally-in-the-way hand encouraged the freakout instinct.) I refused to push at all a few times. Other times, I could only muster up the strength to push for 2 or 3 seconds. “I can’t do this!” I kept saying. Brian and Donna and DeEtte were firm: “You ARE doing it.” “NO!” I yelled. “Something is WRONG, something is DIFFERENT, this is not WORKING.” DeEtte insisted, “it IS working, Paige, you’re bringing the baby down, it’s hard work but it’s happening.” I shook my head. “No. I just need to FIGURE OUT a way to PUSH in a way that WORKS!” Anyone who has been through a birth knows that this is not the optimal time for “figuring out” anything. It’s not like you’re at your most logical. But, that’s me. I needed to figure it all out.

In the end, I didn’t. I had what I think of as an Exorcist-style contraction because I think I actually spit on the bed and spoke in tongues, and when it was over, something happened. In fact, I remember saying “something is happening,” and as the tail end of the contraction faded, I felt the most primal, animal NEED (not urge) to push, and I pushed and I pushed through two more contractions, the first of which DeEtte announced that the baby was crowning, and the second of which the head actually emerged. In between those two was what I now know is the infamous “ring of fire,” which I never experienced when I pushed Lea out. This is when the fullest part of the baby’s head fills the cervix, and women report feeling like their entire body is going to tear in half. I felt my eyes roll back and I heard myself half groan/ half scream until the next contraction hit, when it changed to all scream and I finally felt the head emerge. DeEtte firmly reminded me to keep pushing, and I felt her helping the baby rotate as I puuuuuuuuushed and then pop! Out came the rest of the body, and a huge gush of fluid, and a sweeping sense of relief and ecstasy.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part III

Here’s the other thing—I was coping. I was getting through the contractions without suffering, and this was new to me. I attribute this mostly to the fact that my first labor took place entirely without the cushioning of an intact bag of waters, as my membranes had ruptured at the start, leaving nothing between Lea’s skull and everything it was pressing against. This time, the pain was there and it was real but it wasn’t mind-altering. I was not the crazed beast of a creature I had become the last time. I could keep a conscious thought in my head. I wasn’t screaming my face off. Instead, I was very methodically creating rhythmic rituals for myself, draping my chest over the big blue exercise ball at the foot of my bed and slowly, slowly slowly lowering into a squat during each contraction. I found that if I started doing this the very second I felt a contraction coming, I could keep on top of things and generally do ok. I would also signal to Brian: “HIPS!”, which meant I wanted him to stand behind me and push inward on the bony part of each of my hips. I don’t know why, but this brought considerable relief, and he did it every time.

More good news: DeEtte was about to call her assistant, whose primary job was to help with the actual delivery and the baby itself. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m only 5 centimeters.” It had been just 45 minutes since she arrived, but DeEtte smiled and said, “Oh, I’m sure you’re more than that by now. These are really good contractions, I can tell by what you’re doing to get through them.” I think I actually shrugged my shoulders as this expert who’d delivered over 1500 babies dialed her assistant, and said to me while the phone rang, “Paige, I really don’t think she’s going to be here long.” I wanted, in some ways, to cover my ears and shut my eyes and say “LALALALA,” because I didn’t want to jinx it, and I didn’t want to labor with the assumption that things were moving along quickly, only to find out otherwise and be devastated.

We also talked about Lea. So far, she was sleeping soundly. We had a local friend expecting to be called if we needed her for childcare, and we debated whether to call her or just keep laboring as long as possible. It was 1:30 am, and I decided that if we got to 4am with Lea still sleeping, that would be ideal because she would’ve gotten enough sleep that there would be no expectation on Lindsay to try to get her to sleep more. In all her jinxiness, DeEtte said firmly, “I think we’ll be done by then.” No way.

Assistant Donna arrived, and DeEtte checked me again at just after 2am: 7 cm. OK. I started to believe that I was making very good progress, which seemed to turn a switch in my head that said I was now allowed to suffer a little more. I switched up my routine, climbing onto my knees in the bed (still draping over the ball), and just rocking around in circles, trying to breathe deeply. I also remembered a technique I’d read, to exhale “horse lips” style, allowing my lips to blow raspberries. The theory is that if you relax your mouth, you kind of can’t help but relax everything else. It really did work—I was amazed at how well.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part II

I went ten days past my due date with Lea, but I tried not to panic this time when my due date came with no sign of progress anytime soon. I knew statistics were on my side, as second babies tend to cook a little less, and I tried to focus on enjoying my last few days as a mother of one (and my last few days of sufficient sleep for a while). Sure enough, just two days later I found myself unexpectedly awake at 4:45am with real, unmistakable labor contractions radiating from front to back. These went on for two hours, and although I tried my hardest to get back in bed to ride out early labor as restfully as possible, I found my heart racing, thinking that I would certainly have a baby before the end of the day.

I didn’t. My contractions petered out and the day was a normal one. Remembering that it’s not unusual for labor to start and stop several times, especially after the first pregnancy, I figured the best thing to do would be to return to my regular routine and expect nothing. I forced myself to take a nap that afternoon, and slept surprisingly soundly. This turned out to be a very good thing.

That night was the season premiere of LOST. If you’re reading this, you know me well enough to know the significance of this, so you’ll appreciate the fact that I started having contractions again at 7:30, just a half hour before the 3-hour extravaganza was to begin. But again, I reminded myself—this might not be it. Besides, there was LOST to watch, so I distracted myself as much as possible and tried to focus on the many intricacies of the Dharma Initiative and the Oceanic Six and the Widmore/Linus connection. But by the time Hurley got arrested, I’d been in quite a lot of pain for a while and knew that it was time to call DeEtte.

I gave her the stats: I was having contractions ranging from 3 to 6 minutes apart, and even though they were only lasting 15-35 seconds (much shorter than the full minute generally considered a good rule of thumb for active labor), they were intense enough that I had to stop everything I was doing, drop down to all fours and rock from side to side to get through them. DeEtte was confused by the short length of the contractions, but said she could tell by the sound of my voice that labor was moving quickly, so she said she’d pack up and be here in ninety minutes or so.

In the meantime, between contractions I reverted to the nervous people pleaser I can be, and worried that I’d look like a fool, that she’d get here and proclaim me to be Not in Labor At All, shake her head and drive home. Except, during contractions, it hurt. A lot. And I was SO glad that she would be there soon.

It was close to 1am when DeEtte arrived, and a quick check found that I was dilated 5 centimeters and “stretchy.” My relief at this news was only compounded when she asked me if I’d be ok for a few minutes while she enlisted Brian to help her bring her oxygen tank and other heavy equipment up from her car. Equipment? I thought. That’s so official—I’m actually going to have a baby and SOON. I was excited.

Susanna's Birth Story, Part I

Susanna’s birth story really begins with Lea’s birth, when a kind and fiercely talented midwife with a long grey braid delivered my first baby in a quiet green room at a birth center near Philadelphia. It would be hard to overstate the transformative nature of that experience, and not only because it brought me my beautiful daughter and made me a mother; Lea’s birth also transformed my sense of what is possible when it comes to maternity care, as I enjoyed one-on-one attention and guidance from midwives with exactly the kind of expertise and demeanor I needed. Simply put, I fell in love with midwifery, and with the concept that until conditions indicate otherwise, pregnancy and birth are normal events, not medical ones.

Of course, I wanted medical expertise in the event that something did prove more complicated than normal, and that’s what I found from the Certified Nurse-Midwives on staff at the birth center. And that’s what I was looking for when I got pregnant again, this time 500 miles away in rural Virginia.

The options for maternity care are quite limited here in Appalachia, so the beginning of my pregnancy was spent searching for midwives while getting early prenatal care from an OB practice, one that came highly recommended but still felt hugely anonymous and would approach my pregnancy and birth in ways far removed from what I was used to and preferred. Still, they were perfectly nice, delivered high quality care, and would have been a fine option for me if my search had ended there.

I hadn’t really considered a homebirth until I heard about DeEtte, a CNM from Tennessee (about an hour away) who maintained a homebirth practice. She answered all my (many, many) questions about how she handled various complications and emergencies, and further reassured me as she ran through her resume: many years in a hospital setting as an obstetric nurse, and then working in a NICU; running a free-standing birth center of her own—much like the one where I’d had Lea—in another state, delivering 900 babies there before changes at her backup hospital forced her to close down; and finally, beginning her homebirth practice with the goal of operating like a traveling birth center, which meant maintaining solid, consistent working relationships with nearby backup physicians at all the local hospitals. As a CNM, she could prescribe and administer drugs if necessary, and traveled with all the medical equipment that had been available at the birth center. She and her assistant, an RN, had worked together at homebirths for 16 years.

Toward the end of our initial phone call, DeEtte promised me, upon my urging, that if I ever changed my mind or felt like a homebirth wasn’t a good fit for me, she could swiftly transfer my care to her backup and it would be fine. I told her that I needed to know that, that I needed an “out” if I panicked, that I planned to spend the rest of my pregnancy educating myself as much as possible about the risks presented in any setting, and that homebirth was a new concept for me that I needed to wrap my head around. “That’s good,” she said. “You absolutely need to do that. But you also need to know how confident I am. I know, that I know, that I know, that this works.” After all the medical technicalities and statistics we had discussed, that one statement made the biggest impression on me, and I realized what an experienced and professional caregiver I was dealing with. I ended the call feeling like I wouldn’t find a more qualified birth attendant anywhere.

A few more...

Susanna is here!

I'm working on a full birth story, but for now:

Susanna Campbell Johns arrived at 4:36am on Thursday, January 22nd. At 8lbs 1oz, she's nearly a pound and a half lighter than her sister was, so she looks miniscule to us. (Before Thursday, 100% of my baby experience was Lea, so I'd never even held a baby that "small".) Labor and delivery were simple and straightforward; everything went as well as it possibly could have, and we're all doing great. Lea is adjusting well for the most part, a few psych-textbook moments notwithstanding ("Mama, hold me, like THIS, like a baby, because I'm Susanna!").

Thanks for all the well-wishes! It's a happy and hectic time and, with the exception of a frantic run to an appliance store today upon the long-expected demise of our washing machine, we're pretty hunkered down and removed from the rest of the world for a while, which is nice.

Some pictures:

Lea right now

Every now and then, I startle myself by realizing that on some level, I go through each day with Lea as though assuming that her personality and her way of communicating today will be permanent.  I think it's because she is communicating so well; she is able to express her needs pretty clearly, and we have conversations, so I no longer spend much time thinking "if only she could ____," the way I did before her leap in vocabulary, when we'd both be brought to tears at times by the frustration of not understanding each other.   So we're at a sweet spot right now, and because of that, I often forget that it's temporary, that she'll progress even more with her language skills, and her personality will evolve and she will grow up.  Wow.

In particular, I find myself smiling at the Lea-related memories of just about every second of this past Christmas, because over the month of December she caught on to enough about the season to get really, really excited, but still bewildered in some ways, which was insanely cute. For instance, she started to become familiar with Christmas songs, and developed her favorites: "Rudolph the Reindeer" (and now she calls every deer a reindeer), "Confern-en-joy song", "Crib for Bed," "Now you dear old man song."  She would request these at bedtime and freak the heck out when she heard them on the all-Christmas radio station or at church.

A couple of times recently, she'll start to sing one of these songs out of the blue, weeks past Christmas, and screw up her forehead trying to remember the words.  In the car the other day, she kept repeating, "Christmas eve is coming soon, now you dear old maaaaan."  After about 5 repetitions of that line, she paused, and asked, "What's the next one, mama?"  When I started to sing "Whisper what you'll-", she cut me off.  "No mama, I sing." And then, memory jogged, continued: "Whisper what you'll bring to me, tell me if you caaaaaan."

We took her to the Bristol Motor Speedway light show.  Twice.  She would literally gasp with excitement, saying "Look at thaaaaat!" in a breathy, awed voice. "And look at thaaaaat!  See?  See, look!  It's a snowmaaaaaaan.   It's a-- It's a-- It's a penguin!!! Look at thaaaaaat!"

We also geared our bedtime stories to the season, flipping to the nativity stories in the little kids' Bible storybook we got for her a long time ago.   Through this, I'm assuming, she got the idea that all babies could be identified as "Baby Jesus," and has since pointed out a little Willow Tree figurine of a mother, father, and baby, saying, "And there's Daddy, and there's Mama, and there's the Baby Jesus!"  Those stories have also introduced words like "manger" and "stable" into her vocabulary, and she's been using them both to mean any sort of small space.  I found her recently putting all her beloved stuffed animals in the bottom of the little Ikea wardrobe in her room.  When I asked her what she was doing, she said, "Shhhh.  Everybody's sleeeeeping.  In the manger."

By the time we got a few days past Christmas, the Bible storybook had moved on to grown-up Jesus, and the little follow-up question to one of the stories (I forget which) was something like, "If you could spend the day with Jesus, what would you ask him?"  Usually these questions are totally rhetorical, because Lea's just at the beginning of understanding open-ended questions like that, but she actually answered, and with feeling: "Hi Jesus.  How are you doing?  Are you feeling ok?  OK!"  We laughed, and Brian followed up: "That's a great thing to ask Jesus.  What do you think he would ask you?"  Again, we didn't expect a coherent answer, but: "He would ask... for a potato."  By this point, I was really laughing.  "Wow!  Anything else?"  Lea answered matter-of-factly.  "A banana."  Of course. 

She also has started to compose her own bedtime prayers.   Nine times out of ten, the result is, "Dear God.  Jesus.  Was born.  In a stable.  Amen."  

(Coming back a day later, I remembered something else I wanted to add.  Christmastime also coincided with a period of heightened confusion regarding subjects and objects when piecing together sentences.  This resulted, most notably, in the often-repeated insistence that "A fire truck was on top of Santa, and he fwo chid-a-wen to the candy.")

As usual, I'm having a tough time letting go of the Christmas season, which, even though I don't get that sense of magic I did as a kid and young teenager, still gives me a very warm feeling that I tend to grieve for the rest of the winter.   But Lea still sings Christmas carols on occasion, which is fun, not to mention a whole host of other songs.  She asks frequently for "Hills lar-alive song" (the Sound of Music), and actually knows most of the words.  Sometimes, when we've put her to bed for the night, we can hear her quietly singing to her animals "... for the thousand yeeeeeeears...."  

Actually, listening to her over the monitor is often hilarious.   Last night, she spent about 10 minutes taking body-part inventory: "What do you have, Caw? Do you have toes? Oh, you do have toes! OK!  What do you have, Rufus?  Do you have eyes?  Oh, you do have eyes!  OK!  What do you have, Froggy?  Do you have arms?  Oh, you do have arms! OK!"

Those three animals-- Caw (so named because although he is apparently a duck, we thought he was a seagull and would have him go "Caw! Caw!"), Rufus (the little stuffed dog that we got as a shower gift and has been Lea's favorite animal since about 6 months old), Froggy (who came from my cousin Glen, weirdly enough, via my dad, when they ran into each other at a trade show and Glen had won this little frog at some booth with carnival games, and didn't know what to do with it), plus a stuffed owl known as "Owl Baby," comprise the A-team that Lea sleeps with every night and refers to as "Everybody."  They are small enough that she can, when she's feeling particularly somber it seems, gather all four into her arms and clutch them to her chest to keep with her at all times.  

You need to know this to understand another funny moment.  You also need to know that her first McDonald's happy meal toy is a plastic Shrek that she, for some reason, started calling "Guy," and is very keen on at the moment.  

The other day we were talking about having good friends, and I heard myself saying how some friends are extra-special.  Feeling stupidly self-conscious about this, and wanting to make sure she is friendly with everyone, I said to Lea, "Everybody is special, you know."  She paused, and added very soberly, "And Guy is special, too."  

She has animated, and very brief, pretend phone conversations, using our old XM Radio remote as a prop.  "Hi Uncle Eric, what are you doooooing?  You feeling OK?  OK! Bye Bye!" Pause.  "Beep beep beep."  Another pause.  "Hi Aunt Megan, what are you doooooing?  You feeling OK? OK! Bye Bye!"  And then on down the list of relatives.  

She calls credit cards "messages," fishing through our wallets with urgency, insisting, "I have to get my messages!" No idea where that came from.  She also plays occasionally with the gigantic plastic orange wristwatch that Brian purchased at Rite-Aid to time contractions the first night I thought I might be in labor with Lea.  She calls this "my match," and will frantically push all the buttons on it, announcing with a slightly panicked voice, "It's not working!"  I'm not sure what she expects it to do.  ("It's not working" is her go-to phrase when she's frustrated with something.  Can't get her pants on?  "It's not working!"  Keeps dropping peas off her spoon?  "It's not working!")

And oh, I was mistaken when I said that she calls all deer "reindeer."  There's apparently one exception.  When she and Brian were flipping through a coffee-table book about Smoky Mountain wildlife, they came across a picture of a bobcat.  Evidently, that term really struck Lea's fancy, because when they turned the page and Brian pointed out a deer, then came the logical correction: "No, it's a bobdeer."  Come to think of it, I rather like the sound of that, too.

I hope this all gives a glimpse, for those of you who are far away and haven't gotten a chance to see these developments in action, of the very entertaining phase we're in.  I'm sure half of it is my aforementioned wistfulness about the ever-shortening "just Lea" time, but so far I have very few complaints about the so-called terrible twos.  I know life is about to get crazy, crazy, crazy, and it will be perfectly understandable if our frustrating times ramp back up as we sort out how to continue to meet Lea's needs as best as we possibly can.  Above all, I know it's going to suddenly become immensely more difficult to remember these times, so it is with some urgency that I try to record it all here.  (I never did keep an official baby book, but every now and then it strikes me as something like an emergency that I create a textual snapshot of who my daughter is.)

I also, in the interest of full disclosure, remember something I was told when I crept further and further past my due date with Lea.  I went for my first acupuncture treatment, which was designed not to induce contractions, but simply to help me get rid of tension.  The practitioner said it would be helpful if I could spend time during the treatment thinking about ways in which I might be internalizing stress about the transition to parenthood, which could be counterproductive in terms of my ability to relax enough for the treatment to work (and ultimately, go into labor on my own).  I've been thinking a lot about what's stressful about the upcoming transition from one child to two, and the main thing I fixate on is this: have I adequately celebrated and cherished the child I already have, the parenting I've already done?  Will I remember this time as a mother to one?  As a writer of sorts, or at least a writerly person, my compulsion is to sort through those worries by describing life the way it is, right now, so it doesn't slip away forever during the upcoming post-partum haze and subsequent ramping-up of stress. 

I don't have an acupuncturist here, so my blog will have to do.  So there, mind-body connection: I've written it all down, I've responded to my worry about losing the specialness of this time, I've preserved the pre-baby memories as best as I can.  I'm free to go into labor now, correct?

Christmastime!

I'm having this problem where, when I upload pictures to my blog on my Mac, I can't change the order in which the pictures show up (I can still do this on the PC, though).  Because I am fundamentally lazy and would never get around to sharing any pictures, ever, if I had to deal with two computers to do one simple task, I am just going to put them up out of order and leave it at that.  Enjoy!

High-fivin' the belly

Almost every night, I go through a terribly emotional hour.  Giving Lea her bath, dressing her in her pj's, reading a story, singing songs, and putting her to bed with "everybody" (her four most prized stuffed animals) is a special tradition that we've been doing ever since we started trying to enforce a regular bedtime, 20 or so months ago.  She welcomes bedtime for the most part; she is sweet-natured and sleepy and happily requests the songs she wants to sing.  Sometimes she will pull one of our faces very close to hers for the duration of a song, and then give a little squeeze before letting go.  She is at her most adorable and easy to cherish at those moments.  So lately, of course, I find myself feeling more than a little bit sentimental about the way her life is about to change, and the fact that many of our traditions, and nearly all the totally-Lea-focused time, is going to have to slip to the back burner for a while.  

But then there's the rest of the hour.  Once Lea's in bed and I immediately collapse on the couch, trying to will myself to do yoga before drifting towards comatose, I tend to suddenly think: hey, I'm way pregnant here.  Wow.  So much of the day finds me terribly distracted by life and unable to fixate on pregnancy the way I did when Lea was about to arrive.  But the thing is, I freaking love this part of pregnancy, and have almost no complaints about it.  In fact, there are times when I think I could happily spend the rest of my life about 37 weeks along.  (Those inclined to hate me for that, please contrast this with the first half, when I am puking many many times a day.)   I have a few physical discomforts, but for the most part I find the wiggling baby, the intense Braxton Hicks contractions, even the hugeness of my belly to be more exhilarating than anything.  There are times when I feel the baby moving, and I could swear that I have never not been pregnant and will always be pregnant; it feels so normal, so natural, so much a part of my existence-- how could it be temporary?  

But it is, of course.  And although we both have times when we could see doing this again, there are a million practical reasons to stop at two, and in all likelihood, this will be the last pregnancy for me.  Reminding myself of this fact was actually a source of huge relief all last summer, I have to remember.  But right now, it's kind of devastating.  Maybe it's way too biologically-deterministic of me to think this way, and maybe someday I'll roll my eyes at the fact that I ever even entertained the thought, but I just feel so complete when I'm in child-bearing mode-- preparing to birth and nurse and nurture a baby-- it's hard to imagine anything ever being so personally fulfilling.  

Maybe-- no, certainly-- that's why I want to be a midwife.  (Note to self: get career counseling.  Find out if a career in health care is even close to a good match for my aptitudes.) 

Anyway, that's what makes the second half of the hour so fraught with a million different emotions.  I want to celebrate this pregnancy and relish every moment of what makes having an on-the-brink-of-birth little person grooving around in there so beautiful.  But that's hard to do, and I'm so notoriously bad about documenting things (exhibit A: this blog), I can virtually guarantee that on some hormonal post-partum day in the near future I'm going to be wailing about how I have no pregnancy journal and not enough pictures of me pregnant, and I didn't let myself enjoy it enough, and I'll never get to do it again, and and and.  

I had moments like that after Lea was born, and I have to remember the wise words of a friend of mine who gently reminded me that having little in the way of documentation of that short chapter of my transition to motherhood did not mean that it hadn't happened, that it hadn't mattered or been just as special as if I'd made a whole leather-bound book about it.  It was precious to me and it is again, and if the best I can do is one blog entry and a few photos, that doesn't matter, because I know I'll remember this, and I'll remember my firstborn kissing my belly and poking on my "baby button" to try to get her little sibling to come out.  I probably won't always remember the physical sensation of a Braxton Hicks (like getting the wind knocked out of me, kind of, but in a good way, if that makes any sense), or what it feels like when the baby has hiccups (well, it feels like my cervix has hiccups, I guess), but that's ok too.  By the time those memories have faded entirely, I'll have two kids on the "outside" doing way more fun and funny and impressive things, things that I won't be the only one to get to celebrate.  I can get excited about that.