I started this blog to chronicle this mad adventure I was embarking on...and then the real adventure began. The miraculous, joyful, exhausting, all consuming adventure. Beatrix (spoiler!) is now 16 months old. She walks, she approximates running, she vocalizes, she signs, she laughs, she thinks farts are funny, she eats EVERYTHING, she is my beginning and my end. Everything else in my life suffers because of her, as it should. In any case, I thought I should try and finish the story I started over two years ago.
So, let me pick up where I left off, exactly 14 days before Bea's birthday.
I ended up stopping work as I could no longer ride in the car without a lot of pain. I'm pretty proud of the fact that I worked up to 39 weeks. Here is my belly 5 days before she was born. I was sizable!
In the remaining days before the birth, I rested, visited with friends, went to a partners yoga class with Anya (because she was one of my birth partners) which was hilarious and everyone thought we were a couple and not just a couple of weirdos, ate and ate and ate, and tried to think about final preparations. I worked out the sleeping arrangements and set up the sidecar. I got her diapers and changing stations ready. I made a loose plan with my birth team (Lara, Kate, and Anya) and tried to resolve any final hang ups I had about the birth. Dawn made a calendar for all my helpers and it was decided that Sarah would spend the first night at home with us. I walked a lot and felt amazing lumbering around like an ocean liner, wishing I had a foghorn to blow. Anya stocked my freezer with so. much. food. so I would be ready when my Estimated Date of Confinement arrived.
One of my big fears was that I would have trouble with milk production when I returned to work at only ten weeks postpartum. So I also stocked the freezer...the breastmilk freezer that is...with donor milk. Well, first I found a mama who wanted to informally share milk but I had no idea it would be like 60 gallons, so then, in order to make sure there was some room in my freezer for big people food, I ran around trying to find a small, used freezer. The absurdity level was very high, which was about right as my due date came and went.
And so it went. Until the night of October 25th, 2013. The very last night someone else lived in my body.
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