Well, it’s been quite a week. This time last week, Aimee and her parents and I were eating dinner in the backyard after a day spent visiting me at work, taking a tour, and going out to lunch. Late that night, Aimee’s water broke, and we were on our way to the hospital.
Now, I haven’t even mentioned her being pregnant over the last nine months here – just to catch everyone up, she was pregnant – and last Wednesday at about 3:45 in the morning, we headed to Cedars and so began a very long day. They were out of the smaller pre-delivery rooms where we were supposed to wait until her actual delivery, so instead, they put us in a delivery room from the very beginning, which was nice. It didn’t have any windows, so we quickly lost track of just how long we’d been there. Aimee seemed pretty comfortable for the first few hours, say, between 4 a.m. and 2 p.m., and by the time she opted for the epidural, the contractions hadn’t yet gotten to the unbearable stage we’d been warned about in the childbirth videos.
Around 8:30 or so, she started to push, and just before 9:00, our daughter Grace was born! I think we were all surprised – we had really been thinking nothing but boy for the last five or six months – but there she was, cute as a button at 6 lbs., 9 oz. and with what a number of folks have deemed to be notably long feet. It was pretty overwhelming; I broke down when she was born, and stood in a daze watching the nurse go through her routine, weighing the baby, washing her off, and so on, but no one screamed, no one fainted, and much like mother and so far, daughter, there was precious little drama involved.
We spent that night and the next in a post-partum room down the hall, and started to get to know our girl, her noises and faces and the way she jerks to life during sleep as though she’s having a falling dream. The hospital stay was great, with very helpful nurses introducing themselves to you every few hours, checking on the baby, but we were happy to get home.
It’s been a series of sleepless nights since then, punctuated by feedings and time spent with Aimee’s parents, who have been invaluable in cooking for us now and for the future (the fridge is stocked with enough to feed an army) and for taking care of everything else so we could concentrate on the baby.
We’ve had a couple of uneventful but reassuring pediatrician visits, and I’ve managed to catch a cold over the past few days, which is cutting into my ability to help out Aimee, but we’re figuring it out. Grace is mellow, sweet, and, it goes without saying, completely adorable. It’s hard to believe it’s been a week, but the whole thing is so strange, so both overwhelming and completely normal feeling that trying to describe it doesn’t seem very useful. She’s lying next to me right now, snuffling and holding her legs in the air as she sleeps, and she looks perfect to me, so I’ll leave it at that.
Check out this time lapse of the past nine months that got us here… (The video is limited to Flickr friends and family, so if you are one, but don’t have a Flickr account and would like to keep up with Grace, now’s a good time to get a free Flickr account).
