The Story of Your Birth

Dear Katie,

This is the story of your birth. This is the story I will tell you when you are older, maybe, and you want to know everything I can remember about what it was like to meet you for the first time, and to become your mother.

Your due date was March 6, 2004, although for some reason your doctor said your due date was March 8th. But March 6th was a Saturday, exactly 40 weeks after the date of my last monthly period, which is how a baby's due date is calculated, and so as far as your daddy and I were concerned, March 6th was your due date. (We think maybe the doctor's date was different because of leap day, but we're not really sure.) In any case, you ended up splitting the difference between the two due dates, since your birthday is March 7th.

Before you were born, our obstetrician Dr. Trendai had talked about inducing labor, which meant she would have started certain procedures to try to make me go into labor. Since the only day she was on call at the hospital was every Tuesday, you would most likely have been born on a Tuesday if labor had been induced. There were a lot of reasons why I didn't like the idea of having labor induced, but one of them - a very small, silly reason - was that it seemed like we would be giving you an "artificial" birthday; you would be born on the day that fit into the doctor's schedule, instead of being born on the day that God and nature planned for you to be.

That's probably an especially silly thing for me to worry about, because in the end, we weren't completely content to let nature take its course, and we decided to try some "home remedies" of inducing labor.

When you were born, you were a big baby, but before you were born, the doctor thought that you were going to be a huge baby, which is why she wanted to induce labor. We were originally scheduled for an induction on March 2nd, but it turned out that my body wasn't ready to give birth to you yet, so the doctor rescheduled an induction for March 9th, and she sent us home. We were supposed to check into the hospital on Monday, March 8th, so that they could start the induction, with the idea being that you would be born the next day. The doctor and your daddy and I all hoped that I would go into labor before then, though, so that labor wouldn't have to be induced. We wanted my body to go into labor naturally, because if it's possible, that is usually easier and better for the mother and baby. The doctor said that if we wanted to try some home methods of inducing labor, that it couldn't hurt.

So the weekend before you were born, your daddy and I went and had breakfast with our friends Rebecca and Candace at a place called Uncommon Ground, and after breakfast your daddy went home, and Rebecca and Candace and I went to Osco, and I bought some evening primrose oil, because I had read that evening primrose oil could help a pregnant woman's body get ready to give birth. I took my first dose of the oil right there on the street, while we walked along on that beautiful hot spring day, and after that I went and got a manicure and pedicure with Rebecca and Candace and Erin, who met us at the salon. (I was wearing the nail polish from that manicure and pedicure when you were born, and today as I type this, almost two months from your birth day, I still have a few tiny chips of that nail polish on my fingers. I repainted my toes awhile ago, though.)

I kept taking the evening primrose oil for the next few days, and when we went to see Dr. Trendai on March 2nd, she was very pleased to discover that my cervix - which had to open up before you could come out into the world - had started to open up! We were very happy about that, and that is why when we left the doctor's office that day, we believed that I might go into labor before we were scheduled to go to the hospital to be induced.

I had that whole week off of work before you were born, so we ran errands and cleaned up the apartment and waited for you to be born. At the beginning of the week, I kept thinking things like, "well, if the baby is born now, then we won't have that room cleaned up the way we'd like!" or "well, if the baby is born tonight, we won't have that set up the way we wanted to," but by the time we got to the end of the week, there was nothing else waiting to be done. And on Friday, I decided that it was time for another home induction method, and I told your daddy that we should go and buy some castor oil.

Saturday morning was warm and sunny, and we went to the Jewel and we bought castor oil. We also went to a store in our neighborhood - the Paper Trail - and we bought a baby book to take to the hospital so that we could have your hand prints and footprints put into the book when you were born. And then we went home, and we tried to think about what else we should do, and your daddy (who was not yet your daddy) and I (who was not yet your mommy) spent some time just the two of us, because we knew it might be one of the last times we were there together, just us, before we became your parents. And then I drank some castor oil - I swallowed it as quickly as I could, because I had heard that it tasted really bad (I threw it back like a shot, not that I've ever done shots, and not that you should know anything about doing shots), and then I drank some diet Coke to wash it down, and then I sat back and we waited.

And nothing happened.

I didn't feel any different. But after a little while, your daddy and I started to get hungry, so he went to fix dinner, and somewhere in there I took a nap. I didn't sleep very well during the last month or two while I was pregnant with you, so I liked to take naps when I could. I had been wearing these stretchy velvety pants that day - I wore those pants probably every day the week before you were born, because at that point my stomach was so big that I had no other pants that were comfortable. The only bad thing about those pants is that they had the tendency to stick to other fabric - when I wore them in the movie theatre, they got stuck to the seat cushions, and I had to reach behind me and try to pull up my pants when it was time for me to stand up. They also stuck to the bedsheet, so when I took my nap, I took off my pants and went to sleep under the covers.

We ate dinner at some point, and you would think that by then I would have had my pants back on again, but I didn't, and the reason I know this is that I was not wearing any pants when my water broke, and my water didn't break until after we had eaten dinner. I was pants-less, and I heard a knock on our back door, and Geoff went to answer it, and he told me that it was our friend and upstairs neighbor Arek, and I said ok, and since I didn't have any pants on, I went and sat on the couch and pulled the covers up over me.

And it was then - right then - that my water broke. I had read that sometimes women couldn't tell the difference between their water breaking and having some pee leak out, but I will tell you that I had no doubt at all. Fluid gushed out onto the couch, and I freaked out and stood up and listened to Arek and your daddy talking in the kitchen, and after a few seconds, even though I knew Arek might see me in my pantsless state, I scurried from the living room into the bathroom, and I waited until I heard Arek leave. He left, and then your daddy came walking down the hall back toward me, and I opened the bathroom door and caught his attention, and I said, "uh, I'm pretty sure my water just broke." It was about 8:20 p.m.

Your daddy got kind of nervous then! We both kind of laughed, because it was very exciting and a little bit scary to know that we were going to meet you very soon. The doctor had told us not to come in to the hospital until I was having contractions that were 3 minutes apart (we lived a little more than five minutes from the hospital), but I was pretty sure that we were also supposed to come into the hospital if my water broke, without waiting for close contractions. So we called our doctor's office's answering service, and we told them that my water had broken, and they said that they would have the on-call doctor call us back. The on call doctor was not our doctor - it was another doctor who worked in the same office. Her name was Dr. Thorpe, and she delivered you - she helped me give birth to you.

While we waited for her to call back, we ran around the apartment a little bit like chickens with our heads cut off, going back and forth from room to room. We were a little taken aback - we weren't going to get to time contractions, and gradually prepare to go to the hospital, and wonder whether I was really in labor or not. I tried to remember everything that was on my list of things to bring to the hospital - most of it was packed, but some of the things on the list were things we used every day, so we needed to pack it - and I couldn't find my printed list. So I put on my stretchy velvety pants, and I turned on the computer so that I could check my list and print out a new copy. While I was printing it out, I saw your Aunt Laurie get online, and so I told her that we were about to go to the hospital. She was very excited, and then we lost our internet connection, so she called and I talked to her for a few minutes. Then while I was sitting there at the computer looking at my list, I felt what I thought was maybe a very mild contraction, and at the same time, I felt more fluid gush out! I stood up quickly and managed to avoid having it get all over the chair. It landed on the floor, and it splashed!

After that, I took off my pants, and I put on my robe, and I decided that I would not put on pants again until it was time to go to the hospital, because at that point there was just too much water! I worried for a second that you might not have enough fluid left in there to survive, but later the doctor told me not to worry about that - you still had plenty.

Dr. Thorpe called us after that, and I talked to her, and she said that since my water had broken, we would need to get our things ready and come in to the hospital. I told her that we had assumed that we would need to come in, and that we would be there soon. We called my mom (your grandma), and we called my dad (your grandpa), and we called my brother (your uncle), and we told them we were going to the hospital. We wanted to tell them as soon as possible, because they were all planning to drive up to Chicago to see you as soon as they could. Geoff called the upstairs neighbors Heather and Arek, and told them we were going to the hospital, and asked if they could take care of our dog Molly for the evening, and they said yes. We gathered up our things, and your daddy collected some CD's to bring with us, and we carried everything out to the car, and we left for the hospital. By this time, I was having contractions regularly, but they were very mild - instead of having to focus on them, I just found them interesting. In the middle of a sentence, I would stop and tell your daddy, "oh, I'm having one now, I guess," and then it would go away.

In the car on the way to the hospital, I started looking at the car clock to see how far apart the contractions were, and right from the start, they were between 3 and 6 minutes apart. They were pretty close together!

We got to the hospital around 9 or 9:30 at night. We had to follow a special procedure to get in to the hospital, because it was after hours - we had a sheet of paper that told us what we needed to do, though. We had to push a button, and then stand in front of a security camera, and then talk into an intercom. A voice asked us what we needed, and your daddy told the voice that his wife was in labor, and then the voice told us to come in and go to the third floor, and something buzzed, and we went into the hospital. We left the car in the circular driveway in front, just like the sheet said to do. We went up to the third floor, and as we walked toward the reception desk, a nurse came out of someone's room and walked behind us. "Are you joining us for the night?" she asked us, and we said yes, we guessed so, and she said that was good.

It was all very surreal, like we were just practicing to have a baby, instead of getting ready to really have one. Even though I'd been feeling you kick around in my belly for months and months, at that moment, you still didn't seem real!

We told them who we were, and they checked us in, and they took us to a room. Your daddy went back downstairs to move the car and to get the rest of our stuff out of the car. Our nurse turned out to be the same nurse who had followed us down the hall, and she had me get undressed and get into a hospital gown (actually two hospital gowns - one for the front and one for the back). They asked me if I was sure my water had broken, and that it wasn't urine, and I told them yes, I was sure. Dr. Thorpe came and said hello, and that she would be around. They put two monitors on me, across my belly. One monitor was to measure your heartbeat - for hours and hours, while we were in that room, we listened to the sound of your heartbeat, and we knew that you were ok. The other monitor was to measure my contractions. By that time, I was starting to really feel the contractions. They still weren't very strong, but now it was a little harder to talk normally while they were happening. All night and the next morning, every time someone came by to check what the monitors were recording, they said that everything was going wonderfully. They said that you, especially, were doing just fine in there, with a good, strong heartbeat the whole time.

I had been up since 5:15 that morning, and by that time it was after 10 at night. I was excited because we were going to get to meet you soon, but I was also already tired. Maybe it's because I was already tired that I don't remember everything that happened that night in the order that it happened, so I can't really tell you all of the specific details. Or maybe labor is so intense that that's just what happens - you can't possibly remember it all clearly.

But I know that we listened to some of our CD's, and I know your daddy kept telling me nice, supportive things, especially when I had contractions. He would tell me that I was strong, and that I should "breathe, breathe," and that I was doing such a good job, and that I was beautiful. He would stand next to me, on my right side, and sometimes he would lean over me with his face close to mine. Every so often, the nurse would come in and check on us, and at some point she asked me if I would like to get in the Jacuzzi tub in the bathroom, and I said yes. We went into the bathroom and took a little bath, and the water was not nearly high enough to cover my belly that was full of you, so I got some towels wet and stuck them in the hot water, and draped them over my belly, and your daddy took some pictures. I still felt pretty good, then, so I didn't mind. I was starting to feel like I was working, but it was more like a good workout than anything else, so it was not too tiring. Our nurse asked me if I needed anything for pain, and I said no, at least not then, and she said ok, and that I was doing great.

Around 11 at night, the nurse who had checked us in went off duty, and a new nurse came on duty. Her name was Maureen, and she was there with us until 7 in the morning. She had curly hair, and I liked her even more than I had liked the first nurse. Like the first nurse, she also kept telling me what a good job I was doing, and when I had a really strong contraction, she would say that it was good to have strong contractions, because those were the contractions that were doing lots of work to get my cervix opened up so that you could be born. That made me feel a little bit better about those really strong contractions.

Sometime around midnight, your Grandpa and Uncle Josh got there, and sometime around 1 in the morning, your Grandma got there. They said that they had thought maybe you would already be born by the time they got there - ha! None of us knew it then, but there were still a lot of hours left before you would be born.

Like I said, I don't remember a lot of the details in chronological order, but these are things that happened between midnight and 8:00 the next morning, which was the next time that the doctor came back to see whether you were ready to be born:

When I had strong contractions, I would swing my head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, on the pillow, while I breathed in a rhythm that our teacher had suggested in the birthing class we took. I had my head on a pillow with a green pillowcase - it was a pillow we had brought from home. Your daddy would stand next to me and hold my hand and encourage me. My hair got all crazily tangled from all of this head swinging!

At some point, we decided to put in the videotape we had brought. When we took our birthing class, we found out the all of the labor & delivery rooms had VCR's and CD players, but that there was no cable tv, so hardly any tv stations would come in. We were encouraged to bring videotapes, so when we were packing up our overnight bags, in the week before you were born, I stuck my videotape of The Jerk in my bag. I figured that later we would go through our tapes and pick out a few more to bring, but that didn't ever happen, so when we got to the hospital, the only videotape we had was The Jerk. And now my memories of those hours in the night are interspersed with scenes from The Jerk. My contractions were too strong to let me pay attention to more than a few minutes of the movie at a time, so I remember seeing the scene where Bernadette Peters' character has snails on her plate, and I remember hearing the scene where the homicidal guy is shooting oil cans ("He hates these cans!" and I remember hearing the scene where the guy staying in the hotel tells Steve Martin that he should call his dog "Shithead." And in between, I was flinging my head from side to side, side to side, and breathing funny, and occasionally I would carry on a little bit of conversation with my husband or my mom or my dad or my brother. In between contractions, I could talk and smile at them, and when I would smile at them - especially at my parents - they would look relieved to see me smile. I think they were feeling a little bad for me, because they could tell that it was getting harder for me to deal with the contractions than it had been when they first got there.

At some point a nurse came in and put an IV in the back of my left hand, and it really hurt. It was a sharp pain, and even though I was in the middle of a contraction, the IV needle made me say "ow!" out loud. The contractions weren't painful to me in the way that I normally think about pain, and I understood what my mom had always told me about how her contractions had felt like intense pressure, but not like pain. For me, there wasn't any agonizing pain - just pressure so intense and overwhelming that after hours and hours of it, I didn't think I could handle them anymore.

Afterward, I tried to figure out how to describe what the contractions felt like to me, and the best I could do was to compare it to how it might feel if you had to lift weights over and over and over, except that when you're lifting weights, you have the option of putting the weights down and walking away when you get tired, and with labor contractions, you don't have that choice. Your muscles are in charge of you, instead of you being in charge of your muscles. Even when you are so tired that you would never choose to keep flexing your muscles, your muscles just kept lifting the weights anyway, involuntarily. Not only do you keep lifting the weights, but each time you lift, the amount of weight you're lifting gets heavier and heavier. You might start to wonder if your muscles will be able to keep lifting, or if you might rupture something, because the weights are so heavy and your muscles are so tired! At least that's sort of what it felt like to me. That's not exactly right, but it's close.

The doctor had checked my cervix at midnight, and at the time she told us that I was 2 centimeters dilated, and 75% effaced. We knew it wouldn't be time to push you out into the world until I was 10 centimeters dilated, and 100% effaced, so I still had a lot of work to do before you could be born. The night went on and on, and remember when I said that arriving at the hospital was surreal? That was nothing compared to how surreal everything felt at 2 or 4 or 6 in the morning. While I was in the middle of a contraction, the seconds and minutes went so slowly, but overall, the night seemed to pass quickly. Each minute took forever, but then I would look at the clock and it would be an hour later than it had been the last time I really looked at it, and I would feel like we were making progress.

I remember after The Jerk ended, the tv was showing infomercials, and at some point my mom, I think, was asking me what else I wanted to watch, and I kind of grunted at them all that at that point, I really didn't care at all what we watched, because I wasn't watching it, anyway. Not too long after that, I think, somebody turned off the tv, and your daddy played one of our CD's. I also remember that sometimes your daddy would go to the bathroom or lay down for a minute, and when he did that - and some other times, too - my mom or my dad would come over and try to make me feel better. My dad would rub my feet, and my mom would put a cold washcloth on my forehead, and they would smile at me uncomfortably, like they were trying to pretend they weren't worried, or that it wasn't painful to watch me struggle through the contractions. I remember feeling bad that I didn't have any extra energy to hide how hard I was working, so that they wouldn't worry at all, because I knew that I was ok.

I remember that at one point, Geoff was standing next to me, holding my hand, and telling me what a good job I was doing, and by then I think I was getting more tired, because I might have said something about whether or not I was going to be able to do this, and he told me that I could, and that I was doing great, and my mom looked at us, and she said, "I think the two of you are doing great," and she looked proud of us and happy that Geoff is your daddy and my husband. I remember my mom and my dad talked some about what had happened when she went into labor with me, over 33 years before then, and what things had been different, and what things had been the same. One time my dad asked our nurse what time she thought you might be born, and she didn't want to guess, but dad told her to go on, just guess, and she guessed that maybe you would be born around 8 or 9 in the morning.

All this time, I was so thirsty, and the nurse kept bringing me water with chunks of ice in it. I would take big swigs of water every so often. After I drank the water in each cup, I would eat the ice. Later in the morning (maybe even after 8:00 a.m.), they brought me a tray with lots of different liquids on it - broth and juice and I don't remember what else - but I didn't drink any of it, because I didn't feel hungry. Later I wished that I had eaten something, because it might have given me more energy - it turned out to be about 24 hours between meals!

Since I was drinking so much water, I had to get up and pee several times. It was awkward - something about the way you were positioned inside me made it difficult for me to pee, so instead of sitting on the toilet, I ended up standing up and just barely bending my knees so that I could pee in the toilet. It was very strange, and very uncomfortable. Your daddy came to the bathroom with me each time. After I had an IV in, he helped me drag my IV stand around behind me.

It turned out that the only position I was even close to comfortable in during labor was on my back in bed, with the bed raised to a semi-sitting position. It's not that that position was actually comfortable, it's just that every other position was so much more uncomfortable. Squatting was awful, kneeling was awful, and standing was awful. Lying in bed was at least tolerable. It was too bad, because by the end of the night, my body was getting really tired from staying in the same position, but every time I attempted a different position, I ended up abandoning it to go back to how I'd been to begin with.

By morning, I was getting really tired, and I figured it must be getting close to time to push you out. Our nurse Maureen went off duty at 7, and we got a new nurse, Eva, who asked me again whether I wanted any pain medication, or whether I wanted to keep dealing with it myself. I said that I'd keep trying on my own, and she said that was fine, that I was doing well with my breathing. I remember she and the resident doctor who dropped by seemed impressed that I was still laboring without any pain medication, and I remember being proud of that. I also felt very, very tired, and I was just starting to get a little bit worried about how much longer this was going to go on, so we asked if the doctor could come back and check to see how much my cervix was dilated by that point. I thought that she would say that I was 10 centimeters dilated, and it was time to push, and then I would get to rest!

Dr. Thorpe came back around 8 in the morning, and she felt to see how far I was dilated, and she said that I was four centimeters dilated and 100% effaced, and I felt so crushed that I started to cry a little bit. The doctor and the nurse said that I was doing well, but I was so disappointed I felt like I was going to crumble. I tried to blink back tears, and after the doctor left, your daddy came over and stood next to me, and I told him, "I don't know if I can do this," and he said yes, yes, I could, and I cried a little bit. My parents tried to make me feel better, too, since they could see how disappointed I was feeling.

Nurse Eva asked me if I wanted to get back in the Jacuzzi tub or the shower, and I remembered reading that for some women, being in the water helps make contractions easier to deal with, so I said ok. You were doing great in there, so they unhooked me from the monitors and detached me from my IV tube, and the nurse ran me a hot bath. When it was ready, I got in, and the water did feel really good. But after a few minutes, I had a contraction, and a few minutes later, I had another one. And they weren't any easier to deal with, and all of the feelings I had when the doctor told me that I wasn't as dilated as I thought I would be came back, and I started to cry again. I was so tired - I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life. Your dad was there next to me, and I told him that I wanted to ask for an epidural. I was having a hard time not crying then, and your daddy told me that no one would be upset with me if I wanted an epidural, and I had been very strong and worked very hard, and I still had more work to do.

So Eva came back, and I told her that I wanted an epidural, and she said ok, that she would get the anesthesiologist. I had to get back in bed so that I could be hooked back up to my IV. They started an IV going so that I would have plenty of fluid before they started the epidural, and after a little while, the anesthesiologist came to my room and introduced himself. He was very friendly, and I was very glad to see him, because now that I had decided that I wanted an epidural, I was having an even harder time dealing with the contractions. By this time, it was about 10:30 on the morning of your birthday.

I had to sit on the edge of the bed and bend forward - which was hard, because my belly was so big that I couldn't bend forward very easily! - and after a little while, the doctor gave me a local anesthetic, and then he put the epidural needle in my back. The needles didn't hurt very much - the most uncomfortable part of the whole procedure was having to stay as still as possible while I had contractions. I think I had three contractions while I was sitting on the side of the bed, hunched over. By the fourth contraction, the epidural was starting to work, and I felt so relieved. My legs got all tingly, and I could feel where the line for the epidural was taped to my back. The doctor made sure I was ok and that I could still move my legs, and then he left the room, and I laid back down in bed, and your dad laid down in the foldout bed next to me, and I actually slept, on and off, for at least an hour.

Sometime around this time, I told my mom and my dad and my brother that they should go ahead and go back to our apartment and take naps, because it would be at least a few hours before you would be born, and we had all been awake all night long. So they left, and your daddy and I slept a little bit, and during that time, I could hardly feel any contractions at all, but after a couple of hours, I started to feel them again, and they were strong enough that I couldn't sleep through them.

The only major things that happened between then and 1 in the afternoon was that I threw up several times, enough so that I was no longer allowed to drink water, but could only eat ice. I also started shaking and shivering harder than I ever have before. My teeth chattered, and the shaking went on and on, and oh, my God, I was so thirsty! Geoff stood next to me and fed me ice chips.

And then it was almost 1 in the afternoon, and Dr. Thorpe came back to check me again, and lo, and behold! I was fully dilated! It was almost time for you to be born! Dr. Thorpe said that as long as I was relatively comfortable, though, she didn't want me to push yet. Instead, she wanted me to wait another hour, to let my uterus "labor down" and push you (you! I didn't even know you then!) toward the birth canal without me having to voluntarily push.

At the beginning of that hour, I really was pretty comfortable, but toward the end of the hour, my epidural was wearing off, and I was having to rock my head back and forth again and do breathing exercises to get through each of the contractions. (My hair, by the way, was looking insane by this point, because first I had gotten it all matted up with rocking it back and forth all night long, and then I got in the bathtub and shower and got my hair all wet, and then I got back out and laid down in bed and started rocking my head back and forth again! By the time you were born, it was a matted mess!)

But we made it to 2:00, and around 2:15 or so, the doctor and nurse were there by my side, and it was almost time to push you out. They pulled the bottom of the bed away, and had me lean forward and hold onto my legs, and whenever a contraction happened, the doctor would count to ten, and I would push as hard as I could from 1 to 10. Then she would count to ten two more times, and I would push each of those times. And then the contraction would be over, and Geoff would feed me ice chips (sometimes I didn't even have the energy to ask, really, I would just motion frantically at the cup of ice - I was so thirsty that I remember wondering if I would ever not be thirsty again, ever), and I would rest until the next contraction. I was really starting to feel the contractions by then, and I discovered this amazing thing - that if I was pushing during a contraction, I didn't need to do any other special breathing or head rocking to get through it! The pushing itself carried me right through the contraction. While I was pushing, I remember we were listening to a Dan Fogelberg CD, and the doctor commented on it. But at the moment you were born, I think a U2 CD was playing.

When I first started pushing, it felt like nothing was happening. I'm sure I was still partially numb from the epidural, or maybe I would have felt you moving downward, but instead I just had to believe the doctor when she would say, "oh, good work! you're pushing very well! we're going to be done with this quick!" There was a mirror up in the ceiling tiles, and while I was pregnant, I thought that there was no way I'd want to see my own private parts when I was giving birth to you. But then when you were being born, and the mirror was there above me, and I was pushing you out, I couldn't help looking, watching, waiting to see the top of your head.

And then all of a sudden I could see some hair! It was during maybe the fourth or fifth pushing contraction, and when I stopped pushing, the hair disappeared. But it appeared again the next time I pushed, and somewhere around the eighth contraction, right around 2:45 p.m., your head came out! It was amazing and bizarre to see your head there, looking so small and purple (and disembodied). The doctor told me to stop pushing so they could suction out your nose, because they had discovered that there was meconium in your amniotic fluid. By the next contraction, they told me to push again, and this time your whole body suddenly slipped out of me - I had the impression that you were moving so fast that you could have sped across the whole room. They wanted to take care of you right away, so they cut the umbilical cord (instead of letting your daddy do it), and they took you over to give you a bath and check all of your vital signs. And somebody said something about you, but I couldn't hear for sure what they said, and I asked, "it's a girl?" and somebody said yes, you were a girl, just like we thought you would be. Then we knew you would be named Kathleen Matilda instead of Charles Geoffrey.

Before long, you cried, and it was one of the best sounds I've ever heard. I lay there for awhile after that, waiting for it to be time to push out the placenta, and waiting for the doctor to stitch me up (it turned out that I had a small tear), smiling at your daddy, and watching you. While I was pregnant, I saw a lot of those baby stories on tv, and whenever I did, I cried when the baby was born. I just knew that I would cry when you were born. But when the time came, I didn't cry. I was so relieved and happy that you were born, but I was so tired that it was all I could do to lie there and look around and listen to your first sounds.

But right after you were born, I looked at your daddy, and he was crying, and I was so glad. After a little while, after you were cleaned up and the pediatrician at the hospital had made sure that you were ok, they gave you to me, and I held you on my chest, and I looked into your face.

You were perfect, right from the start. 

This is you, today.

Now you are almost two months old, and you are sleeping in your car seat on the floor next to my chair. And already, I love you so much more than I did on the day you were born, that I can't really imagine how much I will love you by the time you are old enough to read this, but I know - and I hope you know - that it's a lot. A whole bunch. Oodles and oodles. Your daddy's and my lives were made better when you were born, in ways we don't even know about. You made us a family. Thank you for that.