Internet Grapes

WHATEVER YOU NEED AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS

Dear Katie, 

Is it appropriate for you to know how much it hurts me when you won't look me in the eye? When you won't tell me what you are thinking or how you are feeling? When you won't tell me how I can help you? 

How about when I give you a hug because I think it might make you feel better? I stand while some seconds pass, squeezing you - but gently! not too tight! - and I feel so much love course through me. I try to use sheer force of will to make my love find its way deep into your heart. I think to myself that if I just hold on tight enough or rub your back just right, that you will feel my love reach you, and I hope that after enough seconds pass, you will speak or cry or wrap your arms around me. 

Instead, you stand there, limp, as if you are only allowing me to hug you because you think that if you do I will leave you alone afterward, until the force of your uncaring (which may not be uncaring at all, but which feel like it is) reaches deep down into me, and I start to cry, and I move away from you. I try to hide from you that I'm as upset as I am, but I think you know. I am a terrible, horrible, no good poker face. I think maybe there is a part of you, deep down, that not only knows how much I am hurt, but that takes some pride from not allowing yourself to be moved by my grief. If I break down, you can feel stronger. 

I know that you are strong. 

I realize, each time this happens, that I have fallen for the oldest trick in the book, despite having been warned about it since you were born and maybe even before that: I keep thinking we are friends. There are so many signs, pointing the way to friendship!

We like so many of the same books and movies and tv shows and music, and we share new discoveries with each other. We can talk for hours, or just sit and binge watch tv together, and some of my very best giggle fits have been with you. We have so many inside jokes, and sometimes I know what you are thinking just from a single glance my way. On other days, at other times, you give some of the best hugs I've gotten, and we often come to each other for comfort, and to share stories we think will make the other laugh or cry. You come to me for advice, and sometimes I ask for your advice, too. I love you and admire you and in so many ways, I want to be more like you, or I want to commiserate with you over the things we do that we wish we didn't, or the ways we felt that we wish we didn't. 

But we are not friends, not really, not yet. If a friend looked at me the way you look at me on a day like today; if a friend refused to speak to me about how she was feeling; if a friend said that I could give her a hug and then stood, limp as a doll, while I did...if those things happened between me and a friend, then probably we would not be friends anymore, or at least our friendship would be lessened or damaged. I know that since I am your mother, and not your friend, my job is to take whatever you can dish out (and maybe even to recognize that in the grand scheme of things, what you are dishing out is not the worst meal I've ever had, not by a long shot), and to love you and forgive you and be here for you when you decide to emerge from the frozen, angry version of yourself that is in charge right now. I do love you, and I will always forgive you. I am here for you when you want me, and I will always be here.

I think I understand now that these days like today are what people meant when you were born and they said that parenthood would "never get any easier." They forgot, I still believe, how all-encompassing it is to take care of a newborn, how you can go for hours without being able to have one literal anxiety-free minute to yourself, and how scary it is to care for a precious human who can't give you enough signals to let you know what they need, whether what's happening is life-threatening or just mildly irritating. In so many, many ways, parenting gets easier. You can clothe and dress and feed yourself, and walk where you want to go, and tell me where it hurts. And you never ever comforted me when you were a baby, but now, on many days, you do. You are so close to being my friend. 

When people said it never gets any easier, I now believe that they were coming from a place like the place I am in today, where I have no idea what to do or say to you to make it any easier. When you were a newborn, your needs were mostly limited to four things: food, a diaper change, sleep, or to be held. You were a pretty easy baby - no health issues, no colic, no developmental challenges, and it was easy for me to feel like a good mom. When you were upset, it didn't take that long to cycle through those four things, or to narrow it down and then try each of the possibilities, but now! Now there when it comes to what you need, there are infinite possibilities, and not only do I not have time to cycle through them all, but there is also a very good chance that what you need is something I can't give you. I'm sure that a lot of the time, what you need is amorphous and undefinable and complicated and layered, and even if it's something I can give you, there is no way I can give it to you right now, because it would take hours or days or weeks or months to do what needs to be done to satisfy that need. (Is the need stability? Trust in unconditional love? Forging your own independence?) It is so much harder to feel like a good mom now, at least for me. It is even harder to feel certain that I am making the right decisions with respect to you and Annabel. There is so little that is black & white, and so much that is gray. 

I'm sorry that so often, I don't know what to do or what to say. I'm sorry that I get my feelings hurt when you feel how you feel. I'm sorry that I take it personally when you don't want to be hugged, and I'm sorry that I make you feel like you have to accept my hug even when you don't want it. I wish I could be stronger for you, or more compassionate, or more restrained, or more sweet, or more of WHATEVER YOU NEED AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS. But I wish I did. I am trying, even if it feels like I'm not.

You have asked me, more than once in the past few years, if I have written more of these "Dear Katie" letters, and tell you that I haven't written one in a long time. You say that I should write one again, and I have a feeling that a letter like this isn't what you mean, but here is what I have for you today. Maybe someday you can read it and find that it gives you an extra boost of compassion for your own child. Or for a friend. Or for me. 

(And Annabel, my dear sweet Annabel, if your needs are getting lost in the shuffle of the angst between the other three of us, I am so sorry. I love you so very much, too.)

Love, Momma 

Two Years Old

Dear Katie,

You are in bed now, on the night of your second birthday, having gone to sleep in your usual way: quietly, calmly, happily, and early.  Your usual bedtime these days is around 7:30, but tonight you were in bed no later than 7:15.  You were a tired girl, worn out by two previous bedtimes that were close to 9:00, and two minor mishaps that left you sobbing.  First, you were splashing in the tub in your favorite way, which consists of throwing your whole self down into the water with great joy, when your poor baby butt landed on your hard plastic baby doll who was taking a bath with you.  You cried and cried, and even though you were soaking wet, I lifted you out of the tub and held you to me while you sobbed.  Then later, after we'd eaten our leftover birthday cake and ice cream, you fell on your dad's guitar case and hurt your mouth, and you cried some more. 

I've started this out by talking about your crying, and although it's true that you do seem to suffer some minor injury pretty much every day, it's also true that you laugh so much more than you cry.  (I hope it is always this way for you.)  You love to be tickled, you love to play with balloons, you love cake, you love Mama, you love Dada, you love Molly dog.  You love to list, over and over, the things that you love, in just that way.  We spent a good part of our last car ride together (our trip back home from Cincinnati) this way - "I love Mama!"  "I love Katie!"  "I love Dada!" "I love Daddy, too."  "I love Molly Dog!"  "I love Molly dog, too." 

I love the way you say "mama" after almost everything you say to me lately.  "Thanks, Mama."  "More chip, mama."  "Hi, Mama!"  I love the way you somehow learned to start saying "see you soon" after you told someone goodbye.  I love the way you come into a room and say "Mama's hand," as you grab my hand and try to pull me to wherever you want me to go.  I love the way, when I tell you that it is bathtime, you shout, "Bath time!" and run to stand in front of the bathroom door. 

Today I took some pictures of you, and as I looked at them (and as I looked at you), I thought, "she is not a baby any more.  She is a little girl."  You are growing up so fast, so well.  You are so strong, so healthy.  We have never taken you to the doctor except for your well-baby checkups.  You walk, you run, you climb, you talk.  You demand things, you tell jokes, you sing songs, you look at books, you dance to music, you play with the dog and the cats.  You love to color with crayons, and lately you will draw a series of squiggles, each one slightly different from the other.  Today you drew four squiggles on my pad of paper and told me what each one was: Daddy, Mommy, Molly Dog, Katie. 

Have I mentioned that I love you?  I love you.

Until less than a week ago, you were still drinking milk in bottles.  Worse, you were taking bottles of milk with you to bed at night and for your naps.  I knew that it was bad for your teeth to go to bed with a bottle, and we'd tried to cut back on bottles here and there over the past 9 months, but then you'd get a cold or wake up crying, and we'd give you a bottle to help, and before we knew it, you never went to sleep without a bottle.  I justified letting it go on partly because I knew you didn't sleep all night with the milk pooling in your mouth - about 20 minutes after you'd gone to bed, we'd hear the bottle land on the floor of your room after you tossed it out of your crib.  But still, I was a little embarrassed about the bottles.  Finally, last Wednesday, a day that I worked from home, I decided it was enough.  No more bottles of milk.  In the morning, when you asked for a bottle, I told you no.  I told you you could have a sippy cup full of milk, or you could have a bottle full of water.  I told you that you were a big girl now.  You are so big!  You are so strong!  Babies need bottles, but big girls don't! 

You studied me somewhat seriously when I told you this, but you kept asking for a bottle.  I didn't give you one, and eventually you turned your attention to something else.  (Elmo?  The Wiggles?  Your crayons?  I don't remember.)  When it came time for a nap, you whined for a bottle, and when I asked you if you wanted a bottle with water, you said, "ok" in such a pitiful voice that it made my heart hurt.  But I gave you the bottle with water, and you took it, and I put you down for your nap.  And miracle of miracles, there was no crying.  There was no protest.  You went right to sleep.  It went on that way all day, and for your second nap, and at bedtime.  Occasionally you would ask for a bottle, and I would explain to you that you are a big girl.  "Remember?" I say.  "You are big and strong, and you don't drink bottles of milk."  You haven't had a bottle of milk since last week, and as of tonight, you are going to bed without any bottle at all.  We got rid of the bottles, without crying, without tantrums, without any disturbance of your sleep routine. 

I am so proud of you. 

The lack of drama over the end of the bottle surprised me, but it is really somewhat typical.  It's not that you can't be dramatic - you can spin and tickle us and make crazy faces and repeat something a bazillion times and spit on us with your raspberrying with the best of them.  You will laugh maniacally, but when it comes to protests and anger, you are, for a toddler at least, a minimalist.  It's possible that I am jinxing us by saying this, but I will say it anyway: you have never thrown a tantrum.  The closest you have ever come is that on ten or so occasions when you have not wanted to do something that we are telling you you need to do, you will lie down on the floor in silent protest.  You don't cry, you don't scream, you don't kick. I call it your "silent tantrum."  After about 10 seconds, I will ask you to get up, and then I will either pick you up or you will stand up on your own, and usually when you look at me, you are already ready to smile again.  (If only I got over my frustrations so quickly!)

The other day your dad called me up at work to tell me about something that you had done, and he said that the terrible two's had begun.  But I am pretty sure that when most people talk about the terrible two's, they are talking about a bad attitude, usually expressed in whining and yelling and crying and tantrums.  It's true that you do whine on occasion (but who doesn't?).  What your dad was talking about, though, is the much-increased frequency of times that you're causing trouble!  Last week you not only climbed out of your crib for the first time, you also took the opportunity of your dad going downstairs to switch laundry over to take the top off of your sippy cup, pour your milk out onto the floor, and start licking the milk up.  (Someday, when you realize just how much dog and cat hair is on our floor at any given time, you may realize how disgusting that is.)  And yesterday your dad called me to tell me that you had started crying after he put you down for a nap, and when he went in, he found you huddled in the corner of your crib, naked - having stripped off your sleeper and your diaper - with two piles of poop in the crib.  "Poop.  Two poop," you told him, and then showed him the sole of your foot, where you'd stepped in it.  You had taken off the diaper before pooping.  You're definitely approaching potty training readiness. 

Back when you were 18 months old, your father and I made a list of all the words you knew.  There were a little over 40 words on the list.  When you were around 21 months old, we updated the list, and found that it had grown to over 150 words.  Now that you are two years old, I've thought about updating the list, but I'm really not sure that I could.  Almost every day, you say a word that I didn't know you knew.  You don't say everything clearly, of course.  You aren't very good at saying R's or L's, you often confuse your B's and D's (and sometimes P's and T's), and sometimes you leave out consonants in the middle of words.  Bottle sounds like "doll," love comes out like "wuv," bye sounds like "die," and bubble sounds like "dull."  You call our friend Rebecca "Deck" (or "Deckdeck"), and you say "Ta" for Grandpa.   (You can definitely say your b's - the other day, trying to get you to say balloon instead of "doon," I asked you to say "buh buh buh balloon!"  You looked at me and obediently repeated back, "buh buh buh doon!") 

One of your funniest mispronunciations right now goes along with a game you love to play.  You will ask for a dog biscuit, and then you will run down the hallway with the biscuit, sometimes yelling, "go, go, Molly dog!"  You then fling the biscuit onto the floor for Molly to eat.  Then you immediately come back to the kitchen and ask for more biscuits.  You love this game so much you could play it all day.  I have to admit, it's pretty funny when you come into the kitchen begging for "more dick? more dick?" 

I have been writing about you since before you were born.  I did it partly for me, and partly for the people who I know like to read what I write.  But mostly, I did it for you.  I found out recently that many of the things I wrote for you after you were first born are gone forever, because I saved them at a site that is now gone forever, along with all of the journals of everyone who wrote there.  I have the entries I wrote while I was pregnant, and I have what your father and I wrote about the story of your birth.  I also have what I've written from the time you were six months old on.  But the earlier entries are gone - and there is one in particular that I am so sad to have lost - an entry about the first week of your life, with one section for each of the 7 days of that week and one picture for each section.  When I realized that that entry was gone forever, I got really sad.  Yesterday morning I realized I didn't have that entry, and I cried. 

I told your dad that I might as well not have written it, because after all, I had written it for you, and you would never get to read it.  I felt like I had, in a small way, failed you as your mother.  (If I'd never written it at all, that would be one thing.  But to have written it and then not to have protected it?  I felt awful.)  You came into the room, then, while I was crying and getting dressed for work, and you looked at me.  "Mama sad," you said.  "Yes," we told you.  "Mama is sad." 

"No sad, Mama," you said.  "No sad." 

I think this might have been the first time I've known you to show and express compassion for somebody else.  And it was just this little thing, but somehow it put things back in perspective for me. 

You are growing up so fast.  It's hard to believe you are two years old already.  I often think about what you'll be like when you are 3, or 8, or 15, or 20.  I hope that we're helping you learn things that will help you to be happy when you are a grown up.  Your Grandpa Bagley emailed me a couple of months ago about the qualities he had hoped to see and nurture in his children ("a list: honest, confident,  independent, good-humored, appreciative of life and its trials, self-thinking, true, able to love and permissive of love (letting others love you), good worker, considerate,  i wouldn't know where to end the list; of course i've been describing you and josh"), and asked me if I ever thought about what qualities I hoped to see in you.  Here is part of what I wrote back to him:

"I liked your list and feel pretty proud and happy that you think I have those qualities.  Those are qualities I'd like (or that I'm glad) to have, too, and I hope Katie has those, too.  I do wonder about her, of course, and who she will turn out to be, what she will be like, what she will care about....I would like her to be confident and proud of her abilities.  I would like her to be more loving of her own body than I usually am (I'm not sure how to teach that part, but I figure that part of it is probably setting an example, so being happier with my own body will probably reflect well on her). I would like her to be honest, with herself, and with other people.  I would like her to think it's ok to cry if you're touched by something, and that's it's also ok to laugh.  It's ok to be sad sometimes, and it's also ok to let go and be happy.  I would like her to care about other people and to show that she cares.  I would like her to keep her finances in control earlier than I did (not that I would love her less or lose faith in her if she had financial issues, just that I would like to save her some of the pain).  I would like her to know that she is valuable and worthy of love (which is basically one of the things you said), and I would like her to have lots of people in her life that she loves and who love her.  I would like her to be curious and creative in whatever ways she thinks her talents or interests lie."

I hope you have all of these and more.  I hope that I am a good mother to you.  I am pretty confident about that; I believe that I'm a good mother.  Even on the days when I am unsure about how well I'm doing with other things in my life, you've given me that gift - I am proud of the relationship I have with you.  I sure hope I'm right, and that someday you are proud of us, too - because baby, you deserve nothing but the best. 

Love,
Mama

To my bubble bearded little lady

  Bath & Teeth '05 (bw) 
  Originally uploaded by jessamynnorth.

Dear Katie:

I am overdue to write to and about you, but for the record, you are as charming as ever.  You turned 20 months old on November 7th, you have yet to throw a tantrum, and you love to be tickled.  If your dad or I tell you to lie down so we can tickle you, you almost immediately fling yourself face-down-butt-up onto the small round carpet in the living room and start giggling in anticipation.  It's just about the cutest thing ever. 

Katie, if you ever look back at these things I've written and think that the fact that I wrote less during any given time means that you seemed less interesting or wonderful to me, you will be wrong.  If anything, the lack of my writing about you means only that when faced with the choice of spending time with you or spending time writing about you (in a period which has been very busy with all kinds of other things we are filling our lives with), that I will always choose to spend the time with you.

You are in bed now, and your father is at choir practice, and this is one of the few nights each week when I have the place (almost) to myself.  So I am not going to write very much right now.  Instead, I am going to go watch one of the tv shows I have Tivo'd while I work on a Christmas present for someone we both love. 

And then I'll probably do some more cross stitching on your Christmas stocking.  I'm looking forward to sharing Christmas with you this year.

If you need me, I'll be out here in the living room.  Just call. 

Lots of love,
Your Mom

(I don't write) Poetry

Dear Katie

The other day I watched you
eating peas with great intensity and immense concentration.

You sat at the dining room table,
scanning the surface for the next pea target.
You chose one, grabbed one, popped it in your mouth.
One and one and one and one.

When you saw me watching you, your eyes locked on mine.
You smiled.
Then your eyes returned to the surface of the table:
Bull's-eye.

This is new to me.
I have never loved someone for the way she eats her peas.

15 Months

Dear Katie,

On June 7th you turned fifteen months old.  I started writing this on June 8th, the very next day, but that was a day and a half after we moved from our apartment to our new home (which we own!), and things have been crazy since then, and please forgive me for not finishing this within a week, even, of starting it.  Please also forgive me for occasionally zoning out over the past week and a half while you ran around the apartment doing unbearably cute things, as usual (the cute things are usual, not the zoning out) instead of paying as much attention to you as you deserve and as I would like.

While we're at it, I'd like to ask your forgiveness for the times when I lose my patience with you (when I'm telling you NO, keep your hands out of the dog's water bowl, or YES, you must come here now to get your diaper changed, or NO, you do not throw your bottle or the phone or the remote control onto the floor in such a forceful manner) when you wilfully ignore me.  I know you are just testing out what you can do, figuring out which parts of the world you have some control over, deciding how you have to move your body parts to make certain things happen, seeing how water splashes or how gravity pulls things crashing to the floor or what's the heaviest thing you can carry from one place to another.  I know you are not doing it to make me upset - even though you look straight at me with that mischievous glint in your eye while you are doing it - and usually, honestly, usually your enthusiastic love of all things chaos-inducing only makes me love you more.  Lately I've been a little stressed. 

I think you've noticed, because you've been a little extra sensitive, too.  Usually when I say "no!" to you, the only change in your behavior is that you look straight at me while you do it again, but yesterday I said, "no!" and you looked at me and did it again while your bottom lip started to quiver and your eyes started to tear up.  So I picked you up and held you on my lap and rubbed your back and told you that I was not mad at you (and I wasn't), but that you could not throw the phone because you might break it or injure someone or something else with it.  But that it was all right, I loved you very much, I was not angry, just please don't do it again.  You laid your head down on my chest and looked very sad.  I held you until you looked a little happier, and I kissed your neck, which made you laugh and arch your head back in extreme ticklishness. 

The big news right now is that we have moved.  Heather and Arek used to be our neighbors, and they were wonderful neighbors, but we found a home that we could buy, and so we decided to move.  We have moved into a 2-unit building.  We're on the second floor, and right now (a week and a half after we moved, still) the whole place is filled with boxes. 

On the Friday before we moved, Daddy put you to bed and I went over to the new place.  I had decided to go over to the new place to do some painting and to have some alone time, because frankly, you'd been wearing me out the previous evenings.  You cried and cried until I let you get out of your crib, and wouldn't go to sleep until 9:30 or 10, which is MY bedtime, young lady, so it is therefore too late!  So I decided, "hey! I am more than just a mother, I am an independent woman!  And I can go over to the new place and spend a night all by myself.  I can eat my frozen pizza and my pint of chocolate ice cream, and drink my diet coke and water, and I can blow up the huge Aerobed and stay up as late as I want, and sleep in as late as I want, and do some painting (which I actually really love to do - there's something about the bare clean expanse of a freshly painted wall that makes me feel like I've really accomplished something) in peace!  It will be an adventure!"

What actually happened is that I stayed at home with you and your dad until about 7:45, and when it was time to go, I waved to you and your dad in the doorway, and as I drove away I cried a little bit.  You are fifteen months old, but that was the first time I was going to miss both your bedtime and wake-up.  I had missed your bedtime a few times, but I had always been there the  next morning when you woke up.  I wondered what I was doing, leaving you and your dad there on a night when you would probably want to play until 9:30, when I could enjoy spending time with you after having been gone to work all day. 

I forged ahead, though! I went over to the new place anyway, and you know what I did when I got there?  I had a pretty good time.  I heated my frozen pizza and then I ate it.  I drank some diet Coke.  I ate a little bit of my ice cream.  Nobody cried for me, and nobody needed me to take care of them.  And then I painted your bedroom a lovely pink color, so that it would be nice for you when we moved, and so that it hopefully wouldn't smell like paint anymore by the time you slept in it for the first time.  I painted for hours while I listened to the radio, and I wore myself out, but I had a good time.  I  called your dad at about 9:00 to see what was going on, and he said that you had been asleep since 8:30, and that you hadn't made a peep since then.  I stayed up painting until almost midnight, and then I went to bed on the Aerobed.  In the morning, I kept waking up, checking the time, and then going back to sleep.  I finally decided to get up at 7:42.  Later I asked your dad what time you had woken up, and he said you had gotten up at 7:30.  So there you go, I had 12 extra minutes of sleep!

Just so you know, I'm aware that it's a little bit pathetic that my first big night away from you was spent painting your room after eating frozen pizza and ice cream in an empty condo.  But there it is - a first step along our road to your someday independence and separation from me.  Our first night apart, and we were both very brave.  One of us didn't even cry. 

Last Monday, while the movers were packing up our boxes and furniture, I kept wondering what you were thinking.  Were you confused?  Were you worried?  You never seemed upset - you played and ran around and ate raisins and Cheerios and drank milk and water pretty much the way you always do.  Molly, our dog, was way more upset than you were.  Molly seemed frantic, and kept barking her head off.  I think she was worried that we were going to leave her behind.  I like to think that the fact that you were so unconcerned is an indication of the immensity of your sense of security.  I hope you feel so safe that it would never even occur to you that it would be possible for Mom & Dad to leave you behind. 

On the 7th we went to the doctor for your well-baby checkup, and you got two more shots (the last ones for "a long time," according to the doctor!).  You also got weighed and measured, and as the doctor says, he's running out of options to talk about just how big you are compared to all of the other babies your age.  "I've already said she's 'bigger than 95th percentile," he said.  "I guess now I can put 'even bigger'!"  You weigh 31 pounds 5 ounces, and you are 33 1/2 inches tall.  THEY say (some of them do, anyway), that a person's adult height will be twice their height at two years of age.  You aren't two yet, of course, but if you double your current height, you will end up at 5'7", an inch taller than I am.  We think you will be a tall girl.  Almost everyone who sees you thinks that you are older than you really are.  You have 11 teeth now, at various levels of protrusion from your gums, including four pointy molars.  Your hair is getting longer and curlier all the time. 

You walk like a pro now.  For a long time, you only wanted to walk on flat surfaces like our floor, a sidewalk, or a parking lot.  You wanted nothing to do with any crazy uneven grassy surfaces, with their bumps and valleys, all covered by a layer of fuzzy green stuff that prevented you from seeing the bumps and valleys.  Lately you have decided that maybe the grassy stuff is ok, too, maybe because when you fall down, the earth beneath you is softer than a sidewalk.  In any case, now when I walk across the grass and call for you to follow me, you will.  Last weekend you played in the sprinkler in the back yard with our friend Arek while Heather and your Dad watched and I took pictures.  Over and over, you approached the sprinkler with great trepidation, winced, ran through the water like you were stepping on hot coals, then ran straight to me, laughing hysterically, and clung to my leg.  Arek thought you were so funny that he laughed so hard he cried. 

You seem to learn more words all the time.  A couple of weeks ago, I realized that when you walk to the door and pat it and say "asigh? asigh?" that you were trying to say "outside."  "Outside?" I asked you, and you nodded vigorously.  You also say: door, ice (you LOVE ice, which is good, because now when you get restless at a restaurant, we ask for a glass of ice, and we feed it to you piece by piece, and you are mostly content), dog, cat, hi.  You and I took a trip to Seattle a couple of weeks ago, and by the end of the trip you were calling your Uncle Josh "Joss."  You call your Dad "Da! Da!" Often when he is in the bathroom with the door shut, you like to stand on the other side of the door, rocking from side to side and yelling Da! Da! 

And sometimes, now, occasionally, you say "Ama," and I think that you mean me.  One night a couple of weeks ago you woke up after 10, after having been asleep for hours, and you were crying and crying.  Your Dad went in to try to calm you down so that I could go to bed, but you kept crying.  Sometimes you have a very strong preference for either your Dad or me - who knows why you have the particular preference on any particular day, but you do.  That night I went back to your bedroom door and poked my head in, "Does she want me?" I asked.  And I heard you say, "Ama?!" through your tears, and my heart melted and I didn't care anymore if I got to sleep right that minute or not. 

A couple of days ago I bought a new CD by a group called the innocence mission, and I brought it home and played some of it for you while we were eating dinner.  I played "Over the Rainbow," and you recognized the song and rocked back and forth and smiled your huge toothy smile.  You also recognized the next song, "What a Wonderful World," and after that I skipped ahead to "Edelweiss," which is the song that we have sung to you every night for months and months now, since you were 3 or 4 months old.  You didn't recognize it at first, so your dad and I started singing along with it, and your eyes got wide as you realized what the song was, and then you smiled.  If I haven't told you before, my sweet girl, you have an infectious and heartbreakingly beautiful smile. 

There is another song on that CD called "Bye-Lo," which apparently is an old traditional lullaby.  The second verse is "Mama will love you, Mama will love you, Mama will love you, All my life."  And while I listened, I got a lump in my throat, not just for me and you, but for this universal experience, for the way parents hold and rock and love their babies and sing them simple songs, for the way everything seems so simple then (now), and for the way parents keep loving those (former) babies no matter what happens later, no matter how complicated the relationships become.

So right now, that song is for you.  I want you to know that no matter how complicated things get between us, no matter how many fights we have, no matter how many things I say that make you roll your eyes, no matter how many times I get upset with you for refusing to do what I ask you to do, and no matter how many times I don't understand what you want or need or are trying to tell me, I hope you remember: mama will love you, mama will love you, mama will love you, all my life.  (Daddy will, too.)

Love,

Mama

Nothing like falling in love

Dear Katie,

This is nothing like falling in love.

There are none of those questions: "Are you The One?" "Do I really love you?" " Do you really love me?" "Are you really the person I think you are?" "Will I still love you in a month and a year and a decade?" "Are you too young or old for me?" "Are we too different?" "Are we too alike?" "Do I find you attractive?" "Do you think I'm pretty?"

I do not wonder whether you will have a successful career that will help us build a life together (or what exactly we mean by "successful"). I never wonder whether we will someday run out of things to talk about (so far, we don't talk about much). I don't wonder if those little habits you have (that I now find so charming) will one day grate on my very last nerve. I don't wonder if my friends will like you or approve of you. I don't wonder if you're smart enough for me, or if I'm smart enough for you.

I don't feel embarrassed or self-conscious when you see me with messy bed hair, or if you see me spill something on myself, or if you see me without clothes on. I don't feel uncomfortable when I see you naked. There is nothing about you that makes me feel awkward or distanced (not even when you squat right in front of me and go ridiculously red-faced with straining). I did not feel awkward or even a little weird the first time that I called you "sweetie" or "sweetheart" or "honey" or "sweetpea" or "my little sweet potato baby bee." That time I accidentally drooled on you, right after you had drooled on me? I did not feel embarrassed (I just laughed).

I have had no internal debate (or external one, for that matter) about whether or not I should let myself love you. I don't wonder: Should I allow myself to be vulnerable? Should I admit to you how I feel? Should I tell you that my heart fills with joy when I know I am going to see your face or hold you close at the end of the day? Will it scare you off to know that I can't keep myself from grinning when I walk down the steps at the el station and see that you are out there in the car, waiting for me? Will you get annoyed and think I touch you too much or too often? Will you feel smothered if I smother you with kisses every single day?

I have never wondered: Will this love last forever? 

To all of these questions, I know the answers, or else the answers don't matter.

I gave you a bath last night, and you looked up at me with your big happy sparkly eyes, and I wanted to stare into your eyes forever, and I had these thoughts that I am writing down today, my dearest wonderful brilliant beautiful daughter, my Katie coo, my baby girl.

You are too young to read this now (even though you like to turn the pages of books). But maybe when you are thinking about having a child of your own, you will want to know what this is like, this business of becoming a mother. Or maybe when you are older, even if you are not thinking about having a child of your own, you will want to know what it was like for me, this business of becoming your mother. And so I am writing this down for you.

It is everything like falling in love.  (It is wonderful.)

Love,
Mom

Nine Months

Dear Katie,

Hello, sweet girl! Today you are nine months old. This morning we sang "Happy Birthday" to you, the way we do pretty much every time you turn one more month old. While we sang, you held onto the CD shelf - against which you had stood up all by yourself! - and rocked back and forth from foot to foot. You really like it when we sing, and you really like to rock back and forth.

Rocking back and forth is one of those things that you do all the time, so much that your dad and I sometimes forget that this is apparently something that not every baby does. We forget until someone else sees you and says, "Wow, she is really rocking!" "Look at her go, she's rocking!" "She's cracking me up with her rocking!" You rock when you're sleepy and when you're a little bit bored. You rock when you recognize something, like me or your dad or the dog or a cat. You rock when you think something is funny, and you rock when you want to get down off of our laps to explore on your own. You rock hardest when you are very excited.

Over the course of your lifetime, you will probably get tired of hearing me say things like this, but there is a part of me that can't believe you're only nine months old, because it seems crazy that you have only been part of my life for that long. I have jeans and sweaters and socks and nail polish and hair care products older than you, for God's sake. You are such a huge important part of my life (much, much more important than jeans or sweaters or socks or nail polish or even hair care products) that it's a little startling to remind myself that I didn't know you nine months ago.

I guess that's not completely true, since I knew a little bit of your personality while I was pregnant with you, or at least I thought I did. I was pregnant with you for forty weeks, give or take a few days. Next Sunday it will be forty weeks since you have been born. It seems significant, that you are now reaching the point where you will have spent more time out here in the world than you spent in there in the womb. I have to say, I like you much better out here than in there. And I firmly believe that you like it better out here, too.

The last time I wrote one of these letters to you, you were only six months old. You have grown so much since then! Back then you had just learned how to sit up from a prone position and couldn't even crawl. Now you can sit up and crawl and stand up and "cruise" along the furniture while barely holding on with one hand. Sometimes you even stop holding on with any hands. You stand there with both hands up in the air, wobbling, and then you either grab back on with one hand, or you get so excited you start to rock, which causes you to fall over. A week or two ago you discovered our shelves full of CD's, and oh boy howdy do you love to pull the CD's off of the shelf and wave them around in the air and drop them on the floor (in an effort to avert frustration, we have temporarily given up the idea that our CD's should be in some sort of order). You say "dog" and "cat" (well, you say them close enough, and you definitely say them loudly enough). You have four teeth, two on top and two on the bottom (for the record, your bottom middle right tooth came in first, then bottom left, then top middle right, then top left). Your hair is all blonde now (back then you still had some dark brown hair, before that fateful day of September 19th, when I cut off the dark brown mohawk-ish growth of hair on your head).

When I come home from work, you are so excited to see me that both of us can hardly stand it. One day a couple of weeks ago I was on my way home from work, and you and your dad were out doing something, and I talked to your dad on the phone, and he said that when you guys were headed home, he would call me and let me know, and maybe you would pick me up and give me a ride home from the el. I left work and got on the el and got off at the stop near our apartment and walked the 15 or 20 minutes from the el stop to our building, and your dad had not called, so I figured you must still be out running your errands. But then what did I see when I got close? Our car! Sitting right there in front! And then I walked in, and there you and your dad were, at the end of the hallway, in the kitchen. You were sitting in your high chair, and your father was sitting in front of you, feeding you fruit. At first you didn't know it was me (I was kind of far away), and you just looked curious. Then I said to your dad, "Why didn't you call?" And he said, "I was supposed to call?" And then I knew he had forgotten, and I was irritated. 

But when I started talking, and as I walked closer, you knew for sure that it was me, and you got very excited. You started rocking back and forth in your chair, and you got a huge smile on your face, and you were going "ahhh! haaaa!!! baaaaa!!! DAH! DAH!" and you were giggling and waving your arms around in the air, and I tried, momentarily, to hold onto my irritation with your dad. I said, "Hi, Katie," and gave you a big smile and then turned to your father and said with gritted teeth, "yes, you said that you would call me," and then I turned back to you, and you were rocking and grinning and reaching for me, and you were so full of joy that I just couldn't do it. I let go of my irritation, because really, what difference did it make? It's not like it was rainy or snowy outside. I wasn't hurt. I didn't even have a headache. I was home now, and you and your dad were home, too, and it was warm and full of yellow light in the kitchen, and you were so happy to see me that you left me with no room for anything but happy, too! Thank you.

You sleep through the night now, almost every night. Last night you went to bed at 7:00 p.m., and although I heard you murmuring very quietly to yourself when I went to the bathroom at 5:30 this morning, you didn't actually wake up until almost 8:00 a.m. I couldn't believe how long you slept! Other than the early morning murmuring, you didn't even make a peep. We got you ready for bed - we gave you a bath and a bottle and then we read you a book and sang you a song - and then we put you in bed, and you rolled over, and we left your room and shut the door, and we didn't hear you make a sound after that. No crying. Amazing!

You make weird noises sometimes. I can't think of any way to describe it other than to say that it sounds kind of like you are a really old asthmatic man who is trying to clear his throat loudly and with great vigor. No one can make the noise as well as you can. We try - oh, yes, we all try! But you are the best. When we do it, we hurt our throats and make ourselves cough. But when you do it, you smile and rock, and your face glows with noise-making triumph. (Your dad's dad - your grandpa, in case you're reading this but haven't yet figured out how your grandpa is related to you - says that your dad used to make those same noises when he was a baby.) You also do a lot of what one of our baby books calls "immature jargoning," where you babble in what sounds like a foreign language. Not one of the Romance languages - we guess maybe it's Croatian, but then again, we don't really know what Croatian sounds like, so it's entirely possible it's more like Swahili (but for some reason I doubt it).

You eat all kinds of things now. So far you like every food you've ever tried except some of the baby foods. You don't like pureed vegetables, and you don't like pureed meat. We sympathize. They don't seem very appetizing to us, either. But if it's not pureed, or if it's pureed fruit, you will eat it. You especially love fruit - we haven't yet found a kind of fruit you don't enjoy, but you especially love banana, on its own or mixed with other things. So far you've eaten: sweet potatoes, pears, bananas (pureed and in little pieces), apples (and applesauce), prunes, peaches, apricots, avocado, plaintain, mushroom, peas, carrots, bread, Ritz crackers, animal crackers, Zwieback crackers, macaroni & cheese, mashed potatoes, tiny bits of turkey and chicken, stuffing, rice cereal, barley cereal, oatmeal, carrot soup, and (I admit it) a tiny bit of brownie (you tried that two days ago). There are other things you've tried, too, but those are some highlights.

You love water, and you love your sippy cup, but you haven't figured out how to get water out of your the sippy cup yet. You'll gnaw on the chewy part of your sippy cup with great pleasure, and you really like it when we hold a cup of water for you or fill a bottle with water or feed you water through a straw. One of these days, you'll figure out how to suck water out of the sippy cup, and then a whole new water world will open up for you.

Last Friday night our friends Heather and Arek babysat you while your dad and I went to my work holiday party downtown. It was the first time that I missed your bedtime! We were worried that you might cry and keep yourself from going to sleep, but it turned out we didn't have much to worry about. You went to sleep with only a little bit of crying - once you got a little bit more to drink from your bottle, you went back to sleep and didn't wake up until after 10, which was a little while before you went home. I know I shouldn't have been happy that you woke up after 10, because it means that you didn't get the best night's sleep that you could have, but honestly I was a little bit happy to come home and see you awake, because it meant that I got to hold you and rock you and sing you back to sleep.

Today we went to the doctor for your 9 month check up. You weighed 26 pounds and 8 ounces (2 pounds and 11 ounces more than 3 months ago) and you are 30 1/4 inches tall (2 3/4 inches taller than 3 months ago). You are healthy and happy and developing well. Your doctor commented today on your beautiful eyes and your strong legs, and when he left, he told you to "stay happy." (Then he sent in the nurse to give you some shots, so you had to take a short break from being happy to be very angry and sad. Your face got all blotchy like mine does when I cry. We felt very bad for you. Within 10 minutes, though, you were laughing again.)

Remember up there where I said that I can't believe you have only been alive for nine months, because it seems like you have been part of my life forever? Well, the other thing that I will probably say too much, and that you're probably sick of hearing me say, is the flip side of that. The other thing is that it seems like only yesterday that you were born. It seems like you are growing and thriving and blossoming before my very eyes. I look away and look back and you are bigger! And stronger! And more capable!

Almost everybody who sees you talks about how beautiful you are, what beautiful eyes you have, how smart you are, how happy you are, how lucky we are. All of those things are true.

Every day I tell you that I love you. I love you more and more all the time. Every month I think that you are about as wonderful as you could be, and sometimes your dad and I will say, "ok, she can just stay at this age now," but then the next month you are doing more and learning more, and we decide that you are even more wonderful. When do you stop getting more wonderful? Will that be during the Dreaded Teen Years? I guess that could be. But rest assured that even then, no matter how rebellious you may feel, or how uncool you think I am, or how misunderstood you know you are - I guarantee you that I will still think you are wonderful, and I will still love you, because I am your mom, and that is my job.

Let's face it.  Even if it wasn't my job, I couldn't help myself. 

Love,
Mom

A Letter to My Six-Month-Old Daughter

Dear Katie,

This week you turned six months old. I can hardly believe it, but you're half a year old! As I told you the other day, I am now approximately sixty-eight times your age. In six months, I will only be almost thirty-five times your age. And in another year, I will only be about eighteen times your age. Isn't that strange? Isn't that funny? I like to tell you things like that, things that you can't possibly understand or care about; even though you don't know what I'm talking about, you look right at me and smile, and then sometimes you laugh. You have a mighty fine sense of humor already.

You have recently started to lift up your arms when you want me or your dad to pick you up. If you're sad when you do that, you usually also make that sad pouty face that you make, and we just about kill ourselves rushing over to pick you up so you'll stop making that sad face. We hate to see you sad.

Fortunately, we don't see you sad very often. You are such a happy girl. Yesterday your dad and your Aunt Stephanie came downtown with you to the place where I work, and one of the first people you saw was Ed, the head of my department. You looked at him very seriously (the way you do, as if you are assessing the person you're looking at, possibly by doing some sort of mathematical equations or scientifical calculations in your head), and then you gave him a huge grin, and you grabbed his finger and wouldn't let go. He was very impressed with you and your strong grip.

You make friends for us everywhere we go, lately. Yesterday after work, I met your Dad and your Aunt Stephanie in Marshall Fields, and as we were on our way out, you drew a crowd of appreciative store employees. They gathered around us, telling you how beautiful you were. They gawked at your chubby legs and your beaming smile and your big blue eyes, and they told us that we ought to put you in commercials. It's not the first time somebody has told us that. You are a beautiful baby.

Your days go pretty much like this. You usually wake up between 6:30 and 7 in the morning. You do some yelling to let us know that you're awake and would like to get out of your crib now, please. I get up and come over to your crib, and you smile at me happily. If you've had a really good night's sleep, you will even squeal or laugh and flail your arms when you see me. Lately you are usually on your hands and knees, practicing trying to crawl. You reach your arms up to me, and I pick you up, and I go back to bed with you, and I play with you a little bit, and then I let you nurse. You used to take a half an hour to eat your breakfast, but now you are almost always finished in less than ten minutes. You don't spit up as much, either (we'll be glad when you stop doing that every day). We visit a little bit and maybe play some peekaboo, and then I hand you over to your dad so that I can get ready to go to work. Somewhere around the time that I'm ready to go to work, you are ready for your first nap, so your dad rocks you to sleep and puts you down in your crib, where you sleep for about an hour, usually.

While you are sleeping, I leave for work. While I'm gone, your dad gives you two or three bottles, depending on how hungry you are that day. He plays with you and cuddles you and sings to you. Sometimes he puts you in your Jumperoo, which you still love, and he puts you down on the living room floor on top of a blanket so that you can practice rolling over and trying to crawl. Most of the time, the living room floor carpet is covered by your baby quilt, which is covered by your toys and one of your Boppys (the blue one, I've decided, is Senorita Boppy, and the red one is Senor Boppy). Some of your favorite toys lately are an orange rabbit that plays part of a Bach piece (which your dad has named Rarebit), a small metal mixing bowl from the kitchen, a teething ring, and the green Baby Einstein block. You like the green block better than the red or blue or yellow blocks because the green one has tags on it - you love playing with the tags on any toys that have them. Once you find them, you alternate sucking on them and flicking them back and forth with your fingers. Tags are SO COOL. 

In the afternoon, you take a nap. Your afternoon naps have just started getting longer - yesterday you delayed your dad's & Stephanie's trip downtown to meet me because you decided to nap for over two hours! We don't know exactly how long you slept, though, because after two hours and fifteen minutes, your dad went in there to check on you, and he found you wide awake, completely silent, playing happily by yourself.

Your dad is having a good time staying at home with you. At first, for about the first two months or so, he wasn't having such a good time. He was worried a lot, and you cried a lot, and some days he would call me at work and plaintively say, "when are you coming home?" But a few months ago, I asked him how he was doing, and how he was feeling about staying home with you full-time, and he said that it was good. "In fact," he said, "I think I love it." Your dad likes to throw you up in the air or to hang you upside down, and you love it. You laugh and try to fling yourself around so that he will do it again. Almost once a day lately, at some point when I am holding you or nursing you or rocking you, your dad will look over at us and say something like, "I love you both more than anything in the world." And that's how I feel about you and your dad, too. I love you both more than I can say.

A lot of times you and your dad and Molly Dog will take a walk to meet me at the el station when I come home from work, and we'll all walk home together. I am always very happy to see you - I bend down over your stroller, and say, "Hi, Katie!" and you look at me for a second with your assessing look (as if maybe you are thinking, "is that who I think it is?"), and then you smile a big relieved smile ("Oh, Mom, it's you! There you are!") If it's been awhile since your last bottle, you will sometimes get fussy a few minutes after you see me, because not only am I "Mom," I am also "FOOD SOURCE," and you are "HUNGRY BABY."

I have to admit that for now, I enjoy being both Mom and Food Source. It makes you so happy to nurse, and it makes me so happy to see you get happy. I am glad that I can give you what you need, and that breastfeeding has worked out so well for both of us. In the first few weeks after you were born, I used to see the future stretched out before me as a series of every-three-hours-for-ever feedings, and I wasn't sure I could take it. It made me a little panicky, and I didn't know if I could do it. You still eat every three or four hours, and if I'm not with you when you eat, then I'm at work pumping milk for the next time that I won't be with you, but the thought of your future meals no longer stresses me out, because it's now so easy. After all, I eat every four or five hours, too, and that thought doesn't panic me.

After we get home, you nurse, and we play together, and I try to make you laugh. Sometime around 7 or 7:30, we give you a bath, and then I give you the hee-haw*, and then we put you in your sleeper, and then we rock and you nurse a little bit more, and then we read a book (really, we read it and you try to eat it), and then it's time for bed. Sometimes you cry when it's time for bed, and we come into your room and comfort you and tell you that we love you, and before too long, you fall asleep. You usually wake up in the middle of the night (last night you woke up at 2:15), and when you do, I usually nurse you, and then you and I both go back to sleep, and we start all over again the next day.

*(The hee-haw, in case you don't remember, is when I take a blanket and flip it back and forth over you so that you get dried off after your bath. My mom and dad used to dry me off this way when I was little, and my mom remembers her parents drying her off this way, too. She mentioned it to her dad, your great-grandpa, and he said that his father used to dry him off the same way, and that he called it "the hee-haw."  So now we call it that, too.)

We took you to your pediatrician on Wednesday, and you smiled and laughed at him for possibly the first time. You weigh 23 pounds and 13 ounces, and you are 27 1/2 inches tall. You are a very big girl for your age, bigger than almost all of the other babies who are six months old. (I carried you around a lot yesterday when you came downtown, and the muscles in my left arm are a little sore today from it.) At the end of our visit, you got three shots, and you cried as if your heart were breaking. When you got the second shot, you cried so hard that you made no sound, and when you finally did make a sound, it was so loud and full of pain that it tore at my heart, too. I was holding your arms so you couldn't get in the way of the needles, and I leaned over you and kissed your head and told you, over and over, that I loved you, and that it would be ok. Five minutes after your shots, you were smiling again even though your face was still blotchy. (You seem to have inherited my pale, prone-to-blotchiness skin.)

You are healthy and strong and happy. You sit up by yourself for long periods of time. You roll over from your back onto your tummy, and you push yourself up onto your hands and knees. You do little stomach crunches when you are lying on your back - you are straining to sit up to see what's going on. You grab at everything - nothing that is within two feet of you that isn't nailed down is safe - and you put everything that you successfully grab into your mouth. Your hair is three different colors - dark on the end, light brown in the middle, and blonde at the roots. You have roots like your Mom! You still have no teeth.

You laugh and you squeal and you make weird guttural noises that sound like they would really hurt your throat, but apparently they don't. You are trying out new noises all the time now - the last few days you have been working on "bbbb," and this morning you kept clicking your tongue. You are also working on your wave - we've been waving at you lately whenever we leave or go into another room, and just as of last night, you have started to do something that looks like you're trying to wave back. So far it looks more like you're trying to quickly fling your whole arm toward me, but we think that before too long, you will figure out how to make it look more like a wave. You're very smart, we can tell.

One day a couple of weeks ago, you and I shared our first laughing fit. We were sitting on the bed, and you were on my lap, facing me, and something I did made you laugh, so I started to laugh, too. My laugh made you laugh some more, which made me laugh some more, and it went on and on like that, the two of us laughing and laughing, with less and less time between each laugh, until we were just sitting there, smiling at each other, laughing at our own laughter. We laughed so long that my belly hurt from it, and later I thought that hopefully that would be the first of many times (countless times) that you and I laugh together until our bellies hurt from laughing.

I told you this the other day, but I should tell you again now, because I know you won't remember what I said (and you don't understand the words yet anyway): I love you. I will always love you. Your smile will always make me happy. I promise.

And so, when you were six months old, this is how it is, and this is how I feel. You are beautiful and wonderful and amazing and perfect.

Love,
Mom

P.S. Well, perfect except for the other night when you woke up at least 13 times in the night. That wasn't so perfect. In fact, that was the opposite of perfect, and headed down the spectrum toward hell. But we don't need to talk about that, because that is never happening again, right?  Right.  Of course not.  Ok, then. 

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.

Pregnancy Journal Entry 20 - July 23, 2003

Dear child-to-be,

This is what our life is like now, while you are only the size of a grape, and before you have ever seen the world. 

Your father-to-be Geoff and I live in a medium-sized two bedroom apartment on the north side of Chicago, just to the west of a neighborhood called Andersonville. The apartment seems a little on the small side to me, but that's only because we moved there from a gigantic two-bedroom apartment several months ago, at the end of March. The apartment we live in now is warmer and cozier and brighter than the old one, and there is a grassy backyard (the other apartment's yard was completely paved over!). We also love the neighborhood we're in now - people are friendlier, streets are quieter, and we can walk to restaurants and shops. Right now there are daisies and some kind of pink roses blooming in our back yard.

Right now we sleep in the smaller of the two bedrooms. The larger bedroom has our guest bed and our computer in it. We think, though, that before you are born, we will switch bedrooms. The smaller bedroom, which is painted a pale blue, will be your room. We may switch before too long, actually - the smaller bedroom is so small that I almost have to walk an obstacle course when I get up out of bed. The night before last, I stepped on the dog's paw when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I'm concerned that as you grow inside me, and as I get bulkier and (even) less graceful, I will find it harder and harder to get in and out of bed, and there might even be a danger that I'll hurt myself.

It's not just Geoff and I who live in our apartment - we have a dog, Molly, and two cats, Zellie and Ichabod. We dote on the dog, and we think that as you grow up, you will love her, too. Molly sleeps on an old folded up comforter at the foot of the bed (which is why I stepped on her the other night!). The cats are not as friendly or energetic as the dog, but I bet you'll think they are pretty interesting. Ichabod plays with Molly sometimes, and Zellie makes a mewing sound that's almost like barking.

I'm a lawyer. I work at a title insurance company in the claims department, and although I don't love my job, I do like the people I work with and the work schedule. I work from 9 to 5 each day, and never on weekends. Your future dad works part-time as the music minister at a church in Oak Park, and part-time in the privileges department of the library at Northwestern University, which is where he's getting his doctoral degree in music composition. (I also went to Northwestern, for law school.)

We got married November 16, 2002. (I bet that will seem like prehistoric times to you, when you get older.) When we found out I was pregnant with you, almost four weeks ago, we had only been married for about 7 1/2 months. That's pretty soon, I know, but we decided that the time was right, and that if we could help it, we didn't want to wait any longer for you. Also, we have been together quite a bit longer than the amount of time we've been married. In a little over a week, on August 1st, we will have been together for five years (your father moved all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where your grandparents, uncle, aunts, and other relatives on your dad's side live, to be with me, and I am still so grateful!). We have been talking about you for years.

We both really like food (which makes it hard for us to diet). Your father cooks a lot more often than I do. When he cooks, he usually puts a lot of effort into it, and the meals he makes are almost always extremely delicious and a little bit out of the ordinary. When I cook, I usually make breakfast (French toast, banana pancakes, eggs, biscuits) or desserts (chocolate chip cookies, cake, pie).

I like to take a lot of pictures - I'm sure you'll find this out first hand. Right now I have eight rolls of film waiting to be sent off to be developed. It's always like magic to me when I get the pictures back and see what I've captured on film (even though I don't ever like every picture, I always like the process, and I always find some pictures that I really love). I hope that someday I will be a photographer for a living, and then I will quit my job in the claims department. Or if not a photographer, I would like to be a writer.

Geoff composes music. Right now he is composing a soundtrack for a one-hour documentary about shipwrecks on Lake Superior, and last night he played some of the music for me. I don't really know what it's like to be able to compose music - when I listened to him play, I just kept being amazed by how beautiful it sounded, and how evocative the music was. It's like magic to me, hearing music that he's composed. I hope that someday Geoff will be a composer for a living.

The same day that we found out that I was pregnant with you, the piano that Geoff had bought a few days before was delivered. He plans to give piano lessons (he used to do that, back when he lived in Halifax), but so far the only one he's given lessons to is me. So while you are growing, I am learning to play the piano. I'm a beginner, so I'm not playing any music that is too exciting, but I'm having a lot of fun learning something new. I am most of the way through Book One of the piano book series we're using. Maybe by the time you are here, I will be up to Book 4 or 5! Woo!

There are things that we worry about, but they usually don't bother us too much. We worry about money sometimes - I'm in a lot of debt from law school, and Geoff will have a lot of debt from graduate school, too. I hope that's something you don't have to worry about too much, although I suppose almost everybody worries about money a little bit. I worry about my weight - I have always been pretty healthy, and still am, but I'm overweight by around fifty pounds or a little more. Sometimes I feel like being overweight makes me ugly, but deep down I don't believe that is true, and your father says that I am beautiful, no matter what. I know that we will think that you are beautiful no matter what, too, and I hope that we can help you be more self-confident about your looks than I have been (especially if you are a girl - it seems like it's harder for girls to be confident about the way they look than it is for boys). After you are born, I have a goal to lose weight. But I also have a goal of being happier about the way I look, no matter what I weigh. If I want you to be confident in the way you look, I think I should work on my own attitude.

And I admit I'm a little worried about you - having a successful pregnancy, giving birth to you, taking care of you, raising you. But the amount of my happiness about you far surpasses any amount of worry I'm feeling. I want you to know you were always wanted, and always loved, and always worth it. Even now, before we've met you.

This letter is kind of weird, and I guess writing it is more for me than for you. I woke up in the night last night at 4:00 a.m., and I couldn't get back to sleep, and this is what I was thinking about. I was thinking about how to write a snapshot of our lives right now, right at this moment, in a way that was both general and detailed, and in a way that might make sense to you someday. I was thinking about how I want to remember the snapshot of our lives right now - I want to remember where we lived, what were some of the things we did, and what we think about you this early in my pregnancy. It probably doesn't matter if you know a lot of this or not.

Mostly, I want you to know that we are happy, and we love each other very much. We laugh a lot together. I am more comfortable with Geoff than with any other person in the world, and I think he feels the same way about me. We don't think this world (or this country, or this city) is perfect, of course, but we think the world is a pretty amazing place. We know lots of people - family and friends - who we love and who love us. They will love you, too. We're excited about adding you to our small family. You're not even born yet, and we think we love you already, but I know that whatever love we feel for you now is nothing compared to how we'll feel after you are born.

Love,
your mom-to-be