The Love Of My Life

It was a long road in labor, which will be the subject of another post that I will write when I need the catharsis of writing about the experience, but let's do first things first.

Here's my daughter, Sadie Anne, on the second day of her life. She's on her way to being the most photographed baby in the world. The picture above was taken by the professional photographers that come to the hospital, spend 10 minutes in your room, and walk out several hundred dollars later. I am so glad we did these pictures because already everything is a blur and I want to remember everything about her and these early days.

My impressions of her so far is that she is very alert and very good at evacuating her bowels. She had already make a poop before I ever held her in my arms. As a person who has spent well over half her life constipated, I couldn't be more overjoyed by the murky content of her diaper. So, you can see that I have already made the leap into the part of parenthood where poop becomes a very, very big deal. Sadie is like her dad in that she would rather sleep than eat. (Her mom would rather eat than do anything.) I am happy to let her curl up next to our bodies and sleep, but there we are still in the hospitals and the nurses are very big on SCHEDULES. The protocol is that Miss Sadie must eat every 2-3 hours and we are asked to record the her feeding information on a dry erase board in our room. Twice I have pushed the feeding because it would have taken a stun gun to rouse her-- and stun guns are frowned upon at this particular hospital-- and the nurses went all One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest on me with tales about low body weight and how they will supplement with formula, which another set of nurses (and the La Leche League) said would ruin Sadie's life forever.

Physically, her newborn picture looks a lot like my newborn picture. I see Jeff's chin, eyes and ears on her. I see my nose for sure. She's quite tall for her age (21. 5 inches) so that has to be Jeff too. She's got the most gorgeous long black hair that has a slight wave in it. I can't wait to see what kind hair she has once it gets going. For obvious reasons, we are hoping she gets my hair and not Jeff's, but since she already has more and longer hair than Jeff, we're probably safe on that score.

Emotionally, she's mature as well. She's really good at letting us know what isn't working. Being cold is not something she'll tolerate quietly, which should make winter very interesting. She's ok with a massively dirty diaper, but DO NOT deny her the breast when she's ready to eat. She's pretty comfortable with having a camera stuck in her face every 5 seconds, which is good because we have more cameras than people at any given time. She loves to be swaddled tightly in multiple blankets, but does not like her feet rubbed at all. I can't believe it's only been 56 hours and I can already name things she does and does not like.

As for me, emotionally I am all over the board. Yesterday (Day 2 of Sadie's life) was a dark night of the soul for me. The physical toll from labor, the pain medication, the sore nipples, and the bone crushing fatigue started to wear me down yesterday and I was overcome by all of it. Luckily, people more rested than myself encouraged me to get some sleep and after almost 5 hours, I am literally a new person. When I get very tired, I forget how insane and despairing I get and I can longer remember that missing lots of sleep is practically lethal for me.

Today, I am so in touch with the joy it almost hurts. She's so precious and little and I can't believe she's ours. I can't believe we get to watch her grow and change and become her own little person full of life and love and thoughts and preferences of her own.

My favorite moments are after her feedings when we lay skin to skin (big deal with baby experts to lay skin to skin with baby to promote bonding and breast feeding) with my little baby and watch her mouth move inscrutably while she sleeps, utterly trusting me for her every need. In those quiet moments, when Jeff joins us in some family quiet time, I can say with greater certainty than ever before that there is nowhere else I would rather be and no two people more important to me. I hope to hold them close to me all the days of my life.