happy valentine's day, Cari

2019 in review

Despite keeping notes for this post all year, it's January 11th 23rd 25th and I still haven't published this yet, so it's time to cut corners, skip pictures and accept all of the other posts I meant to write, but did not and therefore cannot link here.  2019, another year of the pig, was a good and busy year for us. 

Here are the kids at the beginning and end of the year.

Travel

We took one big international trip and went to Boston, but otherwise stayed in western WA this year.

• Feb: Azores, Portugul and Boston        
• I'm so happy Jack blogged about our hikes from his phone during the trip, because we have yet to write anything else about the trip: hike 1, hike 2, hike 3, hike 4, hike 5, hike 6
• Mar:  Boston again (just me and Dd) <link>
• May: Fort Worden cabin over Memorial Day with two other families
• July: Deception Pass camping, Dd's first camping trip at nine months
• Aug: camping for four nights at Newhalem in the North Cascades, our longest camping trip in quite a while.   Our friends joined us for one night and my sister for two. <link>
• Bainbridge (just me and Dd) with my sister <link>
• Poulsbo for two nights in a nice airbnb, while my parents were also there with friends
• Sep: Mt Rainier, Paradise Lodge (just me and J)
• Nov: Cama Beach cabin with Jack's mom and stepdad
• Dec: Cle Elum (just me and D) with my parents for some snowshoeing and sledding

Books, Music and Entertainment

• best solo read by J: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
• best solo read by C: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• best book we read together: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• best book we read to D: Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat (according to the grown ups)
• In January we were listening to Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on repeat with D and he knew almost all of the lyrics.  It was fun but now he's over it.  
• Dd and I took music together classes in the summer and fall.   In the first class he was happy in the social setting but overwhelmed as soon as we started singing, which was surprising.  By the third class he loved it and particularly enjoyed banging sticks.  The xylophone was one of his favorite toys earlier in the year.

• D started piano in a relatively low investment way, with a before school, group class on keyboards.  He has learned some and we will see if he is motivated to take more lessons.
• Beyond a Garfield High school jazz band concert, I don't think we made it to any concerts.
• I thoroughly enjoyed watching Blood, Water, Paint put on by www.machatheatreworks.com, where Jack's brother is a production manager.   D and J also like their production of The Flight Before Christmas.
• Along with my mom and sister, we formed our own small book club and read four books to discuss in 2019.   We read Becoming, Where the Crawdads Sing, Kafka on the Shore and 99 Nights in Logar, the last of which we haven't discussed yet.
• In June I joined a fledgling book club, which has been really fun.  We read Becoming, as almost all readers I know did, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, [part of] Freedom Climbers, The Library Book,  A Gentleman in Moscow, [sort of] Wild Swans.
• I paid for a New York Times digital subscription, for the first time.  I feel so honest and grown up.
• D moved up to legos and for several months we had a "lego jail" set up for him in the living room.  In the fall we got the duplos out again and both kids are pretty happy playing with them.
• The best thing I saw on social media was the Cloud Appreciation Society facebook group, which is just amazing pictures of the sky from all around the world.
• D's progress on reading was one of the most rewarding things about the year.  We've been through all of the BOB books and some other random early readers.  A few times we witnessed the magic of D reading an easy picture book to Dd.
• I discovered this great local musician called Brandi Carlile.  Maybe you've heard of her?
• D has an ever growing playlist and we're all happy on car trips when he sometimes listens to the old iPod he got from my dad.  It means Dd can sleep and J and I can converse with each other.
• We got to go to the exciting Sounders MLS cup championship game.

• For the second year, we enjoyed the Seattle Summer Teen Musical, which was a Willy Wonka story.

School, Work, camps, daycare

2019 saw lots of family and friends hunting for jobs, but not us.  I spent most of 2018 and at least the first half of 2019 obsessing about childcare planning and options.  From March through September, Dd attended a center on Capitol Hill on Tuesdays and Thursdays.   As soon as he was old enough, at 12 months, he moved to four days a week at the neighborhood daycare D attended for several years.  Finally, we arrived at a stable and much simpler plan.  Meanwhile D started kindergarten in September.  These two major simplifications have put us back in the position of not needing to drive on a regular basis.  We do drive to D's school sometimes, but the school bus, city bus, biking and walking are all viable options as well.

first day of school

• I came back to work at the very end of February and managed to arrange to work 80% time through Dd's first birthday, in the beginning of October.
• A few weeks after I returned to work, we pulled the plug on D's three-mornings-per-week attendance at a French immersion preschool in Hillman City.  The drive and 9 am drop off broke me.   
• In the spring, Jack worked on Saturdays and watched Dd on Fridays for a few months.
• We had our first non-family (non-daycare center) babysitter who helped us out a few times a week in June.
• D was five during the summer and had many more summer camp options available to him.  He did a Will Smith music camp, a reading camp at the UW (a study where he must have been in the control group and didn't actually learn much of anything), a bike camp, science center camp and kindergarten jump start.
• We are thrilled that his school offers before and after school activities organized by the PTA.  He did piano and a cooking class in the fall.   So far, his after school care has a been a mix of these classes, grandparent help and one day a week of entertaining himself at home while I work for an hour or so at the end of the day.  
• I was happily shunted to full-time remote status at work, along with many of my co-workers, which was really not much of a change since I rarely made it to the office.  Also I switched projects   <link>
• Jack's best college friend came to work at his small firm, in a slightly surprising alignment of circumstances.

House, Car and Stuff

• We bought, and assembled huge new desks.  It's the first time we've had our own desks at home since we lived in Pittsburgh.
• Our leaky windows were fixed (thankfully under warranty) for either the third or fourth time.  It was the second time we had scaffolding set up on the west side of the house.  It was a multi-month production.  

scaffolding, behind us

• We turned a corner on the amount of baby stuff we have around the house and in the basement.  It was satisfying to ditch bulky things like the jumperoo, baby bath tub and second stroller.  Also Dd has grown so much that the differential in the kids' clothing sizes is much smaller, meaning we have way fewer in-between sized clothing stored.
• We hauled our loaner hot tub up on to the roof and got it hooked up this fall.
• Our darling cats flunked out of any kind of litter box convenience and refused to use wood pellet litter too, so we are back to the smelly drudgery of scooping the litter box.  Luna was actually good with alternatives but Toru just happily crapped on the floor when he didn't get his way.
• Within a block of our house, eleven new houses/units are being constructed, in place of three old single family homes.  We're grateful to have our little off street parking spot as the density will soon ratchet up.  I'm a bit tired of all the noise, since it's been going on for almost 18 months now, across the street.
• On the third floor we put up seven electric blinds (on just the west side) and another seven corded blinds in our bedroom.  It's a big upgrade for our bedroom from the various paper window coverings we've had up for the past several years.  

new blinds behind the borscht brothers

• We stepped our retirement savings up again, after slacking a bit during house construction and the aftermath.
• Somehow we managed to keep Dd sleeping in our bedroom until he was seven months old.  Then we moved him down to the first floor in the beginning of May.
• After months of preparing D's expectations we then had the kids switch bedrooms in December.   Our thinking was that it's good for them to not get too settled and inflexible and switching rooms has the added benefit of encouraging a deep clean and a reevaluation of all the detritus they, mostly D, have acquired.  Since we do not plan to move for many years, this kind of swapping is extra important.
• Lastly, I found the letter "H" from a nice alphabet puzzle that was complete at the time I packed it up in our apartment.  It only took three and a half years to get to the box that it had fallen into.
• We bought a snazzy new bike rack for our car and Jack got a new bike to replace the one that was stolen in 2018.  For D we also bought a "ride-along" thing that connects to a grown up's bike opening the door to more types of family bike rides.
• Our meyer lemon tree succumbed to pests :(
• Jack built an awesome permanent baby gate <link>

Recreation and Community

• Dd's first bike ride in our bike trailer was just before he turned six months old and we rode out to a park on Mercer Island.  In August our "Epic Family Bike Ride" took us twenty something miles, including some non-trail riding.

• While we didn't finish all of the trails on Cougar Mountain as we aspired to, we did hike there nine times.  <link>
• Jack got a new, much nicer, pitching machine which he enjoyed using in our boxy yard.
• Jack coached D's second season of T-ball and his throwing, catching and hitting are vastly improved.   His grandparents played a lot with him in our yard.  He's perfectly able to hit a slow-pitched ball. <link>
• In the fall D played soccer for the first time and had two practices a week and games on Saturdays.   Thankfully his grandma likes soccer and helped us out by taking him to practice once a week.
• Jack did the tunnel/viaduct 5k run with my sister and cousins, in February.  The rest of us walked through the tunnel a bit when it was opened.
• We snowshoed a few times as a family.
• Labor day weekend we celebrated Jack's 35th birthday with a kid-free game night <link>
• We ripped up most of the grass in our parking strip and planted a meadow mix, that did pretty well.  We really don't want to deal with cutting grass and flowers are nicer anyway.  Our japanese snowbell trees are still with us (and actually smelled good for the first time this year <link>) and our little Christmas tree that usually lives on the roof served us for a third Christmas.

• On the roof some of my favorite plants were the kale and lettuce and a jasmine plant that did pretty well.   We put in a north country blueberry bush but failed to plant more than one so only got about six blueberries.  The raspberries also failed to produce.  We've got a lot to learn about gardening still.  
• D and I volunteered planting trees at an Earthcorps site on the Duwamish river that my sister helps run.
• Of course 2019 was also an exceptional snow year.  I was the 3rd coldest February on record and Seatac airport got a total of 20 inches of Snow.  On the night of February 9th, Seattle got about 8 inches of snow.  We were happy to trudge to the bus stop in the snow to escape to the rain and wind of the Azores and to witness cleanup of a similar amount of snow in Boston.
• Jack hit two home runs!

Food and Health

• Our salad innovation was fresh mint in spinach salad with crunchy, spiced (packaged) chic peas and often cucumbers.
• I read a great New York Times article that convinced me to start steaming eggs in stead of hard boiling them.
• I sampled Oregon Grape berries from our little yard for the first time.  They are not poisonous but they are also not good.
• At the beginning of the year I was continuing the post-partum physical therapy I probably should have done after D was born.   Then I went back to work and I didn't prioritize it any more.  I did learn a lot from it that I am now applying to the MuTu system post-partum exercise program I started in early December, which I am optimistic about.
• Dd came down with a mild case of hand, foot and mouth disease over winter break. <link>

Friends and Family

Our parents had more health issues than usual in 2019.  My dad had a small surgery in January that was a follow up to his previous cancer surgery.  In June my mom passed out and broke her collar bone badly.  She then had surgery and a few months later bent the metal plate that had been put in.  Just before Christmas, Jack's step dad had an urgent surgery that had some complications and led to him being hospitalized much longer than expected.

Our visitors were:

• my aunt and uncle from Houston
• Jess and Adam visited from Ann Arbor/Chicago
• Meredith and Nathaniel from D.C.
• my cousin Jacob, after his college graduation

Other pivotal happenings were:

• My brother-in-law got an attending position in Seattle, which will keep them here for at least several more years, if not longer.   The job search process was harrowing and stressful, even to witness.  Just before the end of the year my sister also found a job that is off to a good start.
• Our good friends Read and Anne moved back to Seattle, from Portland.
• My uncle passed away after battling brain cancer
• A family we were becoming good friends with moved up to Alaska.  In doing so, the one existing friend D had who would have been at his elementary school, skipped town.
• My other brother-in-law, Jack's brother, moved out to his own place.
• Our good friends, who we normally see frequently, lived in China for several months, followed by some amazing travels in other parts of Asia.

parents know best?

Currently D resists direct guidance on many things.  Time will tell whether this is a phase or not, but he has his own opinions, even if often that opinion is something like "I'll watch any movie other than the one you both think I would really like" or "I don't like chapter books."

At the beginning of winter break I finally cajoled him in to letting me read aloud five minutes of this book, promising that I'd stop if he didn't like it.   Unsurprisingly he was hooked, but so were Jack and I.  Last night we finished about an hour after D's bed time.  Like so many books, it was a fairly random find.  My sister picked up the second book from this series in a little free library and gave it to us, which prompted me to buy the first book, Space Case, as a Christmas present.  Its vocabulary is way too advanced and it's a murder mystery, but hey, that's how you learn new vocabulary ... and um... other stuff, right?  The end was so suspenseful, that D insisted we both be present and stopped often to discuss and predict things.  Jack and I both love reading, read a lot as kids and are just ecstatic to have D excited about a book that is good enough that I found myself thinking about the plot even outside of bedtime.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571237-space-case

Dd meanwhile is quite excited about books and often asks for them, but quickly loses interest in most books that don't have a tactile element to them.  We love our little bibliophiles.

a little hand, foot and mouth

December 21st we were informed that Dd was exposed to hand, foot and mouth disease at daycare and on the 24th we realized that he had come down with it.  It is quite contagious. 

He had a very slight fever on Christmas eve, a terrible night on the 25th to 26th and a few days with trouble napping, but otherwise was normal.  His appetite was almost unaffected and as far as I can tell he didn't have sores in his mouth, on his hands or on his feet, but rather on his cheeks, his wrists, his elbows and his knees.  I was already taking a lot of time of work for D's school break so the main impact  was going a bit stir crazy as we avoided places with other kids and not getting to have time adventure with just D, without worrying about Dd's naps.

Best of all, D managed to not come down with it, although he has never had it.  Getting the two of them to not be in close contact while they play was impossible, although we tried.

Between this and other family illnesses, a few holiday gatherings were rescheduled in to January so this is the year where Christmas lasts a whole month!

Dd's 15 month vocabulary

We are having so much talking with Dd.  He produces new words almost every day.  Even with the best of intentions, families operate as comparison machines, so feel free to compare to what D was saying at this age: https://aglie.blogspot.com/2015/08/ds-15-month-vocabulary-update.html   There is quite a bit of overlap, as is not surprising, given that we have a similar day to day routine, including many of the same books.   Five months ago Dd was just getting started at talking: https://aglie.blogspot.com/2019/07/talking-in-3-2-1.html.

It's really rewarding to see signing pay off again and I love how excited he seems to communicate.  He never fails to speak or sign about the birds flying past our windows or the airplanes or sirens we can hear in the distance.

Our definition of a word is the same as it was for D.  These are words that have been observed by attentive observers, with a lot of context, but we are confident of his intent.  All of the words on this list have been observed multiple times.  Right now all of these words are one syllable (and even then not always complete) versions of the words.

spinoff

I've been at the same company for a decade now (!!!) minus seven months for our Grand Adventure in 2011-2012.  From 2014 through the summer of 2019 I worked almost exclusively on speech recognition for use in cars.

Nuance is famously acquisitive (Nuance_acquisitions_after_merger), buying up almost every speech competitor smaller than the big names like Apple/Microsoft/Google.   However this last year things went the other direction and they spun off our automotive work in to a new publicly traded company called Cerence.  While I was on leave I checked in with a coworker and learned of the impending split, but the catch was that we spent three or four months not knowing which people would go with the automotive work to the new company.  In the end, my project went but I stayed, so now I'm doing similar work on other speech domains.  From the time I came back to work in March until the middle of the summer, most of my times was spent training new Cerence people.  It was a massive undertaking to divvy up knowledge, tools, people and responsibilities.

Here's a slightly futuristic video promoting the new company.   Spoiler: it concludes with a flying car.

Last year we got a new CEO after 13 years of the same leadership, so in addition to the spinoff, a lot of other things have changed at work. We have better benefits, and new perks like charity matching and volunteer time.  The leadership is working hard to change the company culture as well and most of it has actually impressed me, though it would be easy to write it off as corporate mumbo jumbo.  

Oh, and since August I've been full time remote, which means I go in to the office one or two times a month when there's a good reason to go in, and I no longer have my own cubicle.  Fine by me!

cougar mountain hiking and google map fun

We set a family goal to hike all of the trails of Cougar Mountain in 2019.  After another good hike yesterday (about 5 miles since we wanted to go down a couple missed spur trails for efficiency's sake), here are our completed trails:

Ok, we have quite a lot still to do in the last two months of the year, but it will be fun to see how far we get.  We got D motivated to finish yesterday with promises of a night hike with flashlights to come... pretty easy since with daylight savings time over, darkness will be coming early.

In addition to plotting out a big map of the park we can mark up at home, I am having fun curating a google map of the hikes, complete with the color auto-gradient above, based on date.  This also lets me do fun things like export the lines into google earth to get the 3D view.

Custom google maps have become my go-to trip planning tool, as well.  For our Azores trip, I found hike GPS files and pulled them into a map of Sao Miguel, giving us lots of options depending on what we felt we could handle, and the weather, on any given day.

Conversely, our trip to Scotland was planned down to exactly the bus stop and routes we would use in a google map (Cari had a spreadsheet, too, but I say ppppppbbbbfff to spreadsheets).  Adults only, and we were prepared for weather :)

Even for the Azores, it was pretty easy to find path files on the internet to load into the map.  For Scotland (and Washtington state- WTA maintains a database), it is very easy and fun (for me, clearly).

hot tub time

We are the temporary custodians of our friends’ hot tub.  It is a soft sided tub that weighs 65 pounds when empty so the two of us were able to tie it up and haul it up 3.5 stories to the roof ourselves.

Jack, in particular, has always planned on an eventual hot tub so the roof is engineered for one.  It has been pleasant on these rainy evenings this week.

35 goes 3 for 5 on his 35th

Since Jack is 54.25 weeks younger than me, he is fated to always hit the traditional milestone birthdays about 54.25 weeks after I do.  That inspired me to celebrate his 35th more than usual.  His baseball jersey number has been 35 on almost every team he's been on since the beginning of high school.   Also, Jack threw me a nice surprise party for my 30th so a party for him was overdue.  This year on his birthday I wasn't 20 months pregnant (2018) and we weren't in the middle of moving out of an apartment and in to a barely finished construction zone with a toddler (2016).  All this added up to a good birthday to celebrate.

Late August and early September are always a busy time for us with travel, birthdays, daycare closures and baseball.   Often there is a stretch of August where Jack has 3-4 games in a seven day period.   Then in September it is the playoffs, which means we won't know when his games are ahead of time.   It's complicated.   We squeezed a kid-free birthday party game night in just before labor day weekend, on a night guaranteed not to have baseball.   Games are such a treat.

Pictionary with three teams and all-plays!

Jack is cringing with delight because that is what Cards Against Humanity does to you.

We're both wearing number 35 here. 

Then, on his actual birthday Jack hit three for five, with three singles and the day was capped off with the most memorable lightning storm in Seattle.

Better yet, Jack's baseball season was book-ended by hitting two home runs, for the first time in a dozen years.   Fortuitously the first one is on video thanks to Jack's stepmom!   Overall he did less walking and base stealing than some other recent years but also hit more doubles and home runs than usual too.  His stats were 0.364/0.456/0.455.   The second home run was in the penultimate playoff game.  His team finished second for the third time in the last four years.  Someday they'll make it all the way.

PRO TIP: before clicking the play triangle on this video, right click on the three dots in the upper right corner and click "loop."  Otherwise, YouTube will send you in to the abyss of semi-related videos.

the story of Dd's pregnancy and birth

As Dd’s first birthday approaches, there are some things I’ve been meaning to share and document about his birth and our pregnancy.

I am not accustomed to feeling proud of my body but both of my kids’ births have been powerful exceptions to that. 

From the large volume of birth stories and statistics I have heard and read over the past five or six years I know that childbirth is a nebulous mix of choices, actions and uncontrolled circumstances.  Most of life consists of a similar blend, but pregnancy and birth are tidily defined and acute.  This is to say that we can never be sure how our choices affect our results.

Our kids’ birth experiences have been very positive, with delightful outcomes. I know enough to grateful for my good fortune and genuinely compassionate for women with less positive birth experiences, yet at the same time I want to celebrate some of the things I am most proud of here.

My pregnancy went smoothly except for a few rocky parts in the beginning.  At five weeks while walking up the steep part of Yesler Way from downtown I had alarming cramps and bleeding.  I spent a miserable weekend worrying continuously, rather than just frequently, about a miscarriage.  Then an early ultrasound confirmed Dd’s strong heartbeat.  At this point I moved from my Fit 4 Mom HIIT classes to the Fit 4 Baby classes, which I did once a week up until a month before Dd was born.   Exercising with other pregnant women was fun, motivating and just the right amount of amusing.  Picture pregnant ladies doing burpees or planks where their stomachs touch the ground.  I learned that jumping consistently made me bleed, so I modified exercises and the class was great for me.

Then at 20 weeks the ultrasound suggested Dd was in the 99^th percentile for size.   I was able to look back and see that D was also massive at 20 weeks. Some of my providers got very serious about this and vacillated between saying things about my “proven pelvis” (Thanks D!) and terrifying complications like shoulder dystocia.  They do not recommend elective c-sections for large babies, but I think it is still done.

Estimating fetal size is a very inexact science.  Ultrasound size measurements can be off by as much as 30% and the estimate from the hands of an experienced midwife are actually more accurate.  More importantly, shoulder dystocia is about the interaction of the size of the baby and the size and of the mother, so it unfortunately happens with small babies too. 

I worked really hard to not let the specter of an 11 pound baby freak me out.  We took a refresher birth class and spent time rehearsing birth positions that open up the pelvis.  I was simultaneously worried about labor not progressing due to size and labor progressing too fast, based on the speed of my mom’s deliveries and on the relative speed of D’s birth, considering his size and status as a first-born.  Fear is not good for labor and I am really proud of how I trusted my body and kept my worries in check. 

I started off my pregnancy with Dd much heavier than I started off my first pregnancy, but I gained only half has much weight.  The concern about fetal size motivated me and I was trying to not gain too much, but really it was about 10 times easier than my recent non-pregnant weight loss experiences. 

Those same long terms weight struggles, a few injuries (knee, wrists) which somehow have felt like my own fault have eroded the confidence I once had in my body, which probably peaked at age 15 when I was a decent runner.  Birth and breastfeeding build me back up. 

Enough about pregnancy.  Now, for the record, here is the story of Dd’s birth.

As with D my labor began with three weeks of slow dilation, with no noticeable contractions.  This type of labor is absolutely not covered in any of the books and sites I read, which I found frustrating.  It felt like he could come any day and we were ready, especially since we didn’t want him to grow too big as we sailed past his due date.  Here's what I looked liked, one day overdue.

I had acupuncture twice, bounced on a yoga ball, walked, had my membranes swept 3-4 times and followed all of the other advice to bring on labor.  I worked until the day before my due date.  My parents returned from their trip to Maine without missing anything exciting.  We planned to have an induction, as with D, on Monday, Oct 1^st, when we were five days overdue.  Swedish was full though so Jack and I wandered around the Mount Baker neighborhood, looking at houses and waiting to see if space opened up.  It turns out that my water broke with a slow leak during the walk but it was really hard to tell and the advice on how to check didn’t really work.  Dd was pushing down hard enough that hardly anything leaked out.   Kathy came to take care of D in the event that we got a spot, then returned home again.

In retrospect we were glad that there was no room for us at the hospital on Monday because Tuesday morning I woke up at 2:30 am with strong contractions that were about a minute long and about 12 minutes apart.  Kathy came back to watch D again.

Even with my history, the midwife on call suggested we wait until contractions were 5-6 minutes apart.  I was really not okay with that idea because I expected things to go fast and I was supposed to have an antibiotic administered four hours before birth for strep B.  She was accommodating enough to let us come in anyway, so we left for the hospital at 4 a.m. on a clear starry Tuesday morning.

My contractions were still 12 minutes or more apart, but they were strong.  At the hospital a few miles from our house we found our way out of the labyrinthine parking garage to the room waiting for us, arrive at 4:30 a.m.  They got the IV in on the first try, unlike the hour it took with D’s birth, and I started the antibiotic at 5.

The contractions sped up to an interval of about 6 minutes.  I threw up a bunch all over the floor and a little bit in to a trash can.  Jack asked me several times if I wanted to walk around a bit, just like a good birth partner.  I definitely did not want to.  I leaned back against him for a while and somehow managed a bizarrely deep sleep in between contractions.  We didn’t know my water had already broken they did not check my cervix (which they do as little as possible to avoid contamination).

We talked with the midwife, Hilary, about waiting to see how things progressed and then breaking my water at about 7:30 am.  Around 7:40 she checked my cervix and I was already 7.5 cm and we learned my water was already broken.  I was feverishly hot and I threw up a bunch, again, although my stomach was empty.  Yuck.  I rambled about epidurals.  Then I got in the tub, which felt a little better.  The contractions were much more frequent.  After 10-15 minutes in the tub I got out to use the toilet, and quickly realized I had mistaken my bodily urge.  It was time to push, RIGHT THEN.  Jack and I were on our own in the bathroom.  He called everyone back in, using complete sentences, which seemed excessive given the urgency I felt.

They got me back in bed, confirmed I was at 10 cm and Dd was born about five minutes later at 8:05 (?).  I think I only had two or maybe three contractions in the bed, but Hillary had me push continuously, rather than with contractions.  I yelled a lot and it was a blur.  Jack did not get to catch him, because of the speed and the fetal monitor cutting out.  Hillary turned him as he came out, to unwrap the cord.  He was quiet and fairly blue, but he came right up on my chest for the first hour and nursed pretty well.   We found out he was a boy.  Happily he was a whole pound less than D, though still big enough that they checked his blood sugar often. 

We went home about 28 hours after birth.  Jack and I were eager to go for many reasons, including the fact that we both had painful sore throats, presumably from the AC in the building.  In no way do I wish I’d had a home birth, but the hospital is certainly not a place for peace and quiet.   Nurses, doctors, midwives, audiologists and photographers came in.   I was amused to realize that we didn’t know the last names of our midwives, with whom I was intimately acquainted.  The visits from family were welcome interruptions.

I felt glad that I insisted we come in when we did and to have chosen providers who respected our instincts.  They said three hours of antibiotics was close enough to four to be protective.

The immediate recovery was way faster than with D, though the longer term changes to my body linger.    Nursing a newborn is a mix of mother and baby learning and I was surprised by how much my experience helped.  Dd grew beautifully.   Though he was smaller than D at birth, he was bigger by three months and now, at 11 months, has achieved the 99^th percentile predicted by that unnerving ultrasound.