<<     July 2008    

Happy Birthday Nou!

She decided to join us two and a half weeks early on July 26th at 4:30 a.m. at home, in our bed, after fourteen and a half hours of labor (four and a half hours of actual, honest to goodness hard work...I know, I know...I got it ridiculously easy...). She was 6 pounds, 7 ounces and 18 inches long.

No medications, no interventions...the perfect, peaceful birth (not particularly quiet mind you, but no hospital bells and whistles, needles or drugs to dim or dampen the experience for me or for darling little Nou.

She is everything that is right with the world and I am madly, madly in love.

When it matters most

I'm a little late in sharing a brag about my darling husband who not only passed his recent PHP certification exam, making him one of only 3,000 some such smartypants on the planet, but finished the gruelling 90 minute exam in a third of the time provided.

Daily, I am more and more in awe of just how brilliant he is - building fabulously functional internet concoctions out of my own or a client's most abstract notions. No longer phased by the irony that he cannot seem to remember to see the garbage bin from our garage to the street each Friday...a major crime in some households, I suppose. After nearly three years of marriage I've learned to take a 'when it matters most' approach; and in the grand scheme of things, the universe gifted me big time when it brought Hamid and I together. This beautiful brainiac with his selective memory.

40 days and 40 nights

With just 5 weeks to go Nou seems to have 'dropped' (a bit early?) but I'm told she could just as easily move back up again...either way, she's got me peeing by the teaspoon every hour or so, 24 hours a day.

I started out this pregnancy with a very minimalistic approach. Not wanting to buy the anything-and-everything we're conditioned to go into debt for with the arrival of a new baby I made a list of the absolute necessities for Nou's first three months of life, and then thoughtfully added on a handful of personal must-haves like a fabulous diaper bag and a custom made moses basket and bedding. All in all, I've stuck to my list pretty religiously, only coloring outside the lines long enough to scoop up some wearable treasures for the baby at a garage sale and a custom rocking chair/ottoman which is totally necessary when you consider how important comfort is when one is going to be immobile for breastfeeding on a regular basis for the next two+ years. And of course, the rocker means I need a little table to hold books and water and whatnots to stave off boredom once nursing becomes less the religious experience I fully expect it to be and more part of our regular, everyday lives. Well, the table needed a tiny lamp...just in case we end up in there very late at night; and the tiny lamp happened to be part of a series, complete with matching floor lamp, which was equally adorable and simply couldn't be left behind.

But otherwise, I've done well and haven't bought into all the other 'stuff'. We did, of course, buy the organic Chinese prefold cloth diapers, some liners, a couple handmade wool diaper soakers (one in particular I am so in love with - lambswool pink and red stripes...so tiny you can't imagine there's any human small enough to make use of it), and some wonderful all-in-one diapers from Bum Genius...
You might cringe at the idea of washing diapers on a daily basis but I have no intention of outfitting my child with a poop receptacle that is still going to be present on the Earth when she's in her eighties, much less more than 1,000 of them over the course of a single year. Did you know it takes ONE FULL CUP of crude oil to create just ONE disposable diaper?? AND, they decompose after, oh, about 500 years... So, to spare the Earth yet larger piles of poopy plastic, and my tiny daughter the negative karma of being a litterbug from birth, I am learning how to lanolize wool diaper covers and fix a cloth diaper without pins, etc. etc. It's really quite fun (let's just hope it remains as much fun when the diapers are actually piling up with actual use...)