How the Older Boys are Handling their New Baby

Bringing home a new baby is always interesting. The boys’ reactions are pretty varied. Porter: We’ll start with him because it’s hardest on the current youngest. Porter already hasn’t been feeling his best (a little cough and congestion), but couple that with a baby, and poor thing. He wanted to touch the baby a lot…

Harlan’s Birth Story–Successful (if Long) VBAC

Usual caveats apply; I’m not too graphic, but if you don’t like birth stories as a genre, don’t expect much else from this post. Birth is such an amazing process, not only because it brings a new and beautiful life but also because it’s a test of one’s ability to adapt to changing conditions and…

Spring Break! (and some False Labor) (and 37 week ultrasound results)

This post is heavy on the pregnancy news and light on pretty much everything else. Yay! I’m on Spring Break. I was a little torn, hoping baby would come while I had some time off to enjoy him, but also hoping that I’d get to just do a whole bunch of things I want to…

Making Space for Baby

It’s no secret that we do like the Konmari approach to tidying and decluttering of one’s space. It’s hard when the holiday means that there will be new stuff that we want to use and keep for awhile. (I also have bags of clothes that fit me regularly in the attic, but I have drawers…

A Lot of Exciting Things

Porter says many new things, and some old things. I’m going to try to write them all here. Ball, Nana (banana), Mo, No, Yeah, Cheee (Cheese), Dada, Mama, Byebye, nose, NiNi (Night night). He isn’t super consistent on talking because he really prefers to point and grunt, and have you guess. But it’s awfully cute…

Why You Need a Doula, Even for a Cesearan, and Some Other Thoughts

I never had a doula for my first two deliveries, mostly because I didn’t know how helpful one could be in making sure I would understand what was happening calmly and rationally. I think it would have helped, especially with Seamus’s birth, and in the aftermath of Gilbert’s. When we moved to the DC area…

Porter Pops Out

We welcomed Porter Bret at 2:02 pm on July 22, 2014. He was 8 lbs, 5 ozs, 21.5 inches. He came in a very unexpected way! It’s a birth story, so the usual caveats apply–don’t read it if you don’t want to know. There are pictures at the bottom. If you’ll recall, we left Porter’s…

Seamus’s Birth Story (Only Five Years Late)

Seamus was six months old when I started this blog, so I never wrote about his birth. He’s been asking lots of questions about birth, and we had explained to him that a baby gives off signs when it’s ready to be born, and then the muscles in the uterus squeeze hard, and then finally…

Quick Takes that are mostly not Whiny

1. Gilbert is already planning for his birthday. He wants “3 inside of 1” oil for his present. I’m not sure what he wants it for, but he does have a lot of items to fix. He also wants a lefty baseball mitt (luckily, Seamus found one at the thrift store the other day, and…

39 Week Visit

It’s easy to forget that I’m not actually past the due date with this baby. I think it’s because I have been on edge with the start, get strong, and then just stop contractions on four different evenings. Last night I was sure things were happening. He moved low and there was a lot of…