Finally here!

I can't believe it's been a week since we welcomed our little lady into the world. This first week has been a mixture of amazement, love, exhaustion, frustration, lots of learning, and a lot of mesmerized staring at this beautiful baby that we get to call our own.

The mind does play funny tricks on you - I'm already forgetting the painful parts of labor and pregnancy. I couldn't have done it without Sean and our doula, Lisa - they were so amazing throughout the 20 hours that I labored, helping me through each contraction and encouraging me when I was tired and sick (I couldn't keep any fluids or food down the whole time). At hour 15, I decided to get an epidural, which made me feel so much better, and helped with the nausea. I did end up getting a fever from the epidural, and had to get antibiotics in case the fever was a result of an infection. This meant that V had to get antibiotics once she was born, too, and she ended up having to stay in the NICU because the regular special care nursery that they would normally keep her in to monitor her was too full. We were disappointed not to be able to keep her in our hospital room for the first few days, but visited her in the NICU every three hours to feed her and hang out for a bit. Honestly, after seeing all those tiny, fragile babies in the NICU, it was hard not to feel grateful for our very healthy baby, even if her first few days weren't what we imagined them to be.

V is a lovely, chill baby so far - she mostly just sleeps, poops and eats, and cries very little. My favorite time with her is when we wake her up to feed her - she goes through a whole stretching routine and makes the funniest faces while doing so. It's still kind of crazy to think that we are parents - I wonder how long it is before the surprise wears off, until this new phase feels like a natural part of our lives?

Week 34 and the Great Blizzard of 2010

Everybody already knows that Mother Nature dumped a huge amount of snow on NYC at the beginning of the week. I had been hoping for a white Christmas, and the storm definitely scratched that itch. We had plans to have dinner with a friend, so we wandered out into the blizzard and walked to the west village to a very empty (and tasty!) Mexican restaurant. All of these photos were taken on our way back home. Keep in mind that NYC got 20" of snow by the time all was said and done, and our photos were taken at about 8" of accumulation.

Other than the wind (which was brutal!) it was a lot of fun to walk through the storm - everything was so pretty, and what human beings you did run into were enjoying themselves, too. There was definitely an air of comradery that night - my brother and his wife were visiting from North Carolina and commented on how the snow made everyone so much more friendly. They were supposed to fly out on Monday but got stuck here until Thursday - it was nice to have a few extra days with them!

Week 31

Zut alors! I'm getting big!

The past few weeks I've found myself feeling very...impatient. At this point I am close (9 weeks!) but still not really all that close (9 weeks!). Patience has never been one of my virtues, and pregnancy is the ultimate waiting game. Now that I am closing in on the end, I find myself frustrated with how much longer there still is to go. I am just really looking forward to meeting this little being that has taken up residence in my belly. That and I can't wait to be able to sleep on my back again...

Week 29

I keep popping the buttons off of my coat. Gah! It might be time to invest in some maternity wear...

Week 28

We missed week 27 - whoops! These days I always find myself a little bit surprised when I see my side profile - I don't feel as big as I apparently am. The view from up here (looking down at my belly) doesn't seem nearly as substantial as the view from the side...

Week 26 and Halloween

It was Halloween weekend, and in the grand tradition of many Cornell architecture kids, we built some bad-ass costumes. During our college days, there were no less than three big costume events every year - Halloween, a Beaux-Arts ball, and Dragon Day. People always went all out for Dragon Day, which is where our love for dressing up and making costumes originates.



We brainstormed for weeks on ways to incorporate Anna's belly into a Halloween costume - we were going to a Hollywood-themed party, and wanted the costume to have something to do with the theme...Someone on twitter suggested the idea of capitalizing on the bump with a light bulb costume, which we thought was clever, and we figured I could complement Anna's costume by being a lamp (we'd be props, get it?). But after sketching it out, I thought I'd end up looking more like a royal guard from Alice in Wonderland or some sort of roman centurion armor, so in the end we settled on the hippo and the alligator characters from Fantasia's Dance of the Hours. It was a fun costume to wear, but it was super hard to gauge distances with the masks, so we ended up bumping heads a bunch of times.



It took me three evenings of cutting and gluing cardboard, taping, and painting, but I think the alligator/hippo heads came out pretty nicely in the end. Unfortunately, most people haven't seen Fantasia since they were kids, so not many people knew what we were until we told them (except for one girl at the party who got it immediately because she used to watch the movie all the time as a kid).



So now we are brainstorming for ideas for next year. We will have an unruly six month old to deal with, so our team costume will have to accommodate her. We're thinking about Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and of course - backpack Yoda.

Week 25

This week we were able to feel what we are pretty sure are the baby's elbows and knees, or some joint along those lines. The movements they make are different from the typical kicks I've been feeling - more like something sliding around instead of kicking...And if we push on the area of the belly that those movements are happening in, we often hit a hard spot, which will move when we touch it. It's all so weird (and wonderful!)!

Week 24

Sean and I are struggling to come up with a name for BN. We have a handful of names that are contenders, but coming to a consensus on any one is harder than I thought it was going to be. I can't even make up my mind about which one I like best - my preference seems to change on a daily basis. I'm kind of commitment phobic - I often get buyer's remorse, it takes me forever to make a decision and once I do I start second guessing it - this drives Sean nuts, as I'm sure you can imagine. Settling on a name for our baby is a pretty permanent thing (though I suppose she could change her name if she really wanted to). If only the baby could name herself!

Week 23

This last weekend baby and I went on a solo trip to Miami. I recently started freelancing again for Notcot, so I was out there for a hotel opening, and it was a fun and relaxing work/play weekend full of good eats, a lovely hotel, and time on the beach. Sean enjoyed a totally bachelor weekend of playing video games, watching movies that he couldn't pay me to sit through, skateboarding and eating ramen noodles.

As nice as Miami was, it felt great to get home. It was an especially nice homecoming because Sean came all the way out to the airport to meet me, cooked me a lovely dinner, and bought me my favorite fruit from chinatown, a pomelo. I'm super lazy when it comes to my fruit - if it involves more than peeling or cutting it down the middle, I probably won't eat it, but I love pomelo so much that I will gladly spend the 10 minutes or so it takes to get the deliciousness out of its skin and onto a plate. If you see one at your local grocery store, you should totally grab one - so tasty (it's citrusy, tangier than an orange, but sweeter than a grapefruit)!

Week 21

This week you have been plenty active - lots of movement in my belly going on. In fact, Sean was talking to you one morning this week and you rewarded him with a punch/kick/hi-five to the mouth! He said it was the highlight of his day.

My brother, Ben (your uncle!) and his wife, Sarah, came to visit us this weekend and they brought you your first comic book! It's called Princeless - a comic book by Jeremy Whitley and Luis Franco about a princess who is smart, strong and adventurous - a princess who is capable of rescuing herself. I hope that you grow up to be an adventurous, self-sufficient young lady (though not one who is afraid to ask for help if you need it).

Week 20 - hump week - halfway there!

It's hard to believe that we've passed the halfway point. The last 4.5 months seem to both have flown by but also taken their sweet time - I guess that is inevitable when you are counting weeks (kind of like watching for water to boil, right?). 20 more weeks seems like forever, but I'm sure it will go quickly, especially with the holidays coming up. These days it seems like my body is changing all of the time, and so we've been trying to take a photo a week to document the changes.

This week we found out that we are having a girl. Knowing the gender makes the baby feel so much less abstract. That and I've been feeling more and more of her movements lately. It feels less like little pokes now, and more like butterflies, as I've heard it described - it's a weird sensation. Sean felt her kick for the first time this week, too. I was surprised - I didn't think that her movements would be strong enough to be felt outside my belly. I guess she was listening when I asked her to grow stronger.

No longer an it!

We had our big anatomy ultrasound yesterday. They looked at everything - bones, fingers, toes, brain, bladder, heart, etc...The technician couldn't tell us anything, but to the layman it seems like everything is developing correctly, and the baby is exactly on target for being 19 weeks and 2 days old. Yay!

The baby was being stubborn (or lazy and comfortable?) and wouldn't change positions for the technician, no matter how much coughing, hopping or changing of positions that I did. Finally, it shifted position just enough that the technician was able to confirm that we are having a baby girl! We're super excited, and a little terrified (teenage girls, anyone?).




In honor of knowing our baby's gender, I put together a few of the things I would like to get (or make something similar ourselves) for the babies "nursery" (in quotes, because we live in a 400sq ft. studio and she's basically going to get the space where sean's desk is now). It's not full of particularly girly things, but we're not super into pink, and all of the other traditionally girly items out there.

Zen Blocks: Stackable wooden shapes.
Bud Rubber Ducky
Themis Mobile, by Clara von Zweigbergk.
Eames Rocker (more for me than the baby!).
Animal Cork Memo Board.
Motif Cubes: They claim there are 68,719,476,736 possible combinations for the blocks!
Petit Collage pennants.

Week 19

I haven't really had any pregnancy cravings yet, but maybe this counts - tonight I had a late evening hankering for a bagel with cream cheese, and scrambled eggs and mustard. Of course, it could just be that breakfast is awesome at any time of day...

Tomorrow we find out if this baby is a boy or a girl. Excitement!

Week 18

I'm now 18 weeks pregnant, and relatively "symptom free" at this point - somewhere between the nausea stage and the stage where you can feel the baby moving inside. I've had a few instances that I thought might have been the baby moving around - little flutters - but it's so light and infrequent that it's easy to convince yourself that it's just gas, or something along those lines. I'm looking forward to really feeling movements, because other than my growing belly, it's sometimes hard to believe that there's anything in there. Grow stronger, little one!