I know, everyone's been wanting an update, so here it is, with the warning that it is not for the faint-of-heart. For months, I've been reading books that casually use terms like "mucus plug," as if they were acceptable in polite company, so you may encounter such terms in this blog.

My estimated due date was Oct. 15, and I want to emphasize that this is an estimate. Yet many of my friends seemed to expect me to produce a baby by that deadline. Sorry, folks.

I suspected my baby would appear after the estimated due date, if only because the midwife, and the OB she referred me to, both said that the baby was measuring small for date. Now, I say the simplest explanation for that is that they got the date wrong, but the OB in particular seemed to find it more interesting to speculate that something was woefully inadequate in my baby's environment. This sort of slow growth, he said, was just the sort of thing they see in babies that seem to be doing OK, until they suddenly die shortly before their due dates. I was like, gee, thanks for the info. My midwife said that the OB was an old grouch whose grumblings were best ignored. She said it was a much more likely explanation that, as Bob and I are both small but healthy people, our baby would be small but healthy too.

On Saturday, October 18, I lost my mucus plug. Here I'd been imagining it as a sort of champagne cork, but it more closely resembled snot. I got all excited and called my midwife, leaving a message on her machine, then googled it. I found that losing my mucus plug is a sign that labor might start any week. I called my midwife back and told her not to bother answering my earlier message.

But the very next day, Sunday October 19, my water broke around 6:30. I managed to get to the bathroom in time, so no damage was done to the house. I was impressed at myself for handling that so neatly, but what I hadn't considered is that after the water breaks in the first impressive gush, then there's this constant drip of water after that, way too much water to be handled by feminine hygiene products. I sat on a towel and waited for contractions to start. They usually start before the water breaks, so I was like, let's get this show on the road already.

Now I might make a parenthetical comment here, and say that in a hospital birth, once the water breaks, the hospital generally puts some strict deadline on delivery. Like, they'll say that the baby has to appear within 12 hours or whatever. (The time limit can vary by hospital) This is because of the risk of infection to mother and baby, once that sealed-off barrier of water isn't there to protect them from bacteria. The advantage to going to a hospital in this case is that they'll have lots of drugs handy to hurry the delivery along, and if you don't make the deadline, they have the cesarian equipment all set up to go.

What hospitals don't tell you is that they themselves are often the cause of those dangerous infections. Hospitals are breeding grounds for all sorts of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Plus, with all the internal checks OB's generally do, they give the resident hospital bacteria a free ride upstream into the uterus.

So, I said no thanks to all that, and sat at home on my towel. (Have you read The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?) I got a pad of paper to write down my contractions, since the midwife said to call her when they'd been 5 minutes apart, and lasting a minute each, for an hour.

When timing contractions, first you have to know what a contraction feels like. Was that a contraction? Was that indigestion? Or do I have to go to the bathroom? If this is all contractions feel like, they're pretty lame. They were maybe 15-20 minutes apart, if that's what they were. Anyway, I waited excitedly for things to get more interesting. I took my towel and waddled the hall a bit, since walking is supposed to hurry things up.

By the wee hours of the morning, the contractions were strong enough that I didn't have to decide if each one counted or not, but they were still only about 10 minutes apart. I was getting tired. I tried to lie down to rest, but lying down made the contractions much more painful. Lying down between contractions felt fine, but lying down during a contraction was intolerable, and so was the act of sitting up during a contraction. So, I sat up or stood.

By Monday morning, I was getting tired of sitting up or standing, and just wanted some rest. Well no, I wanted my baby already, then some rest. My contractions, meanwhile, got further apart, as if the whole labor was just a false alarm. This would have been fine, except for my water being broken already. Even outside the hospital, it was only a matter of time before some opportunistic bacterium discovered this underutilized resource and moved in.

I took a few little naps Monday, and had some snacks.

By Monday evening, things finally got interesting. The contractions got more painful, and finally were 8, 7, 6 minutes apart. I wanted to walk to try to speed them up, but I felt too tired. Finally they were 5 minutes apart, mostly, for an hour. I threw up my snacks, timed a few more contractions, and called my midwife.

She was busy assisting another woman, whose labor was charging ahead at full speed. Bitch.

She dropped by anyway, then left to help the other woman. I don't remember the timing of all the details, but over the course of the labor, I was assisted by the midwife, her nurse, her apprentice, and another midwife who filled in when the first midwife was at the other birth. Plus my mom, who kept my spirits up by saying how much better this was than her hospital births, and Bob, via Skype video chat. With the 7-hour time difference, the interesting part of my labor was taking place at a reasonable hour for him.

I tried to drink some water or juice, but threw that up too. This is something really stupid my body always does, that just when I need energy or at least hydration, my stomach rejects it. And I was still leaking a little gush of water with every contraction, too. I don't know where it was coming from, since I hadn't kept water down for, like, a day. I started running a fever, and the midwife (the substitute midwife this time) mentioned how chapped my lips looked, both symptoms of dehydration. Chapped lips were the least of my concerns at that point. The fetal monitor said that the baby's heart rate was speeding up, which meant that it was stressed from the dehydration too. The midwife started talking about setting up an IV to rehydrate me, but I hate IVs, so I suggested taking some ondansetron instead, which was the anti-morning-sickness drug that kept me alive through the first half of this pregnancy. She looked it up, found it to be safe, and let me take it. It enabled me to keep some diluted juice down, which was a good thing.

This fetal monitor, by the way, was not some inconvenient machine they strap you into like in the hospital. This was a little hand-held thing that the apprentice would periodically hold on my belly, to hear the baby's heart. We made a very interesting discovery. You know how I'd been in such pain when I was lying down during a contraction? They midwifery team suggested I try lying down anyway, since I really needed the rest. So I tried it, but the fetal monitor said that when I had a contraction while lying down, the baby's heart rate got dangerously low. When I had a contraction while sitting up or standing, the baby's heart rate got slightly lower, which is normal, but not dangerously so. Apparently the baby and the umbilical cord were arranged in such a way that the combination of gravity and a contraction cut off the blood supply through the umbilical cord. I'd instinctively known to avoid this dangerous position, because it had been painful. That's what pain is for, so we don't do dangerous things. If I'd taken a painkiller in a standard hospital birth, I wouldn't have known not to lie down, the baby would have have been stressed, and the hospital would rightfully have had to rescue the baby from this stress by performing an emergency cesarean.

Anyway, after a whole lot of waiting around as the contractions got more painful, they finally got so intense that I felt the urge to push. So I pushed. You know how on TV there are always people in the hospital yelling at the laboring woman to push? There is no need to do that, unless she's been numbed up by drugs I suppose. I was perfectly obvious to me when to push, and I didn't need anyone telling me how or when to do it. Thankfully, no one did. They just let me get on with it. Since lying down wasn't an option, I found the least uncomfortable position to be a squat. Call it a plie if you're into ballet.

Pushing was the fun part. Here I'd thought that this would be the painful part, when the baby is actually leaving my body, but actually this was when the endorphins finally kicked in, and also when I finally felt like I was doing something useful, not just waiting around. I was really surprised at how it wasn't actually all that painful, compared to all those tedious and very painful contractions earlier.

The midwife told me when she could see the top of the baby's head, and said I could touch it if I wanted. So I did, and yes, it was the top of an actual head. I stopped touching it because I'm sorry, that's a really weird place for a head to be. I was holding out for a more proper introduction to an entire baby.

So I kept pushing, and there was the head! The hard part was over, and just another easy push or two would free the rest, right? No. Instead, there was suddenly a whole lot of busy scrambling by the midwife's team, and rather more difficulty than I'd been anticipating, but suddenly the whole baby was out, in a disturbingly gory gush of blood onto, yes, another towel, which was over some plastic that was protecting the bed.

It turns out that the difficulty had been because this baby had the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck twice. She's a little breakdancer, spinning on her head in there. Despite this, she came out bright pink, not blue. The midwife had to revive her with a bit of oxygen, though.

Then my daughter was in my arms! She's beautiful, even with her head smooshed like that. (It has since returned to a normal head shape.) As soon as she was born, she looked around at everyone in the room with total fascination in her big dark blue-grey eyes. Bob and I named her Thelma after Bob's great-aunt. After all that fuss about her being to small, she (the baby) weighed 7 lbs, 6 oz.

Once Thelma had done enough crying to get some air into her lungs, she kept crying, which bothered the midwife. I mean really, anyone whose head has been smooshed like that has every right to cry, but the midwife tried various things to soothe her. Nothing worked, until my mother started singing to her. She quieted right down and locked her gaze onto my mother, completely entranced. Here I'm the musician, and I didn't think of singing to her! Not to be outdone by my mother, I sang to Thelma too, and she liked that.

The midwife was adamant that Thelma start nursing right away, but Thelma seemed content to just hang out. When I tried to get her to nurse, she pulled away. I was cool with that, and figured she'd nurse in her own sweet time, but the midwife insisted that she nurse right away. She explained that when a newborn pulls away, that doesn't mean she wants to pull away, it just means that she can't control her body yet. And indeed, once I fought past this pulling-away thing she was doing, she latched right on.

The midwife was so adamant, of course, since nursing signals the uterus that the baby is finally out, so it's time to expel the placenta. Supposedly. In my case, we were still waiting for it two hours later. For me, holding Thelma, the time just flew by, but for the midwife's team, it must have felt like a long time, since various problems can result from a placenta that overstays its welcome. Eventually, after establishing that it had detached properly, she pulled it out, which was a bizarre sensation.

I felt great immediately after the birth, and I've felt great since, much better than during the pregnancy. I didn't need a single stitch. I'm amazed at how fast I'm recovering my former shape, too. I have to gain a few pounds to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight, though.

Anyway, Thelma is a delight! I realized I'd better write this blog already, since she's developing so fast, these early days are disappearing.

She's very good at her two jobs, sleeping and nursing. Sometimes she tries to multitask and do both at once, which doesn't work very well.

The midwife was right that she's not very good at controlling her body yet. Like, when she wants to nurse, which is most of the time, she will often put her hand to her mouth in a nursing sort of way. She's really good at communicating her needs like that. But then when I try to nurse her, she doesn't understand that first she has to take her hand away from her mouth, since only one thing can fit into her mouth at a time. I have to pull her hand away myself, which is hard because she's strong.

She gets very enthusiastic about nursing. Think of the Far Side cartoon of dogs at feeding time, saying, "Oh boy, dog food again!" That's what she's like about breastmilk. But to express her enthusiasm, she shakes her head back and forth very quickly, which can make it difficult to keep a grip on her and latch her on. Once she latches on, though, she gets right down to business.

Anyway, Thelma is an excellent communicator, and she does it all without crying. She occasionally emits a loud sound or two, to alert any adults in the area to the fact that something is wrong and needs an adult's attention. Once she sees that an adult is on the job, she quiets right down. Then she'll make occasional little distressed noises until the adult has solved the problem. Then she'll smile.

You hear about babies crying all the time, but she is definitely not one of those babies. I credit this good disposition to an excellent book, Our Babies, Ourselves, by local Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small:
www.amazon.com/Our-Babies.../ref=sr_1_1
She presents the obvious-once-you-think-about-it idea that babies come out adapted to a particular environment, the environment that humans spent most of our time evolving in. This would be the world of hunter-gatherers, where babies are generally carried around by their mothers as their mothers go about their daily business, and nursed on cue. The modern world, with its houses with separate rooms, its clocks, and its motorized plastic baby-entertaining devices, is completely alien to these creatures, so it generally makes them cry. Professor Small cites numerous fascinating studies that basically show that the more modern "improvements" Americans try to add to the old-fashioned hunter-gatherer model, the more babies cry. Seriously, the crying of American babies is often measured in hours, while the crying of babies from many other cultures is measured in minutes.

So, I sewed a simple sling to carry Thelma around in. This was with the plan of keeping her entertained with my daily activities, but actually she mostly sleeps in it. Since separate bedrooms are a modern invention, I take Thelma to bed with me, so she doesn't get lonely and scared in her own room. A hunter-gatherer baby left all by herself at night would be eaten by some predator by morning. Babies instinctively know this, so they'll complain very loudly if you try to put them in this situation. That's what I read.

Notice that I didn't say I sleep with her. As she sleeps much of the day, she's up much of the night. Anyway, this is still much more convenient than putting her in a separate room, since she has to be fed and changed several times a night anyway, so putting her in a separate room would just add a walk to each of these nighttime chores.

One reason many American babies have to cry so loudly is that they have to reach parents in distant rooms. They just keep increasing the volume until they finally get the response they need. Thelma, on the other hand, could never be called "The Loud" at least not until she gets a hurdy gurdy or zurna. At night when she needs something, she doesn't make a peep, but instead gets my attention by punching me in the face. I'm not saying it's a perfect system.