Today is Noah’s birthday. That is a wonderful thing. I’m really lucky to have him in my life. While this birthday won’t be the most exciting one ever, hopefully holding off long enough to give him a Gemini instead of a Taurus counts for something. 😉
Shanna and Noah are making monkey noises back and forth. And he is encouraging her silly faces. I feel like such a stick in the mud. 🙂
I plead my back hurting. I need to figure out a better nursing position.
I’m totally babbling. You don’t need to read this if you are not interested in baby squee.
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We have a daughter. Her name is Shanna Francesca. She was born at 9:54 May 24th after a 49 hour labor. We didn’t have the home birth of my dreams because after 40 hours of difficult labor and no sleep I was only 4 cm dilated. At the rate I was going I wouldn’t have had the strength to push when I got to that point. I transfered to Valley Med where we had the best hospital experience I can imagine having. I was presented with options and gently encouraged in the direction that the given nurse/doctor felt was best but at no time did I feel actual pressure. When I turned down their suggestions they would very cautiously and respectfully ask if I was sure then accepted my decision without judgment. I am thrilled by how accommodating the staff was. Multiple people were very pro-home birth and understood that I was not gung-ho about the hospital procedures and made every effort to bend or break rules so that my wishes could be accommodated. Really–it was great. Our delivering doctor made the extra effort to find us a private room so that Noah and the baby and I could stay together all night. If she hadn’t then the baby would have been taken to the nursery and Noah would have been kicked out at 10. Really, I’m grateful to the staff.
I find it funny that I was discussing “compassionate epidurals” with someone a couple of days ago and I was less than thrilled with the idea. At this point I’ve changed my opinion. I needed sleep. There were big chunks of labor that weren’t really painful. The actual pushing (I did almost three hours of it) wasn’t terrible–and the epidural was basically worn off. (They had finished my first bottle of medicine and never bothered to get me a second, I was effectively unmedicated for the final hour.) Labor got hard when I was too tired to be coherent and when I became terrified that it would go on for three or four days at the intensity it had. That was a reasonable fear considering how slowly I was progressing.
At this point I am grateful for modern medicine. I needed to use it and everything went breathtakingly well for me. The hospital was good to us and for us. I’m going to try for a homebirth again next time. I hear that once the cervix has opened once it usually is more willing to do so the second time. 🙂
I have no regrets or anger or upset over how things went. I made it through 40 hours on my own. That’s a very long time and I’m quite proud of myself. I pushed for freakin ever and I got my 8 pound baby out. (She’s also 20″ long.) She’s gorgeous. I have been with Noah and Shanna almost constantly since her birth and I may well have missed as much time as I did at home. 🙂 I’m so joyful. This is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. We signed out of the hospital this morning AMA and now we are home.
I am so very lucky. I’ll get pictures up very soon, I promise.
about reading romance novels is that I always end up wistfully thinking, “I wish I had a glittery hooha. I know this is lame. I know Noah adores me. But he’s not obsessed with me like that. I haven’t spoiled him for sex with all women for all time. Granted he may not have sex with a woman (uhm, other than me) again–but it won’t be because I’m just so amazing that the thought is unappealing. The thought of me getting upset isn’t worth facing… but that’s different.
So I kind of freaked on Noah yesterday. I’m not telling you why. Suffice to say I was not as awesome of a wife as he deserves. But I tried to find solutions. Then more stuff got complicated today. ACK. But I sent him off with his best friend tonight. It’s been hard for him to be stuck at home all the time with me. It’s hard to be supportive of someone getting their needs met when your needs are conflicting. I’m trying though.
This life and being a grown up and taking care of your partner stuff is all a big fat pain in the ass.
I think that relationships are complicated. When you think about what makes someone “right” for someone else you are looking at a whole elaborate string of interrelated points and it’s hard to figure out what is the clincher or deal breaker. Yeah, Noah is awesome in general and attentive and a good communicator (very unusual) and hot and good at sex and… He’s just a really bitchin package.
But I think I know what the clincher is. See–I have a really clear picture of what I want in my life. Of what the most important non-negotiable thing was in a life partner. I believe with all my heart and soul that Noah will be a good father. He balances me in all the most ideal ways. We’ve already spent a lot of time talking about how we think parenting should look. Yeah, there are going to be surprises and course corrections and there will be things that Don’t Go As Planned–but our overall attitudes and how they work towards dealing with kids is unlikely to drastically change.
I am not the most stable person on the planet. I work really hard at being consistent, but I can only do the best I can do. Noah is incredibly stable and cheerful and good natured. I’m really happy that I can give that to my kids even if I can’t be that. Noah also believes in letting kids do things for themselves and letting them learn how to accomplish things; they can ask for help if they need it, but I think “doing it for them” is a good way to stifle kids learning. My opinion is backed up by a lot of studies. 🙂 There are areas where I am probably inclined to be far more strict than necessary and Noah is good at telling me that I’m being lame and over reacting. (It’s a delicate line let me tell you.) He likes to play and is physically comfortable with touching far more than me which is going to be awesome for our kids. He can make up the best stories. I really suck at making up stories. He’s so willing to try things even if he might suck at them–I spend too much time worrying about looking stupid. Noah will be awesome at reminding me that just because he doesn’t need privacy and it’s ok for me to snoop in his stuff it’s not ok to do that with our kids. 🙂
Noah is everything I wish my father had been and wasn’t. I’m so glad I get to bring kids into the world and have them grow up with him.
Every so often Noah goes through and rereads my archive. I think this is a bit frightening as I know how much I have written. When I notice that he is doing this I tend to copycat. Honestly, I shouldn’t. I should simply smile and nod and let him read because he gets something out of it. I don’t get good things out of it. I get weird and insecure. I find things he said years ago and I want to point at them and say, “See! You said that! That’s why I get upset!” But that is an awful thing to do. Noah is allowed to change his mind and grow as a person and do different things now. I don’t need to take previous statements about “poly is non-negotiable” (dude has actually said it. I could point at dates.) and treat them as currently true. Because it isn’t currently true. Noah doesn’t feel that way at this point. Given how his life worked then I can see why it wasn’t negotiable then, but a lot has changed. I need to trust him.
Not quite two years ago Noah and I went through a rough patch. I was really awful to him. I did some things I’m not very proud of. If a good friend of mine came to me and said they were being treated the way I was treating Noah I would tell them to run, not walk, to get out of the relationship. But he trusted me and he let me try to change things. He trusted that I loved him enough to work through what I was doing and stop hurting him. I hope his trust was well placed, I have certainly worked very hard at stopping that behavior. He trusts me.
Trust is hard and scary. In a relationship it’s so multilayered. I have to trust him and he has to trust me and we both have to be able to trust ourselves. Noah has certainly done everything possible to earn my trust. I don’t know that I have done as much to earn his trust, but he gives it anyway. I think the hardest part is trusting myself. Part of being able to trust myself has to come from knowing myself well. Right now in order to behave in the way that Noah deserves I’m going to stop reading his old lj stuff. There is nothing wrong with anything he wrote and I’m glad that record of his life exists. But I internalize things that are not about me and then create problems around that. That is something that *I* do that is not his fault or really about anything he has said. I’m not going to do it this time. I’m going to trust that I made the right decision in having a relationship with him and that he is completely telling me the truth because that is what he does. He tells me the truth when it will make me angry, when it hurts me, and when I would really rather he lie. So I have every reason to trust him and to trust my faith in him.
I picked a good man. I picked a man who is willing to work through just about any level of hardness to stay with me. It doesn’t matter what was said five years ago or three years ago. What matters is what he has said consistently since the day we got married. He has lived up to his promises. Ok. Breathe. And no being a buggy weird bitch when he gets home.
So I’ve been feeling boring lately because all I write about is complaining about boredom. So I’ve been thinking about things.
This is what it feels like to have everything I always wanted. I have the best husband ever in the history of the world. He is supportive, communicative, willing to do anything I ask, and he’s the best sex partner I’ve ever had. That’s not a combination I thought existed. I win.
I’ve wanted to have a baby for a long time. Ok, so I haven’t had the easiest pregnancy in the history of the world–but by and large it’s not so bad. I’ve actually been aware of the bedrest risk since before I got pregnant. I have Menieres and it’s super common to end up on bedrest. It gets increasingly common as you get older which is why I needed to start having babies fairly young. (I don’t actually think that my preterm labor was related to the Menieres, but the risk was present for me anyway so I’m not as shocked as I could be.) And for all that my pregnancy isn’t the easiest it hasn’t actually been that hard. Given the prize I have at the end of the journey it’s been worth absolutely all the difficulty.
I may not live in the house of my absolute dreams, but I live in a comfortable house. We own this house and can afford the mortgage. We have all the financial safety I ever frantically aspired to. Sure, as soon as my ability to eat settles down we need to go back to cooking and stop eating out all the time, but I won’t want to go out with a baby anyway. 🙂 For now I am getting to eat out as much as my poverty-stricken-inner-little-girl wants to. This is cool.
I have amazing friends. They are supportive and awesome. When I put up a message asking to borrow DVDs within 24 hours I had more than 50 of them delivered to my house. If I were up for being social I could see people seven days a week and have good quality time with each person if I wanted. That’s really amazing to me.
So yeah. I’m happy. My life is really great. Yeah, I get angsty sometimes but that’s becoming a lower a lower percentage of my time because when I stop to think about what I have I am blown away by how awesome my life is.
And now I go snuggle my Noah.
A while ago I squeed about making Noah come with oral.
I didn’t mention a couple weeks when I did it again. But last night I did it again. This means that I have now made him come from oral more times than anyone else!!! I’m number one! I’m number one! *cough*
This wouldn’t be such a big deal if he didn’t announce that he is one of those “Doesn’t come from oral” guys except in freak occurrences. I think it is fairly safe to say that I have figured out the knack. Awesome. It’s actually getting easier because I have indeed figured out the trick to it. 🙂
Have I mentioned that I’m excited that as most of sex is much harder and more difficult I’m massively grateful that something is working better than normal?
Our only concession to VD was to give one another silly cards. Technically, I do this randomly sometimes so it isn’t that big of a stretch. He did bring home flowers, but…. he does that every so often too. (I REALLY like getting flowers, so he probably does it in the neighborhood of once a month.)
We had pizza bites for dinner. I made brownies so we had brownies a la mode for dessert. We danced around the living room when silly music came on. I won my first game of Monopoly ever!!! (I’m kind of excited about this. I *always* lose.)
It’s probably time to call it a night so we can rest up for the long, long, long……. weekend. 🙂 Hope to see lots of people this weekend! Maybe I’ll even be in a good mood! Offer me food. 🙂 I like chips and chocolate right now. 🙂
I met Noah just shy of four years ago. (It’ll be four years in another week or so.) He asked me to marry him ~ 23 months ago, so close enough to two years. Besides, even that time period where I wasn’t dating him I was still obsessed with him and writing g-blog entries about how in love with him I was.
I’m still giddy when I see him. I pine for him if he works too long on a given day. We still talk for hours and hours and hours about nothing at all. Pregnancy complications aside, I’m still madly in lust with him.
Is this still NRE? Or is this just our relationship? I don’t take him for granted. I’m soooooooo grateful that I have him.
I win.
I told Noah last night that I really wanted to dance. He asked what the options were. I told him Merrie Pryanksters (I’m pretty sure it happened…) or BaGG. BaGG was the more interesting option. I had a lot of fun, he wasn’t miserable. We call this a win on a dance event. (He was so good. He played around, he tried to be social within the limited noise-allowance, and he flirted. So proud of him.) I danced! I didn’t feel sick! w00t!
Today I got my shiny new laptop!! YAY!!!! Which means that I get to start recollecting some of the stuff I haven’t bothered collecting in a few years because I figured I didn’t want to bother keeping it on a work machine.
So!
If I have ever had your contact information there is only about a 1% chance I have it now. Ok, I have phone numbers in my phone, but I don’t have addresses or email for almost anyone unless I have received an email from you pretty recently. It would be great to have that kind of data for people again. The comments on this post are screened so please give me whatever contact information you want me to have.
Yay!
I’m looking for maternity dresses online because I can’t find anything I like in stores. I found an adorable dress, but the company only makes clothes going up to a pre-pregnancy size of 10. Uhm, that’s not me. I told Noah and he said:
“I think this proves they are poopy-heads.”
🙂
Last night I was being very angsty and fussy. My Noah was awesome about listening to me fuss. He patted me on the head. He told me stuff I’m doing well. He validated my feelings. And he helped me type up the stoopid review questions. And did I mention that he did all of this after running around the house finishing up the stuff that needed to happen before staging today?
Have I mentioned that I married the best boy ever? Cause I did. Best. Boy. Ever.
Tonight marks the first time that the Lizard has kicked hard enough so that I could be absolutely definite that I was feeling it and Noah could feel it too. This is so wonderful.
Have I mentioned that I’m really happy about having a family with Noah? I can’t imagine this being so wonderful in any other circumstance.
Noah and I normally don’t really agree about what clothes look good on me. He is inherently biased towards the non-skinny chicks (I’m not really complaining) and that means that he appreciates how I look in clothes that I don’t think I look good in. I’m all biased by society’s standards that it is my job to be skinny or doomed to ugliness.
But! We have found a way we both appreciate how I look! I’m *thrilled* that I am looking more and more pregnant. I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. Now when he says, “I think it looks great–but it makes you look very pregnant” I squee. Usually when he says I look great I doubt him. This is awesome.
I love to watch him sleep. He is so beautiful in repose. I look at the character that remains in his face even as he dreams. I love how broad his shoulders are; how easily he shoulders burdens with them–both his own and those he willingly, even eagerly takes from me. I like that his body is soft and comfortable to curl up against. I love the whimsy that lead him to get a barrel of monkeys tattoo.
I love that he can forgive me anything. I love that he will do anything for his friends, even as that same habit drives me crazy sometimes. I love how completely he gives himself over to lusting after me. I love that he embraces the changes in my body as beautiful in recognition of the life we created together. I love that he tolerates my mood swings and often difficult temper. He gives of himself more freely and openly than any person I have ever known. I love how he loves me with the open eyed glee of a child being given the best toy in the world.
What I am thankful for is that he was willing to humble his pride and ask me for a second chance when I was too afraid to ask him. I am thankful for the gift of him in my life. It is a rare day when a fight is bad enough to cause me worry about whether this will really work out. Even in those moments I am still grateful he asked for the chance.