Baby Max

On 5 September, I gave birth to Max. 

I labored somewhere around 36 hours, and the last 18 were full on. Tom and I compromised a water birth with midwife in our living room by having a water birth with midwife at the University of Colorado hospital. 

My doula said it was the most beautiful and peaceful birth she's seen - which wouldn't quite be the words I would choose - coming from someone I'd hired to encourage me, but we were grateful for the outcome. And actually, working that hard/suffering and then reaching the goal/delivering was a high point of my life. I forgot it rather quickly the next week when nurses weren't helping us feed and change every three hours, but the sweet boy remains.

We stayed at the hospital for 48 hours, or $23,500 according to what the insurance agreed to pay the hospital for the $39,000 the hospital said a non-medicated vaginal delivery with room service for two people is worth. It was an excellent experience with world-class access, but the US healthcare system is not fixed, in case anyone was wondering.  

And now the weeks have gone by quickly and so slowly in the middle of the nights. The lowlight of the intervening time is Tom breaking his ankle rock climbing such that he just had surgery and can't carry the baby for two months (to the car, to the changing table, to the living room...). But it's been fun to discover him as a dad, at which he does a great job despite being confined to the bed with a bottle.

Speaking of bottles, my milk never came in to where I can feed the baby exclusively. That has been a disappointment, and I mostly record it here for my own benefit, but we used donor milk for a time and Max has transitioned to formula with gusto. Or perhaps I record it for another expecting friend, or someone who will have a baby someday and be encouraged by this version of childbearing. I acknowledge we're not always Winning.

We love the cuddles and blue eyes, appreciate when he occasionally sleeps six hours in a row, cannot always discern how to comfort him in his great sorrows, and enjoy the joy he brings to other people. He may have started smiling not-on-accident today.

Here he is at one month old.

His usual scowl, inherited from his momma,

but it doesn't mean we're angry

 His infrequently-spotted (no pun intended)
dimples, inherited from his daddy