nostalgia

As spring has s.l.o.w.l.y....arrived in Denver (we have had snow once a week for the last four weeks!)...I have found myself living in a very nostalgic place. One year ago I was creating crazy spreadsheets titled "paycheck week-by-week for maternity leave" or "who tell tell first when baby arrives", creating draft 'birth announcement' emails so all I had to do was fill in the 'he/she', name, and birth stats, and beginning to slowly (unwillingly) inflate the skin of my feet beyond all comprehension.

The weekly midwife appointments were scheduled, my mom arrived hoping to be here the day the baby was born, and then the every other day midwife appointments were scheduled as I measured 44 weeks during my 39 week appointment and was rushed to a perinatologist to make sure I wasn't indeed growing a giant human baby...but just a regular sized one. My due date of May 15 came and went, my mom went back to New Jersey, and we even scheduled an induction for May 21 through many tears and prayers for the baby to come on it's own time.

Low and behold, the morning of May 20, I woke up earlier than normal, kind of crampy but not convinced anything was actually happening. My sheer girth made it hard to understand if I was just perpetually uncomfortable or if I was indeed in the early stages of labor. I consumed an entire pineapple, a pound of (candy coated) almonds, ate pizza, ate spicy food, went for walks, drank cotton root oil every hour for 48 hours (or something crazy like that). We did everything we could think of to get the party started in the weeks and days leading up to May 20. After a walk around the neighborhood (ok, it was a very slow waddle-shuffle)...I started to experience contractions. I will save the rest of H's birth story for another post, but needless to say, she was born on 5/20/12, all 8 lbs. 3 oz. and 22 inches of her and we could cancel our induction on the 21st!!

I am feeling nostalgic as I  so vividly remember the days leading up to her birth, and how ready-yet-clueless I was for what was about to happen to our family. My sister is expecting my very first niece any day now, and that definitely brings all of my memories flooding back.

Last week I organized H's baby clothes, and finally decided it was time to pack away
the breast pump, bottles, and burp cloths. We just haven't used them in a long time and it's crazy to think/hope that some day when they get pulled out of storage it will be for a baby brother or sister for Miss H. H's baby stage is long gone, and we cherished every moment of it, but it's still hard to believe we've got a toddler on our hands when I can so vividly remember what was going on this time last year.

A calendar that I LOVE which my mom passed down to me before we even lived in CO and had this view of Pikes Peak every day. :)