The Occasional Solipsist

So here I am, again watching my two girls sleeping, this time at home, and I can't help but go over the events of the last two days.

The whole experience has been crazy, and terrifying, and staggeringly emotional, and every cliche you've ever heard.

And some you haven't.

We had a few unexpected bumps, but otherwise, as with Superwife's entire pregnancy itself, it went better than any delivery I'd ever heard of.

Some of the bumps involve Superwife going through some particularly unpleasant female things that I won't share and only Dooce would blog about. In fact, likely she has. You gotta love her.

But The Bump I will talk about occurred after Trinity was born.

Immediately following her delivery and the successive vigorous towelling off of the goo she had been firmly ensconced in for the last nine months, the nurses gave Trinity her first APGAR test of the night. This for those not in the know, is a 5 item test for 1 minute old newborns concerning Activity, Pulse, Grimace, Appearance, and Respiration, wherein each item is scored from zero to two.

Trinity, trooper that she is, would have scored a ten, but for the fact that she wasn't belting out that nice loud cry that one expects a newborn to hear. Why wasn't she crying? Well, in a surprise move that will likely predict a lot about her personality, because she decided to drink her way out of the uterus when things weren't going quickly enough, of course!

Apparently, she drank a ridiculous amount of fluid on the way out, and couldn't cry because she was jammed with the stuff.

So the nurses whisked her away to the aptly named Nurses Room for suctioning, at which point The New Mom issued her first command and told me to quit gawking like a landed fish and follow the nurses. So I did.

And what followed was my very first taste of the anxiety that will now live forever in me wherever my daughter is concerned.

I spent the next 90 minutes holding her hand and wiping mucus away from her mouth, while the nurses suctioned and poked and tested, and I imagined my wife going into total apoplexy from being cut off from both of us.

As it turned out, everybody was fine.

Trinity came around after that 90 minutes, and I was allowed to hold her for the first time and carry her to her Mom, after carefully stepping over the pile of my own hair that had fallen out during my 90 minute anxiety attack.

And once we returned to the room, Superwife wasted no time in bundling our baby girl into her arms, nursing her like a pro, and making it clear that Trinity was not to cause us that kind of worry again.

I hope our daughter was paying attention.

And I have now changed 3 of my baby girl's diapers unassisted. I did passably well I think. And according to the estimated 7,000 diapers she'll use before she's done, I'll have some time to get even better at it.

Labels: family