Out of the Darkness

I'm sitting in the dark to write this. It seems to be the only appropriate way to get it out of my head since the last year was so bleak. Bright flecks bracketed the gloom, but what happened between the parentheses has left me scarred. I'm working on turning the lights back on and it's almost bright enough to return to writing my way through my imagination.

The short version: I have a fifteen week old now, my third and final baby. My pregnancy and postpartum were full of complications so I'm still recovering.

The longer version:

I had my first midwife appointment the day after I got a positive test. I had a history of hyperemesis gravidarum so we needed to be proactive with my treatment in case it happened again. It did. By 5.5 weeks I couldn't keep anything down anymore and started taking an anti-nausea medication, Diclegis. It helped at first, but it made me so sleepy that I couldn't drive more than the mile to get Turbokid to and from school. Messy Mouse trashed the house while I dozed on the couch.

By eight weeks I was on the maximum dosage of my medication and was running out of safe foods. I was vomiting between 15 and 30 times a day. I was triggered by the shower, by the color chartreuse, by certain sounds, and by every smell. I could no longer drink water, and wouldn't be able to again for another sixteen weeks. My husband was out of the country for work so I was alone for ten days with a preschooler, a toddler, and an inability to stand up for more than five minutes without vomiting. My kids' whole foods diet became a steady stream of veggie burgers, veggie dogs, bread, fries, carrots, and applesauce.

I forced myself to sew my son's Halloween costume but I was too sick to take him trick-or-treating. My entire body ached from the frequent vomiting and lack of nutrition. We went to a friend's Halloween party and I spent almost the entire hour we stayed in the bathroom. The rosy glow in my cheeks was due to broken capillaries.

At fifteen weeks I hit my critical dehydration point. The midwife couldn't find the baby's heartbeat with the doppler. After a terrifying five minutes of searching, she took me in a different room for an ultrasound. My heart rate was fast and the baby's was slow, so they matched and she couldn't tell them apart with just the doppler. The midwives tried giving me a shot of phenergan. I vomited foamy acid into the sink, became agitated, and the walls started to move. They sent me home after two liters of IV fluids and making sure the baby's heart rate was back up in a less scary range.

Less than 48 hours later, it was Thanksgiving and I was in the ER pleading with my body to just get it over with and let me die. The vomiting was continuous, my pulse and breathing were rapid, my balance was poor, and I was so confused I couldn't figure out how to fill out the forms. I had lost seventeen pounds and it would have been more if I hadn't spent the previous seven weeks on partial bedrest to conserve calories. The IV Zofran the ER gave me made me hallucinate and projectile vomit. It took 2.5L of fluids before I could bring my thoughts into some sort of focus. I was diagnosed with a UTI, given IV antibiotics and a printout of ridiculous "tips" to combat HG, and sent home with a 10 day course of oral antibiotics. It was a fight to keep them down. I lived off a soy pediatric drink for two weeks because my stomach was so irritated from a week of vomiting every 15 minutes that it couldn't handle anything solid.

At the beginning of December I started having headaches like electric shocks to my left temple. They were brief, but frequent and excruciating. My doctor determined they weren't dangerous and were the result of nerve irritation from excessive vomiting. I had electric shock bursts 5-10 times a day for several months before the extreme pain faded to tingling. I still have strange sensations in my temple so I think the nerve is damaged.

Just after Christmas I had my anatomy scan. I chose not to find out the sex of the baby. I wanted to separate the baby from the awful pregnancy and keeping her anonymous until birth was the only way I could think to do that. The baby was healthy.

In early January I started to slowly gain back the weight I lost. My first attempt at weaning of the Diclegis was a disaster that nearly required another IV. I ended up not being able to wean off it until about 28 weeks.

February was my best month, even with the broken toe I sustained from knocking a can off the counter. I can't remember if that happened in January or February because it ended up being an insignificant injury, though it was painful at the time. I was able to go back to the gym, though all I did was walk on the treadmill while the kids went nuts in the child care center.

March was cataclysmic. At the end of February, I caught a respiratory infection. It progressed quickly from congestion to a bronchial cough. I went to urgent care on Monday when I spiked a fever and coughed up pink. I was diagnosed with bacterial bronchitis and started on antibiotics. I started getting better, but then on Friday I coughed up blood and coughed hard enough to feel a pop in my lower left ribs. The doctor thought I'd fractured a rib and the bronchitis was turning into pneumonia so he gave me an antibiotic shot in my hip and a prescription for Tylenol 3. I stopped coughing blood. Sunday night around 10pm I was getting ready for bed and had a coughing fit. My left ribs audibly popped as I tried to catch my breath. I couldn't calm my breathing and was in a lot of pain so my husband called a friend to stay with the sleeping kids and took me to the ER. I was given morphine and a chest x-ray. I went home with stronger painkillers and a printout on rib fractures. My husband was flying out for a work trip at 5am Monday so he called his mother to come help me with the kids.

I woke up very early Tuesday morning with a crackle in my left lung. Every breath caused more pops and more pain. The pain spread down my back and up into the hollow of my collarbone. Every movement was agonizing. I knew something was very wrong and drove myself to the ER. After I had a positive D-dimer, the doctor told me he suspected a blood clot in my lung. Since I was seven months pregnant I had to sign a bunch of consent forms for the recommended CT scan. I was afraid the test could hurt the baby, but I knew a life-threatening pulmonary embolism needed to be ruled out. I had a CT with contrast and ultrasounds on my legs. I didn't have any clots, but my left lung wasn't normal, either. I had pleurisy, pleural effusion, a partially collapsed lung, and torn intercostal muscles, though that last one wasn't diagnosed until a month later. There wasn't anything I could do but take Vicodin and wait out the extreme pain. The Vicodin didn't help.

About two weeks later I was starting to feel a little better and could move around a little, but then I fell in a hole in the yard and sprained my ankle. It was the same ankle I had reconstructed when I was in college and I had nerve damage from the repair so I wasn't sure how badly it was sprained. I was given crutches and referred to an orthopedist, who said my old ankle repair was tight and well done so I escaped with a moderate sprain. Unfortunately, I could only use the crutches for a day. The strain on my ribs was too much and my pain level went back up to an 8-10. If I laid in bed on my bad side and didn't move, I was only at an 8, but moving turned it into a pain worse than my worst kidney stone. Several times when the pain or the lingering HG made me vomit, I ended up stuck on the bathroom floor unable to move.

The month of March was pure torture. As the baby grew, more and more pressure was put on my ribcage. It didn't help that she was persistently breech and liked to jam her head into my injured side. I felt like whatever I used to be died months ago and my mind was nothing but a numb shell. That wasn't the beginning of my depression since I was already having issues with it due to the HG earlier on, but it certainly aggravated it. I was in so much pain that I couldn't function. I couldn't take care of myself, let alone my family. I finally got a referral to the pain clinic after the last non-invasive treatment option, lidocaine patches, did nothing. My appointment was in early April, when I was 34 weeks. The doctor examined me and decided that the pain was most likely neuromuscular. He gave me a series of trigger point injections, which released the spasms in the damaged muscles and finally gave me some relief. I was very sore for a couple days afterward, but soon the pain levels were greatly reduced and I could resume living. I still couldn't do any torso-twisting motions and coughing and sneezing were horrible, but after a month of agony just being able to breathe was wonderful.

My muscles relaxed enough to allow the baby to flip head-down just before 35 weeks. That was definitely a relief because I had about run out of room. I measured behind the last six weeks with my first two babies, but this one was bigger and I was measuring ahead. At 35 weeks I was already bigger than I was when I went into labor with the other two even though my weight gain was much lower. I only gained 10 lbs this time compared to the 40 and 35 I gained with my other babies.

My water broke in the morning on May 8th. I didn't have contractions for a couple hours, but once they started up I knew it was going to go fast. After a 2.5 hour labor, my little warrior Elora Eowyn came into the world with a scream. She was born with her right arm next to her head and a true knot in her cord. I had hoped for another waterbirth like I had with Messy Mouse, but since I went from 7 cm to baby out in under 5 minutes with a series of involuntary pushes there was no time to get into the tub.

Our pain journey wasn't quite over yet. I aggravated my torn intercostal muscles from moving around during labor and injured my tailbone during the rapid birth. Elora's face was bruised and her eyes were red with broken capillaries. She screamed whenever she was moved. On day four she was hospitalized overnight for jaundice and we found out the screaming was because her right collarbone had snapped in half on her way into the world. It took about six weeks to heal, and during that time we had to dress her only in front-fastening clothes and swaddle her arm to her chest.

Elora is wonderful now and I love everything about her. She's chubby, smiley, and cooing. I'm still fighting my way out of the darkness, though. All of the physical trauma I went through triggered postpartum depression and anxiety. I've been on antidepressants and going to support groups for two months now, and those have been a great help. I no longer feel so overwhelmed and disconnected from myself and the world. The derealization I had for a while was terrifying, especially when I started feeling lost in my own neighborhood or having panic attacks at the grocery store. I'm coming up on month six of rib pain with no end in sight, but now it usually only bothers me when I move the wrong way or do too much physical activity. I tried a restorative yoga class last weekend but it was still too painful. The tailbone still aches sometimes, but hasn't bothered me much in a month or so.

I'm working on feeling like myself again, both mentally and physically. Progress is slow, but it's still progress. My muscles are starting to feel a little less gelatinous and my mind is leaving surrealism behind. For a while I struggled to write a single coherent sentence, but now my stories are starting to come out of hiding. I'm heading toward rereading what I have already written on Sand Into Glass so I can finish writing the last act of it, but I'm not quite there yet. It's coming back, it will come back, I will come back. It is taking some time to find myself again, but the fight is no longer as daunting as it was a couple months ago. I just need to be patient with myself through the endless days as I battle out of the abyss and back into the light.

Lyra's Water Birth

I wrote Lyra's birth story a week after I had her. I'm just now getting around to posting it up here. This is a direct copy-and-paste from my post on a natural birth forum.

Lyra was my second unmedicated birth. My first was in a hospital and I felt like I was constantly fighting off offers of drugs and interventions even though everything was going great my labor was relatively short -- sixteen hours from water breaking to birth, ten of those hours in active labor. With my second pregnancy, I started out at the same OB practice I had my son with, but switched at 21 weeks when our insurance changed to one that was in-network for the new free-standing birth center opening nearby. I transferred to the midwives and my anxiety about having another hospital birth immediately disappeared. The birth center officially opened in September and the day after Thanksgiving I hit 37 weeks and was cleared to give birth there.

I woke up at 4 am on December 8th with contractions. They felt like intestinal cramps, so I just laid back down and tried to sleep. I'd been having GI issues for two weeks and was having prodromal labor on and off for the last six days, so I figured it was one of those causing my discomfort. An hour later, the contractions were still keeping me awake. I got up to use the bathroom znd wiped away my mucus plug. I started leaking fluid about 5:30. It came in intermittent trickles, but was slightly pink-tinted so I knew my water had broken. I was having a lot of back pain already so I took a shower and waited for my husband to wake up. When the alarm went off at 6, I told him, "I think you're getting a Get Out of Work Free card today."

We hung out downstairs for a little while and made sure we had everything we needed for the birth. Unlike last time, I was GBS- so we didn't have to worry about rushing to get antibiotics. My husband put together a birth announcement template and I woke up my mom, who was staying with us to help with our two year old son, and told her what was going on. At about 7:30 we drove do my husband's office so he could pick up some things and be closer to the birth center. We called the midwife on call at 8:30. She had just gotten home from attending another birth the night before, so we arranged to meet her at the birth center in an hour. We had an hour to kill, so we wandered around Whole Foods and picked up some food to get us through the day. I was having contractions strong enough to make me stop walking and lean over the shopping cart. We got out the contraction timer on the phone and timed them at 1 minute long and 3-5 minutes apart.

We went to the birth center at 9:30 and got checked in after the test strip confirmed I was leaking amniotic fluid. I was having fairly strong contractions with a lot of back pain already so agreed to a dilation check to find out where we were starting from. At 10:30 am I was still only 2-3cm dilated, but my midwife commented on the stretchiness of my cervix. We decided to put our coats on and go for a walk outside. The birth center is in a heavily wooded corporate park and it was about 40 degrees outside, so it was a nice place to walk. Partway through our walk, I had to grab my husband's arm and just sway back and forth as a multi-peak contraction hit me and hung on for several minutes. By the time we got back to the birth center 20 minutes later, I was having contractions I had to focus to breathe through and was in pretty obvious active labor.

I accepted the pain as progress and let my body tell me what positions and movements were best. Lyra was posterior so I spent some time on my hands and knees with my husband holding a phone playing music at the base of my spine. This worked and she flipped to face the right direction, but she flipped back to posterior at some point later and stayed that way. I was standing and using the windowsill for support for most of the labor so I could move through the contractions and let my body take over. I also sat on a birthing balland did hip spirals and bounced and got on my knees and leaned over the ball so I could rock. I tried to lay on my side to rest for a few minutes and that triggered a lovely tetanic contraction. I had to get on my hands and knees while still on the bed as it started and then went into the bathroom to see if emptying my bladder helped, but it continued for about six minutes. I jumped almost immediately into transition and every contraction was significantly stronger than the last. I was becoming really noisy, but concentrated on keeping my jaw open and kept my moans and grunts low-pitched.

I finally got in the tub as the contractions continued to intensify. The fatigue in my legs lifted almost immediately and I let the water support my weight. I got myself into an odd lunge position and stayed there. I was feeling a huge release of fluid and bloody show during each contraction. My midwife did one last cervical check (I only had 3 the entire time). I was at a 9 and Lyra was still high up. All of a sudden, I started involuntarily pushing. I couldn't control the rapid-fire pushes in quick series, like a jackhammer. It wasn't an urge to push, more like hiccups or muscle tics that I couldn't do anything about. It was terrifying but I couldn't fight it. I felt an extreme amount of pressure and thought I was going to the bathroom. I jumped onto my knees without leaving the water and reached down to feel her crowning.

My husband and the nurse helped me to sit back so my feet were in front of me and I felt intense burning as her head crowned and emerged face-up and my body continued to push on its own. I managed to take control just enough to slow down the rest of her coming out while the midwife helped ease out her shoulders because her hand was by her face and we didn't want to hurt her shoulder or collarbone. I helped catch her, but I was in a state of shock after the involuntary pushing, so I needed some help to bring her to the surface. Lyra was on my chest four minutes after that last dilation check. It was 4:23pm. Lyra was alert and looking around, but it took her almost four minutes to start taking good breaths, which wasn't a huge problem since her cord wasn't cut. My midwife said she was probably shell-shocked from coming out so fast so needed a few minutes to get oriented. The pain was gone and I suddenly felt really good, though a bit shaky.

We hung out in the water for a little while while the cord stopped pulsating. My husband cut the cord and took off his shirt so he could hold her skin-to-skin while I was helped out of the water. We laid on the bed with Lyra on my chest so I could deliver the placenta. My damage from the rapid delivery and nuchal hand was surprisingly light... three first-degree periurethral and labial tears, but none on the perineum, although that was already showing bruising. Lyra's face was a little swollen and bruised, but not too bad, and it was fine after a couple days. The midwife stitched up two of the tears while Lyra nursed, something it turns out she was very good at from the first latch and has needed almost no adjustment since (she was already back to her birth weight at 5 days old). We did skin-to-skin on my chest for about four hours before any weighing or measuring were done, and my mom and son visited during that time. Lyra ended up being 6lb 4oz and 18.5 inches, just an ounce smaller than her brother was and the same length.

We came home at 10:30pm. We had the option to stay overnight, but I was feeling pretty good and we wanted to sleep in our own bed. I had the shakes on and off for about twelve hours after the birth from the endorphins and adrenaline, and couldn't sleep until about 5 am.

This labor from beginning to end was far more intense than my first one and a bit shorter (12 hours vs. 16 hours from first sign, <6 hours of active labor vs. 10 hours, and fetal ejection reflex vs. 20 minutes of controlled pushing). I just let go of any fears and doubts and went with the pain, allowing my body to dictate positions and movement. I don't know how much being in the tub actually helped, since I was only in it about an hour and during that time my body went insane. It took me a while to process what happened at the end, but it helped to find a name and reason for it -- fetal ejection reflex. My labor was mostly undisturbed and the midwife and nurse were hands-off and quiet except for occasional heart rate checks with the doppler and when I asked them for something. I felt safe and instinctual, unburdened by the presence of people I didn't know and trust and unrestricted in movement. I probably would have had a lot more damage from birthing a posterior, compound presentation baby if I hadn't been allowed to labor and birth her as my body instructed me. It still is an awesome feeling knowing I could trust my body to do exactly what it needed to.

Time Warp

So... it's been a bit too long.  Mommy brain took over and this blog fell neglected.  It was all worth it, though.  On December 8, I gave birth to an awesome and beautiful little girl named Lyra.  She weighed 6lb 4oz and came flying into the world by way of a water-filled tub in a beautiful new birth center.  She was sunny-side-up, had her hand at her face, and graced me with a mere 6 hours of active labor.  She's already helped me donate a gallon of milk to a needy baby and there will be plenty more to add to that gallon.  In more masculine news, my son has grown into a rambunctious two-year-old and is really putting a new spin on "terrible twos".

I haven't been able to focus enough to get back into writing yet, but I did decide against conventional publishing this morning and I'm now on Amazon.  Everything is going digital these days and I wasn't really up for waiting months or years on rejections from publishers and agents, so I just reformatted them and made them available for Kindle.  And why not?  I didn't write them for money, I wrote them because I was inspired.

My E-Books! (if all four of them aren't up yet, they should be soon.)
So, here I am.  Here are my verbose babies, set loose into a world that probably doesn't care.  But that wasn't the point.  No point letting them hang around on my laptop anymore when there are new ideas echoing around in my head.

One Year Ago and Today

One Year Ago -- A birth story
I wasn't expecting to go into labor for at least another two weeks.  I had my routine weekly OB appointment on December 17th and had absolutely no progress. I was horribly uncomfortable and hoped she would tell me something was changing.  The baby was still high up and cozy.  My doctor asked me about induction and I told her I didn't want to be induced without medical reason.  She was fine with it, and told me she'd let me go until 42 weeks, which would have put me around January 12th.  My original due date was December 29th, so I was at 38 weeks.  Despite my discomfort, I was going to let the baby come when he was ready, especially since he was predicted to be quite small.

I got home from the doctor and had a breakdown.  My hormones were going wild.  Every little thing made me cry.  A calender, a baby on a TV show, even my cats.  I went through work on December 18th with tears in my eyes.  My heartburn flared.  I was on an emotional roller coaster, and it was really the only time in my pregnancy that I was in that spot.  I was always so calm and cool, even when I was working 20 hours of overtime a week for months straight.

We made plans for the weekend.  The 20th was my husband's birthday.  We bought movie tickets and set a time to go to the art museum.  We bought groceries.  We sat on the couch and watched a movie and then went to bed.

I had woken up several times each night ever since I was 6 weeks along, so waking up in the middle of the night on the 19th was nothing unusual.  I went to the bathroom, and I wiped away a glob of goo and a little blood, again nothing too unusual, since it happened every time I was checked by the doctor.  I woke up a final time at 6:30am and when I stood up after using the toilet, a large amount of liquid ran down my leg.  I thought I might have urinated on myself, a common pregnancy problem, but when I shifted, it happened again and I noticed that there was a little bit of pink in the liquid.

I woke up my husband and he groggily rolled out of bed after I told him I thought my water had broken.  He has always been a really difficult person to wake up, so I think it took him a good 10 minutes to figure out what I was telling him.  Since we weren't expecting labor for a couple more weeks, we didn't even have our bags packed.  We got our things together and called the doctor.  My doctor wasn't on call on Saturdays, so we ended up talking to another in her practice.

We headed to the hospital at 9:30.  I was still only having light cramping instead of noticeable contractions, but since my water had broken and I had tested positive for Group B Strep, I was told to come in so I could start antibiotics.  The hospital we had chosen was a 20 minute drive and it was snowing lightly.  My husband made me sit on towels over a garbage bag because I was making a mess.

I had pre-registered at the hospital and we had called ahead, so they knew I was coming.  We walked to our L&D room and the nurse tested and confirmed that what I was leaking was amniotic fluid.  It took two nurses and an anesthesiologist to get the hep-lock in my arm.  I have terrible veins for sticking.  They are tough, roll, and have many valves that tend to blow.  It took seven sticks to get the hep-lock in so I could get started on antibiotics.  I ended up getting fluids at some point later because I ended up vomiting throughout my labor and couldn't even keep down ice chips.

I had a check and was only at 2cm and still wasn't having significant contractions.  At around 11am, I had my first real contraction, a ten-minute long tetanic nightmare.  I held onto a steady tone, a D-flat, and breathed through the contraction, but the monitor showed that my baby's heart rate had dropped as a result of the extreme contraction.  It didn't go back up when the contraction ended.  I got onto my hands and knees and the nurse gave me an oxygen mask and the change in position made his heart rate go back up to normal.

The doctor came in and told me that if it happened again and a position change didn't help, they'd be taking me for a Cesarean.  As it was, I wouldn't be able to use the jacuzzi tub because he wanted me hooked up to the external monitor.  I was still only 2cm dilated so the tetanic did nothing for progression.  The doctor wanted to give me pitocin, but I told him no.  I told him I wanted some time to try to progress on my own and only use interventions if absolutely necessary.

I spent the next hour and a half bouncing on a birthing ball while playing Diablo 2 on my laptop and watching Kung Fu Panda.  My method worked and I progressed to 4cm two hours after the pitocin threat.  I didn't get on the bed until transition.  I spent the next 9 hours or so on the ball, standing and leaning over, walking, rocking in a chair, and in the shower when they let me go off the monitor for a while.  My baby's heart rate stayed up.  I rocked through the contractions.  Even when I was just standing, I was dancing, swaying side to side.  We listened to music, played games, and watched movies for distraction.  A friend came by to bring my husband dinner around 5, but other than that, it was just him, me, and the nurses.  The anesthesiologist came by once to tell me that he could give me a high epidural despite my spina bifida, but I basically told him off.  There was no way I was going to let anyone stick anything in my spine.  I was handling the pain really well and I didn't need anyone trying to tell me that I should just take the drugs.

I'm not sure when I hit transition, somewhere around 9 or 9:30pm.  At that point, I couldn't stand up anymore because the pain was constant.  I kept humming my D-flat while lying on my side, rocking front to back.  At 10:20 I was ready to push.  The nurse told us the baby had a lot of dark hair.  I never felt the crowning or the "ring of fire".  I pushed with each contraction, which greatly relieved the pain.

At 10:49pm on December 19, 2009, my son Rowan was born and was placed on my chest while my husband cut the cord and I was stitched up.  He had a full head of black hair and dark blue-indigo eyes.  He was a hairy little guy.  He even had fine, dark hair on his forehead, ears, back, and arms.  His hairline and eyebrows were connected.  He was a tiny guy, weighing in at 6lbs 5oz and was 18.5 inches long.  He had quite a conehead, which resolved over the next 12 hours.  He had an incredible set of lungs, which he still likes to demonstrate.  He was extremely alert, active, and rooting like mad.  We had a little trouble initiating nursing because his mouth was tiny, but he got it after a while.  He kept looking at me with those big bright eyes.  He was absolutely beautiful.

I had such an endorphin rush that I couldn't sleep for 12 hours after birth.  I was out of bed 30 minutes after being stitched up and was able to take a shower an hour later when my husband went with Rowan for his first bath.  I turned the bathroom into a crime scene, but getting on my feet so quickly was definitely a major perk of natural birth.  Rowan was brought back to me in the room we'd be staying in and we snuggled up for some more latching practice while my husband slept.  I think he was far more tired than I was.

My regular doctor came to visit the next morning.  She kept calling me a "rock star" because of the way I handled my labor.  I was always calm and in control.  She was surprised that I was out of bed and moving around when she came in.  I guess they don't get many unmedicated births, even though it was a low-intervention hospital with the lowest Cesarean rate in the area.   He ended up going to the nursery for a couple of hours because he had trouble maintaining his body temperature even with skin-to-skin contact, but he was completely healthy.  He was better able to maintain his body temperature and we were home 36 hours after he was born and on to our great adventure.

Today I am nursing a toddler
The in-between matters, but this isn't about the year, it is about a year ago and today, so that is what I will observe.

My little boy's first birthday is today.  Instead of a helpless itty bitty baby, I now have an independent-minded tiny tot who asks for milk, and eagerly crawls to me to get it.  Our cuddle time is better than ever, since milk time is the only time he wants to sit still.  Rowan is busy exploring the world, but always comes crawling back to me when he needs a little milk.  He isn't walking yet, but he makes up for that by being a very early talker.  He started asking for "nana" at 8 months, and now he asks for "meh".  His first three words were "mama", "dada", and "kitty", and now he has added book baby, yeah, hi, up, crackers, done, more, stinky, poopy, Loki, Rhappy (sometimes called Pawpaw by him... her full name is Rhapsody), play, my, and done.  He is extremely animated and only falls asleep on accident.  He is observant and doesn't want to miss anything.  I get comments from strangers all the time on how smart they think he looks.  There just seems to be some light in those gray-brown eyes (used to be blue, but not anymore).

We're halfway to my vague goal of two years for breastfeeding.  The dynamic of our nursing sessions has changed considerably, even just in the last month.  He's faster now because he wants to get back to playing.  It is a huge change from the 45 minute marathons of even 3 months ago.  Our positioning has become acrobatic as he first learned to hold his head up, then sit, then crawl, and now stand.  The teeth weren't even a challenge after the initial problems I had with severe engorgement that lasted for over two weeks and Reynaud's phenomenon vasospasms.  He's got 8 teeth now and the points of a couple molars are starting to make an appearance.  He only nips when he's falling asleep, and only once did he nip hard enough to draw blood.

We've dealt with RSV/bronchiolitis (and a 4 day hospitalization), coxsackievirus, and gastroenteritis, but Rowan made it through his first year without an ear infection, diaper rash, or food allergy.  The last one was a huge concern for us, since DH and I both have food allergies, mine multiple and severe.  Rowan is vegan and loves to eat beans, tofu, leafy greens, tempeh, and mushrooms.  He chowed down on a pineapple cupcake at his birthday party, and followed it up with a few minutes of mommy milk before he went back to being overwhelmed by wrapping paper, sparkles, bows, and too many toys.

All the nursing pain I went through at the beginning was worth it just for this moment.  Rowan sprawled on my lap, napping off his party, a drop of milk still on his chin.  He is worth the hours and hours I spent pumping at work before I left my job.  He is healthy and intelligent and fantastic.  We are heading into unknown territory with toddler nursing, but I decided a while ago that I absolutely do not care if the ignorant criticize my parenting style.  I look down on my lap and see not an infant, but a little boy who still has a lot of growing to do, a little boy whose future is still forming, and I am only writing the prologue.