Your Birth Day for Your Birthday
Hi all, I wrote Julia's birth story in honor of her first birthday. It's in 3 parts which I will post over the next few days. Enjoy!
Part 1: The Prelude
On Saturday, April 29th, Daddy and I had a busy day preparing for your arrival. First, we interviewed a potential home daycare provider named Catherine. We were fairly happy with her but felt that we were just at the beginning of our search. We had only interviewed at one other place in person. I should point out that this appointment was at 11:00 a.m. and was the very first thing we did that Saturday. Little did we know that it would be last morning for a very long time that we got up just in time to eat and shower for an 11:00 a.m. appointment!

Right after that meeting we had an appointment at a place about 30 minutes away in Needham where you make 12 dinners in 2 hours for freezing and later consumption called Dream Dinners. I was starving so we stopped at Rosie’s at Inman Square and I had a German Chocolate brownie and milk that I had to eat in the car. I was grumpy about that.

When we got to Dream Dinners, the greeter exclaimed, “Don’t have that baby in here!” and I wholeheartedly assured her that I wouldn’t be having the baby for another couple of weeks. We made our food and rushed it home to the freezer. After a late lunch (which I honestly can’t remember), we spent the afternoon/evening on baby prepping chores. We searched the Consumer Reports website for the air conditioners we needed to buy and called around to local merchants to locate them. Then we made two important lists: the Things To Do Before Baby list and the What To Bring To The Hospital list. We left the hospital list unfinished. To be clear, the Things To Do Before Baby list contained some pretty important items. For example, I had just received the signed maternity leave paperwork from the OB-GYN in the mail THAT day, so on the list was, “turn in maternity leave paperwork.”

It was getting fairly late by this time so we decided to relax for the rest of the night. Neither of us was hungry since we had a late lunch, so we ate peanut butter toast. This decision was one I came to regret for the next 3 days. We then retired to the living room to watch Good Night and Good Luck on DVD. I was very tired and snoozed on and off throughout the movie, but Daddy said you were kicking and bouncing around like crazy in there. We ended up going to bed about 12:30 a.m.

It was taking me awhile to fall asleep and just as I started drifting off, I felt a gush of warm water on my legs—my water broke! I woke up Daddy and immediately called the doctor reporting the items they told us to keep track of during our childbirth class. They told us to get packed up, shower and go to the hospital. The next hour was complete chaos, I remember shouting to Daddy, “Do you realize that when we come back here we will be bringing a baby?” I also remember Daddy running around with a duffel bag with nothing in it. We finally got a hold of ourselves and remembered that our pregnancy book had a generic list for hospital packing—I think we had temporarily forgotten about our half-finished one. We used that to pack a bag, showered up and left the house about 2:30 a.m. The picture below was taken during that chaos.