Getting busy part II

Well, since I unavoidably swerved off into sex talk last time, I'll try to keep this a little more on the straight and narrow this time. Really, it was time to get busy. Life was cruising along at a comfortable clip, finances were starting to come into a healthy picture, hobbies were established, we were enjoying our freedoms together and separately. So why not throw a wrench in the works and see how it ends up?

Ahh yes, the talk of children.... The subject was broached, I was found to be in a more receptive mood than in the past, and an exchanging of thoughts occured. I can't say I was fully on board with the entire idea of becoming a parent and even more worried about being a good one at that. After many hours of discussion, some good soul searching, and a good many more hours of discussion, we decided it was indeed time to "get busy" starting a family. See, this is the direction I originally intended this post to go!

We set a rough timeline involving the stopping of birth control and the start of taking our chances. Our timeline was to get pregnant sometime near the center section of 2006 and have a baby by the time 2007 rolled around to join us. Well, we're nothing if not punctual. OK, so that's a flat out lie for anyone that knows my wife. She's nothing, if not 15 minutes late! I swear she'll be late to her own funeral. In any case, it figures she'd be on time for this. As September rolls around, we get the note in the mail saying congratulations you're pregnant. Well, maybe it didn't come by mail, but instead involved attempting to pee on a little strip of paper, following by some sort of archane hyroglyphic reading, and a follow up to the clinic. All in all, we were indeed pregnant. Woohoo, now comes the roller coaster.

A little side note here as I've taken some flack on a forum for talking about pregnancy in the terms of "we" or "us". That's my own personal preference since I believe if you're as involved in the pregnancy as I think a person should be, you actually have as much stake as the woman who is carrying the child.

In any case, we were now pregnant and though we thought we'd prepared by reading and researching, we were in for a world of fun over the next 9 months. We really hadn't gotten to the point of figuring out how we wanted to have this baby. Typical doctrine dictates you pick out an OB clinic, wait 9 months, and head to the hospital. This didn't sound like us. We wanted to take an active role in the pregnancy and use this as a learning opportunity as well. Our search for something different led us into the world of midwives.

For those that haven't a clue about what midwives are, what they do, or have heard from a friend of a friend who had a midwife and delivered in a barn in Coonsfoot, Kentucky, you owe it to yourself to learn a little more about them. We had a truly awesome experience and spent hours with our midwife learning about the pregnancy, learning what we could due to stay healthy, and learning more about our own physiology than we ever thought we'd need to know. Granted, it wasn't an easy process for either of us, though I was definitely less affected than Miranda. There was a new diet to follow, a fair amount of recommended reading, and a number of guidelines to follow. I'm sure there are a number of you reading this and thinking, why would you subject yourselves to so much extra work when you're all ready dealing with being pregnant? Trust me, there were a number of times we asked ourselves and the midwife the same thing. The bottom line was to maintain the health of the mother and baby throughout the pregnancy is the single most important thing you can do.

As we would later piece together, our midwife set us on course for a wonderful pregnancy that resulted in a very healthy baby girl being born on Good Friday of 2007. It was, indeed, a Good Friday! Our close friends know pretty much all the details of the birth, but I'll highlight a few things that astound most people. Labor started around 4 AM Friday morning, we went for a walk completely around Gray's Lake during the course of labor, saw our midwife around noon, and went for an accupuncture appointment after that. Around 3 PM the ball really started rolling and we headed from the accupuncturist back to the birthing center and the care of our midwife. Our beautiful girl was born a couple hours later completely without drugs and with the use of a heated whirlpool. Miranda was awesome during the entire process and kept her focus as I tried to keep up with her needs. It was a great experience and best of all, we were home and in bed by 8:30 that night!

Little did we know how much our lives were about to change. How in less than 2 years this beautiful bundle of joy:


To a fun, demanding, wildly adorable little person:


Ahh how sweet life is!