Ye Olde Pro

Besides sometimes seeming (and feeling) like an old vet at all this pregnant mommy stuff it surprised me just how much I’d forgotten about the days leading up to and following the big event. Then I remembered I was half comatose in my 9th month and out of my freaking mind in sleep deprived delirium the first two weeks of my daughter’s life….so it’s no small wonder a few details have escaped me.

I forgot, for example, that B.D. leaves the OR with the baby while they sew me up. I forgot that he is to stay by baby’s side that entire first day because I won’t be competent enough to be left alone with her (they’ll have me drugged on something close to morphine). I forgot that he has to spend his nights on a crappy cot next to my hospital bed. I forgot if or when I get to shower…..or how I’m supposed to even do that as a stapled together, crippled mess. I forgot about the birth certificate, social security card and first photos, all done right there in the hospital while I’m damn near out of it.

I’ve been taking a refresher course by way of two TV shows on TLC, A Baby Story and Bringing Home Baby. With A Baby Story I find that I cry every time they have the baby……even though I KNOW they’re going to have the baby. It’s the whole point of the show. There’s never an episode where they DON’T have the baby. It’s called A BABY STORY!…..and still, I tear up every single time the baby is born. I could be across the house in the laundry room, have the television on just for noise, be passing by the living room on my way out the front door, hear the “waaaahhhh” of the baby being born and BAM…..salty tear city.

Because I’m the silly hormone monster.

Bringing Home Baby serves to remind me of the reality of it all. It’s a show that documents the parent’s first 36 hours home with a newborn. Their haggard faces following the first night home says it all. We’re going to be fortunate enough to have my mom and mother-in law there to help entertain and care for Boo Boo (formerly known as Doo Doo). I count myself especially blessed because my mom isn’t the naggy know-it-all type and my mother-in-law isn’t the disapproving dictator type. They’re both terrifically lovely AND…. get this…..they get along!

Point is, we won’t be left wanting for helping hands and a great deal of it will come back to me, like some foggy dream I once had. And what B.D. doesn’t know I can help him with. But I sometimes wish I wasn’t so experienced. It would have been nice to have had my first child with him. Not that I’d give up my Boo Boo for love or ridiculous amounts of money, but how nice if he’d been there for her birth. Both of us being brand new at this thing called baby, rather than me appearing to be an old hand at the prego trade.

But oh well. Nothing is ever ideal, at least our little family comes awfully close.