Our weekend as a "Things We Did" list.

Friday:
Went out to eat at Nana's, where we destroyed some baked ziti and chicken parmigniana. (Commercial No. 1: Albuquerque residents, go to Nana's! Best Italian food in the city.)
Went to Barnes and Noble, where I bought Dara Horn's "In the Image." (Commercial No. 2: Dara Horn is the best new author I have found in recent memory. I highly recommend "The World to Come" and "In the Image." And that she write another book now since I've read those.)

Saturday:
Slept in, drank coffee, read my book.
Went and hung out with our friends the Overbeeks for the afternoon and then had dinner at Chili's. I wish we had video of Josiah, age less than two, eating corn on the cob with great zeal in spite of his general lack of understanding of how to maneuver the corn. Hilarious.
Finished my book.

Sunday:
Went to church. Came home, took a nap. Got up, went to Whole Foods to buy red raspberry tea. (More on that later.) Bought another book at Border's. Two, actually. I had a coupon.

Things we did not do this weekend:
Have a baby.

So, all in all, it was a really nice weekend. But we still don't have a baby! Yes, here I sit, the night before my due date, still pregnant. I've been on plenty of long walks as recommended by my doctor to trigger labor. There was a whopping thunderstorm, disproving the theory that drops in the barometric pressure might send you into labor. I have also done something very uncharacteristic for me and bought some herbal red raspberry tea that is rumored to have baby-bringing powers in spite of my vague skepticism towards all things homeopathic. We even talked to the baby about all the interesting things and people she has to look forward to out here. ("Look! A nursery! A stroller! Friends! Come out!") But she is apparently uninterested.

So I am resigned to seeing September 3, the long-awaited due date, arrive. I will greet its dawn from behind my giant, round, visibly-bouncing-with-each-kick-from-the-baby belly. In a way, it's kind of cool to think about the fact that it's actually about to be September 3, because I remember vividly the moment in January when the woman on the phone from the doctor's office told me my due date for the first time when I called to make an appointment. "September 3?" I thought. "That is forever and ever." And in a way, it seems like that moment was an eternity ago. So by comparison, whatever amount of time stands between us and the baby's birth is small. It doesn't feel small. But I know it is.

So for those of you who have called, emailed, and generally inquired, we're sorry to inform you that there is no news posted here because there just is no news. We'll let you know when we have more interesting developments. We promise. In the meantime, feel free to make new predictions on the baby's estimated arrival date. Your guess is as good as mine.

And September 4 passes into oblivion with no baby. Just in case you were wondering.

Having just returned from my "Congratulations, you're past your due date" doctor's appointment this morning, I have a news flash for you: Baby Kate has apparently decided that she is completely uninterested in being born. I know this because my doctor tells me that physically, in terms of stuff that usually indicates your baby might be coming soon, my body has made no change since last week. Nothing, people. I am speed-walking my life away, and this kid is just hanging out, laughing, like "What? You think all this movement is bothering me? I can wait forever, lady."

This does not seem to phase my doctor too much, because as she points out, a due date is just a theoretical marker in time for when the baby might arrive, but since we're getting farther and farther away from that marker, we've formulated a plan, and here it is: If this baby does not make her appearance sometime in the next week, we will check into the hospital next Friday, September 14, and forcibly evict her via the use of pitocin. This is not my first choice for a birth experience, but if I am still pregnant a week from tomorrow, I have a feeling I am not going to care what I have to do as long as it will result in a baby. In the meantime, Kate will get plenty of opportunities to show off for the cameras, as we will go in for two ultrasounds/biophysical profiles to make sure she is still happy and safe in the little water world she refuses to leave. If there's a problem, her birthday will get moved up. If not, we wait.

So we've got a week. It is still, of course, entirely possible and likely that at some point soon I'll just go into labor on my own and this whole induction conversation will be moot. And if you've got some extra time on your hands or just love us very much, I would appreciate it if you'd pray for that to happen. I'm trying to have a good attitude and be patient, but it's hard, because I'm huge and uncomfortable, and my level of anxiety and general edginess is not exactly going down as each day passes. You can imagine what this is doing for Dan's quality of life. By the way, if he shows up asking to sleep on your couch sometime this week, it isn't because I threw him out. It's just that he needs a break from waking up every ten minutes when I hoist myself out of bed to go to the bathroom and then fall back onto the mattress, catapulting him out of bed from the force of the impact.

Let the countdown begin.

Having returned from our ultrasound, I can report to you the following facts about our baby, who is still not overly interested in entering the world:

She has plenty of amniotic fluid.

She is, according to the ultrasound tech "Moving around like she's got plenty of room in there." Except that no, she doesn't have plenty of room. I should know. There's no more room. She's just accomplishing all that kicking through the power of positive thinking.

Her heart rate is good.

She is, indeed, still a girl. Dan asked the lady to check.

She has Rice cheeks. For a few seconds, the tech let us look at her face in 4-D, which makes all those baby parts you're staring at on the screen actually look like a baby suddenly. Kate, as will not surprise anyone who knew myself and my siblings as children, has got some chubby, chubby cheeks. This was perhaps accentuated by the highly indignant frown she was wearing at the moment. Apparently, she is not a big fan of the ultrasound. It was adorable.

Lastly, and perhaps explaining the cheeks, the technician informed us that, based on her various measurements and calculations, which were entered into the computer and processed, Kate's estimated weight is nine pounds. Nine. My response to this was to put a lot of stock in the word "estimated" and focus on the umpteen stories I've heard of babies who were predicted, based on their ultrasounds, to weigh 10 pounds or more, only to emerge at more reasonable weights. But still. Nine pounds.

Dan's response was to laugh in an "I told you so" kind of way. Dan was a large baby himself, and he has been saying for months that he thinks Kate is going to be big. A few weeks ago our doctor guessed that the baby might weight 7 pounds at the most, and Dan pretty much told her she was crazy. She took that well, considering she's a highly-trained professional who was being called out by someone with absolutely zero baby-related experience. But now Dan has some justification for his belief in Our Giant Baby. There will be no living with him.

Of course, he might not laugh so hard if they have to put splints on his fingers after he holds my hand through the delivery of a nine pound baby. Ha. Ha. Ha.

It's 3:30 in the morning, and we're headed to the hospital. That's all for now. Stay tuned.

After a long day - which is actually several long days. Baby Kate is here. She was born on 09/08/07 (which is kinda cool) at 9:29pm weighing in at 8 pounds 8 ounces measuring 19 1/2 inches.

Haley and I are doing well but are pretty exhausted. Unfortunatly, this time of year is the time to have a baby. This means Haley had to share a recovery room and I got kicked out and sent home. I'll try to catch some sleep at home and then head back in the morning.

Thanks for everyones continued prayers. Please pray for healing for Haley. Also be in prayer for baby Kate. The nurse said she sounds like she has some liquid in her lungs and needs to "cry it out". Kate never really put up a large fuss after she came out, so she probably just needs to get upset and cry for a bit.

More coming soon.

-dan

Well, after almost 24 hours everyone is doing pretty good. The Doctor said Kate is perfectly healthy and everything looks great. Haley is recovering, and doing better.

Mom and Baby should be home tomorrow.

As a side note - a major milestone was passed in the Wachdorf household. Not just the obvious birth of the baby. But I (Dan) changed my first diaper. I change a Kate diaper BEFORE Haley did. Not only that, I changed a gigantic blow out diaper. Who would of thought a little baby can fill up a diaper so much.

Well, we made it home from the hospital yesterday and survived the first night. Haley's mom "Gam" made it in last night and we are grateful for the help. For now, more pictures. Haley will try to get a real blog entry up soon.

Kate in her home coming outfit.

Kate in her crib.

Kate making a funny face.

Kate making a funnier face.

Kate and "Gam"

Kate stretching

Sleeping Kate

Kate hangin' with her dad on the couch.

More pictures. Still no post from Haley. She promises one soon.

Kate entertaining herself in her chair, given to her by her great Grandma Mimi.

Kate sharing a moment with Haley.

Kate stretching on her "lambi".

A close up.

Kate doing her morning stretches.

Kate listening intently to Dad tell her the story of the Aggies triple overtime victory over Fresno State which occurred on the day she was being born.

Hi, everyone!

It has been so great for me to read all of your love and happiness for us in the comments. Thank you for being so excited for us and so joyful about welcoming out little girl into the world. Every day when we check the blog, we tell Kate we're collecting her fan mail. She's going to have a massive ego if we keep that up, but for now I don't think it's going to her head too much.

Today is almost one week since she was born, and I am starting to feel more like a functioning member of society capable of having coherent thoughts, thanks entirely to the loving care I am receiving from Dan and my mom. Dan has been the absolute model of a wonderful husband and great daddy and has borne with great humor the fact that he now has two crying women in his life. And my mom arrived on Monday with several suitcases, including one packed with ice and Southern food staples like fresh okra and green peanuts for boiling. I may be the only woman in the history of the world to actually gain weight post partum. This means that I also get the benefit of her extensive knowledge of babies, which is considerable, since she did have five of them. Mom and Dan have been feeding me, doing all the shopping and house cleaning and such, and making me take naps when Kate is sleeping, and thanks to them I am recovering in great luxury. Here is the okra, in case you don't believe me.

I have so many thoughts to share that I've been trying to put them all into categories for future posts. One whole post will be about hospitalization. I've been blessed with great health my whole life, and have therefore never been in the hospital before, and while everyone on the staff where Kate was born was just fantastic, I have to say I did not enjoy the whole hospital experience. So that will be one post. Then I have a lot to say about labor and delivery, not to share gory details, but more to relate to you the story of how it came about that in the hours leading up to Kate's birth, we ended up watching a triple overtime Texas A&M football victory against Fresno State while being attended to by a nurse who was, no joke, a Fresno State alumnus, and also checking in periodically with another Texas A&M Aggie whose wife was having a baby down the hall. Our room was football central. When I married an Aggie, I knew football would be part of my life, but I have to say I never thought it would be part of my birth experience. Of course, I might not have found this all so humorous if it weren't for the fact that I had had an epidural by that time and was therefore in a pretty good mood. For the 14 hours preceding the epidural, I was not a big fan of noise. Or people. Or breathing oxygen in and out of my lungs in order to continue living. But that's just me.

For now, the thing that occupies a lot of my mind when I'm not trying to figure out some immediate mommy task like how to work the Diaper Genie is the fact that I am now a mom and that Dan and I are parents. It's not that I didn't know this was coming, but there is something very overwhelming about the reality of it that has caught me off guard at strange moments. When we were checking out of the hospital, there were all of these forms to sign indicating that we understood that we were getting a human baby and we were responsible for her once we left the hospital, etc. Every time I was supposed to sign, there was a line, and under the line, there was the word "Mother." And I thought "Oh my goodness. I am a mother now. I am signing legal documents as a mother. This is so weird." I know that one day soon, it's not going to seem that remarkable to me that I'm a mother, but for now, it's pretty amazing.

There are plenty of things about the last week that I know I will remember for the rest of my life even when I am old and can barely remember my own name, but my favorite memory so far is this: The day that we were discharged from the hospital, my hospital roomate checked out early in the morning. The labor and delivery floor had been extremely busy, and so it was the first time that we had the room all to ourselves. Even the nurses were leaving us alone at that point because there wasn't much left for us to do but final paperwork. So Dan and I got ourselves set up in the two arm chairs in the room, got Kate all wrapped up in blankets and sleeping, put on some music in the room and got out the Calvin and Hobbes comic books we brought to the hospital in case we had a random moment just like this. It's a silly thing, but one of the first things that I loved about Dan when we were dating was that it was so easy to laugh with him. And one of the first things we enjoyed laughing over together was Calvin and Hobbes comic books. So on the day we brought Kate home, we sat in the hospital room and read comic books, and at one point, we were laughing so hard that Kate was bouncing up and down in my arms and I was actually afraid I was going to wake her up. But she just kept sleeping, so I was looking down at her beautiful little face, and holding Dan's hand, our new little family having a good laugh together. And I thought "This is the happiest moment of my whole life."

It's true that my brain is currently controlled by lethal amounts of post-baby hormones and therefore, my perspective on the world is perhaps a bit intense at any given moment of sadness or happiness. But the thing is, I have had that exact same thought again at least once every day that has come after that one, even on the days when I've been overwhelmed and tired and scared of all the things I don't know about being a mom. So while every day I realize again just how unalterably our lives have changed because Kate is here, that doesn't scare me like I thought it would when I used to think about having a baby and how it would change our lives. Instead it feels like we've traded in one life full of love and blessings for a new life that somehow, inexplicably, has even more of that beauty and grace than we had before. And I wouldn't change it all for anything in the world.

Thanks again for checking in with us. We'll keep the baby pictures coming.

Here are some new photos of Kate. Don't laugh at me for how many of them are essentially variations on the theme "Baby lounging on sheepskin." It might look like the same photo to you, but that's just because the various facial expressions of my baby aren't the most fascinating thing in your world.

Dan finally got to break out the stroller he's been learning to drive when we took Kate on her first walk around the neighborhood. Kate seemed less interested in this than us, but I suppose when you're in the stroller, there isn't much to see.

Dan in diaper-changing action. He's actually very good at this. I'm so proud of him.

The previously mentioned sheepskin series:

When she yawns, it makes me yawn. Of course, I think she yawns out of boredom. I yawn out of sleep deprivation.

These are the little feet that were kicking me so vigorously at the end of my pregnancy.

And hanging out on the couch with her Gam.

Hello, everyone. Apologies for the lack of photos yesterday. It was a busy day, because we took Kate to the pediatrician, where she was declared very healthy, and gave her her first bath, which was quite an adventure. It wasn't a real bath since her umbilical cord hasn't fallen off yet, but she really needed a sponge bath after a late-night feeding that ended with her somehow managing to get spit up in her own hair. I'm pretty sure having your kid smell like puke is not a sign of competent parenting. Perhaps it's fitting then that my Mom actually did the bathing, and I just took pictures.

Kate looks sort of apprehensive about the whole thing. I think she's figured out by now that any time we undress her down to her diaper and lay her out on her back in a room with bright lighting, something she's not going to like is coming.

And, as expected, she did not love the washcloth.

By the time we got to doing her back, she looked sort of resigned to the whole thing.

And once she was all clean and warm, she didn't seem too traumatized. But she did look at us sort of suspiciously for the next couple of hours, just like in this picture.

I'm actually considering giving her more baths since it makes her so alert. A lot of my life right now is spent trying to get her to wake up enough to eat. I took this picture at around 3 a.m. the other night after I had spent at least 15 minutes undressing her, jostling her around and basically doing everything short of hanging her upside down by her toes to get her to wake up, all to no avail. Here she is, snoozing away.

And yawning, just to emphasize how very not interested in eating she was. I think she's mocking me when she does that.

During the day, I try to keep her up for a little while after she eats in what is probably a futile attempt to help her learn the difference between night and day. This usually goes pretty well in the morning and gets harder and harder as the day goes on. In this picture, though, I had just changed her clothes, and she is doing her heartbreak and anguish face to show me how unhappy she is about that parental decision. She has the pouty lip thing down alarmingly well for an infant. I think we're in big trouble when she gets older and wants a pony.

And lastly, I might as well go ahead and confess to the Internet that we are bad parents and have succumbed to the lure of the pacifier. It turns out that this kid is a sucker, in the sense that while she isn't interested in productive eating all the time, she does very much enjoy having something in her mouth, and she'd be perfectly happy if I served as her human pacifier all the time. But since I have goals in life, like taking a shower, it's nice that she will settle for a paci. Also, we're entertained by the fact that it looks comically large next to her baby face right now. I told you. We're terrible parents.

Hi, everyone. Has anyone ever told you how you can't get anything done when you have a newborn in your life? Well, in case you didn't know, you can't get anything done, partly because you don't have time between feedings, diaperings, and trying to get some sleep, but also partly because you don't have any attention span, and so you walk into rooms with a purpose and then have to stand there for 45 seconds hoping to magically recall what that purpose was. So while I meant to post pictures all day yesterday, it just didn't happen. But now, here are a few photos for you.

First of all, the big news around here is that Baby Kate now has a belly button. I am glad about this, because frankly, the umbilical cord stump kind of freaked me out. Also, her little belly button is pretty cute.

This is Kate doing her "I have a full tummy and I am happy" face.

Kate tries out the blanket her Aunt Dinah made for her.

Kate being cute.

Saturday night Dan, Mom, Dad and I gave Kate her first real bath in preparation for her first trip to church on Sunday. We set the kitchen table up as a baby tub platform and had enough bath supplies and towels on hand to bathe and dry off a soaking wet golden retriever. This, of course, turned out to be overkill for one tiny baby, but it's good to be prepared. Giving Kate the first of what I'm sure will be many Saturday night baths made me think of a funny story from my childhood. When I was about three years old, I stayed the night with the Thompson family from our church in Yazoo City, Mississippi while mom and dad went on a brief trip. On Friday evening, Mrs. Becky Thompson, who in later years was my dearly beloved sixth grade teacher, tried to get me to take a bath. Much to the embarrassment of my parents when they heard about it, I declined this offer, and confidently told Mrs. Becky that I only took baths on Saturday nights, to get ready for church. Apparently, I sincerely believed this, not because it was true, but probably because Saturday night was the only time my parents made a big deal about the bath time ritual, and so I started associating Saturdays with baths. We're most likely setting Kate up for the same association, but that's not all bad since she actually seemed to enjoy it. Here are a few pictures.

On Monday, my dad left town after flying in for a couple of days to meet Kate, the child that he and mom have decided will refer to him as "Geez," thus setting the stage for all subsequent grandchildren to do the same. Geez is short for "Geezer," which has long been Dad's nickname amongst his own children. Specifically, my brothers started calling him this when they were in high school, to emphasize to him how anciently old he was quickly becoming, as if having twin teenage boys wasn't enough to make him feel the passage of time. That probably sounds disrespectful, but it's actually part of Dad's tradition of showing affection through nicknames. Everyone in the family has at least one, if not several, nicknames given to them by Dad, and frankly, they are all more ridiculous than Geezer. A few of those nicknames include Tuna, Big Girl, Middle Moose, Baby Moose, and his crowning achievement, at least in terms of length, Audgie Mo Paudge, Queen of the Audgie Paudgies. With that kind of record, I was expecting that Kate would have at least one nickname before the weekend was over. But apparently, Dad wasn't able to find one that felt right, because aside from some brief references to Kate as "Mumu" (pronounced "moo-moo") he never really settled on one. Nicknames aside, I think they got off to a great start as grandfather and granddaughter. Here's a picture.