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.