Ahoy, matey!Preview smile (no real ones yet):Last day with Grandma Becky:While my mom was here, we reupholstered a rocking chair that was sort of falling apart from another student who graduated. Try to ignore the mess behind the rocking chair in this picture--turned out pretty great, eh?The perfect size for reading to Naomi......and for Naomi to hold Sage (in a very, very supervised setting):

Day 4

Some more pictures from the last few days. Everyone is feeling well. Sage is not a spectacular eater so far (she seemed to be the first couple of days, but then we started to have some new difficulties), but she is not terrible either, and is otherwise great. We think she spends a lot of time with her eyes open for a newborn. Her cry sounds like a pteradactyl--very different from Naomi's baby lamb cry as an infant. She likes her left arm. She had her first sponge bath today. And so far we think we have a pretty successful sibling relationship--Naomi likes to kiss Sage occasionally, but doesn't seem to be impacted a ton by her arrival. 90% of this is probably all the extra attention she has been getting from my mom, so the true test of jealousy may come later, but she still seems to be doing pretty well.

Sage's first trip to the Met (we went to see "the Model as Muse" exhibit). Granted, she slept through the whole thing in the sling, but we enjoyed it:



Then again, maybe Naomi does have some mixed feelings about new baby Sage...
Touching the ceiling:
The new big sister wrapped up in a special new Peter Rabbit blanket from Grandma Becky, reading Squirrel Nutkin:

Twins!

Introducing Sage Amara Brice

I love this picture. She is perfect. And perfectly peaceful. So sweet.

Sage was born yesterday, May 22 at 2:17pm. My water broke around 9:15, but it took me a while to be convinced that is really what happened because I wasn't really having any contractions to speak of at the time. I walked up to the hospital at 10, had a magical epidural around noon (no numbness again, just a dramatic reduction in pain), and just a very lovely birth overall, followed by some nice time together as a family immediately after the birth and almost zero recovery pain. We walked home from the hospital this afternoon, again in no pain, and I am physically feeling *fantastic*. I am a little surprised, because I remember it taking literally weeks before I felt this good after Naomi was born.

Emotionally...emotions are high. But I think we are going to be ok. We will see.

In spite of being kind of little (and she is actually not little for gestational age, just little compared to the average baby because she was born a couple of weeks early, which is OK), Sage is great. Healthy. No problems. And I need to sleep....

New Baby Girl

6 lbs and 12oz, name coming tomorrow!! Annie is doing great. Naomi now has her new baby "stister"....

False alarm

Matt and I spent last night in the hospital because I thought I was in labor. I was dilated 3cm, then 4, and by 2:30am, having very painful contractions consistently 3 minutes apart and lasting 90 seconds each (ie, about how I felt maybe...2 or 3 hours before Naomi was born?). Everyone thought it was the real deal for a couple of hours...then everything petered out and I fell asleep. Now I'm back home with contractions that are less painful and farther apart.

Go figure.

We are all completely exhausted.

UPDATE (Wednesday at 12:45pm): Now I am having NO CONTRACTIONS. NONE. This is the first time in about a week and a half that I've gone for more than 30 minutes without a relatively strong contraction. Obviously there is nothing to be done here, and in a way I am glad I at least do not have a physical excuse anymore for not being able to get anything done, but...man, I would really prefer to have a textbook pattern of labor progression!

Nesting...

All our closets are officially clean and organized, as is my desk. Matt and I have a contract for me to keep my desk organized and clothes put away in exchange for him putting the toys away in the right spot (his half of the room is already clean, but this trade gets at two things we each do...me more than Matt...that occasionally bug each other, so it's a good trade). I'm happy because I actually found all of the missing pieces for most of our puzzles. Naomi isn't really that into puzzles right now, but somehow we seem to lose all the pieces anyway. I guess because rather than putting the pieces together, she instead prefers to hide them around the house. :-P But now they are found!

The girls' closet (on the left are all our infant clothes, organized by size; this closet took a long time):Another gratuitous picture of Naomi dressed up as a princess. She spends a lot of time pretending and acting things out right now--*especially* pretending to have her animals or bath toys play hide and seek with each other. I'll see if I can get it on tape sometime--I cannot tell you how hilarious she thinks this game is. Another funny thing she has started doing is "reading" books like a teacher (holding the book up in front of her for other people to see) wherever we go...at the park, walking down the street, you name it. It definitely wins some smiles from passers-by!Nesting part II: an attempt at a project for the new baby. Black and white pictures laminated with some extra self-laminating sheets from a friend. We never got any of these (nor the black and white board books that are also very big these days) for Naomi, which is sort of the point. I want to make sure this baby has some things that are special for her...since in reality the vast majority of what we have for her is going to be hand-me-downs from Naomi. Which is also fine, I just don't want it to be universal.Close-up of the other side of the smaller cards. The pictures were scrounged online one night when I could not sleep--kind of cute, eh? Not exactly a quilt or anything elaborate, but it's something. Good enough for an infant who doubtless could not care less about any of this anyway.Now back to relearning everything I've forgotten during the past two years....

Done...

NO BABY YET, huzzah! Last Monday and Tuesday I started having 2-7 strong contractions an hour throughout the day, and was worried that I was going to end up going into labor before the end of the week. But we ended up getting through the week just fine (though in order to focus at all on studying I had to stop timing my contractions and just decide to ignore them completely until they were unbearably painful...since really, there is probably not a huge rush given that I was already *in* the hospital, just a different building, for school), I finished my last test of the year early Friday afternoon, and Naomi and I spent a nice afternoon at a great playground on the west side of Central Park with some friends:Someone brought an ice cream maker that is a soccer ball...pretty cool.Yesterday we spent much of the day at a spring fair for the Cathedral School at St. John's in morningside heights. This is actually a really great fair, plus we picked up a lot of fun stuff (puzzles, books, some princess gear):Then Matt and I went out to dinner and had a great time with some of my school friends (after "teaching" Naomi how to play baseball in the backyard...ha, ha.)Now we are on to some serious nesting/cleaning/organizing. Pictures to come.

Resolution

Today I destroyed my one chance to have a conversation of any length at all with anyone over the age of 2 by watching one and a half episodes of a crappy tv show. I didn't realize that was the tradeoff I had made until afterward, but I cannot think of any more depressing way to end a day, so.....

No more tv. Until the end of med school. None.

I would say until the end of my life, but I don't feel like I can make that type of commitment right now. But I do feel depressed and lonely enough at the moment to commit to two years on the off-chance that I can avoid ending another day on as desolate a note as today.

Matt and I don't own a tv specifically because we both don't *want* to watch tv, but end up watching it when it's there. Like ice cream (for me), except that in that case I continue to buy it. The problem is, it has just become so easy to watch tv even without one. There is no way to set things up so that you don't have to use self-control on a daily basis (unless I guess we decided to not have internet access, but that doesn't turn out to be very practical anytime other than on vacation. I can't even take tests without internet, or study for the boards. Though really some things I use the internet for are pathetic (...looking up the temperature rather than opening a window to check? please...). Oh well, at least I learned something today, even if it was a terrible day.

Oh, and by the way, the tv show was Gossip Girl. Point this out, please, anytime I seem like I am on any kind of tv high horse...or anti-superficiality high horse...or I-am-so-busy-I-have-no-time baloney self-pity-party. Feel free to point out that I watched almost an entire season of Gossip Girl in a period of under two months...and probably would have watched more had I known where to find it. I wish I could say I am more the type of person who becomes addicted to something mildly substantive, like Lost, or Law & Order, or ESPN, but....let the truth be known. Don't be deceived by the lack of make-up and determination to cut my own hair. I watch Gossip Girl.

Just not any more.

Day 15

So, it looks like our plants are actually growing so far. We do have two plants (the scallions and bell peppers, I think) which have not really sprouted, but the rest of the seeds we planted seem to be doing well, and the tomatoes (hidden behind Naomi), basil, and cilantro all seem to have grown now that I compare them to this picture from two weeks ago:PS--in the first picture, Naomi is holding another zinnia which she brought home from daycare as a Mother's day present for me. Granted, that day we ended up going shopping (to a store where the sales-lady made a serious attempt at convincing me to make a cast of my belly....anyone want to venture a guess as to which store this might be? If you've been there before, you should be able to predict it...and no, it was not a cast-making store!), so this pot has been carried all over the city and will probably not sprout unless I transplant one of the zinnias from another pot into it to avoid disappointing Naomi.Matt did a triathlon in New Jersey today. Naomi and I had a complicated morning and but ended up on the west side at a kite festival where she made a kite that we all later attempted to fly from our balcony.Then we took the kite to the river, where we had a little more success.So, an update on Naomi and baby sister. Naomi has decided that she would like to be a fireman when she grows up. She can tell you ALL about what firemen do. It's pretty cute, though on behalf of her lungs, I hope she changes her mind (really I just feel badly for all of the firefighters who have permanent debilitating lung damage after 9-11). Meanwhile baby sister has decided to start giving me a little more grief. I am feeling a little crappy (I think this is detailed enough for a public blog), and I am mildly afraid of the potential implications of the fact that this child already DOES NOT SLEEP, but so it goes. As long as she stays in for at least another week, I will be happy.