smitten

Steve and I are completely and totally in love with our baby son. Besotted and delirious and exhausted. Let me introduce you: Daniel Joseph, previously known as the Lemmondrop, was born Friday, August 25, 2006, at 5:01 p.m. He weighed 8 pounds and nearly 10 ounces and was 21 inches long. It was a Cesarean birth that followed 26 hours of labor in the hospital and more labor at home beforehand (having found out when we checked in that I was already 6 centimeters dilated). Because it was a Cesarean, I was in the hospital for four days instead of two, which is why this blog has been silent. (Oh how I wish our hospital had Internet access!) I'll write more later about the experience we like to call "The Sampler Plate of Labor," but suffice to say that it was very positive, despite an outcome we had hoped to avoid. Even the surgery had an element of joy and emotional wonder to it. We felt very well-cared-for throughout the entire process. (And our doula was fantastic.)

We got home this afternoon, and as you can imagine, it's a new kind of hectic trying to get Daniel acclimated to his new home. It all feels very surreal. Like, it's the same house we left Thursday, but it's not. Everything is different.

P.S. You can see more pictures of Daniel here, on my friend Liz's blog. She and her husband Chris were among our visitors over the weekend.