This isn’t the craziest birth story you’ll ever read. It isn’t the most dramatic or fastest or the closest call. But it is my craziest birth story. I’ve already told this story several times, and each time I feel a bit like I’m lying, or at least exaggerating because the timeline just doesn’t feel real. Whenever I tell it, I
One thing I didn’t expect about having kids is the arranging required to do absolutely anything outside of the normal schedule. You take this kid, I’ll take this kid, Mimi will pick up that kid, and ugh, I wasn’t even thinking about their carseats. Do we have enough Goldfish and carseats? The arranging is why moms just stop
It’s hard to know when or where to begin baby Thomas’s birth story. Does it start it when I felt my first, painful contraction? Or a month before that, when I packed my hospital bag and asked several close family and friends to please keep their phones on in the middle of the night just in case.
Thomas Christopher Krieger Jr. Born May 19, 2015 8 lb, 10 oz., 22 in. Mommy and Daddy enter the hospital: 6:35 a.m. Baby Thomas enters the world: 6:38 a.m. Since the very beginning, Thomas has been sucking on his fingers and chewing on his hands. He doesn’t seem to be the sort of drowsy newborn who will nurse and
Last Friday I fulfilled my duty as a mother and on the last day of preschool I forced David to stand on the porch with his school bag, stare directly into the sun, and let me take photos. Since I happened to be two days past my due date, the night before the last day
We are in the middle of the late-pregnancy waiting game. Maybe tomorrow we’ll wake up, make breakfast, go to the park, have lunch, shirk a few chores, and count the minutes until Daddy gets home. Or maybe tomorrow I will have a baby and our family will be forever changed. Who knows. The weather just turned — it’s
If you happen to see Mary Virginia anytime soon, make sure to compliment her on her newly erupted lower incisors. She’s been working on them for several agonizing weeks, and now that they’re here, they’re her greatest accomplishment. Or maybe mine. If you’ve ever read any of Mary Virginia’s updates, you can guess what I’m about
A little over six years ago I injured my hamstring in a triathlon. I’d iced, stretched, rested, done physical therapy, and still it wasn’t quite right. I kept running, but I could only run conservatively — I couldn’t push myself. Two years later when I got pregnant with David, my hamstring was still bothering me. I ran through
The other day during breakfast, David leaned over and whispered into his sister’s ear. Then he looked up at me and said, “Mommy, I just told Mary Virginia she’s going to die soon.” He informed me like it was something we’d talked about ahead of time, and then he went right back to eating his pancakes. The
Mary Virginia loves babies. She acts like an over-eager grandmother when she hears about an infant. She gets so excited that she starts talking in falsetto, and has to channel her energy into frantically knitting tiny sweaters and bootees. Then when she’s actually in the room with an infant, she transforms into a middle-school-aged boy with a crush. She