Kat Dancing

Eleanor Rahil

My daughter, Eleanor Rahil, was born Wednesday, May 4, 2011, at 11:49 am. She weighed 7 pounds 9 ounces and objected quite vocally to the whole "being born" experience.

I didn't blame her. I started having contractions at 11 pm the night before and checked into the hospital at around 4 am. At 9:30 my water broke, meaning what had been "oh hi, I guess labor contractions hurt, who knew" became a somewhat surreal experience where I was either in severe, insane amounts of pain or semi-conscious -- sort of the reverse of an out-of-body experience; nothing except my body was particularly real. Occasionally I resurfaced enough to realize, in a distant way, that Dan had Pirates of the Caribbean on for me and to briefly appreciate the distractive properties of Johnny Depp, but mostly it was breathing and squeezing poor Dan's hand half-off. At around 11:30 I started informing people that I was going to push now, and there was a bit of running around finding doctors and setting up beds and I don't know what all, and finally, after a bit under ten minutes of pushing, they were holding up a screaming baby and telling me it was a girl. I'm told this was a pretty easy labor for a first-timer, but, as I said, my sympathies were primarily with Eleanor. I can't imagine it felt much better, for those thirteen hours, to be the toothpaste than it did to be the tube.

Ellie is now a week and a half old and I'm... well, it's probably too early to say I'm getting the hang of this parenthood thing, and that I started this blog post on Monday probably gives you an idea how things are going. She's a good baby, as babies go, but there's no getting around the fact that she needs someone adult watching her all the time, that there's only two adults in the house, and that of those, only one has the proper equipment to serve as a 24/7 all-you-can-eat-buffet. We're coping. I'm getting a lot of reading done but very little sleep. Dan let me buy an iPad, which arrived just before Ellie, and I gotta say the thing is damn nice if you're trapped on the couch/bed/armchair with a kidlet... but actual computer time is, how shall I put this, limited. Along with almost every other type of time that doesn't involve being trapped on a couch, bed, etc, and can't be done one-handed.

She is a total pain in the ass, and I love her to death.

Sums up the whole parenthood thing nicely, doesn't it?