Family photo, November 15, 2007

Well, she’s here!  Charlotte Makenna was born last Thursday.  Surgery went very well, and we’re home now, embarking on that joyous and perilous journey called “adjusting to a new family member”.  So far Elijah is hanging in there.  Day one wasn’t pretty.  Days two and three were much better.  N and I both read “Siblings Without Rivalry” this fall (thanks to those of you who suggested it!) and are SO glad we did.  We both can’t recommend it enough.  Whether you have kids or not, or even whether you have a significant other or not, it’s so helpful for understanding the ways that we shape and are shaped and *were* shaped by dynamics in our homes.

But that’s a tangeant!  I’m feeling so grateful to be home, to have the scariness of surgery over, and for the initial plunge into new babyness to be made.  And not least by any stretch at all, to get to see dear Charlotte, daily, face-to-face.  I feel like I’ve emerged from a long, dark tunnel (pregnancy is unquestionably miraculous, but honestly, for me, this one was very hard), and the parts of myself that were necessarily on hold for so long are returning to life.  I can’t wait to begin exercising my body and mind and soul again in the ways that I used to enjoy.  Such things feel wonderfully imminent.

Thank you again for your thoughts and prayers and good wishes!  I hope to return my own offerings, by means of essays and conversations in this and others’ spaces, in the very near future.  For now, I will let this adjustment journey continue its new course.  From what I hear, the paved part begins a little further on.

Much love to all,
Kristin