The Details (skip if you'd rather not know)

There's a placenta in my freezer.  I was distracted by Skipper when the midwives stashed it helpfully away for me.  I'm not disgusted by it or anything, and I'm impressed by my body's ability to make such an amazing thing, but I'm just not interested in doing anything with it. And now I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it. Gosh, it's not a biohazard or anything, is it? My current plan is to make sure it's totally frozen, double-bag it, and chuck it in the dumpster just before the trash pickup. I really don't want some homeless person* to dig it out of the trash and try to eat it. Not that it wouldn't be a nutritious meal. Maybe I should just label it "HUMAN PLACENTA" and let the homeless people make an informed choice.

Anyway, the birth! It was totally straightforward - the Chief Midwife cheerfully informed me that it was a "vanilla birth" (and then hastened to reassure me that it's okay to be vanilla, as if I had any doubt). The midwives were wonderfully hands-off, stepping in only when needed.  It was also really lovely to be at home the whole time, with no need to go anywhere, and then even more wonderful to be at home afterward, listening to Dutch and one of my fabulous cousins chatting with Skipper in the next room while I lay in my own bed, freshly showered and fed, dozing and looking out the window at the flowers on our tree. 

However, I have to say that labor and birth are really pretty crappy. I had forgotten. About two hours into the experience, I started to get pissed off that things weren't going faster (even though they were progressing pretty quickly, and really quite easily, all things considered), and then when I was pushing the kid out, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of disbelief that I was actually having to do this ridiculous thing. I even said "This is IMPOSSIBLE!" at one point, and I suspect that I looked and sounded quite a bit like this, except without lightsabers (start at 1:50):

And then I got her head out, which was great, but I still had to do MORE! And then I got the rest of her out, and that was really great (Hi, Skipper!), and then, after w'd all sat on the bed, admiring our new, slippery, angry family member for a little while, they asked me to push the placenta out, and I really felt that that was just unfair. Really. After all that work, you want me to do something else? Do you KNOW what my innards feel like right now?**

It's a really silly way to reproduce. And I'm not doing it again. 

Dutch woke up just in time for the actual birth, and refused an invitation from a midwife to come up on the bed, preferring to watch silently from the hall. She allowed as how she was somewhat alarmed and confused when she woke up, but she seemed untroubled by the experience. "I thought you said that you would make mooing noises," she told me later, "but you were yelling!" and I had to explain that she'd missed all the mooing, and skipped straight to the really exciting part.  She did very much enjoy going to the kitchen with one of the midwives to inspect the placenta and umbilical cord (and lecturing the midwife on what the placenta and umbilical cord are for). 

And things are going well. I'm feeling pretty good, and Skipper seems healthy, so far as we know. She's definitely different than Dutch, in appearance and behavior, for what that assessment is worth at 28 hours of age. Dutch spent quite a bit of her first hours in the world looking around and checking things out, and Skipper hasn't had her eyes open more than 15 minutes total so far (and when she does, she looks squinty and appalled, like she can't bear to see more than 12 seconds of the world at a time - I'm not sure if I hope that this is due to personality or something wrong with her eyes). Last night she decided that she would like to be most alert between 8 PM and 3 AM, which is a bummer. I'd forgotten what new babies are like, too. But I can't imagine what it must be like for her to be realizing that THIS is her new reality, what with all the crazy feelings and experiences, and it's not going away. All things considered, this is a much easier adjustment for us.

Skipper, for all her essential loveliness, looks totally terrible right now, like an ugly adolescent boy who just crawled out of a stickerbush, what with the scratches from clawing at her own face, and the newborn rash. Dutch said yesterday that Skipper has a "scrumptious face," which I think she intended as a compliment, rather than a comment along the lines of "pizza-face."

That's the news! I'm going to go take a nap.

*Like the guy who was passed out on our back steps yesterday - Dutch and I were coming back from doing laundry, and she came running back to me to say "Mom, there's a MAN sleeping at our door." Urban life is so educational - Dutch (and Skipper) and I had a chance to talk about social issues and alcohol abuse.

* They do know, what with having 8 kids between the two of them.