To fully document and share our experience I’d like to begin
with when we first became parents and welcomed our sweet little Reyna into the
world. By thirty-eight weeks I was definitely
done being pregnant and luckily Reyna took the hint and joined us on May 9,
2009. She picked a remarkable day to be
born as this was the birthday of her great grandmother who had sadly passed
away only two years prior to her arrival.
I went into labor on the day prior, but our little sweetie hung on through
the night to come on Great Grandma’s birthday.
It was also the day prior to Mother’s Day that year and I was able to
celebrate my first Mother’s Day as a mother with a brand new baby girl in my
arms. Best Mother’s Day gift ever! As many do, I find it impossible to describe
the moment when I held our baby in my arms for the first time. Sounding totally cliché, it is simply miraculous. I just loved looking at her, nuzzling her,
seeing her tiny little fingernails and kissing her sweet, sweet head over and
over. God bless her tiny little 19th
percentile head. Not to say it didn’t
hurt, but God bless her sweet, tiny little head.
To be honest Reyna’s arrival was pretty typical. She was almost by the book. She slept a lot in the beginning, she nursed well,
she roomed in with Seth and I and we all left the hospital after two rather blissful
days. For new parents this was such a
blessing. I was especially grateful for
this as her pregnancy had been pretty challenging, nothing terrible, but I
wasn’t beaming rainbows and butterflies out of my orifices as I was almost
constantly sick while lugging my big belly around. Also, since my husband Seth and I can’t seem
to do anything small, and after a busy year with getting married, moving halfway
across the country, beginning new jobs, getting pregnant, buying our first
house, moving again (at eight months pregnant in a blizzard), and having a baby
I think it was time for something to come a bit easy and calm for a bit.
For three whole weeks life was very calm. Reyna remained a pretty happy, easy
baby. We had the typical things of
getting up through the night and lots of diapers, but nothing unexpected. Until week three when Seth lost his job with
a company he had been with for ten years.
The same company we relocated for when he got another of many promotions
in his career. The company that was
largely paying our bills and keeping us going.
The company that helped us feel secure when recently buying our first
house together. Thankfully we had gone
toward the lower end of what we could “afford.”
Seth then began his journey of looking for work, along with a large
portion of our nation and over ten percent of our state. Thankfully I had still had my wonderful job as
a teacher to help us squeak by. Best of
all we had a beautiful, happy baby girl to make every day bright.
As so many families have had to do we learned to get by with
much less. It was a tough situation but
a huge benefit of the job loss was that when I returned to teaching in the
fall, Seth was able to be home with Reyna.
She is a Daddy’s girl to this day and the impact of having her dad home
with her is immense. She remained a
pretty easy baby and I am pretty sure for the first six months they were
hanging out eating chili fries on the couch together. Not sure how she gummed them down but she had
the thighs and cankles to prove it! I also
don’t know how she survived infancy without me gobbling down her sweet chubby
cheeks and rubber band wrists whole when I arrived home from work each day. Her only issue as an infant was wicked acid
reflux which again points to the chili fries.
Go ahead and deny it daddy!
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Yep, look!
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Are my feet still down there?
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