After long silence . . .

. . . hello again everybody! It's Cara this time, and it's been a while. Thanks so much to Brian, Laurie, and my dad for keeping this blog full of new info and pictures as the days have passed.

I'm awake right now eating a cheese sandwich and checking the news websites to see what's been going on in the world since Tuesday. I'm feeling FANTASTIC physically, which is a true joy! The aches and pains that I have are the result of a profoundly challenging physical experience, and so I get a kick out of them and appreciate them.

Brian is upstairs with Maia, and they're probably both sleeping at the moment. I just finished feeding her about 1/2 an hour ago, and was starting to feel really hungry myself. I'm sitting here in front of the computer screen, and my fingers are hesitating to type anything at all, because I just don't know where to start. (Yep, now I'm starting to get tears in my eyes; no sadness, just a sense of the profound weight of this week's experiences.)

I've cried so many times in the last few days out of pure joy and relief and exhilaration. When I think back on the experience of labor and birth, there are three main feelings that I'm carrying around with me at the moment:

1) surprise at my level of physical endurance.
2) reassurance at the amount of trust I can place in the people I love.
3) gratitude for the entire experience as a whole.

I can confidently and honestly say that I don't have a single regret about how the labor and Maia's birth went for me and for our family. Although I'm going to steer clear of writing about the nitty-gritty details of the labor here, I will say for certain that if I were presented with these precise circumstances again, I would make every decision exactly as I made it before. I don't hesitate to write more because of shame or regret, but rather because of an odd sense of protectiveness that I'm feeling about the whole thing. If any of you were to ask me for "Maia's Birth Story," I would happily tell you (probably) more than you wanted to know. And I know for sure that one of my projects over the next few days indeed will be to sit down and put the whole thing in writing. But, for some reason that I can't really figure out right now, I'm just not ready to do that yet. Hmmmm . . .

Anyway, as you can clearly tell from the photos, Maia is the most beautiful human being ever to grace the surface of the Earth. :) We have her first appointment at the pediatrician this morning (routine check-up, no worries!), and we've already learned that she really digs the car seat. Also, just to put in my two cents about all the baby and pregnancy books that I read before Maia's arrival, I must say that the book The Happiest Baby on the Block is a work of genius on the level of Joyce's Ulysses right now as far as I'm concerned. Brian and I have been using the strategies in that book since day one, and holy cow do they work! Brian is an absolute Zen master of baby-calming strategies, and it's really cool to watch Maia respond to him and mellow out right before my eyes.

That's all I'm going to write for now, but, please know how much I appreciate all of your comments and words of congratulations. Brian read them all to me every day in the hospital, and that connection was really reassuring and comforting. Thanks for everything. :)