* By the way, I appreciate the responses to the last post. I didn’t mean to be particularly cliffhangerly, so I hope the rest of the story is not a letdown; I just ran out of time when Simon woke up from his nap, which undoubtedly will happen again.
** I keep thinking it’s taking me too long to write this, but in the true spirit of “this time last year,” you’re not really missing anything, since mostly all I was doing was hanging out in room 433, watching What Not to Wear and How Clean Is Your House?

That first weekend was full of surprises of the not-so-great variety: Friday they told us that I’d have to stay overnight (well, I had kind of figured that when I was still hooked up to the baby monitor and they were still taking my blood pressure every five minutes at 10:30 pm); Saturday, they told us not to make plans for the rest of the weekend (hard to swallow, but we figured even hospitals were a little wonky on the weekends; Monday would be a normal doctoring day and we could get some answers and head home); and then on Sunday, they told us that we should plan on staying until the baby was born.

I was diagnosed with PIH (pregnancy-induced hypertension). My blood pressure was just not coming down, and although tests showed that my kidneys and liver were still functioning within normal ranges, they kept me (and kept keeping me) because the condition could worsen quickly and unexpectedly. In fact, everyone (except Jason and me, that is) expected me to have to deliver Simon within a couple of days, a week at the most (I overheard my midwife tell someone that). It still was not sinking in that he would have to be delivered early, so when they said “until the baby is born,” I was thinking at least six weeks (thirty-seven weeks is considered full term) and since they also said that the longer I could stay pregnant the better, it did cross my mind that I could be in the hospital for nine weeks.

The worst moment of that first weekend was when they (I keep saying “they”; I don’t really remember who specifically—maybe a nurse, maybe a doctor, maybe Carol, my midwife) told us that we would need steroids to help develop Simon’s lungs. I didn’t care about the pain of the shot, which a nurse warned me would be significant (yeah, it hurt; actually, if I remember right it was two shots given a day apart). As I have said, an early delivery was just not in my schema, and it really freaked me out—and by that I mean made me go completely cold inside—to think that they were even remotely considering having to deliver him before he was ready.

And this is where the story becomes not much of a story at all: for nineteen days I pretty much slept, watched cable TV, read magazines (I didn’t have much of an attention span for books, even with all that time on my hands), and gladly chatted with whatever friends could come by. (Rebecca tells me that my visitors were pretty limited because they were concerned that too much stimulation would raise my blood pressure—either I don’t remember that or Jason kept it from me at the time. I don’t doubt it, though: after just one wheelchair ride the first or second night there, I was banned from going anywhere but up to the bathroom and back, and even when I had ultrasounds, they brought the machines to me.) Jason slept most nights on what must have been a very uncomfortable couch (he said when it was all over that “sleeping in your own bed after 3 weeks on a hospital couch is like getting a massage from God”); if I had it to do over, I probably would have told him to go home to sleep more often, but I was so very grateful for his presence.

They hooked me up to a baby monitor on every shift,and by the time he was born, I figured I had listened to Simon’s heartbeat for something like fifty-two hours. We had I think four ultrasounds—two with a tech I would very much like to forget. I learned more than was good for me about what Simon “should” be doing in there (heart rate increasing at least twice during the hour, etc.), which made me sometimes worry needlessly.

I don’t know how deep the rose tint on my glasses has become, but I actually do look back on my time in the hospital with fondness. I have amazing friends who were taking care of the “nesting” I never got to do—cleaning our whole house, painting the nursery, even going shopping for basics like diapers and crib sheets; all my needs were taken care of, including meals brought to me on a predictable schedule (after about a week, they stopped bringing me the regular menu and told me to order whatever I was craving, and the kitchen complied), a dessert tray in the afternoon, pudding for Jason whenever he wanted it. As Jason said, life got stripped down to just the basics, and while I wouldn’t want to live that way for very long, I never did get too stir crazy or even bored really, and it wasn’t until the last two or three days that I felt bad (actually, that did make it a little weird to be in the hospital; for the most part I felt fine. What I didn’t feel was pregnant). Though it wasn’t what I would have chosen, I was grateful for the rest, for the time to prepare mentally, if not physically, for the gracious care I received especially from the nursing staff, for the opportunity to see concretely how much our friends and family love us.

***Okay, I’m thinking I’ll probably do two or three more installments. I still want to write down so that I don’t forget entirely what it was like the day Simon was born and our experience in the NICU afterward.

Dear Simon,

You are eleven months old now, and I hate to admit it, but too often instead of savoring eleven, I find myself thinking of you as “almost a year.” Almost a year.

You are so inquisitive, and in fact this is probably the most prominent characteristic of your personality so far. You have to stop and check out everything in your path—feel its texture, turn it over in your hand, taste it. Grandpa Carlson teases you that someday it will take you hours to get home from school because you’ll be so distracted by all the thises and thats that you find on the way. You are also sensitive to sounds, often pausing to listen when the furnace kicks on or the dishwasher changes cycles or a motorcycle zooms by outside. I love having this constant reminder of how much there is to learn, every day, all the time.

This month we celebrated Christmas with you for the first time. You actually did pretty well staying out of the tree and away from the presents. You did grow curious about the curly ribbons, and eventually you learned to use the wrapped boxes to steady yourself as you reached for the lowest ornaments. And I suppose you ate more than your fair share of needles, but all in all Mama was glad we braved having a tree.

And you are loving all your new gifts—blocks and shapes and noisy things—and you didn’t even notice that I put away a whole big container of “baby toys.” You did get one gift, though, that you H-A-T-E-D: a train from Aunt Rhonda. You were fine with the “choo-choo” noises, as long as it didn’t move, but when it started to chug toward you, I have never seen you move so fast. Poor little guy, you were terrified. And I am so, so sorry that it was so cute. Even the next morning, you heard the train from the other room (Mama accidentally bumped it) and it still made you cry. Don’t worry, we took the batteries out of the devil train. (And, of course, you are just as happy with a measuring cup or plastic spoon as you are with “fancy” toys anyway.)

You are doing better at eating big people food, and you have surprised us by liking spicier food like curry and chili. Over the holidays you made both sides of your family proud by tolerating our ethnic food traditions—Swedish kroppkaka and potato sausage for Christmas and German New Year’s cookies. You finally pushed another tooth through (for a total of four, two up top and two below), and you seem to be getting the concept of chewing down, though more often than not you just shove a bunch of stuff in your mouth and let it get soggy enough to swallow (kinda grody). You are still pretty adamant about feeding yourself, and, hey, that’s fine by me.

We are going a little stir crazy in the house this winter, and I will be glad when it warms up a little to let you explore outside. We went one day with Liv and Rebecca to the the Pioneer Park Nature Center, because Liv was going a little crazy too. You loved touching the bull snake and watching the (wounded) birds (falcons maybe?). Come to think of it, you seem to really like any animal you encounter. You especially loved meeting Jersey, Pastor Tobey’s dog; he actually made you giggle with delight.

You have the perfect little crawl, exemplary form, really; we should make an instructional video. Every day I think you go a little farther, a little faster (and in so many of the pictures I took of you this month, you are crawling away from me). Your favorite activity in the whole world right now is climbing the stairs; you especially love to pull yourself up by the slats at the top of the first set of steps. The first time you made it to the top all by yourself, you were so happy that you crawled in circles on the landing, which made me laugh hard. You climb every chance you get, and you just don’t seem to get tired of it.

It’s possible that you are finally saying “Mama,” after a month or two of saying “Dada” (first to everything and later seemingly more specifically to actually indicate Daddy). I say “possible” because we’re still not positive that you are actually meaning Mom and Dad. We’ll give it a little more time before we start bragging about that too much—I’m not quite willing to say these are your actual first words until you start to use them more regularly. You do babble quite a bit, and sometimes quite adamantly. Often you get this serious look on your face, as though whatever you just said settled the matter once and for all.

Oh how Mama loves you, little man.

It was one year ago today—not by date, January 11, but by day, the second Friday of the new year—that I was admitted to St. Elizabeth’s for what turned out to be the remainder of my pregnancy with Simon.

I dropped Jason off for work in the morning and headed down to Omaha to visit my friend Kasey and her little girl in the Children’s Hospital NICU. Evie had been born about three weeks earlier—two days before Christmas. She was just twenty-nine weeks gestation when she was delivered (that’s eleven weeks early) and weighed only two pounds (Evie is doing great, by the way, though I see her far too infrequently). Kasey and I did a lot of walking that day—Children’s and Methodist hospitals make up a huge complex, and there was much back and forth between the NICU, the cafeteria, a doctor’s appointment for Kasey—and by the time I was ready to head back to Lincoln, my ankles were really, really swollen, literally the size of melons. Kasey, who had had preeclampsia (the reason Evie was born so early) told me over and over that day that I didn’t look good (yes, she is that dear of a friend) and urged me to call my midwife and get my blood pressure checked. I knew it looked bad, but I just figured that people who are pregnant with people swell.

I called my midwife, Carol, from the parking garage. The office was closed for the afternoon, but she was there doing paperwork and whatnot. She told me to call when I got into town and that if she was still in the office to swing by and get my BP checked. Not being particularly worried, I actually picked up my dad at his office in Omaha and detoured to Fremont (one of my parents’ cars was in the shop) before heading back to Lincoln. As it turned out, Carol was still in the office at 5:30 or so, so I drove straight there. This was one time I was glad that Carol is a workaholic (or at least totally overworked).

Looking back I can see that Carol took one look at me and made up her mind, but she did weigh me (I had gained thirteen pounds since my last checkup just one week earlier) and took my blood pressure. I can’t remember what my blood pressure was, but I do remember that she skipped the third test she had told me she was going to do and said that she wanted me to head over to St. E’s for some more tests. I was a little stunned and I think I asked if I could first go pick up Jason, who was downtown having a drink with coworkers (not that it would have mattered if she had said no; I would have gone anyway).

So I called Jason on the way (of course, I was crying by this point), and I remember feeling like I was very rude to his coworkers (he didn’t know what to tell them so didn’t tell them anything but that he had to go), but at the same time I was starting to get nervous. We drove all the way back out to St. E’s, and to my great surprise when we found the appropriate nurses’ station on the labor and delivery floor, they started admitting me—asking questions about what kind of delivery we wanted and whatnot. I kept wanting to say that I was just here for a couple of tests and then would be headed home; I mean I was just thirty-one weeks, for goodness sake. I even called my friend Trish to postpone for an hour or two (not cancel) our dinner plans for the evening.

They put a bracelet on me and checked us into a delivery room and gave me a robe to put on. And that was when I really started to panic. We had taken a tour a few months earlier (yeah, I was one of those people who took them seriously when the brochure said to take the tour during your first trimester; no one else on our tour was less than four weeks from their due dates, and I felt really out of place; the tour guide actually had to ask me if I was pregnant, but I digress), but we were so unprepared to be in a delivery room. We probably asked the nurse five or six times to assure us that we were not planning a delivery that night. The only way I could keep myself the least bit calm was to tell myself that this would be good practice for when we came back “for real.”