Four Years Ago Tonight...

I began having contractions. Luckily for hugely pregnant me, our across-the-hall neighbors Sanjay and Janna were having a New Year's Eve party, so I could just waddle over in my flip flops. I sat and ate some insanely good Indian rice pudding and talked with a gathering crowd of revelers about... guess what? Birth. Labor and delivery. What everyone wants to talk to the hugely pregnant woman about.

"Have you decided what kind of birth you want? Will you take the drugs?"
"Well, I can't predict how it will go, and I'm not ruling anything out, but I'd like to try to have a natural birth as much as possible. That's my goal, as few interventions as possible."
"Yeah my sister totally wanted a natural birth, but then [details] and [complications] and [harrowing turns of events], and then after all that she ended up with a C-section anyway."

It seems like I had at least six conversations that went more or less like this, all the while having what I later realized were relatively mild contractions every twenty minutes or so. All the stories of difficult labors and jettisoned birth-plans pissed my Old Man off to an extreme degree, but for some reason, I was completely unfazed. I was just excited to get started, and hopeful that things would go well.

My son O. was born on January fourth, and my contractions didn't cease in the interim. Stay tuned for the whole nine (ten, fifteen, twenty) yards.