Introducing Lara Calliope, born 9/11/12, 5 lbs 14 oz, 19″ long. She’s done some serious growing since then.

She is soft, warm, portable, sweet-smelling, and constantly hungry. We’ve had her now for almost three weeks, which means that we have passed the deadline to return her. Anyway, even if we had returned her, we wouldn’t have gotten our money back; we would only have been eligible for stork credit. (ba dum CHING!)

The blanket pictured above, by the way, was crocheted for us by our friend and Lara’s potential future mother-in-law, Tamar. That’s what she was doing while she was pregnant, besides also being a full-time medical resident at Johns Hopkins: making us both beautiful baby gear by hand. What was I doing? Tweeting, mostly, and trawling the Park Slope Parents list to get as much free and cheap swag as possible. But you know. We all have our priorities.

And now I’m a MOMMY. I know because that’s what they kept calling me in the hospital. (“How’s Mommy this morning?”) I never knew quite how to respond. (“Mommy’s cooch is a bit sore from all that labor, and can she maybe get some steak to put on her black eyes? She looks like she was in a bar fight.”) Luckily Mommy wasn’t in the hospital very long. She gave birth on September 11th at 12:00 noon and was discharged on September 12th at 4:30 PM. In between, of course, she had a very exciting adventure that involved lots of screaming and fluids and a midwife exhorting her to “roar like a lion” and the world splitting open and a new human being spilling out.

The new human being is tiny and perfect and more-or-less worth all the trouble of producing her. Her tall funny Southern friend Tara Leigh came to visit and marveled at just how tiny Lara is. “But of course,” she added quickly, “I’ve never met a Jewish baby before.”

Ben and I are overwhelmed and tired and happy and dizzy and all those things new parents are supposed to be. We’ve been very fortunate to have help from our own parents up until very recently. That allowed us to maintain a semblance of cleanliness & organization in our apartment. Now we’re on our own, which is daunting, but we still have our community, which has also been incredibly supportive & welcoming to our little bundle of needs.

We also have our health, which is not to be taken for granted. For example, and women do not talk about this enough, post-partum: it is super awesome not to be pregnant anymore. I can sleep on my stomach! My back doesn’t hurt! My feet are my own again! Of course my breasts have been appropriated and turned into a full-service, eat-in-and-take-out, open-24-hours Dairy Queen, but at least while I’m feeding the little piglet I can look down and admire my totally normal ankles.