Cookies, Pies, Cupcakes and more!

It turns out my mother-in-law is the perfect enabler when it comes to my lack of self-control with butter, eggs and sugar. Since I've been home from the hospital (approx. 2.5 weeks now) I have led a crusade for baked goods in my house and none of our creations have had much of a shelf-life. The average time from a full-batch-out-of-the-oven to a full-batch-in-my-stomach is about 1.5 days. I consider this quite impressive and think medals should be given to anyone who can keep up with the amount of creativity it takes to think of new things to bake and the unprecedented speed with which I can put away said baked goods.

Thankfully, my mother-in-law received a cupcake cookbook of Martha Stewart designs from my husband and I as a thank-you-for-changing-all-those-newborn-poopy-diapers and for-putting-up-with-my-hormonal-weepy-self. She glanced through all the pictures and decided on an aptly Halloween-inspired confection, our most polished and blog-worthy.

I should also note that this over-indulgence in all things sweet and homemade is directly a result of my 9-month long self-deprivation of sugar. It didn't in fact help me create a less than gigantic baby but it did help me appreciate and feel absolutely worthy of 2.5 weeks worth of non-stop baking! Thank God for breastfeeding because despite my unapologetic, blatant display of gluttony, I continue to watch the scale point to weight loss (only 6lbs left to lose) having effectively transferred all the buttery goodness to the simply scrumptious buttery thighs of my newborn. Those dimples are much cuter on her butt anyway!

Cheers to a season of baking to come! Now I have a chocolate pecan pie and French gaufres to bake!

The 2 Week Meltdown

Well, here we are at the two week mark and our cuddly, cute, sleepy newborn has entered that familiar stage of colicky crankiness. It happens to most infants but most parents may be too sleep-deprived to recognize the pattern. At approximately two weeks old, most babies go through a period where they cry for long periods and seem to never sleep. Noa is true to form, good ole girl that she is, and has gone from sleeping approximately 20 hours a day to sleeping about 10. Now, I'm lucky that my mother-in-law is still here with us and I can take a break once in awhile but in another week I'll have to face the music and figure it all out on my own. I imagine much hair pulling and tears on my part, and just when Gi was getting into a rhythm of her own.

Big sister Gi has had a rough go of it from the start. We had to leave her for much longer than we had planned due to the long labor and then my extended hospital stay and she was passed around a bit for those days. Yet, after about 10 days at home with her new sister it was obvious she was doing much better. She gives hugs and kisses to her baby sister all the time, plays with her and sings songs to her too. She still misses her one-on-one mommy time but I keep assuring her that I'll be able to pick her up and spend more time with her once my "big boo-boo" heals and Noa is a little older. Unfortunately, I know all too well that we're looking at at least another 4 months before Noa will be less needy and I have another 4 weeks before any heavy lifting won't leave me sore or worse.

I didn't think it would be this heart-wrenching to watch my first-born adjust to having another child in the house and having to accept my divided attention as good enough. Mommy guilt over here is in full swing.

P.S. Noa's stats at 2 weeks: 9lbs. 14oz. 21 inches. She put on a full pound in one week!

Noa's Birth Story

It all started around 5pm on the 5th. I was getting pretty good contractions at pretty regular intervals though the timing kept changing (8min, 10 min., 5min.). I thought to myself that this was going to be the night and I told Ben too. We did our normal thing and went to bed around 10:30 but I couldn't sleep. The contractions never let up and were getting stronger. By 12:30 I was so uncomfortable I needed Ben to help me get through them with breathing. I waited them out until about 2:30 then took a bath to help ease them. I wanted to call Chrissie--my aunt--to come over but I didn't want to call her at that hour in the morning so we waited until 4:30. I started to get my last minute things packed for the hospital and took a hot shower. We left the house a little after 5am and got to the hospital at 6. The contractions were strong but still not regular, I just knew transition wasn't far off. As I got checked in at the hospital they told me I was at 6cm and I felt very happy to have gotten there when we did. My water still hadn't broken though and I was wondering if/when that would happen. My doula showed up at 7am and the doc came to see me at 10. I was still at 6cm and she offered to break my water but the baby was still floating really high and I was worried about her descending posterior like Gi had so I told her I would wait. I labored to a 7cm and at 4pm I finally let her break my water since my strength was waning and I knew I had a long way to go. After my water was broken all hell broke loose and I went through wicked contractions that left me feeling like I had when they had given me pitocin with Gi. After an hour of that I had them check me and when they said I was at 8cm I was so relieved. Progress! And I had made it past where I had ended making progress with Gi. But I was in serious pain and needed rest so I begged for an epidural and QUICK! It was about 7pm by that point--a full 26 hours into labor--but I finally got some relief. I was tired, hungry, shaking and catching about 15min. of sleep at a time on the epidural. I was thinking a c-section would be inevitable because of my previous experience with the epi and Gi turning posterior but this time, the baby stayed in good position and I kept dilating. They checked me at 10:30 and said I was completely dilated!! You cannot imagine how excited I was! At 11pm the nurses had me start pushing but I really couldn't get it together. The epidural was wearing off but even so the pushing didn't come naturally to me, probably because Noa was still pretty high, only at a zero station. 2 hours of pushing later, the epi had completely worn off and I was back in horrible pain. Each pushing contraction was excruciating and the nurses were getting more and more invasive and aggressive about maneuvering the head and trying to keep it coming down. My efforts were finally paying off and we could see hair and the molding of her head but she just wouldn't descend. By 3:30 I was begging the staff to turn the epi back on and was just screaming through each urge to bear down. Finally my doc arrived, put both her hands inside to see if she could manipulate the baby into a better position (her head was a little asynclitic) but even with that and a good long push on my part, she didn't budge. I just looked at the doc who said, "well.." and I was like, "C-SECTION!".  I was just done. The anesthesiologist came back in, put some meds in my line but it took 3 more agonizing pushing contractions before it stopped the pain. I couldn't do anything but grunt and push even though I knew it wouldn't make the pain go away. That was terrible but at the same time, those last few pushes were the ones that gave me the greatest sense of urgency and completeness about what it is to give birth. Now I understand! I can imagine the rest entirely and leave it to all the other moms of the world!

The whole c-section experience was totally different this time too. There was no pain for one, and it all happened in such a way that I could experience it. Noa was just a stronger baby than Gi was. She cried immediately after birth at 4:14am on the 7th and never let up. She was pink and her apgars were 9 and 9. They cleaned her up 6ft from where I was. My arms were never strapped down and I got to marvel at her for a few minutes before they took her to be cleaned up and weighed and measured. I didn't have to be knocked out so the rest of the surgery didn't take long and as soon as they wheeled me into the recovery room they put Noa on my chest naked and she army crawled to my boob and latched on all by herself! I mean, this is the stuff of natural births not c-sections!

I was and am just so incredibly grateful for having gone through this experience. It was a healing journey even if it was incredibly long and painful. The recovery has been smooth and though more painful in some ways because my perineum was stretched and I had pushed for so long (but no tears), it is less painful in the incision area and I am able to walk and move about, get out of bed etc. with much less pain than I had with Gi. I love knowing I gave it my all, I never let things get out of my control, I called all the shots, (including a little battle over my hep lock not becoming an IV straight away when I arrived) and Ben was the most supportive, most encouraging partner I could have asked for. It really brought us closer to have gone through this together and to have seen what is possible when you're prepared to have the birth you want.

It may not have been a successful VBAC but you cannot control everything and it was the best birth experience for ME under those conditions. I even asked my doc about a third pregnancy and the state of my uterus a day after going through all that! She says there were no areas of thinning in my uterus, not a lot of scarring and she would happily okay me for a third. We'll see about all that of course a LOT later.

Here are some more first photos:

From stems to stemware

It's no secret that Ben's ancestry in the Old World can be traced to a famous champagne house and when we bought this property with an eye for restoring the vineyard, we dreamed of our fate as champagne growers and reprising the long-lost family art of champagne making. Well, we haven't been able to accomplish as much as we had hoped in the past year towards those goals. The vines are all chardonnay, that much we have discovered. That's both good news and bad news. Chardonnay grapes can be used to make champagne, though in France, pinot meunier and pinot noir are more commonly used or comprise a greater proportion of the grape blend in a bottle. Chardonnay is also not as frost resistant as we clearly saw this year and it needs to be planted closely together which is not the spacing chosen by the previous owners of this vineyard. It's likely we will want to replant some acreage with pinot meunier considering our high elevation and tendency for spring frosts and somehow tighten the existing spacing of the chardonnay grapes if we are ever to make a bottle of champagne.

Until we have the time, energy and resources to see our dreams of a champagne vineyard materialized, I have tasked myself with appreciating the history of other aspects of champagne, namely the champagne glass. What better way to pass the time than to do a little antiques troving and online shopping? Did you know that most salespersons in a home goods store will look at you like you are speaking a foreign language if you ask where the champagne "coupes" are? It appears this classic and, in my opinion, ultimate statement of elegance has almost completely disappeared from the commercial scene in this country. Currently, the only options for purchasing champagne coupes, also called saucers in the U.S., are to buy extremely expensive etched crystal glasses like the ones offered by Waterford or Orrefors or to scour the antiques houses and ebay listings for those that were mass produced as late as the 1970's. Good luck finding a complete set with no etchings or chips if you go the antique route.

Since I just cannot fathom my half-French household, owners of vineyard property to NOT also be in possession of a set of handsome but not overly ornate champagne coupes, I naturally turned to www.google.fr to find some. With the baby on the way and my mother-in-law set to arrive in a week I had a deadline to find myself an easily available or at least deliverable-to-my-mother-in-law option that could also be transported duty-free to my home via her checked baggage. One of my first shopping stops was to a store called Habitat (Ah-bi-tah in French). It's a store that Ben and I are quite fond of shopping at whenever we go back to France and is like a Crate and Barrel meets a more colorful, more upscale IKEA. Suffice to say it's a modern, but not monochromatic (like West Elm) home goods store ranging in price from Mervyn's to Macy's. It runs the gamut and we always turn up some interesting, affordable surprises there. It's no surprise this is the place that had my kind of champagne coupe!


Et Voila! A red beauty of elegant proportions to show off the handsome bubbles we will pour over the holidays, hopefully coming to me unbroken, courtesy of Air France and my mother-in-law's one free checked bag.

So, we may not have our grapes or our wine but we will have the perfect glasses this holiday to serve someone else's fine bubbly!