Eva is swiftly exiting her toddlerhood and becoming a kid. She says such flabbergastingly grown-up things. Her first dentist appointment was the other day and afterwards she announced, “I was quite a trooper!” She’s also making fascinating logical leaps with her language development. Recently we were shopping at Target and it was time to go home; she said, “but I’m not done Targeting!”

I don’t know what “typical” three-year-olds are like (or if there is such a thing as a typical three-year-old), but she seems to me like she has a little bit extra in the drama department. This makes for some funny and fun times (the sparkling imagination!), and also some times where I wonder if I’m parenting a hormonal 16-year-old (the long-suffering sighs! Her ability to make “ugh” into a six syllable word!) If I’m busy putting Jack to bed and I need her to be quiet, she’ll sigh, whine, flop herself down, and wail things like, “but mooooooom, I love you soooooooo much. I just want to beeeeeee with you!” But, her drama extends to her pretend-play and her love of reading. She’s memorized books like The Cat and the Hat, and the Lorax, and recites them with such expression in her voice it makes me really excited for the future when she’ll really know how to read.

She loves to pretend to be characters from her favorite tv shows and movies. I think I will always remember the time I heard her in the other room playing with her Dad and forcing him to be Bambi’s mom. I love that man; he played along, pitching his voice higher and everything. She likes to be Swiper the Fox and makes a “ch-ch” sound, then emerges from her hiding place and tries to steal something. No matter how fast I say “Swiper, no swiping!” she still steals the thing. My girl likes to win. But she’s also really caring and generous. She even defends her brother (“Mom, you don’t yell at my brother! If he tries to get the cat food, you say, ‘Jack, that’s not for you.’”). She gave away half of her coveted Valentine chocolates because she wanted to share with her Mom and Dad.

So far, toddlerhood has been a roller coaster, but age three has definitely been higher hills and lower valleys. Her growing independence (potty-training is finally happening; she sleeps in a bed now; she can finally dress and undress herself to some degree) is offset by the DRAMA and we spend a lot of energy trying to manage her really big feelings.

Jack is about 9 1/2 months old now. He crawls, he pulls to standing, he rolls, he gets himself to sitting, he goes for the cat food, he goes for Eva’s potty, he goes for peoples’ hair, he goes for my iPod. Are you sensing a theme here? This boy goes.

I kind of had a feeling I had it easy with Eva, who was content to sit and play till she was about 10 or 11 months old. Even well after a year of age, she would get stranded like an overturned turtle if she fell onto her back. I could leave the room for a minute or two and be reasonably sure she wouldn’t kill herself. Not Jack. You can’t turn away from him for two seconds or he’ll be down the hall, sticking his head between the railing rungs, or hanging from the chandelier. Smiling the entire time.

He’s a smiley guy.

The word that seems to come to everyone’s lips when describing Jack is “sweet”. He’s sort of like our cat Indy, the sweet, cute and dumb cat. I’m not saying my child is dumb, but he sort of heedlessly crashes through the world in a way that our cautious little Eva never did. Why go around when you can go over or through? But temperamentally, he is the sweetest baby. Happy as can be. He hates things like having his face wiped, but the instant you finish, he stops screaming and is all smiles again. He would never think to hold a grudge.

He still hasn’t slept through the night with any consistency at all. On a good night he’ll sleep till 3 or 4 in the morning, I feed him and he’s out until 6:30 or 7am. On a bad night, he’s up every two hours. I’ve mostly learned to cope with the sleep-deprivation. It’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. But again, I had it easy with Eva who at this age would go to bed at 7 and sleep till 7, sleeping through thunder, lightning and fireworks. Thank goodness Eva still sleeps like a rock and I’m only up with one kid.

Everything is going lightning-fast with this second baby. We know he’ll be our last baby, and while I’m perfectly happy that he’ll be our last, I also linger over his babyhood and don’t want it to end. I’m in no rush for him to be talking, walking, or any of it and I know that with his first birthday around the corner, he’ll be a toddler before we know it. Sometimes after I feed him in the middle of the night, I have a hard time getting myself to put him back in his crib because I know that in the grand scheme of my life, this time when I can hold his perfect, warm, sleeping little body in my arms will be over in the blink of an eye.

I love these guys.

In the last few days, Jack has really started smiling and cooing a lot. He’s actually been smiling for the last couple of weeks. I know that social smiles aren’t supposed to start until five or six weeks of age, but this kiddo was really looking at me intently and smiling from a very early age and that’s been absolutely lovely. But in the past couple of days, he’s opened up and has started smiling at his sister, his dad, or just at a toy dangling over his head. The first few weeks of parenthood are so grueling, the smiles and coos really do a lot to soothe the stress.

Being a second-time parent has been a very interesting experience so far. Everyone says that all babies are different, and that’s something we’ve definitely learned to be true. Jack and Eva are different babies in almost every way. Eva was colicky; Jack is easy-going. Eva slept large chunks of time at night from a very early age; Jack is up at least every hour all night long. Eva was content to sit in her own filthy diapers indefinitely; Jack hates everything about the excretory process and diaper changes happen constantly and are stressful for all. Eva refused to be worn in a baby carrier; wearing Jack in a carrier is a sure-fire way to calm him and get him to sleep. Eva hated the swaddle; swaddling is the only way to get Jack to sleep in his crib.

In some ways, it’s been easier this time around. It’s wonderful to have a baby who doesn’t scream his head off constantly. I have a ton more confidence as a mother this time around because I can diagnose his problems almost instantly — I can almost anticipate them much of the time — and I know what to do to soothe him. With Eva, we never knew how to calm her down; she was just inconsolable. But two things have made this endeavor a particular challenge for me — 1) trying to juggle Jack and Eva at the same time; 2) Jack’s inability to sleep at night is taking a huge toll on me emotionally. There are days when I think I need to call someone and get on antidepressants right away. Then he’ll sleep a little better that night and I’ll be fine the next day. Until I can get two hours of uninterrupted sleep at night, I think I’m just going to be a basketcase half the time.

But the biggest unanticipated challenge for me has been managing my relationship with Eva. Up until four weeks ago, Eva was the center of my universe. Now, no matter how much I love her, she can’t be the center of my universe.

I figured that being displaced would be hard on her, but I had no idea how hard it would be on me. I miss her intensely and there are times when I feel heartbroken that our relationship has changed. But I also see her lavishing her love on Jack too, and I know that I’ve given her something else in exchange for that altered relationship with me. I’ve given her a new relationship with a sibling. And that’s something that will only grow and get richer as they both grow up.

So we’re all working on adjusting, and it’s getting a little easier as we go. Change is hard. But just like Eva was worth every minute of her screaming, all this will be worth it too.

Jack Nathaniel Walter was born on May 16. He’s been with us for two weeks now, and those two weeks have honestly seemed like two months. We’re finally getting into a bit of a rhythm as a family of four, and I wanted to capture his birth story now before it gets lost in the haze of sleep-deprivation-induced memory loss.

The Monday Jack was born, he was two days past his estimated due date. I’d been having contractions for weeks and weeks, several times they were regular enough that I’d thought I was going into labor. But that weekend I’d had a total respite from contractions. I’d taken Friday off work and indulged myself in some frivolous time-wasting. I’d gone to the greenhouse on Saturday and picked up flowers and herbs for my deck and my mom helped me plant them. All in all, it was a nice way to spend my last weekend with any amount of free time.

Monday morning I was dreading going to work for yet another week of trying to stay awake and not be horribly distracted by contractions. But I woke up and had some “show” (that is the polite term for the disgustingness that can come out of a woman when she’s going to give birth soon). I just knew that this was going to be the day, and I didn’t want my water to break while I was at work, so I decided to work at home. I sent Eva to daycare and Brad to work and told him I’d call him as soon as anything happened.

At about 10:30, I started getting light contractions; nothing more intense than I’d been already going through for months. I kept working, quickly trying to finish some things that had just come up that day. I started doing tons of laundry, because I knew that it’d be easier to do now than after the baby was born. I went to get the mail and bring in the garbage can, partly just to see if it would get things going.

Halfway back down the driveway while dragging the garbage can, I had my first contraction that was hard enough that I actually had to concentrate through it. I still wasn’t convinced I was in real labor, but after I came back inside, I had two contractions one on top of the other that were pretty intense. I felt like my body was warning me that things were about to get serious, so I called Brad and had him come home.

At 1:45pm, Brad walked in the door. I was about to tell him I wasn’t sure if it was real labor or not, but I was glad for the company. But before I could say anything, my water broke. I couldn’t believe the perfect timing. We called the midwife and she said I’d better head to the hospital. I texted my mom, “water broke. Plan to pick Eva up from daycare today!”

The ride to the hospital was exhilarating. I was truly excited to give birth. So far everything was working out perfectly. I wasn’t in a ridiculous amount of pain, and I’d prepared to the nth degree to have this birth in a way that was less traumatic than Eva’s birth. With Eva, I’d had a bad reaction to an epidural, and Eva had ultimately been violently sucked out of me with a vacuum extractor. It was not something I ever wanted to go through again, so I knew that this time around I had to go natural. I’d learned some basic self-hypnosis to cope with the pain and was planning a water birth.

After driving around downtown St. Paul for 10 minutes trying to find the emergency entrance to St. Joes, we finally arrived at the hospital. Another birthing mom was arriving at the same time. She was in much worse condition than I was in, whimpering and moaning as she was wheeled by in a wheelchair. They put me in a wheelchair too, and we all went up to the maternity center together. I was feeling unjustifiably smug about my hypnobirthing calmness and how well I was handling my contractions. I wouldn’t be making noises like that, I thought.

As I settled into my labor room, I could hear the other woman in the room adjacent to mine. Her moaning and screaming got worse. I tried not to listen or let it affect me. I was starting to get a bit scared of natural childbirth! The midwife arrived and checked me and I remember saying through one of my contractions, “I hope she’s okay.” The midwife kind of chuckled at this, like it was weird that I’d be thinking about anybody else at a time like this. Eventually her screaming stopped and I heard a baby cry and I was really relieved.

I don’t have a good sense of time, but I labored pretty easily for the next few hours. I spent some time walking around, then sat in a chair for a while and listened to my hypnobirthing scripts, which helped me stay relaxed through the contractions. I labored for a while in a hot bath and it was amazingly more relaxing and easier; once I’d experienced labor in a tub, I knew I wanted to birth in the birthing tub. I labored for a while on a balance ball.

Then things started to intensify quickly. I started getting contractions one after the other with only maybe 30 seconds or a minute between them. I was still able to remain calm and cope with the pain quite well, but I was starting to get nervous because the midwife was telling me that the hospital’s one birthing tub was still occupied by another mother. I’d been told by the nursing staff when I toured the hospital that they almost never have two moms wanting to use it at the same time, so I could pretty much count on being able to birth in the tub.And I had been counting on it, because I knew what a relief it would be to get into the hot water.

The pain started to get ahead of me and I started to make some noises, involuntarily. I remember thinking that this was what I got for being smug about that other mom making noises. The midwife told me that vocalizing was fine and that if I made low, gutteral sounds, it would actually help the baby move down. So I proceeded to moo like a cow, or maybe like a really badly injured cow that ought to be put out of its misery. It was at this point that hypnobirthing pretty much went out the window. I yelled at Brad, “turn that music off!” and there was no way I could stay calm at this point.

I climbed into the bed, thinking maybe I could take the pressure off somehow if I was laying down. But laying down made it so much worse. Then I didn’t feel like I could get back up again. Suddenly I broke out into a sweat and was outrageously hot. I realized somewhere in the back of my injured-cow mind that I was probably in transition.

Out of nowhere, I felt the urge to push. “I need to push!” I yelled out. “I need to be in the tub!” But the tub wasn’t available. I just kept repeating over and over, “I need to be in the tub!”

So my midwife and the nurse, bless their hearts, started filling the bathtub in my room. I don’t know what we were all thinking, but we decided to have a water birth in a regular old bathtub, in a tiny bathroom no wider than the bathtub itself.

Before they could even finish filling the tub, I was crawling into it. They had a thermometer in the water trying to get it to optimal body temperature for the baby when he came out. “It’s too hot!” I said. “She’s right,” one of them said, and they started adding cold water. “Now it’s too cold!” I said. “We should just stop looking at the thermometer and listen to her,” said the midwife, “because she’s right.”

Pushing a baby out of your body while laying in a little bathtub is awkward business – especially since the baby has to emerge fully immersed in the water, so you have to angle your body just right. They tell me it took something over an hour to get him out. It felt like an eternity. It was really, insanely hard work. The pain level wasn’t as high as transition was, but pushing that hard was just really, really exhausting. Between pushes I was huffing and panting trying to get some oxygen, and they kept telling me to slow down my breathing but I couldn’t seem to control it very well. Brad was trying to hold my body up so I didn’t slump into the water, and the nurse and midwife were crowding in trying to help deliver the baby. I had my arms behind me, bracing myself at my lower back and, whoa, my arms ached like nobody’s business for days afterwards.

Eventually the midwife told me to reach down because I would be able to feel his head, and she said he had dark hair. I thought, “dark hair? Not possible,” and I reached down and I felt my baby’s head for the first time. It was an incredible experience and one I have thought back on fondly many times in the last two weeks. Sometimes when I’m holding Jack and running my hands over his silky dark hair, I feel that spot on the back of his head that I had first touched and I feel connected to him in a way that I couldn’t right after having Eva ripped out of me the way she was.

It took a bunch more pushes before he started to really come out. I hadn’t realized his head was out — I was surprised by that, because I thought I would feel something different at that point — until the midwife told me to push once and his shoulders would come out. And then, next thing I knew, he was out and I was saying, “I want to hold my baby; give him to me”.

So, almost exactly seven hours after my water broke, Jack was with us. The birth wasn’t easy but I would have done it exactly the same way again in a heartbeat. And everything since then has been an order of magnitude easier than it was with Eva. Part of it is his mellow disposition. Part of it is that we’re more experienced and less anxious. Part is that the birth was easier, and easier to bounce back from. We’re having plenty of challenges, especially challenges unique to being a family of four now, but taking care of this baby is so much easier this time.

Soon I want to write in more detail about what the first two weeks have been like, but for now I must sleep…

Not so much.

I’ve been swinging back and forth between extreme impatience to get this baby OUT, and trying to give Eva extra attention and appreciate our current life together.

There’s a lot to appreciate about our current life. We have a routine, we have a child who sleeps through the night (not that I sleep through the night, but still). We kind of know what to expect and how to deal with Eva. Parenting a toddler – aside from the temper tantrums and the taking FOREVER to get anything done because she wants to try to do everything herself – is a riot. It’s so fun to watch her physically and mentally develop so insanely quickly. Just a few months ago, we were excited she could string a few words together and now we can have entire conversations with her. Her personality is more amazing than I ever could have imagined, and she shows so much affection towards us I can’t wait to see what it will be like when she has a baby to love.

Last night when Brad was putting her to bed, Eva said, “Daddy, you’re my best friend!” He was surprised as we’ve never heard her talk about best friends before. Then he said, “what about Mommy?” “Mommy’s my best friend too,” she said, “and Eva’s my best friend.”

Soon, everything we currently know will be blown to smithereens when the baby bomb drops onto our house. But I hope it won’t be long before she says, “baby brother’s my best friend” too.

My biggest worry when I found out I was pregnant again was our house. We live in a split-entry suburban townhome that we’d never planned to stay in after starting a family. It was supposed to be a starter house, which we bought during the height of the housing boom when we naively bought into the idea that if we didn’t get into a house ASAP, we’d be priced out and would never ever be able to afford to own a home. We planned to sell it for a modest profit in a few years and buy a cute little house with a yard in an urban neighborhood that we, at the time, couldn’t afford to get into.

Within a few months of closing on our house, the housing market tanked and our plans were completely destroyed. So we have done our best to make our little suburban starter home a decent place to raise our daughter. Only problem is, there isn’t really a good place to put two little kids in this house. Eva’s room is 9 feet by 9 feet, and one of the walls is completely taken up by bifold closet doors. The kids could theoretically share the room, but there wouldn’t be room for anything other than a crib and toddler bed, and possibly a dresser/changing table combo.

So where do all the toys and baby gear go? Not much room in our small living room, though we’ve found pretty creative ways to stash toy bins around the place. It’s been doable for one kid, but with two things are about to get really crowded really fast. In the short term, the baby will live in the master bedroom with us, but that’s not going to be workable forever.

Our solution is to make the basement a more livable place than it has been currently. We had previously used the two rooms in our basement as an office/craft space, though in reality it was pretty much nothing more than a dumping ground for all our excess stuff. So in the last few months we’ve spent a ton of time and energy culling all that stuff, making donations, selling books, etc. Just this week we finally had the nasty old carpet ripped out and put in a beautiful new carpet with a cushy new carpet pad so that it’s actually soft and cozy to walk around down there.

We emptied out the cube shelf of most everything and it will now hold toys, art supplies for the kids, and my sewing supplies. We emptied out the downstairs bedroom so that when Eva is a little bigger, we can move her bedroom down there and the baby will get her bedroom (good thing we stuck with a gender-neutral color scheme in her bedroom!)

Now we just have to find some ways of regulating the temperature better in the basement (it gets COLD) and it will almost double our usable living space.

I can’t even begin to express what a relief it is to finally have the basement space be a viable, usable space. Now there’s really not that much left to do to get ready for the baby’s arrival. Ten weeks go go!

So I didn’t mind it too much when I heard we were going to have a major snowstorm starting last night. I figured we’d hole up in the house and recover from a week of insanity.

And yep, we ended up with a lot of snow:

The deepest part of the snow on our deck is almost as tall as Eva.

We decided to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies, a feat that was more work than it should have been because we still don’t have our kitchen really put back together considering the cabinet refacing just wrapped up last night. We pulled Eva’s stepstool up to the counter and she helped out. I gave her a bowl and spoon and some measuring cups and she had fun pretending.

Another one of her classic “smile for the camera” moments:

Eva was so excited about watching the cookies bake that she tried to get Indy to watch it with her.

In that last shot you can get a decent glimpse of our new cabinets. What a huge improvement over these awful-looking old ones:

(We still have lots more to do to finish updating our kitchen, so no big “before and after” photos yet. But it’s so nice to have the new cabinets!)

After baking the cookies, Brad and I whipped up a batch of chili and cornbread because it just seemed like the perfect dinner for a snowy day. We were running all over the house trying to find where we’d stashed the beans, the cooking utensils, the spices.

I keep forgetting that when I’m pregnant, I don’t have much physical stamina and then I take on too much. So even though I haven’t even changed out of my pajamas today, my lazy snow day turned out to be exhausting. But worth it.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point I realized that I have this chatty toddler who can say surprisingly long, grammatically-correct sentences about mundane things like, “watching grandma pour the milk”. As well as grammatically-incorrect sentences that we still somehow understand, like “no it doesn’t letter V” (she swears the letter V is actually the letter Y) or “no it doesn’t Eva go to bed”. She completely understands the appeal of being defiant, though her delivery leaves a bit to be desired.

In some ways we’re lucky that Eva is such a precocious communicator because it often helps us figure out what she needs or wants, but sometimes I’d rather not know what she wants. Like tonight when she started fussing an hour after I put her to bed and I heard her yell out through the baby monitor, “want a shoulder rub!” Yeah, kid, don’t we all? Suck it up and go back to sleep.

But today she had a simple childhood milestone: her first snow angel.

Her first tromp through the Minnesota snow in a snowsuit:

Then we came home and she peed in her potty for the first time and I had an utterly cliched parental moment when I was simultaneously proud of her, excited for that mythical diaper-less future, and yet also wanting to hold her tight and figure out how to keep her from growing up.

I didn’t argue for very long.

Up until recently, I hadn’t thought of ever owning an e-book reader. Then Brad started talking incessantly about the Nook and how much he wanted it. I looked into it as a possible birthday gift for him, tried it out at Barnes and Noble, and started to come around to the idea that an e-book reader sounded kind of cool. I definitely supported him getting one because he has sort of a book-buying addiction and we’ve long since run out of new places in the house to stash our piles of books.

So for his birthday last week, Brad got the Nook. And there was much rejoicing. And then he started asking me all these questions about how much I liked the Nook and whether I might eventually want one, and I said that the jury was still out for me because I wanted to research the Kindle as well. The more research I did on the Kindle the more I was convinced it was the superior product, as much as I preferred the look of the Nook and the idea of throwing in my lot with an actual physical bookstore rather than the behemoth Amazon.

Lo and behold, tonight when I got home from work there was a package from Amazon.com with a note on it that said, “I love you”. I’ve spent a couple of hours playing around with it and I’m already starting to become sort of attached to the little thing. I admit it, I’ve wished for years and years that I could simply type CTRL-F while reading a book. And that I had an easy way to capture my notes as I was reading. And that I could carry around a whole library in my purse, with books to suit my every literary fancy.

I have mixed feelings about joining the world of digital books, and I know at least one person who will think I’m engaging in some serious sacrilege. But I guess I’m too much of a geek to stay stuck completely in the world of the physical book. And at the same time, I’m sure my shelves will continue to house books of all sorts for the rest of my life.

Yes, Brad and I will be adding to our family! Sometime around May 14, 2011, Eva will have her own little brother or sister to boss around.

I’ve been debating what to say about this here because I have been a bit, shall we say … vocal? … about not being ready to have another kid soon (if ever). I can either pretend that it was all a big act and I was actually planning to have a baby all along, or I can fess up that this was totally a surprise baby. Then once you fess up that it’s a surprise baby, the questions radiate out from there. Are you unhappy about it? How did this happen? Were you just being reckless? Does someone need to explain to you about the birds and the bees? These are questions I never thought I would ever have to answer because I always thought sensible people like me do not have unplanned pregnancies.

It turns out, sometimes sensible people are also highly fertile and come from a line of highly fertile women, so that it’s actually possible to become part of that statistic — the small percentage of a possibility that a birth control method could fail.

However, all that said… Brad and I really and truly are thrilled. We were contemplating getting pregnant a year from now, because if we were going to have a second I wanted to give birth in April or May. I also wanted an entire year to train for a triathlon, go on a hot air balloon ride, and various other endeavors I had planned and was excited about. But those are all things I can do some other time; I can have my May baby now, instead.

So I’m 9 weeks along. I have felt much better this time around than last time. I’ve been tired — sometimes downright bone-weary — but the stomach has been SO, so much better this time. Also, even though this was a surprise and the first time was planned, I was able to get exited about it so much faster this time than last time. I just have so much less anxiety about the entire process this time because I have experience, I know what I’m going to do differently this time, and I know that it’ll all be okay. And I absolutely can’t wait to see what this new little individual will be like and how Eva will interact with him or her. It’s all good.

Brad and I took a short trip up to Grand Marais while my mom stayed at our house and took care of Eva. Grandma was so elated to having so much time with Eva that she was actually surprised when we gave her as a thank-you a pair of handmade gold hoop earrings that we’d gotten from a gallery in Grand Marais. She was thanking us for giving her the chance to take care of Eva.

The vacation was entirely low-tech. I forgot my cameras at home. I hate to admit it but as we were driving up north, I actually missed my cameras more keenly than I missed my child. In my defense, I’m sure it’s because I had already geared myself up for spending three nights away from Eva.

The B&B had no cell phone signal at all nor did it have a land line that was accessible for us to use to make local calls. No wireless internet, either. If we wanted to make plans, we had to look in brochures or drive to town and use the free wireless in the coffee shop. Which we didn’t do. We also never turned on the television in our room once during the trip.

Going completely tech-free was refreshing. We spent our evenings with Brad reading and me knitting, just mostly being quiet and talking occasionally. We spent our days going on hikes and appreciating the beautiful fall colors and Lake Superior, eating at the various local favorite places to eat (yes, they may actually have the World’s Best Donuts in Grand Marais, though I’m not so convinced that Sven and Ole’s pizza is all that). Every time I felt the urge to take a picture, I just spent an extra few minutes looking at whatever I wanted to take a picture of and trying to appreciate it.

I spent the rest of my week alternately being lazy and getting things done around the house. But mostly being lazy. I’m just hoping that when I go back to work, I don’t erase all the benefits of this relaxation within a day and become a tense ball of nerves all over again. That would be bad.