Reflections on 2008

Looking back on it now, it seems almost ridiculous what we managed to do in 2008, and mostly in the latter half of 2008 at that. Move, job, baby—blam, blam, blam. Factor in all the other things that happened, and the absurdity stands out that much more. Even in the process of writing it up, I can't tell you how many times I had to stop and say, “holy cow, I completely forgot about this part, which happened right alongside x, y, and z...”

It's hard to believe, but it all happened. We got lucky when we needed it. We had invaluable help. And we worked our asses off. In the end, less than a year from its conception, we're now off on the Great Northern Adventure, with a healthy Sabre Ruth in tow, and ready to give it its full due.

A humble thank you to every one who helped us along the way, both in the move itself, and in the friendship, hospitality and good will that gave us the strength and confidence to make it happen. It is hard to find the words to express how much we love our friends and families; hopefully, an open invitation to come and visit us is an acceptable start! :-)

Sabre Ruth At Home

(This post is a continuation from Enter Sabre Ruth.)

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Okay then. At home with new baby. Now what?

It has been said many times that babies do not come with an instruction manual. Okay, some people are true masters of understatement. The next four weeks would prove to be the most educational in my life, bar none, and the featured methodology would again be called “just-in-time” learning. I hate that damn phrase, but that doesn't mean there's one better! Among the things that we learned:

First, let nobody distract you from this Golden Rule: context is the most important “detail” you can get. Lemme 'splain...

In the first week, little Sabre didn't seem to follow any of the expected behaviors. It started with acute narcolepsy at the breast: she would try to latch on but whenever she managed to do it, she'd take a couple of sucks and fall right asleep. (This is far more frustrating to a new mother than it may sound.) Sabre never refused the breast; she was always interested—she just zonked out right as she managed to latch on. As well, she had started out with some simply amazing fuss fits through the night, which changed to lots of sleepiness later in the week. And right before the first week checkup at the midwifery, it occurred to us that she hadn't had a dirty diaper in over 24 hours (this was something specific we were told to watch out for), after a most impressive start with passing the meconium. (Dad had had the first diaper change, at the midwifery, which was comedy incarnate. The sheer volume of that black tar was eye-popping, and because even the preemie-sized diaper was like a muu-muu on her, meconium had already smeared all over the carefully chosen first outfit as well. Sigh...Not to be deterred, dad got the diaper out of the way and made with the wiping, carefully observing the front-to-back guideline...whereupon...you guessed it: Sabre re-flooded the torpedo tube with approximately the same payload, at the exact moment when dad had two feet in one hand and a maxed-out wipe in the other. We have since established that Sabre Ruth can specialize, at will, in diaper changes featuring multiple diapers per change!) Anyway, at that one-week checkup, we found her weight was 5lb 11oz, and our jaws hit the floor.

It is expected that babies lose a little weight after they are born, and that they tend to re-gain their birth weight after about two weeks. So, we were expecting to lose a little bit, but not almost 20% of her body weight, which was surprisingly low to both of us to begin with, and 5lb 11oz really did start to sound like “preemie”. When we saw some concern about her weight from the midwives, we latched on to that concern, hard. Now...in hindsight, we may well have misjudged the amount of importance others were placing on weight as the preeminent indicator of health (I suspect it, now), but our biggest mistake was then focusing so hard on the singular goal of getting weight on her, that we lost sight of other indicators of health.

We felt horrible about this. We could now see that the symptoms we were seeing before, pointed to Sabre actually not getting the food we thought she was getting: no dirty diapers because there was nothing to poop out; increased sleepiness was actually the lethargy that the books warned us about; and the screaming fits were because our new daughter was actually going hungry. We thought she was getting food at the breast but now it was pretty clear that was not right, and there are few feelings that can compare to the utter pit-in-the-stomach sense that you have been starving your first-born child without even knowing it.

We kicked into high gear, steering everything toward getting weight on this girl. She continued not to latch on in the way that everyone told us that a normal baby would—not helping already exhausted and now nearly panicky parents—and we turned to other means. Eventually, one of the midwives (who were being heroically accessible to us the whole time) suggested manually expressing milk and spoon-feeding it. And so a heart-wrenchingly frustrated Cathy tried this one afternoon, and the effect on Sabre was immediate. Her eyes opened up wide and alert, she calmed down, and then slept naturally. Okay, so...when we know she gets food, she suddenly starts acting exactly as we'd thought she should from the beginning. Great. So, now, the best way to get food into her? The midwives suggested a pump and a plastic-needled syringe, and Dad sprang into action to secure the equipment. (Hey, it was something to do other than feel utterly helpless!)

The syringe imposed its own imprisoning box, again inadvertently. Pumping and feeding with syringe meant two things: one, that she did start getting food, and two, that we knew exactly how much food that was. That was fantastic, because we could see her getting the food she had not been getting before. And that was also very difficult, because knowing exactly how much food we were putting in her imposed new and very specific expectations on mom, dad and baby, that in hindsight we probably paid way too much attention to. Over the next roughly two weeks, through both visits to the midwifery and housecalls by the midwives and a lactation specialist, we kept a close eye on her weight, and it did start to come up, well enough that we could even see the rate of weight gain increasing.

On the syringe, our problems turned to managing the pump, keeping the “right” amount of food going into Sabre, and trying to figure out how to do a proper latch at the same time. This involved a three-step process at each feeding: 1) try to nurse, working on the latch, then 2) feed Sabre pumped milk via the syringe, and finally 3) pump for the next feeding. For poor Cathy, this often meant that a feeding lasted three times as long as it would for a “normal” nursing mother, prompting one of the midwives to comment sympathetically, “you know, we often say that new moms feel like they do nothing but feed their babies, but for you, it really is like that, isn't it?” Even with Dad volunteering to take some feedings, Cathy still had to be awake to pump, and the fact that we now knew that our daughter was getting food, kept us going. In the middle of all this, too, Cathy even tried using a nipple shield (which essentially fits over the natural nipple and presents a different shape to the baby's mouth...we had established that Sabre's mouth was both very small, and that like her mom she could not open her jaw as much as one would expect) to work on getting her the best chance for a good latch.

The lactation specialist, Heather, was an absolute godsend. Now the midwives are no slouches when it comes to nursing help and advice, but the specialist over several visits was able to help Cathy work through her frustrations, help her find the latch she needed with confidence, and help encourage her to try going off the syringe and back on to the breast. (What I find interesting in hindsight was that Cathy and Sabre seemed to “figure out” the latch almost all at once, after one of Heather's visits. We had been told, both by Heather and by Sue O'Dell in Denver, that many babies having trouble finding a latch seem to “just figure it out” in the third or fourth week. In the end, Cathy did the work herself, but I suspect that the outside help was invaluable in reassurance and confidence.)

It was during the help-with-nursing stage that we got a few little pieces of context that were amazingly enlightening, in hindsight. First, we learned somewhere in there that the amount of weight that Sabre lost that first week was certainly on the high side, but not unprecedented—and one resource specifically said that people too often use weight as a singular measure of success, rather than taking into account other indicators of health. Other indicators of health? It was at that point that a few other things swam into focus. It occurred to us that at no point had anyone actually said that she didn't look healthy...her skin and color looked great, she seemed normally alert, not abnormally distressed, and so on...just a little on the light side, something to try and work on, and a little jaundice. From the beginning we had felt that something wasn't quite right, without knowing exactly what...and when we heard that the weight had dropped more than we'd expected, we zoomed right in on that, putting everything into remedying that problem. Classic tunnel vision.

Other little things came into focus as well. Not too long after going on the syringe, the wee miss had started to make up for lost time with regard to both wet and dirty diapers. It turns out that this is another indicator of health—you know she's getting enough food when you can see it coming out the flipside! Also, we had started to notice that Sabre would fuss badly after she had nursed a little bit, which did not bode well for weaning her off the syringe and back onto the breast. We did not consider that we might still be looking for a nail for our hammer—it never occurred to us that she might have been fussing over the syringe, not over the breast. In hindsight, it seems pretty clear that it was the syringe that she wasn't entirely happy with. (The little critter probably took it the same way we did, in the end: “this is not my preference, but it's getting me what I need, so I'll do it”) In short, each time we backed out and took a broader-context look, things became much clearer, and much calmer.

At the end of the third week, with new confidence in the latch (brought about at least in part by a slightly bigger baby!), Cathy and Sabre went “cold turkey” off the syringe, and onto the breast, and seem to be doing fine. (Happily, we made it through this process without resorting to formula.) The concerns about “how do we know she's getting enough, now, when we can't see it going in her?” seem to have abated (since we can certainly still see it coming out), and each day things get a little closer to what seems “normal” to us. Looking back on it now, it seems pretty clear that we lost sight of the right context, and probably chased our tail unnecessarily. Context is hard on a new parent—how on earth do you even know what you don't know?

So, we learned things that we expected to learn, but got caught in some of the traps anyway. Perhaps this was simple vanity on our parts; I still believe that one of our strongest assets is our ability to keep things in perspective, but I am humbled at how we still managed to lose sight of many things that probably could have kept us much more calm and rested during the process of figuring out how to get Sabre successfully to the breast. Likewise, I know that I usually have the ability to adapt to change pretty flexibly, but I gotta say, when your newborn daughter seems to throw something new at you every hour or better, challenging everything you think you have learned to this point, it can get rough. (I have had cause to be thankful for every bit of background reading and knowledge that I have managed to acquire, and yet I'm not sure anything could have really prepared me for this.) And I suppose we should take some solace in some of the comments from the midwives who complimented us on being very aware and observant about things that might not be right. Here we felt that we had failed so miserably that we were literally starving our daughter, but the comments from others suggested that we were actually ahead of the curve. I guess that's what happens when you want to succeed that badly.

We learned that you really do know more than you think you do. At various points in this process, we got what seemed like conflicting information, or at least conflicting priorities, from multiple parties. Sometimes we were faced with the choice of doing what people were recommending, or doing what we knew to be getting ounces on our little girl. In the end, we made our choices and are happy with where we have come, and as we continue to incorporate what seems right to us with what people recommend to us, things continue to get better all the while. (It is important to note here how significant it is that the midwives and Heather supported our right to do this at all times. Had we been in a traditional environment with this set of circumstances, it is quite possible that the loss in weight may have prompted an immediate mandate for formula supplements, which we really wanted to avoid. We were able to work it out naturally, if not without challenge, simply by some attention and investment of time. Now obviously we don't know that it would have been different, but having the conspicuous choice is intensely gratifying.)

We certainly have learned that a new parent's sense of time changes. Before Sabre, neither Cathy nor I would have ever believed that you could put one or two ten-minute items on your day's task list and not be able to get to them, literally. With a due nod to The Powers That Be, okay, we get it now. (And that seems to be the crux in making it seem a little less impossible the next time you attempt it, by the way.)

Finally, I have learned just how much of a rock star my wife is. I know I've been singing her praises elsewhere in this tome, but please allow me to close with another accolade. I am intensely grateful to have been around pretty much the whole time since Sabre was born; I work during the days now but I am still here at the haus when I do, and I've only been away for a handful of supply and grocery trips. This means both that I get to help out a lot (which I am very happy about), and it also means that I have been able to see how Cathy interacts with Sabre, frequently and uncensored. In a nutshell, her patience and devotion has surprised even me—and I had some pretty big expectations. I mean, I figured Cathy would be a good mother, but I have been here to see what she has been through, the frustrations, the triple-time feedings, the inconsolable newborn fits, the obvious soreness from the enthusiastic munch that produces a good latch...but most of all, I have now seen her try everything that her considerable mind can come up with to do right by her new baby, in spite of scares, all sort and manner of little curveballs, and of course all of it on broken or no sleep. When I know good and well that she must be crazy tired, and nothing that I have tried is calming the fussing miss down, she calmly takes her from me, sits down with her and starts to work her patient magic. At her level worst, she is still more impressive than I could have ever asked for. Sabre Ruth may be the most beautiful creature I have ever seen, but Cathy is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. Of course that doesn't make sense, except that it does.

Trust me on this.

Enter Sabre Ruth

I have come to the inescapable conclusion that my new daughter is a contrarian.

(Given what we know about her mother and certainly her father, this may be a real shock, so take a moment to let that set in properly. No no, seriously, we'll wait...)

The scene: Saturday, December 13, 2008, Palmer, Alaska.

Cathy woke me somewhere between 3 and 3.30 in the morning. She had just knocked over her water glass in the dark, but this was not about to keep her from a singularly urgent bee-line to the bathroom. (It should be said up front that Cathy was extremely easy on me during the whole pregnancy—seriously, almost none of what I had been prepared to encounter—but even in a sleepy stupor I was smart enough not to argue with a woman in her 38^th week.) I mopped up the spill and promptly sacked out again.

I awoke on my own a while later (probably somewhat over an hour) because something was definitely not right: I have no idea how I knew this, but Cathy had not returned from the bathroom since the spill. At that realization, I was bolt awake, and as gingerly as I could manage—let's face it, this is not a delicate operation—I tapped on the door to check in on her.

Turns out Cathy had been awake since midnight-thirty or so. She was pretty uncomfortable with what felt like menstrual cramps, on the normal side of intense but with the alarming beginnings of back pain. She also noticed she was leaking slightly, no more than say a tablespoon at a time, clear and odorless. Above all she could not get back to sleep. We immediately thought that this was probably the baby descending into the pelvis—that precursor event that heralds a little relief for mom's lungs but hard times ahead for the bladder—and which usually happens about two weeks before birth, for a first time mom.

(Looking back on this, of course, it seems rather obvious that she was in labor even at this point, her water having already broken, but we were in no way prepared for that. Our official due date was still 11 days away, and everyone had been drilling into us how first babies are usually late, first babies in Alaska are almost always even later, and winter first babies in Alaska are almost always later still. We had just had the 38-week appointment three days earlier, at which the owner of the midwifery concluded that the baby still hadn't descended yet, so there was no real need to do a manual exam—we would do that next week, at the 39-week appointment. Cathy and I were expecting descent, not labor, and we had been advised that the sensation of the baby descending into the pelvis would feel like, well, menstrual cramps. And presto, there they were, so that's what we assumed. For anyone who doubts that Whoever Is In Charge has a sense of humor, I submit this as yet more proof.)

Somewhere along in there, two things happened: the back pain kicked in pretty good (far worse than the cramping), and the cramps started becoming quasi-regular. It became clear that something was up with the back pain—I could hear some fear in her voice, mostly a “what is happening here, nobody ever said anything about this” sort of anxiety. We later joked that we had both thought during this time, “holy crap, if this is what descent is like, we may be in over our head when real labor comes...” I mean, Cathy had always been told she had a good tolerance for pain, but what did that mean, really? We weren't exactly in familiar territory, and maybe we were wrong all along... I switched into caretaker mode, figuring that something was up, labor or not, and focused on my tasks: 1) keep her calm, 2) try to keep her fed, and 3) try to get her to sleep. I fetched the little “chronograph” we had picked up to time contractions with, thinking that I might as well start measuring the cramps in case they were contractions. I quickly found out that we had selected an absolutely worthless POS for this task. That I got any semblance of accurate information out of it was in spite of, and not at all due to, its design. We quickly learned that the “contractions” were not meeting the standard that would warrant a call to the midwifery, but we started calling them “contractions” nonetheless, as they were not stopping and getting pretty intense. (At least the back pain was getting pretty intense.) I all but shoved hot cereal down her, and did what I could to help her get comfortable enough to sleep—that latter being a real losing battle. (In our education and training, it had been well-impressed on me that moms do much, much better when rested and fed, and I was not about to set Cathy up for exhaustion if there was anything I could do about it!)

Eventually, probably about 5 in the morning, I called the midwifery. (The general rule is that if mom can call the midwifery, she's not ready to come in yet, but if dad has to do the calling because mom can't, it's time. I knew that we weren't there yet—I was calling as a courtesy, and to keep Cathy calm.) As I would have expected, the general tenor of the call struck me as testing to see if we were really ready to come in, or if it would be better to get her to sleep as long as she could. In the end, we concluded that we were probably doing the right thing; Cathy had even tried a bath, which often calms down false labor, after I had mopped up the water spill and gone back to sleep.

The bath had helped a little with comfort, but it didn't stop, and the back pain was still getting worse. We called back several hours later, probably 9 or so, and after some back-and-forth with Peggy, she suggested we come on in. (Remember: at this point, all we knew for sure is that something was happening, but we still weren't convinced that it was real labor. I was honestly half-expecting to get there and find out that we were still two weeks away.)

Come on in. Holy cow, was that a moment for me. When I say that we were not ready, there is a bit of understatement at work. We had been planning to take that very weekend and get our “grab-and-go” kit ready; we were probably at least two and more likely three weeks out from delivery, but best to be ready, right? Likewise, we were going to get a few more things around the house firmed up, like getting the new desk set up, the second car into the garage, etc. We were technically ready to bring baby home, in terms of having car seat, bassinet, a few clothes and supplies, but we were not exactly set up. And so here I was, with a 38-week-pregnant wife writhing with back pain, suddenly charged with getting everything together myself, right now.

And so I did. We found the suggestion list from the midwifery (very useful!), and I rounded up everything on it, including food and clothes for mom, food and clothes for dad, clothes for new baby, car seat, supplies and a few niceties like music. (It wasn't a pretty packing job, but it was pretty fast, and all there.) As I did, I could not help but think about the desk that had been in the car just the night before. Earlier in the week, we had bought an “assembly-required” desk in Anchorage, which took two people and a pallet jack to get into the back of the car. There was no way I was getting that out of the back myself; I had known that I'd have to disassemble it in the car and carry the pieces in bit-by-bit. I'd figured we'd do that on Saturday, but for some reason I could not explain to you, I got some bug up my butt to get this done Friday night, in temperatures of probably five below zero or so. But it got done, and as the car was warming up not twelve hours later, I put the seats back upright and got that car-seat base in place and started to wonder about things like unconscious prescience. (If that beast had still been in the car it would have added at least half an hour to our departure time.)

I've also gotta say that we couldn't have picked a more absolutely gorgeous winter day to have a baby. It was brilliantly clear and sunny, if very cold—the car's thermometer read thirteen below when we left. (I consciously added to my list of divine thank-yous the fact that Cathy is an even bigger polar bear than I am, and the cold didn't seem to faze her a bit.) Amazing what you notice at times like this, but the quality of the morning light on the mountains, with the fog in the Knik valley and the rime ice on the forest canopy, was breathtaking. We now live in one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen (and I have seen some impossibly beautiful places), and on this particular morning, Mother Nature was even more spectacular than usual.

Enroute, I can remember steeling myself to the idea that we would probably be coming back home in a few hours, with weeks left to go. We chatted and tried to get Cathy to relax and take her mind off the back pain, which really was getting alarming for me. The half-hour drive to the birthing center probably seemed like an eternity to Cathy, but we got there and settled into our preferred delivery room with Peggy, who started working with Cathy while I shuttled stuff in from the car. It was about 11 in the morning on Saturday, 13 December. Okay, we were now here, with supplies. The only thing we didn't know yet is whether we were actually going to have a baby.

A word, here, about working with midwives at a birthing center. One of the reasons we had chosen to work with Mat-Su Midwifery has to do with the delivery experience we wanted for ourselves. It has been said that with midwives, the birth of a baby is a natural event, not a medical procedure. That sounds really trite, but isn't—not when it counts. Cathy wanted the ability to move around, wanted to be able to make choices on the fly, wanted to be in charge of the operation. For my part, I wanted to be able to catch and cut, to work with Cathy during labor and delivery, to be educated as it all happened. The midwives (Peggy and Jackie, on this particular day) gave all those things to us, and more. They were brilliant at keeping Cathy calm and focused, keeping us aware and informed at every turn, letting us drive the decisions while being happy to offer advice when asked, and apparently being extremely prepared for things to go wrong. (It was not until after the birth that I noticed all the emergency equipment that had been on ready standby the whole time.) I later asked Cathy if she could imagine having the same sort of experience in a hospital...hers was as emphatic a “no way” as mine was. (I suspect that we could have had a marvelous experience, to be sure, but just not the same. I will always appreciate that, and I'll choose it again if I have a choice.)

When I was actually able to turn my attention to being there, I noticed that the room smelled marvelous (lavender, I recall) and somehow was very homey and calming. At this point, Peggy had concluded from talking with Cathy that what we were going through was quite possibly real labor, with the back pain indicating back labor. (Perversely, this “validation” made us feel at least a little better, that we weren't crying over a little nick.) When Jackie arrived, they got an antibiotic drip into Cathy to counteract a positive test for “Group-B strep”--our one concession to modern medicine during the process. Poor Cathy, of course, simply detests needles, as her veins are not particularly cooperative for phlebotomists, and it was a minor struggle to get the shunt (an evil-sounding name unto itself, isn't it?) into that most uncomfortable of all possible positions—on the back of the hand. Oi.

The whole point of this was to find out where we were, exactly. The signs thus far had not pointed to anything we could count on, and for all we knew we weren't dilated at all. We couldn't reasonably do a vaginal exam until the antibiotic had had a chance to do its work (its whole purpose is to protect the baby while passing through the birth canal, so the exam itself presented a risk), and so during the time it took to get hooked up, empty the drip, and wait for it to have full effect, we tried to get a handle on the back labor. I got into comfortable clothes (still not knowing how long we'd be at it, I came prepared for a haul), put on our own music (a newgrass collection featuring Bela Fleck, Tony Rice, and of course Sam Bush, which drew some nice comments from Jackie), and went into learn-and-do mode.

We had taken recommended classes, read recommended materials, and did some of our own research, but in the end, as always, it came down to, er, “just-in-time” learning. It's not that preparation is not essential, but it's essential only in that it is background, it is context. Looking back on it now, every bit of that background was useful, but for us, only part of it happened in a manner that even resembled what we had seen and read. What really made it was having the midwives there, with their attention focused on the most important matters of principle, guiding us along, adapting and teaching and showing us as we went. (At a time when you are under a considerable amount of stress, in completely unfamiliar territory, not knowing what comes next even under ideal circumstances, for things to take a turn you not only did not expect but hadn't even considered, it can be very easy to get derailed from the objective. As Sun Tzu so appropriately said, “in any battle the first casualty is the battle plan.” Just so. And at that point you must fall back on principles and pay attention.)

The back labor was the big unexpected factor. Back labor essentially means that the baby is turned backwards so that the baby's spine is aligned with mom's spine. This is not an ideal position for a gentle birth, and if you can remedy it, you remedy it. It certainly explained the pain Cathy had been having, but was a bit alarming in that it presented a potential problem to go with the one we already had (not knowing if we were even in labor or at all dilated), and with the one we were currently discovering, which was that we could not find distinctively where the heartbeat was—that is, our best guess was back labor, but with no real confirmation yet. So, with the best intelligence we had available to us at the time, we set about focusing on getting that baby to turn around and align properly. (This is all during contractions, mind you.) Okay, great, how does one do that? We had heard in the classes that there are “things you can do” to get a baby to turn around, but no mention of what those actually were. Well, here we go: what's the trick to getting a baby to turn over on its own accord?

Gravity.

Yup, apparently simple gravity works, even in the womb—baby's backside is heavier than its frontside, and so we got Cathy on all fours, which was at least initially not comfortable for her, but she was a trooper and did it anyway. With a little bit of time and with some attention from dad and the midwives, she learned how to work with her own contractions, and got visibly better at managing the pain and discomfort. I was amazed by this, at how much better she was handling these much-more-intense contractions than the ones that we had started with. Along in there somewhere she even tried a shower, which definitely made things better. (It's a weird thing for a first-time parent to really buy into the idea that you don't want the pain to go away—it's going to happen whether you are ready for it or not—you want to learn to ride the contraction like a surfer, letting your body do the work instead of fighting it. The whole purpose of labor, if I understood all this right, is to achieve effacement and dilation, which is involuntary. Mom will do best to simply learn to get out of the way.) This went on for a while, with Cathy on hands and knees and the birthing ball, and with both parents praying hard for a little coaxial roll, until we were confident the antibiotic had had its full chance to take effect. Hopefully, we could now find out where the heck we were.

Peggy was the one that did the exam, and I confess I was still pretty worried at this point—for me, the worst part of anything is not knowing, and we didn't seem to know much for sure, despite quite a few hours of what sure seemed like labor to me. I was doing my best to keep Cathy calm (meaning, I was doing my best to keep me calm; Cathy was already a proven rock star by this point) when Peggy started, and almost immediately got really wide-eyed—but it was a bright sort of wide-eyed.

“Oh my God, I feel hair!”

Now, it took me a moment to realize what that meant. I'm fairly sure that everyone else in the room figured it out well before me; in fact I think I got it right about the time Peggy was explaining it to me. This one little revelation was pretty conclusive proof of the following:

• Cathy's water had definitely broken. (In fact, it suddenly occurred to me, it had probably broken even before she was awakened by the cramps. All those little tablespoon-sized leakages had probably added up over the course of everything that happened.)

• Baby had most certainly descended, and apparently went right into labor directly thereafter. Apparently this is common in a mother's subsequent deliveries, but not common for her first.

• She was not just dilated, she was really dilated. We went from not knowing we were dilated at all, to being at 10cm. This also meant that all the pain and labor she had gone through thus far was not only not in vain, it was real, honest labor—and it was already behind her.

As if this news were not heartening enough, Peggy also said that she felt the head turned correctly, toward Cathy's back. Jackie was instantly on it, figuring that if that were the case, they should try listening for the heartbeat again—since we had been looking for a baby that had not even descended yet, not one that was already at zero station. “Well, if that's right, then we should be able to listen right about here...” wump-wump-wump-wump-wump... Cathy and I both got a huge jolt of both adrenaline and relief at that one. Big, strong and beautiful, and right along the anterior the way we wanted. (Imagine that...just getting her on all fours, and working with the birthing ball, caused that baby to roll right around and cooperate. If I hadn't already accepted that a successful, healthy birth really is something of a miracle unto itself, I was definitely there now.)

“Hey, let's have us a baby!”

With that, we shifted gears and started walking (again, that marvelous gravity thing), while the midwives drew the bathwater in case Cathy wanted to do a water birth, which had been an intriguing option but one that just kinda got overtaken by events. (We may yet try one in the future—personally, I am fascinated at the idea that it presents no risk to the baby because it does not try to draw any breath until air hits its face.) We did several laps around the birthing center's “classroom”, and even a couple trips up and down the stairs. It was during this process that Cathy felt the shift into transition, when the urge to bear down and push starts to become inexplicably compelling. (And it continued to simply amaze me, having grown up with such a limited mental image of births in hospitals, moms strapped to metallic beds in white rooms with green scrubs, that almost every minute of our own experience was spent in our own clothes, with the ability to walk around, and work things through entirely at our own discretion. Here we were at full dilation and effacement, and were taking a stroll up and down the stairs! I simply had no idea that it could be like that.)

The midwives had Cathy try several positions to facilitate the birth, including both the high and low stools, which can seem almost amusing or medieval until you actually take a look at how they open up the pelvis to, well, exactly the right attitude to let a baby come out. The contractions for Cathy seemed to take on a very different flavor; it wasn't so much pain as it was discomfort, and not so much discomfort even as an uncontrollable urge to get this done. We got to the point at which the midwives must have known the birth was imminent, as they seemed to be testing her to see how effective her push was. Apparently at this point, you want to push as hard as you can, but no harder, to avoid tearing the perineum. The midwives used olive oil and literally supported the perineum with fingers, during the pushes.

This segment was fascinating for me to observe, as Cathy seemed at turns to doubt herself, and the midwives on a couple of occasions actually had her take her own hand and feel where the baby's hair was, for herself—this immediately produced a positive reaction in Cathy, who found the strength to bear down again and more besides. (Interestingly, Cathy does not remember any doubt, herself; she remembers the intensity being overwhelming, and thinking that she really wasn't as far along as she actually was.) I was also tremendously impressed at how with every contraction and push, the midwives checked in on everything—perineum okay, heartbeat okay, mom okay. They've got your back.

We eventually got to the point where we chose a birth position, with the deliberate intention that this is it; it's time. It was at that point that I reminded Peggy and Jackie that I wanted to catch if I could, and they didn't even blink, but immediately put me to work. Initially, I held the perineum as Peggy worked on the crown and Jackie worked with Cathy; the position she had chosen was sort of sideways-supine, with Peggy and I manipulating legs to simulate the great effectiveness of the taller stool but without having Cathy feel like she was sitting on the crapper to give birth. (I get the impression that a birth is necessarily an indelicate experience, and we had certainly long since subordinated any sense of propriety to the desire for efficient function. I cannot imagine that anyone who has attended a birth would argue that efficient function does not have its own compelling dignity.)

Cathy pushed and she pushed, and in the end it really didn't take that long. I was on perineum duty when the baby crowned, and I gotta tell you it is heart-wrenching to see that little head suck back in just a fraction as mom lets go of one push and rests for the next one. Holy cow! But the next contraction came, and Cathy bore down, and the head came out with Peggy's help—and here was another one of those images that a new father has simply never even fathomed; the head is out and mom rests for a minute or so before the next push. The baby even began to cry in between, which both startled me and brought tears to my eyes.

“Okay, dad, time to pull him out.” Ah, right! I was so flabbergasted at the whole spectacle that I had to be reminded that this was my moment. And here's the crazy part: I kinda figured that by the time the head crowned, the shoulders would just sort of slip through and I'd truly be catching a baby that was sliding out on its own. I was not prepared to actually have to pull to get the little munchkin out, but I learn pretty quickly when I have to, and with a little tug, we had us a newborn.

And, for you eagle-eyed readers, about that “him” in the quote above: all throughout our time at the midwifery, through all the appointments with all the midwives, we can recall only one comment that did not predict a baby boy—on one occasion, Jackie had said “either it's a boy, or a sleeping girl”, referring to the relatively slow, steady heartbeat. Apparently boys' heartbeats are very steady, while girls' heartbeats will fluctuate and flutter with certain stimuli, and every heartbeat we had heard previously had everyone confident of “boy”, right down to the birth itself. Which is why it was so amusing to pull our new daughter into the outside world. Somehow, the mental image of “my child, contrarian from birth” seems perfectly right for the occasion, and I will always remember that.

Peggy and Jackie deftly got her cleaned up and onto mom's skin while Cathy and I both had some pretty nice tears. The time was 3.50 in the afternoon, after probably 16 or so hours of labor, and less than five at the birthing center. Looking back on it, Cathy handled it all with amazing grace and not even so much as a Tylenol; I was there with her the whole time and I can still hardly believe it.

Sabre Ruth Wilmeth (first name is pronounced SAY-bree) was 6 pounds 13 ounces, 20” long, with a 13” head. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I have never been more in love with my wife than I am now.

(When you're male and grow up with such a limited view of what the birth experience is like, it is easy to think of some of the common clichés as little platitudes designed to make moms feel better about their accomplishment, but without really meaning anything. Well, I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but brother, it's real. The birth of my child is the most astounding thing I have ever witnessed, in almost every one of its parts—the mother's body that somehow knows exactly what to do, and does it without direction—the voluntary cooperation of the baby who has not yet drawn her first breath—the very development of this miniature human, against all sorts of odds of defect and mishap—the mother learning how to voluntarily submit to what must be tremendous discomfort and pain—and the midwives, performing the incalculably valuable function of showing us all, by demonstration, that this is a perfectly natural process. And there is the indescribable spectacle of literally watching your child come from your wife's body. It is impossible to describe how impressive that all seems to someone who is completely and utterly not capable of these feats. Cathy has told me countless times since then that my assistance was valuable and even essential to her success, and I certainly appreciate that, but it just pales in comparison to what she can do—to what she has done. That she chose me to do this with is probably the greatest compliment I have ever received.)

We ran tests, and did the foot-prick, and cut the cord (tougher than you think!), and before long Cathy delivered the placenta naturally. Even here, the midwives did a great job of educating us as we went along, showing us by looking at the placenta that everything looked great. I filled out some paperwork, Cathy got little Sabre nursing on colostrum, and the postpartum checks on Cathy started. Everything looked good, with the perineum intact and those marvelous words, “mom and baby are doing fine.”

It was late enough in the day that Peggy and Jackie invited us to stay the night at the birthing center. By 7pm, we would have been cleared to go, but we took them up on this offer. The midwifery ordered dinner for us, a pizza from a local and fairly swanky Italian place down the street. (To mom & dad, this simple meal tasted pretty exquisite.) We finished the evening off by making the most important calls, to parents. We were lucky to reach both sets of parents directly (it was getting late in St. Paul, and not exactly early in Bozeman), and they seemed quite pleased, if as surprised as we were that Sabre had arrived eleven days early.

As we calmed down a bit after the events of the day, we also reflected that our first daughter had been born to a Sam Bush record. Somehow, that seemed extraordinarily right. After all those years watching Sam at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, literally watching pregnant women one year return with babies the next, and seeing those kids grow up each subsequent year, I wouldn't have chosen it any other way. A small thing, to be sure, but at the same time, not so small.

We slept well that night, given that we didn't sleep much that night. I got some great daddy time with the wee miss on my chest, after she made it fairly clear that the midwifery's bedside bassinet simply would not do. I had read a number of testimonials about how nice it can be for a dad to have the little one sleeping like this, and I gotta say oh yeah, that is just one hundred percent a-OK with me. (Naturally, my subsequent ability to achieve this same result has been woefully inadequate—at least by my reckoning—but whenever it does happen, it makes everyone happy.)

The next morning, we were visited by the owner of the midwifery, Judy, who checked in on us and ordered us breakfast (completely above and beyond the call, and highly, highly appreciated). Both Sabre and Cathy got a clean bill of health and we were good to go home right away. This worked out well for everyone, including Judy, who was on her way to an alternate church service that Sunday morning. It seems that someone found it necessary to burn down the governor's church the day before, which just happened to be the same one that Judy goes to. I wish I could say that I was really surprised by this, but sadly in my observation, naked arson is just about in keeping with the type and quality of attack against her that we had seen throughout the campaign and even well after her loss. (I have personally seen otherwise intelligent people whipped into an inexplicable ad hominem frenzy against her, featuring such total, naked contempt as to be the crown jewel of any military propagandist's career. And my use of the word inexplicable here is carefully considered, taking into account the even more vile and sanctimonious tyrant-in-waiting whose boots her attackers would apparently rather lick instead. [Those of us who simply reject anyone who promises to be a tyrant, are neatly dismissed as insane.] One can only hope that a proper sense of shame will eventually come to those who would have burned that witch at the stake, simply in order to pave the road for their own witch.) At any rate, it impressed me that the church had decided to meet elsewhere, at last minute on word of mouth, and if Judy was any indication of the congregation, they did so with considerable grace and class, and little if any judgment. (She never even hinted at what she thought of the governor, one way or the other. Gratifying.) It probably will not surprise you that we wished Judy well and let her get on her way as soon as we could.

So! We had a healthy baby, and a healthy mom, and it was time to go home. Sunday was another really cold and clear day; the car thermometer said eighteen below, and lemme tell you, that was one of the most gingerly handled car rides of all time!

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This post continues in Sabre Ruth At Home.

Thanksgiving

We had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at Keith and Meaghan's in Eagle River, with much of Meaghan's family in attendance, plus Darrell and Julie from the magnificent New Year's 4WD trip up the Knik valley. Some really marvelous people, from the sound of it. I even overheard some polite declines to talk politics because of how strongly most people in the house felt about government interference. (Ha! These folks ain't seen nothing yet, have they?)

Fairbanks!

I sent the following message to my best man Hunter Goosmann after our November trip to Fairbanks. It is of interest in the continuing Team Wilmachek Great Northern Adventure.
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Hi Hunter:

I thought that you of all people would appreciate this. At this point I'm kicking myself that we didn't take more pictures, but that just wasn't the purpose of the weekend.

Cathy and I went to Fairbanks this weekend, leaving on Friday (we'd already had Thanksgiving dinner with cousin Keith Howard in Eagle River) and returning Sunday. We had three goals in mind: 1) pick up an ottoman that we had bought as part of a set but that would not in-store-ship down to Wasilla for us (long story), 2) visit Blueberry Baby, a baby place Cathy had found on the internet much earlier which featured lots of different cloth diaper options we'd wanted to investigate, and 3) well, get introduced to Fairbanks, duh!

Time from house door to Fairbanks proper (about 330 miles) was right around six and a half hours, including a lunch and refueling stop in Cantwell. We took the new Patriot, of course (different story) for the AWD and its cargo space. (I'd also say we did it for the heated seats, but you probably remember that Cathy installed those on her TJ as well) Driving conditions were mostly dry but distinctly shiny for many a mile as well--we were very happy to have an AWD vehicle to work with. We timed it almost perfectly viz light; it was just getting light when we left and it was just getting dark when we rolled in to Fairbanks. On the trip we saw moose and caribou, but no bears (I believe there truly is a hibernation season up here, but I should check before I say that), nor sheep, which may be a combination of unpracticed eyes and inhibited visibility. In general, visibility ranged from low (usually, reasonably clear within half a mile but with a cloud ceiling of < 500') to pretty good (patches of blue sky, ceiling probably in the 8000' range). It's all low elevation, with Broad Pass right around the town of Cantwell (surprisingly, if you look at a map) being the high point at 2300'.

It was the most stunning drive I've ever taken.

Everyone has preferences in the type of countryside they deem the most scenic, of course. For me, I love open vistas and a sense of scale, which implies patchy rather than continuous forest cover, multiple ridges and ranges, and rock given perspective by incomplete snow cover. This territory, especially the 50 miles south and 20 miles north of Cantwell, simply has everything in it that I love about landscape. Add in to that the je ne sais quoi that is Alaska, and my jaw was permanently on the floor. And finally, as if I needed a coup de grace, there was the winter light, which sneaked in when we weren't ready for it, and rearranged shadows, vistas, and shades of color that I did not know existed. I would never have guessed how many shades of pink and slate could intermix with what would otherwise be simply dull gray. Usually this was fleeting--you could blink and miss it--but absolutely mesmerising. Definitely not fair to someone trying to keep his eyes on an icy road!

This is big country. In Palmer, we are 5 hours and 250 miles from Homer at the southern end of the Kenai peninsula; the distance to Fairbanks is about 330 miles and 6.5 hours; and from Fairbanks you can drive all the way to Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast, if you have 20 hours to drive the 500 miles nearly due north. (Imagine 500 miles of gravel road; apparently that estimate of 20 hours is not kidding.) And Prudhoe is not even the northernmost point in the state, nor is Homer even close to the southernmost (Homer is approximately the same latitude as Yakutat, which is on the little isthmus of land connecting the main body of Alaska with the southeast panhandle, entirely further south). It is also big country. The Talkeetna mountains loom off to the east, stretching from Palmer in the south to Cantwell in the north (they are separated from the Alaska Range by the Nenana river), and the Alaska Range picks up north of Talkeetna/Trappers Creek/Petersville, to the west. The peaks on both sides are unexpected monsters, jumping 4000 and 5000 feet straight up off the deck, so numerous that some of them don't even have names...they are steep, rocky, and mostly above treeline which is very low at this latitude. (For the guy who loves the open vista, this is visual heaven.) I remember that this stunned me before, the first time I was in Alaska--I had never expected these mountains to be so visually impressive. Why? Because they are the freakin' foothills to the big boys. Get back into the core of the Talkeetnas (good luck with that!) and you are in the 8000' range; in the Alaska range there are numerous points above 10,000', and then of course there is that Big Thing. Just imagine being at Fort Garland, looking at how incredibly impressive the Sierra Blanca looks to the north, jumping not quite a fair 7000' off the deck. Now, imagine it being steeper. Now, imagine that treeline only goes up the first 20% of the hillside, or less. Ya good there? Okay, now imagine something fully and literally three times bigger than that. In this case, imagine looking at a 5000' monster peak just across the riverbed, from maybe 600' actual altitude, and realizing that there is something lurking in the clouds behind it that is not quite four times its size. This will play with your head!

I was also enchanted with the forests, which are marvelously open, with cute little spruce trees. Apparently it can be called true taiga forest at this latitude, although I would expect the trees to be a little shorter for that name, and I usually think of spruce-looking confier evergreens exclusively rather than a mix including deciduous trees like birch and alder--I'm not exactly sure where those expectations came from, but I tend to think "boreal forest" rather than "taiga" when I see that intermixed configuration. One way or the other, it is the most appealing looking forest cover I have ever seen; on this route it stretches all across the lowlands, with nicely sculpted parks and breaks that provide contrast. Fantastic.

Even the sheer geography was fascinating, and sometimes unexpected. The approach to Cantwell was a classic valley-between-two-ranges; it was mostly distinguishing because of the unbelievable size of everything and the unusual look of the forest. What is weird about it is that the watershed divide between south (the Chulitna river which drains into the Susitna and Southcentral Alaska) and north (the Nenana river which drains into the Tanana and then the Yukon, in the Interior) is not at the crest of the Alaska Range, which is what I would have guessed. Not at all: Broad Pass is aptly named, a small plateau right around Cantwell, from where it certainly looks like you should continue to rise to go through the mighty Alaska Range still to your north. But, you may notice, right out of Cantwell to the north you seem to immediately pick up the Nenana river, and follow it through the Alaska range as it flows north, and down. This seems remarkable; I'll have to look further into that.

The Alaska Range is definitely a barrier separating the Interior from points south. Going through the range is telling: from Cantwell to Healy is 43 miles, and that is definitely "sneaking through" from the look of it. What I found fascinating is that when you come down into Healy and thence to Nenana, at the confluence of the Nenana and Tanana rivers, you have been following the Nenana river bank north the whole time. To your west and east are vast, broad plains with several north-flowing rivers running parallel to you; to get to Fairbanks, which is somewhat to the east and north of you at this point, you'd have to ford these rivers and the presumably unstable river plains that they flow on. The Tanana river, flowing west at this point, picks up the Nenana at the town of Nenana, and north of this there is a small mountain range (1500' or so) that rises to the north and then curls around east towards Fairbanks, like a little island in the giant riverbed valleys. The road, then, runs right along the crest of this range for a little more than 50 miles, neatly bypassing the problems of river crossings, to get you the final way into the big town--it's a decently abrupt drop down into civilization at the end, and kinda cool.

Fairbanks itself is interesting. Strikes me as a workingclass town (about 35K people in the city, about 80K people in the borough) with the usual assortment of charms and rough edges. (In this, I thought it was not unlike Casper.) It is more cowtown in vibe than Anchorage, but still unmistakably Alaska. Naturally you can't form that great an opinion over the course of one full day in a place, but at least initially, I rather like it. The day was of course pretty short (sun was up at about 10 and down a bit before 5, with marvelous twilight on both ends), and the weather plus our business schedule didn't exactly permit a great deal of viewing, but it looks like there are some pretty nice vistas from various points in town. Not the jaw-dropping skyline of Palmer or Homer, perhaps, but then you may be able to see that Big Thing on a clearer day, so the jury's still out. We enjoyed its considerable charms as they were, and will be happy to go back.

Business was good. Got the ottoman in good order, protectant applied, fitting nicely in the back of Blue (that's the Patriot's new name, after its quite-ridiculous electric blue color), and were on our way before we knew it. We then headed over to Blueberry Baby, which we had dropped in on the night before on our way into town. This had been a wise move, as the sheer quantity of useful information the shopkeeper had given us took a while to digest. We were able to have a very productive discussion on Saturday (same person) because of this, and consequently we are now most of the way set for diapering supplies and strategy. We're plowing forward on the path of the classic cloth pre-fold diapers as our primary diapering solution, with a handful of fitted and all-in-one cloth diapers as "to try" items (and with which to make it easier to work with sitters and others who might be uncomfortable with cloth), and with a couple of very intriguing other ideas hanging in the wings--the most promising of which might be the "G diaper", a system which features flushable/degradable liners under a fitted cover. In keeping with our overall strategy, we like the idea of a lower-waste and traditional solution, but we're not going to make a jihad out of it. The way we're thinking of it now, the pre-folds will be our primary approach, with a few fitted and all-in-ones available to help appeal to sitters, and the G diaper will be available for specialty applications like camping or travel, or sitters who need something even simpler than the fitted cloths. The gal at this place was extremely helpful in showing us techniques to get the folds right on squirmy babies, fitting for avoiding the umbilicus stump, different folds that can work better on boys or girls, folds for heavy wetters or for best containing blowouts (that one was impressive, I must say), the use of liners/inserts, and the like. What sold me was the "Snappi", which is the modern update to the safety pin that our moms used on Cathy and I. We hadn't really understood from the product pictures how it is used, but from the shopkeeper's first demonstration both Cathy and I literally got wide-eyed and said, "OH". With that thing, even my first attempt on the doll would have been effective. Whoever came up with that idea may well deserve to get rich.

Anyway, with that concluded, we tooled around Fairbanks for the rest of the day, having (good) Thai for lunch (apparently the Thai thing is not just Anchorage), and then inspecting much of the Museum of the North at the university, which was really cool.

Sunday morning, we unplugged the car (still a novel idea to me...probably not necessary when it's "only" zero, but hey, the new sled has a battery heater and the hotel had plugs, so why not?) and made the trip back home. Once again we timed it just about right, leaving during the delicous morning twilight, running the crest of that little mountain range with a very light fresh snow falling onto the impossibly undisturbed trees, catching little glimpses east of the Alaska Range as we approached it up the Nenana, scooting through the range in flurries and occasional glimpses of way-up-there ridges, refueling in Cantwell again, seeing the sun try to poke through the clouds and thereby backlighting the jagged Talkeetna skyline to the south, looking the other way to see the 5000' monsters briefly illuminated by some random tunnel in the sky, waving at more caribou on the way by, and rolling into town right around evening twilight.

The biggest surprise was probably waking up this morning and noticing the thermometer here at home reading -6. It had never dipped below zero up north (windchill notwithstanding) and it had been in the high 20s when we left. Interesting.

The one thing we wished we'd have been able to do on this trip was to see the aurora, but the activity has been really low and the clouds out. We're hoping that over this next weekend the activity may rise enough that we can see it from here; according to the forecast, activity should be 3 (out of 9) and the band of direct-overhead visibility will be as far south as Talkeetna...in theory, we might be able to catch it lower in the northern sky, from here. Fingers crossed.

For me, this makes four state highways in Alaska that I have now traveled end to end. There are only a dozen or so in the whole state, and people refer to them by name more than by number. This was #3, the Parks Highway, and I've also travelled the length of the Seward Highway (Anchorage to Seward), the Sterling Highway (ending at Homer on the tip of the Kenai Peninsula), and the Glenn Highway (Tok to Anchorage). Technically, I've also travelled most of the Alaska highway, just not the final stretch from Tok to Delta Junction.

At any rate, what kills me is that people tell me that I haven't seen anything yet. People look at me and say things like, "if you think the road to Fairbanks is nice, just wait until you drive the Denali Highway between Paxson and Cantwell." (this is 135 miles of dirt road, by the way.) For Pete's sake, I still can't get over the view from downtown Palmer!

Anyway, more writing to come before too long. Laters!

- HB

November and the first business trip

During this time, we had been taking the childbirth classes from the midwifery, and in addition to all the stuff we learned officially, there were also a few choice stories that went with it. At one point they showed us a video which was very useful, in reinforcing several key concepts...but then they showed a second video, which Cathy and I have since referred to as, simply, “the trendy chant”. This production featured a not-really-all-that-clever lyric--”I am opening up in sweet surrender to this beautiful baby in my womb”--actually, it didn't so much feature the lyric as consist of it, repeated exclusively over and over as a lightly syncopated round for some twenty minutes, over still pictures of moms and babies. Presumably this was meant to inspire the expectant moms, but I suspect that we were far from alone in being just too polite to say, “okay, you have been making a wonderful case for why to go with a midwifery instead of a hospital, with impressively little side-stream baggage, up until about right now.” Hopefully, they will learn that not everyone who wants to exercise natural alternatives to standard procedure, necessarily buys into a deeper stereotype. (This is really the only criticism I think I have with our experience, and let's face it, it's a trivial one. It came across shallow, we ignored it as such, we moved on. Simple.)

More directly amusing was an episode earlier in the same session, wherein the subject of delivering the placenta came up. The speaker talked about the mechanics of delivering the organ naturally, and mentioned that at this point you have the choice of whether you want to keep it or not, and then at that point...

My hand went up instantly (I have no control over these things). “Beg pardon...did you just say 'keep the placenta'?”

Perhaps I play the “guy” card again here, but I just had to have that explained. And you know, I really was educated by it. It turns out that in some societies it's actually really common to keep the placenta and do various things with it, from burying it (historically as though it was a twin that did not make it) to grinding it up and taking it as a hormonal supplement (to stave off postpartum depression). Well, I have to say that I truly just did not know that, and odd as the subject may be to us, I thought it was kind of cool that we did have the choice on it.

Unfortunately, I had to miss the last class, which got rescheduled to the one week I was going to be out of town, on business. The schedulers at Davalen (who knew about the baby) did an absolutely great job at making sure that I was not out of town around the time that we were expecting to deliver, and instead scheduled me for a week in Portland, Oregon, onsite at Portland General Electric. The trip was a pretty good one, given that I had not had a bona fide customer-facing business trip in over a year. Highights included walking to Voodoo Doughnuts (truly a must if you're in Portland), gawking at Mount Hood, and dusting off the rust viz how to teach Portlet Factory concepts. I can say, however, that I do not miss the insanity of air travel, not one bit.

A two-Jeep family

We had been talking about getting a primary vehicle to supplement Cathy's Jeep TJ, of course, but it took an incident to really kick it into high gear. Cathy had been doing so well with her Jeep, even late in the pregnancy, that it just hadn't been a critical thing for us. One snowy day, we were headed to the midwifery for a class of some sort, and the Jeep (in 2WD) started to slide on Cathy just past (not on) a bridge. I have to say, she did everything correctly by the book far as I could tell, steering correctly into the skid, and then correcting as gently as you could ask, but still it slid, first one way and then the other, and we went into one of those inexorable 180s in which you can see exactly what's going to happen, in super slow-mo, and simply can't do anything to change it. We tagged the front passenger corner into the guardrail, pretty hard, and she was ticked. Now, she's also 8 months pregnant, and we have just found out that it is not just slick outside but stupid slick, so I insisted that she stay inside and let me look at it.

And look at it I did. I was not expecting what I found. I took several looks, actually, just to be sure I wasn't fooling myself, but no, I had it right. Cathy's new custom front bumper, which had been affixed just a few months before, positions a steel bar a few inches out from the front face of the vehicle. This bar was bent about five degrees toward the vehicle, while the driver's side was perfectly straight. There was not a scratch to be found anywhere else—tires and fenderwells intact, winch untouched, light lenses in perfect order, nothing!

I got back in the car and answered Cathy's look directly. “Dear,” I said, “your custom bumper just paid for itself.”

And so it did. Nonetheless, we decided we wanted a vehicle that had four meats in drive at all times, and now we had a goodly reason to step up the search. The initial thought was a Subaru Forester, based on our previous experience with Penny (the blue '96 Outback we'd had before); we reasoned that the Forester would sit enough higher to be workable, and we could get back to the amazing sure-footedness of Subaru's AWD system.

In the end, I'd never have guessed we'd end up with a 2008 Jeep Patriot with pretty much all the trimmings. Cathy and I both were predisposed against anything that smelled like a “Dieter-Jeep”, and this one certainly smacked of that label. In the end, what changed our minds was recognizing that we weren't in the hunt for a “real Jeep” in the first place (duh...we already have a vehicle capable of far more than either of our driving skillsets or stomachs will tolerate), and then the test-drive. In a nutshell, we realized that we were mentally comparing DJs to “real-J”s, but we were not comparing anything else (like, for example, the Subarus) the same way. This was a mistake, of course, and when we recognized that what we were after (some sort of AWD or fulltime 4WD system, reasonable space and economy for a family utility vehicle, and if possible a truck-type ride height) was quite specifically not our beloved XJ platform (which fails the first and most critical test for us--it's just not the surefooted wonder on ice that an AWD system is), suddenly the Patriot started to look pretty good. Then, at just that time, we had an entirely unexpected experience at a dealership, and met the Blue Raspberry (I simply call her “Blue”). She was a 2008 with a tiny handful of miles on it, with every trimming available at the time, priced almost exactly the same as the base 2009 models it sat next to. We happened across a salesman who took us on a good hour-and-a-half test-drive...he was very informative, and almost unnervingly low-pressure...and by the end of the drive, pretty much all my apprehensions about the vehicle had been answered in practice. We asked him for a little time to discuss what we'd learned...and the guy actually left us alone. We pretty quickly recognized that this was the right choice at the right time (or as “right” as you're ever going to “know”), and bought the newest vehicle either of us had ever owned.

Several months down the road, with a trip to Fairbanks, several hauling operations and full-on family occupancy under her belt, we're really happy with Blue. We're both still trying to adjust not only to one of them newfangled “awtermatic transmissions”, but a CVT auto-tranny at that...it defintely has a “rubber-band” feeling to it at times, and on slick streets there is occasionally a horrible moment of panic when you can't tell whether the vehicle is actually slipping or if the tranny is just adjusting. The power is there if you need it, and it is plenty smooth, but it take a little getting used to for those of us raised on fixed gears. But the economy is great, the space is definitely usable, the ride height is the perfect compromise between car and truck, and it will do nicely as a family vehicle (the kid-seat snaps in like butter). The AWD system is impressive, and the Patriot gives you something that the Subaru does not: an override of the AWD system into a locked 4WD state. As it happens, I've already had occasion to use this, and am really glad I had it available. Next year, we'll put some tires of our own choosing on it and I suspect it will be even better on the slick stuff--which we, uh, do get up here.

Cathy and I are not exactly big on automotive gizmos, but two things I really am liking about this car are the battery heater plug and the heated front seats. The difference the battery heater makes on below-zero days is impressive (if she's plugged in, -30 is like nothing), and heated seats are a more practical luxury in Alaska than probably any other single item you can add. The rest of it is gravy...but sometimes gravy is nice. In the end, Blue is about as sure-footed a vehicle as I have come across on ice, and that is what we wanted for our second vehicle. So, the stable is now Betty (Cathy's TJ) for the fun stuff, and Blue for daily utility and trips.

Which leaves us free, now, to work on the next items. (An ATV and snowmachine, duh...)