Welcome to the Bruiser!

On February 3rd, we joyfully welcomed our third baby.  Around here, we'll call him the Bruiser. He weighed in at 10 pounds, 3 ounces and was 22 inches long.  We've been recovering well at home, and life is returning rapidly to a new form of normal.  In fact, my own recovery has been the easiest, despite the Bruiser's heft.

As I've reflected on my recovery, I've wondered what has made this go around easier than the others.  There are many thoughts running around in my mind, most of them related to the simple fact that I've done this before.  But in talking with friends, I've realized that over the years I've amassed quite of bit of information about labor, birth, and postpartum recovery.  So I've planned a series of posts about it all.  My guess is that there will be at least six of them, two each for pregnancy, labor & birth, and postpartum recovery.  It's likely that once I get going, that will be expanded, but for now, that's the plan.

Blogging took a long hiatus during the last months before the Bruiser's arrival. Between the holidays and ample contract work, I barely had time to wash the baby clothes so the new one would have something to wear home from the hospital!  Additionally, a lot has been going on with the Reader and Miss Rosie. The Reader will be officially tested for a variety of intellectual competencies next week. We discovered, with the help of his amazing preschool teacher, that he's reading at a 5th grade level. More on that later, but I've been investigating giftedness in relation to parenting - though that investigation is on hiatus with the arrival of the Bruiser. We've also been watching Miss Rosie turn into a true toddler. She has full-on tantrums like we've never seen before! But she remains our sweetest darling, too.