Dear Noah,

You were “supposed” to be born exactly a year ago today, but you weren’t ready. Your father and I weren’t yet freaking out—lots of first-time moms see their due dates come and go without a blip on the radar—and in fact, I didn’t really freak out at all throughout my pregnancy with you. Which I believe is probably one of the reasons you’re so chill. That and the fact that, well, you’re part Jankowski. Jankowskis define chill.

Also you eat spinach and squash and other regulating foods every day for every meal, so you probably usually feel pretty great. As any pregnant woman can tell you, regulating foods are basically the key to happiness. That is, combined with yoga. This is what you learn in your thirties, but you have to get there on your own so I don’t know why I’m even bothering telling you now—especially since you’re a boy and it probably won’t apply to you since boys—yes, even boys of mine—don’t reach the girls’ level of maturity until at least their forties. Your father can let you know how that’s going for him.

You are taking a nap right now—in your crib, under one of the several beautiful blankets loved ones knitted in anticipation of your arrival. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sufficiently convey to you how warm a welcome you received into this world, how excited everyone in our lives was for you to make an appearance. Every day, several times a day, I would be hounded for news, for signs. Any labor pangs yet? Has your water broken?

Your due date was the sixth—though I was not-so-secretly hoping you’d be a Cinco de Mayo baby, and actually one of the names we entertained for you was “Julio” . . . no joke—but it wasn’t until almost two weeks later that you started to squirm and jostle around in there to be let out. And even then, you took your sweet old time, and I mean, who could blame you? I had nine months to do pretty much nothing but create a perfect uterine environment for you. I drank beet juice every morning for christ’s sake.

Except not for Christ’s sake—yeah, we’ll discuss religion later on in your life if you want to—but for Noah’s sake. For your sake. So that you would become a big strong happy resilient baby. A baby who—before you came out—was feared to be much, much bigger than your eventual 8.2 lbs. To the point that the hospital staff had a pool going.

Oh yeah, and that’s the other thing: you were “supposed” to be born at home. Mommy was going to have a nice natural semi-unassisted labor on her bed and in the bath tub, and you were going to slide right out of there smoothly and the midwife would help us get cleaned up and cook us dinner and then go home and we’d suddenly just have the ability to take care of you perfectly and would all live happily ever after the end!

Except that after a few days of labor with no “progress”—hey, I KNOW it was comfortable as hell in there; you don’t have to tell me—we had some decisions to make.

Actually, let me rephrase that:

After a few days straight of my walking around and having to stop every few minutes to grasp [the side of a building, a tree, your father's arm] to experience excruciating pain that rocked my entire body . . . with no “progress” . . . as in, no major dilation of my cervix beyond, like, a couple centimeters . . . we had some decisions to make.

Lucky for you, you’re a boy and will never have to experience what it’s like to BE IN LABOR while everyone around you is just cavalierly going about their business, walking and talking and checking email and shit. The labor part alone is beyond worth it, and for you I would have continued for as long as it took, but your midwife asking for your wi-fi password? I’m actually surprised that right there didn’t cause labor to “progress.”

So finally it was a day before the official “two weeks late” mark, which, just to give you a recap, is when everyone starts to panic about the sustainability of the uterus. As in, sure, you weren’t ready to leave yet . . . but for how much longer would the placenta keep delivering the nutrients you needed?

Our midwife told your father and I to go for a walk while she continued—I don’t know—playing Words with Friends or something? We walked a total of three and a half feet away to the Skyline Diner next door and had to stop no fewer than fifty-seven times for me to clutch the nearest object and labor. I ordered an Athenian omelet, and if you’re old enough to be reading this, you KNOW I always finish my Athenian omelets. This time I only took a couple bites. The pains were getting stronger!

We dashed back to the apartment so Linda could check my cervix. I was really excited—convinced things were finally starting to move—but that wasn’t the case. Nothing had changed since she’d last checked me hours before.

People usually get the impression that midwives are these new-age, western-medicine-shunning witches or whatever, and ours definitely gave off a convincingly spacey vibe, but to be fair, that’s what people look for in a midwife. That’s why you DON’T go the scheduled c-section in a modern hospital setting route. The spacey herbal-remedy witch thing is what sells.

But for it to REALLY work you have to have actual medical knowledge, and ours was smart—smart enough to know when intervention is needed. I want to set the record straight, lest anyone thinks our midwife was sitting there administering infusions of mugwort and wolf’s bane and chanting Wiccan spells. SHE’s the one who convinced US to go to the hospital.

Now, here’s where your father started to freak the eff out because months before that I’d made him swear that no matter what happened he wouldn’t let me “give in” and go to the hospital. He freaked out again AT the hospital when labor STILL hadn’t really progressed and we were faced with even more decisions. And by freak out I mean “probably thought I was going to leave him for going against something he swore, like, seven years ago that I’ve since forgotten about.”

Anyway, Linda pretty much advised us to go to the hospital using a tone of voice and looking me in the eye in a way that quite frankly scared the hell out of me and convinced me to throw together a “go” bag and thumb a ride uptown. The cab ride was the classic woman-in-labor ride you’d expect, with me freaking out in the back seat about the driver not going faster, literally not comprehending why he wasn’t ALLOWED to run red lights. You know, since I was the only person to be in labor ever. Luckily we were only going thirty blocks due north.

You know the quintessential triage waiting room full of slurring, cussing homeless people being ignored by the receptionists behind the bullet-proof window? That’s what we were greeted with when we arrived at St. Luke’s Roosevelt. We waited for long enough—with me in labor on a chair—that the homeless people who themselves had been waiting all day started to get pissed off that I was being ignored. Problem was, Linda had faxed all my paperwork to the wrong number or something. Maybe in high school history class you’ll learn what “fax” means.

Eventually we got admitted—not without my being made to feel like a knocked-up crack addict off the street once or thrice—and by the time we were settled into a more civilized, more high-rent wing of the hospital, the nurses attending me were positively fantastic. I really cannot sing their praises enough. Julie something and Marie-Josie were their names, and they treated me like I’d been their patient for years.

I keep meaning to write to Marie-Josie because she was the one who—even after it was already decided that I’d be having a c-section within the hour since despite being shot up with an epidural and pitocin and allowed to rest overnight, I still wasn’t dilated much more than I’d been at home—encouraged me to get into whatever laboring position felt most comfortable because I was going to push out my baby now and that’s all there was to it. She really believed in me up until the last moment, the rest of the hospital’s agenda be damned.

I tried and tried but it still wasn’t happening, and pretty soon the doctor and her swat team of attendants took position in the room, broke it down, and wheeled me out into the hall and onto an elevator and out onto a different floor into a different room. The room in which you would be born!

It all happened so quickly, and it was infuriating that a giant sheet was separating me from being the first one to see you come out. Your father got to watch the whole thing and when they lifted you up out of me, he burst into tears. It was only the second time I’ve seen him cry. The first was one time when someone used the wrong number of ellipses in a sentence.

You cried out when they held you up and it was the most beautiful, melodic sound I’ve ever heard. I heard you before I saw you. When I finally got to see you, it was established: you were magnificent. I made your father tell everyone your name right away. Noah Joseph Beard.

A little while later they brought you to me to nurse, but there were so many wires attached to me it was difficult to get you into the right position, so I started yanking them all out. It was kind of like that scene from E.T., as your Auntie Marie pointed out when I was describing it to her. Eventually we got comfortable, though, and that was just the beginning of our now-going-on-a-year nursing relationship. A relationship that I will miss terribly when it ends.

Looking back, I don’t think we had a clue how we’d get through this first year, let alone that first day or first week or first month home from the hospital. Things have not always been easy, but only because we’re inept. We lucked out with you—we’re reminded of it every time we look at you, every time we feel the urge to squeeeeeezee you. You are oh so amazing and I’ll still be telling you this when you’re old enough to develop a complex from it because I don’t care. You are.

So happy one-year anniversary from your due date, little boy. Maybe we’ll celebrate later with some beets or kale juice. Daddy and I will spike ours, pretending to be frazzled parents, even though really we have no excuse since you’re perfect.

Love,
Mommy

Between 6:00 and 6:45 a.m. Noah wakes up. Elliott asks me if I think the baby is really REALLY awake, and I say yes. Elliott gets him up and brings him into the kitchen to give him his breakfast and to feed the cats so that I can go back to sleep.

7:15 a.m. I wake up, go out to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee. (Sidenote: the most useful thing I’ve ever done in my life is get a programmable coffeemaker. Our lives as we know them would not be possible without that puppy starting up by itself at 6:30 a.m., rain or shine.)

7:20 a.m. With Elliott either still in the process of feeding Noah or doing the dishes from the night before, I return to the bedroom with my cup of coffee to relax with my electronic reader, catching up on my news feed or—in recent developments—reading an actual book!

7:30 a.m. I saunter out into the kitchen for my second cup of coffee, returning to the bedroom yet again to laze around without a care in the world while Elliott is scraping pots & pans and Noah is shouting to be let out of his high chair.

8:00 a.m. After Elliott has given the baby a bath (wow, I didn’t realize how much Elliott does until actually writing this all out!) he brings him into the bedroom to me for our morning nursing. We are down to two nursings per day, one morning and one evening, plus usually at least one in the middle of the night.

8:15 a.m. After nursing, Noah and I play on the bed for a while. He “crawls” toward the edge and I pull him back by his feet—it’s the most hilarious thing in the world to him and he laughs like crazy. Then we go over to the window and look out at the city. I point out various objects and things that are going on—birds in a flock, joggers on the High Line, x number of yellow cabs whizzing past, somebody with an umbrella, somebody walking a dog, etc. He usually gets bored with it after a couple minutes and ends up just staring up at my face and smirking.

8:25 a.m. At this point Elliott is out of the shower and getting ready for work. Noah and I go out into the living room and I put him down on the floor to play. I grab a container of Greek yogurt from the fridge, add either almonds or nuts & berries trail mix to it, and down the mofo as quickly as I can before having to chase Noah—who after about five seconds has stopped playing nicely in one spot on the floor and is making a beeline for [insert lethal object babies love to put in their mouths here]—around the apartment.

8:30 a.m. I finish my coffee in Noah’s room while he plays on the floor with his books. We keep the door closed because at this point Elliott is usually emptying the kitty litter box, which is the singlemost fascinating thing in existence for the baby (we will remind him of this when we assign it to him as his first chore in a couple years).

8:40 a.m. I put Noah in his playpen so that I can make my spinach/kale juice without worrying about him being underfoot in the kitchen.

8:45 a.m. I chug my juice, clean the juicer, and now—with baby still cooped up in his pen—it’s time to Give Cobweb Her Fluids. Cobweb is our elderly cat who has recently been diagnosed with renal failure. She’s hanging in there for now, but we have to keep her hydrated by injecting her with ringer’s lactate twice a day. I had to do it with my old cat Scylla as well. Reckon it comes back to you like riding a bike.

8:50 a.m. Elliott leaves for the office.

8:55 a.m. Noah plays on the floor while I do my “exercises,” which are basically just a series of ballet- and yoga-inspired stretches. Plus lately I’ve been doing sit-ups and push-ups. Noah is a great spotter, especially for the sit-ups! Everybody should invest in a baby sit-ups spotter.

9:15 a.m. I take a shower—with Noah in his playpen right outside the door where I can peek out to make sure he’s, well, alive. I do often wonder when the whole making-sure-your-baby’s-still-alive thing will phase out. Probably never.

9:25 a.m. I finish getting dressed and we play on the floor for a little while.

9:45 a.m. Noah has his morning snack, which is usually just cheerios and water. Really I don’t get the whole giving-your-kid-constant-snacks thing. I think it’s for kids who don’t eat their regular three meals, maybe? He never seems ALL that hungry at snack time.

10:00 a.m. Wow, we’re only at ten a.m. and I’ve been writing for half an hour? That used to be the approximate time I woke up for the day. What? Anyway, around ten a.m. Noah takes his morning nap. By which I mean, I stand in the middle of his room rocking him to sleep for anywhere from five to thirty minutes. I sing the following songs to him—in this order: “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Frere Jacques.” OTHERWISE IT DOESN’T WORK. Nah, just kidding–sometimes he falls asleep at “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”! And sometimes—but usually not for a morning nap, because morning naps are the easiest—I have to throw in “Edelweiss.” Which for some reason makes him giggle.

10:15 a.m. While Noah is napping, if I have freelance work to be doing, this is when I do it. I’ve actually found I can make more progress during this morning nap than during any other napping/sleeping point in the day—I guess because I’m not yet totally drained? The whole thing baffles me because I never used to be a “morning” person.

If I don’t have work to do, I’ll catch up on the news a bit, surf the web, and then maybe start preparations for baking cookies or researching chords for a new song to learn on my ukulele. Or I’ll read a magazine article or some pages from a book (again, just read my first full book in ages recently—these truly “spare” moments are so few & far between). I’ll clean up the apartment a bit, but without making too much noise as Noah is kind of a light sleeper. Often this time is spent begging Cobweb the Yowler to shut the eff up.

11:15 a.m. Noah usually wakes up an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes later. I get him out of his crib and bring him over to the window to look outside and point things out again. Then we go into the living room to play for a little while before lunch.

12:00 p.m. We have lunch. Noah has pureed spinach, squash, and, say, black beans—except that lately he’s been refusing to eat anything besides yogurt, so we have to improvise, and by improvise, I mean “trick the baby.” I think the issue is that he resents having to BE FED and wants to do it himself, but not just by himself with his hands, with an actual utensil. So I’ve found if we give him a second spoon or other object to play with, he’ll feel like he’s more in control of the situation and won’t notice that WE’re actually the ones shoveling food into his mouth with the spoon . . . albeit a different spoon. Or sometimes we dip the tip of the spoon in yogurt so all he sees is the white coming toward him even though he’s about to get a mouthful of, like, collard greens. See? I missed my calling in Child Psychology.

12:10 p.m. At this point I’m eating “my” lunch, too. Translation: depending on what it is (lately it’s been vegetable pad thai from Trader Joe’s), Noah usually gets some of it as well, which is good because we’re trying to get him to eat all the same stuff we eat so that I can stop spending a third of my life slaving away over baby food-making. And honestly, he WOULD eat everything we eat, no questions asked. But we usually eat crap and I don’t want to start him out on the wrong foot like that. We’re the ones who need to change. In my fantasy dining world, Elliott and I would actually start eating spinach, squash, and black beans for dinner . . . and then we’d write a cookbook about how baby food changed our eating lives and we’d make millions.

12:45 p.m. Usually we’re done with lunch by now, so we get cleaned up, dressed to go outside, and head out for a walk. If the weather’s crappy we just stay local, hitting up the grocery store if we need to and making a fairly conservative loop around the neighborhood. Or if it’s raining but only drizzling, we’ll go for a walk on the High Line, which—don’t tell anyone—is best for rainy-day walking since everyone steers clear of it but the greenery is particularly striking in the wet glaze. If it’s fair, we’ll head further afield for a “destination walk”—like, up to the Cloisters or all the way across town to the East Side River Walkway (or whatever it’s called) or down to Battery Park City. Last week we took a field trip to the Upper West Side to walk the length of 76th Street to see (in addition to just enjoying the gorgeous West 70s) if the building in the opening credits of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd is an actual building on the street she supposedly lived on in the show. Turns out it’s not, proving my theory that that kind of architecture only exists downtown. Also during this time we usually hit up the swings.

3:00 p.m. Noah’s usually ready for another nap around now, so if we’re still out I just let him fall asleep on me. But if I have work to do, I really try to get us back to the apartment so that I can put him down and fire up my computer for an hour or so. We used to nurse right before this nap, but we’ve replaced that with a sippy cup of cow’s milk—mildly pasteurized, unhomogenized New York State grass-fed, thanks—and I try to get him to drink as much of it as possible. We’ve only been doing this substitution for a couple weeks, and at first I didn’t think he was gonna take to it, but now sucks back half the cup like a pro. Ain’t no child of mine turns down dairy!

3:15 p.m. I try to get some work done now (like I said, if I have any). It usually takes a bit longer to rock the baby to sleep in the afternoon, and I used to be EXHAUSTED during this nap and would often take my own, but lately that hasn’t been the case, and we’ll get to why in a few hours. If I don’t have work, I’ll tidy up the apartment or work on my writing or pay bills or debate the pros and cons of this new book idea I have. Or, on rarer occasions, try my hand at baking something or—even rarer—making something for dinner.

4:30 p.m. Noah wakes up and we play—or he crawls all over the place and I continue doing whatever I was doing in the kitchen, in between sprinting back and forth across the apartment to catch him before he put his hands in the toilet or litter box or cat food dish, etc. If he wakes up any earlier than, say, four, we’ll usually go back outside and go for another quick jaunt or pay a visit to the swing set before dinner.

5:00 p.m. Dinnertime. Same as lunch, except Noah’s the only one eating. He seriously eats spinach three times a day—I’ve gotta hand it to the kid. And when it’s not spinach, it’s kale for christ’s sake. We recently started brushing his teeth, actually, because even babies aren’t immune to the kind of breath that results from excessive kale eating!

5:10 p.m. At this point I’m looking at the clock, wondering how much longer it’ll be before Elliott walks in the door because I’m itching to go to the bathroom with the door closed or otherwise be alone with my own thoughts without having to worry about the safety of another human being for three and a half seconds.

5:30 p.m. Elliott has usually come home by now and Noah’s finished his dinner, so either father and baby play inside or they go to the park or to run errands or pick up dinner or what-have-you. Or sometimes we all go out together, if I don’t have any work to attend to, or if I’m not totally exhausted and in need of some down time.

6:30 p.m. They come back and I watch the baby while Elliott starts making dinner (yes, Elliott makes dinner, too! Oh em gee, what an ungrateful, lazy stay-at-home mom Bess is!) Sometimes he gets creative and sometimes he just heats something up out of the freezer. Lately we’ve been subsisting quite happily on frozen meals from Trader Joe’s. Masala burgers and biryani rice are among our favorites.

Anywhere between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. Noah gets put into his pajamas, we nurse, and he plays for a little while before bed. Sometimes this includes reading a book or two—he’s obsessed with the little British Christmas board books my mom gave him months ago and his current favorite is the old classic Pat the Bunny—but not always.

Anywhere between 7:15 and 9:00 p.m. After standing in the middle of the room rocking him for upwards of half an hour (repeat sequence of lullabies as before)—not that I’m complaining since it may burn more calories than breastfeeding and I love any excuse to hold my baby close—he falls asleep and is transferred delicately into his crib. I know what you’re thinking: why don’t you “train” him to fall asleep on his own? Well, my answer to you is: no matter what approach we take in parenting, it’s not like he’s going to turn into an eighteen year-old who needs to be rocked to sleep, and you know what? I might wish that to be the case when he’s eighteen. So why shouldn’t I enjoy it now when he actually does seemingly need it?

Whatever time that’s been accomplished: Usually I tell Elliott to eat first, but sometimes the timing is such that we can eat together. If not, I scarf down my dinner the second I’m done putting the baby down. Elliott has finally come to terms with the fact that he needs to prepare me, like, eight times the amount of food that a normal person would eat. None of it goes to waste, ever.

9:30 p.m. or so: Sometimes—but less and less frequently—the baby will wake up, like, thirty minutes after he’s fallen asleep, and that is when DADDY goes in and rocks him back to sleep, because guess what? Daddy doesn’t carry the possibility of a nursing in his boobs!

At some point during this evening stretch: I try to cram some work in.

10:00 p.m. or so: We hit the sack! Yeah, it’s early, but we’re both pretty beat, and we know that we’re most likely going to be getting up in the middle of the night at least once.

12:00 a.m. If Noah’s gonna get up multiple times, this is usually the first, and oftentimes Elliott can go in and rock him back to sleep before we have to resort to nursing. Or we resort to nursing and THEN Elliott rocks him back to sleep. Or we let him fall asleep nursing in bed with us.

3:00 a.m. or so: Noah usually gets up again (or for the first time) and needs to be nursed. If he’s in his crib he gets up less frequently because he doesn’t have my body RIGHT THERE making him think he’s thirsty, and we all get a much more blissfully continuous night’s sleep. And again, I know you’re thinking, but WHY don’t you just ALWAYS make him sleep in his crib? Answer: sometimes he just will not fall asleep in it and we don’t believe in “crying it out.” Yet again: no matter what we do now, I’m pretty sure he will NOT WANT to sleep in our bed when he’s eighteen.

6:00 to 6:45 a.m. Repeat as above!