Homecoming

The day we brought Avery home was one of the hottest of the year.  All the way out of the hospital I anticipated the shock Avery and I were both about to experience as we went from the comfortable air conditioned hospital-so far all that Avery knew-to 110 degree July weather.  

And, of course, her first time being strapped into a car seat only added to the shock.

But she quickly adjusted.  The ride home from the hospital was much more painful than the ride there.  When we pulled up to the house (Audrey, Betsy, Brad, Avery, and I), everyone quickly got out and started making their way to the house.  Meanwhile, I considered spending the rest of my life in the front seat of the car, like I've done so many times since then.  If you've ever injured your tailbone, you know that while there is pain in the sitting down and staying set down, the real agony comes in the standing back up.  It's a real dilemma because if you just stay set down, the pain will gradually get worse and worse and you'll know you need to stand up, but the pain of standing back up is so horrible that it takes time to talk yourself into it and remind yourself that the pain'll go away once you've been up a few seconds.  Anyway, Audrey hung back and helped me get out and into the house.  Stairs never loomed so ominously LOL.

We made it in and showed her her new home.  It was a whole lot messier than I wanted it to be.  That whole "nesting" thing kicked in a little early and it was messy again by the time she arrived :)  Another way the house wasn't how I wanted it to be- it was an absolute oven.  It took me quite awhile to realize that heat won't in fact kill a baby, and on her first day home I was completely unnerved.  I became a little irrational, telling Brad we HAD to do something about the heat.  NOW.  I didn't spend nine months growing her and eight hours doing the workout of my life just to bring our little flower home to wither.  So Brad found a window AC unit at Shopko on sale.  It was more than we anticipated spending, but I didn't feel we had any other choice.  He installed it in the bedroom window, and that's where we spent the majority of the first couple months of her life.

A cryer from the beginning, she spent a lot of time in distress that first day.  We changed, we fed, we changed, we fed.  Nothing seemed to work.  At around nine at night Brad forced me to eat dinner while she cried, because otherwise I never would have.  She cried.  I cried and ate pizza.  All part of the process :)