In honor of my birthday, Mr. Handsome took off from work to take care of the house and kids and meals and do little projects that were high on my priority list, like installing the white board in the back hallway, hoisting boxes of clothes up to the attic, and filing the teeter-tottery stacks of papers piled on top of the filing cabinet that had been giving me the same skin-crawly feel you get when someone screeches their fingernails down a blackboard. Because he was home and because it was my birthday, the pace of life slowed down. There was another adult around who was focusing on helping out to make the house run smoothly, and I didn’t try to get anything done—I wasn’t allowed to. I declared a holiday from studies, and I didn’t have to cook or do jobs.

After a non-nourishing but very rousing meal of Captain Crunch cereal, Yo-Yo Boy ordered me to get my coffee and sit down on the couch, and he then proceeded to rub my feet. Becca Boo soon joined him.

I took all the kids into town and dropped them off at my Girlfriend Shannon’s house and then on to the library where I browsed through the stacks for an hour with no interruptions, making off with an ENORMOUS stack of books, videos, and magazines.

And when we returned home, Mr. Handsome had lunch ready: bologna and cheese sandwiches, assembled and stacked on a plate in the middle of the table and covered with a cloth.

After rest time Mr. Handsome took the two olders into town to do some shopping. Sweetsie listened to tapes and The Baby Nickel, after waking from his nap, puttsed around and cuddled with me. I read magazines, planned menus, worked on a spreadsheet for the garden, and baked a couple loaves of sourdough. At one point I pulled up a chair by the hot oven (it was a chilly, rainy day) to warm my feet while reading. Pure bliss.

My Balding Bro and his family joined us, coffee-chocolate ice cream cake in hand, for the after-dinner, take-out pizza, activities. The kids were falling over themselves to give me their packages, crowding so close that I could hardly see what I was doing. Miss Becca Boo gave me a necklace with a gold cross, studded with “diamonds”, to show that I love Jesus, she explained. (She had wanted to get me a statue of Mary, like my mother-in-law has, but she couldn’t find one.) Yo-Yo Boy gave me a silver necklace with an assortment of heart-shaped baubles. From The Baby Nickel I received a bag of peanut butter cups, and from Sweetsie a bar of Dove chocolate. Other lovely gifts: an immersion blender, In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, a coupon for an outing to Books-A-Million from my sister-in-law, and a two-year subscription to Home Education Magazine.

All in all, it’s a very good start to my thirty-forth year of life.

I over-proofed this batch of Country White. I wanted to bring it up to the requisite 62 degrees a little faster than the three hours that it normally takes, so I turned on the oven for several minutes, which was a couple minutes too long because I then had to wait while the oven cooled down again so I could finally put the bowls of bread in to proof. After only a couple hours the boules checked in at 67 degrees. I could tell the bread was overproofed just by touching it—the dough was shaky and trembly, not firmly taut like it should have been. I quickly turned on the oven to pre-heat, tsk-tsking at my carelessness.

There is only one way to remedy this kind of problem, the overproofing problem, and that is to dock the bread with a more shallow cut than normal. I did that, and the bread turned out fine, but you can see in these pictures that the bread looks sallow, washed out, and sick. It doesn’t have the strong, robust, vibrant look of a properly proofed loaf.

But the loaves will still taste pretty good, so it’s not the end of the world.

An excerpt from our book, in my mother‘s words.

Washes of pain, my husband making annoying solicitous noises and the big round clock glaring at me from the wall. My gurney ride down the night hall. Finally, at 2:28 a.m., one last burst of maniacal bearing down, my face screwed into a prune, and whoosh. They laid the baby on my belly and in a delirium of relief and amazement I gazed at this new wet, naked creature. After my husband held her a delivery room nurse put her to my breast and right away she latched on, making the staffers crow. Then they trundled her off to the hospital nursery.

My husband gone, in my room down the hall I waited. They’d said I could keep her with me after the first few hours. I was way too exhilarated and wired to sleep. A laboring woman’s groans drifted my way. One nurse after another bustled in to check my blood pressure.

Daylight came, and my breakfast tray, and still I waited.

“How soon am I allowed to have my baby?” I asked, midmorning. The nurse’s answer came too promptly, it seemed to me. “Twenty-four hours,” she replied. I looked at her in alarm. Another more cheerful nurse contradicted, “Oh, no, eight to twelve hours. It all depends.” They both whisked away.

Was there trouble? I recalled how quiet the baby had been at first. Right off, she’d made just a tired little squeak. But then she’d wailed loudly—she’d cried hard. She’d looked perfect. Had something gone wrong?

A snippy nurse brought me pills, tiny red ones. Didn’t they give women pills to dry up their milk? Where was my baby? “What are these pills for?” I blurted.

“To put your tummy back in shape.” The nurse acted in too much of a hurry.

People were whispering out in the hall, and the doctor strode in. He asked how I was feeling. He’ll think I’m some kind of a nut, I thought. But I questioned him anyway.

“Something wrong? No, no, no. Your baby’s in the nursery.” But he was too hearty, reassuring. Wasn’t this how people acted when they lied?

Knowing I might as well face the truth, I persisted. “Can’t I at least see her?” He glanced at that snippy nurse who’d come in with him, and they agreed to find someone to accompany me to the nursery.

Ages passed. I had them trapped. They were plotting, devising some way to further deceive me. Finally, in bounced the cheery nurse: “Come on, dearie, let’s go.”

I padded weakly down the hall behind her and stood at the nursery window. I could see three babies. The one way back in the corner, the nurse said, was mine.

But back in bed again, I counted in my head. One woman had delivered soon after me; I’d heard all her caterwauling. A second woman had birthed a bit later; she occupied the other bed in my room, now. Surely several babies had been born before ours, or a few since. Why hadn’t they brought my baby’s crib up close to the window? They hadn’t wanted me to read the identification tags! They’d shown me somebody else’s baby!

The obstetrician’s office called to say congratulations, but of course they were in on the plot. I scolded myself for worrying, and I kept hoping that what I dreaded hadn’t happened, but the fear clawed and clenched at my heart.

Not until after lunch, around 1:00, did they bring me my firstborn. What an astonishing wee, fuzz-top mite! My soft mewling, nuzzling bundle!

My parents came chugging into the maternity ward a short time later. When I told Mother about my crazy spell, she smiled. “Oh, that’s normal. I went through the same thing.” Really? This, yet! If women typically suffered these private spasms of terror, postpartum, why hadn’t somebody clued me in? Were such fears some big shameful secret?

Cuddling my baby, drinking in her milky, warm sweetness, I was wholly smitten. I’d had no idea, no idea at all, of the intensity of affection I would feel for my infant. My maternal instinct—the tiger ferocity—just shocked me.