At the end of a dungeon crawl ... a Wild Baby!

I was out late last night, over at a friend's house playing Dungeons & Dragons until two o'clock in the morning. I haven't done that in quite a while, and it was a lot of fun!

When I arrived home, Anita was deeply asleep. The baby, however, was not. "Like a typewriter in reverse," I told my sisters tonight; "Like some sort of crazed octopus," I told my co-workers. Our child was just going nuts in there! As I slid quietly into bed next to my slumbering wife, I put my hand on her tummy as I always do, just to have my whole family there in my arms, and holy cow! A flurry of activity such as I have not felt before, all over the landscape of Anita's belly. I cannot imagine which limbs were involved, but there were a powerful lot of them, all flailing away like a gang of people who flail at things with their limbs. It was overwhelming; I nearly cried, I was so excited, but I did it quietly so as not to wake Anita, who really needs all her sleep.

Names

People have to have names. I mean, how confusing would it be otherwise? We have finally settled on a pair of names for our new little person: Anwara Mairead for a girl, Aidan McGrew for a boy. Pretty neat, huh?

A bit of background is called for, I suppose. Anwara is the name of the mother character in The Moorchild by McGraw, a book we listened to together on our honeymoon. It also, coincidentally, means "to bring to light" in Arabic. Mairead is the Gaelic spelling of Margaret, and is pronounced may-read.

Anita has always liked the actor Aidan Quinn, so that brought Aidan to the table. But as we looked into it, there were a lot of reasons for us to pick this name. There were no fewer than fourteen Irish saints named Aidan, which is the diminutive, or nickname, of Aodh, the ancient Irish sun-god, which ties in nicely with Anita's love of the sun and especially early morning. McGrew is the little brother character in The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, one of Anita's all-time favorites, and a book that Aldean had to read and be quizzed on when we first started dating before the relationship could proceed. (Thankfully I passed!)

We found a midwife

I think we have found our midwife. It was a pretty easy decision for us to make regarding our desire for a home birth; I have some vicarious experience with the home births of my two youngest siblings, and Anita has no interest in having such a personal and spiritual event as a birth medicalized in a hospital setting. But actually seeking out and selecting a midwife? That sounded like an awfully grown-up undertaking!

But we found her! Anita did a lot of online searching, and we interviewed and selected Rachel McGraw. She is surprisingly young; as Anita put it, "When I think midwife, I think old wise woman, I think crone." But she is well-qualified and we think we will have a wonderful experience of pregnancy and birth with her assistance.