A year later...

I spent the last two days in a conference room in Salem--the same conference room I was in a year ago for a conference. With the economy as it is, money for professional development is tight, and to find myself out of the building and in the same place a year later was strange.

At this point last year, I was hugely pregnant and made other people nervous. I'll never forget the superintendent of my district meeting me in the hallway outside the room and telling me he found out where the closest hospital was, just in case.

I wrote my sub notes on the afternoon February 11th--I was doing the same last February 11th, but from home, after leaving school in the morning, having been to the doctor and hooked to the monitors and being told those were contractions and that within three days I'd have me a little Valentine to hold.

That's wasn't true.


The hoopla--monitors, people telling me a contraction was coming, feeling like a watched hawk, subjected to bright lights, trying to wrap up loose ends--made me realize how much I wanted a quiet and calm birth.


We went home.

We walked and walked and walked the next three days. We created the Baby Loop--a decently difficult walking path around our neighborhood that included hills--and walked it regularly. Then when night fell, we switched to the mall.

One of my favorite memories of all time would be last Valentine's Day evening walking at the mall, talking, timing contractions. It was a sweet time of togetherness. Ultimately we had to leave--me feeling really disappointed that there was no way a baby would be arriving before midnight and that I wasn't getting a Valentine after all.

Not that I really ever endeavored for her to be a Valentine and had oft said I wanted her to have her own birthday, but by that point it had become my time frame and the window was closing.

I had another eleven long days. I would have cried if I had known that then!