One Year Ago Today....

...at this time (7:15 AM), I was just an hour and a half away from meeting Maya for the first time ever. To say the least, I wasn't feeling really comfortable. Beyond pain, I felt nervous, excited, amazed, in shock...almost like my life was suddenly moving in slow-motion and fast-forward at the same time.

The day before, I had spent my time cleaning every inch of our house...I mean really cleaning. Moving all the furniture to thoroughly mop all the floors... Ryan came home from work and 'freaked' a little when he saw all the living room furniture re-arranged and piled on top of each other. I was still wearing something like pajamas, sweating, dirty from all my dusting, my hair was wild, and I was ready to clean some more.
By midnight, I had finally taken a shower and crawled into our freshly cleaned sheets, exhausted. But only three hours later, Maya woke me up. And somehow Ryan knew that these contractions were worthy of jumping out of bed, showering, packing, and watching the clock with me. We waited for just a couple hours for the contractions to be closer together (they were pretty consistent and getting more and more frequent), calling our parents and nurse sisters, packing a little more, I started the dishwasher and changed a load of laundry, curled my hair...
5:00AM: We arrived at the hospital, giddy, wide-eyed, and excited, somewhat afraid that they would check me and send us away. The nurses were kind, but rather condescendinly implied that I was far too friendly/comfortable/not-irritable-enough to be in real labor. However a few minutes later, after checking in...one of those nurses said..."Oh honey......you're almost dillated to SEVEN!"
This is where the fast-forward effect seemed to really take over. We got a room, it filled with nurses and doctors asking questions, asking for signatures, my parents, Ryan's parents were suddenly there, Andrea had jumped out of bed and she was there to be my nurse. I remember just before the chaos hit, I used the opportunity to apply my make-up (knowing that there were probably going to be a lot of pictures of this event)...

What seemed like a few minutes of really intense pain, discomfort, pushing....and then Maya. I heard her cry for the first time. That moment seemed to freeze in time. It was that thing, the event we had been anticipating, that we had been consumed by for months.

And today. One year later, she just woke up, peeking out of her crib and giving me a shy smile. She calls me "mamma."