The Imp

20 Oct

Posted by: Lizzie

We didn’t nickname him “The Imp” for nothing. In fact, the mischief began before Simon was conceived. To avoid the unseemly side effects of hormonal medications, and among various other personal reasons, we choose Natural Family Planning. If you aren’t familiar with it, look it up. I was charting diligently back then but my thermometer went missing. I ended up finding it lodged between the bed rail and the box spring mattress of our bed. We had a great laugh about “The Imp” in our house hiding it until it turned out that Imp somehow found his way into my uterus.

Yes–I know “what causes it.”

And yes–WE LIKE IT.

The irony of this whole thing is that once I found out I was pregnant things stopped going missing in our house. That had been a big problem, too. I had a journal go missing that never has been found. I looked for it for months and one day found the bookmark I used in it stuffed into the back of a kitchen drawer. Weird things like that.

Anyway, fast forward to the birth of Simon which was a quick pitocin-induced but otherwise normal hospital birth (no epidural or any other form of pain management except my Bradley techniques). Our nurse was new to “natural births” and freaked out when I started pushing. In case you have no idea what it’s like to feel the urge to push, try to imagine that you have to take a really huge poop and can’t control it. The poor nurse lady tried to tell me to stop pushing because my doctor wasn’t there yet, but she had no idea that my body had taken control at that point and there was no way my uterus or Simon was going to wait until it was convenient for anyone else. Simon birthed himself right onto the hospital bed and my doctor sauntered in ten minutes later.

When we had his pictures taken at the hospital, we knew we were in for it: