Elisabeth Dorothea Collings

Week in Review: 3 April – 9 April 2006.

Monday: At the end of her official due date Lia found herself officially overdue. Justin sent his official acceptance to Yale, together with a $250 deposit to reserve his seat in next year’s entering class. In another effort to abet Collings child #2’s entrance in this telestial sphere, Lia scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees. To no avail.

Tuesday: Still subscribing in vain to the “if-I-work-hard-enough-this-kid-will-come” mentality, Lia assigned to herself and performed a great host of errands. The net result of such laborious zeal was not encouraging: at the end of the day Lia was thoroughly exhausted and as pregnant as ever. Perhaps more pregnant.

Wednesday: To our great mutual rejoicing, this evening marked Lia’s final Relief Society presidency meeting. She celebrated this happy fact by forgetting about the meeting altogether. When she was some twenty minutes late her faithful president called to summon her to meeting, and the forgetful, but not intentionally truant, counselor complied.
Humbly acknowledging the spectacular failure of every old wives’ prescription for the work-intensive induction of labor, Lia embraced a wholly opposite strategy and strove in every possible way to do nothing at all. The results this time were more encouraging by far. At about 10:30 p.m. Lia got up from bed, walked into the living room, and announced in tones of calm rationality that she was having regular contractions, was probably in labor, and was determined to wait a couple of hours before going to the hospital, lest they send her home with instructions to return when her labor should have progressed further. Justin flew into an immediate panic but, all things considered, nevertheless dispatched his duties admirably. Shortly after midnight Jini came over to baby/house-sit (i.e. sleep comfortably through the night) while Lia and I piled into the Big Blue Bull and set out for the hospital.

Thursday: We settled into Lia’s hospital room at about 1 a.m., Lia still anxious that we might be sent back home and Justin serving as host to an internal battle between panic and fatigue (the latter progressively gained ground). After the passage of some time a kindly nurse returned and after some talk of centimeters and effacement not at all suitable for rehearsal given the modest reserve of this blog, announced to Lia’s great relief that we were not to be sent home. Another nurse arrived shortly thereafter officially to admit Lia as a hospital patient.
Then began a long war between a determined mother and an obstinate child. The labor progressed slowly—painfully slowly—and lasted for almost nineteen hours before the dust finally settled and our family was graced by the arrival of a brand new baby...but we get ahead of ourselves. For the first fifteen hours or so, Lia’s contractions were not intolerably painful, and Lia suffered more from impatience than from physical pangs. We passed the time sporadically and unsatisfactorily napping and, with greater relish, reading a recent Cold War history by a noted Yale historian.
At length, Lia’s patience was at an end; she instructed the nurses to call for the anesthesiologist, who was to give her an epidural, after which the nurses were to endow her system with doses of pitocin sufficient to “get this kid here.” Alas, the end was not yet, but by and by. After three hours or so more the obstetrician, himself apparently losing patience, called for Lia to push and have done. She complied, and shortly thereafter there emerged, rather to our surprise, an hirsute and portly little creature, whose beauty made her in all things the picture of female infantile perfection. We had expected an infant of the male variety, but if it did happen to exit female, we had thought to name her Katharine. But this child, when it saw the light, had not the look of a Katharine. No, she was an unmistakable Elisabeth—with the British spelling, mind you. And so, in a felicitous nominal fusion of the protagonists, respectively, of Pride & Prejudice and Middlemarch, we christened her “Elisabeth Dorothea Collings.” As a concession to the child’s associates who eschew words of greater than two syllables—namely, her big sister and maternal grandfather—we shall call her “Eli” (pronounced “Ellie”). We had thought that any future daughter would suffer by comparison with Julia, but Eli is as beautiful and sweet a child as mortals ever looked upon. We all love her and rejoice to welcome her into our little family.

Friday: Lia and Eli spent most of the day in the hospital. As Lia convalesced a host of visitors kept her company, and kept her awake. Visitors and nurses alike raved about Eli’s incomparable beauty which, having seen her father, perhaps took them by surprise. In the evening mother and daughter returned home to the great contentment of father and firstborn. In all things this week we have been blessed by the assistance of loving family members, but are particularly grateful to Mindy for cleaning our home, preparing our meals, appeasing Julia, and variously helping out in nameless ways.

Saturday: We awoke to greet the dawn after the unmitigated worst night sleep of this calendar year (Wednesday-Thursday night excepted). Eli spent her first full day in our home in comfortable boredom and somnolent inactivity. Not wanting to waste any time in the inauguration of her education, she has been treated during nursing-time to an auricular feast of the elegant pungency of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. We’ve progressed about half-way through Strachey’s life of Cardinal Henry Manning. Justin spent several hours frenetically composing a dozen pages of lamentable prose about the cosmology of Marsilio Ficino, the leading figure of Italian Renaissance Neoplatonism, which pages are to serve as his term paper for Italian 420, due Monday. It was the unqualified worst research paper of his undergraduate career, but his excuse for this poor performance was a good one. In the late afternoon Justin and Julia attended the annual 34th ward barbeque. Justin socialized pleasantly with ward members and Julia flirted outrageously with Joseph Jeffrey. We returned home well-fed and in good spirits. Lia, meanwhile, has taken to perusing Robinson Crusoe during her therapeutic sit-baths; perhaps in her imagination she fancies our capacious bathroom analogous to Crusoe’s lonely isle.
In sum, then, we have enjoyed an eventful week and could not be more pleased with the present status of our burgeoning little family.