Letter from Vermont

I feel the need to justify our inn being closed for two months.  It isn’t that we’re unmotivated or lazy, nor that we’re poor businesspeople.  No, when we decided to close the inn temporarily, it was because we had a rather momentous event coming up: the birth of our second child.

Our first daughter, Klara Cordelia, was born at the inn a little over two years ago.  In fact, she was born in the same room that she sleeps in every night.  Our midwife, Melissa, was wonderful, and the whole experience of a home birth was just what we wanted: calm, warm, and not at all hospital-antiseptic feeling.  Olya’s labor for our first baby was about six hours, and our midwife told us then that the next labor was likely to be quicker, so we should be prepared.  Well, we knew that all in advance, but you’re never really prepared to deliver your own child with no medical assistance.  In the event, that is exactly what happened.

We closed the inn for a couple of weeks of “nesting” before Olya’s due date, and for six weeks after, to ensure that the new baby would have our full attention.  A little after 3 o’clock in the morning on her due date, Olya woke me and said “I think I am going to get into the bathtub; I am having a contraction.”  We called the midwife and asked her to come.  Our midwife unfortunately lives about 30 miles away (even in Vermont, it’s not that common a profession), and it was a snowy, slushy middle-of-the-night.  When she arrived at our door, I was able to answer her question “How is Olya doing?” with “She’s fine, and so is our new daughter.”  Agatha Grace was born at 4:15, about an hour after Olya’s first signs of contractions.

Everything was so quick, and so smooth.  And so wonderful.  Never would I purposely plan to have been the only one helping Olya deliver our baby, but I feel such a special bond toward Agatha.  For the first half-hour of her life, only the three of us were there together.  No one had touched her but us; no one had looked into her eyes except us; no one knew that she had been born save us.  It was an awesome sense of closeness.

Later that day, and in coming days, as we shared our little Agatha with family and our good news with friends, there were lots of jokes about the inn offering obstetrics vacations, childbirth while-you-relax packages, and so on.  Russians believe in newborns staying at home with only immediate family for a full month, and that was our intent with Agatha as it had been our practice with Klara.  We sheltered Agatha as best we could from bad weather, visitors with colds, and the like, but this past Tuesday we took her for her first car trip.  Her mother had an appointment so important that she could not miss it, and Agatha had to leave the shelter of home.  What could be so compelling?  Some other time, perhaps.