introducing anna justine!

Our beautiful daughter Anna Justine was born Sunday, January 25 at 3:12 p.m. after a 19-hour labor! She is healthy and perfect, weighing in at 6 pounds, 13 ounces and measuring 18.5 inches. We are home and doing great. You can check out more photos here!

finally, a fruit we recognize

At the beginning of our pregnancy, we signed up to receive weekly updates from Babycenter.com. You plug in your due date and are rewarded with weekly information about how your baby is growing, what organs developed that week, etc. (I'm told that this handy service continues after birth -- a dear friend of mine still gets weekly e-mails about her three kids and learns about developmental milestones, etc. It's so much more convenient than reading a book that you have to pull off the shelf every time something new happens!)

Anyway, every week we learn approximately how big our baby is, how much she weighs, etc. Until the very end of pregnancy, it's pretty hard (for me, anyway) to conceptualize how big "x ounces" is. So Babycenter helpfully provides a comparison. Except, for us, it's not helpful, because we sometimes have no idea what they are talking about.

At the beginning it was easy: a blueberry, a lemon, a banana. But lately we have had to be very produce-savvy. Our baby's size/weight has recently been compared to an English hothouse cucumber, a Chinese cabbage, and a crenshaw melon. And there were other weeks where she was compared to a regular cucumber, a regular cabbage, and a regular melon. So you really have to know your different cucumber, cabbage, and melon varieties. And since we are not in the habit of eating crenshaw melons regularly, lately we've been a bit in the dark as to her size...

But today (39 weeks) she is the size of a watermelon. (Indeed. I could have told you that!)

fun cello article!

Still here. Still working. Since I have nothing else of note to share, I thought I'd pass along this interesting NYT article about Yo-Yo Ma's new carbon cello. While watching the inauguration yesterday, I commented to Seth that he must be crazy playing his cello outside in that cold. I see now that he was one step ahead of me! (Obviously I wasn't paying very close attention or I would have noticed that his cello was, um, black and not made of wood.) But why wasn't the man wearing gloves?! My fingers were cold just watching him...

* * *

Cold Case: The Sound of Carbon for Yo-Yo Ma?
By CHRIS MUSELER
Jan. 18, 2009
Reprinted from the New York Times

When the cellist Yo-Yo Ma takes to the inaugural stage on Tuesday, the instrument he will have may take music enthusiasts by surprise. Black, with a single-piece body, neck and peg box, and with no scroll at the top, the cello is a high-tech carbon-fiber instrument designed to withstand the cold.

Created by Luis Leguia and his Massachusetts-based company, Luis and Clark, the cello is unaffected by temperature and humidity, which can crack or split the delicate antique instruments that professionals usually use. Mr. Ma plans to play his Luis and Clark cello if the weather warrants, said his manager, Mary Pat Buerkle. His other cello, a 1733 Montagnana from Venice, is worth more than $2 million. Mr. Ma will be playing a score by John Williams with Itzhak Perlman on violin, Gabriela Montero on piano and Anthony McGill on clarinet. Mr. Perlman could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Ma is not the only inaugural string player using a Luis and Clark instrument. At the “We Are One” concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, the entire Joint Service Orchestra string section — 44 musicians in all — played the company’s carbon-fiber cellos, violins, violas and basses.

“My cello is a couple hundred years old,” said Staff Sgt. Ben Wensel, a cellist in the United States Army Band, before rehearsing on Friday in 14-degree weather. “I wouldn’t dare take it outside in this.”

Sergeant Wensel said that this would be the first time a major orchestra had exclusively used carbon string instruments. The orchestra is a combination of the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy and Marine bands.

Mr. Leguia, who studied under Pablo Casals and played cello for the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 44 years, came up with the idea for a composite cello after going sailing on a fiberglass Hobie 16 catamaran. He was struck by how efficiently the boat’s hulls transmitted the sound of the waves. “The greatest instruments can be heard through the din of an orchestra,” he said in a telephone interview. “I saw potential in that.”

The first cello Mr. Leguia built was of fiberglass in 1990. He then moved to carbon, partnering with Steve Clark, a champion sailor and carbon-fiber expert from Rhode Island. Mr. Clark helped refine the design and construction process, and the Luis and Clark cello was born.

About 12 Luis and Clark instruments are manufactured each week at Clear Carbon and Components in Bristol, R.I. The cello costs $7,139. Each instrument takes about a week to build and is handmade of layers of carbon fiber and epoxy. More than 600 have been produced.

As for the sound, Mr. Leguia said that he had tried to maintain the full-bodied sound of top-end instruments, but at a much lower price. A carbon cello, he said has a “flooding, deeper sound,” though “not quite as penetrating” as Mr. Ma’s Montagnana.

René Morel, who deals in fine string instruments in Manhattan, has said the sound is as close as you can get to a traditional top cello like a Stradivarius without being one. The cellist Aldo Parisot, a longtime instructor at the Yale School of Music, has been recommending Mr. Leguia’s cellos to his students for everyday use.

Sergeant Wensel said that his instrument “sounded a little raw at first,” but that “the sound has opened up for me.”

“It’s a good cello,” he added, “not just a good carbon cello.”

still here

The trial is done. The settlement facilitation is done. (Well, it was postponed, due to factors beyond my control.) I have one hearing on Tuesday which could be continued if necessary. I do have about a day's left of work to do. Well, more accurately, I could busy myself for a lifetime, but I think the necessary projects will only take about a day and then I'll be able to breathe easy about leaving the office.

Someone alerted me to the fact that I've now entered the phase of pregnancy where if you don't post regularly, people will assume you are off having a baby. (It's very interesting to me that there are still 2 weeks till my due date and people are already pestering me about whether I'm in labor... as if I have some control over the matter or am somehow behind the ball for not having delivered early.) Sorry to disappoint, but Miss Hartwell is still quite comfy where she is! She's making it harder for me to sleep these days (I spent the first half of last night in the rocking chair next to our bed, then transitioned to bed around 3 a.m.) and is still moving around a lot, which I find pretty amusing considering she must be running out of room in there! My due date is 12 days away, and I hope she will stay put for at least 3 more days. That's long enough for (a) me to finish up at work and (b) her to be born during the Obama administration. ;) Rest assured that when she makes her appearance, we will broadcast it to the world - here, on Facebook, through e-mail, possibly renting a skywriter...

I've had a lot of moments of apprehension lately - not really about my abilities as a parent, because I'm feeling strangely okay about all of that. Maybe it's all the exposure to babies I've had (though I know nothing can really prepare you for the enormity of it), or maybe it's because I see some pretty bad parenting through my job, but I think we will be okay in the parenting area. Not without a significant learning curve, but definitely capable. My feeling of being overwhelmed comes more from all the well-wishers who tell me things like "Your life is never going to be the same" and "Get ready to lose your identity." The first comment, I assume, is just as much good as bad. The second comment, not so much. Considering my identity has just started to solidify at the age of 31, losing it again sounds kind of... scary. But I know I'm not the first person to feel these things, and I am lucky to have many dear friends who have paved the way and shown me that it is very possible to be a wife and mother, have a career you love, and still maintain the very best parts of yourself. And so, my apprehension has been slowly melting away and is replaced by pure excitement: to meet our daughter, to welcome this new little person into our family, to finally become the mother I have always wanted to be.

near the end

I worked from home today. It seemed the best way to deal with the fact that I was up from 12 midnight to about 5:45 a.m. having contractions. I slept from 5:45 to 7:00 a.m. Then my alarm went off and I quickly realized professional attire and facing my co-workers were not in the cards. (The contractions have completely gone away, by the way. My doctor's office didn't seem to care and said they were Braxton-Hicks. I disagreed, as they were totally different from the BH contractions I've been having for months, and I could not sleep through them. But obviously they were not the real thing!) Anyway, I had my laptop at home and all my work files, and billed just as many hours at home as I do during a normal day. I wish I could do that every day - except I really can't until Jan. 21. That's the day when all my obligations - the trial, hearing, and settlement facilitation I have all in the coming week - will finally be over and I can just piddle around at home writing briefs and letters and stuff. Boy, I can't wait.

I know I'm not indispensable at work - far, far from it - and I know that if I were to have our daughter right now the world would go on spinning just as it should. But quite frankly, I will feel about 1000% more relaxed when these three things are behind me! And I know I won't feel very relaxed even then - because, let's face it, there isn't a lot to get your brain spinning a hundred miles a minute like the thought that any day, you could be a parent.* So imagine how worked up I must feel now with all these silly court appearances to contend with.

* Funny story: Seth and I went to a breastfeeding class tonight. At some point, the narrator said, "Parents, don't forget to..." and my first thought was "why are they addressing my parents?!" Then I realized: oh. They are talking to us. Yup.