Before Ian was born, technology was so different! My goodness, we still used a film camera and cell phones flipped open and only made phone calls. The digital cameras we had either attached to the top of a computer monitor that weighed 25lbs or were packed in a foam-lined suitcase the size of a footstool. I hand wrote letters to people to fill them in on what was going on in my life instead of updating my status on Facebook. I even kept a journal.
I spent my pregnancy with Ian at graduate school. Being married and pregnant at school is a much different social scene than being single and unattached. No one invites you to their parties for one. And you don't have anything to talk about with the other students if you didn't go to the party. So I stopped enjoying the social part of school and spent more time just being the studious one...when I wasn't napping. Or eating. And I did plenty of both in my "graduate student office." Hm, I wonder if I ever cleaned out my desk? I know I never gave the keys to the building back.
My Master's thesis project was basically handed to me by the Whatcom County Conservation District. I was going to study how streams that had had their meanders replaced by bulldozer compared to streams that were still channelized into nice, straight lines. I was so naive. What the heck was I going to do with the baby after he was born, stick him in a playpen on the side of the creek while I electrofished? Hahaha!
My last quarter at school I was taking a class that I think may have been Advanced Stream Ecology. My lab partner and I had to design a stream ecology project. We collected water samples and macroinvertebrate (bug) samples from a few streams around Lake Whatcom and analyzed them. By this time, my chest waders didn't fit over my baby bump, so I switched to my hip waders. I was still scrambling up and down creek banks with a tote full of glass bottles and sulfuric acid. My lab partner worked part-time with Mark at WDFW and he would ask Mark if I should really be clambering around like that in my condition. I do remember the last field day before Ian was born. I had a hard time getting my leg over the chain at the end of the road and decided to stay up on the bank and let my lab partner do all the work. He said he was going to feel responsible if something bad happened to me. The day before my water broke, I obsessively titrated water samples and counted bugs in the lab: the scientist's version of nesting.
Ian was born three weeks before the end of the quarter. My lab partner and I still had to finalize our results and come up with a presentation for our class. I look back now and think, "Good gracious, I actually functioned a bit with a newborn?" Honestly, most of what happened in the weeks after Ian was born are a blur. I remember needing extra time to get used to having a baby (ha. ha. ha. breastfeeding and waking up all night long? Hello???) and I remember sitting downstairs in front of my computer holding Ian when I was supposed to be writing my paper. I know I didn't go back to any classes, but I did do my final presentation and take my final test while Mark stayed home with Ian. Three weeks postpartum.
(The only picture that survived off my computer camera. Ian looks between two to four weeks old. He must have been cold! Where are his clothes! What kind of a mom would take her newborn baby into a cold, dark basement with no shirt on???)
But once I held Ian in my arms, I knew I didn't want to go back to school and finish my degree. I just wanted to be a Mama. So I dropped out and never looked back.
