Two years ago this this moment (10:15 Eastern) I sat cross-legged (to the astonishment of the nurse who brought me a Tylenol) in a half-reclined bed in Charlottesville's Martha Jefferson Community Hospital staring into Entropy Girl's unexpectedly alert, wide eyes, half-listening to some brouhaha about Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl bleating from the television, and wondering when Brainiac would be arriving with my post-birthing calzone and diet soda.

My labor had gone well and smoothly and my daughter arrived into the world squirming and mewling, eyes open. Her first night I had hoped to rest for a few hours but the nurses brought her to me explaining that her fussing and sleeplessness was keeping the other babies awake. And so I cradled her into my arms not realizing that her fussing and sleeplessnes would indeed keep her family awake for the better part of two years. She is still all-seeing and incredibly kinetic. New friends and acquiantences require only about 15 minutes before stating, as if we had not heard so before, "Wow, she's really active!" It's funny now, a joking comment that we can easily appreciate.

Her first months were difficult for all of us. Brainiac spent weeks battling pneumonia, was hospitalized for a time and not more than physically present for weeks on end, K. died, J. died and C. died within six weeks of each other, only the last with any foreknowledge. I confronted the same sort of gloomy haze of post-partum depression I faced after the Boy Wonder's birth, only this time hundreds of miles from friends and family and without the ready support of a healthy partner. Only now are we experiencing the sort of bonding that I wish for every baby and my only enduring regret around my memories of Entropy Girl's infancy is that I was so ill-equipped to do anything to change the course on which we found ourselves.

But that is the past. Today Entropy Girl is funny, sly, exuberant, fascinated by tea sets, stuffed bears (most especially of one, formerly pink and now grey, that she calls Dee) and sparkly shoes. She adores her big brother and her daddy and the other day when she called out to me while walking up the stairs to bed "I ruv oo, mama!" I knew that just as much as I gave birth to her that blustery cold mid-winter night two years ago, she has also given birth to me. I can't wait to meet the woman she grows into. She is going to be awesome.