This here is our daughter Elsie Asayo Bradford.  She is now four months old.  I plan to narrate this blog as events happen, but first let's get up to speed on how things got this way...

Maggie and I got married in April of '05 at City Hall in Manhattan.  Here we are after saying "I do" about to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge.

When we got home we packed some things and drove up to New Hampshire to go camping at Tuckerman's Ravine.  Sometime during that honeymoon Maggie got pregnant and we were both happy about that.  Oh yes!

But it didn't last too long because when Maggie went to the doctor for the first ultrasound there was no heartbeat.  Everyone knows that this can happen, but it's still tough when it does.  I think it would have been a little easier had the miscarriage occurred before the ultrasound.  As it was we had to wait for it to occur and this was strange and awful.

Anyway, we set about trying to get pregnant again but each month would pass with no positive result.  I began to worry that I'd smoked too much marijuana in my youth and now my sperm were overly mellow.  Studies show this can happen, although I know several guys who smoke way more weed than I ever did and they have about six kids apiece.  I went to the doctor and "donated" into a cup, which is not easy, and had them analyze my sperm.  It turned out that my "count" and "motility", the things usually affected by weed, were just fine.  The problem for me was "morphology".  This meant I had a high percentage of misshaped sperm.  What kind of drugs had I been taking?

I went on a very clean diet for three months (that's how long it takes to manufacture sperm) and got tested again.  This time my morphology was even worse!  It wasn't hopeless, said the doctors.  It only takes one good sperm, as they say, and they pointed out that we'd gotten pregnant before, though I was starting to suspect that this had been the work of the male stripper at Maggie's bachlorette party.  Just kidding!  She didn't even have a bachelorette party, though we do know several male strippers.

I began to think that our hip, but very toxic neighborhood, Williamsburg, Brooklyn was to blame.  All the toxins were mutating my sperm!  I ordered a water cooler for our home and haven't drank from the tap since.  I'm not really sure if this made any difference, but if you're interested in just how toxic Williamsburg is, check out this video.  Why are there so many kids living here anyway?

As the months rolled by without pregnancy we decided to take more drastic action and did a few cycles of IUI.  This meant Maggie had to take shots to hyper-stimulate her egg production and, on ovulation day, I had to go to the medical office and "donate" into a cup again so that the sperm could be injected via a skinny catheter.  Let me tell you, they stock some lousy porn in those places.  The IUI process isn't as difficult and invasive as IVF, where they actually remove the eggs and mix them with sperm in a dish, but it's still fraught with frustrations.  One time the shots caused Maggie to produce so many eggs and we had to skip that cycle altogether.

 
We were starting to get pretty antsy.  The one year mark was approaching and we talked about IVF, which we didn't want to do, and adoption.  I was feeling pretty guilty about things.  But then, that month, Maggie became pregnant.  Whew!  I was fairly sure something was going to go wrong.  I just didn't trust those mutated sperm of mine.  But things progressed nicely and on the morning of Decemeber 30, 2006 Maggie said, "I think my water broke."  The baby wasn't due for another month so we were both kind of taken by surprise.  I was hoping Maggie had just wet her pants and didn't know it, but it became apparent that this wasn't the case.  We called the midwife and she said, "go to the hospital" so we did.  Here's Maggie waiting for something to happen.

They had to induce the labor since the water had broken but the contractions weren't really coming on.  Maggie was determined to keep things as natural as possible  so she didn't take any painkillers or have an epidural.  This can be especially painful after inducing labor with pitocin, which is what they used.  Maggie wasn't so happy about this decision in the heat of the battle, but later on she was.  Elsie was born on the morning of New Year's Eve and that night our hospital room looked out over Times Square so we watched the midnight fireworks with our new baby.

And in the morning we woke up to a brand new year.