Lesley's Page

Parenthood is one of the biggest changes that can happen in a person's life. Watching a child grow as you nurture her with love is incredible. In November I became a mother for the first time after nine months of having this other life growing inside me.

Ingrid's birth was an adventure. Everybody expected labour to last a long time as it was my first pregnancy. But Ingrid surprised everyone. I started feeling contractions at 2am on 30th November, but there was no pattern to them by 5am when I called the midwife to let her know how things were going. There was still no pattern to the contractions by 10am when I phoned her again to give her an update, so she suggested I have a bath, in the hopes that would help things along. By the time I got out of the bath, the contractions had pretty much disappeared and at around 11am I felt comfortable enough to try to lie down for a nap, which I hadn't felt able to do before. I never made it to the bed. I sat down on the side, but then, suddenly, I had an urgent need to push. When the next push came about five minutes later, we contacted the midwife again and she asked us to go to her midwifery clinic, less than ten minutes from the hospital, so she could see how far along I was. When we arrived at the clinic at about 11:30am, the midwife was seeing another client, but there were two other midwives there who took one look at me and ushered us into a back room. Ingrid was born in the back room of the midwife's clinic just over half an hour later at 12:10pm.

Afterwards, I felt pretty good and Ingrid was healthy, so we came back home.

Here are some other things to know about me:
I currently reside in
Auckland, New Zealand, but I was born in Sydney, Australia and grew up in Titirangi, Waitakere City (West Auckland), NZ, and spent four years in Bryn Athyn, PA, USA.

I'm the oldest of five so I have three younger sisters and a younger brother. My parents have been happily married for 28 years.

My husband, Jonathan, is American. I met him while I was at college in America. By the time we got married in November 2003 we had known each other for about six years. Married life is wonderful. We have a daughter, Ingrid, who was born in November 2005. Parenting is often a challenge, but, of course, has it's special happy moments.

While I stay at home, caring for Ingrid, I am on six months of maternity leave. I work for Fairfax Sunday Newspapers which publishes many newspapers around New Zealand, including a major national weekly paper. But I'm not a journalist. I work in the library, doing research for the journalists and cataloguing the newspapers to go into an electronic database, among other things. I will be returning to full-time work at the end of May, which I am expecting to be hard.

I finally finished my
Masters in Library and Information Studies degree at
Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, last year. I had been studying part-time for four years including taking some time off to get married. I wrote my research project, required for the degree, on preservation issues in New Zealand newspaper libraries. You can read it here in PDF format. Make sure you have plenty of time to spare!

On the subject of schooling, I received a Bachelors degree in History and English at
Bryn Athyn College. For my senior essay for that degree, I wrote about how libraries have adapted to changing technology throughout the ages. While completing the Bachelors degree I spent four years in the United States without a trip home, which was hard. The college is a religious one and people interested in the religion of the New Church attend from all over the world.

I am an active member of a
New Church group here in Auckland. Although I no longer co-ordinate the Sunday School, I still regularly attend worship services. Since Ingrid has been born, I am learning how to be a mother and have relinquished my duties with the Sunday School to be able to focus on motherhood. I am sure that I will take up the Sunday School duties again sometime in the future, when Ingrid is a little older.

It doesn't seem like I would have enough time to do anything else! But I do have other interests. In high school I played a lot of cricket and a bit of soccer. I haven't been able to do anything recently, but hopefully I will again one day. I read a lot and enjoy gardening and sewing, although I haven't been able to do as much of anything as I would like.

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Last updated: April 2006