I want my body back.

Have you bought your “buggy” yet?

Some stroller advice from the UK….courtesy of my mom, as most of my links are.

According to the pregnancy facts gadgets on my iGoogle homepage, I have 62 days until my due date.   There’s still a lot to do to prepare, and that’s all I want to do, really — read about babies, make things for babygirl, organize and clean things for babygirl — but I can’t, not quite yet.  I’ll work until Dec. 12, and I have to focus on work until then.  After that, I’ll be free to baby it up.

In my thirty-first week, my appetite has finally slowed down.  For the past couple of days, I’ve been feeling more Braxton Hicks contractions, mid-back pain, pain down in my groin, and stomach-stretching pain.  But my energy levels have been up, a bit, and with such a supportive husband, I really can’t complain about a thing.

30 weeks and 2 days; 68 days to go

A couple of nights ago I had a dream that while I was at school one day, babygirl stuck her hand out straight through the left side of my stomach.  It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t bloody — it was like one of those fantasy movie scenes where somone steps through a mirror or wall.  She grabbed onto my finger.  I asked one of my students to take some pictures.  We all thought it was pretty cool.

—

And speaking of movies, sometimes when baby girl is kicking, I feel like I’m in a sci-fi flick, and my body has just been taken over by an alien.

–

Some people know exactly the right things to say: “From the back, you don’t look any different!”  “You look beautiful.”  Other people, trying to show their enthusiasm, could do better: “Ooohhhh…getting bigger!” (Thanks for pointing that out, as if I don’t feel huge enough already.)

–

“How’s the baby?”

I don’t know.  I’ll ask her when I see her and get back to you.

–

We’re halfway done painting babygirl’s room.  It’s a little limey.  But I like it.  It feels brighter and cleaner than before. (Postscript: After two coats, the green walls next to the dark wood trim look like a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream…)

–

My blood test results last week indicate that I have very low iron (29 when it should be 35, though I don’t know what those numbers mean, exactly).  I’m feeling it, too.  The last week, I’ve had a couple of headaches and a lot of bone weariness.  The worst part has been the breathlessness, though.  Lecturing in class, going up and down stairs, swimming, even just prepping the walls to paint today: I lose my breath and have to stop. I’m taking my iron pills, with vitamin C to help absorption, and I’m trying to eat iron rich foods every day.  I wonder how long it will take to build my levels back up.

–

Reading Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth is probably the most empowering thing I’ve done in my pregnancy.  It’s making me feel much more prepared for giving birth.

the place

Where it all will happen, hopefully. Don’t worry, relatives, I can transfer to a nearby hospital at any time if something goes wrong. And my midwife can accompany me.

But think about this: Giving birth, without any complications or even overnight stay, costs about $13,000 at the hospital.  It costs about $2,500 at the birthing center.  And sure, insurance will cover 80% of either one, but we’re still talking about a significant difference.  If I want to try to go all-natural anyway, why not do it at the cozy birthing center?

News

Babies need tummy time.

The good news is: the baby is head down!  Both feet and hands are in my left side – that’s what I’ve been feeling every morning.

The bad news is that everywhere I go now, clerks and strangers ask me sympathetic questions implying that they think I’m due any day now. And it’s true…there’s another girl at church who is due this week, and I am the same size as she is.  I already look like I’m ready to burst… how am I going to look two months from now?

great starts?

Last night from 7-9 (yes, while the election results were being announced), we attended the first session of our seven week birthing class. I could hardly stay awake.

“Great Starts” is, as far as I could tell, the most popular birthing class in Seattle.  That’s why we signed up for it. It’s based on a book written by three Seattle area pregnancy care providers. Here’s what I expected it to be like, based on my assumptions about Seattlites:

I expected a real earth-mother type teacher.  I expected at least one same-sex couple.  I expected most of the couples to be older than we were. I expected that we’d be split at least 50/50 between midwife births and hospital births. I expected to get some information that I could not find in my pregnancy books or by googling a topic.

In reality…well, the teacher was wearing birkenstocks. But that was about as earth-mother as she got.  She didn’t seem entirely confident in the information she was presenting, and she referred to her notecards rather often.  All seven of the couples there were married, heterosexual couples in their late twenties or early thirties.  Of the seven couples, DH and I were the only couple planning a midwife-assisted birth.  The topics we covered: common ailments in late pregnancy, facts about nutrition in pregnancy, and a brief discussion of choices we will have to make after giving birth (DH got woozy listening to the talk about circumcision).  I heard nothing I hadn’t heard before.  And our instructor didn’t even know that calcium deficiency can contribute to leg cramps, or which fishes were low in mercury but high in omega-3s.

I did kind of like that she played a scene from the film “orgasmic birth” (please, try to ignore the name) which showed birth as a natural process.  But I hated the way we ended our class.

At the end of class, we practised deep breaths while she read us a “visualization” exercise.  It went something like this:

Think about your mother….your grandmother…your great-grandmother, if you knew her.  Soon, you will be joining the ranks of all the mothers of the earth, the long line of mothers leading us back to the beginning of time.  One of your ancestral mothers was named Lucy…

Can you guess where this went next? We were supposed to visualize our great ancestor Lucy swinging about the jungle, without thought or speech, and suddenly finding a change in her body.  But her body knew how to handle this change.  The end of the story had us visualizing Lucy “screaming and dancing” through the final stages of delivery, and then we were being reminded to be thankful for our chance to join the ranks of mothers, from Lucy, to Mother Earth, to our own mothers….

Shoot me now.

Seriously.  The “calming visualization” that ended our class had me envisioning my grandmother the monkey?  I am supposed to take pride in being a descendant of an ape? I am supposed to take comfort in the fact that, essentially, I am an animal with animal instincts?

More comforting would be the instructor’s one line from the beginning of the class: “A woman’s body was designed to give birth.”  Yes.  My body has the right instincts to know what to do.  That’s because it was Designed.  By a Designer.

This isn’t a question of six day creation vs. evolution.  It’s a question of what supplies our peace in life and in death.  For me, peace doesn’t come from meditating on my monkey ancestors.  Peace comes from meditating on the Designer, the Lord and Giver of Life.

I sure hope this birthing class gets better.

just a little

baby crazy.

Everyday I want to get out all the baby things I have so far, little onesies and soft blankets, hats and socks, look at them again, and then put them away again.  They are just so cute.  I’m counting down the days until the current occupant moves out of the baby’s room, and we can start moving the baby things in.

Every Sunday we sit in the back right, where all the families with newborns sit, close to the door for an easy exit.  I try to decide which is the cutest baby in the section, but I keep changing my mind.  And getting afraid that my baby won’t be as cute as all the others. (I know, I know.)

Every morning, regardless of the position in which I wake up, babygirl is always hanging out in the left side of my stomach, and she starts kicking immediately.  You can see my belly move, she’s so close to the surface.

But still about eighty days to go.

crafts

We finished our wall art project today!  I’ll post a picture of the whole tree once it’s up on the wall, in a couple of weeks, but here’s a preview…