one month to due date

“My due date is in one month.”

“That’s soon.”

“Then we’re going to have a baby with us, all the time.”

“Yeah.”

Pause.

“I hope that works out ok.”

——-

I’ve decided to just not step on the scale anymore.  I don’t want to know how many pounds I’ve gained.  I feel better not knowing.

I wake up and switch sides every couple of hours.  My hips and butt ache in my sleep, my allergies make my nose stuffy and my throat sore, of course I have to go to the bathroom, and then sometimes acid reflux wakes me too (has that fact induced me to change my eating habits?  No.  So I can’t complain).

In the daytime, my main complaints are how difficult it is to bend down and then get back up, as, for example, when tying shoes or picking up a dropped pencil.  That, and the pain of stretching ligaments, which is sudden and can make me gasp a little. Oh: and don’t let me forget the achy, swollen hands.  Feet too, but right now the hands are much worse.

I feel more energetic.  I don’t know if the energy is due to my iron levels going back up or due to the fact that I’ve quit work and can take life as easily as I want to.  Not that I’m taking it THAT easy.  Yesterday, while 8 inches of snow blanketed Seattle, DH and I spent six hours deep cleaning the kitchen. Whew.

Our inane birthing class is finished.  My recommendation: instead of the 150 or 200 or whatever the class costs, just get yourself a free library card and promise to spend 10 or 15 hours reading books and watching dvds.  The books I’ve read have been way more informative and empowering than the class was.

Gear decisions have been made.  And re-made.  And made again.  We ended up choosing a Chico infant car seat instead of the  convertible we’d originally chosen, so that we could pop out the seat and carry it places.  This will mean that we’ll have to buy a second car seat at 12 months, so it’s not the thriftiest of decisions.  But maybe eventually we’ll need two seats anyway, a toddler seat and an infant seat, depending on what might happen with a baby #2.

As for diapers, Mom bought us our first dozen bum genius 3.0 one-size diapers, which are adorable.  They are washed and ready to go.  I’m also going to get some old-fashioned cotton prefolds and covers, which are cheaper than bum genius, but not quite as simple.  I bought a bunch of cotton flannel remnants at the fabric store, and I’m cutting them into re-usable cloth diaper wipes.

Instead of buying a sling, I got a long piece of fabric from the discount section (it cost like $10, total) and will try it out as instructed here and here.

I found a great website to help determine what laundry detergents are good to use for baby stuff: http://www.pinstripesandpolkadots.com/detergentchoices.htm.  For now, I’m using the Arm and Hammer for Sensitive Skin, just because it’s sold at the grocery store a few blocks from my house.

And as if I haven’t committed my little sewing machine to enough other projects, now I want to use the leftover quilt fabrics to make a flock of birds.

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.