an open letter

Dear babygirl,

Your Mimi is here now, and so it’s time for you to come on out.  All of us have done about all we can – walked long miles on swollen feet, drunk sixteen cups of red raspberry leaf tea, taken in as many prostglandins as possible, eaten spicy curry, tried new yoga poses, cleaned your room, cleaned your parents’ room, organized and re-organized, started filling out the baby book, and prayed — all that’s left is a pogo stick, and I’m just not sure I’m up for it.

By the way, we have a new President now.  Everybody’s all full of hope because of President Obama.  Economically, it’s a bit of a rough time to be entering the world, but with him at the helm, our nation has its confidence momentarily renewed.  So don’t be afraid.  What I’m saying is, come on out.

You’ll want to be like your Mom in some ways, but don’t follow my example for coming out.  I was a week late.  According to the “Calendar of Memories” that Mimi brought to Seattle this week, here were some other noteworthy events from my infancy:

• I smiled every day in my first week of life
• I went to the mall at six days old
• I went to church at 13 days old
• I went to my first concert – the Sonshine Festival – at three weeks old.  Mimi carried me in the Snugli and DaddyB (Bobby?  BaBa?  Grandad? It’s not going to be G-Daddy; sorry, Dad)  was the emcee for the event.
• At five weeks old, I started sleeping through the night.  I was a good sleeper. Still am. Please imitate me in this.
• My first trip, at three months, was an overnight church retreat to New Life Ranch.  Yeah, I swam in the pool.
• At three months, I would fake cough to get Mimi’s attention
• I went to the movies at 4 months, and also made my radio debut on a commercial about the “Sonshine Cruise”
• On November 4, Mimi notes that I liked ice cream.  No wonder I have a HaagenDaaz weakness. It’s all her fault.
• Feb. 25: “Amy loves graham crackers!”
• Mar. 4: “Amy LOVES graham crackers!”
• At nine months old, “Amy turns away and acts shy when people say hi.”  So demure.
• By eleven months, I was walking.

Babygirl, those are just a few of the things we have to look forward to!  So why not come on out?

See you soon,

your loving Mother.

38 weeks, some unsorted thoughts

Last night I had a dream that I was in early labor and my midwife suggested that I buy some very expensive mint chocolate chip ice cream and eat it to stay hydrated.

Ha!

When people talked about having swollen feet at the end of pregnancy, I thought they were complaining because their shoes didn’t fit and their ankles looked fat.  I did not know that swollen meant painful.  I did not know that after a couple of hours laying down, I would have to move very slowly to get up, because moving too fast would give me round ligament pain in my sides, because my balance would be off and my legs would be stiff, because it would hurt to place my swollen feet on the floor to walk to the bathroom.

Pregnancy becomes more surreal after 37 weeks, doesn’t it?  Try to grasp the idea that there is another person living inside my body.  She’s complete and ready to live outside my body, and if you could reach in and pluck her out, she’d be able to breathe and cry and send blood pumping through a fully formed human body.  But she’s living inside of me.  Look at me, and you see two people in one.

The pregnancy book I’ve skimmed through most recently is Birthing from Within.  It is kind of like The Artist’s Way meets pregnancy.  Written by midwife Pam England and psychologist Rob Horowitz, Birthing from Within is based on a childbirth class taught by England in New Mexico.  Focusing less on institutional procedures,  scientific facts, or the kinds of guidelines you’d find in “What to Expect,” Birthing from Within is a right-brained, zen-influenced guide to preparing for childbirth.  There were a couple of things I particularly appreciated about this book:

• The early chapter on creating art as a way of exploring your own feelings about giving birth is challenging, helpful, and unique.
• England emphasizes the reality of the pain of childbirth (Ina May’s books, in contrast, do make it sound too easy).   Birth pain is inevitable, but you can handle it.
• While American culture today focuses on the baby in birth, England shows how other cultures have also honored the re-birth of the woman as mother when she gives birth.  The late, most painful phase of labor and delivery, where the woman loses awareness of everything going on, knows nothing but what her body is doing, feels that the pain is too much and she will “die” — this England likens to the death of the former woman and the birth of the mother.  Mothers and Fathers are both accepting a “death” to an old life (of being free to go out to dinner, to the movies, to sleep through the night, to earn the same income, to career plans, etc.) and a birth into a new life.  An interesting thought, and perhaps especially important for women (like me, and like most women in the US today) who didn’t grow up imagining themselves as mothers.
• The most helpful chapter, overall, is the chapter on pain management techniques.  Of course, not having given birth yet, I can’t say how helpful they will be, but the chapter seems to me to be the most complete collection of natural pain management tools that I’ve found in a general pregnancy guide (discounting books that focus primarily on labor pain).

lullabies

It’s a little yuppie of me to have an ipod for the baby.

But I bought one.  A little one. A third-gen nano.

So here’s the music on her ipod.

Air
Andrew Bird
Belle and Sebastian
Billie Holiday
Bob Dylan
Bon Iver
Bonnie Prince Billy
Calexico
Califone
Decemberists
Denison Witmer
Explosions in the Sky

Fernando Ortega
Fleet Foxes
Gillian Welch
Help Me to Sing: Songs of the Sacred Harp
Hushabye Baby – Lullaby Renditions of George Strait
The Innocence Mission
Iron and Wine
Jack  Johnson
Joanna Newsom
Jon Foreman
Joni Mitchell
Jose Gonzales
Kings of Convenience
Mindy Smith
Over the Rhine
Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead
Rosie Thomas
Shane and Shane
She and Him
Sigur Ros
Simon and Garfunkle
Songs: Ohia
Sufjan Stevens
Taize
Thom Yorke
Wye Oak

and Tim Keller sermons

Today I’m 36 weeks and 4 days along.  The midwife says baby has dropped and my iron levels are up (hematacrit percentage went from 29 to 34)! Yesterday we went Ikea shopping for babygirl’s room.  I’m feeling good.

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.

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.

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.

28 weeks

Yep, I’m in my twenty-eighth week, known to many as the beginning of the end.  Well, the beginning of the third trimester, at least.  And, having gained twenty three pounds so far, which is on the upper end of average weight gain, I’m beginning to get really worried about having to deliver a fatheaded baby. Well.  Beginning to get worried about delivering any size of baby. I mean, I’m not very good at geometry, but I can certainly see a disparity in the sizes of diameters we’re dealing with here.

Ahem.  In other words, I really do want to be in better physical shape for the great physical labor coming up.  Although I walked regularly in my first trimester, my second was busy and tiring, and I hardly exercised at all.  So now that I’m in the third, I am ready to strengthen my heart for the pounding and my thighs for the squatting (ugh, gross, I can’t believe you just said that) and certain other muscles for various other endeavors.  So far, so good:  yoga Thursday, long hilly walk Saturday, and swimming laps Sunday.  So far, with a supportive exercising husband, so good.  Now if I can just lay off the Haagen Daaz.