On Having a Baby (Excerpt From an Email I Sent to a Friend in September)

You know, I think about Sadie a lot, and she has changed my life for the better, but contrary to what I expected I don't think about her ALL the time, nor has she become the sole focus of my life. For example, I just bought a sewing machine, and am looking forward to learning how to make things and setting up my sewing space, etc. I just mention this because I thought your life essentially ended when you had children, that you loved them so much and became so wrapped up in them that you had no time to do or even think about anything else. But it's not quite like that after all--it's more like they cast your life with a different shade, or color, but they don't transform it as completely as I would have imagined. Which is a good thing!! And doesn't lessen the love or joy I feel for her and with her.

Pity Party is Over

Okay, I was definitely feeling sorry for myself in that last post. Maybe I wasn't yet ready to accept how much work--like, manual labor type of work, on your feet, getting up and down, dealing with smells and trash and junk work--goes into having a child and animals and a "house." Okay, Mom and Dad, I get it now. 

But I must say that having Nick around more has made it all a lot easier. He works 40 hours now, instead of 70, and twice this week he even brought Sadie to daycare while I sat around in my pajamas drinking coffee making myself late for work. Like right now. But it's blissful. And I can't seem to get my butt off this big, red cozy chair... 

A Day in the Life

With Nick working over 60 hours a week at his new job, I'm finding myself a bit overwhelmed by the day-to-day routine of working and caring for a baby and three animals, and trying to keep the house somewhat clean and presentable. Here's a snapshot of yesterday:

Come home from work.
Change into jeans and get stroller out.
Attach Ting Tong's recently recovered collar to her leash (the collar had been buried in my mom's couch for the last two months until it was found this weekend).
Take Sadie and Ting Tong for a walk around the neighborhood; Ting Tong hasn't been out in days.
Come home from walk, park stroller, put TT in downstairs entryway and close door.
Go back outside, gather things out of car that I couldn't carry up when I first got home from work: diaper genie inserts, a tray for Sadie's Bumbo, my breastmilk pump.
Put car seat and Sadie in downstairs entryway.
Go back outside, wheel stroller to door, collapse stroller and put in downstairs entryway.
Take Sadie out of car seat, gather up bags from car, walk up narrow, winding stairs, implore TT to follow. She doesn't.
Put stuff down all over kitchen, put Sadie in her Bumbo, wash off new Bumbo tray, prepare Sadie's cereal.
Realize I'm trembling from hunger and rip open box of crackers and start dipping them into peanut butter. The box of crackers falls on the floor but I'm too weak to pick them up.
Drink an Emergen-C.
Make Sadie's cereal.
Feed Sadie--her cute, cereal-strewn smile makes me happy.
Hear TT whimpering in the downstairs entryway because she doesn't think she make it up the stairs, even though she can.
Finish feeding Sadie and gather her up for a bath.
Hear TT barking at neighbors coming home.
Put Sadie in Bumbo on floor and go downstairs to get TT.
Push TT up first two steps then watch her bound easily up the rest.
Feed TT.
Give Sadie a bath.
Take Sadie upstairs to get her ready for bed.
Dry, dress, cuddle, read books to Sadie, nurse Sadie, and put her in her crib.
Hear Sadie cry as I walk back downstairs. She can't fall asleep without crying first.
Realize tomorrow is garbage day.
Put kitchen trash into bigger Portland City trash bag.
Empty cat litter. It hasn't been changed in days, and we have two cats.
Turn on Wet/Dry Vac to vacuum up scattered kitty litter and get sprayed with water sucked up a few days earlier during kitchen flood (requires another entry to explain)
Wipe off walls now sprayed with dirty flood water.
Tie up garbage bag and bring downstairs. Don't bother with recycling.
Walk outside and inhale the sweet, clean Maine air. The water in the bay is still and the sky is darkening.
Walk back inside, up the stairs into kitchen, and clean out pot used to heat up can of soup the night before.
Heat up another can of soup for dinner.
Play fetch with TT while eating dinner and reading story in "American Baby" magazine about how to "get it all done."
Notice that Sadie has stopped crying.
Go to bathroom and see that TT has peed on the bath mat. Rinse off bath mat.
Put dishes in dishwasher and forget to run it.
Sit down in big, red chair, intending to do freelance editing work.
Stare at big pile of unfolded laundry on the couch, and realize I'm too tired to either edit or fold laundry.
Go upstairs to bed. It's 8:30.
Wake up 1am, 3am, 4:30am. Sadie is gassy and fussy.
Wake up Nick and have him try to comfort Sadie when nursing doesn't work.
Have Nick put Sadie in her swing.
Talk to Nick about his day, since I never see him anymore during daylight hours.
Get out of bed at 6:30 and reheat yesterday's coffee in the microwave.
Start writing this post.
Sadie wakes up.
Keep writing while she fusses.
Go get Sadie out of swing.

Welcome to the Johnsons

There is a bar on the Lower East Side called Welcome to the Johnsons. From what I can remember, it's got faux-wood paneling on the walls, 70s-era couches, and maybe even a Ms. Pac-Man game. It is, of course, a totally ironic homage to the childhood homes of many 30- and 40-something hipsters, with its quintessential middle-America orange and brown 1970s decor, notable for its utter blandness. Hipsters go there to remind themselves of how far they've come since leaving the mid-West and moving to Manhattan. That they do this by hanging out in a bar that looks and feels exactly like the sort of space they killed time in back when they were still in Minnesota and dreaming of being anywhere but there is not an irony lost on anyone; in fact, it is the whole point of going to Welcome to the Johnson. I enjoyed a beer or two there in my day.

So I thought it was pretty darn funny when we got this in the mail today:

[photo to come]

A completely un-ironic welcome to the neighborhood: an envelope emblazoned with "Welcome Johnsons!", stuffed with coupons to places we'll probably never go, it's a reminder of how far we've come since leaving New York City and moving to Maine.

Another sign that you're moving in a different orbit than your younger self? Going to see your friend's babysitter's band. Happened Saturday afternoon, right here in Portland, ME.

Or getting called ma'am in the supermarket checkout line.

And not getting carded anymore. Ever.

Prolonged Absence

Wow. I haven't written in two months?? Really? 

Okay, since I tend to put off blogging  when I don't think I have the energy to write anything substantial, from now on I'm just going to log on and blog whatever is on my mind, without worrying about whether it makes a full blog post or not. How's that for a deal?

Today's thought:

On being a mom who works and takes her child to daycare:

I miss riding my bike through town and stopping at the local coffee shop for a Jamaican Me Crazy to go. It's harder being green when you're a working parent, I think. The other day, I drove my child to Falmouth, and because I was in such a rush and hungry from no breakfast yet not able to think clearly because I hadn't had any coffee, I went to the Dunkin' Donuts drive-through at 9am and got a coffee and some kind of egg white omelet on a panini. In my station wagon. Then  I drove on the highway to get to work. And parked in a big parking lot and took the shuttle bus up to my office. Very un-bohemian and un-environmentally friendly. And a little soul-crushing.

So the other day, I drove Sadie to daycare, then came home, parked the car, and got on my bike and rode to work! It takes about the same amount of time as driving. Then I rode my bike back home, and would have gotten in the car to pick up Sadie, but it just so happens that my sister-in-law offered to drop off Sadie on her way to her parents' house in South Portland (just one of the benefits of having your sis-in-law be the assistant director at your kids' daycare). So I was sort of semi-environmental and hip that day. But really, am I going to do that when it gets colder? When it's raining? No, it'll be highway driving while dunking donuts. 

Speaking of daycare, Sadie loves it! She is like, the hit of the infant room! This little kid Anthony did a dance for her while she sat in her Bumpo! Her teacher Cate says that Sadie just smiles and laughs all day. She even painted on Monday! My heart almost melted when I saw her "painting." I finally understood why mothers have put their kids' artwork up on their refrigerator doors. Sadie's painting was brilliant!

A Play Date

Yesterday I took Sadie to our first infant play group. I say "our" because I now realize these things are as much for the mother as for the child. The babies can't talk, after all, so the mothers do. I was unprepared for it. I guess I've been at home so long, socializing only with Nick or with my family, that I wasn't ready for chatting with people in the "real" world. 

To begin with, I showed up with sweat dripping in rivulets down my face from pushing Sadie's stroller up the hill to get to the place. Maybe I was dehydrated and unfocused, but I felt overwhelmed by having to present myself to these other mothers. Perhaps it was because their babies were 8 months or older, and they seemed more comfortable with their roles as mothers. Or maybe it was the competitive side of me, feeling that I needed to be the BEST mother there with the CUTEST and most advanced baby--nothing less would do. (Actually, I don't know if that's a competitive thing or a psychologically weird thing.) There is, of course, room for all sorts of babies and different kinds of moms, but something about the play group left me feeling....depressed? Alienated? Chagrined? I'm not sure what it was.

I do know that there is a real disconnect between watching someone else care for their child and the act of caring for my own. When I watch other parents with their children, the tedium of it overwhelms me, makes me feel sad. But with my own daughter, it really is different. My mom always said it's different when they're your own, and I see now that she is right. It's not that I think Sadie is more fascinating than other kids (though of course, she is), it's that the seemingly inconsequential things she does have context. Yesterday, Nick told me that she opened her mouth when he held the pacifier in front of her. A more mundane action you probably could not script, but the fact that she'd never done this before is what made it interesting to us.

Back at the play group, Sadie watched the other kids with a mix of awe and curiosity. She saw a little boy up close for the first time--the only other children she's played with are her cousins, all six of them girls. I, in turn, was fascinated watching her being fascinated. But I was self-conscious, too. What would the other mothers think of the way I held her? Of how I played with her? At one point, I put her down on the mat for some tummy time, and she squirmed and struggled to lift her head, leaving a huge wet spot of saliva where her mouth had been. I sensed the mothers looking on with horror at my having put her down on an unclean mat. Ooops. (My own personal germ theory is to expose her to things now so she grows up with a healthy immune system, but maybe the mat was too much?)

I can only imagine what it would be like to join a play group in Manhattan or gentrified Brooklyn. My experience of New York was that most people liked to tell you how wonderful whatever it is they were doing was. And I always took the bait, assuming that whatever someone told me was the literal truth and that whatever I was doing wasn't nearly as glamorous or cool or worthy. When it came to children, I imagine it would only get worse. It would be like a yoga class all over again, with me spending more time wondering how my downward facing dog stacked up to everyone else's than actually relaxing.

I don't know--is this healthy competition, or intense self-consciousness?

Community Agriculture

Nick and Sadie and I haven't moved too far from our last place (we're on the same street even, just around the bend and several houses east), but the new apartment feels more cozy, homey, and relaxed. Now that we aren't presiding over the view from a third floor loft-like one bedroom, but are safely ensconced in a second floor Victorian, I feel, somehow, like we're more a part of the neighborhood.

Yesterday, while walking home from a neighborhood party we sort of crashed (after being invited by Nick's friend, David), we struck up a conversation with a woman working in her raised bed garden two blocks from here on Vesper Street. Turns out she had more kale and Swiss chard than she knew what to do with, so she gave us a big bunch of both. When we got home, Nick created a delicious pasta dish with the greens, some grape tomatoes we had in the fridge, and some sheep's milk pecorino cheese. Yum. I'm going to try to replicate the meal tonight, while he's out of town, but I don't suspect I'll have much luck. He's really the chef of this relationship.

Baby Got Back

According to Nick, my backside is returning to its former shape. Since I haven't really been able to see it, I'll have to take his word for it (when I was pregnant I was too large to look over my shoulder, and now that the baby is born, I don't have time to brush my teeth, never mind examine my figure).

To be honest, I was never that worried about my potential weight gain during pregnancy. I figured my body would do what it needed to do, and I wasn't going to try to mess with it. As it turns out, because of my gestational diabetes, which required me to monitor my diet very closely, I probably ate better during my pregnancy than at any other time of my life, outside of early childhood. Limiting carbohydrates meant I had to resist mightily the cravings I had for chocolate cupcakes, though luckily small servings of ice cream were actually acceptable due to the protein content. So I ate a lot of chicken, fish, vegetables and fruit, and rarely ate bread, rice, or cereal. As a result, I gained about 30 pounds during my pregnancy; I lost 20 of those pounds in the first two weeks post-partum. I'm convinced that most of that "weight" was primarily just the retention of fluids, because I sweated buckets at night those first two weeks. Oh, what a time it was: back labor and massive tearing left me completely sore and hobbling around, I woke up covered in sweat every morning, and nursing left me blistered and bloody.

But it's truly amazing what our bodies can do. Each day gets easier, both in terms of how I feel physically, and in how I am able to care for Sadie. I remember the relief I felt the first time I got into bed, when Sadie was 2 weeks old or so, and didn't feel total dread and anxiety about how I'd get through the night. I've learned to nurse Sadie while laying on my side in bed, which makes getting some real rest easier, and emotionally have come to accept that my life will slow down as I transition to caring for a newborn. Though at times I'm still overwhelmed with the reality of caring for Sadie, and how intense it can be at times, I think I'm adjusting pretty well.

And, as Nick pointed out, my butt is getting smaller.

Say What?

I think being pregnant and giving birth have decreased both my memory and my hearing ability. Or else having my mom stay with us for a week has caused me to pick up some of her habits. Or else certain traits that I associate with my mom in particular are actually traits that befall women in our family once they spend nine months bathed in pregnancy hormones. I can't tell if I am simply mimicking my mom's speech patterns, or if part of my brain has been forever suppressed and won't ever re-emerge under the weight of me thinking and worrying about my child. Here is a sample of a typical conversation with my mother:

Mom: "Can you hand me the um….[long pause]….the um…."
Me: "The what mom?"
Mom: "The uh….the phone."

And this is a sample of what my conversations with Nick have been like ever since we had the baby:

Me: "Babe, when you go out can you pick up some….um…."
Nick: Waiting patiently for me to finish….
Me: "Some uh…what's it called…some yogurt?"

Besides forgetting very basic vocabulary words, I've also had to ask Nick to repeat himself a lot more often than I ever did before the baby, something my mom also does (to an alarming degree). And, paradoxically, I find myself turning down our music, just like my mom always did when I was a teenager. I think I'm just so tired that any noise over a murmur sets me on edge. Yet I can't hear anyone when they speak at a normal volume.
Is this motherhood?

Sadie Marisa

Sadie Marisa has arrived!

She was born two weeks early, on April 10, at 2:18pm. I haven't had the time to sit down and write until now.

My labor began, in dramatic movie-style fashion, with my water breaking while I lay in bed one night reading at about 10:30pm. Nick and I quickly packed a bag and drove to the hospital, where I labored until 9am, when I was fully dilated, then began to push. But because I'd had an epidural at about 3am (my contractions had me gripping the bed rails and cursing like a sailor), I wasn't able to push very effectively at all. What followed was 5 hours of lowering my epidural dose, adding pitocin, and assuming various positions to try to better push.

Sadie was face-up, and as a result having trouble making her way through my pelvic region. She spent about 3 hours at +1 station. Most babies start out face-up, then turn as they enter the birth canal, but Sadie stayed sunny-side up. This is sometimes known as back labor, and is supposed to be especially painful. But in order for me to be able to feel enough to effectively push, they had to turn down my epidural drip, first to 5, then eventually to 0. They also gave me some pitocin to increase the frequency and intensity of the contractions. So, essentially, despite being in great pain and asking for an epidural without a second thought, I ended up having a "natural" childbirth after all.

At one point, Sadie's heart rate slowed down to a dangerous level, and I had to be consented for the anesthesiology for a C-section. For an hour or so I stopped pushing, until Sadie's heart rate came back up on its own. For the last hour of labor I pushed like champ. Once Nick saw her head and told me she had dark hair, I knew there was no going back. I pushed through the ring of fire with everything I had in me. When I finally gave that last push and saw the doctors guiding Sadie out of me, I laid back on the bed and let everyone else in the room take over.

The doctor said the umbilical cord (which was wrapped twice around Sadie's neck) was the longest he'd ever seen. I like to take that as an omen that as Sadie grows and our relationship as mother and daughter deepens, we will maintain a close and nurturing bond, but with a healthy distance between us.

Lovely Day

I took this photo a few days ago. Wish I could lounge around at home everyday with the animals.

The other day, when Nick had taken the car down to Boston to visit a friend and do some work, I took the bus to my job. This is the view from the bus stop:The photo really doesn't do justice to the fact that from the bus stop, you can see both Portland Harbor and the open ocean. It's a far cry from waiting for the bus at the Fulton Street Mall to get to Red Hook.

Actually, I feel guilty for not taking the bus more often. Nick drives me the two miles to work every day, then keeps the car so he can go out on tech service jobs in and outside of town. Our old Volvo uses up so much gas it's ridiculous--I think we go through something like 1-2 tanks of gas per week, and gas is SO expensive right now. My excuse this winter was, well, it was icy and cold and winter, and I was pregnant, and now that's it's warming up a bit, my excuse is that I'm even more pregnant, which means standing and/or walking for any length of time makes me feel like my bladder is going to implode and my baby is going to fall out from between my legs. So we continue to use our gas-guzzling car every day, even though in a city this size, it's not entirely necessary. My mom just bought a Toyota Prius, and I would love one of those. I think what we might do is try to sell the Volvo and take over my mom's old (but newer than the Volvo) Toyota Corolla. It's in decent shape, and I think the gas mileage will be much better. Last summer, I rode my bike to work most days, which took about 10 minutes. I'd like to do that again when I return to work at the end of the summer, but maybe with a baby at home I'll need a car close by for emergencies. Any working moms have any thoughts?

These are such mundane thoughts for the weeks before a new baby is coming into our lives, but unfortunately, reality doesn't seem to take a break, even in the face of an upcoming miracle.

Ninth month!

Preggo me

Here are Nick, Thumbs, and Wiley, just chilling on the couch. These lazy days will be over soon.

Here I am in my eighth month of pregnancy. This photo was taken about two weeks ago, before Nick and I went to our friend Lucinda's house for an evening of great food and meeting new friends. Just two weeks later, and I'm already bigger, rounder, and waddling more--amazing how quickly and significantly the pregnancy progresses at this stage.

 

Nesting, Part 2

Nick and I went on another Ikea run last weekend. I think we are now officially done setting up our nursery. My three brothers and their wives generously combined forces to gift us the funds to buy a comfortable nursing chair, which they all insisted we would want once baby arrives. I'm so glad we found this comfy, happy-looking overstuffed chair. It even came with a matching storage ottoman, which is key, because space is at such a premium in our one-closet apartment.

We also got the "Gulliver" crib, which was one of the least expensive cribs I'd seen out there, but also feels perfectly solid and desn't overwhelm the nursery, or become a syrupy-sweet centerpiece, like so many cribs out there have the potential to be.

Before I post the final photos, I'll give you a preview of the set-up phase. Note our weary faces. And that's Ting Tong sipping up the beer we spilled, again, just like the last time we put a baby thing together.

Compartmentalizing

Today, after... oh, only about 15 years of working in the world, I finally got my own office, complete with nameplate, a door, privacy, etc. And wouldn't you know that I moved into this enclave of workplace serenity a mere three weeks before I am scheduled to go out on maternity leave for at least three months. I'm flattered that my boss has enough faith in me to grant me an office right before my leave, but I can't help but feel sort of Alanis Morrisette about the whole thing (isn't it ironic?). I plan on returning to work at the end of the summer, out of necessity more than anything else, but I can't help but feel conflicted about the fact that I've finally landed a decent-paying job where I'm given lots of respect and leeway, only to to have it coincide with a time in my life when I'd be just as content to turn my attention entirely to staying home and raising my child. 

I've always been perfectly happy staying at home, fussing around the house. As a kid, I'd frequently feign illnesses so that I could take a break from school. It wasn't the schoolwork that wore me down, it was the incessant socializing that school requires. I've always felt the same way about jobs. The work itself has never stressed me out as much as the people one inevitably has to deal with on any job. Of course, that's just the way the world works--life, and especially business, doesn't happen in a vacuum. I think that's a lesson I didn't pick up on in school--that it wasn't just spelling words correctly or solving equations that mattered, but knowing how to interact with the other people working on those same problems that really counted. 

Virginia Woolf famously said--actually wrote a book about the idea--that a woman needs a room of one's own in order to successfully write fiction. I'd argue that a woman--at least this woman--needs a room of one's own to get just about anything done. When I was sitting in cube-land, I couldn't seem to gather my wits about me and focus on what I was doing. I don't know if it's just me, or if it's the distinctly feminine side of me, but when other people are in a room with me, I can't turn off the compulsion to be tuned in to what they're saying, their moods...and am easily affected by both. It could be some form of ADD, or some womanly habit of being tuned in to others' needs (whether I responded to them or not). But I often found that I got most of my work done only after the other women in cube-land had gone home, when I felt freed to pull in those hyper-sensitive external feelers and focus internally. 

So it strikes me as almost absurd that now that I'm finally hitting my stride, career-wise, and realizing just how essential it is for me to have privacy and solitude in the workplace, I'm also coming to the time in my life when I'll be having a child, a time when my old habits of tuning into others needs and moods are going to serve me better than at any other time of my life. I've certainly wasted years of my mothering instincts on a string of men who didn't deserve my patience and attention, and spent years in my career inadvertently allowing those same instincts to get in the way of reaching my goals. And now I find myself at a place in my life where I'll need to cultivate and nurture those instincts more than ever before, for the reasons that nature intended. So I've learned to muzzle--or at least delay--my biological impulses, yet I also have to learn to recall them at a moment's notice. Is modern life just a training ground for learning how to compartmentalize our natural instincts in such a way? Is this how evolutionary biology works?

The Calm Before the Stork*

Only five weeks to go. Before I have a baby. What a strange state of anticipation to be in. It’s different than waiting to graduate from college, or to start a new job. Because I had some idea of what life after college would be like, and some idea of what most of my new jobs would be like. But this, this is completely different. A total transformation. For me, for Nick, for me and Nick as a couple. Sometimes I can’t even believe what I’ve gotten myself into. Other times I wonder why I’ve waited so long.

Leaving work today I decided to walk home. I took my time, stopping in shops along the way. I got some buttons at the yarn store on Congress St., looked for a pack of thank-you cards at Ferdinand ($15 for 6? No way, even if they are Graham & Snow), and finally, when I realized I was too exhausted to walk the rest of the way home, stopped at Homegrown for some sniffle-kicking tea. Nick met me there, and then we decided to go out for Thai food.

When the stork finally delivers, will I ever be able to have such a non-planned, carefree Friday evening again? Probably not until the baby is 16 years old! A night like this (which was pretty tame to begin with), will, post-partum, probably require multiple arrangements with baby-sitters, Nick, me, daycare providers, and, on some level, the baby herself. They say that when the baby’s still young (like, under 6 months or so) you can pretty much take her anywhere. But once she starts to get a mind of her own, the baby’s mood, temperament, and sleep schedules are going to have a much larger say in our evening plans than whether we’re in the mood for Thai or Indian food.

I’m sure we will love spending evenings in, doing nothing but ogling our adorable baby girl. And I’m really looking forward to it. It’s just shocking to me that our old, boring, predictable life is going to change so much by bringing another life into the world. I can’t wait!

* I have to credit Nick with this heading. It's become our mantra.

Circle of Life, Part 2

Sorry for the cheesy heading, but in this case it's really apropos. My Aunt Nancy held a baby shower for me this weekend in Rhode Island, in the house next door to the one I grew up in. Her very same living room was also the site of my mom's own baby shower (for my younger brother Jay) 32 years ago. There were probably a half dozen guests at my shower who were also at my mom's shower, as was I, at 3 years old. How cool is that?
At least three of the women pictured above were at my mom's baby shower 32 years ago.

The shower was especially poignant for me because the neighborhood I grew up in has had such a deep influence on my sensibilities as I've grown from child to teenager to adult. When my parents divorced while I was in college and later decided to sell the house while I was living in San Francisco, I was heartbroken. I'd always imagined getting married there. There was a long expanse of grass with a canopy of trees that led down to the waterfront, and I pictured myself walking through the trees as if they were a church aisle, then standing at the concrete pier with my beloved and the sun setting behind me as the ceremony was performed. Alas, the house was sold, the land parceled off and built on, and the trees cut down.
A Google maps screenshot of the old neighborhood. The house in the top center of the photo is my Aunt Nancy's; the house on the far right is the one I grew up in. Laura Lane, named after my dad's mom, leads right down to a small rocky beach we swam and sailed from.

But to be able to return to the same special spot for my baby shower was just as wonderful. My cousin's girlfriend, Kate, who drove down from Boston for the shower (with my cousin Emily, of course) recognized what a special place it was right away, and I told her the story of how, at age 13, I pretended to be a mermaid swimming in the water for Emily, then aged 3. Emily was too smart to fall for it, and I remember feeling disappointed that she hadn't fallen under the same imaginary spell I was under.

A recent article in the New York Times magazine about whether kids have enough free time for unstructured play in this day and age makes me wonder if my own daughter will have the same luxury of time and resources that I did to let her mind grow with her own unsupervised, undirected thoughts. I want her to learn piano, and take dance lessons, or even play soccer
if that's what she's interested in. But I don't want her to be denied the free time to imagine herself in worlds other than the real one we're all so cruelly thrust into, whether we want to be or not.

Nesting, Part 1

Last night, after a looong day of driving back from Rhode Island and spending 2 dazed hours wandering around the Stoughton, MA Ikea, Nick and I returned home to spend another 2 hours assembling our Ikea purchase. Nick said he felt like we were in one of those movie montages where the happy couple gets the baby's room ready. It was sort of like that, except I spilled Nick's beer all over the new baby shelf-thingy we bought. The baby's not even born, and I'm already making her nursery smell like a frat-house! What kind of mother will I be?!?! Once I cleaned up the spill sage-scented cleaning fluid, the final result was heart-breakingly sweet. Only 7 weeks to go!

Nick reading the Ikea instructions. Note the precariously placed beer bottle, next to the big plywood board that was resting against the bag of baby clothes I was organizing into the Ikea bins.
Two hours later, the proud papa shows off his work.


The final result! We're going back to Ikea in a few weeks for their Gulliver crib. The changing table is in the bathroom--photo to come.

Seeing the space that will soon be where our baby lives and grows up made us both feel a little awestruck. As if seeing her baby knees and elbows transform my stomach into a bulging mass of flesh wasn't enough of a reality check, seeing an actual space that will soon be occupied by our little soon-to-be-person gave us a better sense of how our home will no longer be just ours, but will a place for our whole family, baby, pets, and all.

Let Them Eat Cake

I feel I've been remiss in not mentioning what an amazing cook Nick is. He's been especially great with this whole gestational diabetes thing, helping me stay on track with my meals and thinking up great dinners. Tonight he made us broiled mahi-mahi with Clementine oranges, butter, garlic, and rosemary, with sides of avocado, rice and broccoli. It was a delicious meal, met my current low-carb guidelines, and made me feel (for a moment) as if I were in Hawaii, not Maine, in February.

I always hoped I'd end up with a man who could cook (and liked to do so), because if mealtimes were entirely up to me, it'd be beans and rice every night for life, with the occasional plate of pasta thrown in for good measure. My poor child would grow up not knowing what properly salted food tasted like, thinking that dinner always came wrapped in a tortilla or smothered in tomato sauce. She would also think that chocolate cake was a legitimate food group, since I do like to bake, and do so pretty well upon occasion. (I also make killer pancakes, which shot my blood sugar up much too high last weekend.) But when it comes to the workaday meals that one needs to, like, survive, and get nutrients from, I'd rather someone who can actually improvise in the kitchen be the one preparing my meals. Thanks Nick! I'll gladly do the dishes.

My Growing Belly

3 months

4 months. I thought I looked big at this stage. Ha hahahahahaahahah ahahahahaha!!!!!!

5 months

6 months
7 months--taken February 20, 2008

Pics

Penney Ugland in a new light; a representative tableau of weekend days.

Tired

I'm soooooo tired. Last week, I fell asleep three times at my desk. Nick saw these on Gizmodo.com and suggested I get myself a pair. I wasn't being lazy--I swear--I am just so overcome with sleepiness that it's a struggle to keep my eyes open most days. When I met with my boss to go over an analysis I need to do to determine whether it's worth sinking a half-billion dollars into renovating the hospital, my eyes kept fluttering closed, like I was at home on the couch watching late-night television. This was while I was sipping deeply from a cup of coffee, as if it were a well run dry.

My OB says it's normal to be this tired at 7 months, so I was feeling encouraged that maybe there was a timeline on this drowsiness that permeates my life lately, but then my brother told me I could expect to feel like this for the rest of my life, once the baby was born. Please say it isn't so.

My dear Aunt Becky came to visit this weekend, and she, Nick, Ting-Tong and I went on a 2 mile walk, which probably should have been invigorating, but instead just made me want to take a nap. I yawned all through dinner at Katahdin later that night. She left Sunday, and on Monday, I slept in until noon.

My blood sugar levels have been, for the most part, in the normal range, so I don't think it has anything to do with the gestational diabetes. I think it has to do with carrying around something the size of Ting-Tong in my womb all day and night. The ultrasound today said the baby was about 4.5 pounds. Hard to believe she will be here in just 9 weeks!

Prognosis: good

I met yesterday with my diabetes educator. I’ve been checking my blood four times a day for the last 14 days, and logging every meal or snack I’ve eaten during that time. Because I’m a nerd (and work as a data analyst), I even graphed my fluctuating blood levels, and created a color-coded chart that showed when my blood levels were high and the corresponding meal that made them so. To my great relief, my counselor said my diet looked very healthy, and said my blood levels were really pretty good, even those times when they went over the 120 limit. She even suggested that some of the unusually high readings (like those times after eating plain yogurt, oatmeal, and herbal tea for breakfast) might have been caused not by high blood sugar levels, but by residue on my fingertips that the glucose monitor picked up on. Overall, she said I was doing great, and didn’t anticipate any problems with the pregnancy, or suggest that I would need to control my sugar levels with insulin injections. Thank goodness!

Counting Carbs

On Thursday afternoon I had my first consultation at the Diabetes/Endocrinology Center in Scarborough. Nick came with me, to make sure I paid attention to the dietary recommendations, and because he’s really the better cook between the two of us, so we thought it important that he be there to know what I should be eating. There were only two other women in the class with us. Both were rather large women, and had they not been in a gestational diabetes class, I would not have realized that they were six months pregnant. Neither had a discernable baby bump. One of the women came to the class late, scraping the bottom of a cup of chili from Wendy’s.

The class was much more informative than either Nick or I were expecting. The instructors gave very specific guidelines as to how many grams of carbohydrates can be consumed at each meal (45gm) and snack (15gm). I was also given a glucose testing meter, and have been instructed to check my blood four times per day. Testing my blood consists of pricking my finger with a tiny needle, called a lancet, then placing the blood drop on a small plastic receptor strip that is inserted into a glucose meter. I check my blood upon waking (the fasting level) and two hours after every meal. My first reading, two hours after my usual breakfast of whole grain cereal and soy milk, was too high. Every other reading of the past four days so far has been normal.

I stopped eating cereal, and replaced it with a breakfast of yogurt and frozen blueberries, and a fried egg and cheese on a sprouted wheat English muffin. Delicious and filling, and seems to keep my post-breakfast levels lower. The meal plan they recommend is really not so different from what I usually eat—I just have to watch my carbohydrate intake, and limit sweets. Last night for dinner, I made whole wheat penne with chicken, broccoli, and parmesan, and two hours later for dessert had an organic ice cream bar dipped in chocolate with almonds. Both are perfectly acceptable on the meal plan. Neither spiked my blood sugar levels. The trick is to count carbs and space out meals and snacks every two to three hours so that my blood sugar never has a chance to dip too low or get too high.

I’m feeling less guilty about how this happened. I realize now it’s less a problem of my diet than the fact that my body simply isn’t producing enough insulin during this period of pregnancy. The placenta blocks the absorption of insulin into the bloodstream, meaning there is more glucose traveling through my blood, and not getting into my cells, where it belongs. All I can do to counteract that fact is watch my intake of carbohydrates, so my glucose levels don’t get too high, and exercise more to burn off whatever extra glucose is leftover. Between counting carbs and walking more (I walked for two hours yesterday while doing errands), I think I’ll get this under control.

Owning Up

I thought I was reasonably healthy. I read labels, scrupulously avoid high-fructose corn syrup, and whenever possible try to eat minimally processed foods. I eat organic, whole-grain cereal with soy milk every morning. I eat red meat sparingly (once or twice a month), and I snack on things like oranges, almonds and yogurt.

But I have some bad habits. I crave chocolate almost every day at 3pm (strangely, this only happens during the workweek, not on weekends), and indulge my sweet tooth with a chocolate or two, or a few cookies. I love French fries, and would get the fries at Duck Fat at least once a week if I could, but tend to resist so that I have them only once or twice a month. And if I have chocolate ice cream in the house, I will eat it. But then again--I can buy a pint of Haagen Dasz and make it last for a week--and I am pregnant, people! So I think my dietary habits, while by no means perfect, are not horrible.

Yet, last week, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes. The good thing is that by making changes now, in the next two weeks, there should be no ill effects on the baby. What can happen is that babies can grow excessively large when the mother has gestational diabetes, necessitating a C-section. The babies can also have problems with their own blood sugar, and they are more likely to grow up to be obese and to develop Type II diabetes themselves. (Type II is also called adult onset, or late-onset diabetes.) Gestational diabetes usually disappears in the mother about 6 weeks after giving birth, unless the tests in pregnancy merely caught a previously undiagnosed case or the disease.

The frightening thing is that I THOUGHT I was being healthy, until I got the results of this test back. I know I ate a lot of extra treats over the holidays—homemade toffee, chocolates, cakes, pies, cookies, etc. etc.—and compounding the effects of this candied cornucopia was my lapse into a completely sedentary lifestyle beginning about two weeks before Christmas. I generally like to walk, whenever feasible, but with all the snow we got here in Portland, walking around outside was extremely difficult. There is no city ordinance enforcing people to shovel their sidewalks, so a day or two after a snowfall, the sidewalks in our East End neighborhood would be about three inches of treacherous ice thick. Forget about the beautiful walking paths along the Eastern Prom—they were still buried in snow. Those conditions, plus the early darkening of the sky, relegated my walks with Nick and Ting-Tong to weekends only. And even then, I’d find myself exhausted after short routes around the neighborhood.

I also stopped doing any stretches or formal yoga routines. The reason for that wasn’t clear to me, until I found out (also last week) that I’m also anemic, which explains my low energy and motivation for doing any exercise in the first place. So put the two together—the exhaustion and worn-out feeling of anemia, and the high blood sugar levels—and I have been feeling completely tired, overwhelmed, and exhausted lately. Sometimes my exhaustion manifests itself in uncontrollable crying jags that seem to come out of nowhere. Other times I feel weighed down by inertia.

Last night, Nick made me a healthy meal of broiled salmon, brown rice, and corn-crab chowder. It was delicious, and there’s no doubt it meets the requirements of my new healthy diet. But I wonder about the rest—the bean and cheese and rice burritos, vanilla yogurt, and even the soy milk I drink every day. Are they too high in sugars and carbs? Tomorrow I go for a consultation at a diabetes center, where I will be put on a meal and exercise plan. I never would have thought I’d need to be told how to take care of myself, and I feel both embarrassed and guilty. But I also feel indignant: Eighty to 90% of cases of Type II diabetes are found in people who are overweight or obese. At 6 months pregnant, I’ve gained 20 pounds, which my doctor assures me is right on target. I do have a family history of diabetes, which I only just learned about last summer, so that might explain some of this. As soon as I found out that I had gestational diabetes, I stopped eating anything with sugar in it, and was disappointed to find that three days later I’m still as tired and drawn out as I was before.

I guess this is just one more thing I can’t control with a few days’ notice, along with my growing belly and breasts, my decreasing bladder capacity, and my lessening ability to get a good night’s sleep. I think one of the hard things about having a baby later in life is that as an adult you get so set in your ways (especially as a formerly single New Yorker who did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted) that it’s hard to relinquish the control I’ve so carefully cultivated over my life and body during this last decade of being single, footloose, and fancy-free. The baby’s not even born yet, and already I have to account for my actions, even as I’m still navigating the in and outs of learning how to live with a man I’m also accountable to.

This is all new to me, and it’s all happening at once.

Week in pictures

Not a lot has been happening around here. The first full week back at the office in a while was slightly tortuous, so much so that I couldn't even drag myself in by the time Friday rolled around. Luckily, I'd brought home some files and was able to work from home before my afternoon doctor's appointment. I probably got just as much done in a morning of intense concentration as I usually do in a whole day in cube-land trying to fend off unwanted conversations from Chatty Cathy and trying to ignore the feet stomping and sighing and shouting over the top of my cubicle that comes from my neighbor, CB.

CB drinks nothing but diet soda (she claims to get her water from the ice that melts in her giant igloo/thermos that she keeps filled with Diet Coke all day). She just spent an entire week home with some sort of illness that left her dehydrated and vomiting. By Thursday, we began to notice a strong odor in cube-land. The financial manager who directs the other women I share space with had them call maintenance. I wasn't there for this part, but apparently the maintenance crew pulled open vents and looked behind every nook and cranny, expecting to find a dead rodent. Ultimately, it was Kathy from California who found the offender: a chicken sandwich, sitting in a bag under CB's desk. It had been there for a full week, including the previous weekend. Just, please, get me out of there, now.

Ok, now for the pictures. I don't know if you can tell from this first one, but we had some cold weather recently:
Wiley tried to bundle up in my maternity sweater:
I FINALLY finished my mom's scarf, and even mailed it off to her the same day:
The Penney Ugland came to visit:
And Thumbs got comfortable in her new pad:
Do NOT try to rouse her:

Practice Run

My nearly two-year-old niece Eve came over early on Sunday morning for a visit while her parents were busy with other obligations. Nick and I took her on a walk to the coffee shop, where we got her a cup of hot chocolate and shared a bagel with her. I think she felt really cool, hanging out with the big kids. Afterward, as we waited outside the shop for Nick, I rested my foot on a snowbank, and Evie did the same. Her foot was at a really awkward angle, and it couldn't have been very comfortable, but I think she just was just getting in the spirit of being a big kid.