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.