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.