I keep thinking of great ways to turn a phrase about Mia, and then inevitably being called back to duty and forgetting them before I can blog. Which is no great loss for the Internet, but makes it a bit harder to consistently produce content here. My other excuse is that the majority of my posts are written when Mia is asleep; because the packandplay/crib thing is next to my computer, I wake her up with my 70 words-per-minute clicking (ok, more like 60 now that I've switched to Dvorak). I just typed this paragraph on the iPad, and it was non-literally painful. Though apple's auto-correct isn't bad.

Luckily, Mia also loves playing in her playgym, so now that she's awake I can type this while she entertains herself. I found out that she was ready for one when we had a playdate at a friend's house, and she wouldn't stop playing with this one. I thought it was the cutest thing, but when I mentioned I wanted to get one, another friend ended up loaning us this one (not exactly, it's a few years older). My biggest lesson from baby-raising: beg and borrow, but don't buy everything you think you need. M barely uses the super-expensive swing that we got, but loves hanging out in the changing table. And she's gonna outgrow both in another month or so. You just can't know how they'll use things.

I thank the stars that she's still very independent for a baby - she looks around for us, but she'll hang out by herself for hours, which other moms tell me (with envy) is unusual. I think that's starting to change, however, with her growing awareness and sight. Now she can see me if I'm typing when she's in her crib, and will make cute or demanding noises. Since I'm not sure I'll be getting as many chances to blog, I've set up two Twitter pages: one for me, and one for her. Actually, that makes it sound like there was foresight or wisdom involved in this decision, when actually at 5am this morning my brain decided that people would stop reading my blog unless I posted more, therefore I should post more, but since posting these long, verbose pages takes writing time that is hard to find, I needed to set us up accounts on Twitter. Once I decided to do that, it let me fall asleep. I'm unused to following my brain's middle-of-the-night cravings, but I figured I'd run with it. I probably should have just eaten some leftovers instead.

Thursday's 4am brain-demand was that I wake up and offer to make C a sandwich before he left for work. It's like it decided I needed to punch feminism in the face, or something.

Month 3 has started off much better than 1 or 2. She sleeps from about 7pm to 9am, waking up twice during that and wanting to feed. Once around 2-4am, and once from 5-8am. I usually take the first, and C the second, so not only does everything feel more "fair" than it used to, we're both getting a decent amount of sleep for new parents. Although it takes us both a long time to fall asleep again once we're up - that's the really hard part. I would assume that since I'm spending 12+ hours Trying to Sleep that I'm well-rested, but it really varies day by day. The bad days I'm running on 3 hours of sleep, the good ones usually 7. So I try not to count, for fear I realize how tired I really am. Mia actually slept 9 hours straight the other day, but I couldn't take advantage of it because at 2am I woke up and waited for her to wake up, only to doze off again and wake up a half-hour later. This repeated until 5am, at which point she woke up and was starving, and I was a sleep-zombie the whole next day. It's a weird combo of having a routine and constant change as well...it means every day is different, and also that I have no idea what's coming next.

M's head control has really improved to the point where it only flops around if she's tired, so C has taken to handing her to people willy-nilly in order to make them more comfortable with babies. We both agree that it's unfortunate that in the US, by the time you're having a baby, it's not likely that you've actually had much experience with them, so the learning curve is steep. Ok, she's napping again, I have to take a break...

Ok, I shouldn't have mentioned the 7 hours thing, because the last three days it's been 6 instead. Which still sounds a bit like parent humblebragging, but man that extra hour would be soooo nice...sigh.

In any case, here is photo evidence of the double chin. If she wasn't mine, I wouldn't post such an ugly photo of her. But I think it's pretty funny. Poor M. When she starts school I'll have to archive my blog somehow and take all these things off the internet. But until then...















A friend sent a link to this article hoping to liberate me from breast-feeding guilt. It certainly worked - I feel much more ok with the idea of giving M formula, even though that is really going against the parenting tide these days. I really like the idea that assuming breastmilk is "free" gives no value to a woman's time.

We continue to have an awesome baby. The developmental changes are so welcome but subtle...she holds her head up a little more, she looks at you a little longer, her smile stays longer on her face. I think I heard her laugh the other day. It's just amazing to watch. And she is getting huge - her double chin has connected her chunky cheeks for a while now. Which is actually hard to clean, unfortunately, but I'm lucky to have such a healthy growing baby. One thing you hear a lot of from other moms is "I can't remember when my baby (no matter what their age) was that small!" And now I know why - I saw a friend's baby who is a month younger, and I said the exact same thing to her mom.

Another thing moms will say to each other is "How are you doing?" For people who haven't just had a kid, this phrase usually means you whip out your stock answer of "Great, you?" But for moms, this phrase means "Tell me about your mental state and whether you're feeling post-partum depression, and then lets talk about this in detail." It took me a bit to figure out why I was getting such puzzled looks when I automatically used the stock response.

I got pretty lucky post-partum, I think, as I only broke down crying twice. Both times felt more due to serious-lack-of-sleep/other frustrations than to hormones, but who knows. What people don't tell you about having babies is that the first month to 6-weeks is really, really hard. Fucking Brutal, in my opinion. The reason varies from baby to baby, but there's practically no one out there who has an easy first month. There are some relative differences, i.e. M usually doesn't scream her head off when she's upset, or if she does scream it doesn't last long, but that's no compensation when you are completely incoherent due to interrupted sleep. But then you somehow get over the hump, and things start getting slowly easier. For me the peak was about 3-4 weeks into it, where I felt that if everything continued going the way it was going, I wasn't going to make it. But then she started sleeping a 4-5 hour period during the night. And then she started smiling. And then breastfeeding got easier and C could start giving her a bottle, etc. And now I'm really enjoying my days again and it's such a luxury to be able to bond with my daughter like this.

We took her to Hawaii for a week, which was soooo nice. When I first bought the tickets, I thought "even if I just see the inside of two other apartments for the week, it'll at least be a change." But I got some beach time, some hangout-with-other-moms time, some lay-in-the-sun time, and my parents got more time with M. And flying with her was much easier than expected, although the first night was rough because I'd had so much pre-flight anxiety that I hadn't been able to sleep. And if you can't tell by now, because certainly I don't seem to be changing my behavior to get more of it, when I don't get enough sleep this whole thing breaks down. But other than that, it's been surprisingly easy to continue our lives, even with a new baby in the mix.

Places that I have now breastfed in that surprised me:
Michael Mina (a 1 Michelin starred restaurant)
Airplanes and Airports
The beach
My car's driver seat
Other people's apartments
Chinese restaurants
Cirque du Soleil

Mia slept 7 hours last night. SEVEN. OH MY GOD my life is AWESOME. I'm firmly in the camp of "we do not brag about wonderful things for fear they never happen again", but OMG SEVEN HOURS SLEEP. Superstition would have us repeat what we did Sunday all over again today, but that would involve C making us waffles, lazing around on the couch, C going to work while the baby and I napped, and then Cirque du Soleil. So that would get expensive to do again. Maybe I'll try the napping thing again...

Alternate titles for this entry:
Reasons she'll blame me for therapy
Might as well put her on the internet first
or
The closest I've come to peeing in my pants this year.

I can't get the animated gif to display well in Firefox, so you can find the whole thing here, or a full color video on GooglePlus.

M is spoiling us. She's such a mellow, chill baby that it makes me scared to have a second. There's no way another baby will be this good. Every now and then she'll get super gassy, and that's about the only time we have to listen to unstoppable crying, but even then it's not really all-out-crying, it's more "this is really uncomfortable and I'm going to make sounds and faces to show it." And then when she finally farts/burps/poops we're so relieved because now she'll be able to sleep...having a baby really opens your relationship to bodily functions. We've taken to congratulating each other for them, in order to be consistent for her. Except the stinky ones...those we still try to hide. But for the most part, once you've had a diaper change misfire and start running down your leg (jeans for C, bare leg for me), you really relax about the whole thing and get much less grossed out by it. Last night was a go-thru-two-diapers-and-the-whole-changing-pad type of change, and I just nonchalantly rinsed her off in the kitchen sink before we went back to bed. The most surprising thing to me is how fast this confidence develops - 2 weeks ago I barely knew how to pick up a baby or change a diaper and I was terrified of bathing them. Now I can do 2 out of 3 before she even wakes up completely.

The first week home for the hospital, we had friends over every night, and they brought take-out. I had no idea how helpful this is, and now I feel bad for not doing it for friends who had babies earlier. We were just getting settled into our new routine, so I could barely think twice about food, and having ready-made plans and food show up was AWESOME. They got to meet the baby, we got adult conversation, and everyone got fed...everyone won. Especially when they brought extra and I could eat it for breakfast and lunch :)

We've been mostly using disposable diapers with occasional naked time on a waterproof pad and the occasional cloth diaper, but I'll probably try to start EC soonish. She's amazingly competent at sensing when a diaper comes off and pooping immediately, which seems like it'll work well for EC, though it makes changing her diaper an anticipatory stand-off. I finally caved and bought a changing table from IKEA, and it does make things easier. We were fine using the dining table, but changing time is now much less fraught with worry if I go wash hands mid-chnge. Besides, C wanted one, and since he's been doing a majority of the changing, he gets what he wants. So on the front of avoiding baby furniture and stuff, my big caves have been a swing (not used much yet, hear it comes in handy soonish...), a pack-and-play (used as a crib), and the changing table (foldable). Not too bad so far. The pack and play is super useful - I'd figured we'd all just co-sleep (baby in our bed), but the first night made it clear that I can't sleep with her that close to me - instead I'll lie awake all night neurotic with "is she still breathing?" worries, which once again everyone always says, and I didn't listen to. In my defense, you can't know how you're going to react to your own baby. We've napped together successfully in bed, but at night I find it much easier with her in the pack and play near our bed.

Everyone asks about the sleep, so here's the low down - as a breastfeeding mom, I get to sleep about every 2-3 hours, as much as I want to as long as it's in intervals, because she eats every 1-4 hours now. So a typical night time is getting ready for bed around 10pm, letting her eat as much as possible, then going to bed while C changes her and swaddles her and puts her in the bassinet/pack-and-play. At first she'd wake up at midnight, 2am, 4am, 6am, 8am, etc. and want to be fed, and feeding would take about 20-30 minutes. After 3 days when my milk came in, I started (unintentionally) waking up when she's stirring, getting her, changing her, feeding her, re-swaddling her and occasionally letting her fall back asleep on my chest before putting her back down and going back to sleep. C is totally willing to do the nighttime changes and burping, and I know some couples do this as a way to keep things "fair", but in my mind it doesn't make a ton of sense since I'm already used to the interrupted sleeping from pregnancy (I was waking up every few hours to pee) and am going to be up anyways. So C mostly handles the day changing and burping instead. In any case, like I mentioned before, the first night home from the hospital with the every-2-hour feedings was really rough, but since then the feedings have spaced out and become almost pleasant. I can't say I love getting up, but I'm happy after that. She rarely cries during the whole thing, and now the timing is more 10pm feeding, 1am, 4am, 7am, with feedings taking 10-20 minutes. Last night was 10pm, 2am, 6am, 9am...which was awesome and I hope keeps up. As long as I remember to get a nap in during the day, I feel pretty rested, but on the days that I forget or have to skip a nap I tend to crash around 8pm.

After a month, the breast-feeding advocates say that you can start using bottles/artificial nipples, but we've been doing so well weight-gain wise we may start earlier so that C can take a feeding or two. It's been going relatively well, in comparison to some horror stories I've heard, though it still hurts a bit when she first latches. However, my breasts have developed a mind of their own. I keep asking C if this is what being a guy is like. When she cries, or it's feeding time, or sometimes for no reason that I can tell, They'll start tingling and leaking breastmilk. It's pretty common, but certainly new to me, and occasionally I'll just stare in bewilderment as I start dripping on the carpet. Sleep-bras are very, very useful. I should have ignored the nursing bras and just bought more sleep bras, which are basically easy-access sports bras. Much more comfy. But the nursing bras are useful for going out in public, so they aren't all bad, and they remind me that I used to care about what I was wearing more than "can I whip my breasts out to feed when I'm wearing this?" Priorities!

I typed most of this while wearing her in a Hotsling, though now our visiting family is over and holding her. Baby-wearing is wonderful - you can do almost every activity you do pre-baby with them next to you, and it keeps them happy and content. We're going out to a fancy family dinner tonight, and probably someone will be holding/wearing her the whole night. So far we've gone out for dinner, dim sum, and lunch each once, and it's gone really smoothly. Best baby I've had so far.











I can has your nose!

Baby-g was born Friday the 14th, saving her from ever having to have a Friday the 13th birthday party. 7lbs, 14.5 oz. If you want to hear the labor story, you'll have to ask, because it's the one preggo thing that I am not planning on blogging about. It was possibly the hardest thing I've ever done, and completely worth it. Also, having a doula was definitely the right choice for us.

We've had a rough two nights since we've been home from the hospital, with the intermittent sleeping and tag teaming comforting a crying baby. But today she's sleeping crazy amounts like the first 24hrs of her life, so I had to wake her up to feed just now, because I couldn't sleep. Engorged breasts are ridiculous things. In any case, as I was holding my zonked out daughter and feeding her, I realized that I couldn't have asked for a happier life, even amidst all this sleep deprivation. Having a child is an amazing thing.

I'm not in labor, and there is no external baby yet. ARGH.

Monday started off at 2am with a 8-hour run of 5-20 minute apart contractions. Surprisingly enough, neither of us got much sleep. I was pretty jazzed, actually, hoping for a 10-10-11 birthday, and they weren't that hard to breathe through, so in between me breathing and C using the acupressure points that our doula had shown us, we double-checked that our bags were packed and were ready to call the OB & doula and head to the hospital once they got to the one-minute-contraction-every-5-minutes point. But they never got there. I paced around the apartment, spent a lot of time sitting (i.e. the toilet), took a warm bath, ate a big delicious breakfast of leftover Burmese food, and C checked in code for work. We even played Portal 2 for a bit. And then we went back to bed when it was clear at 10am that I wasn't having any more contractions.

Contractions feel very much like muscle cramps, which makes sense, given that's what they are. You can't really control them, most of the time you feel it coming on, there's no way to predict/control your reaction to the clenching, and when it's over you'll still feel some lingering soreness in your muscle. For me, having C push on the two acupressure points in my lower back decreased the cramp sensation by about 50%. The points are very close to the dimples in your lower back, so I could do it by myself occasionally, or use the two-tennis-balls-in-a-sock trick.

In hindsight, Monday morning was an example of false or pre-labor, but at the time it certainly seemed like it was the real thing. In our case, the two pertinent specifics that we either didn't remember or know are that real labor "progresses" - the contractions get less spaced and increase in length, and that in real labor the pain tends starts higher in the stomach, whereas in false labor the pain tends to be felt in the groin/lower abdomen. C was timing them using an iPhone app, and they seemed pretty consistent, but I guess the lack of progression was what should have tipped us off. There was bloody show, which did make me think it was real, but my water didn't break...basically there are all these things that contribute to labor that happen in no particular order, and there's no way to know for sure besides the non-exact checklist of how many of them have happened. So I totally understand why tons of women end up getting sent home from the hospital because they aren't actually in labor - it's so easy to think it's the real thing! We spent the rest of Monday in a dazed anti-climactic funk - like "What the hell, body, we totally could have been sleeping."

Before Monday, I'd been pretty content to let the pregnancy ride go as long as necessary before it happened naturally. But now I'm getting kind of antsy thinking "when is it going to happen???" The contractions I've had since then have been a bit more intense, but much less predictable when they happen, and I'm not very patient with waiting. Knowing that it could happen any time makes me hesitant to do anything...which is a waste of time. So I've been making myself do things to try and fight that. C's mom came over yesterday and we walked to lunch and a bakery, and then I finished another novel and got some real sleep last night, so I think I'm recovered from the Monday all-nighter and less anxious about having it HAPPEN ALL READY. Maybe :)

I'm not in labor, and haven't had the baby yet. I basically start off every conversation with that statement these days. Especially phone ones with my family.

...

Things people have said to me that I should get an award for not punching them afterwards:
1. Excuse me, your water just broke.
2. Oh my god, you're Huge!
3. You're gonna pop any day now. (2 months to go at that point)
4. Wow, you're really waddling. (From an engineer, almost excusable)

At least I've been spared the comments about how-there-must-be-two-babies in there, or questions about how much weight I've gained, or other mom-to-be pet peeves. Turns out, you should be very careful talking to pregnant women. Some of the best conversation starters that people have used are open-ended questions: how are you doing/feeling/etc. This lets me either talk about being pregnant or not, because sometimes I get sick of talking about it all the time.

Our doula is semi-new to the doula-ing, but she's also a current yoga teacher, so the two prenatal visits I had with her were combination visits/private yoga instruction. It didn't help my pelvic pain like I was hoping it might, but I did realize that yoga and birth are very similar. (I'm biased because I'm actually don't like practicing yoga, though I do like the results: increased strength/flexibility/balance/etc) In my mind, they both involve holding uncomfortable positions and breathing through the muscle burning and thoughts of "I want to stop doing this now". So, good practice for birth.

Last night was a bit exciting - I had a decent run of contractions pretty close together around 6am. But then I got up and ate a NY bagel with an indecent amount of cream cheese on it, read the internet for a while, and went back to bed. I will forever be grateful to AK for making me realize that I don't have to continue using a middle-school-girl amount of cream cheese on my bagels, because 1) it makes no damn difference to my weight and 2) it makes an amazing amount of difference to my happiness.

Being on pregnancy leave has been awesome so far - I've made it through a bunch of books, played too many games on the iPad, read a lot of the internet, had fun lunch dates with friends, and haven't even started Portal 2 yet. I haven't driven myself crazy with boredom yet, nor nested myself into exhaustion, so it's been better that I thought it would be. Turns out that I can still find things to procrastinate besides work, which makes everything else more fun. Though my houseplants are possibly suffering, because now I procrastinate paying bills and watering my plants. Hopefully it's making them stronger instead.

My nesting keeps taking on weird forms - it's way more theoretical than actual. I'll think about something a lot, then eventually do it and forget about it. I've already made quite a few Goodwill runs, but today we pulled out everything in the guest bedroom closet and re-ordered it, found more things to donate, shoved our dusty hiking/camping/climbing gear in less valuable closet real estate, and now I'm going through the piles of clothing trying to marshal them into some semblance of order. I've been thinking about doing this for 3 weeks at least, planning out where things should go, and trying to figure out what the daily routine will need.

At first I was convinced that we didn't have enough clothes for Baby-G and needed to buy some, but it turns out that people totally give you stuff, both new and used, so she has way more awesome/cute clothes than I do now. (Thanks awesome people!) And people with kids somehow find you in order to clean out their closets, so if you're not too gendered with your clothing options, you can easily find yourself overloaded with kid stuff. Our friends adopted a kid 4 months ago, and he's outgrowing his clothes at a ridiculous rate, so we practically have a steady stream of clothing coming our way every few months. My major dilemma with the clothing is how to sort it: size, function(pj or going-out wear), or preference(soft/fuzzy/adorable). Such a quandary!

Squeamish alert - more fluid talk starting. One of the moms in my group that has already given birth was telling me that when she was giving birth she had to pee so bad but couldn't, so the nurses catheterized her twice, and she was so grateful both times. At first I felt horrified sympathy, but now I totally understand why she was grateful. The more Baby-G drops, the harder it is to use the bathroom - think old man with prostate issues, and that's my at-least-5-times-a-night routine. I have much more sympathy for men with prostate issues now.

Ok, back to sorting.

Saw the OB today - now that I'm past week 36 I have weekly appointments with her until I give birth. The general schedule is: first 2 trimesters = once a month appointments, starting Week 30 they become twice a month, and Week 36 they are once a week. Usually the appointments involve peeing in a cup to test protein(pre-eclampsia) and sugar(gestational diabetes) in the urine, testing blood pressure and weight, listening to the heartbeat with a Doppler, then 5-10 minutes of talking to the doctor about any questions. Now that I've hit the weekly appointments they're now also checking fundal height(belly circumference), placement (engaged or not), and the fun one: dilation and effacement. Basically, the doctor feels up your cervix. C has been pretty game about coming with me to almost all of my appointments, which seems really rare - most of the other women in the waiting room are there alone, so I get to feel pretty special.

I'm also 2 cm dilated, which first doesn't mean anything and yet is 1/5th of the way there - at 10cm you're ready to push the baby out, and most of the hard work is getting from 5cm to 10cm. I don't know what I should visualize - some books say to think about your cervix as a flower opening in order to start labor. Since I've got two more weeks until 39, should I think about a flower in stasis? The existential questions are the hardest ones :) The real reason it doesn't mean anything, though, is that the average baby is born late. How is that possible? Statistics! Don't forget, average can imply the median, the mode, or the mean. In this case, the mode is a few days late, and the numbers are also wonky because more than 2 weeks late usually gets induced. However, this means I'm going to start keeping a towel in the car, because it really could be any time now. Scary and exciting and nervous all at the same time!

Baby-G is now officially considered term, which doesn't actually mean anything. I think there's a decreased chance of her needing the NICU if born now, Alphamom says we're full term starting Week 38, but Wikipedia says that there's still risk of underdeveloped lungs/immune system/brain until Week 39, so I guess we're not fully out of the woods yet. Which is ok - she hasn't dropped/lightened(hah, what a term) yet, so I don't feel like birth is imminent, even though I'd like it to be. Lightening, when the baby descends into the pelvic cavity, is also called baby drop or head engagement, which is funny to read about because the phrase "torpedoes engaged!" comes to mind. Supposedly after lightening you can breath easier and eat more, but it's harder to pee and poo. This doesn't seem like a good trade-off to me right now, but it is a necessary one to get to the birth, so all I can do is wait for it and hope the phase doesn't last long.

It's been too hot (high-70s outside, so high-80s inside our place at 4pm) and I've been snappish for the last week. Luckily it has cooled down for the weekend, but temperatures are predicted to go back up for next week, and I'm hoping they don't. I've really appreciated having a gloriously cool summer, though SF tends to stay pretty stable temperature wise regardless of season, but hot days are very linked to grumpitude. I'm just thankful that our place has much more insulation than my old place - since old buildings in SF tend to have single pane windows, no insulation, and no A/C, my old top floor apartment had 20 degree differentials between outside and in, and I'd spend hot days lying on the kitchen tile trying to cool down. I've only had to do that once at our new place, and it's much more comfortable when you're not pregnant.

I finished up my last project at work, so I have a week to wrap up my year-review and organize/archive my files so that my team can access them, and then I start pregnancy leave next Friday. I'm already feeling bored. While I first thought "Sweet! Two weeks of vacation before the baby comes!" I imagined walking daily to the crazy-popular bakery a mile away and eating and reading, but now that I can't walk that far, my imagination is failing me on how I'm going to pass the time. I've definitely got tons of books to read, and Portal 2 (I saved it for this), and the ever-present internet, but I think a lot my minor activities are enjoyable simply because they're procrastination of work, and since I can't go play soccer or climb, I don't know what I'm going to do with my time. It kind of reminds me of being a kid and looking forward to summer vacation, and then realizing after a few days that you're bored and don't know what to do with yourself. The whole not-being-very-mobile or able to stand for very long makes much more of an impact on daily life than I've ever given it credit for. Just like everything - you only stop taking it for granted when it's taken away from you.

It's 5 am, and I can't sleep. I'd been worried that I wasn't feeling Baby-G move nearly as much as last week, but I'm worried no longer, because the last hour has been all movement. As babies hit the last month, all of their organs and bone structure have developed, but they're still skin and bones and immature lungs. While they pack on the fat and the lungs develop, they get large enough to start finally displacing amniotic fluid, which is absorbed back into the mother's body. This results in less fluid for them to move around in, which changes the way it feels to the mother. I'd say it's like she used to practice Kung Fu and now has taken up Tai Chi.

As we were getting ready for bed, I was looking at the toilet longingly, and C said "You just went." "I know," I told him, "but it feels like I have to go again." Unfortunately, when there's a little foot massaging your bladder, it feels like you constantly need to go to the bathroom. I know I haven't drunk any water in the last 6 hours, and that I've gone 3 times in the last 3 minutes that I've been up, but it feels like I still need to go. Occasionally it feels extremely urgent and pressing, but it's just her body weighing upon my squished bladder. Do your Kegels. Besides the sexual benefits, they're a lifesaver in the last month as you try to prevent yourself from peeing at the slightest movement, and I've had multiple mom's tell me they prevent uterine prolapse when you're older.

I have so, so, so much more respect for moms now. Before I used to think "Whatever, it's a personal choice that you have to live through. You make your bed, you lie in it." Etc. etc. from my former hard-ass self. I think I have now probably stopped taking for granted the fact that when I was born, my mom had to go through all-of-this. On my 30th birthday this year I called my mom and thanked her. Because holy shit, this pregnancy thing is hard. I lucked out and had a ridiculously easy first and second trimester, and I still have come to that conclusion.

I finally talked to the HR company that handles leave-of-absences, and yesterday a "case-manager" called me back to verify dates/info/etc. I'd already gone over this info the day before with another staffer, but hey, I know bureaucracy, I've worked here going on 6 years, I'm cool, I can talk it over again. They already had wanted me to call only two weeks in advance of my expected leave date in order to simplify paperwork, so I was expecting them to have other arcane needs. Except this one won the most awkward conversation of the year award. She asks me my height and weight, and then apologetically tells me I don't need to answer either of those if I don't want to. I ask her whether she wants pre-pregnancy or current weight. She says she thinks she is asking for current weight. She asks me the gender of my future child. She asks if I'm planning on having a vaginal birth. I'm not sure if it was her, or me, or the phone connection, but I wanted her to be confident, clear and concise in her questions, and I wasn't getting it. I gave up when she asked "So...have you been feeling any symptoms of pregnancy?"

I thought this:
"You mean besides the bloating, thicker head hair, less body hair, softer skin, fast-growing nails, constant yet intermittent elimination, ginormous belly, excess fluids (including drool - I didn't mention that one in the last blog entry), increased hunger, grumpy-ass mood when dealing with phone-tards, and pelvic pain? Or the living, growing, BEING IN MY BELLY? Why no, no symptoms at all."
I said this:
"You mean besides the huge belly?"

I then passively-aggressively gave her 3-out-of-5 ratings in the phone survey afterwards instead. Apparently if you want to talk to me, come bearing ice cream.

***

I don't have a 9/11 story besides waking up at my dorm in college, seeing the TV on in Clam Lounge and just watching the news in dazed confusion. But I do have an atomic bomb story, because without the atomic bomb, I wouldn't be here. I don't think about this often, but when I do, I'm thankful for the Manhattan Project, which is a confusing thing to be thankful for. In WWII, the Japanese occupied Malaysia in the same timed offensive as their attack on Pearl Harbor. My mother's father made the mistake of giving money to the Malaysian resistance. They made the mistake of writing down his name. He was taken to a Japanese POW camp and tortured. The specifics that my mom told me a long time ago, besides the typical starvation and desperation, was that he was forced to drink water, and then the soldiers would jump on his stomach or beat him until the water came out. I always used to wonder why the phrase "Chinese Water Torture" was so culturally endemic in America, when the Japanese version seemed so much more effective.

Without the atomic bomb, most likely my grandfather would have died in that camp, instead of surviving to be released and fathering my mom and two more girls. Even though he survived, my mom referred to him as having been broken by the camp, though she only could have known the broken version. She sounds almost relieved when she talks about his death. This is what torture does. It breaks people - that's the point. Knowing this, when I first read about the Geneva Convention in school, I was so thankful that humanity had come far enough, or reached such a dark state and recovered, that it knew better than to ever do it again. And this is why it makes me so ashamed to live in a country that openly broke and possibly no longer follows the Conventions. Not having any more Great War survivors is irrelevant when we can't even remember the lessons from WWII.

My family knows first-hand what torture does, how useless it is, and that it is self-propagating. The individual impact of any country's torture policy is never forgotten. The small jabs in my bladder from my unborn daughter would be barely noticeable to my grandfather, but they do make me think of him, and hope that the future generations will similarly be able to get past the torture we continue to inflict, the wars we continue to wage, and the mistakes we are doomed to repeat.

And the countdown continues! 5 more weeks to go, and Baby-G weighs about 5+ pounds now. I've gotten some feedback from female friends that this chronicling has been useful/informative, and I'm very glad it's more than just an excess of navel gazing, because wow it's a lot of navel gazing. Unfortunately, this feedback has just encouraged me to take the over-sharing to the next level, since I've been putting off an entry regarding the more gross parts of pregnancy for the fear of scaring off my loyal readers. I'll throw in the caveat that every pregnancy is different, so what I'm experiencing is no guarantee of what you'll experience, or even what I'll experience for my second child. This is why I'm not particularly worried that re-reading these entries will scare me off from having any more children, as I'm starting to understand that all-of-this is totally worth it. Once again...if you're squeamish, you may want to stop reading this here.

Let's talk about fluids. When I first was reading about the different stages of pregnancy, a few of the women writers made a big deal about the fluids that end up coming out at one point or another, and I brazenly passed it off as normal female squeamishness about bodily functions. Can I just say I was wrong? Because wow, there are a lot of fluids involved, and I'm not even in labor. It's gotten to the point where I've wondered if my water has broken at least 3 times in the last month, and if I hadn't been reading other mom-blogs, I would think I was either completely abnormal and/or be going to the ER non-stop. Take your normal female output and multiply it by a factor of 10, and you'll understand why no preggo is going commando. The big guidebook o' pregnancy that the hospital gave us says that some extra fluid is your body preparing for the baby, i.e. baby-lube, but I think my body may need anxiety meds because it is definitely overdoing it. It also swings the other way once the baby is born, and then you suffer from vaginal dryness. Yay. Most of the time, bodies amaze me by being such intricate, finely integrated systems...but this time I'm thinking "WTF body?" New this week and also in the fluids category - swollen hands and feet, unless I spend a large portion of the day horizontal. I'm no longer wearing my wedding ring, so if you see this, don't start worrying we're in trouble. As C says, "It's pretty obvious you're taken."

I finally packed a bag for the hospital. I've been itching to do so since week 30, but I thought that would be a bit crazy, so I waited. Now that it's packed, I feel much more prepared and ready to go, though I'll probably still be thinking "I need to go get some soft ginger chews!" when the time comes. I spent about 30 minutes going "Awwwwww" when picking out the possible outfits that Baby-G will come home in, because they're just that cute and tiny, and I packed multiple outfits in case she's early, normal, or huge. And then I sat down and wondered who I'm turning into for the hundredth time. Regarding the aforementioned fluids, bag-packing guides on the internet say a variety of things about how much of your stuff you should pack, and how much you should just use the hospital's, and basically it all boils down to this: will you still want your stuff back if fluids get on it? And in this case, I'm using fluids as a very general term meaning some combination of blood, mucus or other secretions, amniotic fluid, piss, poop, and meconium - which gets it's own designation because when they say it's black, tarry, and staining, they really mean it. If so, you should bring it, and if not, you shouldn't. This applies to towels, pillows, robes, clothing, and even socks. (I'm bringing C's socks. He needs new ones anyways.) In general, most people seem to agree that bringing your own pillows is worthwhile, as it's hard to sleep on the hospital's plastic-covered pillows (see earlier discussion on fluids), and you obviously need your sleep, but my conclusion is that you shouldn't bring expensive or valued things as they may never be the same*. I used to assume that you could sequester your good stuff from the dreaded fluids, but these guides seem to laugh at that idea, so I'll have to keep you posted on that part. When I went to the store to pick out a supply of pads for post-baby bleeding/healing, I was tempted to get the Depends that one woman had recommended, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. This is a sign that I still haven't let go of the pre-kid tendency to try and hold onto your dignity. Did you know they now make Depends in orange? In case white is too diaper-like, I think. They call it "soft peach".

*This probably applies to most stuff that you own pre-kids - it may or may not survive the next phase of your life.

As the last insult to dignity today, I'm going to talk a small bit about hemorrhoids. Unfortunately, the internet says they're very common during pregnancy, especially during the third trimester. There's not much you can do about them besides pop the baby out, so hopefully they aren't painful. And that's about all I can say. My blog = best birth control method developed yet. But hopefully, you can read about all-of-this without being too scared off from pregnancy, because you shouldn't be. Like I said earlier, there's no guarantee what your version of it will be like, just like everything else in life. There's no way to predict if you're fertile, going to be a good parent**, or going to have an easy time of it until you try. You may have a much harder first trimester, and a much easier third. Or you may have smooth sailing all the way through. (Those women don't tend to write blogs, though, because of the hate mail.) Remember, I still want y'all to have kids someday. Soon, preferably, so mine will have cool playmates. Otherwise we'll get the movie Idiocracy, and we already have people in this country feeding their babies Mt. Dew.

**Hint: If you're worried about it, you'll be a fine parent. Bad parents don't worry about being bad - that takes self-awareness.

6* more weeks to go! This is exciting - I'm starting to think about buying my new non-bellied self clothes again, though the prevailing wisdom of my mom's groups seems to be "9 months to put it on, 9 months to take it off." Immediately after the birth, they say to expect to wear clothes from when you're 6 months pregnant. No celebrity expectations here...which unfortunately means I should hold off from shopping just yet. Other revelations from meeting other moms (stop reading now if you're squeamish): you can expect to spot bleed off/on for about a month after birth, you'll be incontinent for about a week afterwards, and the mesh panties the hospital will give you are awesome for healing and also a form of birth control in and of themselves. Which is interesting - normally when I hear the phrase "mesh panties" I think "sexy-time"...so I'm super curious what hospital-grade mesh panties are like.

* Plus or minus a few weeks, but it's a goal I can at least see.

On my dr's recommendation I bought a pregnancy support belt to try and help the pelvic girdle pain, and it seems to help a bit, but the main factor is still how much time I spend on my feet, and I'm really bad at stopping what I'm doing to go sit down. Yesterday I really overdid it; after meeting another group of expecting mom's and hanging out for 3 hours, I then went on a walk with one who had her baby back in July. Today is not the best day due to that foolishness, but I'm still pretty upbeat about the whole thing, even with the pain. The Bi-Rite S'more Ice Cream pie that C brought me for my birthday helps a lot.

We're going to interview a doula next week - a few friends have sworn by their services, and though we'd met some at a hospital meet/greet and thought we'd be fine without one, after the hellish week-o-pain two weeks ago, C changed his mind. I was on the fence anyways, as it'd be nice to have a trained caregiver there so that when C needs a break I won't be left alone, but also thought it was a luxury that we didn't need. But after that week I realized how easy it is to completely change your mind in the face of actual pain, and also that someone who can help me maintain a positive mood could be a game-changer. The studies are pretty convincing that women birthing with the support of doulas have far less interventions than those without, and I think as first-timers it's useful to have someone backing you up and reminding you of your "plan", especially when your minds are totally elsewhere dealing with contractions. Although I am hesitant to call it a "plan", because that indicates a certain level of expectation, and down that road lies certain disappointment. When I read stories of women who are disappointed about their children's births (and some of them end up going to therapy for this), I feel so sad that they can't see the birth as a "natural" birth. Even if I end up needing pitocin or an epidural or a C-section, I'll still get Baby-G out of it...this is still a winning proposition and 100% natural. In any case, if hiring a doula can help us, it definitely seems like the right choice. There's a small part of me that says "this is the role family should play", but honestly, just because they're family doesn't mean they're necessarily the best people to help you through birth (I love you Dad!), and it'll be nice to be able to really let loose without worrying about destroying long-term relationships. I worry enough about saying mean things to C - in a lot of the birth videos women end up yelling at their husbands. Which is fair and not fair at the same time.

In my mom's meeting yesterday we watched a video called the 3 R's, which was basically a 15-min documentary about 6 different women in labor, and helps get you comfortable with the range of movements/sounds that are completely normal to make. I'm still not super comfortable with all the vocalizations, but that's the idea. There was one woman that I was actually very uncomfortable watching, because she was making such sheep-like bleating noises, until she said through the bleating "I'm.... yoooooodeeeeelling..." and it immediately turned the mood from awkward to funny. Hopefully I can keep a similar semblance of humor through the upcoming marathon...although I have to admit, my innate machismo keeps telling me "this is going to be a piece of cake!" It's only the realistic part of me that admits that I'm going to need every bit of strength and support I've got. We'll see who's correct in a few more weeks.

People keep asking me why pregnant women always have a hand on their bellies. For a while the Gap Maternity online catelog was an excellent example of this, but now I don't have an easy visual reference to direct you to. In any case, for me, the reason is that I can feel Baby-G's movements much better through my hands than my internal organs, and I spend a lot of time in complete curiosity asking "What the hell is she doing in there???" As a result, C and I also spend a lot of time handling my belly and trying to guess what baby-part is poking out this time. There are so many positional permutations it makes this new game very hard to win, and I spend a lot of time trying to understand how the lumps could possibly be attached to each other. I also feel like Baby-G has discovered that my belly button is a weak spot, and spends a lot of her time trying to turn it from an innie to an outie, so a lot of time I'm trying to move her foot/hand/elbow away from it. Not because it's painful, just because it's somewhat disconcerting to see your belly button grow an inch suddenly, and it's an odd feeling as well. And because manipulating her is fun.

Speaking of pain, my last entry was pretty grumpy, and I wasn't any better through the last week and a half, but I think it's been getting better. One of the many non-fun parts of the third trimester for me is the development of Pelvic Girdle Pain. Basically, transitioning from sitting to lying down to standing hurts my crotch. Rolling over in bed can also cause pain, as can too much walking. It got to the point last week where continuously dealing with pain had completely disintegrated my desire to give birth without an epidural, and I would have taken any amount of pain drugs possible had they been within arms reach. Luckily, sharply dropping how much time I spend on my feet and walking has decreased the pain's intensity and brought back some semblance of resolve. I also had acupuncture on Friday and am going again today - I am a firm believer in the placebo effect, and for me, it seems acupuncture helped. It doesn't matter whether I attribute the decreased intensity, or the better mood, or the ability-to-deal to acupuncture, I'll take whatever works. (However, I'm still scared-to-death of chiropractors. Basically I tried going to a chiropractor years ago to get rid of residual RSI. Now I can crack my neck in 5 different places by turning my head a certain way, and I don't consider this a good thing.) Besides, acupuncture is the closest one gets to an insurance-covered massage.

We had a Newborn Parenting class yesterday, which was somewhat useful. We both have been reading so many books about babies that I think most of it was redundant for us, but it was fun to learn the best way to pick up, diaper, and swaddle a baby hands-on with a baby doll. It was like h.s. health class, for 40-year-olds(I think we were the youngest in the class), and as the teacher said, "If you really need your 8-hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep, y'all made a huge mistake ~8 months ago." We chatted with another couple who don't have any family around and both felt really grateful that we'll have such awesome support from our families and friends. Though did you know that 1 in 4 babies come out with poop on them? This is why only C and I will be in the delivery room. Ew. Anyways. The class was from noon to 5pm, and they gave a lunch break at 2:30, so I was dreading what we'd find at the tiny, deserted cafeteria on a Sunday afternoon, but they actually had jook! (AKA Congee, or Chinese rice porridge.) And it was good! I was unreasonably excited by this, but I could have guessed it'd be decent by the number of Chinese cafe workers. C had made us egg/bacon/english muffin sandwiches for breakfast, and after the class we were just in time to grab seats at a Japanese Izakaya that has the best ramen in the city, so by my metrics it was a good Sunday.

We found a pediatrician recommended both by our Dr. and friends that adopted a baby 3 months ago, and the office is even walkable from our apartment. They had a parent-meeting last week, since they only accept new patients while they're in-womb as a way to control how many new patients they take. The nurse that met us after-hours and talked to us was pretty reassuring, and our friends can't praise the Dr. enough, so I'm content with only "interviewing" one practice. Our friends also dropped off a mother-load of newborn clothes that their baby no longer fits, so I'm not worried that Baby-G will come home from the hospital naked anymore. I think she now has more outfits than I do, and certainly has way more hats.

According to our pediatrician, everyone who wants to be around babies before they're 6 months old should get a pertussis vaccine, and the new flu shot for this year. You may be able to get these at any drugstore - Walgreens definitely has them. I'm not sure how vigilant we'll be with Baby-G, most likely we'll still let you hold her if you haven't been vaccinated, but it'll definitely reduce our anxiety if you're already vaccinated, especially since our pediatrician has already had one newborn die from pertussis, and CA has called it an outbreak. Blame it on all the friggin crazies down here that refuse to vaccinate their kids. That's what I'm doing. I also have to go get the vaccine and flu shot, though I have to wait until she's born, as we had no idea that you were supposed to do this before you start trying. A few of the mom's in my mother's group are anti-vaccine, and I really have to bite my tongue whenever the subject comes up, since debating it is about as useful as proselytizing religion, and I need mom-friends more than converts.

When I used to hear summaries about pregnant friends, the typical comment was "She's a little grumpy now that she's in her third." And I used to think "For a damn good reason!" This is now verified by my own experience. I'm super moody, spottily tired, and swinging from 100% confidence that everything is going to be alright and becoming a mom will be awesome to 5% confidence in myself and being convinced that this is way too overwhelming and OMGs I'm not ready for this! I've been also going on work binges where I get a ton of stuff done and finish at midnight, to getting nothing done for 3 straight days except beating another video game level. I've got the "nesting" thing going on as well, but it's less "let's buy a bunch of furniture" and more "let's throw out everything that we don't use, make sure the pantry is fully stocked, strip and re-season my cast iron pans, and wash everything else in baby-safe detergent 6 times." Although I did buy a baby toilet seat thing. The grumpiness is harder to describe - C says he hasn't noticed me being out of sorts, but I'm not getting the same joy out of my days that I normally do, so things definitely feel off. I also can't understand how I am sooooo hungryyy allll the time, and yet also uninterested in eating. Lately it's this chore that I have to do to get the energy to do other things. I suppose it's better than my fears that I was going to turn into a gluttonous gourmand, which would get expensive. I guess my grumpiness mostly feels like constant indigestion/heartburn, hunger, and apathy towards food. We did get to go to a nice dinner for our anniversary, which I really enjoyed, but mostly I've been walking around just being grumbly about life.

We had our first class at the hospital that we'll have Baby-G at, and it was useful for a lot of reasons. First, it made me realize that what I'd thought was the hospital is just one part of it, and that the Labor and Delivery campus is about 10 min West instead. Second, we watched videos of actual births and I was totally distressed by them, but in retrospect they were the most useful part of the class, because it's hard to be in denial about what going into labor is going to be like after that. Third, somewhat of an aside, I realized that I may not actually want to become a nurse someday, because one of the women in the videos was extremely negative during her labor, and I don't know how to be supportive for that attitude, though I imagine you can learn like any other skill. Our other classes are a Newborn Parenting class and one on Breastfeeding, though those are only 5 and 3 hours instead of the 8 hours that was the Childbirth Prep class. 8 hour classes are exhausting! I'd say all the material they covered in the class was stuff I'd already read either in the ginormous book they gave us at the hospital or the midwife/pregnancy books that I've read, but it was useful to go through the ice cube exercises and in general reassuring to be in a class with a bunch of other pregnant couples. I expect the other classes to be a bit more useful in subduing first-time fears with hands-on teaching, because it's a bit easier to simulate holding/feeding/swaddling a baby than actually going into labor. We're also going to meet some doulas, taking a hospital tour, and hopefully will sign up for an infant CPR class at some point. I can't believe there's only 2 more months to go! C and I were hoping that the classes would be more of a networking opportunity, but I think there was still enough residual city-dweller avoidance of strangers that we met people but didn't go home with any digits, whereas the SF neighborhood parent message boards on Yahoo have already set me up with 2 groups of expectant parents that are due around the same time and live within walking distance. And thus the internet gets the win over real life once again.

I've been reading about Elimination Communication and figure I'll give it a shot, since I'll be off for at least 3 months anyways. Some friends of ours have done it and love it, and some friends tried it and gave up on it, so it makes any eventual success/failure with the method much less scary. As a method, however, it makes such intuitive sense to me that I'm very curious to see if it'll work on low-grade sleepless exhaustion. To be honest, it sounds a lot like housebreaking a dog, and then once you add up the years of diapers that you're subverting(cloth or disposable), to me it seems like a completely worthwhile trade-off, but I'm not about to become one of those parents that makes it their religion. Dealing with shit is all about the trade-offs - it seems you're either going to pay in attention(EC), money/landfill/toxin production(disposables or compostables), or water(cloth), and there's no real winning in judging since that's what parents hate the most about other parents. Though in our class, C had me in stitches with his analysis of which of the other couples had the most dysfunctional relationship, so I can't pretend that I don't enjoy passing judgement as much as the next person.