31 Weeks, 5 Days

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.