hygiene

Skipper got her first bath last night. We've been wiping her down here and there, but we hadn't given her a real bath in all her eleven days of existence. She was filthy. She smelled funky. She had bits of food in her creases (the only problem with carrying a baby everywhere in a wrap).*

We were dreading the bath, and putting it off, because Dutch HATED baths for the first 18 months of her life. She screamed so hard during her first bath that we were afraid she was going to rupture some important blood vessels. While aware that Skipper is an entirely different personality, Cook and I were expecting the worst with the bath. Of course, Skipper handled it like a pro. She fussed** some, and didn't seem happy about the whole thing (but how would we tell, anyway?), but she didn't scream until Cook pulled off the bandaid over her spinal-tap-puncture. (It's been on a week, and showed no sign of ever peeling off on its own.) Then she screamed. We forgave her.

I know I've got to stop comparing my two children, since that's not a good path toward a healthy sibling relationship, but it's hard not to at this point, bcause Dutch represents all we know about babies, so she's necessarily our reference point.Skipper is a lovely baby, but we still know very little about her.

*Today, after eating a hardboiled egg, I found a small yellow thing on Skipper's shirt. I looked at it, decided that it was either egg yolk or a curd from Skipper's latest poop, and THEN I PICKED IT UP AND ATE IT.  Without  thinking twice or even smelling it. I think that's really all you need to know about my current state of sleep deprivation and general disorientation.

** When Dutch was small, I'd hear other parents use the word "fussing" to descibe their baby's response to something, and I would be mystified.  Dutch would cry or scream or not cry. She never fussed. Skipper fusses. Now I know what it means! I love it! It's so mild and manageable!

fear

I don't check Skipper's breathing too often. For some reason, I'm okay with the breathing during the day. When I wake up in the night (the few times I do that when I'm not awakened by her snuffling piglet noises), I do reach for her in a panic every time, convinced I'm going to touch a cold stiff body. But I think I've mostly reassigned my fear. Now I'm afraid she's going to catch a regular virus* and die. Because new babies do that! And she's SO LITTLE! Dutch is, of course, a spectacular vector of regular viruses, spending her day in close contact with 10-40 preschoolers, about half of whom have runny noses at any given time. I'm resisting the urge to make her take a sanitizing bath upon home re-entry every day. I'm also resisting the urge to stay in the apartment all day every day, muttering incantations under my breath. 

I keep making little bargains with any Powers That Might Be. Let her stay healthy until she's six weeks old, then she can get sick. But not die. And not get really sick. 

I also take other, more sane precautions. I wash my hands. I make Dutch wash her hands twice when she gets home every day. I don't let people touch Skipper unless they've just washed their hands, and then I ask them not to touch her face. (I keep her in the wrap when I'm in public, to avoid touching opportunities.) I avoid crowded places, and if somebody's coughing, I move away from them at high speed. 

I'm not a panicky mom, normally. Really. I don't think I'm at all overprotective as a general rule, in spite of being a terrible worrier. But the experience of being in the hospital for three days has popped the delusion bubble around this baby, and she seems so very fragile and mortal to me. I worried about Dutch, but I didn't really believe anything could hurt her, since she was protected by my crazy love for her. Skipper,  though I love her just as crazy much, feels much less securely anchored to my world, and I feel a constant ache of anxiety in my gut.

Now I'm going to take Skipper to the grocery store, where I will suspiciously scan everyone around me for signs of illness.

*No, not swine flu. Geez, I've got enough to worry about. I'm waiting till we get to pandemic Phase 6!

Look, I can cross my eyes!

Newborn=Weird

This is a movie from Day One

This is a movie from Day Nine.

In my life.

My new life has begun! Cook is back at work, Dutch is at daycare all day. I'm not working or doing anything at all other than parenting Skipper all day and doing the Big School Project. My daily goals are pretty achievable:

1. Do 3 hours of BSP work
2. Wash the breakfast dishes and wipe the counters and table
3. Do 1 small household task, like making granola or doing laundry
4. Get dressed and brush my teeth and hair
   
5. Eat more or less properly
6. Check to make sure Skipper is breathing no more often than once every 10 minutes

That's it! I can do that, right? I'm not going to shoot for showering every day or anything silly like that, since Skipper likes to nurse for about 10 hours a day. I do need some more reading material, though - all this sitting around having my nipples gnawed has allowed me to catch up on my New Yorker backlog.

Just before Skipper was born, a coworker of Cook's told us that he'd been surprised by how much of the difficulty of having a second kid was actually due to the need to care for the first kid. "Babies are easy!" he said. Now I believe him. Other than the whole not-breathing thing, caring for Skipper has been a breeze. Now we know that newborns are really odd, and even though this baby sticks her tongue out all the time, squeaks and quacks, and has wandering eyes, she's probably going to turn out okay. I know how to breastfeed. I have already nursed this kid while standing up and wearing her in a wrap (in a bus shelter!), I've nursed her in the dark, I've nursed her lying down - all stuff I came around to much later in the game with Dutch. I know my nipples are not actually going to fall off, and that they'll feel much better in four or five weeks. I also know that Skipper is in some ways much easier (so far) than Dutch was, better able to self-soothe and to de-escalate when she gets upset, so I can be grateful for that.

Haircut

By the way

Some of the words deleted from my emails and blog posts by the hospital computer system were "blood," "urine," "dead," "terror," "nipples," and "hardcore."*  I guess I can kind of see where they're coming from, but really - urine? I've got to wonder how people in the hospital longterm, say, with a dying child to care for, can possibly communicate about their experience through a filter like that.

*Which makes my emails sound waaaaay more exciting than they actually were.

life goes on

I'm proud to announce that Dutch ticked off another developmental milestone today! I was sitting talking to a midwife (the third of my three postpartum home visits - midwives are AWESOME) when Dutch breezed through the living room and went out the apartment door. A few minutes later, Cook came in and said "Did Dutch just leave?" and I said "Um... yes?" and just then the doorbell rang. Cook went down to let Dutch in, and found her on the doorstep with a dustpan, from which she had just emptied a big chunk of her own hair, which she had cut with her own scissors. She did not cut herself bangs, which I believe is the classic cutting-0wn-hair approach, but she did cut a bunch of random short sections.

Tonight (with 4 hours of naptime under my belt, making me more reliable with scissors) I cut her hair in an attempt to even things up.* She was perfectly happy about it until she went to look in the mirror and freaked out because she no longer looks pretty. She doesn't want to go to daycare tomorrow because she's not beautiful. She spent a good 10 minutes sobbing in the bathroom. Cook, after attempting to console her, came out in the livingroom and looked at me. "How did we end up getting this kid?" he asked. (I cut Cook's hair, and I used to cut my own, for a good 10 years. We don't look very pretty.)

Meanwhile, Skipper has been sleeping a lot, and staring at her sister in amazement a lot. The hospital, where she's spent nearly half her life, is much quieter than our home...

*It's a good thing layers are fashionable. I think they're supposed to be more carefully arranged, however.

Here's a belated picture from Day Two. Skipper is looking an awful lot like Winston Churchill, like most babies. I wish Winston Churchill had worn booties with bells on them.

Home

We're home! Skipper has no infections and is super-healthy. We will never know why she decided to take a break from breathing, and we're all kind of okay with the not-knowing (to varying degrees). Skipper has a few new punctures in her, but otherwise seems unscathed by her hospital experience.

editing

I just realized that the computers here in the family lounge at the hospital are editing everything I write, so that I can't write about bodily fluids and other internet-dangerous things (because you wouldn't want to write about THOSE if you're in the hospital) . So where you see blanks, mentally insert your favorite relevant bodily fluids.

We're okay

So we're in the hospital now, to follow up on my embargoed Thursday post. Skipper is fine. We're here because when we went in to the pediatrician for a checkup on Thursday (which I did at the urging of Tiger's Dad), they decided that Skipper needed to be admitted for monitoring, not because their exam showed anything wrong, but because a 3-day-old blue baby is scary, and apparently newborns can appear very healthy right up until they are almost from an infection. Skipper and I (I get to stay and be fed hospital food because I am her food source) have been here since Thursday night, and we hope to get out tonight if Skipper's various fluids haven't cultured anything scary. They haven't grown anything yet, and she appears to be ridiculously, radiantly healthy, so everyone expects us to escape tonight.

It's been a pretty awful couple of days. Skipper had and drawn and a spinal tap. Cook went with her to The Procedure Room for that, and came back looking grey and shaken, holding a staring Skipper in his arms. She's on a cardiac monitor, and a saturation measuring thingy, so she's tethered to a monitor. She's been getting antibiotics, as a precautionary measure, so she has an IV pluggy thing in her arm, wrapped in a splint and bandages so her arm is like a little club. She whacks herself in the head with it pretty regularly, and I'm afraid she's developing a lifelong hatred of her right arm. She seems pretty unfazed by everything since the spinal tap. She's a really nice baby, actually. Every medical-type person who comes to see her says something like "Oh, she's so little!" and then "Gosh, she's so healthy!" The nurses love her.

I'm exhausted. Between various things being done to Skipper, the horrible, constantly-malfunctioning-and-beeping monitors, basic newborn demands (like wanting to nurse for five hours straight last night, which meant I stayed up for 24 hours straight yesterday), stress, and anxiety about how I'm ever going to catch up with school stuff and the rest of my life, I'm closer to the end of my tether than I think I've ever been. Cook, who has been caring for Dutch, shuttling back and forth to the hospital to be with me and Skipper, and generally holding down the fort, is perhaps less tired but no less stressed.

It's weird being in a hospital when it's pretty clear that Skipper is totally healthy, and we're torturing her unnecessarily. I don't see that we could have not come to the hospital - we needed to take action in case of infection. But we'll be leaving with no positive answers, a big sleep deficit, a bigger medical bill, and the experience of having hurt our brand-new daughter. That's kind of painful.

However, spending two days in a pediatric acute care unit provides a deep appreciation for how minor my problems are. The kid next door, for example, has been howling in abject misery for pretty much two days straight.

So. On the one hand, I'm feeling very sorry for Skipper and the rest of us. Poor us! On the other hand, hey, Skipper doesn't have anything obviously wrong with her! Yay us! The next step is going to be letting go of the whole not-breathing thing, and not spending the rest of our lives worrying about it. This whole hospital horror will help, but it's scary not knowing what happened or why.

I'll post again when we get home. I feel kind of bad about posting this, because I know it's going to totally scare lots of people who care about us. Please don't worry too much, and thanks very much for caring about us!

worsts

First of all, before you read this, take note that we're all fine.

Second of all, I wrote the following on Thursday morning, and decided not to post it because I didn't want to scare all of you. Now I don't care so much, and things are less scary, though still pretty unpleasant.

***

So you know how new moms get teased for checking their child's breathing a hundred times a day? Yesterday I looked over at Skipper, who was sitting calmly in a bouncy chair in our kitchen watching her sibling goof around, and I saw that she was a horrible blue-grey color. Two or three minutes later, our apartment was full of firemen,* and Skipper, who had begun breathing again before they arrived, was acting totally normal. Whatever normal means for a 3-day-old.

One midwife visit, an emergency room trip, a panicked email to and phone conversation with an East Coast pediatrician friend (thanks so much, Tiger's Dad), and long debates with Kaiser medical records people later,** we're no wiser, and I'm contemplating staying up every night to watch Skipper breathe, maybe for the next 25 years or so. Skipper has been declared "a vigorous baby" by a real doctor in a real hospital.*** She seems robust and healthy, undamaged by her experiment in parental ization, and with no evident problems that might have caused it. We're not done investigating - if Kaiser ever calls me back, we'll be going in to get some tests today. I don't think I can survive 25 years without sleep, if my functional capacity right now is any indicator.

"Was that the worst moment of your life so far?" I asked Cook, as we sat in the living room after the firefighters left, staring at our pink and beautiful Charles-Grodin-clone, who was loudly opining (I think) that since she had almost died right before our eyes, she should get to breastfeed for at least four hours straight. "The scariest," he said, "because it could so easily have become the worst." Dutch chipped in cheerfully, "If Skipper died, we'd go to the cemetery and sing songs to celebrate her life!"****

So... the moral here is Don't Ever Laugh At Paranoid Parents. Sometimes when you go to check, your kid really isn't breathing. And I can now tell you from personal experience that looking into your baby's blue face, and seeing her look back at you from what seems like a very long way away, and rapidly getting farther away, is really really awful, but I know it won't be the worst experience of my life. I just don't want my next escalation on that scale to happen any time soon.

* When we thanked them for coming so fast - it was REALLY fast - one of the firemen jauntily said "well, if it's a 93-year-old lady, we might not run, but if it's a 3-day-old baby, we run!" Which is great for us, but 93-year-old ladies might want to consider this news carefully and plan accordingly.

**You try getting somebody to give you a straight answer about how to get care for a 3-day-old baby born at home who will be enrolled under her dad's individual Kaiser coverage but currently has no medical record number. Go ahead. These are some of the helpful questions you may hear: "Yes, but what HOSPITAL was she born at?" or "But what is your Kaiser number?" or "What is her social security number?" Skipper has no official existence yet - all her paperwork is in the mail to various official Person-Certifying offices. I try not to think about this as a symbol of the tenuousness of her physical existence

** * If you want to be treated like a celebrity, go to the ER late at night with a brand-new baby. People are really, really, really nice to you. Except the doctor. He's kind of snarky, and he makes you feel helpless. Though he does get points for telling you that Skipper has a great name.

**** Dutch eats drama for lunch and washes it down with a nice cup of telenovela, so the whole chain of events, while scary, was also terribly exciting and possibly secretly pleasurable for her. Ther's a limit to the amount of empathy a 4-year-old can muster.

Day Four

Geez, you're thinking, why is a woman with a new baby still compulsively blogging?! What is wrong with her? Shouldn't she be doing some nurturing?

Well... I do have a lot to do, what with the Big Project, a small and cluttered apartment now additionally littered with cloth diapers, receiving blankets, and half-empty glasses of water. a preschooler apprehensive about losing her parents' love, an overworked and exhausted husband, and a small pimply parasite to tend. But I kind of just feel like writing about it instead of doing things about it. I also know that when Skipper really starts waking up, I'm not going to have time to sit at the computer and navel-gaze. We're in an uniquely blog-friendly period. I'm not really supposed to be out hiking around doing errands, so I'm sort of house-bound. Skipper is still sleeping an awful lot of the time, and I've got her tied to me, so I've got my hands free.  I can't really do dishes (due to the awkward reach and the banging around), and I can't take a shower, but that's about it. Oh, also, I can't really bend over very well, so there's a lot of detritus on the floor.

So that's my justification. Cook has gone to work, and Dutch to daycare - we decided that prying her out of the home and back into her normal routine would be best, and it sure cheered her up yesterday. She seems to feel a little less worried about being usurped, and she's being very clear about what she's feeling, so I think we'll work through it pretty soon. She told me today that she loves Skipper more than I do. 

Skipper is still arriving in our world - she's been awake a little more , and had a few sweet periods of quiet alertness. She likes to recline in the crook of my arm, her head tipped back a little, and peer at the world through half-open eyes. She looks a little like Charles Grodin, actually. 

I've extrapolated all sorts of ridiculous conclusions about her personality already, based mostlyon the poor kid's squintiness. Dutch was a pretty alert and interactive baby from her very first breath (for a newborn, I mean, which isn't very alert). Skipper seems to be more inclined to let the world come to her. She's also much less piranha-like in her breastfeeding, taking a leisurely, snacky approach to the whole enterprise. (We spent several days worried about how little time Dutch spent breastfeeding, until we discovered she was growing like the proverbial beanstalk, and clearly getting everything she needed in her 5-minute feeding sessions. Skipper prefers a 45-minute feeding session.) Also, more charmingly, she actually does some self-soothing, unlike Dutch, who has always been one to start screaming the instant she wakes up. So she may turn out to be the classically mellow second kid,  calmly eating dustbunnies in the corner while the melodramatic first kid gets all the attention.

In closing, here's a list of things I love:

• My wrap. So handy-dandy, and cuddly, too. 
  
• Cloth diapers. Our service didn't start until yesterday, so we had to put Skipper's wrinkled little butt in disposables for a few days, and I'm so much happier with cloth. Phew.  
  
• Weather warm enough to keep a baby naked. 
  
• Fleece diaper covers. 
  
• Midwifery practices that come and visit you in your home three times after your birth to check on you and your baby.  

I'm feeling pretty good today!

postnatal

I forgot to mention how fantastic it is to not be pregnant. I slept on my stomach! I don't have heartburn! I don't itch! However... I still look 6 months pregnant. Dutch's friend Alpha Girl visted on Day One, poked my floppy belly, and said interestedly "Do you have another baby in there?"

The Details (skip if you'd rather not know)

There's a placenta in my freezer.  I was distracted by Skipper when the midwives stashed it helpfully away for me.  I'm not disgusted by it or anything, and I'm impressed by my body's ability to make such an amazing thing, but I'm just not interested in doing anything with it. And now I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it. Gosh, it's not a biohazard or anything, is it? My current plan is to make sure it's totally frozen, double-bag it, and chuck it in the dumpster just before the trash pickup. I really don't want some homeless person* to dig it out of the trash and try to eat it. Not that it wouldn't be a nutritious meal. Maybe I should just label it "HUMAN PLACENTA" and let the homeless people make an informed choice.

Anyway, the birth! It was totally straightforward - the Chief Midwife cheerfully informed me that it was a "vanilla birth" (and then hastened to reassure me that it's okay to be vanilla, as if I had any doubt). The midwives were wonderfully hands-off, stepping in only when needed.  It was also really lovely to be at home the whole time, with no need to go anywhere, and then even more wonderful to be at home afterward, listening to Dutch and one of my fabulous cousins chatting with Skipper in the next room while I lay in my own bed, freshly showered and fed, dozing and looking out the window at the flowers on our tree. 

However, I have to say that labor and birth are really pretty crappy. I had forgotten. About two hours into the experience, I started to get pissed off that things weren't going faster (even though they were progressing pretty quickly, and really quite easily, all things considered), and then when I was pushing the kid out, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of disbelief that I was actually having to do this ridiculous thing. I even said "This is IMPOSSIBLE!" at one point, and I suspect that I looked and sounded quite a bit like this, except without lightsabers (start at 1:50):

And then I got her head out, which was great, but I still had to do MORE! And then I got the rest of her out, and that was really great (Hi, Skipper!), and then, after w'd all sat on the bed, admiring our new, slippery, angry family member for a little while, they asked me to push the placenta out, and I really felt that that was just unfair. Really. After all that work, you want me to do something else? Do you KNOW what my innards feel like right now?**

It's a really silly way to reproduce. And I'm not doing it again. 

Dutch woke up just in time for the actual birth, and refused an invitation from a midwife to come up on the bed, preferring to watch silently from the hall. She allowed as how she was somewhat alarmed and confused when she woke up, but she seemed untroubled by the experience. "I thought you said that you would make mooing noises," she told me later, "but you were yelling!" and I had to explain that she'd missed all the mooing, and skipped straight to the really exciting part.  She did very much enjoy going to the kitchen with one of the midwives to inspect the placenta and umbilical cord (and lecturing the midwife on what the placenta and umbilical cord are for). 

And things are going well. I'm feeling pretty good, and Skipper seems healthy, so far as we know. She's definitely different than Dutch, in appearance and behavior, for what that assessment is worth at 28 hours of age. Dutch spent quite a bit of her first hours in the world looking around and checking things out, and Skipper hasn't had her eyes open more than 15 minutes total so far (and when she does, she looks squinty and appalled, like she can't bear to see more than 12 seconds of the world at a time - I'm not sure if I hope that this is due to personality or something wrong with her eyes). Last night she decided that she would like to be most alert between 8 PM and 3 AM, which is a bummer. I'd forgotten what new babies are like, too. But I can't imagine what it must be like for her to be realizing that THIS is her new reality, what with all the crazy feelings and experiences, and it's not going away. All things considered, this is a much easier adjustment for us.

Skipper, for all her essential loveliness, looks totally terrible right now, like an ugly adolescent boy who just crawled out of a stickerbush, what with the scratches from clawing at her own face, and the newborn rash. Dutch said yesterday that Skipper has a "scrumptious face," which I think she intended as a compliment, rather than a comment along the lines of "pizza-face."

That's the news! I'm going to go take a nap.

*Like the guy who was passed out on our back steps yesterday - Dutch and I were coming back from doing laundry, and she came running back to me to say "Mom, there's a MAN sleeping at our door." Urban life is so educational - Dutch (and Skipper) and I had a chance to talk about social issues and alcohol abuse.

* They do know, what with having 8 kids between the two of them.

Sibling rivalry

Yesterday at 5 PM (about 12 hours into siblinghood), Dutch said "Mom, it's not easy being a big sister." At 4 this morning, she flung herself at the foot of my bed and said "Mom, I have this feeling I know isn't true, but it's what I feel, and it's making me so sad! I feel like you love Anaximander more than me!"

She's still calling her sister (who will be named, for the purposes of this blog, Skipper) Anaximander, and referring to her as "it" most of the time.  And now she refuses to go to daycare, I'm pretty sure because she's afraid that if she leaves us alone with the usurper, she will lose traction on our love.

Phew. This is complicated.

The new one.

Last night, when I went into labor, Cook said curiously "Are you going to blog about this?"

I didn't; I was busy. But now, while our second daughter is sleeping (which she's been doing all day, probably in anticipation of staying up all night), I can take the time to tell you that she's here!

 And it's the most beautiful spring day you can imagine!

Life in Fantasy Land

Dutch has been dancing for two hours. We've been playing a record we have that has Swan Lake on one side and the Nutcracker on the other (medleys, or something), and she's been dancing and narrating complex stories - the ballet involved swans, rats, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, Clara, and other elements from different stories. Then there was a context story with the ballerinas (wearing different colored tights according to their status), and the audience members (a boy, his mom, and his teenage sister, who all got stuck in traffic and ate a snack on the way to the performance, etc.). All this while dancing around the living room pretty much non-stop.

I can't imagine a time when my brain was wired like that.

I love this.

When I'm particularly grouchy, Cook will often quietly put on one of a couple different records that are almost guaranteed to cheer me up. Dutch recently requested the star of the Cheering-Up Collection, The Pirates of Penzance, because it has a preschooler-attractive cover, and she loved it. Right now she's watching youtube clips of the show, and liking it just as much as Star Wars. I've ordered the DVD from the library, because I love it too. I'm pretty sure that my passion for Kevin Kline matches Dutch's passion for the frilly dresses, the pirates, the silly policemen, and the patter singing.

Phthalates!

Child obesity and phthalates. Watch out, mani-pedi industry!

Best of what?

I'm going to have to pump breastmilk this time around. Last time, since I was home with Dutch for two years, I never did pump. I tried a few times with a manual pump, but it was hard and frustrating and it was easier just to skip it, so we did.

This time, though, I'm likely to have to go to work at some point before the kid is weaned. Also, it's going to start daycare at the end of September, when it's still entirely breastfed, and I'm unlikely to get to the daycare every three hours for nursing, even if I am just taking classes. So... pumping. I've been shopping around, confounded by the different varieties of pumps and bottles and nipples.

And I've been getting pissed off by the publicity around this article. I don't know why people get into this kind of argument - can we not have a real discussion around the difficulty of parenting in modern society without playing a pointless and distracting blame game? Why can we not support paid parental leave AND equal pay for women AND better regulation of formula AND better postnatal care AND better affordable childcare AND better family facilities in the workplace?

I'd better have this baby soon. I'm getting seriously grouchy.

80% of ten-year-olds are afraid of getting fat.

I just blundered onto a scary article. It certainly gives me reason to doubt the wisdom of my practice of letting Dutch paint her toenails once in a while (with phthalate-free nail polish).  I can't let her start down the road that leads to Botox treatments at 18 instead of college.*

Sometimes the prospect of parenting makes me feel exhausted. Not only do I have to keep my kid(s) sheltered, fed, educated, and somewhat safe, I also have to take some responsibility for helping them navigate an ever-increasingly complex world. Never mind the fact that I feel barely competent to navigate that world myself.

But... there's a limit to what I can (or should) do. And at least I'm not grooming her for beauty pageants. Dutch'll figure out some way to live her life, and I hope it'll be reasonably healthy for her and everyone else.  And hey, if we can keep her on a once-every-two-months phthalate-free home pedicure routine for the next 14 years, that could actually be considered a modern parenting triumph!

*Not that I actually think we'll be able to afford to put Dutch through college. We'll be lucky if we can retire before we die, let alone actually help our kids with their lives in any way.

Planning

I've been spending some time scheduling the birth in my mind, trying to identify the Best Possible Time. For example, we've got visiting family in town this week. Would it be better to give birth before they leave, so they could keep Dutch company and then meet the new baby? Or better to wait until after they leave, so as to get to spend more quality time with them? Do I want to give birth in the middle of the night? While Dutch is at daycare? 

(I am aware, in case you're worried about my addled dehydrated brain, that I can't schedule this.)

Reasons Next Week Would Be Better:

• My Chief Midwife is out of town for two days. 
  
• I'd really like to catch up on a few school things. 
  
• I haven't quite finished setting up the Giving Birth At Home Kit. 
  
• It would be nice to get this laundry done.* 
  
• I'm still feeling pretty weak and shaky.
  

Reasons Right Now Would Be Better:

• I'd really like to stop being pregnant RIGHT NOW. 
  
• It would be great to be back in action in time for some Big School Project events in the second week of May...
  

This waiting period is so strange. In three weeks, I could still be pregnant, or I could have a three-week-old infant. I tried to broach the subject with Dutch, explaining that the baby could be born any day now, but she clearly doesn't get it. It's a pretty hard concept for all of us. However, she declared "I am ready to be a big sister!" so I guess we're all set.

*There's been a lot of that, what with all the viruses circulating around here lately.

Product plug

I just want to say how much I love THIS. The midwives told me to stock up on it, but I was skeptical, so I bought just one bottle, speculatively. At about 1 this morning, when I felt safe enough to start allowing my parched mouth one sip every fifteen minutes, I fell in love with it. So sweet, so salty! I think I will now have a case on hand at all times.

holy shlamoly

I want to say that the only thing worse than coming down with a horrible stomach bug and barfing nine times in eight hours is coming down with a horrible stomach bug and barfing nine times in eight hours when you're nine months pregnant. Yuck.

First, though, an update:

1) Antarctic Uncle and Green Thumb Auntie are visiting! Hooray! Dutch is thrilled, and tortures them every minute she can get her hands on them. I had a lovely time with them yesterday, dragging them along on my own special guided Portland tour, in which I made them come along while I did errands and ate icecream. 

2) Still no baby.

3) I got a free haircut from the Paul Mitchell School of Hair Design. My hairdresser spoke very little English, and spent a great deal of time styling my hair into a shape it will never achieve again.

Anyway, I had my first ever Public Vomit at the bus stop yesterday* (after that guided tour), and I wasn't sure if I was coming down with the stomach illness** Dutch brought home last week, or if I was in labor. That question got straightened out pretty quickly, since no baby was forthcoming. By midnight, though, I was pretty sure that Anaximander was going to have to be cut out of my dessicated corpse, and I was deliriously speculating about what kind of person I'd like to have Cook marry to be my children's stepmother. 

Being very pregnant while your intestines tie themselves into knots is really weird and awful. The Braxton Hicks contractions and Anaximander's ill-timed dance party, plus just not having a lot of room for gut gyrations, made the whole experience much more active, and unpleasant.

Poor Antarctic Uncle and Green Thumb Auntie spent the evening playing heroically with Dutch*** while I shuttled hastily between bed and bathroom. Cook cooked a meal, acted as host, and took care of me, mopping my face with a washcloth and saying reassuring things like "I love you" as I sat on the toilet, sobbing, with vomit dripping out my nose, cradling a plastic bucket of disgusting slurry.  Oh, was that too gross for you? Sorry. It was a pretty gross night. 

However, I feel better today, and have drunk some water and eaten a piece of toast. And now I'm going back to bed, having overshared with the internets yet again.

* I felt kind of bad for the people who watched the giant pregnant lady barf in the grass and then get on the bus with them. But I made it home without a repeat incident, luckily.

**Yes, the one I've been gloating about avoiding - "Oh yeah, I almost never get stomach illnesses, and I always get them more gently than Cook!"

*** I could hear things like  "HISSS!!! I'm a hisser! I'm a poisonous snake! No, I'm Darth Vader! No, I'm Princess Leia with a lightsaber!"

nettled

I'm sitting here (procrastinating) with a big cup of nettle tea. It tastes like a big cup of hot grass water. My midwives suggested I drink it for a few days to relieve my itchiness. This pregnancy has brought to the forefront one of the minor tensions of my life, which is my feelings about medicine. I believe in science, and I also believe in the limits of science. I believe that the ability of Western medicine to make people well is limited. I want to go to the hospital if I am seriously ill or injured, but I have very little faith in the medical system to address minor complaints, and I am aware that the medical system sometimes makes people sicker. I think the tradeoffs when you enter the system should be considered. I almost never take over-the-counter medication. I also don't take herbal supplements, because I know how poorly they're regulated. My preference for most physical problems is just to try to eat properly, exercise, drink lots of water, and wait and see. This nearly always works out fine, for me. So far.

Luckily, I have never had any serious health problems, so I've never really had to wrestle with my faith in any kind of healing system. However, I've spent a lot of time during this pregnancy trying to pick my way along a sort of compromise path. I got two ultrasounds and some blood tests. I'm planning a home birth. I keep turning down all sorts of herbal interventions for my minor complaints. My midwives are lovely people who quickly grasped that I am not very far out on the hippie continuum,* and are very respectful of my commitment to science. I appreciate the way they work with me. The nettle tea, however, is the first "treatment" they've suggested that I'm actually following up on. The internets suggest that nettle tea might trigger miscarriage, but that's not a problem at this point. It sounds like there's nothing bad about it, and maybe some good (hooray for vitamin K!). Once I settled that, however, there's the issue of who picked it, and from where. The midwifery clinic sold me the stuff, in a plastic bag labeled "nettles" in sloppy handwriting. So I just have to assume that it is really nettles, and that the plants are clean.

Anyway, I guess this is something I'll have to come to terms with pretty soon. The odds are good that I or Cook or Dutch or Anaximander will have some serious medical problems in the next twenty years, and we'll have to figure out what to do. Probably nettle tea won't do the trick.

*One of them has started using car-mechanic metaphors to talk to me about pregnancy and labor, which I very much appreciate. No talk of blossoming lotus flowers and whatnot.

Who would YOU want to help with your precipitous labor?

I dreamed the other night that Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and Joe Biden delivered the baby when I went into labor at a state function.  (This happens when you hang out at the White House a lot.*) It went very smoothly. I told Cook this, and he looked appalled. "Ew," he said, "I don't think I'd want Joe Biden to be at my emergency delivery." I explained that Joe mostly hovered around, while Barack and Michelle did all the work. So I think in the future, I'm going to use this standard to decide whom to vote for.  Who would I want at my side if I had to deliver a baby in a hurry? (Probably anyone would be better than John McCain.) Take note, media strategists!

* I read an article, probably in the NY Times, a while back that said that lots of people like to think of Barack and Michelle as their friends, especially white liberal educated upper-middle-class types like me. Apparently my subconscious agrees!

Manners

The other day I was seated on the bus with Dutch next to me when an obese man with two canes boarded the bus. He clearly needed to sit, and he clearly needed two seats. I looked around, unwilling to give up my seat , and I realized that nobody else was going to get up, so I rousted Dutch, and we went over to another single seat, where I sat down and balanced her in what's left of my lap. I felt very indignant - I'm used to being the first person to give up my seat most of the time, even as I get more and more hugely pregnant, but really, I think that somebody OTHER than the hugely pregnant woman with the preschooler in tow should have been the one to stand up.

Dutch and I talk a lot about being respectful and thoughtful, and she has absorbed my belief in the importance of courtesy, especially in a crowded urban setting. But I'm probably doing her a disservice. In this world, I think nice* people really do finish last. We don't get jobs, we don't get to sit down on the bus, we don't get any of the treats when the numbers are limited. I should be teaching her to be the one who ignores the guy with the canes. I'm teaching her skills that are helpful collectively but not individually. And yet... I can't quite bring myself to go for a more Alex Keaton approach. Maybe with the next kid.


*By nice I mean polite and unaggressive. I'm not actually nice at all, but I am fairly courteous.

Itchy itchy itchy

My face itches. A lot. My earlobes itch. I have no idea what it is, and am hoping that it's just some random pregnancy-related misery, temporary and un-damaging to unborn babies. 

I have not yet had a baby. I've almost got the Having A Baby At Home Kit together, though. Today I bought a waterproof mattress liner at Ikea. The label features a picture of a glass of water spilling on a bed.  Frankly,* I'm not particularly worried about spilling a glass of water on my bed any time soon, and I'd be more reassured if the label featured the spilling of something more drastic in quantity and stain power, like a keg of wine. (I concede that they can't include an actual picture of a woman giving birth, or any of the associated fluids. Ikea has to make some money to pay the sweatshop laborers in Burma or whatever, after all.)  I also bought a sunshine yellow PVC-free shower curtain to replace the moldy old white one we've currently got up. If I end up laboring in the tub, I will need yellow.

Anyway, we had a lovely Easter. This morning, I was awakened by the sound of Dutch saying softly to herself in her bedroom "Easter! It's Easter!" and Cook and I staggered out into the livingroom to watch her track down all the eggs. We don't do an Easter basket (and the munificent packages we've been receiving over the last week have really rendered it redundant, anyway), but we do a hunt.** "The Easter Bunny is SNEAKY!" Dutch declared at one point, after finding a particularly well-hidden egg.

That's the news from here. To recap: lots of sugar, a visit from a conniving rodent, itching, and no baby yet. I hope your Easters were all lovely, too!

*As my friend The Freak Magnet would say.

**The Easter Bunny, should you be curious, comes to our apartment, gathers  all of Dutch's random plastic eggs,  fills them with candy that it finds in our apartment and possibly some other candy, nickels, and a few non-edible items like stickers and flower seeds that it brings along, and then hides them in the apartment.)

Hold on.

Ugh. Wednesday Dutch was home with pinkeye. Yesterday she was home with Severe Brattiness (actually because Granddad was visiting, but she sure was bratty). Today she's home because she barfed several times last night. She appears to be pretty much recovered now, and we've erased most of the barf evidence from the place, but I'm totally exhausted. Though not as exhausted as Cook, who did most of the barf cleanup all night and then got up at 6:45 to go to work. Or, probably, Granddad, who spent his 40-ish hours in town with The Brattiest Grandchild In History, patiently playing her princess games and then listening to her barf in the middle of the night.

At the moment, I'm actually NOT eager to get this baby out of my uterus. I have a lot of catching up on laundry and sleep to do before I'll feel even moderately ready to have a baby.

Conjunctivitis again!

The kid has pinkeye again. Again! So my plans for the day are shot, as I will be in the company of a 4-year-old dressed like an Easter egg,* which makes it hard to swim laps and do data entry. This time, however, I'm holding off on getting the eyedrops unless things get uglier, since I suspect it's viral conjunctivitis rather than bacterial, and is going to clear itself up. And since I don't have paid work anymore, there's a different balance in the expense of the eyedrops vs the expense of my time at home with the kid.

*In that she's wearing lots of pastel patterns and prints, not that she's actually wearing an egg costume.

This morning I stayed at home to do some miscellaneous errands (and data entry!), and I got Cook and Dutch out the door at an unprecedentedly early time. It's so much easier to get two people launched than three! I have no idea how we're going to get four people out the door, if Cook and I ever manage to find real jobs.

This is what Cook looks like in the morning (photo by Dutch).

Yesterday I had one of my now-weekly checkups with the midwives. It took all three of them to figure out what position the baby is in. They groped and puzzled over it for so long that I started to worry that I am actually gestating a bag of kittens. One of them caught the look on my face, and hastened to reassure me that it appears to be a perfectly normal-sized (if perhaps somewhat long - Cook's gene pool may be coming into play again here) baby, in a perfectly good birth position. They all agree that it's got its butt up in the usual position (in my lungs) and its head down and nicely wedged into my pelvis. What puzzled them is that its limbs are all over the place - it sprawls out like it has all the space in the world, and its feet and knees and elbows and hands are more or less everywhere at once.

This behavior puzzles me less when I look at its sister.*
*Photographed this morning, at the beginning of yet another gorgeous spring day - check out the dazzlingly pink and sparkly sneakers, a beloved gift from Broken-Butt Lawyer!

It's alarming how charming I feel...

Oh, the sunshine! And all the flowers! Our trees are blooming! It makes such a difference! Even after a night of scarcely-sleeping, I feel sunshiney myself, and even Dutch and Cook, normally not notable for their morning alertness or good cheer, woke up pretty chipper.* Dutch was VERY excited to wear a sundress today with no tights. (We agreed that she would wear shorts under it, since she likes short dresses, and I'm struggling with the is-it-okay-to-reveal-your-underwear-in-public question.)

Cook and I are hoping that summer will encourage Dutch to wear shorts rather than dresses. We're both sick of the dresses-only rule. I got Dutch to wear pants a few weeks ago, for a weeding-party outing. She was fine until we got to the bus stop, and then she panicked because she wasn't Pretty without a dress on, and she just couldn't go out in public when she wasn't Pretty enough. Yesterday she wore a dress and tights and maryjane shoes, plus THREE fancy hair accessories, and went off on a playdate with Best Friend, who was wearing all boys' clothing. (Best Friend has an older brother and lots of handmedowns and doesn't care at ALL about being Pretty.) They were like Nancy Drew and George.

Anyway. I'm still boring. Also, still pregnant. Anaximander is technically full-term as of today, so it could arrive any time in the next five weeks. Which means we'd better find a waterproof mattress lining, and finalize our list of baby names. (It is not going to be named Anaximander. Or "Tele Bosco Walter Owen," Dutch's latest suggestion, which would mean naming the baby after all the dogs she knows.)



*This in spite of being woken by the doorbell, which Cook went down to answer, and found our property manager's girlfriend at the door with flowers and a tiny model of the Eiffel Tower, apologizing for having rung the wrong bell. We spent some time puzzling over the Eiffel Tower part of this. Maybe they're going on a romantic trip to France?

Spring!

It's 70 degrees! It's sunny! Flowers are blooming! Ants have invaded our home! We are so grateful! We've had a long stretch of rainy, cold, grey days, and it's pretty blissful to have a sunny day.

I'm taking the day off, and not thinking about my Big School Project at all. Dutch went off on a five-hour playdate with Best Friend, and Cook worked (he's doing some consulting, so he spends all his off-work time working, the poor man) much of the day before biking off to play frisbee. I took a semi-nap* and then did some minor chores of the sort that I habitually overlook, like washing the leaves of all the houseplants. The leaves were so dusty that the plants were starting look more like fuzzy fauna than the flora that they are. That was sort of satisfying, but reminded me of all the other annoying little housekeeping tasks (like cleaning the baseboards and moldings and whatnot) that need to be done even after you've done the big stuff.

And... that's pretty much all the news. Sorry it's so boring. I've got to go sit outside on the steps and get my vitamin D for the month.

*I'm a terrible napper, almost unable to nap during the day, and generally disoriented and cranky after any nap I do get, but I did lie in bed and doze and listen to the birds and the traffic for a good 45 minutes. Which was awfully nice.

Changes!

My nose is red, bumpy and itchy! It looks like your great-grandfather's nose! What IS this?! Even the internets don't know! (It's not PUPPP.)

Also, Dutch taught me something yesterday that I DID NOT KNOW. This was different than the usual Learning Stuff From Your Child kind of thing, which I've kind of gotten used to (you know, where the kid makes a poignant observation that illuminates some simple wisdom, blah blah blah) - she actually knew a fact that I did not know. It's begun! In a few short years, she will know much more than I do!

Pediatricians rock.

In case any of you medical types are concerned about those stomach aches, Dutch has very regular and healthy pooping habits, so you can pretty much cross out the constipation explanation. Of course, if I find out she's got some sort of awful medical condition (stomach cancer?), I'm going to feel totally terrible about blaming her aches on anxiety. But I have found, since becoming a parent, that there IS actually a limit to how much one person can worry.

Last night I talked to some friends about how much we worry about our kids, from the moment they're conceived, and how hard it sometimes is to let them live their lives. I have moments every day when I watch Dutch blithely doing something very mildly risky (like skipping quickly across a driveway entrance on the sidewalk, ten feet ahead of me*) and I imagine the Worst Case Scenario (giant car hurtles around the corner and into the driveway, mowing her down and crushing her little head!), and I want to make her wear a helmet (with flashing lights on it) and knee pads and elbow pads and walk quietly by my side forever. I'm pretty sure that would be bad for everyone's mental health, though, so I'm holding off.

I've been lucky in that Dutch, in spite of being apparently somewhat accident-prone, is cautious and risk-averse, like both her parents. I've seen and heard stories of some kids** who seem determined to take every risk in sight. When I babysat a friend's kid for the first time, she warned me about the difference between our daughters - she'd seen me get Dutch (aged two) out of a car, put her down on the sidewalk, and then turn back to rummage around in the car for a minute, while Dutch poked around unmonitored. "You can't do that with My Kid!" she said, which was an entirely justified warning. Dutch has never been a running-out-in-the-street kid, but I still worry about the cars coming off the street to get her,*** and of course, she still gets emotionally and physically hurt. I look at her, and I KNOW that she's going to get hurt. Bad things (chronic illness, acute injuries, heartbreak) are going to happen to her, and there's nothing I can do about it. And this baby, who likes more than anything else to brace its butt under my ribs on the right side and tuck its feet up under my ribs on the left side and do Uterine Leg Presses ALL DAY LONG, this baby is going to get hurt, too. It's a good thing I'm not having eight babies; I think worrying about that many kids would maybe push me over that limit I mentioned.



*I SAID "mildly"!
** Ezekiel, Maisy, and Katherine, I'm looking at YOU!
***She's most worried about the owls and the foxes coming into her bedroom to carry her away, but that's actually fairly low down on my list of Stuff To Worry About.

Mind-body

Dutch gets anxiety stomach aches. She's been having them for a few months, on and off, but just in the last few weeks they've gotten worse, and occasionally seem to be really painful - her teacher actually called me about it during exams a few weeks ago, and I had to go pick her up early from daycare. I'm fairly confident that they're stress-related and not based in some physiological problem. The internets indicate that it's pretty common for kids to get them, and that there's really nothing to do but wait this stage out.

If I'd heard, five years ago, of a four-year-old child having anxiety stomach aches, I would have been sympathetic but secretly would have assumed that the parents must be screwing this poor kid up. Clearly, they're putting too much pressure on the kid! Or they're hypochondriacs! From my current vantage point, I can say that Dutch is definitely feeling pressure, and we're surely contributing, but I don't actually think we're doing anything seriously wrong. (And I would like to point out that Cook and I almost never complain of stomach aches, or could be in any way described as hypochondriacs....) She wants to be a Big Girl right now, and we're praising her for doing that, which reinforces the idea that it's desirable. She has inherited the sort of perfectionist/pessimist personality that perceives any kind of inadequacy as a total disaster. So when she Fails To Be A Big Girl, she feels bad about it. And she knows Baby X is imminent, and I'm sure she's feeling some anxiety about that. (I sure am.) Plus, when she has to go to daycare every morning, she feels worried about the social situations she knows will come up in the course of the day. There's lots of excluding going on, and lots of social maneuvering, and she is deeply engaged with it and invested in it (and does at least her share of excluding and stressing out the other kids). She has a lot of fun at daycare, and I'm sure will miss it terribly over the summer, but it's also a source of stress. All of this, plus the tremendous stimulation of modern life, is kind of a lot for one small brain. So she's moved it to her stomach, which actually seems like a fairly reasonable response. Not that it feels reasonable at 8 AM when I'm trying to pry her out the door and she's doubled over in (genuine) pain.

I floated this theory by Dutch, by the way - "Honey, I think your brain is worried about something, and it's making your stomach feel bad" - and she immediately opined that I was probably right. So now we talk about her brain-bellyaches. That doesn't make it any better, but at least we've got a way to identify and legitimize what she's feeling. Now if only I didn't still feel vaguely guilty about it, that would be nice.