Getting in gear

There is a baby swing in our office. This is freaking us out.

I got back from my Seattle trip yesterday, bringing a big suitcase full of awesome baby stuff that my family gave us. (And gift cards, for ease of packing, which I appreciated.) I would describe them but talking about how extremely adorable every outfit and blanket was and how many neat little things were on the diaper cake (a phrase I never understood before) will probably get very boring very quickly. Suffice to say, we are very grateful and very pleased and very, very alarmed at the ever-growing realization that we're going to need all this stuff for an actual tiny human.

Angie and Matt gave us a Papasan baby swing a few weeks ago and while I was gone, Eric brought it to our house (it had been left at the mothers' for a while). We decided today that it made no sense to wash and put away the new outfits and blankets and washcloths now, since ideally we should wash them just before L.E.O. is born, which is (if all goes well) still thirteen weeks away. But I was itching to do baby prep/nesting-type activities, and I able to be annoying about it because I was home for the day (I took a sick day because I had a doctor appointment and was figuring I'd have jet lag; all is well, though my previous doctor's office apparently never did the state-mandated gonorrhea/chlamydia screen they were supposed to, so we had to do it today--I'm glad I left them), so we decided to assemble the swing instead.

It went together pretty quickly and smoothly, and we decided to bring it into the office to see whether it would fit. It does, and it's sitting by the window now, with a stuffed rabbit sitting inside it. There's a baby swing in our office. In a few months it will be rocking a baby. Unreal.

Did you realize...

This came up Friday night from one of our commenters: Did we realize that L.E.O. will actually be born under the zodiac sign Leo? To which the answer is:

1) Yes, but
2) We didn't notice it until a month after the blog started (and therefore several months after the project started), and
3) We take pretty much zero truck with astrology, at least partially because
4) The sun won't actually be between the IAU boundary of the constellation Leo and the earth when L.E.O. is actually born.

The sun will actually be pretty close to Asellus Australis, the central star in Cancer--assuming due dates stick appropriately. I suspect Jenny will have been induced long before the sun gets near the Cancer-Leo boundary (9h20m, or about 10 August).

Interestingly, it appears that Hindu astrologers use a zodiac that more closely resembles at least a vague match with the actual ecliptic. One wonders if the Forer effect would hold just as well for horoscopes produced by both sets of astrologers, or if people would actually be able to differentiate between the two. My bet is, as always, on Forer.

Adult 2.0 ponders the upgrade

I do not think I am ready to be a mother. Not when I can't talk to my own mother about a misunderstanding over something as simple as my plans for the visit to Seattle I'm starting in about eleven hours without crying. I'm going to blame the baby for my excessive emotionality--that's going to be one great thing about having a kid, someone to blame when Eric isn't around--but I'm vaguely worried now about how I'm going to handle being on the other end of these kinds of scenarios. On the other hand, I've found adulthood to be nothing more than a series of progressively more serious and complicated situations in which you have to make things up as you go along, and maybe parenthood won't be any different. We've been calling it Adult 3.0.

Adult 1.0 was the just-out-of-the-house stage, where things were pretty simple: you cooked and shopped for yourself, got three or four bills every month, maybe had a savings account as well as a checking account. Adult 2.0 was the stepped-up version of a shared household, homeownership, more complicated finances, long-term decisions about career aspirations and where to live. And now we face Adult 3.0: dependents for whom we have to make long-term decisions, even more complicated finances and legal issues, sacrifices and compromises and what I most sincerely hope will be some sort of compensation other than the satisfaction of being able to survive.

How does "Menendez" sound as a middle name?

"How was L.E.O. today?" Eric said when I got home this afternoon.

"Kicky," I replied, lying down.

He touched my abdomen in what's becoming a familiar motion and immediately got a curious expression on his face as L.E.O. kicked straight into his hand. "Indeed."

Then I got a curious expression on my face because there was suddenly a lot of pressure under his hand. "That's not you pressing down, is it?" I said.

"No...that's her pressing up."

Then I jumped as L.E.O. gave the biggest kick she's given yet, directly at Eric, who leaped away. We stared at each other. "I'm pretty sure she just tried to kill you," I said. I patted my belly. "Honey, at least finish gestating first."

Hiccups

I rolled onto my back this morning (not as desirable as it used to be; lower-back pain is starting to hint that it would like to be paid some attention) and checked to see if L.E.O. was awake. Thump...thump...thump. "I think she has the hiccups," I said.

Eric put his hand on my abdomen to see. "Whoa," he said, removing it when it got soundly kicked. We both watched as something rolled and pulsed under my skin. "What do you think this is?" I demanded. "A party?" But on reflection, I'm sure L.E.O. was probably just consolidating some plans to kidnap the world's premier doctors and scientists when she gets out to figure out a cure for hiccups.

Pants

"So apparently, maternity pants are kind of like... fitted sheets."

I found this hilarious when it came out of Jenny's mouth, and hey I'm sitting right here, so look a post!

Project L.E.O., the greed edition

As previously hinted, we are now registered for all the normal baby stuff, at Target and at Babies R Us, mostly at Bev's insistence because there's a shower coming up in a couple of weeks. There are a few non-normal baby things that we were unable to register for, however. These include, but are not limited to:

-home chemistry lab
-supercomputer with encrypter
-anything from here except the ABCs poster (because she has it)
-uranium
-Zeppelin of Death
-alternate transportation
-a tiara
-small hadron collider
-songwriters

We are weak, weak.

Wait a minute. Why did we register for baby washcloths? We have a stack of perfectly good washcloths right there in the closet. Marketing sucked us in after all! I feel so dirty!

24 weeks

Here's me at 24 weeks:


It's definitely starting to be a belly at this point--though still not an unambiguously pregnant one. I tried out a maternity top on my business trip and it worked out very well, but the maternity pants still don't feel like they're going to stay up.

My low blood pressure (which is completely normal at this stage, I understand) tripped me up a little on the trip--I arrived at the airport and met Michelle, the person I was traveling with; she was standing by the gate so I did too. Before long I started getting woozy and there were no chairs around, so I squatted beside my bags. Michelle, naturally, got concerned; I tried to tell her everything was fine, but I couldn't manage to stand back up for more than a few seconds, so she sweet-talked our way onto the plane early and took my bags and walked me to my seat and forced me to take her water. I recovered pretty quickly once I was sitting but had a headache the rest of the day, so she was probably right to be concerned. I thanked her repeatedly and didn't object when she wanted to know whether we knew the sex and what the name would be and how long we'd been trying and so forth. It wasn't a bad price to pay.

Yesterday we visited our friends Courtney and Ryan and got a big bag of baby stuff, a bunch of clothes and a bathtub and announcements and some pacifier tethers (and pacifiers, but I'd rather just buy new ones). And my Aunt Karolyn and Jaime and Bev all sent me things, and Eric's sister and brother-in-law Angie and Matt gave us a swing they'd gotten a good deal on, so we've now got a nice stash of baby stuff in what we're now calling the nurserary (since the books haven't been moved out yet). At this rate, we should be in good shape by the time L.E.O. puts in her appearance--which is starting to feel terrifyingly soon, even though we've got 16 weeks left.

Pregnancy brain sets in, part 2

1. We picked up the crib from Babies R Us today. Dad (who's been in Dayton for a class and has been driving up on the weekends) and Eric went outside to bring the borrowed van around to load it, and I went to the register to sign paperwork. I had to ask the clerk what day it was. It's my birthday.

2. I was packing for a business trip that I'm leaving for tomorrow, and while I was getting things together, Bev called me on my cell phone. I got most of my things packed and then ran around for five minutes, still talking to Bev, while trying to figure out where I'd put my cell phone.

She's going to have us killed anyway.

L.E.O. now weighs approximately 570 g (about a pound and a quarter). She has a four-chambered heart and a three-vessel umbilical cord and what looks like a very promising brain. (Maybe Eric will get these pictures up someday...) Also, apparently, a reluctance to have her spine imaged, since she didn't make it easy for today's ultrasound technician either. But the technician eventually got it, and we were very pleased with the session--it seemed more thorough than last time, and more oriented towards collecting data than showing us the itty bitty fingers and eensy weensy toesies (and we found the data collection more interesting and reassuring anyway).

L.E.O. is also quite definitely a girl. That waveform has thoroughly collapsed. "Look, here are her labia," the technician said, pointing them out on the screen.

"There's a picture to show her boyfriends," I said.

"You want one?" she inquired.

Unused diapers don't go bad, do they?

I was reading on the bed last night and rolled over onto my stomach without thinking, the first time I've done that in weeks, and my abdomen felt exactly like it contained a larger version of that little bubble of water you get in a ripe blister--which, you know, as Eric said, duh, but it was a very strange feeling.

I went to the my new midwife group yesterday for my first appointment with them. It went very well; I liked the people I met and it felt pretty much like any other doctor's office except friendlier, and my old office did transfer over my records like they were supposed to (except for possibly the mandatory gonorrhea check that I certainly remember the nurse telling me she was going to do, way back when--they don't seem to have the results on file anywhere). They gave me a new goody bag (with a diaper sample from 2007) and a bunch of information on preterm labor; at 22 weeks apparently I'm past the word miscarriage.

According to their scale I need to cut back on the chocolate and the peanut butter toast (I don't think the oranges would make me gain quite that much, though I admit there have been an awful lot of them), but according to ours at home I'm doing fine, so it may just be a calibration issue--we'll see how the next weighing goes. I mentioned being a vegetarian, and the nurse said "What kind?" and the midwife said, "Do you know how to make complex proteins?" (she meant complete) and I said yes and that was that. They measured my fundal height (21 cm), which was new, and listened to the heartbeat (145 bpm), and everything continues to be delightfully average and boring.

They called me later that afternoon to say that they'd gone over my ultrasound records and there was a note that the technician hadn't gotten a good view of the spine, which they like to get as part of their anatomy survey. We took home what looked like a perfectly nice picture of the spine, so I don't know what they needed unless the technician just forgot to write down the relevant data or something, but they asked me to go in Friday for a second ultrasound to get it. It'll be interesting to see the three weeks' difference in L.E.O.'s growth--according to pregnancy.org, she was about eight ounces at nineteen weeks and should be close to a pound now, a doubling of her body weight. Suddenly that extra chocolate-induced weight on me doesn't sound so bad.