Last days

Chloë's been waking up early and often this week. She often cries, possibly in her sleep, around midnight or one, and then wakes me up with screaming around four. Then she comes into our room at around six-thirty, which is hour before her usual wake-up time, saying "Chloë wake!" I pull her up in bed with me and have her snuggle down in the hopes she'll go back to sleep and I can have my usual extra hour. She snuggles, but she doesn't sleep. Instead, she says, "Mama wake? Dada sleep. Chloë wake. Mama wake? Mama up! Chloë up! Go down? Mama glasses. Baby crib [referring to the bassinet]. Baby sleep? Dada sleep? Mama sleepy? Go down!" until I have to get out of bed before I throw her out. I don't know what's causing it (the early waking, I mean; I know what's causing the chattering). Does she know these are her last days to have Mama and Dada all to herself?

I am now more pregnant than I've ever been, at least if we assume my LMP due date is accurate. (Since I was still breastfeeding at the time and my cycle was still getting back to normal, I'm more inclined to trust the ultrasound's, which is five days later.) Yesterday evening I kept thinking "This time last pregnancy, I was in the hospital." Then I started having crampy contractions and began to panic, because I've still got a few things I really want to get done before I have to drop my life in order to have the new baby. Luckily they must have been Braxton-Hicks...or else the pure force of my ire when I told Eric I felt funny and he began making faces at me convinced my body to hold off a while.

I don't feel ready for this second baby, not quite yet. I even avoided the crackers on the dinner table on purpose. Setting aside the projects I want to finish (nothing vital to the baby--we've got carseats installed and clothes washed and the bassinet set up and, aside from one piece from the midwives that they can fax in, my paperwork in place), I've been thinking about my labor and delivery and early days with Chloë, and regretting all the things I did wrong. Luckily there was no lasting damage to her, and if my only problem is a bad attitude going into labor I'm doing fine, but I still feel I've got a bad precedent. Maybe that will only make it easier for this time around to be better. I know a lot more this time, after all. And I don't think I'll really have to let the pieces of my life scatter and pick them back up afterward, which is kind of how it's feeling on this side of things (being understaffed at work, and then having my sole true peer go on vacation for a week because it's his last chance until after I get back from leave, doesn't help).

As far as the medication during labor debate goes, I've settled on a strong, firm "I'll wait and see how I feel." If I get to the hospital and am doing okay, then fine. If I get to the hospital and am panicky and despairing, I'll get an epidural and take a nap. At least while I'm at the hospital Chloë won't wake me up early.

Working things through

I've been frustrated and anxious lately off and on, partly as the pregnancy hormones ebb and flow and partly as the cleanliness and functionality of the house does. (The bathroom sink drips, but I haven't been able to get it anywhere near our priority list, nor the paint the garage needs. The kitchen sink is leaking, possibly because we're having problems with plumbing in the basement. We had to have our furnace motor replaced. Box elder bugs are getting in. And so on. Whenever we manage to sell this house, we're just going to rent for the rest of our lives.) Someone once told me that her first pregnancy was all about waiting and her second was all about scrambling to get things done, and that's how I'm feeling too. With my projects behind and the house falling apart and the vacuuming happening maybe once a month with only one kid, how are we possibly going to keep this household running with two? I know people do it. They do it with three, four, five, more. I have my suspicions about what we're doing wrong, but working on the problems is taking time. And I don't have time. This baby is due in a month.

We went to our friends' two-year-old's birthday party on Saturday. Chloë had a great time playing with the balloons and the rubber duck favors and the unfamiliar toys and kids. I knitted, and commiserated with another woman due about the same time as me but more miserable--she's shorter, and I've been gifted with good pregnancy mojo; people at work keep telling me I only recently started looking pregnant, and aside from Chloë-induced backache, I haven't been having any real chronic problems, just acute ones. Eventually the noise and crowdedness got to me, and it was driving me crazy on both my account and Chloë's that we had no plans for dinner. So we left early, stopped at Panera Bread for dinner (note: their kids' grilled cheese sandwich is made with American cheese; Chloë turned up her nose at it), and went home, where Eric and Chloë went straight to bed and I sat up a little while to appreciate the quiet. I didn't do any work. Sometimes you can't.

Last night I laid in bed with Chloë, singing her a few songs ("Emmo dhong," she always requests, and "mohr Emmo," whenever I stop to draw breath. Luckily the songs from her Elmo DVD are very short. The theme song goes "La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's world/La la la la, la la la la, Elmo's world/Elmo loves his goldfish, his crayon too/That's Elmo's world!" Which is pretty sad when you think about it) and then talking about her day, which we've been doing lately to get her settled for sleep, which she persists in calling her "long nap." First we talked about Saturday's birthday party and about the walk we'd had with her cousins Addie and Rae, and how she had been allowed to ride Addie's tricycle ("A-ee. Bik. A-ee. Pee," because Addie has asked her to say "please" to ride the bike), and about the garter snake we saw on a different walk a couple of days before that ("Daw. Nake!").

And then we talked about the shopping we had done that day, and the shows we had watched and the coloring we had done, and I told her she had been a good girl, doing what we asked her and staying out of trouble, and I was glad she was a good girl and a happy girl. "Happy. Gul," she repeated. And then, "Mama. Happy?"

I wasn't quite sure whether it was a question or a comment. "Yes, mostly Mama is happy too," I told her. When I'm with her, it's not a lie. I haven't yet figured out how to fully integrate the happiness of being Chloë's mama with the happiness I had in my pre-Chloë life, which I think is part of the running-of-the-household problem, and I know that that conflict is going to get worse when the new baby comes. With luck, I'll get it together before they reach high school.

Time to go home pregnant.

Do you people HAVE to talk about this stuff? The smell of reheated fish is bad enough, now you're talking about cooking eggs in the microwave at work and eating chili with pickles?

And another thing

Why does everything I eat have to be what I'm "craving"? Why am I not allowed to simply eat something, as normal people do, without being suspected of a ravening desire for it? Pregnancy does not make me into an entirely different subspecies. Maybe I'm having a piece of leftover cake because I want one, just like you, and not because I crave it.

Also, I hate my clothes. I have only one pair of maternity pants that are reasonably comfortable and even the maternity shirts are getting too short and I only have one dress that I can fit into and we probably can't afford to buy more other than the support rigs I need to go get in the next couple of weeks before the RINDS become fully operational.

Now I know why women say they're so ready to be done at the end of pregnancy. It's not the pregnancy itself, it's everything else.

Questions, questions

Apparently people only know four questions related to pregnancy. They are, in order:

• When are you due?
  
• Is it a boy or a girl?
  
• Have you picked out a name?
  
• Are you excited?

I understand and appreciate that these people are happy for me and want to show their interest, and since they don't know me these questions are their polite method for doing so. But seriously, people. You don't know me. Why would you actually care what my kid's name is going to be? If I say "Yes, but we're not sharing it," as some people do, will you feel you have a right to be offended? And am I really supposed to say anything other than "Yes" to that last question? It's as bad as people who say "How are you?" when they're speeding past you in a hallway and are clearly substituting the question for "Hi," or the old-time "How do you do" (to which the only acceptable answer is "How do you do"). I almost enjoyed the variation that one of my coworkers threw in the other day, though it kind of appalled me as well: "Did you guys particularly want a girl, or did you not care?" After all, she was inviting me--begging me, almost--to say "Actually, we really wanted a boy. We hate the idea of a girl. We're not sure we're going to keep her."

Relatedly, I got my first "Are you sure you're still pregnant?" call recently. I'd been warned about these, when people call to say "You didn't have the baby and forget to tell me, did you?" I can understand the impulse; Eric's waiting on the result of an interview and I keep wanting to ask him "Have you heard anything?" even though I know perfectly well that he'll tell me as soon as he gets any news. But do they really expect me to say, "Oh, right, I did spend two days in a hospital extruding a whole new person out of my body. Totally slipped my mind or I would have mentioned it" or "Yes, I had the baby, but I didn't care enough about you to tell you" or maybe "Why yes, as a matter of fact, I did have the baby. She's sweetly asleep on a perfectly made bed with rose petals scattered around her and I've just sat down after my manicure to consider penning a few haiku in silver calligraphy to announce her birth, but gosh darn it, you've anticipated me"?

I'm up here

I want one of these shirts, only with the message a little lower down. (And the arrow longer, come to think of it.) I'm wearing another actual maternity outfit today, and people keep looking at me and then looking down at my midsection. It's disconcerting. I'm guessing in another two months I won't get even the momentary eye contact.

Not safe for (co)work(ers)

I'm not going to be a very patient pregnant lady. I mean, I'm not a very patient anything lady, but I'm pretty sure word is going to go around at work that Jenny's always very crabby and shouldn't be asked about her pregnancy. This will suit me fine. "How are you doing?" people ask me (a lot of people at work know, since I mentioned it to my boss's boss and she told a bunch of other people--I also told my department, but it's a small department and I don't think they found it a topic of much fascination). I say I'm fine, or I'm fine except for a cold, or I'm busy, or whatever. "But how are you feeling?" they say, with extra meaning, and I suppose they want me to talk about my morning sickness, or my cravings, or my ill-fitting pants, or maybe my headaches and constipation and backaches (for the record, I don’t have any of those things other than the pants, though it depends on the pair).

If it's early in the day and I'm in a good mood I'll indulge them by saying "Better now that I'm out of the first trimester." If it's later in the day or I've just dealt with a customer who's upset because I failed to thoroughly read his mind, I say I'm fine. If they press, saying, "Baby growing all right?" I say, "As far as I know, though it could be dead for all I can tell." (Okay, I only said that the once, and she was so shocked I was immediately sorry I'd said it.)

I don't want to talk about my pregnancy at work. I feel basically fine, so there's not a lot to talk about, and there are always pregnant women in the company and I've heard some of them talk incessantly about how they feel and what they think and it bores me, and I don't want to bore people. And if I say I'm fine, you don't get to second-guess me unless you're my parent or my husband.

Not a patient pregnant lady. Don't even think about the belly-rubbing bit.