The peak

This is it. I've reached the epitome of pregnancy. Barefoot, in a maternity tank top that nevertheless doesn't cover my belly, sciatica shooting down one leg, nerves frazzled from listening to my toddler scream "Mama! Stay!" after leaving her at bedtime because she wouldn't lie down, spoon in one hand and carton of ice cream in the other. This baby can come; there's nothing more left for me.

A mishmash of things maternal

Being a woman pregnant with a daughter (and having another daughter) is depressing this week. Because of current politics, I mean. Otherwise, it's pretty cool. My late pregnancy is pretty mellow so far, other than a pinching pain that the midwife says may be the baby's head pressing against my nerves or may just be general tendon/muscle aches. Either way, it could go and I wouldn't mind.

Also, the hiccups. Our pregnancy book says that babies don't mind hiccups. That does not appear to be true with this baby. She's had hiccups several times today, and she's been particularly active. She's a very squirmy fetus to start with, but today's particularly bad. At my last checkup the midwife confirmed that she's head-down, but I already knew that; the hiccups tend to reverberate in my hips and pelvis and thighs. Hiccups are actually more annoying down there than when you've got them in your airway, it turns out.

I've been doing a little research into how to avoid another OP (face-up) labor, since I'm pretty confident that was the major source of my troubles last time. What I've read says that OP babies are more prevalent in modern times because women have more opportunity to lean back and lie down. Hmmph. So the advice is not to lean back in my chair or lie around with my feet up, but to stand straight and do exercises on my hands and knees. It's also not terribly confidence-inspiring in general. Oh well; I dealt with it before, I can probably do it again. Especially if I get more sleep this time around.

In the meantime, I'm keeping up the gentle reminders to Chloë that there's a baby in my belly, and that it will come out and live with us in a while. She repeats "baby baey" obediently, pointing to my belly (or sometimes kissing it, which is adorable beyond words), though I don't know what she really thinks about that. She does seem to be happy to leave the nursery behind, though. She told me last night she had a dirty diaper, and I carried her into the nursery to change it. "Nooooo!" she screamed, and pointed to the door.

"Do you want to be changed in your room?" I said, and she nodded. We've been changing her on the bed, so I grabbed one of the waterproof pads we inherited before she was born and have never used and brought it along to change her on her bed. I'm so glad she likes the new room, and isn't clinging to the old. We'll see how it goes when a new baby moves in. With luck she'll have forgotten, or won't care, that that used to be her old room. She seems happy with the little reading corner we've got on her bed, and the way she can jump on it, and the moon light and the box of blocks, and the dozen or so stuffed toys that can stay with her on the bed. The other day she took delight in stacking them, carefully, beside the bed rail until they reached their angle of repose and started tumbling down. Then she started sitting on her sock monkey and saying "Munky! Hide!" Then she jumped up and down. Then she made her monkey and her dolls jump. Ah, my little girl and her puppet minions.

On instincts

(Note: if I ever say "to make a long story short," I'm probably lying.)

Chloë's been waking up screaming around midnight pretty often lately. As previously mentioned, I'm finding it hard not to go to her and give her what she's asking for, even if I know she doesn't need it, because now she can ask, and the sad sound of a baby crying in the night is nothing compared to a toddler's piteous "Bottle! Bottle! Mama! Bottle!", especially to pregnancy-hormone-addled ears. She slept through the last few nights and I was so relieved, but last night I woke up around one to her screaming for juice.

We've been working on weaning her off bottles, and she now only has one for bedtime. Sometimes she doesn't even want milk when she gets up in the morning, preferring juice or not asking for anything at all. And she's not always asking for milk in the night, obviously. But we don't want to encourage her to have tooth-rotting liquids in the night, either. And we had discussed the night wakings previously and agreed that we should probably try delaying our response to see if she'll just go back to sleep.

So when I woke up, I checked the time. After a few minutes, I got up and waited in the hall for Eric (who was in the office on the other end of the hall, with Chloë's door between us) to get up to try to stop me. He did, saw me, and indicated "five minutes." So I went back to bed. Chloë continued to scream "Ju! Ju! Ju!" Then she started to slow down. The five minutes were up. There was silence. I started to cry because my baby was probably sitting in the dark with tears drenching her cheeks thinking that nobody cared enough to come to her, since I knew she could hear me get in and out of bed. Then she started up again: "Ju!" and "Bowah!" (her new word for bottle) and then, "Mama!"

I went. The five minutes were more than up and my maternal guilt was overflowing. Eric joined me as I picked Chloë up and stroked her back while she cried. Eric told her that juice was not for night time, but she could have water; did she want some? She wailed, "No," and went on crying, her little body shuddering with sobs. After a while I sang to her and Eric turned on her planetarium night light and brought her a doll and wiped her nose and cheeks with a Kleenex, and she calmed down. When she had stopped crying and had started pointing out stars, I put her back in her crib. She said, "No! Ju!" and started to cry again.

I retreated to bed for another few minutes, listening to the screaming continue to ramp up, starting to cry again myself. Finally I blew my nose, grabbed a second Kleenex, and went down to meet Eric in the computer room. "Would you put some water in her sippy and bring it to her?" I said, and he, probably afraid of the sleep-deprived weepy pregnant woman, agreed. I pressed the Kleenex in his hand--it was for wiping Chloë's face, though I'm not sure I actually communicated that to him--and went back to bed. In a few minutes I heard him go into Chloë's room, and the crying stop.

A few minutes after that Eric came in to check on me. "Thank you for waiting the five minutes before you did what came naturally," he said, which I hated him for, but he was right. I've been having a lot of mood swings this pregnancy, more than last time I think, and a lot of primal-mother-instinct behavior toward Chloë. I don't know if I'm having a worse time with the hormones this time around or if being pregnant while already a mother is just like this.

On the other hand, I'm a little conflicted on instinct in general. The first couple of months of Chloë's life I felt I had no mothering instincts whatever, but people all around me were telling me that I did and I had to trust them. (While other people were laughing at me for being stressed out when she was hungry, but never mind that.) Now, when I do have them, I'm being told to deny them. But I was pretty sure Chloë was truly thirsty last night, and I knew that she doesn't actually mean "no" half the time she says it and would probably have accepted the water if offered. That was why I eventually asked Eric to bring it to her, which I knew was against his own judgment. This is not to say that we should have given her a drink immediately, or even gone in to her at all; training is exactly about going against instinct; I know that. I'm just not sure when it's to be trusted and when it isn't. When I'm pregnant, it probably isn't, but not necessarily. So what's a hormone-riddled pregnant woman who's beginning not to be able to hold her toddler all the time to do?

Is this how parents end up making their kids' science fair projects?

So Chloë is obsessed with the balls on one page of the Little People book Dad gave her for Christmas. It's a big, colorful board book, "My Town" (I think), with two-page spreads that show the outside of a school, garage, grocery store, etc., and then a sort of half-page you turn to show the inside. It advertises 275 new words to teach your kid, but "SUV" and "diagnostic computer" are some of those words, so we're not totally convinced about the purity of their advertising. But it's a cute book, full of things to look at and name and discuss, and (aside from Eric being disturbed that the "adults" are just kids with mustaches) we like it.

On the school page, there are kids in the playground playing with balls. And as I mentioned, Chloë is obsessed. The book is in the bathroom, and she loves to sit on the potty now just so we can look at these balls. "Ball," she says (back to one syllable!), and I open the book to that page, the first spread. I get tired of it eventually, and I point out the apples and the tree and the books and the cup and the computer and the bee. (I've been pointing out bees to her saying "This is a bee. It goes bzzzzzzzz," moving my fingertrip around like a flying bee and landing on her nose. Now when she's looking at the bee she says "Beeeeeeeeeeeee," flying her finger around in the air.) Eventually, I flip to another page. She waits for maybe two seconds and then says "Ball. Ball. Ball."

So I tell her to find the balls. She knows that it's on the lower right of the page, but she doesn't always get the right spread, and several times now she's turned back a page, looking at the lower right, saying "Ha!" with a laugh, like she does when we're playing peek-a-boo and she's trying to surprise me--and then been surprised when the balls aren't there. I feel so sad and sorry for her when she gets it wrong. I suppose she needs to learn to make sure she's right before she laughs in triumph, but it's so pathetic.

And so I've started cheating sometimes, holding down the pages to make sure she flips to the right spread. Is that wrong of me? I can blame it on the pregnancy hormones for now. (Apparently they turn me into SuperPermissiveMom. We've been having trouble getting Chloe to sleep through the night lately, and it's partly because I wake up when she cries, and before I'm fully awake I can't override my instinct to go immediately to her and give her whatever she's asking for, whether she needs it or not.) But if this keeps up I'm going to be fixing her block stacks so they don't fall and correcting her homework without telling her. I hope she picks a science fair project I won't have to do a lot of research for.

Loyalty

I've been feeling very ambivalent about this second pregnancy, even when you discount the why-can't-I-just-be-hooked-up-to-an-IV-rather-than-eat feelings and the tiredness and dizziness and shortness of breath and other symptoms that I will not discuss here but that Eric knows thoroughly. (I'm not a stoic person.) I thought it was mainly that it was a little earlier than we'd been expecting, and that it's disrupted our plans to try to move. Not to mention my occasional Daisy, Daisy/Everything She Wants* feelings that I'll never survive having two children.

But last night Eric and I were driving home from a party (with the honest-to-goodness singing of Christmas carols, no less--since most of the people there were trained singers or musicians or both, I sang quietly) and the baby was moving around, probably in response to the grapes and strawberries. I thought, "Hush, little baby," and immediately felt terrible, and suddenly realized why I've been feeling so ambivalent: I don't want to call this baby my baby, because I already have one. Chloë is my baby. It feels disloyal to apply that idea to anyone else, especially some stranger.

I realize, of course, that this is absurd, and now that I've identified it it's gone away somewhat. But not entirely. I'm still not excited about the idea of changing up our family just when we're settling into our roles and getting used to each other, at least as much as you can get used to a little girl who changes daily. Today at the dinner table she started to say "please" without prompting once we had identified what she wanted. She also ate maybe a cupful of lentils, after a plentiful breakfast and lunch and snack and part of an apple before dinner because she begged (read: whined) so hard when she saw them in the refrigerator. The girl likes her lentils. She spooned them up herself and then pointed the spoon at me and said "Hep" when it got too hard to do herself. She's marvelous. Why would I want another baby?

At our second baby shower all the guests made little scrapbook pages with comments and advice, and our friends Matt and Carol, who had recently had their own second child, wrote, "You will love the second one just as much." At the time I thought it was kind of funny they thought it was important to say that for the birth of the first, but now I see why, and I'm glad they did it. Right now I don't really think I could ever love another child as much as I do Chloë, but I'm willing to trust that I will, and that helps a lot.



*By Wham!, the relevant lyrics being:

I'll tell you that I'm happy if you want me to
But one step further and my back will break
If my best isn't good enough
Then how can it be good enough for two?

Eat at Maummm's

This pregnancy is giving me food trouble. I can't remember whether I had this much trouble last time. I know in the first trimester I was sicker, but in the second was I having so much "nothing sounds good"-itis? Yesterday I was home early to watch Chloë and trying to come up with something for lunch. I didn't want toast. I didn't want peanut butter. I didn't want pasta or a burrito or soup or anything we had handy. I rifled through the cupboards in desperation and found the ingredients for rosemary-artichoke hummus, and decided that that didn't sound bad, and anyway I needed protein. First I had to get Chloë her lunch, but she's easy; she ended up with scrambled eggs with cheese. Then I started the hummus.

Chloë got interested and, when I spooned it into a bowl, wanted a taste. Now, this stuff has garlic, and rosemary, and lemon juice, and chickpeas. It is very much Weird Food, as Eric calls it. But Eric had also just told me about an article he'd read that mentioned strong tastes, like garlic, get into amniotic fluid and babies whose mothers eat such things prefer them afterward, and I know I wasn't having food trouble my entire pregnancy with her. So I figured I'd let her try. I scooped a little into a baby spoon and handed it down.

She made a peculiar face, and I looked around for her sippy to help her wash the taste away. Then she made her "Uh! Uh!" noise and pointed the spoon up at me. "More?" I said hopefully. She nodded, and I gave her another spoonful. And another. Eventually, replete, she stopped begging for more and I was able to eat some myself. Yes, she's definitely my daughter.

And very recently she's started claiming me as someone other than "Dada." We've been coaxing her to say "Mama" for months. She still doesn't, quite, but she does say "Mom." Or rather, "Maummm..." like she's trying to say that final A but it gets stuck on her tongue. It's cute, and I love it. Though she woke up in the night last night and was screaming "Maummm...! Maummm...!" and I thought it might have been better to let her keep on calling me Dada.

Breathless

First, Chloë sends a shout-out to her new cousin Aubrey, born yesterday. Welcome, Aubrey! You may have been born even bigger than Chloë at birth, but you've still got a lot of growing to do to catch up, so get to it!

Second, Chloë's potential new sibling is still smaller than a thumb but already causing trouble. I spent most of yesterday either sitting down or lying down, panting. This out-of-breath-ness is a new thing; it didn't happen when I was pregnant with Chloë. Of course I wasn't toting around or chasing down a toddler when I was pregnant with Chloë, either (except for a couple of times we were with our nieces and nephew Addie, Cindy, and Steve Jr.). For some reason yesterday was especially bad; I had to lie down after my shower, wasn't up for taking Chloe outside, couldn't stand terribly long. It's a good thing Chloë has started wanting to be changed on the floor rather than the changing table.

In the meantime, she's really taken to "up." I'm wondering if she's generalized it from "pick me up" to "Mom, do something for me." It's seemed like it a couple of times. We'll have to pick a new word to work on. "Drink" would be a good one. She mainly indicates she's thirsty by pulling up my shirt. I don't think she's serious about nursing half the time; that's just the only time I know to ask "Do you want something to drink?" And "drink" starts with D, which means she's halfway there already. Eric is still trying, with more hope than success, to get her to say "Mama." She persists in calling me Dada, just like him. We're wondering if she figures "Dada" just means "parent." I mean, as well as "book" and "tree" and "outside" and "deoxyribonucleic acid" and such.

Status report: Month 14

I've been trying to write this post for a week, but the necessary energy and mood haven't been there. If you haven't yet heard, there's a reason why: the Overlord will, in about seven months, have competition. Let me tell you, dealing with first-trimester fatigue, nausea, and dizziness are not as much fun with a toddler as without. Even when the toddler is as awesome as Chloe has been this month. Why didn't anyone tell me one-year-olds are so much fun? And so much work.


For two days running last week, Chloe ate an entire tomato at dinner. We're not talking small tomatoes, either; these are big, meaty heirloom tomatoes from the garden, thick with sweet, meaty flesh. She eats them like candy (or, I guess, the way she would eat candy if she had ever had any). She asks for them the way she asks for everything--by pointing, and saying "dzuh?" in her best video-game sound-effect voice, and if we're not quick enough, by whining. She's getting very good at the whining. Also the screaming and kicking her feet. She's fourteen months old but she acts like a two-year-old, at least when it comes to tantrums.

She is such a big girl now. We can hardly remember when she couldn't walk, even though it's only been about six weeks. We went out to the community college where Eric teaches a class today Monday, and she and I walked all around, looking at the grass and the trees and tile in the floor and the hawk flying overheard. She hesitated at the steps, then decided she would crawl up them, and then took my hands to step down them afterward. She doesn't run, but she walks awfully darn fast. She loves to walk around in the grocery store now, but it usually takes two of us to let her; she dashes this way, and she darts that, and if we're not constantly keeping track she's likely to end up in the cereal aisle while our cart languishes in produce. Unless she decides to push the cart. It's great when she pushes the cart.


She understands and--mostly--obeys instructions we give her, and she seems to understand things like "I'll be back in a minute." She's very fond of nodding. It's not totally reliable, since she'll nod when I point to Guess How Much I Love You and then push it away when I start reading, or when Eric says "Would you like an alligator for dinner?" But she knows it's a way of communicating. We've just got to get her to figure out how to shake her head as well.

There are still no words, though she does have a special way of saying "Uh" when she's trying to get me to pick her up that I'm thinking may be her attempt to humor me when I tell her, "Say 'up,'" before I'll lift her. I'm not as worried about this as I was. She definitely understands, and she definitely communicates. She's taken to patting her diaper when she needs a change. She points to the TV to watch her show. She pulls at our shoulders to get a piggyback ride. She twists up my shirt when she wants to wear it as an apron.


One of her books is a book on opposites, with little slide panels to show the opposites. One of them is day/night, with a cloud on one half and a partial solar eclipse on the other, which perplexes us, but Chloe's favorite is the happy/sad one, which features a little girl who looks a little like her, smiling on one sad and crying on the other. Today Tuesday I said "Happy girl!" in a bright voice when the smiling girl was showing, and "Sad," in a syrupy sad voice when the crying one was showing. Chloe moved the slider back and forth as fast as she could to hear me do the different voices, and kept switching back and forth until we were both laughing.

She can point to Daddy, and Mama, and Chloe, and her ear, her eyes, her nose (if she has trouble, I say "beep beep" and she knows exactly what we're asking for), her mouth (she stuffs her hand into it), her belly, and her toes. Eric keeps working with her to add on different body parts. She can point to Mama's or Daddy's toes or ears, too, though it's best for us to have our glasses on if we ask her to point to our eyes.

We've started telling her to be "gentle" with things, and whenever we say the word "gentle" she smacks herself on the side of the head. Some things we didn't teach her.

She loves her bead necklace and bracelets, and sometimes she plays, carefully, with the one-year ring that my mom gave me and I gave her. She adores seeing herself on our phones and the camera, and gets upset when we take them away. She's started showing interest in the posters on her walls, too. We need to get her a good big family picture.

Bathtime is still our great tribulation. She won't sit down, even though she does it when we ask her other times (for example, when we need to put her socks and shoes on--she plops right down if she thinks it's time to go for a walk in her shoes). She screams when we hold her down, and if we don't hold her down she walks around, lifting one foot in the air and stomping on it. Sometimes she falls. She hasn't had a bad slip, but it's going to happen. We're going to get a bath chair tomorrow.


Otherwise, ordinary life is going just fine. She loves her Baby Galileo DVD; she likes to play with her blocks--she can stack three sometimes, if her placement is lucky--and her popper and her balls. She still loves being held upside down, and getting raspberries on her belly. Today apparently she kept rubbing her daddy's belly--for the fuzziness, we think.

We're winding down nursing, for the reason mentioned in the first paragraph. We've gotten down to only-when-she's-really-upset, which I'm hoping will ease into never, and I'll have the R.I.N.D.S. to myself for a couple of months at least. She's loving almost all foods, especially tomatoes, fruit of all kinds, cheese, and dried seaweed (the kind you use for sushi). She doesn't like being denied a bite, even if it's something you wouldn't think a girl with only eight teeth could handle. One of her favorite pastimes in the kitchen is gnawing potatoes, and the other day when I was taking apples out of the fridge to make apple pie bars with, I set them down on the floor before moving them to the counter, and that was a mistake--a delicious one, for her.


She uses a spoon, more or less, and has made forays into using a fork, but her hands are still her preferred method of food transfer. Luckily she likes washing her hands. I have this habit of sucking water from my fingers when I wash my hands, and now she's picked it up, to the point where she doesn't always wait for me to rinse the soap off her hands before sticking them in her mouth. Or mine. I'm working hard on teaching her about the rinsing part.


She's a curious girl, a loving girl, a girl fascinated with life. Fourteen months is all about being independent, for short stretches, and then running back to mama or daddy for snuggles or help getting her leg off the play table or yet another read of How Are You Peeling? or Little Cloud. I love that she's learning to entertain herself, and I love that she knows she can rely on us to be there and to help out with her difficulties. It's a beautiful age. Eric got all sentimental the other day and told her firmly, "Stop growing!" But she won't, and I think I'm glad, because she gets better every day.

Update

Since I haven't written lately, here's the latest news in Overlord-ville:

Chloë is loving this whole feeding-herself-with-a-spoon thing. We need to fill it up for her, and she realizes this (though she did her valiant best to fill it herself last night out of the baby food jar and the bowl of peas, with different but ultimately futile results each time). So dinner consists of Eric or me filling up her spoon and Chloë depositing the contents in her mouth. Then she points the spoon imperiously at one of us to demand more. She's so satisfied with herself. I love it.

I've taken her outside to play in the grass a bit the last few days. Mostly this consists of pulling up grass and watching me watch her try to eat it, or handing it to me gravely and waiting until I put it down, then pulling up and handing me more.

We took her to gaming on Monday, but discovered that we can't do that anymore, at least for a while. She consented to sit and watch for a short time, but then she wanted to play. Then she wanted to crawl, and then she wanted someone to play with. Her henchmen attempted to placate her, but she was only temporarily mollified. She wants to do her own thing now, thank you very much, and will accept no substitutes.

Her newest favorite occupation is climbing the stairs. We keep the gate up most of the time, and when it's up she climbs the two steps to the broad landing and stays there, caught in a playpen of her own making because she hasn't figured out how to climb down yet. When we take the gate down, she zooms up the staircase. She climbs with her right knee and her left foot. When we went to visit her grandma, it didn't take her long to discover, joy of joys, a carpeted staircase.

She's also preoccupied with making clicking noises with her tongue. She discovered it a while ago, but she seems to have taken a new interest in it. Especially when she's just finished a meal (food or R.I.N.D.S.), she'll start clicking away, grinning around her open mouth. At dinner Eric and I get into it too, and we'll all three click at each other like ancient African hunters.

Also, she's extremely cute. Did I mention the cuteness?


"Do not make the mistake of thinking that flowers indicate weakness."

Hallelujah!

I have my feet back!

Ice cream and bugs

We had ice cream for dinner on Monday--well, technically we had a substantial snack, then stopped at Dairy Queen while out shopping because I really wanted a Blizzard, then got home late and had another snack instead of cooking--which I realized I ought to appreciate more than I did, since my days of "but I'm pregnant!" are coming to a close. I haven't even used my "send the husband on a midnight run for an unusual food" card. I suspect I'm something of a disappointment to pregnant women everywhere. Maybe I can keep the card for later.

My now-weekly checkup was yesterday. Everything remains fine--blood pressure back down to my normal levels, baby still head-down and poking her feet (or raygun, we can't tell for sure) into my ribs--except that I have tested positive for Group B strep, which is a bacteria that's asymptomatic in normal adults but is apparently the leading cause of sepsis and meningitis in newborns. In order to avoid passing it on to L.E.O., I'll be getting IV infusions of antibiotics at the hospital. Not a big deal, though I was grumpy about the idea of being hooked up to a pole my entire labor until they explained that I could just get a hep lock (a little needle port that gets left in your arm) and be hooked up just long enough for an infusion once every four hours. I think I'll feel a little bit like a cyborg, but that's all to the good.

Push my buttons

We were over at the mothers' yesterday, and before long I sat on the couch to put my feet up because the Time of the Great Swelling has come. I had to shove my rings on yesterday morning, and my wedding ring (slightly smaller than the engagement ring) didn't fit at all today. We'll see if I can remember I'm married.

"My ankles are memory foam!" I exclaimed shortly thereafter. The medical term is "pitting edema," but I prefer "memory foam." It means that when I pressed a finger into my puffy flesh, the dent stayed, and then very slowly filled in. It was fairly creepy. Eric seemed amused, though--and more amused when L.E.O. started moving around a little and I poked at her through the top of my belly and remarked, "Hmm. Whenever I press up here, I have to use the bathroom." I'm not just a baby's life support, I'm a baby's toy. Push this button for interesting textures! Push this button to make it move!

All the pretty little ponies

L.E.O. had better not ever ask for a horse for her birthday. She's already given me four--four charley horses, that is; one two nights ago and three last night. ("How is that possible?" Eric said. "You only have two legs." I would have hit him, but he was out of arm's reach and my calves ached too much to get up.) The Mayo Clinic guide says no one knows for sure why they happen, but it may be due to the uterus putting pressure on the nerves, or decreased circulation. The Web concurs. Both tell me there's no cure and it sucks to be me. I suppose when L.E.O. is running things and has her advisory board of mad scientists I could ask her to have them find out, or make me bionic legs or something.

Best foot forward

Earlier this evening, I swiveled in my chair to get up and get a shower. I pulled my feet out from under my desk and yelped, "Holy $#@!" because suddenly my feet also looked seven months pregnant. I've been going around saying (in my head) when I look into mirrors and bump into doors, "I had a waist once," and if feet could think mine would be thinking, "I had ankles once." Welcome to late pregnancy, I know. I suspect this is the point where that "Only two months until we need to be ready/get to meet our baby/have to try to keep a fragile human being alive" we've been saying to each other in eager but panicky voices becomes "An entire two months until I get my body back," at least for me.

Tomorrow is our first childbirth education class. They're holding it at the brilliantly-planned hour of 5 PM, so I'll be leaving work a little early the next four weeks to attend. The lady I called to sign up told me to bring a blanket, a pillow, and my "support coach." I was a little concerned about the blanket and pillow thing--it screams "exercise that will make us feel really stupid" to me--but now I'm thinking anything that involves lying down, and therefore keeping my feet elevated, is probably the right stuff.

The amazing shrinking shoes

My shoes shrank today. They were fine yesterday, but this morning they were small. This does not bode well. I really love these shoes.

I'm now on the two-week plan with the midwives' office, as the receptionist said when scheduling my next appointment. It feels almost like a promotion. (Actually, I wouldn't know. I've never been promoted.) I met the second of the three midwives who assist with births, Sandy. One of her first questions was, "What's your birth plan?"

"Um..." was my response. ("Survive" didn't seem like what she was looking for.)

"So, whatever? I like that, actually, it means we'll be able to work together to find out what works for you." We discussed pain management, water and relaxation and medications--her attitude toward epidurals seemed to be "Most people would consider them unthinkable but I'm very progressive in my outlook"--and she warned me that first-time mothers tend to be late rather than early, but they'll start suggesting induction at 41 weeks and start getting tough about it at 42. I'd mentioned that my parents live in Seattle, and she said, "So keep that in mind when your parents are making plans." She also said, during the epidural discussion, "Since you're from Seattle I expect you're more open to natural birth than some of the girls around here, who don't want to feel any pain." That amused me.

L.E.O.'s development continues to be splendidly normal. Presumably she's getting it out of her system now. My blood pressure is also normal (due, I expect, to a slow week at work--if I were dealing with clients at full speed I bet it'd be elevated), I'm neither diabetic nor anemic, and my weight gain is pretty reasonable. The nurse said something while taking my blood pressure about me being "little," which made me laugh since I'm now the heaviest I've ever been. Eric pointed out the other day that when I lie on my back I don't really look pregnant, just kind of round, but in any other position it's pretty easy to see at this point. Once the heat kicks in and my shoes shrink permanently, it'll be easy to hear, too, because I'll be complaining all the time.

Weight matters

We got back from Penguicon yesterday. Technically L.E.O.'s first conventions were in 2009, though I doubt she'll count them as she gets older. I wore the Geek Inside shirt that Eric got me (unfortunately, we decided that the next size up from my usual would be best, but it's still way too big for me--we'll see how it fits in two months) and we were able to share our plans for L.E.O.'s world dominion with a few con friends.

Today's milestone: I am wearing maternity pants for real. Mom gave me three pairs and I tried out the jeans a couple of times, because I miss my jeans. But they felt like they were going to fall down, so I put all three aside. But today I discovered I've grown out of another pair of pants ("From this angle you're huge!" Eric said last night. "Huge!") and decided to give this pair a try. They're still slipping a little but not bad at all--mainly, I think, because they're much lighter than the jeans. However, I've been popping out rather a lot the last few weeks (despite not having gained as much as I did last month), and I'm pretty sure that before long I will also be able to defy gravity with the jeans.

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.

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.