I am starting to dislike our Laugh and Learn Puppy dog.

Of all our toys that talk, sing, giggle and snort, the Laugh and Learn Puppy is the only one that gets on my nerves. Mainly, this is because the song takes over your mind and repeats itself, over and over.

To put this in perspective, this is including a 2 page story that repeats, “Let’s go out to play; it’s a sunny day!” and “Playtime was such fun; it’s bedtime everyone!” over and over.  And a hoe-down banjo toy.  And a talking octopus with a really snotty voice.

In addition to having numerous voices chasing me around the house (nothing new, they’re just outside of my head now), my emotions are still shot to heck.

During pregnancy, it was normal to cry at ads with saccharine plotlines and books where children were eaten.  (Thanks, Desperate Passage.)  But, Maddox and I watched Tarzan today, and I cried through the first 15 minutes of it.  Baby eaten by tigers?  Parents eaten by tigers and baby left all alone?  Sobs, I tell you.

Possibly, both of these reactions are caused by exhaustion. A friend of mine used to say, “Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.” This may be true, I don’t know. But if I have to be dead before I get another 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, I may have to scare up a couple of tigers and feed them Laugh and Learn Puppy.

But what the hell. It’s a great big colorful world out there (or so I’ve heard) and Mr. Maddox and I are going to go enjoy it.

It took awhile for me to trust our baby monitor. I didn’t believe that the voice-activate setting would work, and pictured my poor baby crying his head off in the other room.

Note: We live in a 2 bedroom apartment, and there is virtually no room in the house where you could not hear a baby from another room.

So, this is a post for all the other neurotic new moms out there who are worried that their baby monitors won’t actually allow them to monitor their babies.

Product Description

The Sony Baby Call Baby Monitor has three settings: On, off, and voice-active. The “on” setting is a bit much – you hear absolutely everything, and if your baby requires music or a white noise machine to get to sleep, this is not a benefit.

Voice-activate is smart enough to recognize a repeated sound, so it filters out the background noise. The sensitivity is good – it picks up our baby’s cries pretty early on, so he’s hasn’t reached the full-out “WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON” stage by the time we reach him.

The “send” half of the monitor plugs in, and the “receive” half has a detachable plug, so you can carry it from room to room. When the receiver needs to be charged, it beeps at you until you hunt down where you’ve put the plug and recharge the battery.

Price

The monitor costs $45 at Baby’s R Us, and there’s currently a 10% discount if you use the code 930851. It’s $42.50 on amazon, but then of course you have to ship it.

Either way, I think this is a fair price. You and your baby get security, the monitor lasts a long time so you can reuse this with each child you have (or give it to your sister) and you don’t even need to buy batteries.

Overall, the Sony Baby Call Baby Monitor has allowed me to sleep easier, and to stop making 3 minute check-ins when our baby is napping. Also, while letting our baby sleep in his own room is traumatic for Mom, it gives our baby quieter, less-interrupted sleep and will probably decrease the chances that I’ll need back surgery from contorting my body in weird shapes to protect him when he’s in our bed.

Since I’m all about the baby lately, but don’t want to turn this into a baby blog, check out baby updates at maddoxheller.com.

I’ll be updating this blog periodically with similar content to before the pregnancy, but for all baby-related news, pictures & video, head over to the new site.

In any case, I haven’t called the doctor yet because 1) we’re still in the process of recording the time between contractions 2) I’d rather stay home as long as possible and 3) I can still talk (and type) through them.

On that note, I figure the best way to get through this is to breathe, blog and play World of Warcraft. It’s hard to be stressed when you’re editing a post or beating down virtual monsters.

I’ve also started our #labor twitter updates. Part of me is reluctant, just in case this is too much personal information to put on the internet, but what the hell, it’s a Brave New World and I’m going to roll with it.

Breathing is pretty self-explanatory – I’m trying to use the coping mechanism Jon’s Mom suggested, which involves kind of going with the pain, and visualizing to help your body do what it needs to instead of resisting this. The fact that I can still be rational about it tells me that this is the very beginning and things are going to get a lot more painful.

I’ve also been resisting urges to clean the fridge, to spray my plants with lemon oil for fruit flies and to do laundry. All these things need to be done, but after hours of off-and-on contractions, I know I’m going to be tired later, and want to conserve my energy.

Wish us luck, and cross your fingers that this is the real deal – we’re ready for this baby to arrive! Drop us a line via Twitter or email – unless the hospital turns off the wireless internet, we’ll be on throughout the day.

Image Credit: Warcraft Baby and nesting

1. I feel like a poser every time someone wishes me a Happy Mother’s Day. My Mom, who is amazingly talented at the right gesture in any situation, actually found and mailed me a “Happy Mother’s-To-Be Day” card. If she was in charge of the world, things would run much more smoothly.

On that note, I wish my sister was on Facebook so I could wish her a Happy Mother’s Day without having to use my phone. My newest unobtainable desire is an iPhone, which is so awesome of a phone that you don’t have to speak into it to communicate, you can just email people from any location.

2. Time slows down when you’re waiting for things. Yesterday, we had time to do some contract website work, visit Crane Castle , try out a new pizza place in Ipswich, and we also spent a good two hours hanging out with the Tivo guy, who was very nice and tried hard, but who utterly failed to fix our box.

3. You must get really great upper arm strength once you have a baby. We live on the 3rd floor of our apartment complex, and I was trying to work out the logistics of carrying my laptop, the baby and the baby’s bag down to the car, and I came up with two trips, carrying the baby the whole time.

It’s sort of like those logic puzzles where you have to cross a river with a wolf, a sheep and a head of sheep-attracting lettuce, and you can’t leave either the wolf or the lettuce with the sheep. So, you just carry those suckers with you everywhere.

Finally, wish us luck! Remember, we’ll be online during the labor until I become incoherent, or, like my friend Sarah suggested, until I have a contraction and snap my laptop in half.

Image credit: he man, original image: bouquet and pizza.

I figure that it’s better to be safe, and all those doctors must have some reason for prescribing this, so we’re going to do this once a week until the baby is born.

On the plus side, there may be internet access in the birth center area of the hospital. (Jon was able to get online today during the test.) This means LIVE TWEETS OF THE BIRTH, which is vastly entertaining and should contain choice bits of interesting pregnancy information. That is, if I can type at that point.

If anything, after the phone calls to our parents, this will be the first place where the birth will be announced, so if you want to be one of the first to know, check out our twitter feeds. You can view my updates on my twitter feed, or get Jon’s perspective on his feed.

Here is how I measure up:

Around the fifth month of pregnancy, the “nesting” instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one’s house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world.

Well, this week, I’ve been trying to get everything tied up at work, and have sent several totally OCD write ups to my co-workers outlining my open projects and responsibilities.

At home, I’ve set up the bassinet, done baby laundry, organized all his clothes by size, wrote up a birth plan, and made enough risotto to sink a barge (I AM a barge right now).

Females of the animal kingdom are all equipped with this same need. It is a primal instinct…You may become a homebody and want to retreat into the comfort of home and familiar company, like a brooding hen.

I haven’t really wanted to be sitting around at home, although I am very excited that I now have an excuse to flaunt my primal instincts. Another one of my pregnancy books said new mothers sometimes growl at people. I am also looking forward this.

Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently.

Irrational? That’s just absurd. Okay, so maybe I cussed out a cashier in a liquor store today, but that’s besides the point. She had it coming.

This unusual burst of energy is responsible for women ironing anything in the house that couldn’t out run them. Being preoccupied with ant killing, squishing them one at a time for weeks on end. Packing and unpacking the labor bag 50 times. Cleaning the kitchen cupboards and organizing everything by size to the point that you make sure the silverware patterns match when it’s stacked in the cutlery drawer. Sorting the baby’s clothes over and over again is a favorite theme.

This might be a problem. I am already really, really OCD. If I get any more OCD, like my friend Kate says, I’m going to have to start spelling it CDO so it’s alphabetical.

I once read a book where the main character explained to her friend that, hard as it is to believe, the story about the baby being brought by the stork is not actually true.

Likewise, I’m really sorry to disillusion you, but in order to produce a baby you have to gestate that sucker for 9 months, and even if you have supportive friends, family and co-workers, it’s still a tiring process.

These days I work, eat, sleep and look forward to the time when I’ll be able to put four whole things on my to do list and have the energy to accomplish all of them. (The current limit before exhaustion and pregnancy-induced narcolepsy is three.)

But don’t get me wrong. Although kind people (thanks, Tim) have reminded me that sleep is even more unlikely after the baby is born, I figure I’ll be up at 3am feeding him anyway, so I’ll have the chance to write some entertaining (if somewhat incoherent) posts then.

All in all, I’ll take the third trimester over the first and second any day. Being tired can be tough, but I no longer have a constant, very personal relationship with every toilet (or bucket) in the vicinity. When people ask, “How are you feeling?” I can honestly say I’m feeling pretty good.

At 8 months, Jon and I are pretty excited. I think that I’m more excited, because while we’re both equally looking forward to the baby, I am also looking forward to additional great things, like pants that zip and lying on my stomach.

Yes, shortly after the labor, I am going to spend a good 20 minutes just rolling over continuously on our living room rug. It will be fantastic. Possibly, I will have Jon video tape this (the rolling, not the labor), and post it online, just so you all can share in the wonder.

Image credit: edited stork.

Consequently, I’m pretty paranoid about others thinking that I’m slacking off at work. I like being productive, and get stressed if there isn’t enough to do. And I feel compelled to account for my time at work, which means I have a completely anal-retentive record of everything I do during the day, kept in Evernote.

Unfortunately, today my mental neuroses clashed with my physical reality.

You see, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t actually sit up in my office chair comfortably for 8 hours running. By 3:00PM, I was leaning back as far as I could while still viewing my computer screen. To anyone walking by my cubicle, I looked like I was either on cracked out on codeine or was trying to take a nap.

I swear, I wasn’t slacking off. Please don’t hit me with the mop. I just don’t bend much at the waist anymore. After fretting about this unnecessarily for 5 minutes, I discovered I could sit cross-legged and appear alert, albeit somewhat like an-overstuffed Buddha.

Problem solved. In a manner of speaking. Clearly, Buddha did not do a lot of desk work.

Image credit: carrots & Buddha

I’ve reached the point where I wake up in the middle of the night and I swear I can actually feel the baby growing.

Rolling over is an immense challenge – I start by rubbing my sides to get him to unstick himself from my ribs, and then he kind of reluctantly lets go and slides with gravity, and I can get in a comfortable position.

It’s pretty neat – when I eat or drink, it has a direct effect on his movements. If I have tea (doctor approved in small doses), he’ll start kicking around about 5-10 minutes after I start drinking it.

Although I love going to work (I don’t do well when I’m at home during the days), I’ve started looking forward to maternity leave, just so I can get some more sleep.

Being this fat has been great for my ego – seriously. It’s hard not to be aware of your weight gain or loss in our society. Initially, I was worried about what the pregnancy might do to my self-image, but it’s actually rather fantastic. You have an entirely legit excuse to be a seacow.

Baths are great and relaxing, but removing myself from the bathtub is becoming kind of a challenge. If they ever had a 7-Month Pregnancy Survivor, the challenges would be the most boring ever – The Stair Climb. The Snack Eating. The Attempt to Roll Over In Under 15 Minutes.

Finally, I have become reconciled to the fact that they will probably not invent baby teleportation before my labor date. I’m a little disappointed, but feel as though many people have done this before, and 200,000 years of evolution has to have gotten something right.