Entries Tagged 'World Domination - Leanne & Jon Plus Spawn' ↓

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately. For those of you who have asked what is going on (and thanks for asking, I appreciate it), I’ll tell you.

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.

My very first job was at a fruit mart. My boss was fair in general, but pretty harsh about slacking off – if you had a second between stacking the carrots and taking a customer, you had better be wiping off the counters or restocking the salad bar. And if you’re going to the break area to use the bathroom, bring a mop with you and do the floors on the way.

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

7 more weeks to go, give or take a week. Here are some things I’ve discovered about myself and pregnancy:

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.

True story.

Originally, people just thought I was really sick, so they stayed far away from me in case I was contagious. (This also has its perks.) Then, people just thought I was fat. But now, it’s pretty evident that I’m pregnant.

And it’s funny. People get all smiley, and tell you not to pick heavy things up and try to feed you all the time. If you don’t feel like doing something, people just assume that it’s the pregnancy. If you’re crazy or forgetful, it’s due to hormones.

Why is pregnancy a free pass to acting like a lazy sociopath? I even get this reaction from people who don’t like babies. Although it’s possible they are just conforming to social norms and secretly are saving up all the hate until post-pregnancy.

My theory is that people see that you are clearly carrying on the species, and genetically, they can’t respond negatively. You are continuing the dominance of the human race and thus ensuring our survival!

Guys, at 6,765,913,964 people, we are not at risk of petering out. If you start doubting this, go to the US Census Bureau Population Clock and continually refresh.

I have yet to test the limits of this newfound power. I’ve imagined confrontations where people hit my car (always a possibility in MA) and I get out and start screaming at them for driving into a 7 month pregnant lady.

As fun as this would be, I’m kind of glad these conflicts haven’t yet come up. With my luck, it would end up being with a baby-hating census-taker who is well aware of our overpopulation problems and has no social compunctions about running over a crazy pregnant woman who has forgotten why she’s standing in the road in the first place, due to hormones.

Image credit: Babies

9 months seemed like a very long time at the start of this. It’s been almost a year of our lives, and the baby has made himself fully present in our lives since the first month, if only by inadvertently causing me to explore the limits of physics via projectile vomiting.

This Friday, it will be 9 WEEKS (or 10, depending on how eager he is to taste cheeseburgers via his own digestive system). It seems like such a short time, but actually, we’re pretty ready for him now.

We’ve got the crib set up, and my grandparents’ love seat in the nursery, and curtains hemmed and put up, and even this frightening stuffed animal holder that seemed like a good idea at Ikea, but looked like a hanging cage for lab animals once we got it home and put it up.

I need to put together the dresser, and we’d like to decorate a bit, but Jon’s cleaned out all the extra pieces of furniture and books and papers we’ve been storing in the second bedroom.

There’s bedding to obtain, and diapers and bottles and things, but for the most part, we are feeling ready for this baby – as ready as first time parents can ever really be.

Daycare has taken awhile to work out, but we’ve finally found a place we like, and we’ve worked out Jon’s family’s visit for after the baby’s born.

I’m starting to make preparations for maternity leave at work, and have been testing out easy-to-make meals for after the baby’s born.

So, take your time developing, little baby, but we can’t wait for you to arrive.

(Although, if you’re thinking about it, try to arrive quickly, like, say, 2 hours after I go into labor.)

It’s Baby Fever: Read about the Wood’s baby, who might arrive in 9 hours, or Jasper Daniel Blachly-Nelson, who arrived at the end of December.

Image credit: crib

This baby sure moves a lot. It started way back in December, and he’s gotten more active each month.

Right now, he is tucked into my left side, sitting on my ribs. Also, there’s so much pressure pushing out that my belly button has disappeared. I kind of miss it.

You can see the movements now, and you can kind of feel where he is in there. Generally, he’s squashed mostly on one side, with limbs making little movements all over. I’ve tried to think of ways to explain how the movement feels from the inside, so people will get an idea of what it’s like.

Sometimes it’s like your stomach is rumbling. Other times it’s like a hiccup, but in the wrong spot. Sometimes it’s like when your muscle is in spasm – it doesn’t hurt, but it’s tightened up so you can’t fully relax it and stretch out. A lot of times it’s a little hitch like you’ve burped, again in the wrong place and not involving your lungs at all.

When he gets on a roll, it’s sort of like having an eye twitch in your stomach. When he gets stuck, it feels like a stitch in your side after you’ve been running – not terrible, but you need to stop and rub the area until it relaxes. The weirdest thing is that by now it’s not weird to have someone moving around in there.

I wonder what it feels like to him sometimes. When I change from my right side to my left, I kind of picture him going “Whoaaaaa” and sliding across to a new position. I don’t know if this actually happens, or if he’s protected by the amniotic fluid and stays pretty stable. I’ll have to ask him when he gets out. Hopefully, he will also return my belly button.

Why I Loathe Going to Ikea

Ikea has more carts than Market Basket, and the people are just as crazy. When you finish one nightmarish level, there’s another one, with even more stuff.

The knickknacks and weird stuffed animals and plant containers made only for 2″ pots get to me. I always come out of the marketplace area wanting to give away all my possessions and curl into a little ball.

Granted, we have some Ikea furniture that we’ve been pretty happy with. If it’s made out of real wood not particle board, and is not a desk chair, Ikea furniture is actually pretty nice.

For further insight into how I feel about Ikea, check out Molly Schoemann’s post Oh the Hu-Mall-ity. Substitute “Ikea” for “mall” and there you have it.

Why I Love Going to Ikea

But when you get home… oh, when you get home, you have all this awesome stuff to assemble. I don’t actually care what it will eventually make, I just see piles of metal and wood and baggies of hardware, and I’m happy for the rest of the afternoon.

This trip was for Project Baby, so we came home with a sturdy crib, a dresser that can double as a changing table, curtains, a lamp, shelving units and a few other things.

That’s hours of assembly, right there. And, it’s not like it’s plumbing or building from scratch, either – it’s nearly impossible to break anything expensive and you already have all the pieces.

So, Let Us Build

I was pretty pooped from the trip, but I had bits of baby stuck in my ribcage in a very interesting way, so sitting down and relaxing wasn’t an option. Also, assembling shelving units is much more fun.

The instructions said to put a block of wood over the metal before banging the pieces together with a hammer. I didn’t have any spare bits of wood lying around (all my wood is already in use, in chair-form or similar) so I tried banging directly on the metal.

This had loud and unfortunate consequences. Metal against metal clangs in a ear-splitting way that is horribly unpleasant, even though you do feel kind of like you’re building a railroad, which is definitely fun, even as your ear cilia plans to commit suicide in self-defense.

After trying to use Jon’s Perl book and an extra-large coaster as a buffer, I finally gave up and just bashed the pieces together quickly (there were 16) and hoped the neighbors were out.

Then it was just a matter of screwing things together and velcro-ing on the drawer pieces and getting the stickers off the frames. You know and I know that rubbing alcohol would work best for this, but I for one prefer to use knives whenever possible.

The Finished Product

That done, I waited until Jon went down to bring up the crib box and dragged the shelving unit down the hall. (He doesn’t like me to move things these days, which is a logical request that I pay strict attention to whenever he is in the room.)

After unpacking the baby clothes given to us by our wonderful friends Pat, Kate, Kahn & Michelle and our parents, we had our first official nursery furniture.

Seeing all the clothes unpacked kind of made it all even more real. I don’t know why teeny socks would do that more than a watermelon shaped (and sized) stomach, but they do.

In the next couple of weeks, he’ll have a place to sleep (although no blankets) and a place to poop, which I’m sure will be terribly exciting.

Luckily, these pieces of furniture consist mainly of wood not metal, so hopefully our downstairs neighbors will not come after us with guns.