Category Archives: Babies ‘n Stuff

granddaddies

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My paternal grandfather died when I was 4 years old. He was 74. Obviously, I was too young to remember it, but I’ve heard the story since reaching adulthood, and here’s how I understand it happened:

It was July in Mississippi, and the temperature was at least 100 degrees that day. Lord knows what the heat index was. In spite of the heat, my grandfather and his friends went out to play golf, because that’s what they did every day. At some point, my grandfather felt sick, so his friends took him home. He went to lie down, my grandmother left the room (either to call the doctor or get him some water, I don’t remember which), and when she came back into the bedroom, he had died.

I’m still angry that he died that way. A man his age had no business being out in that weather, but he was stubborn and wanted to play his stupid daily golf game. (This is just one of many reasons why I despise the entire “sport” of golf.) I feel cheated that I never really got to know him. I have a few vague memories of him, but mostly, all I know is what other people in my family have told me about him. And that’s lousy.
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16 weeks

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I had my 16-week doctor’s appointment on Friday. Everything seems to be a-ok so far. I’ve only gained 6 1/2 pounds (go me), and the baby appears to be just fine. And, although I had seen the blinky-blinky-blink of the heartbeat on the ultrasound, I had never actually heard it. So Friday was the first time that I got to hear the heartbeat on the doppler, which was very cool.

I also scheduled my 20-week ultrasound, when we will finally find out if the sprog is a he or a she. That will be on September 19th, which I love because it also happens to be Dave’s birthday. So that’ll be a fun little birthday surprise for him.

As for the boy/girl debate, I personally have a feeling that it’s going to be a boy. But y’all are welcome to start placing your bets now, if you’d like.

Other than that, I learned on Saturday that something has happened to my brain, and I am no longer terrified to buy baby things. I guess hitting the 16-week mark is finally making it all start to seem “real.” (Don’t ask me why it’s taken so long.) I went to Target on Saturday, and I bought a few 4-packs of onesies and one of those pajamas with the little footies in them. And some baby socks, which, I’m sorry, but is there anything cuter on the planet? Well, ok, maybe the baby shoes. Everything I bought is either green or yellow, since it doesn’t really make sense to buy anything gender-specific right now.

I showed Dave all the stuff that I bought when I got home, but I didn’t open any of the packages of onesies. I kept thinking, “well, I might have to return them, so it’s better not to have messed with the packaging…” I have no idea why I thought that. I don’t know when I’ll finally be rid of this fear that something bad might happen, but it’s getting old.

In any case, I guess I must’ve been dreaming about baby clothes last night, because the first thing I did when I woke up was grab those packages of onesies and rip them open like it was Christmas morning.

And it’s weird, because I already knew it was there, but for some reason, when I opened the one that has a picture of a duck and a little chick on it, and a caption that reads “I love mommy,” I started to cry. Happy tears, but still crying.

It was just… there. The word “mommy” and this little teeny-tiny item of clothing, and the knowledge that someday soon, we’re going to have this teeny-tiny person in our lives who actually fits into this small item of clothing, and who thinks of me as “mommy.” It felt simultaneously overwhelming and wonderful.

I mean, my god, this onesie is so small that my cat couldn’t even fit into it. It’s that tiny.

(I’d guess the cat is more in the 12-18 month sizes, although I haven’t tried to put any baby clothes on her to test my theory. Yet.)

So there’s that. Overall, I’d say it was a pretty great weekend.

motivation to lie

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The scene: grocery store, last night.

Checkout lady, who I’m guessing was about 50-ish: “So how far along are you?”

Me: “Three and a half months.”

Her: (tilts her head sideways, squints and looks suspicious) “You sure there’s only one in there?”

Me: (trying to laugh it off, but honestly feeling like I might cry) “Um, yeah. I’ve had an ultrasound, I’m definitely only carrying one.”

Saintly lady in line behind me: “Oh, don’t worry. You’re probably just having a boy.”

Fin.

I was stunned because I thought that everyone in the polite universe knew to never ask a pregnant woman “are you sure you aren’t have twins/triplets/a litter?” I really didn’t know how to react.

Honestly, I’m sort of surprised when strangers start conversations with me about pregnancy at all, because I still feel like I’m in the in-between phase. You know, the “maybe she’s pregnant, or maybe she just has an unfortunate body shape, and it’s probably better to err on the safe side and not mention it” phase. Or at least, that’s what I would do if I encountered someone who looked like me. Who wants to go into that minefield and risk being incorrect?

But then, I guess the maternity tops do sort of give it away.

Which reminds me, I’ve been saying “three and a half months” for a while, but I don’t think it’s even accurate anymore. I’ll be 16 weeks pregnant as of Saturday. If you operate under the assumption that a month is 4 weeks and/or 28 days, doesn’t that make me four months pregnant?

And by that logic, if the average pregnancy is 40 weeks long, doesn’t that mean that it’s actually more like ten months rather than nine? How on earth do people calculate this stuff? It’s making my head spin. And the books are no help, because they all seem to have their own definitions.

In the meantime, though, I think I’m going to start lying about my due date. I’ll just tell strangers that I’m a month or so farther along than I am, and then they’ll think that I’m wonderfully svelte given my condition.

Either that, or I’m just going to lose my mind and punch the next person who implies that I’m having twins.

a little late for spring cleaning, but..

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I’m not a really messy person. I know Dave is cracking up that I just wrote that, but I’m really not. I’m pretty bad about clutter – for example, I tend to let mail pile up on the kitchen table, and my clothes spend more time on the floor than on hangers – but I’m usually good about making sure that dirt is kept to a minimum. I can’t stand to leave food out, which I think is due to my southern upbringing, where uncovered food overnight equals a mighty cockroach infestation by sunrise. When Dave leaves a coffee mug on the counter with a tiny bit of coffee in the bottom? It drives me crazy. And not in a good way.

And actually, since we got a housekeeper, I’ve gotten a lot better about the clutter aspect. Every two weeks, I have to make sure that I put all of my clutter away so our housekeeper doesn’t have to clean around it. (I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do next year, if we decide to make a go of me staying at home with the baby, which means we won’t be able to afford a housekeeper anymore. But that decision – whether I’ll go back to work or not – is still very much up in the air, and I don’t see the point of worrying about it now.)

However, as reasonably tidy as I am about the house, when it comes to my car, all bets are off. My backseat is my trash can and my recycle bin. I don’t know exactly when it got so bad. At some point in my life, I kept my car spotless all the time. I think it was probably during the first year or so that I had it, since it was the first new car that I had ever owned. But for the last couple of years, it’s been embarassingly bad. Like to the point where I park my car in the employee garage at work, and then I worry that anyone walking past it might look inside and wonder if the owner of said car is mentally ill. It’s that messy.

But recently, I got into an email conversation with my cousin about infant car seats (which, in all fairness, I started), and I panicked. My backseat is so filthy that you couldn’t possibly put a car seat in there if you wanted to. And yes, I realize that I have five and a half months before I need to have a car seat in my car, but being rational isn’t exactly my strong suit these days.

So when I got home yesterday, I cleaned out the entire car. Here are some of the things I found, because I’m generous and therefore willing to publish my embarassment on the Internet for your amusement:
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Saturday shopping fun

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The food cravings took a step up this weekend. On Saturday, I saw an advertisement for the “funnel cake pancakes” at IHOP, and decided that I had to have some. Like right then. Waiting was not an option.

The problem is that the IHOP nearest to our house is about, oh, twenty-five miles away. Then I had a stroke of genius: the town where IHOP is? There’s a Babies R’ Us about half a mile down the street. And Dave has never been to Babies R’ Us before. Perfect! Maybe we could pick out nursery furniture, or even start our gift registry.

(Aside: I’ve been told by several people that I have to have a registry, even though I don’t want one. I worry it will make people think I want a baby shower, and my god, people, you have no idea how much I don’t want a baby shower. The thought alone makes me break out in hives. Nothing against baby showers in general, just the idea of me having to be the center of attention and ooh and ahh over all the twee little baby things, and then the thank-you notes afterward… Gah. I still feel guilty about the fact that I totally forgot to write thank-you notes for my bridal shower. Please, just no.)

So! I went into this manic “let’s go to Babies R Us and shop and then we’ll go to IHOP and have breakfast food for dinner and won’t that be FUN?!?!?!!” mode, and Dave wisely sensed that he shouldn’t argue with me. (He’s starting to learn that when the Crazy Pregnant Lady emerges, he needs to back off and let her win.) Twenty minutes later, we set off on our little Saturday afternoon adventure.

If I had given the trip any forethought, and taken into account my husband’s love of all things electronic, I would’ve known to take him straight to the displays of bouncy seats and swings. What with all the little buttons to push and knobs to tweak, that was hands-down his favorite part of the whole store. I could practically see the wheels clicking in his head as he was trying to decide if he could reconfigure the motor in the electronic swing and set it for some uber-sonic “instant vomit” speed. (Please don’t call Child Protective Services on us just yet.)

We wandered around the store for a couple of hours, took mental notes of a lot of different things that we liked and didn’t like, and that was about it. We didn’t buy a single thing, nor did we start a gift registry. Oh well, it was still fun to look around. I just seem to be incapable of making decisions about anything until we know whether this baby is going to be a boy or a girl.

On our way out of the store, I had a sudden realization:

Me: “Ummm… Don’t get mad at me?”
Dave (suspicious): “What?”
Me: “I don’t really want pancakes anymore.”

It’s true, the craving had totally passed. In fact, the thought of pancakes – all of the carbs and sugar and ensuing bloat – sounded slightly nauseating. So basically, we drove twenty-five miles out of our way just to walk around Babies R’ Us and not buy anything.

We stopped at a steak restaurant on our way home. It was delicious.

oh my achin' back

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There hasn’t been a whole lot to write about this week because I’ve been in too much pain to do anything interesting. It appears that my energy level only showed up long enough to kick my ass. I really managed to do a number on my back when I was painting last weekend, and doing prenatal yoga to stretch only seemed to make it worse. What is up with that? How can stretching to relieve pain actually aggravate it instead?

Someone please remind me that the next time my nesting instinct kicks in, I need to tell it to take a big fat hike.

It got to the point where yesterday, I was leaning over the kitchen counter making Dave dig his fists into my lower back to try to relieve some of the pressure. I hear tennis balls are supposed to be good for that, I think I need to get some.

But! I got my very first prenatal massage today, and it was quite awesome. So awesome, in fact, that all I can think about is crawling back into bed for a nice two-hour nap. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

Maybe I’ll think of something interesting to write about over the weekend. Here’s hoping.

the second trimester begins…

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…and the mania has set in.

It is amazing how quickly my energy level has come back. I’ve started interviewing contractors to help us with the hundred or so jobs that I want to do around the house before the baby arrives. (I have a list, with the tasks numbered in order of priority. And it’s typed, because my handwriting is atrocious. Each contractor that comes to our house gets their own copy to keep, so they can use it as a reference when writing their estimate.) I’m a big fan of do-it-yourself and all that, but honestly, when Dave and I do some little house project, it tends to look like crap. Also, we both have A.D.D. about our home improvement projects, so we get 80% done and then get bored and move on to something else.

So for things like baseboards and crown moulding that require things to be sawed into exact angles? And where the work needs to be fully completed so it doesn’t look like we live in the Crazy House? Um. No. We’re going to hire help for that.

That reminds me: you know the luck we’ve had with contractors in the past? Like with the siding, and the septic tank, and the dozen or so other things that we’ve spent thousands of dollars on? Yeah. Pray for us.

I guess because I had home improvements on my mind, and even in spite of the fact that I had just admitted to three or four different contractors that I suck at do-it-myself stuff, I decided on Saturday that I was going to paint our dining and living room. Just me. By myself. Because Dave was out working in the yard – and y’all should really see the amount of work he’s done out there, because it is awesome, and I won’t even try to accuse him of using yardwork as an excuse to avoid me and my freshly onset nesting psychosis. Although seriously, that may have been a big motivation for him.

At one point (last Saturday, I think?), when I was manically rattling off my to-do list of errands that I was going to run and things that I was going to accomplish that day, Dave looked at me and said, “Hon, are you really stressed out or something?” I thought about it for a second, and then said, “No, I think I’m just hyper.” It kind of struck me by surprise when I said it out loud. I’ve been feeling so awful for the last several weeks that suddenly having a burst of energy felt totally foreign to me. And I’m guessing it was foreign to Dave too, since he seemed so confused and sort of worried about me at first.

So, I got the entire dining room primed, and most of one wall painted. I only bought one little test quart of the paint color, because I wanted to leave it on the wall for a day or two to make sure that I love it. And I do. So I’ll be finishing the dining room and moving on to the living room sometime this week. Rah! I don’t know how long this whole nesting thing will hold out, but I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.

Also? Kris is going to come over on Saturday to help me paint. We’ll have ourselves a little living room painting party. I don’t know why she isn’t trembling in fear over my nesting mania, but hey, I’ll take all the help I can get.