Unexpectedly Expecting

Brooms and dustpans are my friends

I’ve seen nesting referred to as an “uncontrollable urge” that strikes pregnant women, turning them into devilish fits of cleaning sprays and dust rags, inconsolable when faced with dirt, dizzy to wipe away meshes, crazy with thoughts of home-improvements and re-organization projects. It’s a primal instinct shared by most mammals of the female variety. When babies are on the way, birds make real nests. We humans vacuum our homes and buy dining room sets. It’s natural.

And boy, the term “uncontrollable” is right. I am so locked into the nesting stage that I have dreams of cleaning dirty houses. If you know me at all, you know that this is highly unbelievable. I am what a lot of people would call a “slob.” And yet last night, I had an intense dream where I found myself in a house with four fridges in one room. No one else had noticed them, but HA! They couldn’t get past me! I opened up those suckers and immediately started pitching spoiled items, checking expiration dates. I mentally tried to figure out how I was ever going to get rid of the three extra appliances. Could I move them myself? No? I’d need help!

In reality, I have a long list of projects that are driving the real me nuts. When I’m not working, you can bet that this is what I’m thinking about:

n My bathroom floor. Yes, I clean it. I swiffer. I mop. And yet… it’s not as clean as I want it to be. It’s the grout. The grout is stained. Every time I go in there lately, I come away wanting desperately to drop to my hands and knees, whip out the Softscrub and began scrubbing like a maniac. I’ve actually entertained thoughts of getting all new tiling in there, just to get rid of the problem for good. The floor is as old as this house – almost 60 years old. Out with the old, in with the new, right? I tried to appease myself by buying a new shower curtain. It’s brightened the place up. Then I organized all the shelves and cupboards. They look a thousand percent better. Everything finally has a home. But still… the floors. They call to me.

n The basement. I want a whole new one. If that can’t happen, than I will accept the one I have as long as it’s a) deep cleaned, b) organized, c) emptied of all non-essentials and d) carpeted and painted and turned into a livable space. Since we have only a three-bedroom house, we’re losing one office/spare bedroom to make the baby’s nursery. My husband’s desk is getting heave-ho into the basement. I can’t imagine he wants to spend much time down there doing all his important internet work -–checking his fantasy baseball stats, for instance –- while sitting among boxes of disorganized junk in a dingy environment. I wouldn’t. Last week, it hit me. We must make the basement a place we actually want to go. I envisioned a drop-ceiling and track lighting and a new paint job and cable TV and an office. After consulting with our friends who redid their entire house themselves, I’ve decided the ceiling won’t work because our heat ducts are really low. But that’s OK -– we can still do so much. And we’re going to. A friend of mine said if I have the basement done by September he’d be shocked. I’m telling you right now, this will be done before the baby’s here. All we need to do is work our fannies off. Starting with a yard sale, which I’ve already started getting piles of stuff together for. Then a deep cleaning. Organizing. Painting. And then carpet. We might put in some electrical boxes so we can watch our tiny TV down there. We need to run cable internet cords down there, too. But it’s doable! Right? Or am I totally insane?

n The baby’s room. We’ve painted the walls. I’ve painted the dresser, although it’s not quite done yet. Now I’m onto the next project -– finding carpet. Then once I have my showers, I’ll have lots of stuff to build and organize and clean and arrange and …. Just the thought of it makes me giddy.

n The dining room. Since we’ve lived together, we’ve eaten on the old dining room table from my parent’s house. It dates back to the 70s. Back then, it was expensive and nice. It lasted for years. But it needs to get out of my life. I can’t stand to see it anymore. I’ve lived with it for my entire life -– childhood to college, when we used it the two years my friends and I lived together, to post-college apartment days to now. It’s rickety. The top is warped because my mother tried to refinish it on her own. No matter how many times I wipe it down, it still seems dirty. We have only three chairs left, and they offend me. Why? I don’t know. Because I’m crazy? They’re just too tall. And they’re no longer sturdy. When you sit in them and lean back, the entire back leans back with you. I’ve looked everywhere I can think of for an affordable, casual but not too casual dining room set. Something modern and clean. I don’t want to spend more than say $1,500. My husband shuns IKEA because he thinks we need to make sure this is going to last us. I’ve tried Macy’s and Art Van. I’ve tried some cute furniture shops around town, but they’re all generally too expensive. I don’t know where to go next, but if you’ve got suggestions, I will take them.

n My office. It’s green. The problem with that? Well, besides not really caring for this exact color of green, the baby’s room right across the hall is also now green. Can’t have two green rooms! That would be madness! I’ve decided to paint the room purple and taupe. One accent wall will be a deep purple. The others will all be more neutral. And I’ve already purchased an area rug that makes it all come together. In this case, I decided IKEA would work just fine. Now all that’s needed is to get some of the stuff out of here, paint the walls and rearrange. Maybe find a cheap futon to keep our options open, making it a spare-bedroom-office-space. I don’t know. All I know is, I can’t wait until my mom and Aunt –- the paint team -– arrive on my doorstep welding paint brushes.

I realize all of this stuff is really kind of shallow and unimportant. It’s not that my kid must have a designer house. It’s not that at all. I just want these projects to be finished so they’re out of my head, so I don’t feel this nag every time I’m sitting around my house, so I don’t see work everywhere I look. I want my nest to be built and sturdy and comfortable and functional. That’s really it. Clean and nice enough. Finished.

Gotta run. I think we might go look at a dining set now! Wheeeee!

 

Dance of the crazy hormones

Maybe I'm a bit biased, since I'm me and all, but I think I've survived most of my pregnancy without turning into some deranged psycho lady all bent out of shape because of various hormones. Granted, the pregnancy started on a sad note, but I believe those were just real emotions sorting themselves out. I did not want to be pregnant way back then. It was a shock, and it changed my life around. I had to get used to the idea. Since then, I'm been emotionally pretty stable. No crying fits, no temper-tantrums, no crazy fights with my husband, no all-out bitchery. Again, maybe those around me would say otherwise, but I don't think so. If anything, for the last few months, especially since getting my work future straightened out, I've felt incredibly happy. I'm excited, and I'm content. It's not a bad way to be.

Then last night, I think maybe the hormones got to me a little.

My husband and I love Bravo reality TV, mostly Project Runway and Top Chef. We often tape the show (yeah, we're stuck in the 90s with our VCR) and watch it together whenever we're both home. So last night we popped in last week's episode to catch ourselves up. If you're unfamiliar with the show, it's a chef competition where one contestant is told to "pack their knives" at the end each week. We love it because the people seem truly talented, and they're thrown into all sorts of zany challenges. They do confessional-type interviews throughout so you can see their personalities and what they're really thinking. And there is this one girl on the show who makes my blood boil. Lisa. She is negative times a billion. She points a finger at everyone else. She has no grace, no charisma, and from what I can tell, no talent. She blames everyone on her team when things go wrong, and when they're in the kitchen together, she treats everyone around her like a complete idiot. She drives me nuts. And throughout each episode, I mutter things under my breath at her, mostly to make my husband laugh. He knows I despise her antics.

Well, after the show, for whatever reason, because I said something negative that neither of us can remember, my husband jokingly referred to me as "the Lisa of our house." Ha ha. I snickered. Then a couple of minutes later he said it again. I knew he was joking. But something inside me just went bonkers. I was flushed with serious anger. Outraged. How dare he compare me to that awful woman! Is that really what he thinks of me? I went from zero to pissy just like that. My mood was shot, and yeah, I let him know it.

I decided it was time for bed because in the back of my mind, I knew I was being crazy. My husband came upstairs with me, and we talked it out. By the end of the conversation, I guess the hormone level had balanced itself back out, because I decided the entire thing was hilarious. I mean, what kind of fight is that? I started giggling and couldn't stop, making it worse as I made my husband promise to never call me "The Lisa of the House" again. I felt like a madwoman, one minute fuming, the next embroiled in fits of laughter. I honestly couldn't figure out what I'd been so steamed about. 

So yeah, I blame the hormones. And Lisa. She really is awful.    

Baby rooom makeover

So the baby's nursery is officially underway. It started last month when my father-in-law painstakingly prepared, primed and painted the walls. This kind of project typically takes one day when it's my family undertaking it. When it's my father-in-law in charge, it takes something more like... forever. Well, in this case, about six or seven trips out to our house over as many days. Why? Because he is a perfectionist. I would not call him anal, because he's actually still enjoyable to be around while he is practicing his perfection. He just likes a job well done, and he has certain ideas about what that means. In his case, that means painting the entire room, top to bottom, ceiling, walls, trim and doors, and it means doing it all without the help of any kind of painters tape. Who needs tape when you can just be perfect and draw perfectly straight lines with goopy paint like my father-in-law? The finished job is flawless, and the color is lovely. It's a green called Moontide, a minty, lime-y, bright but not too bright green that should go well with our bedding. For our bedding, we picked a line called Zanzibar from Babies R Us. It's got jungle animals -- giraffes and crocodiles and elephants -- all over it. So that's the "theme" of the room. African jungle safari. Yee-haw.

Step two of the babies room began yesterday when I bravely and much more messily and imperfectly began a painting project of my own. I took my husband's grungy old dresser -- a dirty off-white wobbly thing that got him through childhood, college and our first years together -- and decided to remake it as Luke's dresser. Not knowing what I was doing at all, I sanded the whole sebang and primed it before the fumes got to me. I'd read online in many places that paint fumes can't really hurt me or the baby in short stints, especially with how non-toxic everything is made today. But then that familiar guilt crept in and I started to worry that it was a bad idea. I felt a little light-headed -- probably a psychosomatic symptom of my worrying. But anyway, I gave it a rest for the day and started searching online for cute animal drawer pulls, and that's when I made the real progress of the day. I landed on this Web site, somehow, someway. Scroll down and you'll see a set of knobs called funnily enough, "Zanzibar." They match our bedding exactly. Score! I ordered a full set of 10 knobs without hesitating.

Now all that's left is, let's see. Well, painting the dresser. Putting on the knobs. Buying carpet. Getting all the furniture. Setting up all the furniture. Cleaning out and organizing the closet. Decorating the room. Putting all his little stuff in there. And then, oh yes, having the baby. That's the last step I suppose.

I wonder if that step will make me more lightheaded than step No. 2. Probably, eh?

Crying games

As I laid in bed this morning -- relishing the fact that I didn't have to get up immediately and savoring that murky sleep sensation still rolling through my head -- I wondered about something. What if I wind up sleeping through the entire night after Luke's here even though he's whimpering? What if I simply don't hear him? Is that possible?

This is probably just silly new-mother anxiety, and once he's here, I'll laugh at this very thought, the thought that I could sleep too deeply to wake up to tend to a wet or hungry baby. It seems possible though! I don't hear my husband when he comes to bed. I sometimes sleep through my cat making all sorts of noises around my room (she especially likes to chew on plastic bags). I'm fairly confident that a loudly crying baby would wake me, but what if he's just making soft little sounds? Do those always turn into big loud sounds if left ignored?

Or will my sleep habits simply change so drastically once he's here that I would hear him if he sniffles once, let alone wails?

I'd love a flesh and blood mother to tell me like it is!

Sushi and coffee and wine, oh my

Throughout my pregnancy, I've teetered between following every do-not-do-or-eat-this rule and thumbing my nose at the entire idea of restricting myself. I've gone out for sushi, and while I've stuck mostly to the cooked roles, a few salmon nigiri pieces might have slipped into my mouth at some point. I've soundly ignored advice to avoid deli meat because I just can't fathom what could be so wrong with a little sliced turkey or roast beef. I've had the occasional cup of coffee or latte, although I have shelved my overwhelming addiction to caffeine for the most part. And I've even had a few glasses of wine. Maybe about four total in the last five months.

At times, I've felt guilty about every one of those choices. At other times, I've rationalized them, saying women in Japan no doubt eat sushi all through their pregnancies, and women in France no doubt drink wine throughout their pregnancies, and hey, I wasn't the only pregnant person to ever walk through the doors or a Jimmy John's. Knowing that something is wrong with my baby's heart -- whether it turns out to be a little something or a big something -- intensifies those feelings of guilt at times. I have gone through phases where I've blamed myself, sure that my coffee and wine-drinking instances from before I knew I was pregnant -- two months worth of time -- are the reason my baby now has a hole in his heart and a potentially narrowed aorta. Other times, I've wiped away that guilt, telling myself it's silly to think that way considering I can never know why a birth defect happens. What's the point of blaming myself without proof?

It's a somewhat maddening circle of guilt and acceptance, guilt and acceptance. It does not help that everything I read gives me a different idea of what is OK and what's not. I remember there was a study very early on in my pregnancy that screamed that coffee would undoubtedly cause first trimester miscarriages. It was probably good to hear that message at that time because I was fighting through major caffeine withdrawal, and it made my headaches and irritability seem necessary. But since then, I've read many other places that limited caffeine use is OK. I've read that eating sushi is fine as long as you know the fish was frozen before being served. I've read that I shouldn't touch alcohol at all, and read reports that said "limited' use is fine.

Yesterday I checked out a book from the library called "The Panic Free Pregnancy."  It takes every single pregnancy myth or "rule" and turns them all on their heads. It basically says that almost anything goes. I said there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating sushi because the only danger is a parasite and that can't cross the placenta. It said that drinking wine, even a glass a day, has shown time and again in studies that it will have to ill effect on a baby. In fact it said that women who drank multiple drinks every day, only one-third of their babies developed fetal alcohol syndrome. It said that taking almost any kind of over the counter pain medication is perfectly fine, which I would have loved to know when I suffered through a week-long cold in February or March. It said that there is really no reason at all why I shouldn't travel at any point in my pregnancy. Now that the doctors have me homebound at 32 weeks, that news is stunning to me.

It's so hard to know what sources of information to trust, which are being too cautious, which are being too frivolous. But that brings me to something my very wise grandmother told me when I visited her earlier this month. I was telling her my philosophy of not overly worrying about what goes in my mouth, that everything in moderation is probably OK. She was washing dishes and I clearing the table from a nice, late supper she'd made me, and as she turned a plate over under the streaming water, she said, "That's true. But you know, there's always something else to eat or drink. There are so many options that you can always just pick something else." I felt immediately like a doofus, like a bad kid who stayed out past curfew just because I didn't like rules, not because there was anything really worthwhile to stay out late for. She's right. Whatever the different books and doctors say is OK, those theories aren't really worth testing, not with the guilt that inevitably comes calling, the questions of "what if" that plague you afterward. Not when it's not that hard to just abstain from a little of this or a little of that.

Maybe it's all nonsense. It probably is. But you know, I don't know salmon nigiri when I can nosh on eel and cucumber rolls. I don't need coffee morning noon or night. One glass of wine isn't going to make or break my evening, no matter what's going on in my life. Cutting those things out isn't really a sacrifice at all, not when you consider all you can still partake in, and the little life that could potentially thank you down the road.

I'm a bad mommy in my dreams

I think I have mentioned this, but sleep -- really great, deep, wonderful sleep -- has become quite elusive for me. I'm now 31 weeks pregnant, and my body is finally acting pregnant. It aches. It causes me discomfort. When I lie down in bed, my heart immediately begins pounding in my throat, the baby starts tossing and turning as if HE's the only settling in for a long sleep, and my lungs refuse to fully expand, leaving me with shallow, half-breathes that just don't really do the job.

Then there's my mind.

Last night I spent the hours from about 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. in a half-awake, half-asleep state during which I dreamed all sorts of odd dreams but also consciously thought about those dreams, simultaneously knowing they were simply dreams and thinking they were real. Does that make sense? Probably not. The dreams mixed in a bunch of different things from my subconscious -- basketball, packing to leave for the airport and racing to make a plane, writing and motherhood. In one part, I carried Luke in a sling around my chest. He was tiny, just a newborn. But because he was in this sling and I didn't have to use my arms to hold him, I kept forgetting about him. I wandered around this room -- that for some reason was filled waist-deep with water -- and went about my business of packing to make a flight. All the while, he's being dragged through the water in his sling. Finally, I realized he might be getting wet. I opened the sling up, and he blew a bunch of water out of his mouth. I picked him up, and he was semi-frozen (in the same way the chicken I took out of the fridge was semi-frozen before I cooked it last night). I tried to hug him to my body but his legs were sort of frozen stiff and bent at the knees. Then I realized I'd packed nothing for the baby at all. I raced to find his diapers and wipes and whatever else babies needs, delegating out some of the searching to a girl who was apparently my friend and traveling with me. That's when I realized that a full day had passed and I hadn't changed Luke's diaper. I set him on a changing table and pulled off a diaper that was worn -- worn the way a Band-aid is when you've had it on for a day or two. I proceeded to wipe his butt with a wipe that looked like a square of chocolate. And his butt? It was plastic, like a Barbie doll's.

I don't know whether we made the flight or not, but I do know we left about two hours later for the airport than we planned.

So what's the lesson in this dream? My house is going to be flooded? My baby will have a rear made out of plastic? Or maybe it's that I'm not quite ready for the all-consuming attention and focus the baby will need from me.  That's probably true. I can't really imagine what the early months are going to be like, but I do have a feeling they'll be vastly different from my life now. I guess my brain is trying to prepare me for that. Nice try, brain. But I don't know that I'll really "get it" until the baby's here, resting in a sling around my neck.

I do believe I'll be able to carry him around without absentmindedly dragging him through a flood. Give me that much credit, brain!

Still kicking

I really do mean to post more often, but right now, work is taking up nearly all of my time. Well, if not all of my time, all of my writing brain cells. I'm a little mentally fatigued, and although I've started a post about the changing body image that comes with pregnancy, I haven't been able to really work on it or finish it. It's a hectic time of the year for me, and it won't wind down for maybe another month. The good news, for my own well-being, is that I'm done traveling. I'm home now for good. Won't see the inside of another airport until I go to my friend's wedding in Mexico. That's a really wonderful feeling, even if I am a tidge sad that I'm most certainly going to lose my coveted Gold Elite status with Northwest. Goodbye first class upgrades! Hello coach seating for the rest of my life!

The no-more-travel thing is also good because I'm starting to become just a wee bit uncomfortable. My back aches at the end of the day. It's becoming more and more difficult to get a good night of sleep. My ribs are sore here and there, and taking a full, deep breath seems to be a thing of the past. After months of having no real pregnancy symptoms, I finally have something to whine about! I'm trying not to let that power overcome me.

Anyway, I'm glad to be home for good. And hopefully that means more time for blogging.

In the meantime, I would like to point people toward www.conversiondiary.com, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs to check in on. It is written by a converted atheist who is now Catholic. She's a very thoughtful writer who delves into touchy subjects with a great deal of grace and respect. She makes me think. In other words, she's a way better blogger than me. Check her out.

Also I've become a fan of www.amalah.com. She's also pregnant, due in October. She makes me laugh.

A variant of normal

Just a quick update about the baby's heart. My doctor just called me and said she spoke with the fancy-suited doctor who performed the last echo-cardiogram. They are now telling us that the baby's "narrowed" aorta might simply fall in the range of normal, that it's just "borderline" too small and that as things progress, it could end up becoming completely normal. When he first told us about the problem, I don't remember him using that kind of language. He seemed pretty certain back then that it was too narrow but told us he wasn't sure what it meant. Now, it sounds more like, well, maybe it's too narrow, maybe not. I'll be going back to another ultrasound in two weeks, and we should know more then. If it has progressed negatively, then I'll have some sort of multi-disciplinary consultant with a team of pediatricians, OBs and cardiologists who will recommend what we do next, where I have the baby, what I need to know, etc. If it has progressed positively, then there's nothing to worry about.

Since we found out about this whole thing, I've really had a strong sense of peace, that everything will be OK. I'm betting in two weeks, that's the news we'll hear.

I'm so busy right now with work that I haven't had much time to dwell on it anyway. I don't think I've had a day off in more than two weeks. I'm somewhat tired, but for the most part, it's OK. I'm really enjoying work right now, perhaps more than I have in the last three years. It's kind of ironic the way things work; I fretting and worried about my job for so long, and now that I know I won't have in much longer, I absolutely adore it. I know I'm going to miss it tremendously. 

The Joys of (Almost) Parenting

I have been thinking quite a bit about parenting. Not a shocker, right? Comes with the territory of being more than seven months pregnant. I’ve started noticing mothers and children more in my daily routine. I’ve observed, catalogued, and minded my impulse judgments. And oh, do I have impulse judgments. I suppose that’s just being human, especially of the female variety. Without really meaning to, we see mothers and other children and think anything from, ‘They’re really sweet,’ to, ‘When I have a kid, I’d never let them do X, Y or Z.’ I don’t like that my mind gears that way, but I’m just being honest here. And I especially don’t like it now knowing that soon enough I’ll be on the other side of those judgments. That can be a scary thought, even as I tell myself I don’t really care what anyone else thinks.

I was in a hotel pool recently. It had two lanes for lap swimming and a small wade-in, wade-out, splash-around-if-you-please area. Four little boys between the ages of maybe 7 and 10 played there, but because their space was so crammed, they kept wandering out into the lap lane, where I was trying to get a workout in. I stood at my end and watched them, willing them with my eyes to move out of the way. They were children, though, so my psychic-style discipline did nothing. Finally, I called down to them and asked them to stay out of the lane. I said, ‘This lane is for adults who are swimming. You’ve got to stay over there.’ One kid started paddling back but the other said, ‘Aww, come on.’ He didn’t budge. That took me by surprise. Here I was, a full-fledged adult (right?) telling a kid in my best authoritative voice that he needs to follow a rule, even if the rule was maybe technically made up. And he was unafraid to challenge me. Not only that, but he and his buddies proceeded to wade in my lane. They looked at me with eyes that said we were in a standoff, and they weren’t going anywhere.

I scanned the pool area wondering where their parents might be. Two men who had been lounging on chairs had split for the nearby workout room. Two women were up to their shoulders in the hot tub, deep in a conversation that was muffled by the spinning jets. If they were the mothers, they were oblivious. I fumed. I started thinking, ‘If these were my kids, I’d never let them play like this unsupervised. They could drown! Don’t these women see they’re pestering me? I would be mortified if my kids pestered someone like this!”

It was terribly judgmental. And it made me feel awful. I started swimming laps, barely passing by the kids without running into them, but I couldn’t concentrate on my stroke or the fine pain of stretching out dormant muscle groups. I could only go back and forth in my head about these kids, their parents and my own future parenthood. I wondered if I should have handled the situation differently. Did I not know how to get children to mind? Were these just disrespectful kids? If I truly was their mothers, would I really act any differently? I’d probably be dying for a break away from them into a soothing hot-tub, too, right?

I ended up swimming for about 15 minutes, then gave up. The kids just kept getting in my way, and I didn’t want to fight them anymore. They won; I let them. I was the adult, right? That’s what adults do, they let the kids win. But mothers are different, I’d think. Then again, what do I know? More and more, I’m getting the feeling that I know next to nothing, that what is about to happen to me is gong to be so incredibly unexpected. I don’t know how to prepare for it because I have no idea what kind of transformation is going to take place. I have to only hope that through the grace of God, I am equipped with the knowledge and patience and unwavering love needed to see me through. I know I will be, but right now, three months away, it still seems like such a strange, foreign idea. I am going to be a mother. I have no idea what that means, I have no idea if I’m ready.

But in the meantime, I’m going to work on being a little less judgmental and a little more loving. I figure, that’s one place to start.