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- I’m the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!
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- Pumpkin Close-Up
Thanks to Becky for making the stick-ons and acting as photographer.
the exaltation of the minute October 26, 2008
I was told by What If No One’s Watching, my favorite Portlander-transplant-to-Austin blog, to go read this post at Breed ‘Em And Weep. I couldn’t be happier about having followed instructions. You’ll be happy you did too – go on and read it, I’ll wait.
What I love about this piece is that (1) it addresses the honorable nature of writing about the small, seemingly insignificant detail, and (2) it addresses the importance of mothers/women testifying to their experience as mothers/women.
So many people feel that their blogs are “little” (me included) because they do not have a wide readership or because they don’t obviously move or shake public opinion. What is so true and so ignored about blogs is that they have the capacity to make art the small details of our lives: running errands, going out to dinner, feeling the baby kick, folding laundry, weeding, driving home from work. These are the tiny happenings in which our lives are cataloged, in which our decisions are made or our relationships are ended, and they are tiny things that great authors like Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway and John Donne and Raymond Carver have made great art from. Why then, are our blogs so little? We are the Samuel Pepyses of our generation, bearing witness to the minutia of our world and thus creating the whole-est portrait of our lives that any generation has been capable of to date.
It is this bearing witness, in public, out loud, on the magical super-inter-webs, that is the powerful act for women. So long silent and silenced, women have experienced, we presume, the same terror and joy and worry and boredom that we all do in our lives… but how are we to know that for sure? As more and more mothers get themselves WordPressed or Blogspotted, we learn more about each other – and our children can learn more about their pasts and futures than has ever been possible before. This wondrous avalanche of windows into the lives of mothers and women is a revolutionary movement, and I’m in love with it.
I’ve learned so much, lurking through people’s blogs, and found so much comfort and inspiration in the commonality of my experience. Never think, just because you have (what do I have on this blog, like 20 readers, tops?) a small readership or an “unimportant” life, that you are doing unimportant work. We are each of us, without warning or knowledge, that all-important butterfly who stirs a storm halfway round the world with her wings.
birth class & general update October 25, 2008
After a week that’s been the most stressful of my pregnancy, work-wise, Tom and I went to our first of two “intensive” birthing classes today. This class is taught from the book Birthing From Within, a classic of the homebirth/low-intervention childbirthing genre, and both Tom and I were worried about how foofy (read: crazy New-Age woo-woo weird) it would be, but our midwife recommended it and other mothers I had spoken with a while ago said they took it and got something out of it.
It was a really good class in that it was great to talk to other couples about their pregnancies and births and also because Lanell Coultas, the instructor, had some great advice about letting go of expectations and also on how to cope with the pain of childbirth.
One of the things I hear a lot when I tell people I am going to birth at home is, “Wow, you’re brave.” And I don’t really see the bravery of homebirth as I’ve mentioned before – it’s simply the way that works best for me as I face the issue of labor. That being said, I’m aware that it’ll hurt, and that there are ways to make it hurt less if I were birthing in a hospital, and so I suppose there is a bravery component in the decision to eschew epidurals and drugs and just take the pain head-on. (Head-on! Apply directly to forehead!)
We learned some pain-coping techniques that actually worked really well, insofar as helping us handle the pain of holding ice cubes in our hands for a minute at a time, and I just need to mention how cold-sensitive my hands are, so this exercise seemed particularly apropos to me. Without the techniques, I was really suffering with the pain of the cold in my hands, and really ANGRY at the ice and the exercise, and with the techniques it felt that the minute went by very quickly and that the pain was substantially less intense. So that was heartening.
I am drained after this class, though, I must say – it was really emotional for me to hear other people’s experiences and hear Lanell talk about certain things, especially mother stuff. I teared up multiple times and actually completely lost it when one woman talked about her first birth, which was one of those nightmare Pitocin-epidural-C section whirlwinds that is so common in hospitals for unwary parents. I’m trying not to be so scared of having to go to the hospital that I actually call it down on myself, and I really can’t visualize it at all, but it was such a sad story and SO what I don’t want for me that I was really moved by it.
Saw the midwife this last week, BTW, and everything’s great with the baby: she’s head-down and moving reliably and her heartbeat is strong. I’m growing just as I should, though I lost 4 pounds at some point in the last couple of weeks, but she’s not concerned. Any swelling I’m having is fairly intermittent, BP is good and I have no protein in my urine, so many 3rd trimester ailments seem to be holding at bay. She did say that in the next month or so, Amelia will be DOUBLING in size, so to work extra-special hard to eat as much protein and as little sugar and fat as I can, which seems quite daunting as I’ve been so careful about that for so long, but it’s worth it to keep me and the boo healthy. Wish me luck in staying on the straight and narrow. Most protein seems really disgusting and unappetizing to me right now, and all I really want is sugar and carbs, but I’m exercising my willpower as much as I can.
It’s starting to be real to me that we’ll have this real whole person in our lives soon, breathing air and peeing and eating and cooing and crying, and that’s still very “WHOA,” but it’s also pretty “Yay!”
ooof October 20, 2008
My belly grew a top shelf overnight. All of a sudden, Amelia is pushing up against my stomach, my lungs and my boobs – and as my womb expands, I can feel her movements much more dramatically.
There’s a whole entire human being inside of my body! Can you imagine?
bibliophile in the bud October 19, 2008
and they're Newbury Award winners, too!
We bought some books to read to Amelia in the womb, and beyond. Tom’s been doing all the child development research – I’ve been doing the pregnancy research – and according to him, it will soothe the baby to hear the things she’s heard in the womb.
He read the island book to her the other night – she kicked and wriggled almost the whole way through. So what if the book is aimed for 4-year-olds? Amelia obviously has advanced tastes.
oh, hi October 16, 2008
Sorry for all the silence, y’all – work’s been heating up as I try to get things organized before I go on maternity leave in a few months, and I’ve been starting to get a little more tired as I mature into my third trimester. Funny thing about maternity leave – I’m taking two months off, but my boss keeps talking about how they’re going to miss me for the “couple of weeks” I’ll be gone. Oy.
Amelia’s had the hiccups quite a few times this week, such strong hiccups that Tom and my friend Becky were able to feel them with a hand on my belly. I must say that the hiccups just melt my heart. SO cute.
What else? I find myself craving blander foods lately, reminiscent of my first trimester queasiness around strongly spiced foods. Barbecue and certain Mexican foods are becoming hork-inspiring.
Luckily for our evening tonight at Sarovar with Les Blases, Indian is still OK with my stomach. We had a great time meeting Harrison in person and talking babies, CS4 and cheese. Tom & I are some of the first in our group of friends (and in my family) to have kids, so it’s fabulous to get to know other young parents and get to compare notes & get advice straight from the trenches! Not in a cultish way, I swear – more like a study group so you can pass the Oh Hell A Helpless Human Being Depends On Me For Life, Health and Happiness exams.
Sorry, ladies. October 11, 2008
If you have never been pregnant, I bet you’ve never even thought about nursing bras. Well, maybe you have. I’ve never been a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, but I’ve thought about the Iron Maiden and the rack. I’ve never been incarcerated at Guantanamo, but I’ve thought about waterboarding. So maybe you have thought about them, but I bet you don’t (and would rather not) know just how torturous they are. If the parenthesis is true for you, skip this post and read this hilarious treatise on a 19-year marriage at Derfwad Manor.
My ex-husband the film buff used to call me his Russ Meyer woman, if that gives you an idea of the normal size of my breastimazation area. I discovered through the miracle of Wikipedia that ole Russ used to cast women in the first trimester of pregnancy to make sure their mammaries were maximized.
What is a Russ Meyer woman, you ask?
Mine started growing in the first trimester and have ballooned more and more, as boobies will when their uterus is full – let’s just describe them as bursting with pride. One is told, by all the books and such, that rather than buying a new bra for one’s bigger girls while pregnant, one should buy a nursing bra. This way, you’ll be able to use the garment longer and thus save money and reduce consumerism.
What no one tells you is that the nursing bra is only second to the 50s-era girdle on the list of Cruel Things Women Attach To Their Bodies. This item consists of two layers of fabric, the top your typical cup and the bottom a bizarre fabric boobie frame. The two layers are sure to eventually separate on top, leaving one with a strangely repulsive peek-a-boo cleavage situation. You better hope you’ve graduated to all of your high neckline preggo tops by the time you strap one of these monsters on, because of the queer requirement that a nursing bra must come up to your sternum – especially if you choose a nursing bra with an underwire. Oh, and they itch.
I admit that I hate spending money on undergarments, so it may be that the nursing bras that I have shopped for/unfortunately purchased are so frightful because I bought them at Target. However, I am told that nothing will de-sexualize the knockers quite so efficiently as breastfeeding, and if that is true then the neuterizing of the ta-tas is certain to start from the outside, in.
acquisitions October 8, 2008
le glider avec chat
As I mentioned, my father-in-law bought us a glider. It’s been a very welcome addition to our household, as you can see from Spike’s pose. It was nice of him to put down the magazine and let me take the picture, don’t you think?
For what it is, the glider is very symbolic for both of us. Tom’s father used to sit in his La-Z-Boy in evenings and read the whole paper after watching the nightly news, and Tom kind of feels like he’s sitting down into the same tradition when he puts his feet up on the ottoman. I fondly remember my mother’s antique “platform rocker,” the item of furniture from my childhood home that I loved the most.
I’ve been thinking in the past few months about the process of getting ready for a baby – there’s a lot of winnowing out of old gear and clutter, the detritus of abandoned plans and ambitions. At the same time, there’s a real acquisitive aspect to the adjustment – and early on, we seem to be conscious of walking our parents’ old footpaths. Obviously when you become a parent, you start thinking a lot about the parents you had and what lessons to take from them. I hope, especially in my case, that we choose to learn the right lessons.
Safety first October 8, 2008
Last weekend we did another good job of Getting Things Done. Tom put together the crib and dresser, as well as our new glider, generously bought for us by my father-in-law. It’s looking like a nursery! We do have the glider in the living room at the moment, because it’s just that comfortable.
One nice thing about our cats is how safety-conscious they are. Here, Max makes sure that the crib slats are no more than 2-3/8″ apart at any point, and that the top of the adjustable rail at its lowest position is at least 9″ above the top of the mattress support at its highest position.
She’s about a mover October 6, 2008
This kid can boogie, let me tell you what! It’s like hosting a aerobics-crazed jackrabbit in my womb. I love feeling her move so often and with so much strength! I wonder if she’ll be a dancer? Or a baseball referee? Or a sign language interpreter?
