December 2008

Week 36 Update

Week 36 brings lots of fun in the form of my pelvis expanding in ways I didn't know it could. Yoga this week was a particular challenge.

Yesterday was my last day in the office - I'm now officially working from home until my leave starts on the 17th. I can't overstate how excited I am not to be commuting for three months.

I had my first practice contraction last week (that I recognized anyway). It's a good sign that my uterus is getting ready! When we went to see the midwife this week, she said that the Goose is still a little peanut and that she won't be ready to come out for a while (though, technically, she is about the size of a crenshaw melon). We also got our birthing tub (a rental from our awesome birth class instructor). It's got the names of all the babies who've been born in it, penned in Sharpie on the outside. Maybe we'll get to add a name to it!

I experienced a particularly amusing episode of placenta brain this week. Someone mentioned the restaurant 13 Coins during a meeting, and I wanted to mention that I tried escargot there. But I couldn't think of the word "escargot," and I also couldn't think of the word "snail." So I turned to my coworker and said, "What are those things that are like slugs with shells?"

38 week update

The little one has officially "dropped" (also known as lightening). This means that her head is firmly engaged in my pelvis, and that my ribs only feel like 100 daggers are constantly pressing into them instead of 10,000. She has settled into one position most of the time, with her back toward my front, along my left side. From there, she sticks out her butt on my left and her feet on my right. I like to think of her being in a pike position. I tried to demonstrate it for Joe the other night but it's not so easy to recreate outside the uterus.

We've made great strides in creating our birthing suite - now located in our bedroom instead of the office, as we'd originally planned. Our midwife came to our house last week and strongly recommended that we switch to the bedroom for its privacy. Now a giant mint-green birthing tub is standing ready to serve us in the corner of the bedroom, keeping watch while we sleep. The aforementioned home-birth supplies have been compiled.

I am now taking a dizzying array of supplements: prenatal vitamins 3x/day, calcium-magnesium-D 2x/day, omega-3 1x/day, evening primrose oil 1x/day, oregon grape bark tea 3x/day, grapefruit seed extract 1x/day, iron 2x/day, vitamin C 2x/day with iron, acidophilus-bifidus 1x/day. Fortunately I worked my way up to this level of supplementation, or I'd never remember all the steps.

Now, we just need her to hang on for a couple more weeks. You don't want your birthday to be on Christmas, do you, baby?

More newsy updates from the frigid Hilltop

I know you'll all be excited to learn that I accomplished a major goal of my pregnancy last night: parking in the Expectant Mothers parking spot at the bourgeoise Metropolitan Market in North Tacoma. The spot is marked with a stork carrying a baby, and a sign above it says "Expectant Mothers ONLY." I have been meaning to do this for some time, but I don't shop at Met Market very often. I may have cheated a little, because Joe was with me and he was driving (Lucky is in the shop having a dent fixed), but it still saved me from walking across a cold parking lot.

And cold it is! There has been snow on the ground for several days, and it's not expected to get above freezing for a few more. In fact, it's snowing again right now. This is all very unusual for our area. When the snow originally fell on Saturday, we were driving home from the depths of Gig Harbor around 11:30 pm, and were subjected to the techniques of inexperienced snow-driving Northwesterners. Namely, this technique involves driving no faster than 15 mph and therefore getting stuck on hills. This, despite the fact that half the population drives 4-wheel-drive Subaru Outbacks (an additional 40% drive Subaru Foresters). I actually had to pass someone on a two-lane road. Everyone behind me followed my lead.

Unrelatedly, our washing machine broke on Monday night, just when we are about to double or triple our laundry needs with child clothes and diapers. Those of you who have been to our house, however, know that we have two sets of washer/dryers, due to our inane stubbornness. The spare pair has never been hooked up at this house, but it is about to be put into service. Unfortunately, it's a stack washer/dryer, so the capacity is quite a bit smaller than the one that broke, which is an industrial Speed Queen - the kind they use at laundromats (there must be a joke in that brand name somewhere - anyone?). Both of us said good riddance to the Speed Queen, although it was the dryer that really pissed us off by shrinking most of our clothes. Now we just need to figure out how to get the washer out of here and hopefully get a few pennies for the dryer on Craigslist.

You may be able to tell by the length of this post that I am now officially on maternity leave. I signed off yesterday, and it felt good! Today I have been filling the baby's dresser with her abundant clothes, and pondering the fact that she gets a solid wood crib and dresser, while our new dressers are Ikea veneer specials. We put the first one together a few weekends ago, and it was easily the most complicated construction task I have ever taken on. Just the giant bag of mysterious Swedish hardware was enough to scare me off (not to mention the 32-page wordless instruction manual, which looked like a sad coloring book from Soviet-era Poland). But we soldiered on, thinking of the hours we'd saved a child laborer in the Philippines from having to put our dresser together. We would have been fired from that sweatshop.

I didn't plan it this way, but my non-working schedule for the next week involves a fair dose of new-age pampering: today, yoga; tomorrow, prenatal massage (thanks mom and dad!); Friday, haircut; Sunday, yoga; Monday, acupuncture; Tuesday, midwife visit. I am slightly less motivated to go to yoga at this late stage, because all the friends I made in class have already had their babies; they've been replaced by chipper first-trimester moms-to-be.

I guess I'll go try to use a dirt shovel to clear off the porch stairs now.

Week 39 and lots more snow

I've moved from my regular belly-watch backdrop for this week's shot. Here I am in the front yard this morning, with Joe's truck and lots of snow behind me. It's so deep!

Our poor magnolia tree was completely bowed down this morning (since it's an evergreen, its giant leaves were acting as saucers to hold on to the snow). Joe went at it with a broom to rescue it:

I took these pictures yesterday when the snow wasn't quite so deep. Here's our sedum and nandinas:

And a closeup of the smoke tree:

Mostly I've been at home for the past five days. I didn't make it to half the appointments I listed on my last belly watch update, due to the road conditions. I have a renewed respect for the businesses within walking distance: the Hilltop Safeway (we spent more money there yesterday than ever before, in an attempt to keep our fridge and cupboards stocked in case birth is imminent), Le-Le (old standby of Thai-Vietnamese delicacies), Johnson's Candy (the most cutest chocolate and candy store on earth), and the Hilltop post office (where I have become re-acquainted with the grumpy counter man while mailing Christmas packages the last few days). It's been great to get out and walk, especially because it hasn't been that cold (low 30's) but sometimes it feels just as dangerous as driving, because no one has snow shovels to clear the sidewalks.

I ran across a guy trying to clear his sidewalk with a window squeegee on Friday. He said "I don't think I have the right tool!" and then cracked up. He asked me if I was having a boy or a girl, and when I said girl, he said "bless your heart!" A little later on, a younger guy actually said to me, "what's happening, shawty?" I thought people only said that in songs they play on KUBE, so I was pretty amused and started laughing.

We've gotten lots of projects done around the house in our semi-trapped state. I keep wondering if we're officially nesting (and whether each nesting project I take on is due to the burst of energy one experiences at the beginning of labor). As I look back on one of yesterday's projects, soaking our kitchen blinds in the bathtub to clean them, I'm pretty sure I can chalk that up to hormone-induced nesting.

Another project involved Joe venturing under the house to check out the pipes, because our "new" washing machine was doing the same thing as the broken one: attempting to turn on, but not getting any water. He put a space heater under the house, and it cleared up right away. Guess we need to insulate those pipes in case we ever stay below freezing for seven nights in a row again. For now, I miss having the space heater in our bedroom.