Hi-Lo: Also known as the Ambush and the Thumbsucker

On Friday I had, what I thought was a blood test, to screen for Down Syndrome and some other birth defect with numbers attached (13-18-something?). I told Doug he didn't need to come because I expected the sum total of the appointment to involve needle poking and he's not the biggest fan of blood. 

Imagine my surprise when I get there, am taken into a dark room and told to drop my pants. "Where are you taking the blood from?!?!?!?!," I asked in shock. She didn't laugh. Didn't even crack a smile. Tough room.

Turns out it was an ultrasound AND a blood test (thaaaaaat explains the request to strip). So for the next 45 minutes I was prodded with the magic wand and pictures of the baby were taken from every possible angle. I sat in awkward silence after I realized that the humorless ultrasound tech didn't like it when I talked. "What am I looking at?" Silence. "Is that the baby's leg?" Silence. Occasionally a grunt or a one word response. I got the point and stopped asking questions. She was not a fan.

At one point I got really sad, because no one was there with me - and for the first time it looked like a real baby. Our first ultrasound revealed a lima bean with a fluttering white spot the doctor called it's heart. The second ultrasound showed us a snowman, with a ball for the head, a ball for the body and little twigs I think were arms. This time it was an unmistakable baby - a silhouette complete with forehead, nose, mouth and that's when I saw it... a clenched fist that met it's face. That's right, the baby was sucking it's thumb. At least, that's what it looked like. I didn't ask (as at that point I realized silence was golden with this woman), but when I read on my weekly pregnancy update that babies start sucking their thumbs around now. How flipping cool is that? 

So, choking back both excitement and tears at being the only one to witness this miracle, I fought through my unexpected ultrasound and took my pictures home. Our "love at first site" ultrasound frame has now been updated (Doug reminds me that the caption is now falsehood as the current pic represents love at third site) and when I check out the photo staring back at me I see a perfect little face and the outline of a hand. How cool:-).

None Like Me - Nooma Lessons on Motherhood

Last night at small group we watched Nooma 018. It was called Name. And the whole teaching was about how we compare ourselves to others. Wish we were a little more like that person, or wonder what it would take to do this as well as she does. The thrust of the video is that God has created each of us to be unique - to have our own individual path that's unlike anyone elses. It got me thinking about all of the labels that we voluntarily coop to explain our identities and make sense of our worlds. It also got me thinking about the Mommy Wars (I know, a departure it seems) and all the different kinds of mom distinctions women adopt. Stay-at-home Moms verses Working Moms, Slacker Moms verses Alpha Moms (I know I mentioned these in my last post). And especially as a new mom there's a sense that all of these types have already been established and we have only to choose which club to join, which name to assign ourselves. And as motherhood does, in a sense feel like a sorority you spend nine months pledging, there is a little bit of identity insecurity when it comes to figuring out who you'll be as a mother. 

But, that goes in the face of this belief I have in a God that is infinitely creative. Who has made each of us to be completely distinct, no matter how much we may have in common. Who weaves together our DNA and our experiences, our talents and our brokenness into something that is utterly and completely different than anyone else. And when I think about it like that, I realize that I will likely be a different mom than any other in the world. There won't be a mom exactly like me before or after. It kind of makes the mommy wars seem silly, doesn't it. 

Another thought for the day inspired by Nooma. The new one is about the feminine aspects of God (bless you Rob Bell). And I just wanted to share an excerpt:

"We didn't have anything to do with our birth. We are all here because some woman somewhere gave us life. Her pain, her effort, for our life. And when a mother gives like that to a child, she is showing us what God is like. But sometimes this part of God's nature is overlooked. A lot of us are comfortable with male imagery of God. But what about female imagery for God? Is God limited to a gender? Or doe God transcend and yet include what we know as male and female? Maybe if we were more aware of the feminine imagery of God we would have a better understanding of who God is and what God is like."  

The Guessing Game

So at 13 weeks, 20 weeks feels like an eternity away. Why does it take so long to find out if it's a boy or a girl? I've heard that there's a 3D Sonogram they can do at 15 weeks (i.e. two weeks from now for those of you not so great in the math department) that can tell you super early what you're having. Technically they do it for medical necessity (i.e. old moms), but I'm wondering if I could finagle my way into one... maybe fake some bizarro symptoms I read on WebMD to encourage them to do one? Ethical? No, but MAN am I impatient! 

There's no point in picking out nursery stuff or even a stroller until we know for sure. (Yes, yes, so many people wait and just go for green, yellow and orange, but that's just not me.) So a certain degree of the excitement about the baby feels like it's on the other side of October 1. So much of having a baby is about living in the present and the future. The now and the then. And the now is just a sneak preview (both of the joy and the pain). For the antsy in us, we're ready to be a little more then-minded... so we can picture ballet tutus or dinosaurs. Will the baby's style icon be Suri or Kingston? 

So, I did what any Gen Y mom would do. I consulted an oracle... better known as my Facebook community. Upon asking my friends what their best-guess, gut-reaction, wives-tale instincts were telling them. The results are attached... 

- 7 votes for "it's definitely a boy" and

- 7 votes for "I'm certain it's a girl"

And two parents to be who are as clueless about gender guesses as we are about the impending parenthood... Blast... 

Cankles and the So-So Miracle Massage

It's amazing how you take things for granted until you lose them (if only temporarily). For example, in retrospect, I've always had really nice ankles. I never thought to have them bronzed, or even really compared them to the junction between other people's feet and legs, but it was nice to have this thin point when the calf narrowed and the foot began. Yep, looking back I had ankles to be proud of. Upon getting pregnant (and much sooner than one with normal ankles would expect) I noticed one day that those nice ankles I'd always enjoyed had been replaced with... wait for it... brace for the horror... CANKLES. That's right, my ankles had swollen and all of the sudden I couldn't see those dainty ankles bones anymore.

I started to panic.

What if they don't come back? What if this is what my ankles look like from now? Shortness of breath. Absolute fear. Same day I went for my first maternity massage. I was most excited about the maternity massage table I'd heard about with cut-outs for your growing stomach and tah-tahs. Literally, there are holes there where your more sticky-outty parts can go. Genius. The places without these tables (like Red Door Salon - www.reddoorspas.com) require you to lay on your side the entire time - which doesn't sound particularly relaxing to me. The massage therapist warned me up front that this massage was going to be a little... different. She can only do light pressure (I like tough pressure), she massages the palms and soles of the feet, but not the fingers or toes (wha?), there were certain pressure points she had to avoid, and the weirdest of all... some weird therapy on the legs that isn't massaging at all. At least she told me beforehand. I would have been seriously disconcerted if she's started doing this strange thing on my legs that definitely wasn't rubbing, but rather felt like she was building something. She started at the ankles and would touch them for a second, pause, put her hands in a circle around my legs a few inches up, pause, then up, pause, then up, pause. It was the massage equivalent to chinese water torture. I wondered at points what she was doing? I guessed that if I opened my eyes I might find her doing some sort of bizarro Native American breathing or voodoo. Were those long pauses her filing her nails? It didn't feel bad, but it didn't feel like a massage either. I was confused.

I'm rambling. I know. Sufficed to say it was weird. 

Until, I stood up after the massage, looked down and for the first time in a month saw.... (drum roll)... MY ANKLES! My real, actual, normal sized ankles. I asked her what she did and she said that during pregnancy the swelling/bloating in the ankles and legs is very superficial, and she literally pushed the excess water out of my ankles, up my legs and into my system. I don't know how it works, but it went from weird to miracle.

Vanity? 

I'm sure.

But I'm excited nonetheless:-) 

Why I Heart Dr. Wiles

So finding the right OBGYN is obviously of major importance. What I didn't know is how coveted a good one is. I have another pregger friend right now (Patty) who was drilling me for doc details as she's looking for someone new. And another friend of mine (Kristen) who's thinking about babyville and she was asking for recos as well. I found us talking about Girlie Docs the same way we talk about hair dressers: personality and results. That said, I don't want to make it sound like MY fabulous doctor is just a fun baby catcher. He's the real deal. Duke University, Got his MD in 81 (around the same time my mom was doing her own lamaze breathing to push me out:-) He specializes in high risk obstetrics, which seems like a good thing to me. If he can handle the 63 year-old mamas and the women who have been told to just say nooooo to more babies, surely he can handle this run of the mill 27 year old mom. 

We've seen him twice - and I love, love, love how chill he is. I guess everyone looks for different things. Some probably want someone UBER thorough, cautious and conservative. A lot of women I've talked to prefer a female OBGYN for comfort reasons. That's fair. At our first appointment Doug did comment that it was kind of weird watching another man feel up his wife:-), but let's be honest. Those appointments aren't comfortable no matter WHO is doing the probing. So doc gender doesn't make a huge difference to me. What I love about Dr. Wiles is that he's credentialed enough that I'm confident he knows what he's doing. But he's easy going enough that he keeps me from worrying about things. Having a baby could be majorly stressful. There's about a thousand things you can do when you're pregnant (Icy Hot Pads anyone?) to damage the baby. Someone there to tell you those things aren't the end of the world is a welcome voice in the room to me. My boss Katherine tells the story that her mom was asking the nurses to bring an ash tray for her Marlboro's when she was in the delivery room. It was the 70s - they didn't know! And Katherine's about the most amazing person you'll ever meet. So if she turned out okay, surely my picking up Subway one day isn't the end of the world, right? That's my hope anyway:-)

Talked to my mom this weekend and she's pretty convinced that she had three miscarriages in the 80s because the neighbors put pesticides on their rose bushes. Seriously people, life is too short to worry that our neighbors horticulture choices are robbing us of our children. Not to pick on my mom - I just prefer to assume that everything will be fine until it's not. That philosophy has worked out well so far.... 

P.S. No Ben Gay for Baby

I was using Icy Hot patches on my back, since I'm temporarily incapacitated with back spasms, but evidently that entails absorbing chemicals into my blood stream (and by extension the little one's blood stream). So no more of that. I seriously hope that hasn't caused any damage. The nurse at my obgyn said, "I doubt two icy hot patches will cause any harm." Just what a nervous mom-to-be is looking for in reassurance... doubt. Say some prayers! 

Working the System

There's a new boutique in Short Pump called Weebsworld (www.weebsworld.com) that a friend of mine recommended. Evidently they have a scale you can weigh the stroller on and a pathway built into the store that has different terrain so you can try the strollers on cobblestone, asphalt, sand, etc. How cool?

Speaking of strollers, I have a brilliant plan to work the system:-). I got an email from Amazon with a promotion their doing, where if you register on Amazon and get $700+ in products from there (either from you or gift givers) you get 6 months of Seventh Generation Diapers for free. First of all, who wants to register on Amazon? I can't even begin to talk about why that's not fun... but they do carry the Bugaboo stroller I want, which alone would qualify me for free diapers. So I'm thinking about creating a registry for that one item for the free diapers, since we'd be spending the money on that stroller no matter where we buy it from. I think it's a totally brilliant plan:-). Even if Amazon doesn't have special terrain where you can try it out...

The difference between boys and girls...

Or perhaps I should have said the difference between moms-to-be and dads-to-be. I've heard that a woman becomes a mother when she finds out she's pregnant. A man becomes a father when he sees his baby for the first time. That's an unfortunate piece of misalignment there I think. I get it... it comes real for mom when she's nauseous, sleeping all the time and gaining weight. It would be difficult to ignore those little facts, not to mention to growing list of no-nos she must suddenly adopt (no advil! no caffeine! no soft cheeses! and of course no alcohol!). While I'd disagree that you're insta-mom when you find out this list, you have daily reminds built into your life that your body is no longer yours alone. And that there's lots to do to prepare for this little blessing. It's a little different for dads-to-be. Suddenly their wives are complaining more than usual, can't stay up as late to hang out on the weekends and well, that's probably where their awareness stops. So I get why it's harder for them to feel all parental so soon. But that doesn't mean the need to prepare is any less great. 

Why do I mention this? Doug has been a little, shall we say, less than eager to read the baby books. First I got What to Expect When You're Expecting, which I can admit is a little intimidating given the fact that the paperback version is longer than the King James Bible. After about a month of asking him to read 30 pages (months one and two) I went from asking, to nagging to tossing the book at him in the morning with loving little phrases like, "Hey deadbeat dad, read this," and "Oh my gosh, you're totally Seth Grogan from Knocked Up. He wouldn't read the baby books either." He invoked the "dads become dads when they see the baby" line, but I'm not feeling it. Then friends of ours recommended a different book (Pregnancy Week by Week) and he decided that he wasn't going to read What to Expect because clearly this other book (the one that we didn't have) was better. So I bought it. And it's still sitting in my car... I'll let you know he decides his parental education should begin:-)

In other news, I've wrenched by back. Actually I wrenched it last summer trying to lift a box of books that should have been relegated to The Hulk for lifting and couldn't walk for a week and a half. It's been acting up the last few weeks as my top/front area has definitely expanded (that's a euphemism for "I had to go buy new bras this weekend" for all you boys reading) and that's put more pressure on my lower back. I tried going to work yesterday to find that it took me quite some tine to stand up and then a slow shuffle walk to get just about anywhere. I came home close to 5, sat on the chair and found that I was stuck there for the next 5 hours, unable to move more than an inch in any given direction without spasming pain. At one point (Doug was at a meeting) I decided I had to go to the bathroom and spent the next 30 minutes moving the ten feet to the bathroom. It went like this, "move an inch, spasm, scream and cry. move a couple more inches, repeat. eventually find myself sliding out of the chair and onto the floor, more spasming and crying. then army crawling (stomach and elbows) on the floor to the hall bathroom." If it wasn't so utterly painful it would have been hilarious. So I'm off to a chiropractor this morning to get a little help. Fingers crossed that he, like the massage therapist, won't reject me because many won't help a pregnant woman before she's 12 weeks along. We shall see...

P.S. Promise the pic wasn't a political statement... when you google "dad awkwardly holding baby" Dubya is what comes up:-)

11 weeks...

Evidently the baby is the size of a fig this week and is almost fully formed. His/her (perhaps I'll call the baby "shim" until I know for sure) hands will soon open and close into fists, tiny teeth are beginning to appear under his/her (shis?) gums and some of his/her (sheir?) bones are beginning to harden. She's already busy kicking and stretching, and his/her (shit's?) tiny movements are so effortless they look like water ballet (I should go see a water ballet so I know what that means). These movements will become more frequent as her body grows and becomes more developed and functional. I won't feel the baby's acrobatics for another month or two - nor will I notice the hiccuping that is almost certainly happening now that they baby's diaphragm is forming. 

So that's what I've learned from pregnancy week by week... a few other random thoughts.

On the fact that having a baby is kind of surreal. When I first found out I was preggers it was too insane to imagine the birth or the person that was being formed. So how did I relate to the news? My inner decorator connected before my inner mom. I went online and started looking at baby retailers for nursery ideas. I've been wondering if that's strange, or perhaps some reflection of consumer culture that rather than envisioning life with the actual baby I started thinking about the baby's room? Or was that just a baby step (no pun intended) towards nesting for parenthood? Who knows... anyway, I had the crib and gender-dependent bedding picked out before baby names. Wondering if I should feel conflicted about that. Anyway, a few things I learned during my baby exporatory mission: 

- Modernnursery.com is a great place to start if you don't want your baby to be born among fluffy-pink-cup-cakiness or animal themes. Not to hate on those things, but I'm pretty sure the baby won't notice either way, so I kind of want a room that goes with the rest of the house. That being said, we might have to sacrifice the baby's college education to afford some of that stuff, so I'm going to have to find a way to supplement with more affordable look-alikes from discount places like Walmart and Target.

- Land of Nod is awesome. Expensive, yes, but those are nurseries I can picture in my house. Plus they have strollers that look like they belong in MoMa. That seems like a good thing to me.

- Pottery Barn Kids is cute, but seems overpriced for what is it. All of the nursery bedding looks relatively kiddish to me, and maybe it's just my unnurturing nature (hopefully the hormones will deliver that gene), but the stuff just isn't my style. What I did love at PB Kids were the upholstered rockers, which look gorgeous on the website and come with to die for printed fabrics you can choose from. So nice looking that I was contemplating paying the ransom they were asking for it. Until I went into an actual PB Kids store and saw one in person. Up close it's kind of flimsy and cheap looking. We sat in it and it's not super comfortable. Overall, a big let down. 

- Target had me hopeful, especially because they have a baby line from Dwell that I'm all over aesthetically. Too bad when I read the online reviews most people had given the line 1 star and begged fellow shoppers not to purchase mod furniture that falls apart, comes scratched up and never lives up to the beautiful pictures. Major disappointment.

- Babies R Us. I can't even go in that place. I break out in hives. It's overwhelming and feels unmanageable. I might be as frightened of Babies R Us as I am of childbirth. The entire store seems to shout, "You know nothing stupid parent to be! You don't know which of these 200 breast pumps is good or why! You don't know the difference between all 800 strollers!" Who wants to put themselves through that? I will definitely not being registering there.

- Walmart. The store experience is much better than most would think and the smaller department is far less overwhelming. Obviously, you want more options than they have on the floor, so I started sifting through the dot.com store to find a lot of cute furniture! They had a chair that looked IDENTICAL to the Pottery Barn rocker, only instead of $1,500 it was $299 (and after seeing the PB chair in the flesh I'm sure the WM version is as good quality-wise). The stuff I liked best was by a line called BabyMod, which unfortunately is only sold online and seems to be sold out of everything. Though to be fair, I can see why. It looks like the stuff on Modernnursery.com for thousands less and has good consumer reviews. I'll be checking back to see when/if they get more in. 

All for now!