homestretch?

last night carole began complaining of back pain, and then wrinkling her brow quizzically as she checked all over her belly.

“what’s up?” i asked, trying not to screech with anxiety at her expression.

“dunno,” she said. she’s real communicative these days.

a bit later she stood up next to me, and said, “feel my belly.” i did. i don’t disobey these days.

it was taut all over, like a round trampoline, or like an overinflated ball, except that there were little movements (like tiny sharks just beneath the surface) at the same time.

“i can’t tell if he’s just pushing really hard all over, or if that’s a contraction,” she said.

“i don’t really think he’s quite capable of such uniform pressure all over your belly,” i said. well, i wasn’t that articulate, but i’m writing this, so that’s my story and i’m sticking with it. “i think that’s a contraction.”

“me too,” she said. and smiled.

and they continued through the evening, irregular, not painful (although her back is a different story).

we both know that this situation could continue as is for the remainder of the time until the scheduled c-section. in fact, the contractions seem to have diminished this morning, even as gus keeps on rollin’ around. what we aren’t sure of is how the doctor will respond to this: we know he’s super-risk-averse in our case. will this 1)  be enough for him to pack us off to the hospital and scrub in? will he 2) want daily check-ins from here on? or 3) will he tell us, “great! braxton-hicks. call me when it hurts”? we just don’t know. fortunately, we don’t have long to wait, since carole has a regularly scheduled appointment in a few hours.

just to be safe, we’re taking the hospital bag (with her new pyjamas) with us.

**updated** saw the doc, and he went for option #3. carole feels miserable, and he says that’s just about right. we’re hunkering down in the a/c for a long hot labor day weekend.

thomas shannon smith

last night i dreamt that three days after gus was born shannon took me to meet him. all grown up at 3 days old he was already in day care, in the “binky room” where the 0-6 month set hangs. shannon got waylaid by some guy selling used books from his time in graduate school (enough! we have enough of those already!), so i headed into the binky room by myself. as soon as i opened the door i realized i was in over my head: some babies were squalling, others were getting their diapers changed, still others were hanging off of their caregivers like miniature howler monkeys. here were all these babies, all demanding attention, and i was supposed to find mine among them? i hadn’t even seen my baby yet. how in the world would i recognize him? how would i be able to even see him through this miasma of baby sounds and smells?

but there he was, in a crib at the back of the room, laying on his tummy (agggh! SIDS alert!) with his face turned outward. he was wearing the dr. seuss “thing one/thing two” outfit that is, in my non-dream-world, waiting for him at home. but it wasn’t the outfit that gave him away as mine: it was his complete and utter perfection.

cliché as it is, all parents think their children are gorgeous. truth be told, though i was thoroughly charmed by mairin’s arrival and her looks, her appearance was, well, funny. she looked like an old man. except for when she looked like a frog. she was as adorable as could be, but she was funny looking as an itty-bit, and i wasn’t too doped-up on love-hormones to see that. but this baby? this baby was gorgeous. perfect. dark hair, olive skin, a fine little nose, not a blotch or a squish or an odd genetic gift to be found. i have never in my life seen such a beautiful baby. i stared and stared and stared at this dream-child, unable to believe that he was mine. really, truly, mine.

but since he was, i picked him up, changed his nappie, and began that mommy-cuddling that so many women seem to do instinctively with their kids. i could not believe my good luck. i could not believe he was real, so perfect, so whole and complete. i spent hours in the binky room with this gorgeous little guy.

when it was time to go i realized that it was time for us to go, not time for me to go. i was taking him with me. are you kidding? leave him here in this chaos? unh-hunh. so i packed up his gear and got ready to leave. at that point i realized i had no idea what his name was, so i walked back to his crib to see. by that time shannon was with me. he looked over at me and said “well, i had to name him.” i read the sign: thomas shannon smith. “but,” i said, “that name wasn’t on our list.” “i know” he answered. but i looked at the baby and it was right — a perfect fit. he looked exactly like a little thomas shannon.

which didn’t really matter, because at that moment the baby looked up at me and said “call me lolo.”

if i’m really honest with myself …

… i’m not sure i believed six months ago, or maybe even as recently as four, that this day would come. no, he’s not here yet (and that’s a whole other category of suspended not-quite-belief), but he’s basted in his mama for thirty-seven weeks as of today, officially entering him into the camp of “term pregnancy.” the likelihood of any need for the nicu just went down, the possibility of underedeveloped lungs just went down, and the possibility of a lot more things going right just went up up up.

oddly, my response to this is muted. there’s too much to do to spend a whole lot of time musing on milestones anymore. more accurately, maybe the BIG MILESTONE is close enough (and boy is it close) that any others seem barely worth noting as they pass by in a blur of preparatory bustle.

in honor of this particular milestone, though, let’s shift perspective a little. he’s 37 weeks today, but more importantly:

< 14 days before we welcome gus.

little man…

… is actually pretty big, if you take any stock in those “damn machines” (as carole’s OB would say). his head: big, as in >98th percentile; everything else, big, as in just right. carole says: big head, long torso, short legs — just like his daddy. his daddy says, harumph: it sucks to be reduced so … reductively.

his estimated weight, plus or minus 511 grams (i kid you not, that’s what the printout says: 511 grams is the margin for error): 7lbs, 11oz. how’s that for mixed metaphor? near as i can tell, that means he weighs between 6lbs, 9oz and 8lbs, 13oz, which is right in the range of normal baby weights. (but i’m counting on geohde to set me right if my gs to ozs is off.)

if you ask his mama (which i daren’t do), she’d say “of course this baby is big — he’s huge, and he’s f*&king hurting me with his g#$@amn motherf^%#ing elbows and knees! why are you telling me what is so f*&king obvious, you a$$h*le?!?!?”

damn machines.

36w4d.

are we having fun yet?

the answer is, most emphatically, no.

carole doesn’t sleep for longer than a couple hours at a time. she wakes up on one side or the other, various body parts either in pain or numb, and has to rev up the winch assembly to move herself into a temporarily more comfortable position. and then, a couple hours later, she does the same.

of course, that’s the best-case scenario, which has become laughably rare in the house these days. mairin has decided that 11pm, or maybe 11:30 (last night it was an all-new record of 10:15), is a pretty good time to wake up crying, get out of bed, grab her teddy and her blanket, and go sleep with mom-mee. and sleep she does, pretty soundly by all accounts. unfortunately, she sleeps actively, tossing here, thrashing there, and pretty much using her brother (aka her mother’s belly) as target practice for her kicks. plus, she’s begun talking in her sleep (dreaming of fruit, no less: “no-o! my ‘na-na!”) so carole’s two-hour naps are more likely to be limited to about half that.

except that her mind is racing and her body is surging with hormones. so once wakened, the journey back to sleep is often long and arduous. it frequently takes longer than she can remain comfortably in one position. which means revving up the winch, and becoming that much more wakeful again.

i only know all of this secondhand, from mutterings and interpretations of glares. i have voluntarily removed myself to the sensory deprivation chamber that is our attic guestroom. with a fan running next to me and a window a/c unit in the other room, i hear nothing. you’d think this would be blessed escape; instead, i find it slightly depressing – something about feeling so isolated when we should be feeling so together in eager anticipation of gus’s impending arrival.

carole spends her days in these almost-late-thirty-something weeks with her eyes propped open with toothpicks, unsmilingly hauling herself from one place to the next, sighingly injecting herself with hep.arin twice daily (yes, we’ve switched off of the loven.ox for the duration), heroically and usually stoically humoring a two-year-old whiningly hanging onto her ever-tightening pants, much of the light dimmed from her eyes (except for the occasional glower), frequently wincing in pain as her back wrenches at the slightest misstep.

i’m not much better — well, that’s ridiculous: i am, but it makes me miserable to watch her misery and be unable to do anything and to have my feeble efforts rebuffed by her raging don’t-touch-me-or-even-look-at-me hormones. and my anxiety has (as i suspected it would) accelerated to a breakneck speed as a full-term pregnancy has drawn ever nigher. i sleep in my isolation chamber, but not deeply. i worry about everything, and am hyper-sensitive to feeling slighted or rejected. my chest is tight, and even deep breathing only helps for a few minutes. i can’t focus on work, and i can’t even muster the energy to ride my bike.

mairin spends her days increasingly needy for her mother. i have officially become chopped liver in her eyes. in fact, i’ve fallen so low that i’ve even lost a consonant – i used to be “dad-dee.” recently, however, even though her mother is still very much “mom-mee,” i’ve become “da-ee.” sounds a lot like “die.” tossed off, almost without looking at me. and when she observes me drinking my coffee in the morning and says “da-ee fah-kee!” i have to work not to hear her muttering an obscene request to go away — permanently.

36w2d, and everything’s just as it should be, and everyone’s nerves are reaching the fraying point. which is as it should be.

do not try this at home

my impulse to bake has never gone so wrong, so consistently, as it has over the last few months. my intense cravings for sweet things has led to more cobblers and fruit pies than any of us should have reasonably consumed. our csa-bounty has left piles of zucchini on our doorstep, begging to be shredded and baked into bread. and my general carbo-yen has led to homemade breakfasts of scones and biscuits and pancakes, followed by dinners of pizza and pasta galore.

yummy, yes? not so much.

for a while, i left the sugar out of everything i baked. some of you will remember eating a fresh strawberry pie with me over the fourth of july weekend, and my bitter complaint that it didn’t set up. i learned why — brace yourselves — ONE MONTH LATER — when shannon handed me a 1/4 measuring cup full of congealed strawberry puree and asked me what it was. i was stumped. then i remembered the pie. apparently i had set aside the thickener, putting it on a shelf for safe-keeping, and then not only forgot to add it to the pie but forgot to ever look for it again. eww. two cobblers suffered when i misjudged the berry-quantity so severely that all three floors of the house filled with smoke from  berry-filling burning on the oven floor. last sunday’s pancakes were actually, finally, beautiful, but i attribute that to the fluke of having opened a brand new tin of baking powder, a necessary task since after mairin baked scones with me the remains of the old baking powder were thoroughly mixed with our kosher salt. 

but like a true olympian i have fought through trial and tribulation and continued to bake, certain that i can achieve my dream of satisfying the sugar-carb beast within.  my certainty is only fueled by  my increasing frustration at not being on top of things — when did i get so disorganized, so sloppy and slovenly? – and my insistence that if only i tried harder and then, really, if only shannon would help more that i could be on top of absolutely everything.  in such a state, i required shannon, who was heading out the door for a bike ride, to throw together the dough for focaccia before he left so that it could rise while i was out walking the dogs, and i could come home, throw the dough in the oven, and voila! have dinner.  

shannon did an absolutely superb job tossing the ingredients into a beautiful glisteny ball that he left to rise in the oven. for my part, i did  just fine punching down, shaping and salting the dough, getting it ready to bake. and then i decided to finish it off with true flair. having determined that i should shake the dough off the paddle in the true pizzeria style and, worried that the dough will stick to the paddle, i practiced a quick wrist-flick over the sink. the dough slid beautifully off the paddle into the sink, from which i rescued it so quickly it barely got wet and was even quite easy to reshape on the paddle.

having mastered the wrist-flick i moved to the oven, blissfully ignoring the fundamental differences between the flat floor of a wood-fired pizza oven and the OVEN RACK i planned to flick the dough (perfectly, mind you) onto. my ignorance melted as i watch my beautiful dough wilt and ooze through the wires toward the oven floor (and the aforementioned burned berry fillings) and SHIT how did i ever get so STUPID?  i grabbed a cookie sheet, which i tried hold in one hand while, with the other hand, i tried to slide the dough onto said sheet (turns out it is easier to resuce dough from a sink than from scorching hot oven racks) without burning myself too too many times.

i was burned. i was angry. i was hot and sweaty and on the verge of tears. and so i decided that it would be ok if the dough landed on the cookie sheet in a muddled pile, because nobody would see it except me and i just wanted to EAT it and not be such a failure at every.single.thing. i try these days.  

evidence that shannon held up his end of the bargain: this was one divine-tasting focaccia.

evidence of my utter failure to do anything quite properly, despite having good intentions, plenty of time, AND shannon’s help:

bill the foc-cat-ia

bad mama!

i’ve been berating myself for weeks now about not posting new photos of mairin to flickr. we’ve had this nice thing going with monthly sets for mairin (sure, sometimes i only post 7 pictures for the month, but other months i post 49!) and i’ve liked keeping it going. the only monthly set we sort of blew it on was her 13th month, but i’ve given us special dispensation since ruby was delivered on the day mairin turned 13 months, and i wasn’t too, um, with it for a while.

anyway, so last night was the night. mairin was in bed, shannon was at a team meeting (or so he says), and i actually had a few hours to myself. it was the perfect time to catch up on my backlog of photoblogging, right? wrong. a careful perusal of both our “shared pictures” folder on the computer and the massive databank that is our adobe photoshop, revealed that we got nothin’. NOTHING. sure, we managed to snap a few shots here and there, but they are mostly useless and desultory.

and so it goes: prep for newbie picks up speed, attention to older child starts to slide. no wonder mairin has been a nervous wreck. just wait, though, ’til she gets to open all the gifts i’ve purchased for her to distract her from the attention gus will get when he gets here. (whoever said money can’t buy love had obviously not parented a toddler.)

in other bad mama news, i actually asked nurse cheryl yesterday evening if i could forego my final 17P shot just, you know, to get things going. she said no. and while i was warming up to a good old-fashioned huff about my right to make my own decisions about my medical care, she was describing to us her years as a NICU nurse and her experience that caucasian male babies have the lowest survival rates among preemies. “wimpy white boys” she called them. shannon told her not to call his son names. she told me to keep the baby in place for a while longer so she wouldn’t have to.

extra toys for mairin, a few million more brain cells and some extra lung tissue for gus. should be a good few weeks.

team support

i got this part, dad.

um, i'm kinda busy, mom?

on the charts

sometime this month dear ol’ dr lum will be joined by his new partner, an apparently sweet, young, female newly-graduated ob-gyn. it seems, however, that some of ted’s current patients are not so happy about this: apparently one about-to-deliver patient left his office in tears recently when she learned that the new dr. heidi might deliver her baby.

i learned about this new development — not dr l’s own pending new arrival, but the possibility that she could actually TAKE HIS PLACE as my doctor – at our last visit. dr l had left the room briefly and, bored stiff by all the redundant pregnancy magazines (do everything perfectly! don’t worry — you don’t have to do everything perfectly! in fact, that’s the only way to do everything perfectly!) i picked up and started to browse my medical chart. at the bottom of page one, highlighted in lemon-yellow, is this note: 2nd c-section UNLESS BABY FALLING OUT! i was still laughing when he came back in the office. i pointed to this note and he laughed, too — “wow, did i actually write that? well, with another doctor joining the office, i figure i should have some pretty clear notes on the patients’ charts.”

by the time he was finished with this explanation he was busily engaged in the exam familiar to all late-term pregnant women — the one where the doctor wears your torso like a giant foam finger while shoving the baby’s head around between your hip bones (and for you male readers, yes, it is about as painful as it sounds). still, from my disadvantaged position i looked him squarely in the eye and said, with as much authority as i could muster, “yes, well, YOU’re delivering this baby. right?” he looked up and over my knees at me and smiled. “what if i’m out of town?” “we have a scheduled c-section. how can you be out of town?” “what if i’m not available?” i just glared.  he cracked a toothy grin and said “don’t worry. this baby is one of the only ones i’m going to make certain to deliver myself.”

unless, of course, the baby falls out. which is exactly what happened — feet first, no less – in my dream last night, prompting me, today, to grab my crotch every few minutes to make sure there are no baby toes making their daring escape.

at least i happen to know the doctor is in town.

lel-lo

in lieu of anything substantive to report about the new kid (35w1d, knocking his mama around, heartbeat strong, all systems go for a baby in 27 days or fewer, blah-blah-blah), i bring you trivia about the big kid.

mairin has a favorite color. it’s yellow — i mean, lel-lo. in fact, if you ask her the color of anything, she’ll first tell you it’s yellow. blue shirt? lel-lo! green grass? lel-lo! purple crayon? lel-lo!

i was worried for a while that she was actually not seeing colors right. but she almost always gets the color right if you ask her the second time: no, silly, that’s not yellow. what color is it? boo! geen! bah-po!

carole has even begun singing her an “i love yellow” song as part of bedtime: the sun is yellow, la-la-la, bananas are yellow, la-la-la, eggs are yellow, la-la-la.

the other day, after a successful visit to the kiddy potty, when carole flushed the pee, mairin waved to the toilet and said, “bye-bye, lel-lo!”

of course, i’d like to think that this is partly the result of watching so much of the tour de france (watch! bikes!) and seeing the celebration of the leader’s yellow jersey every day. i even tried teaching her how to say le maillot jaune, but she wasn’t all that interested in other ways to say her favorite color. and if pushed, i’d have to admit that her passion for yellow began well before early july.

really, i think the kid just likes saying the word yellow, and does so at any opportunity. and as the child of parents who like words (see previous post), i suppose she comes by it more than naturally. come to think of it, i like saying yellow too — i even think lel-lo might just be an improvement on the original.

lel-lo, lel-lo, lel-lo…