Heat stroke

Oh god, it's hot. All spring, people have been making comments to me about how much I was going to suffer having a baby when it got to be hot weather, and I thought they were nuts. But oh god, is it suddenly, unbearably hot. Normally I'm the person with a sweater on three quarters of the year, but the baby has turned me into a raging inferno who slept with the windows open in January, and now all of a sudden it's 85 degrees out, and every day the house gets a little bit warmer.

All I can think is that at least I'm not in Ohio, where this would be just the prelude to the REALLY hot weather coming later. Or Texas, with my sister. Then I'd really be hurting.

Brett was hit with a huge burst of energy today and spent the whole day scrubbing the basement, sorting stuff out of boxes, cleaning up the kitchen, vacuuming, emptying the dishwasher, buying groceries.

The cats and I, on the other hand, spent all day lying around like boneless chickens, in the shadiest, breeziest places we could find, trying not to so much as twitch a tail unless absolutely necessary, hatching up schemes in which people would bring us icy drinks.

Things I should have done today:

• Finally gotten the tomato cages up (third weekend in a row I've failed to do this)
• Weeded across the street (ditto)
• Cut back the wisteria (ditto)
• Watered the apple trees
• Visited my poor, neglected P-Patch plot
• Cleaned the fans I'm now using constantly
• Flea-dipped the cats (well, applied Advantage)
• Hung the pictures that have been sitting on the living room table for about a month
• Put together the stroller we just bought
• Put together the backing for the quilt
• Gone fabric shopping
• Gone out to buy that phone we need
• Mopped the kitchen

Things I actually did do:

• Watered the front plants at 7:30 a.m. when I couldn't sleep
• Napped
• Had breakfast with a good friend
• Napped
• Finished a book
• Whined about the heat
• Vacuumed the basement (my one productive task)
• Napped

And Brett, bless his heart, instead of complaining about my lack of efforts today, comes out when I'm finally vacuuming and says, "Are you ok? Do you need anymore assistance from me today? Are you up to this?"

He's so sweet.

The dark side

And then there's the moments of terror about impending motherhood. This came on yesterday, when suddenly, at about ten at night, I realized that I couldn't quite remember the baby moving that day. A month ago that would have been no big deal, but these days the baby seems to spend most of her time trying to physically rip her way out through my abdominal wall, so this was a drastic change of routine.

I wracked my brain. Had she been kicking me in the car that morning? Not that I remembered. Did she move at work in the afternoon? I didn't think so, but I was in such a fog of exhaustion all day that I wasn't sure. What I knew was that she did not perk up after an evening bowl of ice cream (usually a sure fire way to get her going) nor did she visibly move my stomach around during our nightly television watching. She moved so little that the cat, deeply suspicious for some time now of laying on me and getting kicked by a fetus for her efforts, actually moved back in and settled down on my stomach for a nap.

Now I've been CALM during this pregnancy. The soul of calmness. I have been relatively even keeled, not given to much anxiety or moodiness, not worried (much) about whether she'd stick around in the early days when she was the size of a peanut and her future was much less certain. Overall, I've been serene. Just riding a general feeling that everything would be fine.

Which is, I guess, why I was due for a freak out of the proportions of last night. By the time we went to bed, I was convinced that the worst was happening or about to happen and that she would never move again. Which led to the realization that, holy cow, the game has really changed. We used to be safe, I sobbed to Brett, just us, only the two of us to worry about. Now there's another little person involved, someone I'm going to watch over and worry about and love desperately and for whom I'll be filled with the agonizing knowledge that if anything ever happened to her it would utterly and completely kill me.

What are we thinking, us self-sufficient adults, when we decide to take on that kind of risk?

Back in the days, a year or two ago, when Brett and I would talk about whether to have a baby someday -- often after some kind of baby catalog would arrive in the mail, reducing me to a quivering mass of hormones -- I'd say to him something along the lines of this: "Don't you want to know what it feels like to love something like that? Don't you want to know what it would feel like to just be ripped open by love, the way people say they are for their babies?" And he would look at me like I'd just grown a second head. Hell no. Why would we want to open ourselves up to that?

Last night, I was thinking that maybe he was onto something, way back then, before he changed his mind and got hit by the baby bug himself and suddenly saw a whole different future for himself. Why would anyone want to make themselves that vulnerable?

It was hard to remember for a minute there.

Of course, I'm not serious that I've actually changed my mind about any of it. I want - and already love, in fact - this baby more than anything. But I had to face up to the fact last night that my carefree, can-take-anything-that-comes life and the resilient riff I've been playing for the last 35 years may well be a thing of the past. Because this is different. This is somebody we made, someone completely helpless and dependent on us, and already, not having met her or held her or seen her little face, I want nothing more than to mindlessly protect her from any harm, and can't quite imagine anything worse than going through all this only to have some cruel twist of fate take her away.

Sophie, of course, is fine. After my hour long freakout last night, which ended in exhausted sleep, I woke up this morning around six to still find her not moving much, so I quietly snuck downstairs to load up on carbs and caffeine, and then laid back down. That did the trick, woke her right up. She punished me by spending the next hour pummelling my insides. And I've never been more pleased about it.

Cats in contemplation

Brett captured the cats in some thoughtful moments out on the front yard earlier this week:







These were all earlier in the week, before the temperature hit 80, making the front yard scorching hot. Now if you go out looking for feline company, it's like searching for slugs - you're much more likely to find them scrunched up in the shade of one of the big tomato pots or in one of the damp places I just watered than actually laying out on the sidewalk.

Quilt top

Finished a quilt top tonight that I started AGES ago - pic below. This is a really easy pattern and not very big, so it should have taken me about a week to complete, start to finish. Unfortunately, I started it at Christmas about three days before I got completely laid out by morning sickness, which kept me from doing anything productive other than survive going to work for the next three months.

Until this weekend, when I suddenly got the urge to dig this out and finish it.



Simple as it is, it represents the first quilt top I've made entirely by machine - put together on my spiffy Christmas present from Brett, a Pfaff 2046 quilting sewing machine.

Close up of the Christmas-y fabrics:


Next up, I try to learn to do the quilting portion of this on the machine.

Omens

In the universe of Bad Ideas, convincing your husband to take you to see the remake of The Omen when you are ripe with child is high on the list. I'm not normally all that good with scary or violent movies anyways. I don't like watching people die - never built up that indifference to it, and I like to get so absorbed in a movie that I don't remember it isn't really happening, which makes watching violence hard in the best of circumstances.

But The Omen - well, I've seen it before, and I really liked the original, which was more scary than gory, and I figured I knew what happened, so it's not like anything would surprise me. I'd know when to shut my eyes. And nothing else that's out right now really sounded good, so why not?

Well - lemme tell you why not. First, it's about a pregnancy gone horribly awry, at its core. Let's just contemplate the unsuitable-ness of that theme for a second at this point in my life. And second, I'm a bit more sensitive right now to things like violence and gore. Even knowing when to shut my eyes, the violence was really kicked up a notch and it's pretty impossible to shut out the sound of what's happening when someone's being beheaded or disemboweled or chewed up by a REALLY MEAN DOG in a major multiplex with Doppler-blow-your-eardrums-out surround sound. Let's just say there was a lot of cowering going on.

And to top it all off, the baby was awake for at least half the movie and moving around like crazy.

I took my unborn, awake, able-to-hear-really-well fetus to see (or, well, hear) the Omen.

She's got to be wondering what she got herself into.

Progress report

Another post for the out-of-towners, several of whom have requested to see what I look like now - here's me at almost-seven months. (Yes, this post originally said 7.5 months. I can't count.)



Finally bought some dresses too, so I can stop trying to keep my pants up.

Nursery pics

I'm now happily embroiled in putting together the nursery, a little bit at a time. Our beloved handyman (we Zalkans can fix nothing ourselves) came over Wednesday while I was working at home and painted the walls for us. Today I put some shelves together. A few scattered pieces of art have begun to show up on shelves. And it's starting to look just a little bit like a home for our daughter! Very exciting.

Here are a few pics, mainly for family members who have been wanting to see the colors we chose:


Phoenix investigates the new crib. Not sure if you can make it out, but there are small purple elephants (and giraffes, and lions, and other things) on the crib quilt. Which is, of course, why we bought it. Brett chose this.


Some great wall art I bought - alphabet cards with botanical illustrations. There are 26 of them, and I'm going to use them around the room. In front of them, you can see the baby's versions of Monkey and Herschel - her own pint sized elephant-and-monkey menagerie to start life with. These things matter


Close up of the letter c - aren't these great?

I had a few others but I've temporarily misplaced them on Brett's Mac. Which I'm not supposed to be touching. But he's not home, so nyeah. :)

Contentment

Today's been one of those days of almost unbearable sweetness and contentment - not necessarily because anything big happened. It's hard to put my finger on what's left me in such a happy haze this evening - in a lot of ways it was a perfectly ordinary day. Slept in a little and woke to a thick, typical Seattle early-summer fog, which burned off by 11:00 for a gorgeous afternoon. We took a shopping trip to look at video cameras, had lunch, and came home and did yardwork across the street. Nothing huge there. Tested out three paint samples on the nursery walls. Worked in a nice hour of napping, cooked out and had Mom and Dad over for dinner. Laid around reading on the couch while happy, contented cats walked in and out of the propped-open screen door. And that's my day.

But here's the perfection you might not see from the details:

The birds are chirping and roses are blooming just outside the front door and I can smell them from here. My beautiful house (which I still love insanely, as much as the day we moved in) is reasonably clean, full of color and cats and family and a husband I love to distraction. My soon-to-be-born daughter is moving inside me. We have really good ice cream, and tiny tomatoes are starting to appear on several of my plants. The bellflowers and astilbe have finally bloomed in the backyard. I've done not one iota of work, or even thought about work, since 4:30 on Friday. I keep sneaking into the nursery to spend a few minutes sitting on our new glider chair in the nursery, looking around me and imagining what's to come. Brett comes in an pantomimes picking Sophie up out of the crib and patting her little back. A cat joins us and jumps up on the changing table, looking expectant and a little confused. What is this room? And at the end of the day, with my feet up on the couch to ease an aching back, reading a magazine while Brett plays with his computer, there's one perfect moment of silence and peace and happiness when the whole world seems full and I can't imagine feeling any better than I do right now.

Life is really good.

We got a crib!

Torrents

We went to the first of a six week series of childbirth classes tonight, along with about ten other couples, all due within a few days or weeks of our due date. Brett, bless his heart, valiantly stayed awake and even asked a few questions. But I have to admit that tonight was stultifyingly boring. Things should pick up next week as we start watching videos (a concept that still horrifies me - do I have to see it before it actually happens?), and start learning about things we don't already know.

The best part of tonight was when the daddies-to-be had to stand up behind their partner's chairs and practice various forms of relaxation touches -- touching our foreheads, jaws, neck, and shoulders to help us focus on releasing tension there. "We should practice this part a LOT at home, I think," I whispered to Brett afterwards. He smirked.

I've been fairly unprone to mood swings in the first six months of this pregnancy, which I feel proud of, and which also makes me hope that the fact that this has drastically changed in the last week is marginally acceptable.

Surely I get some credit for the fact that I made it this long without any major teary episodes or insane rages right? Even if, on the way to class tonight, I went through the full emotional gamut from getting insanely angry at other drivers, to crying for a mile or two about how Brett gets to go have fun camping this summer while I have to be fat and pregnant and sick the whole time and will Never Have Any Fun Again, to silliness and laughter, to to flopping around in agony from HOWBADLYIHAVETOPEEANDCANYOUFINDMEABATHROOMRIGHTFRICKINGNOW?

What fun that must have been. Brett, to his credit, handled it well.

And then during class, the emotional torrent quietly turned to the utterly lovestruck. Watching him flip through his handouts and examine the diagrams on the whiteboard closely, all for me, all for my sake, I was suddenly struck by how amazingly glad I am that Brett is going to be in the room with me when I actually have to produce this baby, how strong and steadfast he is, how much comfort I get just from his arms around me and how much I'll need that then, how there's no one else who could ever help me so much in a scary situation like birth might be -- and this, in turn gets me all weepy. He's such a Good Man. *sob* I love him so much. *sniffle*

I'm tired just writing all of this. :) Perhaps tomorrow will be a little less... dramatic.

All I want

All I want anymore is to get through the rest of the pregnancy without my pants falling off in public. What IS it with maternity wear? Have the people designing it never themselves been pregnant?

I now have two main pairs of maternity jeans. One has the big huge stretchy elastic panel, and one is cut to sit below your belly and be cinched in at the sides with elastic. Both used to be great, but right around the 28-week mark they both started malfunctioning in a serious way.

The elastic panel pants -- which used to be my favorites, btw, and have the joint benefits of being a) very cheap (thank you Old Navy), b) incredibly comfortable and c) fairly nice looking -- are now just a little bit on the small side, in that the elastic is always rolling down OFF of my stomach, leaving them with nothing to hold them up at all. I'm very sad at this, since these pants used to be perfect.

The low cut pants never stayed up to begin with, and it's just gotten worse and worse. What exactly are you supposed to cinch them TO with that elastic? When a non-pregnant person wears jeans, normally her body flairs out lower than the waistband and that kind of holds them up. I'm pregnant. My belly slopes downward towards my legs. There's nothing to stop them from sliding on down too, and believe me that a couple pieces of elastic aren't doing the job.

Either way, walking across the street between buildings for meetings is hazardous at best, and always leaves me desperately pulling up one side or the other of my pants, or clutching vainly at a belt loop through the pocket of my coat. And if both hands are full and I can't hold onto anything? Forget it.

If the world were fair, all maternity pants would come with soft, unobstrusive suspenders. Or with sticky tape to attach them to your body more firmly. No, I no longer want the rest of the perfect pregnancy experiences I might have imagined a few months ago. I just want to not end up flashing a street full of strangers, or worse, half of my coworkers at work.

Oy.

More cat logic

Such interesting brains, these cats.

Phoenix seems to have set a rule or himself that he can only re-enter the house from the same door from which he left it. While he clearly knows the back cat door exists, he'll only use it to enter the house if that's how he went outside to begin with. Instead he'll wait, quite clearly wanting to come back in, for someone to open the screen door for him. Sometimes he'll even beg, when he could quite easily take a short walk and get back in on his own.

This rule leads to many situations in which he goes out the front door in the morning, won't come in before we leave for work, and is still there on the front porch ten hours later, shivering and quite glad to see us, when we get home. He enjoys his trips outside, but he's essentially a sissy who would rather sit on the couch all day than rough it outside unnecessarily. Today he waited in the rain. Luckily, I came home early to rescue him.

Why does he do this? Why are they such dorks?

See what I mean?