On Love

I have loved a lot of things, and I have loved a few people along the way as well.

I love my mother, because she's my mother, and we are the best of friends.

I love my father, because he's my dad and he's wacky and we're quite a lot alike, and I appreciate his curious mind and the fact that he's usually willing to drop everything to help me out with whatever stupid problem I've got, as long as it's not too mushy in nature.

I love my brother, because I've only got the one sibling and he's a pretty neat guy. He's become a man I'm proud to know.

I love my grandmother, because she's awesome, quite simply. I have a pretty great family all around.

I of course love my husband, because I picked him. He is really quite loveable. We are on this trip together and he's my right-hand man.

And I love Rosie and Sasha, the dog and the cat. There was a time not long ago when Rosie was the baby of the family, and we showered her with it and spoiled her rotten. I loved Loki a whole lot too, as noted in the pages of this blog and on the tattoo on my arm. Loki was sort of my first-born, the first being I was ever solely responsible for.

Not to diminish the love I feel for any of the above people, who are all very important and all in my top ten, but I never really knew what 'love' meant until Nora came along.

Every day I go to bed thinking "well, I loved her more today than I did yesterday." I didn't think it possible but every day there's more. Often I look at her and think "whoops, there I go again" and I'm in deeper and deeper. I never knew what it was to love someone so much that you want to envelope them, to put them in your mouth and carry them around or something. She's like a part of my body, only cuter and I love her more. The intensity of my feelings makes me incredibly vulnerable, as now everything's got way heavier consequences. The pressure to do the best I can by her is immense. Everyone and everything else is getting the shaft because of the love I feel for this 13-pound little girl.

Sometimes she gives me the gears - today for example, she wanted to eat every two hours. It's exhausting but it makes her grow so I do it cheerfully. Over the Christmas celebrations of the past few days she was cranky as all get out, and wailed all evening long for a couple of nights there, including my big Christmas eve dinner. But I don't hold it against her - instead I worry about her wellbeing, and the dinner party can go to hell. I find most babies look kind of repellent when they cry but not Nora, I even find her beautiful when she's bawling. Today she scratched me up in the face with her sharp little talons but I didn't care, I just cheerfully clipped them next time I got a chance. My fault.

She has tiny feet that I love. I put them in my mouth whenever I can. I kiss the back of her neck just because it's warm in there and I can feel her whispy newborn hair tickle my nose. When I change her diaper, I always give her a kiss on the belly, because when her umbilical cord fell off on day seven, the most perfect little bellybutton formed under there. When I carry her to the bathtub I like to stop and take a look at her little butt in the mirror - it is so tiny it fits in my hand. She's the only person alive whose bare ass I like to put in my hand. It is the cutest ever. When she cries, I like to kiss her tears away, because they are warm and salty and they make me sad when they're on her face.

So there it is. I am raw. Sorry for the sentimental post but I am feeling the warm fuzzies tonight.

Now I will go to bed, and tomorrow I will love her even more.

Santa's Sweatshop 2010

This year I told myself that I would take it easy for Christmas. After all, I have the perfect excuse to rest on my laurels; a four-month-old baby makes it hard to do any heavy-duty crafting or cooking.

However, I am not one to rest on my laurels, and the ambition-creep happened again. I started out with the fact that my husband's family are joining us this Christmas - four older German people - and so that means that Christmas Eve Fun-due is expanded to now accommodate 8. I think it's cheaty to eat store-boughten desserts at Christmas if you have the skills, so right now I've got a pot of blackberry/cassis sauce bubbling on the stove, to top off a plain cheesecake.

Then onto the gifts. I thought I might make my brother-in-law a pair of Christmassy socks, since I had the wool kicking around. Well I had most of the wool kicking around, because I had to have my grandmother send me an emergency stash towards the end of the second sock, which was a production on her end because she had to unwind the ball of yarn to fit it into the mailing envelope. Phew. Then I decided that if he gets a pair of socks, I ought to make my sister-in-law something as well, so I randomly picked a wacky felted hat, since she is kind of wacky (in the best possible way). I have, however, never felted before, so I made it all up as I went along. It ended up being way too big, so my mom had to come over and perform emergency surgery on it. It turned out beautifully and I think she will love it, but phew.

Thank god for the internet and my new laptop, because this year, the UPS man brought my Christmas gifts (he is a smart UPS man, who keeps dog cookies in his pockets). Christmas 2010 is brought to you by Land's End, LL Bean, Amazon, and Lee Valley Tools. I bought maybe five small things in actual bricks-and-mortar stores, mostly Loblaws. I did a little bit of local shopping but I feel that I did badly by the local economy this year. I promise to do better in 2011. Maybe next year I will vow to ONLY shop locally and make things for Christmas.

So now, my gifts are all made, bought, and wrapped, and I've made three kinds of cookies: maple shortbread cookies, sticky toffee bars, and hazlenut lace cookies. I still want to make lemon poppyseed cookies and that may happen tomorrow. Maybe. I have also made a batch of dog cookies, for Rosie to give to her brother. The broth and blackberry sauce are made for Christmas Eve, and I still want to pre-make the crust for the cheesecake, the dipping sauces, and pre-grate the cheese for the appetizer cheese fondue. I also want to whip up a batch of cashew/coconut brittle for my neighbor who can't eat dairy, which must be mucho depressing at Christmas. I made some piney country-style decorations for our entrance this week, and yesterday I went and bought a 10-foot tree which will be erected (hee hee) and decorated this weekend, about which I am very excited. Nora has never seen our giant Christmas tree, and we've set up the jolly jumper nearby so she can bounce away and fill her wee eyeballs with sparkly things.

Why all this psychotic Christmas spirit? Well, for a couple of reasons: number one, it is Nora's first Christmas, and while I am quite certain she will remember none of it, I will and I will tell her about it. Also, I haven't got a lot else going on to fill up my days, so I can focus on/obsess over it. I have also been listening to Christmas music pretty much 24/7 for the past two weeks which really does help. I continue to listen just because I want to hear Band-Aid's Do They Know it's Christmas, which is one of my all-time favorite songs period. I hear it about once every two days - a teaser - but I forget that I actually have it on CD somewhere and so I continue to wade through all the crappy Taylor Swift and the Christmas shoes. It all distracts me from the fact that my truck is very sick and needs many dollars' worth of repairs, I am getting very little sleep, I am still hooked up to the milking machine, and there's something still not-quite-right with my body somehow. But yay! Christmas music!

We have a family cocktail party this coming Sunday and I am on deck to make my famous (not actually mine, The Food Whore's) cheesy artichoke/jalapeno hot dip, and a crudite platter. Then it's on to Christmas Eve. Food food food! Fun-due Christmas eve, then the next morning we go to my mom and dad's for gifties and breakfast, then back there in the evening for turkey dinner. On the 27th we wake up nice and early and drive five hours to my Oma's place for Rietveld family Christmas, which is just the best. Several of my relatives have not yet met Nora so I am excited to make those introductions. I am planning all of her little Christmas outfits like a crazy person. She looks good in red so she's got lots to choose from.

Phew. Once this is over, we will have a few days to spend with the still-visiting Germans, then we settle in for the loooong rest of the winter. We've already bought our ski passes, and we intend to have a once-weekly date night on the slopes (thanks to my mom for babysitting)! I didn't get to ski at all last year so I am really excited, especially since we've already got almost a foot of snow on the ground. Nice fluffy stuff, and it keeps falling and falling. I have to focus on the skiing and not on the fact that Nora hates her snowsuit, so going for walks is no longer fun and hence Rosie spends her days mooning around the house waiting for daddy to come home. Either that or I have to endure the screaming and go for a wintery walk every day.

So Merry Christmas to you and yours, and I hope you are all being very moderate this year. I heard somewhere that people spend on average $600 a person on Christmas, and I wondered who the heck these people are? I think I've spent that much in total, likely less. I like to remind myself that expensive gifts lose their appeal as quickly as cheap gifts, and if I over-spend, the hangover will be tough to deal with. Stay moderate people! I keep pushing for home-made Christmas but that's a lot to ask of the other folks in my clan. Anyway, enjoy yourselves, eat too much, drink your fill (if you're not driving), and tuck in for the rest of this snowy season. My very best to you.

Nora and I have to go watch Elf now.

A Tablespoon of Perspective

Those of you who know me, well or even not so, probably know that I have spent the last twelve weeks and five days fretting and kvetching about new-parenthood. I can't breastfeed. My baby's not gaining enough weight. I don't do tummy time with her often enough (she hates it). I hate pumping seven times a day – should I go to formula or not, what to do what to do? It has literally been a twelve-weeks and five-days worryfest.

Then the other day I received a dose of perspective; a friend came to visit by surprise, and brought along two other friends, one of whom had with her her fresh eleven-day-old baby. This baby was born at 37 weeks, so technically, it should still have been in the womb. She weighed 5 lbs 14 oz, and was so tiny I didn't even ask to get a clear view of her, let alone hold her. Nora looked like an absolute bruiser by comparison.

I recognized in Amy the look of the brand-new mother. Slightly pale, groggy, a look of absolute shaky disbelief on her face. This trip was her first big outing. She openly said that breastfeeding was difficult, she didn't know what she was doing, she felt uneasy about everything, etc, etc, exactly what I've been harping on about for twelve and a half weeks! Except that this time, I was the experienced one in the room. Yes, breastfeeding didn't work, but I have a great book to recommend. Yes, I'm pumping, it's a shitty routine but whatever; if you need any information on pumping milk just ask. Oh yeah, my baby's 11 lbs, 10 oz now (she's actually hit 12 now). She spent her time smiling at everyone and charming them with her little voice. She was sitting up (assisted) and looking around the room and being a perfect little human. That other baby was so unbelievably tiny that it seemed like Nora should be in preschool by comparison. It felt really strange for me to have the older baby in the room, as I've spent the last three months nearly thinking that my baby's smaller than all the others, the smallest one around, still a fresh newborn. I've been acting as though I'm still in the bubble of new-motherhood when the truth is that I take her out most days, I can casually haul her in and out of the truck and I have no problems managing the feeding/diapering/napping/nighttime routines. The fact of the matter is: she isn't the youngest one in the room. She's no longer newborn – we even have a bin set aside for clothing that no longer fits. Today her new thing was trying to roll over, and she came pretty close, considering. She sucks on her fists all day, and has developed a sense of humour – she can absolutely tell when something is supposed to be funny, and reacts accordingly.

I still spend my day fretting about feeding her, but the issues are different. I'm no longer worried about her basic survival (except I do still listen for her breathing all night). She takes forever to finish her bottles, and sometimes I wonder if she doesn't prefer formula to my breast milk. I resent my pump and the fact that I have to put her down in order to use it. I hate juggling tiny quantities of milk all day and worrying about my pumping schedule. I sometimes wonder if the benefits of breast milk would be outweighed by having a mother who is able to spend four more hours a day paying undivided attention to the baby, rather than being hooked up to a pump or worrying about breast milk production. Having a mother who's a bit more relaxed couldn't hurt. If I do make the switch, I promise to read her more books and feed her the very best solid food when the time comes. I already have squash from my garden pureed and waiting in the freezer.

When they left I felt jubilant. I felt like I'd made it over the hump, and I have. Nora and I are falling in love and making it work and our days are quite pleasant, for the most part. I understand her cries (which are becoming more rare), her patterns, and she sleeps through the night without fail, so I am not suffering whatsoever from lack of sleep. I have learned that I have to stop comparing her to other babies- especially those many months older than her. She is her own little person with her own little quirks, and our relationship and feeding routine is ours alone. Every mother and baby couple is different. I take strength from talking to other mothers, but I can't compare their situations to my own anymore.

The long and short of it is: my baby is doing great and so am I.

 

Gennyland’s advice for new parents

When I was pregnant everyone had advice for me. Some of it was great, some of it was pretty commonly-held wisdom, and some of it was completely useless to me, and half of the battle remains figuring out what advice is pertinent to me and my family and my particular situation.

There are some things that everyone will tell you when you're expecting. "Sleep when they sleep!", "Don't worry about your messy house!" they will say, and all of that is well and good but I have more advice now that I've been through nine weeks of parenthood (and am therefore an expert, ha ha). Instead of verbally annoying everyone I know who is expecting, I am getting my yayas out by putting it in my blog. So here goes:

Get a swing or some other kind of hands-free device where you can put your baby down and get some things done. In my case, I have to pump breastmilk after every feeding, and because of the configuration of my pump rig, I unfortunately can't hold the baby at the same time. So she has a little rocking swing at my feet and she falls or stays asleep in there, so that when I'm done pumping I can go clean things up, get something to eat, etc. without her freaking out. If she's awake, she's usually content to look at our bookshelves or at me making faces at her.

Sleep when they sleep but by this I mean: don't put the baby to bed and then stay up watching Saturday Night Live. Because an hour after the show ends, as you've just drifted into a deep sleep, she might be awake and needing your full attention. I learned this the hard way, um, a few times.

Tummy naps are the best Putting baby chest to chest, propping your head up, tucking a small blanket over her back and under your sides (nice and taut) and then rubbing her back until you are both asleep is the nicest thing ever. Just keep your hands on the baby's back to ensure that A) she doesn't roll off and B) she's breathing ok. Make sure her face is unobstructed.

Don't buy too many 0-3 month onesies Especially if your baby is born at the tail end of summer and all of your onesies are summery with short sleeves. You will therefore need to have pants, cardigans, and socks to go with everything. As well, onesies are the go-to gift for nearly everyone, so technically you won't have to buy any at all. Buy sleepers instead – lots of sleepers. Although I guess you'd use a lot of onesies if your baby's born in, say, May. Ignore this advice if your baby was born in spring or you live in a hot climate.

Think two feedings ahead This is particularly important if you are a non-traditional breastfeeder such as myself. I don't rest easy unless I've got her two next meals (or the better part thereof) socked away in the fridge. Also, breast milk can stay out at room temperature for four hours, so it's not a bad idea to finish a feeding and take the next one out of the fridge so it warms up at least a bit. If you are breastfeeding in the traditional sense, it pays to think of where you will be, what you are wearing, and the time it might take to feed so you can plan your day accordingly. Like, don't plan on being at the opera wearing a turtleneck when feeding time approaches, that kind of thing.

Keep your house as tidy as you can because no matter what they say, if you are anything like me, if the baby is fussy and the dog is hyperactive AND there are dust/pet hair tumbleweeds rolling down the hall and fruit flies everywhere from the three overripe apples on the counter, it can send one over the edge. I require some external order to feel any internal order. Tidy when you have the chance or get someone else to do it for you.

Always burp the baby It's tempting to go "oh well she's finished eating, now I can go and get X, Y and Z done" but no sooner do you put her down on her wee play mat when
blaaap out comes the liquid gold you just finished getting into her and then there are tears (yours) and the motherly guilt starts ("how could you DO THIS TO ME?" – I'm kidding) and you feel like oh my god, did the last feeding even count? So burp the baby. It takes a bit of time and effort sometimes but it's very satisfying to hear that wee little belch, and then you are free to go do X, Y and Z. NOTE: if the baby's fast asleep when you finish feeding her, a belch may not be required. Don't rock the boat.

Fix up a station for yourself Perhaps it's more of a nest than a station, but I have a corner of Nora's room set up with a platform rocker (electric blue pleather and wood – I got it from an old nunnery and it was the best $60 I ever spent), her little swing chair, and a small table. In this corner I also have the following essential items: my laptop, my breast pump, the collection of cleaned bottle parts required for feedings, a stash of healthy snacks (a tin of nuts and dried fruit - wheee), paperwork and bills that need to be dealt with, a glass of water, a book for lists, a journal, a portable phone, and my agenda. It's like a little lactation office set up in the baby's room. It makes everything feel very official, and also very contained.

Ask for help Many people offer help before you have a baby – take it. I am fortunate that my mom lives about 3 minutes away, so she's at my place every day helping me with various things: taking the dog out to pee, tidying the living room, holding the baby so I can have a shower, and in the early days she even fed me. If people offer help, think of specific things they could help with and take them up on it. Don't be shy; everybody likes to feel needed.

Spring for the nice bras I bought a stretchy relatively-cheap (but still not exactly free) nursing bra at Thyme maternity and after one washing the elastic of the chest strap was shot. Nursing bras are not real glamorous by nature, but there are nice ones out there, and it pays to have some good support and not feel like a droopy sack of poop all day. Plus, you get milk on them and the milk gets crusty, so you'll need a bunch. Invest in three or four good nursing bras or nursing tank tops and keep them laundered.

That's all the preaching from me this go-around. Maybe sometime soon I'll write about something unrelated to my kid, but for now, this is pretty much all I've got going on.

Stuff you can do in the middle of the night

Nora is a pretty good sleeper for someone who's less than two months old. However, she still does need to get up a couple of times in the middle of the night to eat, which means, for me, that she eats her bottle (I don't breastfeed in the middle of the night, I am too exhausted and I'm a bit too full if you know what I mean), then I put her back to bed, come back downstairs, and pump for twenty minutes. Usually around 3 a.m., though it can be 2 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. and even 6 a.m., which I still consider to be the middle of the night. It's usually at 3 or 4 hour intervals, which is tolerable.

I have learned to love this quiet time by myself. I make the best of it. Herewith is a list of fun things you can do in the middle of the night while you're breastfeeding and/or pumping, and if you have a computer handy:

• Shop. So far, since Nora was born, I have bought the following items online: this here laptop computer, wedding gifts for two separate cousins, a set of cordless phones (with integrated answering machine! I am so excited), a book, and I keep trying to buy crap on the new Gap Canada website but am having troubles with my password. Probably for the best.
  
• Go on facebook and catch up with friends. All of a sudden I am a prolific commenter. All of my comments happen between 2 and 5 a.m.
  
• Write this here blog. For those of you looking for something to do, write any blog! It's fun and keeps your brain sharp at 4 a.m. But maybe don't hit 'publish' until morning.
  
• Pay your bills. If you don't already do this, sign up for online banking. It's fun to track your money in the middle of the night.
  
• Read a book. Sure why not?
  
• Catch up on celebrity gossip. Apparently Michael Douglas isn't doing so well and that makes me sad for some reason. Stay strong Jack Colton!
  
• Eat. I keep snacks beside my feeding/pumping station and catch up on my eating in the middle of the night, because I often forget during the day. These are healthy snacks, mind you. I'm not scarfing Doritos at 4 a.m. like a big stoner.
  
• Tidy up. Quietly. If you have a nifty hands-free pump like I do, you can fold laundry and put stuff away on tiptoe.
  
• Write lists. You know me, I love lists. In fact, I just wrote 'write lists' on a list. How crazy is that? Anyway, I have written a list of Christmas gifts I'd like to get (we do this in our family), Christmas gifts I'd like to give, things Nora still needs wardrobe-wise, things to do, etc. etc. I have a little book for lists right beside me.
  
• Knit (while pumping with a hands-free pump only).
  
• Get addicted to computer games. For awhile I enjoyed a free trial of 'Bejewelled,' and when I crawled back into bed after all was done I had visions of tiny jewels falling in my brain. Thank god my free trial ended. Now I'm all into computer Mahjong.
  
• Compose lengthy emails that you will either send in the morning, or not.
  
• Catch up on your hand-written correspondence. If you have recently had a baby, you will likely have thank-you cards to write, so this is a good time to get that done.
  

Anyway the options are almost limitless in this age of computers and other portable electronics. One can get into a lot of trouble at 4 a.m. when left alone in the peace and quiet.

Progress Report

This week I can say that Nora transitioned from being a tiny scary fragile baby I have to take care of to being my daughter. I can't really describe why or how this happened, but she's six and a half weeks old, her eyes are more open, and she smiles when smiled at. She tracks us when we move from side to side and she reacts when we make funny faces and talk to her in a goofy voice. Her personality is starting to emerge and I hate to say it, but I think she's got more in common with me than with her father. She is a piquant baby, and I think it'll be hard to trick her. She's sharp for someone less than two months old.

One of the things that I have learned in the last few weeks is that the best thing to do when you are taking care of a new baby is to get out of the house. With the baby, I mean. Ha ha. I started walking with a neighbour who has a baby only two months older than Nora, and I have gone out for lunch with friends, and even gone to a breastfeeding clinic in the city, all by my lonesome (with Nora, I mean). It's essential to really own this motherhood thing, without making too big a deal of it. I have had to adopt an attitude of 'yep this is my kid, so what' when I go out. Even while I'm trying to un-wedge the stroller from the back seat of my pickup truck in the pouring rain, I have to just act like everything is perfectly normal. This is my life now. When I go places, I wrestle with a stroller – it's just the way it is. At least my stroller is a pleasure to wrestle.

At said breastfeeding clinic, I learned that I likely don`t have any supply issues with my milk, that maybe I just have to have more stick-to-it-iveness about this whole breastfeeding thing. I have to reduce bottle use (formula was phased out ages ago, these are bottles of breast milk) and ergo rely on the pump less, which would be nice because right now it's 3:49 a.m. and I'm pumping as I write this. Nora does breastfeed, and is rather surprisingly effective at it as well, so I`m going to have to learn to trust that she will tell me when she`s hungry and she`ll take what she needs. We`re going back to the clinic tomorrow just to check progress, latch and do a weigh-in, but things are looking up in terms of breastfeeding. I don`t think she takes vast quantities from me at any one time, but so what if I have to breastfeed her every two hours? This would be more pleasant in warmer weather but whatever, I`ve cranked up the heat. This is no time to conserve.

I had my six-week check up with my doctor today. It was pretty relaxed; my doctor is something of a hippie and generally tries to be extra laid-back with me because she knows that I am something of a hypochondriac (who me?). She wanted to discuss sex and contraception, which I found hilarious, since hello, I had a baby six weeks ago. Six weeks is nothing people! Also I reminded her that it took us four years to conceive this one so perhaps contraception would be wasted on me. She seemed to think I was being foolish but we`ll see. Nora told me she wants a baby brother but at this pace, her dad and I are running more of a military operation than a romantic one.

My doctor was concerned about the baby blues, but in talking to her I realized that this is no longer a concern in my case. The fog lifted at around four weeks and since then, I've just been feeling the regular ol' frustration regarding feeding, lack of sleep, a messy house, and paranoia. No more depression. I'm glad that my case was textbook, that it lifted at four weeks like all of the folks online said it might. I was feeling kind of guilty about it. And recently I have been celebrating the fact that I am so blessed. Several people around me have suffered misfortunes; one girlfriend recently had a third failed IVF and are now talking adoption, a male friend and his wife had to terminate a failing pregnancy, another girlfriend gave birth to her baby by surprise at 28 weeks (both are doing well, but oy vey the baby was 2.7lbs), and a friend of a friend gave birth to a child with a rare genetic disorder who passed away at two months old. I am so blessed, so anytime I feel the baby blues, I have to give my head a shake and realize that my baby is perfect. She might not feed so well from my breast all the time and she's sort of cranky some days, but she's perfect. She doesn't even poop, so she's pretty low-maintenance (she goes about once a week, sometimes twice, which the doctors have assured me is fine). She is utter perfection.

So tomorrow we return to the breastfeeding clinic, and I have started taking a drug to boost my milk supply because I'd really love to be able to stockpile it for times when other people take care of Nora, for mixing with her food after we start on solids, or just for peace of mind. I've seen through the haze enough to get excited about skiing this upcoming winter so we're going to get our passes and try to go one evening per week like we used to, since I missed last year altogether. I've even bought new ski pants. We are so fortunate that my mom and dad live at the bottom of the ski hill, so that it will be easy to drop Nora off and go.

So here's a recent picture of my daughter. She's nearly seven weeks old, and she is my whole life.

Gadgetry

The other day I received my new laptop in the mail. I have been at home for awhile now – two months to be precise – and I have learned about the powers and dangers of online shopping. A week or so ago, my cousin (also on maternity leave) emailed me to ask would I like to Skype with her that afternoon? Why yes, I would like to Skype. However, I did not have Skype, nor did I have a camera on my old dinosaur of a desktop.

So I promptly went online and bought myself a laptop. This may seem to have been a rash decision at first glance but in fact I'd been thinking of it for some time – my desktop didn't have enough memory to play a game that I'd downloaded, and I wanted to be more mobile and connected in my maternity leave, so I'd been thinking of making the switch a long time ago.

I have since experienced a few frustrations with this new machine that I foolishly hadn't foreseen. For one, my internet connection is dependent on cell phone reception – I have a wireless key – but cell phone reception is no great shakes at my place. Turns out that the best place to get internet reception is actually in the same place as my old desktop so duh, not as mobile as I'd thought. The other frustration is that the old dinosaur came from a 95-year-old man's house, and he'd already installed Microsoft Office etc. So I had Word, Excel, all the other stuff I use regularly, and this one only has a 60-day free trial version. Expect a lot of blog entries for the next 60 days. What my computer does have are a bunch of weird and useless programs that I haven't yet figured out. There are apparently games on here too but I haven't had time to play them yet.

I have a feeling that the next bit of technology to enter our house will be a new t.v. I realized today, as I watched DVD episodes of Flight of the Conchords on my laptop, that our television screen is so blurry that I almost didn't recognize Brett and Jemaine in their crystal-clarity. The computer puts the t.v. to shame. Also tonight I noticed that the lower right-hand corner of our t.v. monitor is green – as in, everything on the screen in that corner goes green. I think the television is almost as old as my little brother so I have no problem replacing it, it's just that we have to amortize all of this technology a bit.

More technology: yesterday I went to town and broke down and bought the super-duper breast pump, as it seems my little gal is a lazy sucker and doesn't really breastfeed (just for snacks), so I pump and feed her breast milk with a bottle. We are still committed to feeding her breast milk, which makes it compliqué for me. Also, this way I know how much she's getting and can obsess over it daily (ok hourly – I have to restrain myself from creating an Excel spreadsheet for it all). I have hopes that this will change someday, but in the meantime, I needed an effective milk-removal system that isn't $80 a month to rent, as who knows how long I'll need to use it? This one is called the Medela Freestyle pump and it claims hands-free mobility. The instructions boast that I will be able to do such activities as read a book, write emails, talk on the phone and other simple tasks and indeed, I am pumping this very minute (does that make you feel weird?) but I would suggest other helpful things I can do while pumping: go to the bathroom, sweep the floor, fold the laundry, and tend to my baby when she barfs all over herself. Thing is, their idea of hands-free isn't exactly simple. I look like I'm wearing a giant rubber rack on my chest, there are so many separate and interlocking parts that assembling and disassembling it each time is a chore. The pump itself sounds like large animals having sex. I need to hide it somewhere or wrap it in a towel or something. The whole thing comes in a "cute tote bag" as the company calls it, which is handy, though the tote bag is black, which is not so cute. I mean, it's handy, so they should call it a "handy tote bag" you know? It's just a black bag. Anyway, I have my own milker. The resale on these things is crazy so I'm not worried about having bought it, and hubby brought up the point that we could always get a goat someday. In the meantime, I may go as Lady Gaga for Halloween or something. Or a dairy cow.

So right now I am wired, on my new laptop, wearing the milking harness of insanity, listening to this pump groaning away and the baby gurgling in her crib. The crappy side of pumping is that I can't hold the baby while I'm doing it, but at least I keep her in close range. She and I are working it out but we are reliant on technology and gadgetry – the pump, the baby swing seat, the crib. We went out yesterday, to the doctor and shopping, and she was a perfect angel but for a not-quite-ten-pound baby, she sure takes up a lot of space. She goes in the carseat, which is mounted onto the stroller (my beloved BOB), with the diaper bag tucked underneath her. It's like a whole caravan, and she kind of disappears in it. When we go for walks, we're either in the carseat-stroller combo or today (because hubby took the stroller to work with him by mistake) she was in the baby carrier, which I also wear around the house. I wear her while cooking dinner, while wandering around the yard, or for 'rock and roll time', where I put on music and sing and dance in the living room (I think it's important for all babies to have rock and roll time). Anyway to my chagrin my house is filling up with baby gear and I'm starting to feel a bit squeezed out, or like I'm cheating somehow. I used to come from the whole "let them play with cardboard boxes and tin cans" school of thought when it came to baby gear but like it was with our dog, it's a slippery slope to just doing whatever you can to avoid rocking the boat. Before we know it Nora will be eating table scraps and sleeping in the bed.

 

The End Result

As I write this, I have the most perfectly adorable, cherubic baby sleeping in the next room. Her name is Nora. She’s not named after anyone, although we gave her my mom’s name as her middle name – we both just liked the name ‘Nora.’ It suits her in a weird way, since she popped out of me looking like a wee Irish lass for some reason. She has beautiful smooth white skin, and reddish-blonde hair. Her eyes are of a yet-undetermined colour but I have a strange feeling she’s transitioning into hazel, at 2.5 weeks old. Sometimes they’re blue, sometimes they’re just grey, but today I was struck with hazel so we shall see. And that adorable little round head we saw on the ultrasound weeks and weeks ago? Still adorable and round, and covered in hair. Like, she was born with a mullet. I can’t believe how much hair she’s got – she almost needs a trim already.

The birth was not the smoothest. One goes into such things with a vision of how things are supposed to go, or how one would ideally like things to go, but sometimes shit happens and things go awry and before you know it you’ve ended up with every intervention in the book. Like I was thinking I could manage natural labour. I was wrong. I was expecting labour pains to be like bad menstrual cramps but turns out I had back labour and I do not mess around with my back. The pain started in my tailbone and wrapped its evil tentacles around my torso and turned into a kind of bad menstrual pain, but a menstrual pain that burns in the back, if you can picture that happening every two minutes. I did it from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. before they said “we want to give you oxytocin because you’re stalled” and I said “give me the epidural first” so here I am at 5:30 a.m. with the monitor strapped to my body, getting an epidural, oxytocin, and then oxygen because my blood pressure dropped quite a bit. I started pushing around 10 a.m. but wee Nora had other ideas; she was cranked to the side and had her head tilted up, and refused to budge. The doctor kept reaching in on every push and trying to turn her but she’d swivel back, so at around 2 p.m., they said “your options are: foreceps or a c-section.” I have already had one abdominal surgery and they are not fun so after a bit of conversation, hubby and I decided on the foreceps. I warned them they’d better not mess up her face, and we proceeded to the operating room, since they intended to move quickly to a c-section if the foreceps didn’t work. They cranked up my epidural, I pushed into nothingness, passed out, and gave birth to my daughter at 2:34 without realizing what had happened. Literally, I’d been dreaming of a medieval village. When I awoke to the operating room and its hysterics, I had no idea where I was or what was going on, just that I had to push and that something was a success. Nora was lying on the warming table, and I had to ask several times how much she weighed (7 lbs, 11oz) and how long she was (21”), and what her APGARs were (8 and 9). They never showed her to me or put her on my chest, just wheeled her to the nursery for tests (she had a wheeze in her chest – hubby accompanied her). I will never ever forgive them for that, in all of my life.

It took them an hour to stitch me back up. Nuff said about that. Then I was onto intravenous antibiotics, due to the nature of my injuries.

Nora survived the foreceps in style. She had a bruised ear, which went away within 3 days. She’s a beauty, and I still marvel at the fact that I produced a blonde (even though hubby is blonde – I am so dark that I thought it impossible that I’d create anything but black-haired spawn).

I spent the next 48 hours in the hospital, being prodded by a cabal of nurses, each of whom had a slightly different technique for forcing my daughter to my breast. By the second night, they were starting to supplement her with formula – I think they caught me at a weak moment. Apparently I did not produce enough colostrum for their liking, and Nora wasn’t latching, so in went the tube with formula. Another unwanted intervention. Because hers was a foreceps delivery, they labeled her a ‘trauma birth’ and so she was forced to feed every 3 hours, whether or not she was sleeping peacefully, whether or not she was hungry. We were both thoroughly rattled by the end of our 48 hours and only barely got discharged, since she’d lost 9 ounces within 48 hours.

Things haven’t been super ducky ever since. There are lots of things that people don’t tell you about having a baby, probably because if they did, fewer people would have them. My own experience is not universal, but from where I stand, there are a number of things that I would have liked to have heard about before going into this. They include:

- For awhile after giving birth, you smell real bad. Like, not to put too fine a point on it, but I sort of smell like fart. I don’t know where it comes from or what, or if it’s hormonal, but I can take a lavender-scented bath and one hour later I once again smell like fart. I blame the baby a lot.

- Sometimes, it’s way too much effort to get dressed. Right now it’s 7:55 p.m. and I’m still in my pyjama pants from last night. Today I have decided not to fight it.

- You get the sweats. As soon as the nurses started making me breastfeed, I would break out in a fierce sweat, and this continued for about a week. Every time the baby cried, I started to sweat. Every time I tried to feed her, I started to sweat. Sweat more than I have ever sweated in my life. Rivers pouring out form under my boobs – that kind of sweat.

- If you breastfeed, or try to breastfeed, you, your child, your furniture and all of your clothes will be covered in breastmilk for awhile. And it’s sticky.

- Some level of depression is apparently unavoidable. If it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna happen. This does not, apparently, make you a terrible mother. But it makes it hard to get anything done.

- Breastfeeding could possibly be the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. For those of you who are into numbers, goals and targets, everyone’s got numbers for you to follow, or else your baby is close to death, apparently: meconium elimination starts within 24 hours (no problem here, she pooped within a few hours of finally being presented to me, and got rid of it all within 36 hours), then 6-8 wet diapers a day (we’ve got that one licked, Nora pisses like nobody’s business), 4 poops per day (this one is an issue for us – Nora likes to keep it to herself), 8 to 12 feedings per day of at least 80 ml per feeding, no longer than 3 hours between feedings (which can be a challenge if you have a sleepy baby), weight gain of 1 oz. a day on average, and your baby must exhibit a nice range of temperaments. Man alive. I thought my regular job was hard. We’ve got most of these ones licked except for the pooping one.

- Not everyone breastfeeds instantly. I have done an informal poll of my mother-friends, and approximately 9 out of 10 of them had some kind of issue to overcome within the first two months, sometimes longer. One friend, who I had assumed had no troubles whatsoever, admitted to me yesterday during the first 9 weeks of her first daughter’s life, she actually had two other friends breastfeed her baby on occasion, just to make sure she was getting something to eat. More people supplement with formula than would let on. I do. Apparently I don’t produce enough milk to feed my child, which makes me personally feel like a failure but that’s another story, and so here I am hooked up to a milker 8 times a day, supplementing with formula, and breaking my balls to feed my child the requisite 80 ml 8x per day so that she will grow the requisite 1 oz per day (she’s now averaging 1.5 to 2 oz per day, the little porker). It’s rough. The temptation is to give in and just give her formula, but I am not ready to do that yet. As long as I’m producing something (and I am producing at least 2/3 of her diet from my boobs) I will give it to her, even if it means pumping it out and feeding her with bottles for the next six months. Maybe. We’ll see – hubby and I are trying to work on our own plan for total breastfeeding domination but we’ll see how it goes. Meantime he keeps pumping me with this terrible fenugreek tea and making me think ‘milky thoughts,’ whatever that means.

- Sleep is precious, but you can be remarkably alert at 4 a.m. when the baby cries. I instantly wake up, pick her up, go downstairs and begin the feeding ritual – within 2 seconds of her first squawk. Then I can go back to bed 45 minutes later and be asleep again within seconds. Also, napping with your baby on your chest is super nice for both of you. I get no more than 3 hours sleep at any given time and aside from a bit of blurred vision (in the hospital I was convinced I was going blind – I could no longer read), I am pretty functional. Relatively speaking.

- Before I gave birth, nobody told me about the squeeze bottle, which every new mother insists became their ‘best friend’. I don’t know if I would have done this if I’d known that a squeeze bottle of warm water would be necessary every time I go to the bathroom.

- You will have a lot of medical professionals breathing down your neck. If you thought you had a lot of appointments before giving birth, wait until you have a baby. Everyone has opinions, everyone has concerns, and everyone wants you to do something new and different. Everyone wants your baby to poop 4 times a day, I have learned. I often find myself wondering how people manage to give birth and successfully raise children in remote parts of the world, away from the purview of doctors and public health nurses wearing too much perfume. Like Hutterites. How do they do it? I’m sure they have all kinds of olde timey wisdom that would come in super handy.

Anyway, that’s enough of a list for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more horrible things to complain about in the days and weeks to come. In the meantime, here is a picture of what makes it all worthwhile, what makes it impossible to quit this job or take shortcuts just because it’s real hard and my body hurts and I’m sad a lot and I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel on some days. This is why I bounce out of bed at 4 a.m., if not exactly perky, then at least willing. This is my baby daughter Nora.

384 Days

Well it’s finally here; I’m officially on maternity leave. I’ve been off for about a week and a half already – the first couple of days were sick leave, because I honestly couldn’t function at work on as little sleep as I have been getting, and last week was technically vacation time, so as not to eat into my two-week freebie time from work. Today is my first official day of mommy-hooky. It’s funny how easy it was to unplug. I think it’s because I haven’t really been plugged in for a while now, but the day I walked out of the office I never even really looked back or thought about it too hard. Sorry work, I’ve got bigger things on my plate.

So far it’s been a busy week and a half. I started out with not-so-lofty goals: day one, I was going to go and get a library card. That didn’t pan out. And each following day had a little goal in it, which was either met or exceeded. In the last week and a half I have: been up to the land three times and slept overnight twice, sorted the cupboard under the sink, baked pizza crusts and cookies, had a dinner party for Austrians (who ended up not making it until way after dinner, so it was a BBQ for my brother and his fiancée), built a support for my cucumbers, been shopping, been to the doctor, sorted out my books and separated some for donation to the aforementioned local library, done about 18 loads of laundry, read a book (The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a good epic read - I am preparing for the miniseries), started knitting myself a sweater, walked the dog a bunch of times, picked about 4 lbs of wild blackberries (with hubby), and taken about 1.5 naps per day.

I am feeling ok so far. Or rather, I was feeling ok until today, when I started to feel just a bit weird. I can’t describe it, I just feel weird. Super exhausted (easily explained, as I normally wake up at 4 a.m. with killer hip pain and can’t get back to sleep), and I think I have started to have some kind of weird contraction activity. Painless tightening of my tummy, which now feels off and on, as hubby put it, ‘like a turtle shell’. It doesn’t hurt yet so I’m not rushing to the hospital, but it’s a bit of a welcome distraction. I was beginning to think she was altogether too comfy in there.

A couple of weeks ago a wacky doctor thought I was measuring small for my dates, so they ordered a biophysical profile, which is a neat bonus late-term ultrasound where you get to see your baby completely developed. They measure the amniotic fluid, the size of the head and torso, the length of the femur, and a bunch of other stuff, and determine whether you are in fact still being a good hostess for the growing baby. It’s kind of scary – the ultrasound can see through the baby’s skin, so I saw her teeth under her gums – she looked like a scary skull face. I can’t tell you whether or not she’s cute (but she is, I’m pretty sure of it). The profile is scored out of 8, and my gal got an 8. Turns out she’s a decent size – probably over 7 lbs now, at 39 weeks 2 days. She can come out anytime, ‘cause I don’t need a baby bigger than that. When I went to the doctor last time she said I was well on my way dilation/effacement-wise, and that everything looks good for a regular ol’ vaginal birth, so I’m getting rather excited. I am also getting rather huge. This ball I have strapped to my stomach is becoming a load to bear. Where it was once cute, now it’s kind of absurd, as it sticks out at least six inches further than my boobs do. I’ve gained about 18-20 lbs so far, which pleases me as I haven’t been very careful in the last little bit. In fact I’ve been trying to eat lots of dairy fat (ice cream! Cheese!) to fatten up the baby and prepare for breastfeeding, so I hope it’s going to her ass and not mine.

Rosie and I have been spending lots of bonding time together. Today our shared objective was to nap. Neither of us wanted to walk in the heat, so we took a short jaunt down the road until she decided she’d had enough and turned around to come home. She’d been playing hard with her Austrian cousin Dakota for three days straight and I think she intends to sleep for the next three days straight because she’s sure wiped out. We snuggled in the back room, we snuggled in the living room, we snuggled up in the bedroom – we have a real love affair going on. It’s nice that she and I have this time alone together to be cozy, because who knows what will happen in the next few days and weeks. As I write this she’s doing her best impression of a bear skin rug on the living room floor.

So, 384 more days off. Not that I’m counting. My job for the next 384 days is to have a healthy baby, take care to keep her clean, fed, and loved, and to sort out what it means to be a mom. I still find it completely surreal. In case I don’t write again until after the little lady arrives, wish me luck.

Coming Into the Home Stretch

Today is exactly one month until my projected due date. I'm trusting you all with this information in the knowledge that you know how these things go, and you won't be calling me the evening of August 14 to see what's happening. I've done this to people (sorry Peg) and I'm sure it's really irritating.

Now that I'm a month out, I can see how pregnant ladies get sick of being pregnant. I was enjoying it immensely up until about a week ago, when the weather turned hot and nasty and I had to have an emergency air conditioner installed (thanks mom and dad). I'm pretty sure it saved my life. My next move was going to be spending nights at the office.

I feel large. Stretched. Shocked that there's still a month of growing left in me. When I walk, my lower belly feels uncomfortable, as the 8-or-so pounds of baby business bounces on top of my internal organs. My belly skin is tight like a drum, and I have to remember to moisturize moisturize moisturize because I already have one stretch mark and I don't want more. When the baby moves now, I feel it under my ribs AND on my bladder at the same time. This morning I lay on my back and could clearly feel her head (down, which is good), her curved back, and her bum. She's still pretty tiny (it's all relative) but if she decided to be born right now, I don't know that they'd do much to stop her.

There are some distinct advantages to being very pregnant, however, and as someone who looks for the silver lining in every situation (ha!) I will say that these advantages are:

1. People open doors for you.
   
2. Nobody expects much. Some people are shocked to see me still at work.
   
3. You always have an excuse if you don't want to go anywhere or socialize.
   
4. You get to have as many naps as you want.
   
5. People carry things for you.
   
6. Nobody says anything when you eat 3 delicious scones in a row. With jam. Or 5 cupcakes at your baby shower.
   
7. There's only a month or so left until you can have a celebratory glass of wine. ONE, people, don't look at me like that. 9 months is a long time.
   
8. There are only 10 days left of work (in my case, as of today). After which I can be officially unavailable for comment. Stretchy pants here I come!
   

Some things from the first trimester have returned: I am really tired. I need to eat often, like, every 3 hours or I feel I may pass out. Heartburn makes me avoid certain foods. But enough with the complaining, in a month or so I'll be a mum and will forget about all of these trivial things, much like I've already forgotten the nasty processes it took to get me into this situation. Pregnancy is pretty fun overall – I highly recommend it. However, ask me again in a month…

The Dog Days

Have I mentioned lately how much I am in love with my dog?

I took a week off work last week, and while yes, I did have some projects that needed tending to (a craft project I'd been putting off, weeding my garden, baking perfect chocolate chunk cookies to share with small children), mostly I just wanted to spend some quality time with my pooch before the craziness really starts.

Whenever I take a vacation, Rosie is a bit confused for a couple of days. Dad goes off to work but mom's still in her pajamas? Confusing but I'll take it! I realized exactly what Rosie does all day long while we're at work: sleep. Sleep deeply, like, she sleeps the sleep of the dead. We wonder how it is that Rosie has so much energy when we get home at night but man oh man if I slept that deeply for that long, I'd have a fresh pile of energy built up too. She's actually a bit boring during the day. By day 3 or 4 she'd gotten into the routine of having me there, but having me there during the day meant she slept less or more lightly, and so in the evenings she was all floppy and would crawl into the back room for some alone time. That dog can sure sleep.

I was lazy about walking her. It was kind of hot and in the middle of the day the butterflies are out in full force and that makes for a crazy Rosie. She bolts after every one, and if I'm not ready for it, she could easily pull me along with her. It's not so safe and I curse those butterflies, especially after she charged one one day at the end of May and I ended up on all fours at the side of the road, having what I was pretty sure was my first Braxton Hicks contraction. Not good. So I walked her at weird times. She didn't get walked as much but she spent much more time outside and more active time in general so I don't feel bad. Also, it's summer, so last Saturday and this past weekend we were up at the lake, where she runs free and swims all day so her exercise needs are being more than met.

Speaking of the lake, for some reason (and I'm trying to think positively on this one, and not let my brain go to its worst conclusion) we have a bit of a glass problem at our beach. As in, there is several broken bottles' worth of glass shards in the shallow water and washed up on shore. Now, where our beach is located gets all the waves from the lake, but I wouldn't expect shards of glass would travel too far in the water. I'm not sure how long these things have been there, but I'm not impressed. On Saturday afternoon I noticed poor Rosie licking the back of her paw and then saw the blood clouding the water, and saw that the carpal pad of her front left paw was sliced right open. She's lucky it wasn't sliced right off. She bled like a stuck pig, and so I rushed her up the hill (which is fun when you're 8.5 months pregnant) to the trailer, where I brought out my never-used first aid kit and attempted to stem the blood flow and administer first aid. She really didn't like that very much, preferring to lick it herself, so I just tried to keep her quiet until help (hubby) was told what had happened and came to provide back-up. We restrained her and put a bandage around her paw but she didn't like it one bit. The bandage only lasted a couple of hours, after which we were forced to remove it, and she bled all over again.

If we ever find out that someone's been partying at our land, smashing bottles on our beach, or even worse, dumping them there on purpose for some twisted reason, heads are gonna knock, I will tell you. It will not be pretty. Currently there are two adorable small children living up there for the summer and if their feet get cut, after what happened to Rosie, we're going to have to take some action, carefully raking the lake bottom or installing cameras in the trees or something. We combed it with our eyes and found the jagged broken bottom of a bottle, and about 10 decent-sized shards of different bottles, all within child-and-dog wading distance from shore. Nothing is sacred. I feel like we're constantly surrounded by assholes, no matter how peaceful the surroundings may seem. Humans suck.

Anyway, this entry was not supposed to become a treatise on how disgusting humans can be, but rather a love letter to my dog, who is presently laying low in the back room of our house. She went to the vet this morning and came back with a bunch of antibiotics (cream and pills and a shot) and a cone collar to stop her from licking, but frankly she's too tired to lick so the collar is not yet in use. I hate those things, I wish they could just bandage it up.

Pair that with the fireworks that our Austrian friends bought on Saturday and Rosie did not have a stellar day. Fireworks freak her out even if she hears them from a distance. I put her in the trailer before the show began but still, when we came back up afterward, she was laying way under the bed and panting heavily – she panted for about 2 hours before finally falling asleep. Granted, after our relatively small fireworks display the neighbors enjoyed their own, and so the booming went on for about an hour in total, poor thing.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, Rosie is the best dog ever. On Canada Day those wee Austrian kids came over for dinner and were all over Rosie. One would be tugging on her collar to come and play and the other would have her cheeks in his hands making faces at her, and all she did was give me the eyes. The "Mom make it stop" eyes. We'd taken her into Wakefield for the daytime Canada Day activities (no fireworks), so she'd already spent a few hours being freaked out by the parade (in our town, the parade starts with kids on bikes and ends with the big trucks – the garbage truck, fire truck, and a bunch of dump trucks – and they like to blow their air horns down the main drag. Not to mention that the parade also included a motley marching band, some dressed-up goats, a team of sled dogs, a bunch of horses, and other things that make Rosie crazy), the steam train at close range, meeting lots of other dogs, being petted by lots of strangers and small children, eating hamburger remnants and the bottoms of ice cream cones, and just crowds in general. By the time the kids came over she was already bagged and probably at the end of her rope, but she took it all like a pro. She slept for an entire day after that.

Next up we will see how Rosie reacts to having a newborn in the house. In my ideal scenario, she has been staying a couple of days at my brother's with her brother Tonka, and comes home before we do. She has already smelled the baby via a blanket that we somehow send home. When we arrive, we give her a brand new toy (already packed) to distract her and she ignores the baby – maybe she will be freaked out by her crying for a day or two, and curious enough to lick her, but hubby will give her loads of affection and walks and hopefully she won't experience too much disruption. After that, my hope is that she'll get a bit of maternal instinct going and start following us around, protecting the baby, sleeping near the crib, etc. I can see Rosie doing this. She has good instincts and a kind heart so I am not at all worried.

Man, I love my dog.

Bits and bites

Every conversation I have these days:

"Hey you! How are you doing? When are you due?"

"August."

"Wow, that's coming up. Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?"

"A girl. Hopefully, 'cause you know, otherwise he'll be wearing lots of girlie stuff."

"Wow, great. Any names picked yet?"

"Well, we have a shortlist. Haven't made the final decision."

"What's on the shortlist?"

"There are a bunch, and they keep changing."

"What are some of them?"

"If you ask me again I'm going to shoot you in the knees." (Ok I made up that last part but you get the drift.)

It's getting a bit repetitive. I understand that people are fascinated or feel compelled to discuss life-changing events, but just once I wish someone would ask me something interesting like "what are your strange ailments this week?" or "what crazy nesting things have you done recently?"

So let's talk about something else. We're at a lovely point right now where the bulk of our major summer projects are done. The house is all blue now, the garden is in though kind of completely neglected, brother-in-law's cottage is safely in the hands of Georg the Austrian carpenter and is looking mighty fine, and we have a dock. We haven't really used it much yet, and you can't yet walk onto it from land (we need to build one more little section, but that can wait) but the dock itself is pretty spectacular if I do say so myself. It took us two full weekends to build. The first weekend the weather was crap: we packed the truck to the tits and stacked a ton of wood into our motorboat, on its trailer, and pulled the lot of it up to the lake. We did two loads in the motorboat, from the boat launch to our beach (much easier than walking everything down the hill to the waterfront on our own piece of land). It drizzled most of the day and was windy, but it kept the bugs off of us as we worked. The second day we managed to get one dock almost done (without decking) and the outline of the second piece done. There it sat for a whole week. The following Saturday, we were joined by my mom and dad, and we finished it all off, hooked it together, and just tied it to a tree. The weather was glorious and much fun was had by all. On Sunday, hubby and I went up and transported the weights across the lake in the boat, put the dock into position, anchored it and chained it into place. Then we dove off of it. Apparently pregnant ladies aren't supposed to dive but I took the chance and I think everything's ok – baby still kicks and rolls with the best of 'em so I'm not too worried. I burnt my belly. Here's our dock as it floats today:

This weekend, we will likely attach our temporary ramp, dock ladder, and boat cleats to complete the picture (for now). THEN I will wait on pins and needles until my latest acquisition comes in the mail, which is one of these:

To REALLY complete the picture. Too bad I can't paint a margarita into the frame.

Once that's all done it's all about enjoying it. I have next week off work (I know, decadent eh? To take a week off one month before leaving on a year's mat leave?) so I will probably grab the dog a couple of times and go up there to swim and hang out with Georg and Mrs. Georg and the little Georges, who arrive Monday. Then there are a few weekends in July that we can spend up at the trailer, before the insanity begins.

Speaking of insanity, the writing of this post was just interrupted by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake. Freaky. Time to go!

Fluffing the Nest

There's a phenomenon in late pregnancy called 'nesting', wherein the mother prepares and fluffs her nest in preparation for the arrival of her little one. Often, this results in psychotic cleaning episodes where a 41-weeks-pregnant woman can be found on a ladder cleaning the upper corners of her bathroom with a toothbrush, or on her hands and knees at the back of a closet, insisting that every piece of dog hair and every single cobweb must be removed from the house before the baby arrives or else everything will be ruined.

I have heard of these psychotic episodes. I am looking forward to them. I enjoy anything that increases my productivity and results in a clean house, so I'm counting on this last-minute spurt of energy to get things done.

However, I didn't really expect that the nesting instinct would kick in as early as it has. I have a low-grade nesting reflex going on right now, wherein I feel like all of my time is being squished through a funnel, or a cone, ending in mid-August when the baby's due to pop. I have counted down my work days (I think I'm at 33 left) and I am acutely aware that I have only 10 weekends until my due date. TEN, people. That is not enough weekends.

It started with the dock. I feel such panic about getting this dock into the water that I lose sleep and right now I have heartburn (may have been the pastry I had for breakfast, but I'll blame the dock). I have planned and re-planned this dock so many times. I have made lists of equipment needed, lists of steps to take, lists of things to pack into the truck. I am over the edge with this dock – just ask dear hubby. Once it's in, I will feel great relief, not only because it'll be done but because finally I'll be able to achieve my vision of sitting in a lounge chair at the END of said dock, soaking up the rays, drinking a cold non-alcoholic beer (Beck's 0.0% - kind of crappy but still) and hopefully relaxing the panic and heartburn that I will inevitably feel when I realize that at that point, there will likely only be EIGHT weekends left. Argh.

Just now I caught myself making another list. This is one of my great skills – my superpower, if you will. I make a mean list and consider them to be something of a hobby. Lists are like my drug – I can't stop myself from making them, and they always make me feel better. This list had the bold title: THINGS TO GET RID OF AND HOW because I truly fear that the house is being sunk by junk, that we have no more room to maneuver, and everywhere I look there's something that I want gone from my sight. I find it incredibly overwhelming – I can't even think about it. I want to hire someone to come in and do a clean sweep jobbie on the place while I'm at work or something, or sitting in a comfy chair barking orders.

I happily completed this list, which I broke down into things that can be thrown out or recycled, things to be tossed during Household Hazardous Waste Day – about which I am disproportionately excited (June 18! Whee!) – things to be donated to the SallyAnn, things that can be placed at the end of the driveway with a 'free to a good home' sign, things to be moved to my brother-in-law's cottage and things to be burned. Next, I flipped over the page and started a new list: CLEAN AND SORT. This fascinating list includes such things as "sort sock drawer again", "hall closet", "iron everything", "cupboard under the phone" and "sort kitchen cupboards."

It was only once I'd completed this list that I realized: holy cow, I am nesting. This is crazy even for me, and I am pretty crazy at the best of times (every weekend starts with a list). I still have two months to go and already I'm hot to sort out my sock drawer – imagine what things will be like come mid-August? Crack out the toothbrushes and stock up on cleanser, because I am well on my way.

One thing's for sure; where I was on the fence about keeping my cleaning ladies (there have been issues, already, two cleanings in. I just think that anyone who cleans the house should scrub our one toilet and dust something, y'know? Not too much to ask), I now believe that I can just dump them. I am going to be productive enough over the next two months that their once-biweekly floor washing will be/has become redundant. I don't need to pay someone to do the stuff that I am likely to re-do at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night anyway, and with summer's open doors and muddy paws, their effort really makes zero difference.

So, I may have to call in my troops (mom, hubby, misc. friends) to give me a hand at certain points. Someone will have to help me by A) entertaining my need to sort things out, and B) calming me when I get overwhelmed or irrational. Hubby may have to adopt an extra regular chore here and there, and help me pack stuff up and haul stuff to the curb when I need it to be gone. I have only 10 weeks left people! After that, I suspect I will be out of commission.

Which I find terrifying. Ten weeks! (pant pant pant)

Rock Out With Your Dock Out

After a long day of walking the Glebe, hubby going fishing, swimming in the river with my dog and our new Austrian friend Georg, and partaking of a very loud disco/funk show at the local music hall, Sunday was finally the time to unwrap the bundle of wood that's been sitting in our driveway for a month and get down to business on the dock.

Our plan all along has been to mock-build the dock in our driveway at home, where it's flat and we have electricity, so that once we get it hauled up to the land all we have to do is transport it to the beach and knock it together. I say that so casually. We have a careful plan, which is like the 14^th version of the plan, and have thought out most of the bugs that we could encounter along the way. It's to be two docks actually, two 8 x 12' sections hinged together for two reasons: to provide greater flex in ice breakup and waves, and because finding, handling and transporting 24' boards would be next to impossible.

We set out a bit late on Sunday, so I was cranky as all hell. Seriously, I have adopted the persona of 'cranky pregnant lady' lately. I can't help it. I am pissed off at everyone, it would seem. People who call me on the phone, people who walk in front of me on the sidewalk, people on the elevators. No surprise then that I should be cranky when confronted with a stressful project like this dock. We had visions of getting both sections pre-cut, pre-drilled, hardware pre-installed in one day, but only got one half done, which rankled me. Last night we nearly completed the other half, so I'm doing a bit better.

But holy mackerel is a dock a money pit! I thought we were mostly done with the really expensive stuff, until I added up how many bolts of various types we will need to actually put it together. 64 carriage bolts, 64 lag bolts, miscellaneous other hardware and a whole lotta rope or chain is going to add another $200 to the bill, I'm sure. And then I remembered that we want a ladder too. Not a wooden one , 'cause they always get slimy, but a basic metal dock ladder. Add on another $150.

Anyway, the plan is to finish the bits in the laneway this week, load up the truck (precariously I'm sure) Friday night, and set out early Saturday morning for the lake, stopping for breakfast along the way. We will drive the truck to the lot first, where hubby will collect the tin boat and hook up the motor, then drive it to the boat launch, where I will be waiting with the truck. We will load the wood onto the boat, probably in three loads, strap it down, and drive it (slowly, carefully) to the beach. This will be much simpler than walking everything down the hill, especially considering that I am not so good at walking things down hills anymore.

Once there, we will attempt to 'knock it together'. There are other factors that have to be dealt with (factors like anchors, which I will be making out of two old tires, bent rebar, and cement) and I'm sure other horrible things will pop up, mistakes will be made, swearing will happen, we will fight like cats and dogs (or a cat and a dog, though my cat and dog actually get along very well) and one of us (probably me) will give up at some point and go sit by herself for awhile to blow off steam. Hopefully we will be able to swim. I suspect this could take us up to two full weekends to 'knock together' but we'll see – depends on how much help we've got, and where the energy level's at.

I'll be sure to take pictures. I promise this time.

Oh and as for the Great Glebe Garage Sale? Hubby bought a mannequin leg. He was the talk of the town.

It’s that time of year again.

The Great Glebe Garage Sale is tomorrow and for some reason, I'm not as excited as I have been in previous years. Maybe it's because I'm nervous about walking for 5 hours straight, or finding myself without access to a bathroom, or because I feel like our house is already on the verge of becoming one of the places featured on that show Hoarders, but I am approaching this GGGS cautiously.

Every year, I have wandered the streets of the Glebe on the last Saturday in May thinking "man, if I was expecting a baby, this place would be mecca." However. I have since changed my tune. Already I'm feeling like the basement is filling up with other peoples' baby stuff, which I've politely been accepting but secretly feel like I really just want to buy all my own stuff new. No offense to any of my generous friends. That's part of the fun of having a baby, after all – buying baby stuff – and finally I'm allowed to. Also, lots of people have given me cute boy things and while I'm open to putting a girl in boys' clothes, there are limits, so I've picked through and found the gender-neutralest ones. Not to mention that I had a baby shower, with one more to come, and people have been so generous buying and making us stuff throughout so we're in really good shape stuff-wise. My kid already dresses better than I do and she's not even born yet.

The list of baby things I might want from the GGGS has now been whittled down, and includes: a cool old (but safe, don't freak out) high chair, infant lifejacket if I see one, interesting kids' books (as always), and maybe some toys like blocks or something classic, for later. As for the rest of the list, I am always looking for things for the garden (interesting pots, bits of kooky metal that I can stick here and there as decoration, etc), things for the future cottage, things to use up at the lake, and plants. Always plants. I'm thinking of planting a whack of different ferns and other large shade plants near the staircase leading into our yard, and sometimes there are interesting ferns to be had at the GGGS. If I see a neat large Persian rug I will also consider it. As well as baskets – I like baskets - and a badminton net and backgammon set.

I may also buy some old stuffed toys for Rosie, so she can toss them around and chew them up and there won't be any tragic loss, and maybe so that I can have a stash for when stuffed toys start coming in for the baby. So far, every stuffed toy that enters the house is highly coveted by Rosie, so that I have to hide them all. She goes mental, as though I'm holding a live partridge or something. Now, when she wants to go for a baby stuffy, I will instead produce a Rosie stuffy and try to teach her the difference between the two. Ha.

Another thing I'm nervous about is carrying stuff around. I guess I'll just bring a backpack and make hubby carry most of the load, since I'm already CARRYING HIS CHILD.

Speaking of said child, she is getting to the size now where her once-adorable little flutters have turned into sharp jabs in the bladder. Yesterday I felt her head through my gut, so now I can give her a solid poke if she hurts me. I'm kidding, I'm not about corporal punishment. But I'd like to figure out how to convince her to shift a bit because right now (at 29 weeks) she's breech. I guess there's lots of time for her to flip still, but my tummy's a bit lopsided as a result. Her wee shoulder blade appears to sit squarely under my bellybutton, which feels hella weird. I also lost two pounds in the past two weeks, which they say is fine since it's been +1,200 degrees outside and I've just sweated it all out, and don't feel like eating when it's so hot. Also I've been really active, gardening, going up to the land, etc. so no surprise, really. I've still gained 15 lbs overall, so all's well.

The garden is another story. Every year I go into it thinking I've got a nice plan, everything will be planted in careful tidy rows, I will employ companion planting to maximize space and harvest, and I will only grow things that we can feasibly eat. And every year that plan gets messed up. I go into the garden in late May with good intentions to turn the soil, work in more earth and compost, take out all the weeds, build up nice straight rows (and mounds for the squash). Then I look around and realize that well, one corner is dominated by rhubarb, the other has two blueberry plants in it that I stuck there last year, the back row's taken up with the garlic I planted in fall, the cilantro's already started occupying the entire central area of the garden, the strawberries have all migrated into the pathways, one whole side has been reclaimed by the lawn, the leeks that I planted about 4 years ago are up again and are STILL not big enough to make one decent soup, and there's mint coming up all over the damn place. And I'm seven months pregnant. I end up not turning the soil for fear of disturbing the things that are perennial to the garden, so I just sort of gamely work in bits of compost here and there where the precious annual plants go (tomatoes, peppers, squash). I try to do it all in one evening because I am impatient, and once I'm in there, the bugs are so bad that I don't bother weeding, I just sort of use the hand-rake to muck up the cracked, hardscrabble earth, yank out some quack grass, and drop a bunch of seeds in a relatively straight row. I pat the rows closed, smack a few mosquitos, and move on to the next seed packet in a frenzied rush to move faster than the blackflies.

I had 23 tomato seedlings in the grow-op. I put them in the garden, and two days later I have 11. My squash seedlings are up, and I put in four jalapeno peppers that I bought (so they have a fighting chance). I did some emergency work on the tomatoes last night so they should make it. I also was pleasantly surprised to find that the broccoli seeds I half-heartedly stuck in around the garlic have all come up and are now healthy-looking three-inch seedlings. Last night I planted cucumbers in and around the cilantro, and zucchini in and around the leeks. I have four basil plants – three regular and one thai – adjacent to the tomatoes, and marigolds throughout. I'll take some photos once things start coming up because frankly, the garden looks like crap right now. This weekend I need to find a rich sunny spot for some watermelon seeds…. Hm hm hm. They may be relegated to a large pot of somesort.

It's been unseasonably warm, so we're tricked into thinking everything's GOT TO GO IN OR ELSE, but really, it's only late May. My pots are all done up on the deck (though the plants are still wee) and most of the garden's in, so I'm in good shape. All I have to do now is weed the perennial garden, plant the ferns and shade plants I'm getting tomorrow at the GGGS, and do some tidying, and then I can just sit back and drink iced tea and gestate.

May Two-Four

This weekend is the famed May 2-4 long weekend. And boy oh boy am I excited about it. Not for any great particular reason, just that I took Tuesday off so I have a four-day stretch of home-stuff ahead of me.

Saturday we have our day-long prenatal class. Jury's out on how useful this will be, but I want them to tell me A) at what point I'll need to go to the hospital, and B) how to make it hurt a bit less. The rest of the info I've been getting out of the doctors, who have been really helpful. I have a nice hospital, a nice team of doctors (so far, I've only met ¼ of them) and I'm really vocal (haha), so I don't have thousands of questions left.

After that we are picking up an Austrian carpenter at the airport. His name is George and he's being sent here to finish off brother-in-law's cottage, build the kitchen, the stairs, etc. I look forward to meeting him and seeing his work. We'll feed him and then Sunday we'll bring him up there and leave him to it. Perhaps we will get started on our dock while we're up there, and we'll finally bring Rosie up and let her swim to her heart's content – first time this year.

Monday hubby would like to fish, which will be fine as I'm sure I'll appreciate a day to myself by then as well. My plan is to garden: I'm gonna buy all my annuals, fill my pots with soil, and plant plant plant. This weekend everything will go in – the tomatoes (which I will have to harden off in the next couple of days), the squash seeds, bean seeds, nasturtiums, maybe some bok choy, and I might buy some pepper plants too just 'cause I'm stubborn and cannot accept a pepper-free lifestyle. I've already planted some basil (had to buy it – mine never came up) and broccoli, which is tiny but THERE, and the spinach and cilantro are about an inch-and-a-half high. The garden's overrun by mint, and rhubarb, and the garlic seems to be ok as well though I don't know that my second batch is really up yet. Oh, I will plant the potatoes this weekend too. What the heck, the weather's been really warm lately, and we need to get a move on.

Then I have Tuesday. Both days promise to be hot and sunny so who knows what the day will hold for me? There's some stuff in the baby's room that could be finished off, and I'm sure some cleaning to be done (more on this later) but I think I may do arts and crafts that day. Or at least the hottest part of that day. I may also build a little twig fence to hopefully keep the dog out of the perennial garden because she's trampled some of my irises and alliums, and I am not happy about this.

Back to the cleaning; did I mention that I have a cleaning lady now? Two cleaning ladies actually, a mother-daughter team. They came last Thursday for the first time and spent 3 hours moving furniture and cleaning corners of my house that have never been touched by human hands (at least not my human hands). Their rate is reasonable, and they claim they can do the dusting, pet hair removal, bathroom, kitchen and floors in an hour every second week. We still have some boundary issues to work out (for example, they don't have to take out our recycling because hubby is very particular about that, and they don't have to go upstairs) but all in all I am pleased and excited, and it relieves a lot of pressure, arguments and strain on my growing body.

So woooo May 2-4. I hope you all have a cold beer for me.

Working for a Living

Like many of you out there, I have to work for a living. I wasn't born into ridiculous wealth and I didn't marry dear hubby for his money (just for his looks ha ha. Hi honey!), so unfortunately I have to wake up every morning, get dressed, and haul my sleepy bones to work in order to pay the bills and buy dog food.

Not everyone works. I know some people who are work-averse and other friends who don't need to work, and other friends who are stay-at-home moms who work hard every day but are independent contractors, as it were. I know at least one person for whom work is a luxury, a personal decision, but that is not something that I like to think about. I know a person who claims not to be able to work and is on long-term disability, flying under the radar for years now, healthily enjoying life, milking the system, but that person is not considered a friend of mine.

My job is fairly easy overall. I don't save lives, I don't work in a factory, I'm not an aid worker in a ravaged war-torn country, I don't have to haul dead bodies out of rivers, and I'm not an astronaut. I have a largely administrative job and they pay me well to do it. I sit at a desk all day and type away on a computer that is so slow I want to throw it out the window, but that's a minor frustration really. I complain that my desk chair is uncomfortable or that my desk is messy (jam on the keyboard is lovely, and insidious), but I try to keep it all in check. My phone rings too much, and sometimes I feel like I should have a psychology degree under my belt before I can answer it, but truth be told I rarely pick it up so out of sight out of mind. All this to say, I have complaints, but they are relatively minor.

My colleagues are mostly great. But you don't get to hand-pick your colleagues, so there are some strange ones in the bunch. There are over 200 people working at my office, and it's impossible to expect to be in love with every single one of them. There are some who I avoid like the plague, some who I have never spoken to once in six years, some who I speak to but I don't know why (pleasantries in the bathroom, etc), and some who I am genuinely fond of. Herewith is a list of some types of colleagues in my office, and please, feel free to let me know if you have these types in your office as well:

1. Stinky Food Man. Every day he opens a can of salmon or tuna and does something to it that makes the entire floor smell like fish. My office is next to the kitchen, and this is unbearable. It's almost as bad as his cohort, Delicious Pastry Man. This is the person who insists on putting waffles or cinnamon buns in the toaster oven to warm them up. I can't decide who's worse. I can't blame either one because food is delicious, and essential, but every day? Really?
   

   
    

2. The Never-Worker. Where I sit, I see all of the traffic going in and out of the main doors to our floor. It's a constant parade of comings and goings, which is distracting as holy heck, but also kind of informative. I have learned that there are about 3 people on our floor who seem to perpetually be out for coffee or cigarettes. Seriously, over the past week I've been keeping track, and there's one guy who must have a condition wherein he is only be able to sit down for 10 minutes at a time because he's constantly walking to the elevators and back. Coincidentally, most of these folks are nearing retirement.
   

   
    

3. The VIP. The opposite of the never-worker. This person is always in more of a hurry than you, always busier than you are, always working late, always working weekends, never really friendly, and is always plowing around head-down clacking away on her blackberry. They generally eat lunch after 2 pm. I doubt this person. The days are long and if you're smart, you can organize your workday so that you don't have to come in on Sundays, but hey then you don't get paid time and a half so who's the dummy here? We do the same kind of work. I should practice looking busier. Maybe come in on the weekend to water my plants and surf the web or something.
   

   
    

4. The Over-Emoter. I'm sure everyone has these. They're generally female, unfortunately, which I feel gives us a bad name as a gender. These are the people who come into your office uninvited, close the door behind them and proceed to get upset about some perceived slight, ending up in tears, expecting your sympathy. Personally, I try to project an air of "you've come to the wrong office sister", but this doesn't always work with the Over-Emoter, who is generally lacking in self-awareness. The Over-Emoter is six times more irritating if they are also The VIP.
   

   
    

5. Gregarious IT guy. They come to your office to fix your computer and you end up getting into lengthy discussions about your cats, and then all of a sudden they're friending you on facebook.
   

   
    

6. The Athlete. They come into the office in their bike shorts, sweaty, helmets in hand, recounting tales of great feats performed over the weekend. They have boundless energy and are always planning something very exciting. They wear those little clickity clacky bike shoes (I even have one colleague who wore cross-country ski boots all day this past spring) and are sometimes carrying a wheel, or a snowboard, or some obscure clip for some sport that I have never tried. They generally make me feel bad about myself, without intending to of course.
   

   
    

7. The Compulsive Emailer. You probably have these in your office and in your family, or in your circle of friends. These are the people who forward you everything. How many times have I seen the same slideshow of baby animals, or animals doing funny things, or animals with inspirational slogans attributed to them? It's funny because I receive so many dirty jokes, yet my brain is a sieve when it comes to re-telling them. You'd think I'd have an encyclopedic repertoire of off-colour jokes by now but alas, they've all gone to waste on me.
   

   
    

8. The Medicine Cabinet. I know that when I have a headache, there are two people I can go to for relief. When they open up their overhead cabinets, it looks like a pharmacy threw up in it. They have everything from aspirin to allergy pills to pepto-bismol to hand cream to visine to antacids to strange teas to extra-strength prescription painkillers that you could try if you wanted to… I try to be this person, within reason. I keep Tums in my drawer but I end up eating them when things get desperate. I have a lint roller and a stain remover somewhere back there as well, because I have two sheddy pets, and a knack for squirting mustard or coffee all over every white shirt I wear. However, I am nothing compared to the medicine cabinet.
   

   
    

9. The Loudmouth. This is the person who unfailingly speaks up at meetings, like Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter. They cannot help themselves. You can hear them talking on the phone through the walls, and they often like to stand in the hallway right outside your office engaged in some lively debate about something or other, loudly. Their voice is a couple of decibels higher than anyone else's, causing you to wonder if they are ignorant, hard of hearing, or both. Sometimes they are discussing the hockey game, sometimes they are actually talking about work, but always you want to tell them to shut their trap, because the person on the other end of your phone call can hear every word.
   

   
    

10. The Compadre. It helps to have a Compadre at work. This is the person you rant to when something goes awry, the person who's usually up for a lunch date or some shopping adventure, the person with whom you share bug-eyes at meetings. The person with whom you can speculate on whether or not your other colleague might be in a cult, or is just losing their marbles. Some people have an opposite-sex Compadre which can also be termed the "work-husband" or "work-wife", but my current Compadre is a gay man. We both like to eat, a lot, and knit, and plan our gardens. The Compadre makes one's work more enjoyable, in general.
    

    
     

These are just some of the 10 types that I have encountered during my short career. I am being relatively diplomatic of course, because there are also the psychos, the jerks, the bullies and the incompetents, but we have those in every walk of life. I wish I could go into detail about the really harmlessly crazy ones at my office, but what if they read this blog one day? They'd definitely know who they are.

Being as it is now May, I will only enjoy the companionship of these folks for another three months. Minus three days. I won't miss them at all (except maybe my Compadres) but that's because I really look forward to stepping back and out of office life for a year. My brain totally checked out about a month ago, I'm sad to report, so I'm counting the days (62) until I say farewell to Stinky Food Man, the Neverworker, the VIP, the OverEmoter, my IT guy, my Medicine Cabinet, the E-mailer (though presumably this one could still get through to me), the Athlete, the Loudmouth and my Compadre, who doesn't have a car so won't be able to come and regale me in person with tales of crazy coworkers and injustices. No, I won't miss these people – I know they or someone like them will be there when I return. I probably won't visit either, as people sometimes do when they have a baby, parading them up and down the hallways. The office is no place for an infant. She'll have plenty of exposure to these wacky people in her own career, I'm sure.

Being Pregnant is Fun

I know from experience that reading blogs written by pregnant ladies is really tedious. Occasionally you find a good one but most of them are saccharine and a bit self-involved, and usually involve a lot of exclamation marks. So bear with me here, because truthfully, beyond the many many projects that hubby and I have on the go (which I've already gone on about ad nauseum), being pregnant is really the major task I'm doing right now, and I am rather self-involved to begin with.

Gestating a human is an interesting thing. For those of you who have not done it, it takes awhile to get used to the idea that there's someone living inside your stomach. Someone who has hair. Speaking as a person who for years thought that she might never have a person living inside her stomach, who kind of convinced herself that it is OTHER people who get to do all the gestating, it is a totally alien experience. You already know all the major parts from the movies – morning sickness can be a bitch (but not for everyone!), you gain weight, your ankles get swollen, your boobs get big, etc etc., but there are other things that happen to your body that, wisely, nobody really mentions until you're in the middle of it.

Herewith, I am going to list all of the little observances that I've made over the last five-and-a-half months, so that all of you who are newly pregnant or thinking of doing it are forewarned. Those of you who are not interested – this is a long one so you may want to just skip it.

1. You smell. Nobody told me, nor did I read it in any of my pink-and-blue baby books, that when you are pregnant you smell like a farm animal. Honestly, I get up, take a shower, put on deodorant, get dressed, drive to work, take off my coat, and already my armpits smell like the inside of a bellybutton. Also I sweat a lot, even in mid-winter. Consequently I spend a lot of time at work sneaking sniffs of my armpits to make sure I'm not offensive.
   
   

2. Your feet hurt. I guess this is a relatively common complaint, but I just thought it would happen much later on in pregnancy. Not so. Even wearing my comfortable sensible nun-shoes, the bottoms of my feet feel all prickly at the end of the day and I've acquired a limp. I blame it on the extra 10 lbs I'm carrying around. My dogs can start barking after a day of sitting.

3. People want to touch you. I hereby apologize to every pregnant woman whose belly I've ever touched without invitation. This is a natural yet off-putting reflex, and it's not until it happened to me that I realized how weird it is. It happened early on, so my belly wasn't even sticking out, and I thought to myself "under no other circumstance would a colleague that I hardly know put her hand on my stomach. " Ok, maybe in an emergency CPR-type situation, but still – weird. Why is this considered weird you ask? Well, because your stomach is awfully close to your lady business, frankly, and your boobs, which already feel large. It's where I breathe, and where my bowels live. It's alive. Call me an introvert or whatever but please, unless you're a friend or family, get your hands away from my body in general. It's nobody's body but mine (and maybe my husband's, and definitely my baby's).

4. You aren't infinitely hungry, just immediately hungry. When they recently aired (and re-aired) the episode of "The Office" where Pam and Jim had their baby, one element of it struck me as wrong. Pam and Kevin are shown sharing large meals together in the lunch room – Kevin is excited that finally someone wants to eat as much as he does, so he prepares all these elaborate meals for the two of them. Pam is about to give birth any minute. This felt wrong to me, as I am finding that I can't actually eat large portions of food*, and I imagine this will become truer as time passes and my stomach gets compressed. The stereotype of the pregnant woman who wants to eat everything under the sun just doesn't apply to me. I want to eat certain things*, in moderation*, or a sequence of lots of little things. The thing that I notice most is: when I'm hungry, I don't get hunger pangs. I need to eat IMMEDIATELY OR I MIGHT DIE. There's no grey zone between not-hungry and starving. Consequently, I find dinnertime difficult, because I get home hungry, have to eat a little something, then I'm satisfied for the time being and not really into cooking or eating a big meal. *Except poutine, in which they do not make a large enough size.

5. Sometimes you are blocked up, and sometimes you are not. And I don't mean your nose. Drink lots of water, but also, be prepared if things start to go a bit too fast. Anything can happen, really.

6. Your brain shuts off. I have described before how dumb I was for a week or so earlier in my pregnancy. They say that 'mommy brain' is a myth, but frankly, I find it's challenging me. After some analysis (highly scientific of course) I've deduced that I'm just distracted all the time. I have a lot to think about. Perhaps my brain has just switched gears rather than shut off altogether. For example, this morning I found myself thinking about my future moody pre-teen daughter – where will we put her desk? What if she wants to hang up posters of teenaged celebrities who I don't find poster-worthy? What if she becomes a Justin Bieber fan (or whatever construct the 2020 version of Justin Bieber will be?) What IS a Justin Bieber and how do I keep it out of my house? You see, there are lots of things to think about. Work is kind of on the back burner – sorry work, I'm still doing my job, but I'm foggy in the head a lot, as I obviously have larger issues looming (see Bieber, Justin). As a side note: Sorry mom and dad. You were so very patient between the years of, say, 1988 and 1998. I owe you big time.

7. Sleep is an issue. They say it prepares you for becoming a new parent, but frankly, when I'm a new parent I won't have to go to work early in the morning all fresh and groomed and thinky. Trying to concentrate when you're up, flip-flopping around, from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. (because I fall asleep 20 minutes before the alarm goes off), is a bit rough. Seeming enthusiastic at meetings becomes an impossibility. For about a month there, I would have given my right arm to sleep through the night. I understand that this will get worse, but like I said, while on mat leave I intend to wander around the house all day in sweatpants and watch a lot of daytime television. The issue is that I discovered I am actually a back-sleeper, and they (the books, doctors, etc) advise you not only to NOT sleep on your back, but to actually try to sleep on your left side. For me, this means facing my back-sleeping snoring husband, who doesn't always have a great sense of where in the bed he is positioned while asleep (sorry hubby – it's natural, but true). Also, have you ever tried maintaining one certain position through the night? It's near impossible unless you're in traction or something. I bought a long body pillow, which now lives in the middle of the bed where I can put it between my knees and prop it under my belly, and it seems to have helped. Either that or I'm just getting used to the sleeplessness. Not sure. I often wake up with it on top of me so the jury's out on the body pillow.

8. Everyone who has ever had a child has advice for you. How many times in the past 5 months have I had a conversation that went something like this:
   "hey! Wow! So how are you feeling?"
   "well, I feel pretty great. I wish I could sleep through the night, but otherwise, pretty great."
   "oooh hoho hooo just you wait."
   Then the person proceeds to rattle off all of the parts of parenthood that I will hate, then makes suggestions for where my baby should sleep, how I should/will treat my dog once the baby arrives, what exercises I should be doing, where I should shop, what I should buy, what I shouldn't bother buying, and what I should do once I go back to work. A lot of advice is appreciated and/or solicited – as in, I ask my experienced friends lots of annoying questions – but a lot of it is just strangers talkin' smack about my kid, you know?
   I also find it funny when people tell me how wonderful my hair looks, since my hair looks wonderful because (a) it's a weekday – readers here have all seen my weekend hair, (b) I just had it cut, and (c) I don't put any crap in it, from dye to gel. Honestly, it feels no thicker and looks no shinier than it did before, but everyone tells me "oh your hair looks so wonderful! Just you wait…It will aaalll fall out." These are not compliments people!

9. Maternity clothes are either ugly, expensive, hard to come by, or all three. Awhile ago I found myself at Thyme Maternity buying a pair of black pants of such terrible quality that I would never have even touched them before becoming pregnant. Being between a rock and a hard place (i.e. I have to go to work every day, and pantslessness is not yet an option) I shelled out $69 for these cheap pieces of crap. I washed them once (cold water, hung to dry) and now they are charcoal grey pants. The overwhelming majority of maternity tops are made of stretchy polyester which, if you read point #1 above, you will deduce is not really something I want to wear. Also, a lot of maternity tops are just plain hideous – it's like they were made of leftover fabric from last season that nobody wanted for anything else. The styles are not exactly cutting edge either – awhile ago I was shopping with my pregnant friend Anne when she said "why are these clothes all designed to make me look virginal? I am very obviously not a virgin." I have been fortunate that my mom is a sewing wizard and has made me a lot of nice stuff, and also that the style these days leans towards long stretchy tops, so I've gotten away with looking decent so far, but man, those maternity stores have you by the cahones. There are 0 maternity stores at the mall downtown in my city. I made the mistake the other day of buying a new bra at Thyme, which cost $45, but then got home and realized WAIT A MINUTE THIS IS JUST A NORMAL BRA IN A LARGER SIZE. So the bra will be going back to the store, and I will be shopping for larger sizes at Winners, because Gennyland pays no more than 20 smackers for lingerie. I'm practical!

10. You don't have a period, which is awesome, but you are also incontinent. Hee hee. I went to the doctor last week concerned that I was leaking amniotic fluid because there was a lot of liquid in my nether regions, but was told that nope, nothing to worry about, I was just sitting in my office peeing myself all day. You win some, you lose some.

11. Your stomach can take quite a lot of abuse. Last night I was laying on the couch with my feet up when Rosie decided to grab a log out of the firewood pile, hop up on top of me, and chew it to pieces. I shifted a bit, because it was actually kind of uncomfortable (her elbow was in a rather personal area), and then realized that the little thump thump thump I was feeling was the baby kicking Rosie to get off. Literally, my fetus was kicking my dog, THROUGH my stomach.
    My dad once got mad at me because I was poking my belly, trying to make it kick, but I had to remind him that the baby's tucked behind: my skin, close to an inch of fat (let's not kid ourselves here, may be more than an inch), my uterine muscle (which, by the time I give birth, will itself weigh 2 lbs), the wall of the amniotic sac, a bunch of amniotic fluid.

So my gentle pokes don't bother her. But having a 67 lb Labrador retriever plop on top of her, chewing a log, really pisses her off.

12. The internet is evil My friend Dawn has suggested that perhaps I need to put a child protection-style filter on my google, because every single thing you look up on the internet while pregnant immediately leads to a miscarriage, preterm labour, or birth defects. At the same time there is a lack of useful information on there – for example, the other day I was curious as to where my organs have relocated themselves now that my uterus is in charge. I image-googled "pregnant diagram torso" and "diagram pregnancy organs" and "anatomy pregnant woman" and what I came up with looked like it was drawn sometime in the 12^th century, by monks. I learned that my bowels are now somewhere at my sides and behind my uterus, and that my once-proud bladder is quickly becoming a pathetic little pancake (see point number 10), but it took some figuring out to come up with that information. Also, that it will all lead to a miscarriage, of course. Just yesterday, after a particularly bad day of back pain that kind of radiated down the backs of my legs (an obvious mechanical issue), I learned that someone had that once and a week later went into premature labour caused, obviously, by her sore tailbone "so u bettr get that checked right away by ur dr!!!!". Or that my tailbone's broken or infected. Or that I might need back surgery. Nobody told me that if I just went home and put my feet up and slept in a different position it would get better in two days.

Phew. I've been complaining for 4 pages now. I say all this because the reality of being pregnant is somewhat different that I'd imagined it to be, all of those years. All of these things distract from the real craziness going on inside. Once in a while, I will still lean over to my hubby with my eyes bugged out and go "Holy shit. Holy shit Mr. Gennyland, I've got a person in me! I've got a tiny person with eyeballs and hair! I'm, like, NEVER ALONE" and I don't think that will go away. I have often, over the course of the last 5 months, imagined what it will be like when I meet that little person, touch her hair and kiss her eyes and count her fingers and be able to say "look what I made in my stomach!" There I go with the exclamation marks.