Levedy

Tempting Fate

I think I'm going to challenge Murphy's Law.

Dim's aunt Hosanna is in town today, and I'm going to take her on a tour of Red Rock Canyon Conservation area. There's a 13-mile loop that's gorgeous, protected, and TOTALLY FAR FROM THE HOSPITAL.

Take that, ye gods of labor - I DARE you to break my water while I'm out in the middle of nowhere. I bite my thumb at you, sir. (er, ma'am)

Awww

Last night was our anniversary. Dim came home with a mooshy card and my two favorite sweets in the entire universe: Girl Scout Cookies and a Hollow Chocolate Easter Bunny. We dropped Bean off with my dad and had a nice Italian dinner...

...our thinking? Dr. Internet says that garlic brings on labor - LIE.

It was nice to have a restaurant dinner that didn't involve my picking up crayons off the floor or strategically hiding the sugar packets.

I love you, honey. Happy anniversary.

Gah

*sigh*

That's it. I've decided. I'm going to be the only 70-year old pregnant woman. This baby is never coming out.

He's done. He's cooked. He's ready to go. At this point he's just operating on Greek time. Late to everything. As of now, all he's doing is GETTING BIGGER, and it makes me uneasy.

The anticipation is killing me. I'm the girl who likes to-do lists, schedules, and deadlines. This "It will happen when it happens, just go with the flow" situation is making me want to chew off my own arm. My mom says "dear, that's what life is like. It doesn't conform to schedules all the time" to which I say:

AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH! But it should!

Seriously?

STILL HERE.

The waiting is driving me insane. I'm an anxious, crabby wreck. I'm uncomfortable in my own skin, my hip joints have gone on strike, and I'm convinced that he's never coming out. Should I start charging him rent?

He's going to be thirty pounds. I just know it.

22 Months

So this is your last month being an only child, and I really hope that you don’t end up on a therapist’s couch in the future bemoaning the fact that the best part of your life was the first 22 months, and it all went downhill from there.

You and I spend our days mostly nesting at home. I am so ridiculously pregnant that the thought of chasing you around the house exhausts me. You seem to have a nuclear reactor inside you somewhere: your energy can be measured in half-lives rather than hours. This month we are as opposite as can be: you are thin and agile, I resemble the Garfield float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade; you bounce off walls like a pinball, I fall asleep standing up and drool on my shoulder.

Your curiosity has increased several fold this month. You want to be in things: laundry baskets, toy chests, clothes dryers, and babies’ orifices. A friend visited the house with her baby, and you promptly shoved your fist in his pie hole and shouted MOUF! MOUF! Yes, dear. Now stop gagging the houseguests, please.

Your vocabulary is increasing, but your enunciation still lags. Your favorite toy Lovey is WUFFY! People who don’t spend 24 hours a day with you can’t hear the difference among your much-loved Handy Manny cartoon, your daily vitamins, your dragon-shaped spoon, and your request to tuck a pencil behind your ear as all come out as subtle variations of MANNY! I am often called to act as your interpreter, which is a bit like the blind leading the blind, since I’m usually so tired that people generally can’t understand me, either.

Sometimes, though, you communicate something brand new, and it comes out clear as a bell. The other weekend was sunny and breezy, so we decided to take you to the park to fly a kite. Your father and I wrestled with the blasted thing for a half of an hour trying to put it together and get the string to unwind properly. You got bored with the kite and with us and started to trot off just as daddy managed to get the kite aloft. You looked at the kite in the sky, gasped, and shouted IT FLIES! In surprise and glee. I’d like to think of this as your first two-word sentence. It’s a much better candidate than the OH SHIT! You picked up from me last month.

Your knowledge of anatomy has improved, up to a point. You can successfully point out the major parts of your body and those of other people. While I was quizzing you, however, as you sat in the bathtub with your dad, I asked you to point to daddy’s elbow, and you promptly indicated his weiner. Um, good try sweetie, but no.

You certainly know where hindquarters are, though, and are quick to point out when others’ are obstructing your seat. When Sesame Street is playing on dad’s computer, you poke his bum and insist BUTT! BUTT!, meaning “move your keister outta my way, Mister, Elmo’s solo is coming up.”

I love that you’re so…not bossy, exactly…brassy, I guess. You know what you want and you’ll do your damndest to get it, even if it means poking an adult’s rear end to get a better view of a puppet singing about his rubber duck. I admire that about you – it’s a quality I hope you never lose.

But in the meantime, stay away from boys’ elbows, and don’t be afraid to tell them to get their asses out of your way.

I love you-

Mama

The 19th Came and Went

And here I sit - all bloaty and not labor-y. Sigh.

So to take my mind off not being able to will myself into labor, here is a small list of things I CAN do:

-Understand enough Greek to know when a dirty joke is being told or someone is talking about me.
-Work logic puzzles quickly and correctly
-Score better than my husband in a game requiring me to list off the names of the presidents in under 8 minutes. (I don't get them all, but I do better than average)
-Assist friends with arcane etiquette rules regarding invitation wording
-Point out the scansion errors in Bean's poetry-based bedtime stories. (An English degree is good for SOMETHING)
-Make a mean hospital corner when making a bed
-Manage to operate the overly complicated Media Center television in the Master Bedroom
-Watch the same episode of Handy Manny repeatedly without putting an axe in someone's head, including my own
-Be a tolerably decent pregnant woman and not make my husband fetch me peanut butter and tacos at three a.m.
-Make lists to distract myself

Sigh

Still here...drumming fingers on the table...

Still Ticking

I’m still here. I’m trying to finish piddly errands before I explode. I find that I’m obsessing over silly (to normal people) things, like: I had better get a pedicure in the next few days, because if those nurses see these feet in the stirrups, they’re going to call in a farrier.

The personal grooming thing is a series of trade-offs, at this point. I need a pedicure, and my eyebrows need waxing really badly, but the only thing remotely Brazilian about my bikini area of late is that it resembles a rainforest.

I went to the doctor’s this morning, and I’m now dilated to a 4, so really, I could go at any time. Dim and I were listening to Fox News on the satellite radio on the way to the doctor, and it continually amazes me that those people manage to call themselves journalists with a straight face. (Of course, it is radio, so if they’re smirking, I can’t tell.) Dim likes watching me watch Fox news on TV because I inevitably start yelling at the television, and he finds that funny.

But you know what? I do the same thing when I listen to Air America, the liberal news station. Those guys are a bunch of dweebs, too, but in the other direction. Who knows? Maybe yelling at things will put me into labor. Does annoyance cause my body to produce oxytocin?

Soon

I went to the doctor’s office for an exam yesterday, and she tells me that I’m dilated to 2 centimeters. Yeah! I could blow at any time!

I’m not due until the 19th, (or March 6 if you believe the ultrasound tech, which I DO NOT), but if I’m already dilating, maybe I won’t make it that far. I’m a little anxious, because I still don’t know what it feels like to go into labor on my own. I was induced for the Bean, so I never had to time contractions or worry about ruining the car’s upholstery on the way to the hospital.

It will all work out fine, but for now, it’s exciting and a little nerve wracking.

21 Months

Dear Bean-

The last time I wrote a newsletter was at your 1 year birthday, and here you are on the other side of 21 months. It’s an important time for you. You’re going to be a big sister in the next month or so. Every day you look less and less like the baby you were and look more and more like the girl you’re becoming. I’m wistful and pleased at the same time.

But let’s talk about the absence of letters from months 13 through 20, because I think that you should know. Your mother had a really rocky road for those months. Life was really hard for her for a while, and this is only the third time I’ve talked about it other than to Father John and to your daddy.

I lost my Nana in May, right before Mother’s Day. She was more than my grandmother, she was my friend and my confidante. It was sad for me to know that I won’t get to see her for a very long time. For those past few months, it became very hard to do much of anything. The clinical term is depression, which is a bit silly because we use the same word to describe the shape someone’s hind end leaves on the couch when they get up. For those months it became very hard for me to do much of anything. Some days just getting out of bed was as hard as climbing a mountain with a bear trap clamped to my ass. And did I mention the morning sickness your brother was kind enough to give me? It was debilitating, and I did only a marginal job of hiding it from people. It just goes to show that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can only fool your husband as far as you can throw him. So your best bet, my little Bean, is to either learn to communicate better with your husband or else marry a very thin midget.

But time passes, and the bear trap loosens, and eventually things got back to normal around here. At least, as normal as this family gets, anyway. As dark and colorless as things got, though, I could always count on you to make me smile and be grateful that life never kicks you in the ass without first giving you a pillow to cushion your fall. Well done, pillow-girl, well done. So how did you do it? You have so much personality and so much moxie, it’s hard not to fall in love with you. It’s impossible to stay in a foul mood when I go into your room in the morning and ask you “Who am I?” only to hear “Miiiiiiiiine” in response.

We moved you into your big girl room and your big girl bed this month. We wanted to get you settled with the new arrangement before your brother arrives because we want you to feel like you’ve been promoted to big-girl status rather than booted out of little-girl status. You love your new room, but getting you to stay in bed continues to feel a lot like trying to herd cats. Most nights you fall asleep in front of your door or in the play cottage we set up in your room. Eventually you’ll figure out that your mattress is more comfortable than molded plastic or carpeting, but until then, it’s cute to see a reverse imprint of the flooring on your cheeks in the morning.

You can’t count yet, but you’re getting close. If I give you only one of your two coveted daily vitamins, you squint your eyes and raise one eyebrow: you look like you know something’s amiss, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You’re being swindled, but you can’t figure out how. You spend most days trying to wheedle me into giving you more than your daily allotment of vitamins. Bargaining and suspicion of cheating: your Mediterranean genes at work.

Your language skills continue to improve. Most objects, though, you identify by their sounds rather than by their names. Cars are vroom vrooms, Ruby is a mao, and fish are bub bubs. Objects that do have names, however, usually only get half of their names past your lips: those yellow and brown fellows with the long necks are raffes, and Grandma’s dog is Buuh, rather than Butch, which is just as well, because that dog’s about as butch as Richard Simmons in a tutu factory.

You love to watch Finding Meemo, and just the other day you had an epiphany: those fish are swimming in WATER. You told me at least thirty times: “It’s bub bubs in wawa! It’s bub bubs in wawa!”

Just this morning you dropped something in front of your father and said “Oh, shit.” He blames me, for some silly reason. I guess I’ll have to watch my language now. Shit.

Bean, I love you so very, very much. No matter how dark things got, I had you as my little ray of sunshine. You’re my pride and joy, and it’s the best confidence booster in the world when you tell me that you love me. You’re the best thing your dad and I have ever done, sweetie. Your brother will be so lucky to have you as a big sister. I may have to remind him of that when you have him in a Half Nelson until he forks over his baklava, but that’s to be expected.

Love,
Mama