Surprising maternity moment

When your inner child kicks and knocks the laptop off.

Interpreting the sock omens

I have high hopes that this child will make her arrival soon. We're eleven days from the due date and my mom is praying she'll come quickly. And then last night I organized my socks by color in neat rows five across and counted them. I do that every now and again, organize them I mean, so I wasn't worried until I started counting. That's a sure sign something isn't normal. (There were thirty-three pairs clean; and I think that's most of what I have, because it's still sandal weather and I've been doing a lot of laundry.) So possibly I'm nesting. A friend today told me that a vast burst of nesting might mean you'll go into labor within 24 hours, and we're at 23 and counting. Come on, baby!

Meg likes socks, too. Her new thing is to usurp her parents' socks for her own purposes. Wednesday she very matter-of-factly put on my red ladybug socks under her boots and I didn't discover it until she was fully dressed, at which point I didn't care. I mean, she put on socks and shoes all by herself and looked fine. Jonathan, however, will not let her wear his socks on top of her shoes; that's going too far. She hasn't tried messing with the baby's socks, which is just as well, because I'm a little crabby and might breathe fire if she disarranged the baby's sock drawer... which is not organized by color. Anyway, it's basically all pink. And most of it still needs to be washed. If my subconscious insists on nesting it really needs to start working on more useful things, because there's plenty left to do.

Also, I've decided I need another couple pairs of boot socks for fall. There is nothing unusual about this either - days get shorter, orange clothes come out, I want another plaid shirt, and I want more boot socks. Argyle would be darling. Sadly, though, most of the inexpensive socks are all polyester, and my feet are getting too old for man-made materials. I may have to actually buy quality socks one of these days.

Meg and the stroller

Since the baby is due in, oh, two weeks, it was about time to start rounding up carseats and strollers and whatnot. The living room is currently host to two strollers, actually, and Meg has taken a shine to the nicer one.

"Should we let Meg in the stroller? I'm not sure it's made for that..." Me
"I think it's undergoing rigorous field testing." Jonathan
"No, it's undergoing Meg testing." Meg

"Dad, how are we going to buckle my sister into this stroller?" Meg
"Step 1: remove older sister from stroller.
Step 2: put little sister into stroller.
Step 3: buckle in little sister." Jonathan
"Step 4: STROLL!" Meg

"Lookee over here, Mom. I'm a well-suited child." Meg
"Oh, really. Well-suited to what?" Me
"The stroller. But excuse me, Mom, I need to hop out." Meg

At last count, she had filled it up with one large bed pillow and six stuffed animals, as well as herself, and had pulled the sunshade down like a tent. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Cleaning up

The other night Meg put some serious elbow grease into helping me scrub crayon and marker marks off the furnishings. She really got into it. I appreciated the help, and even more appreciated that she noticed "This is really hard work!"

I was putting out a fresh bath mat, and noticed a disgusting brown stain on it. Sigh. It had been washed thoroughly, but I figured I'd better go alert Jonathan that it was okay to use. He and Meg were playing horsie, or possibly Meg was playing horsie while he read. It's hard to tell sometimes. Anyway, I delivered the message, and Meg leaped down like I'd offered ice cream.

"Can I see the disgusting brown stain, Mommy?? I fell off the horsie to come look at it!"

So I went and led a guided tour.

There's just so much to learn in this world. For instance, the nuance between using a tissue and a shirt-tail when your nose needs wiping. We were at the store waiting to return something as I tried to explain this, and added keep your shirt down to keep it out of temptation's way! The clerk looked at me, startled, and said, "Did you really just say that??" Clearly he's not raising a small person if this is a surprise. Then he asked if "latent congratulations" were due, apparently referring to my maternal state. I could have asked if he was calling me fat and burst into tears... but I didn't. I admitted yes, they were, and he said, "Oh good! I guessed right!" He also offered us a box of tissues, which was more helpful.

This morning we were at a friend's house and Meg spilled her drink. One of the grownups said maybe she'd better come get me and we'd find paper towels to clean it up. Meg, seeing no need for anything so formal, sat down on the spill and wiped it up with her shorts. Problem solved.

Then I took my first bubble bath in a long time. It was a very nice bath, only I displaced more water than I remember. Quite a lot more, actually. Archimedes' principle strikes again!

In which I do not sneak

Happy last Sunday before Labor Day, everyone! I thought it deserved a particularly summery outfit for church, so I put on my lime green maxi dress with the orange flowers and the blue and purple and yellow bits, and added an orange purse and turquoise earrings and shoes for extra beauty. When your bump is as big as mine, there's no point in going subtle. Meg wore a hot pink dress today and her stompiest dress shoes, so we were a great pair.

My favorite conversation of the morning was with Deb, a mom with older kids. We talked for a bit and then I said I needed to sneak out and grab someone before the music started.

"Not in that dress, you're not sneaking anywhere."

Aw, man! Floor-length lime green isn't sneaky?!

Then after, when I moved back into my row, I kind of slightly ran over Meg with her sister, who was sticking out further than I realized. I think my sneaking days are officially over.

What to wear, what to wear

I'm about eight months along, and this little one is due in about a month and a half. I am now officially bigger than I've ever been before; it's not a bad thing, except that I get up most mornings and look at my closet totally confused. Even when things fit, they don't fit like they used to, so I guess I have to recalibrate all my outfits. Things don't seem to go with each other. What does the well-dressed mama on a budget even wear for late summer? I have this irrational feeling that I should be a) covered (even in the middle), b) really stinkin' cute, and c) still look like myself. I don't want to buy much for just a month and a half, but I really would like to wear something attractive.

I used to know how to sew, but my waist doesn't seem to be where I left it and hemlines are rising and falling - like the Roman Empire, only faster - and sometimes they rise and fall again in the same skirt. Terrifying.

I still have cute shoes, though. So there.

Pink skirt

I've been wanting one of those knit skirts for a while. You know, knee-length, stretchy, a little bit flared, maternity-friendly, and preferably brightly colored. The least expensive one I've found so far was $10 at Wal-Mart, which while not that much, is kind of a lot for a Wal-Mart skirt that I plan to wear for maternity: not to be a clothes snob or anything.

But today I was at Wal-Mart and found a $3 shirt, size 4X-Large. Now THAT, my friends, is about right. It caught my eye because it was a good shade of hot pink and had some cute stud detailing around the collar. I could do something with that.

XXXX-large shirt

Ta-da! Pink skirt. It looks much better on me than on the hanger.

The sleeves became pockets and the studded collar became studded pocket edges. I think they keep it from looking obviously homemade.

The sides of the skirt come up in a subtle scallop. It's such a casual skirt, just zig-zagging it was enough. It will be easy to hem it later if I decide it needs it.

I figured it out

Now that I'm officially "showing," I've figured out why I had all those cute dresses in my closet I didn't actually wear. They didn't come from the maternity department, but they were cut to be attractive for maternity figures - Empire waistlines, lots of elastic, that sort of thing. They're really cute now. No wonder I didn't want to wear them last summer.

Bonus: I have lots of cute dresses.

Double bonus: after this baby, I will know better than to buy that style again!

Update on life

I always forget just how much pregnancy brain afflicts pregnant mamas. I forget my shopping lists, and then when I get to the store I forget what I wrote on them and go up and down the aisles saying, "I think we needed applesauce..." I usually remember the coupons, though. I forget words, especially nouns, and Meg is always supplying them for me with tolerance. This evening Jonathan was telling me a story. I was listening, I really was, but I went straight from "...became a character in his own right..." to "...practicing Civil-War style medicine on him." I think I may have missed something. Fortunately he thought this was hilarious.

The other day I explained this phenomenon to the college girls at church as "The baby is eating my brains" and they just about died laughing.

Meg still takes a keen interest in Baby Junior, as we are referring to the new arrival until we discover which pronoun is appropriate. (Meg is still convinced he's a boy.) We had a mutually confusing conversation a couple days ago, when we were talking about grapes. She thought Baby Junior was in my tummy "eating grapes with his teef!" Nooooo, I said, Junior is too little to have teeth. I have to do the chewing for him. She just looked at me in disbelief. But she is definitely preparing for his arrival. She got out the stepstool and carefully arranged her stuffed animals on the highest shelves of the bookshelf so, she explained, he wouldn't be able to chew on them.


I'm so proud of Meg. She's fascinated by words and has almost got them figured out. She goes around saying, "Duck! D-d-d-d-duck starts with... D!" and "Say starts with A!" (True story.) If you show her a written word, she will rattle off the letters for you, D - U - C - K, and might be able to tell you what sound the first letter makes. If the word is accompanied by a picture, she's fabulous at reading the first letter and guessing the word: the other day she got "spaghetti" that way. We're practicing saying all the letter sounds and putting them together.

We also count things, anything and everything, and do simple addition problems. She was really solid on adding two fingers and two fingers, but when there were five fingers on one hand and three on the other, that was too hard. Sometimes we do addition out loud and sometimes I write it out for her in a proper equation. When Nana came for a visit yesterday, I hear they counted to a hundred and Meg noticed that for every new set of tens, the same digits recur in the same order. I think she's doing great.

Spring clothes

Spring has finally, finally, arrived here. I opened a window yesterday and (surprise!) found a very nice sunbeam. Being part cat, I immediately stretched out it, and spent most of Meg's naptime reading a magazine. It was a really good sunbeam.

I spent the rest of her naptime (on through dinnertime and past her bedtime) doing the Great Seasonal Clothes Swap, which involved getting out pretty much every item of clothing I own and either putting it into or out of a storage bin, mostly trying them on along the way. It was more exciting this year since I got out the maternity clothes. Yes, it's true! We are expecting a new arrival at the end of September. And, between junior and the pleasant weather, it was high time to get spring things out.

A snow day with a dwarvish breakfast

"'Hey, brothers! A visitor for breakfast.'

"And immediately, mixed with a sizzling sound, there came to Shasta a simply delightful smell. It was one he had never smelled in his life before, but I hope you have. It was, in fact, the smell of bacon and eggs and mushrooms all frying in a pan."

--The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 12, C.S. Lewis

We had a simply delightful smell of that sort this morning: sausage and eggs and mushrooms and tomatoes all frying together in a pan, with apricot-jammed toast. And eggnog lattes.

Jonathan finished his finals last night (yippee!), so naturally we went to the library. The first flakes were just starting. When we came out, it was snowing hard, so we called in our pizza order, stopped at the grocery store for bread and mushrooms and eggnog, and then retrieved our pizza and returned home. By this point it was sticking to the roads and they were quite slippery.

It has been snowing all night, and we woke up to nearly a foot of good fluffy white stuff, just right for packing. The roads are thoroughly cloggy, and it's still coming down. What could be nicer than a dwarvish breakfast to start off a snow day?

As long as we don't have to dig Olwen out for a trip to the hospital, we are all set. :-)

"Life is running around inside me like squirrel"

The offspring has been making her presence known. She kicks; quite hard, sometimes, actually. This afternoon especially she was kicking. I was talking to Jennie about it at work.

"My mom used to say she thought expecting was like having a squirrel inside her, running around," she said.

And Jennie hadn't even seen 'You Can't Take It With You'! So I had to explain about the Russian ballet teacher and his great quote. I don't think he meant it in quite the same context!

General update

Yipes, I hadn't realized it had been so long since I posted. Sorry, all (those of you who still check).

I have, of course, been busy. Jonathan's started classes and a law clinic thing downtown, which basically ate all his time and was trying for the soul too, and somehow mine too, but that seems to be better now. We like our souls where they are, thank you. (You know it's been quite a week when I have the law school dreams.)

But then we got to go out to NM for Labor Day! That was a lot of fun. My grandparents were having their 60th anniversary party and we got to see a lot of relatives, and even meet some of their friends we've heard about all our lives. We also spent quality time with the cat Nefret, who may behave like a warthog but she's so cute about it somehow you adore her madly. Even Grandma likes her.

Then we trotted back to my parents' house (a mere jaunt of five hours on NM roads, which is SO much more tolerable than an hour on I-95), where the church ladies put on a baby shower for me! It was a beautiful little party, and everybody was so sweet--and generous, too. Golly. We also stopped by the Finneys' house and chatted with them briefly. Then on the way to the airport the next day, Mama took us by the Coffee Booth, and we ran into more people we knew. It was very good to see everyone.

This weekend we did a few things that needed doing, and have resoundingly failed to do others. Ah, well. The most exciting thing in the first category: we bought a baby chest of drawers/changing table off Craigslist! It was very reasonably priced, and we brought it home and scrubbed it well, which cleaned off most of the marks, and sanded it down, which got off most of the rest, and painted it, which dealt quite effectively with the remainder. It's so cute. It was decent wood construction and I think it'll hold up well -- and if we decide we hate it, we aren't out that much. I'm meditating adding pink-and-chocolate trim.

Pillage your village

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

I wouldn't have much minded pillaging something today. Planned Parenthood was running an attack ad on the Cheezburger site against a candidate, and I almost wrote and sweetly thanked them for introducing me to someone to vote for... but Jonathan pointed out they'd probably turn me into a statistic saying precisely what I didn't mean, so PP got away with it. This time.

I'm still a little bitter that they run ads for expecting mothers on Facebook.

We went for the ultrasound...

And it looks like we're going to get a daughter for Christmas!

!!!

Some names really don't smell as sweet

Front Porch Republic had a post on the silliness of a certain baby-naming trend.

Here's quite the list of celebrity baby names, illustrating something of said trend, just to prove the FPR author isn't completely making it up. (To do them justice, the website's Tips on baby-naming are rather more sensible.)

The more names I come across, the more grateful I am to my parents for picking me a really good one. Our goal is for the offspring to not be humiliated by whatever we pick. Incidentally, I'm making lists. I take suggestions, especially for my Awful Names collection.

I don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip

We have a bunch of Indian programmers at work to keep our computers happy. They're quite nice, and the other day, one of them struck up a conversation with me as I made and jellied my mid-morning toast.

"Having your breakfast, eh?" he said.
"Yes," I agreed. "My second breakfast, actually. I'm like a hobbit: I eat six meals a day when I can get them."

He politely developed that frozen smile that means, "We just stopped communicating." I'm not sure if it was horror at six meals a day* or unfamiliarity with Tolkien. Westerners have some very odd hobbits indeed.


*The other three are for the new baby. Well, mostly. :-)

And stuff

Verizon is bound and determined that I need a new cell phone. They've been bombarding me with ads. I don't know why (though I can make a few cynical guesses). But I don't really want a new phone. My current one works just fine, thank you. I like it. I have the right chargers for it. Furthermore, it has all my phone numbers programmed into it, and why would I want the bother of typing them all in again? I'm not necessarily opposed to having a new one, but it just absolutely doesn't rank up there with, say, a theoretical new pair of pants that fit. Or a pair of sandals I could wear to work.

I am, in fact, trying to clear out the apartment so as to fit in cribs and suchlike. I'm busy throwing away dead technology and unnecessary papers and packing away old clothes, so the concept of getting new junk is kind of horrifying. Tuesday night I put away two bags of necklaces I hardly ever wear and cleaned off my bulletin board.

On the other end of the trendy spectrum, my brave attempt to grow my own herbs this spring has been a pretty good flop. Some of them are still alive, but the rest died from... I'm not sure what. Lack of love and water probably didn't help. I even managed to break one of the pots. Organic food is all well and good, but it's simply impossible to grow a baby, work, and keep up with a mouse and house and garden. I don't know how ladies ever make it through the first trimester without a husband.

I recognize that programmers need something to do, and some people actually like gadgets. I'm also delighted for people with time and energy to grow edible things, and someday I might too. I suspect, however, that God has seasons for people, and this is a season in which doing and buying and keeping on top of inessential though very cool things isn't on my Called-To list. Perhaps I should break it to Verizon gently... or just keep throwing away their ads.

Mixed compliment of the day

"You're the mother-load!"

Only my nice husband can say that and make me laugh. It could have been very unfortunate.