entering the whirlpool

Sleeping baby, only slightly grubby:



( one more with me in, and a couple pregnancy pics )

In other news, we have achieved hands-free nursing in a wrap carrier (which is awesome!--see the 3rd video down, here) and I have thus far managed to drop a very few sandwich crumbs on the baby in attempting to eat while she does.

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Baby achieved successful separation as of 3:58 on Thursday morning; I transitioned into active labor probably somewhere around the time Grauwulf came home from work on Wednesday night. ( cut for ridiculous length and not-too-excessively-gorey details )

Oddly, I do have a little more sympathy for the woman saying earnestly that "it's ok if you don't bond with your baby right away because giving birth is such an *interesting* experience." I would still not consider it useful advice for someone who's eight months along, but I kind of get where she's coming from. There's definitely an extent to which birthing uses up a lot of mental circuits, and the full understanding of this tiny creature who you've never met before and to whom you've made a lifetime commitment takes a while to fill in.

On the other hand, everyone talks about postpartum depression (presumably on the theory of being aware of potential problems before they arise) and we'll see where I end up as the sleep deprivation sets in long-term, but thus far I appear to have postpartum endorphins instead. It's rather like the high from a new crush: this person's existence makes me incredibly happy. I don't think I've ever had that thing where you look at something for hours and it stamps itself on the insides of your eyelids when you close them happen with a person before, but she was right there by day two. So, yay for that.

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Long post is long, & not mostly written yet, but the short version is that baby & I achieved separation (with only minor chemical assistance from a last hour or so of epidural) at about 4am on the 21st, escaped the hospital by friday evening, and are doing well so far. She seems at present to want to be nocturnal-baby (sleep all day, wake happy around 7 or 8 pm, eat & fuss from 10-2am) which is not exactly my ideal schedule, but since she is, of course, the cutest person on the planet at the moment, we're managing.

There are all sorts of pictures on other people's cameras & computers, but somehow I fail to have or have taken any of them.

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Last scheduled doctor's appointment; for this 20-minute observation interval I'm having longer & stronger but less regular contractions. Everything else looks about the same. I let them talk me into scheduling an induction for Thursday night, despite rather wanting to throw fits about how I'm fine, and the baby is fine, and I have no genetic history of problems with this, and why do people keep fussing at us about this anyway. I'm not doing so because a) I don't think the advocated course of action is likely to cause actual problems, and b) I don't think it will matter to the kid in the long run. Which means I'm trying not to put my own preconceived notions about pregnancy not being something to *worry* about, darnit (and how am I supposed to experience what real birth was like in a pre-industrial world if they're busy pumping me full of chemicals, anyway? I mean, this may be my only chance at field research!)... ahead of what my doctor thinks is safest for everyone concerned. I'm not convinced that her concerns are relevant to us, but I don't have any less self-centered reasons to argue about it. And we've still got a day and a half to do this on our own; after being poked and prodded at earlier, my stomach muscles seem to be vaguely considering it.

Yesterday involved waking up and wondering why it had not occurred to me to look into getting some sort of Taweret amulet months ago; after a search which turned up a fairly nice one on Etsy that ships from Hungary and an appealingly rough likeness in the Met's collection (She's facing to the right: the three bumps on top are the hippo face and the ones down the front are breast, hands over belly, and legs) I decided that if I actually wanted a luck charm [read: thematically appropriate jewelry to fidget with] in time to give birth, I ought to do something with the reindeer birthing goddess instead, as cross-stitch sounded easier than impromptu carving or sculpting. (This may or may not be actually true.)

Of course, wherever the handout from Luceta di Cosimo's slavic embroidery class has got to, it's someplace Very Safe, so I spent rather longer than I'd intended searching down pictures on the internet and wondering why google seemed to think that the pony in the beflowered hat was an embroidery motif. (It came up in all my image searches.)

(The motif is first seen in stone-age carvings by pre-Slavic reindeer herders, representing twin reindeer-antlered goddesses who live up in the sky over the arctic circle someplace and continually give birth to everything in the world. Or so I'm told. At some point, the motif was transferred to the traditional red & white weaving & embroidery designs, which slipped under the radar of anti-pagan cultural suppression by virtue of being some thing women did that obviously wasn't that important. Over the centuries she has mostly morphed into a flower pot, which was briefly replaced by the Romanov double-headed eagle when that was in season. You didn't know the Romanovs had anything to do with pagan fertility symbols, did you? The black & white picture here (scroll down) has a few different incarnations of her; once you get a sense for it you can spot her all over.)

Here's what I ended up with:

The design I used is the left half off the graph paper, as the one I was mostly working from (second one down on the left side here, from this useful if irritatingly formatted site) sort of skipped the antlers, and once I'd added them back, the hand design needed tweaking. So the right side represents attempt #1, and the left got cleaned up better.

Counted cross stitch in sewing thread over 2 woven strands of linen (I would have done half this size, but the fabric wasn't even enough for it.) Grauwulf points out I'm nuts, but at least this is for me, so he won't be able to go around explaining to people that it's my first [X style of embroidery] or trying to say that it's too nice to use, as he does with the blackwork white scarf I made him. This was made by me for me, and so I have tied it around my neck with a faded red ribbon that I probably picked up while working faire and shall proceed to sweat all through it, I'm sure. I am experiencing no compulsion to start embroidering things for dolls, so I think that's enough of the counted work.

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Baby's still kicking like crazy at my insides in no apparent hurry to come out; I went for a nice long walk earlier, which at the moment seems to have served mostly to abuse my stomach muscles, as they sped up on the contraction thing while I was moving, and have eased back off it by this evening. (Ok, watch me wake up at two in the morning to go to the hospital now, but whatever.) Oh, and it did help limber up my feet, which started swelling like crazy sometime monday, and had got to the point where they were uncomfortably stiff-- based on this and the change in bladder space, either the kid has reached some kind of critical mass, or she's dropped.

Anyway, my mother called earlier to say that my grandfather died this morning; like my father's mother, he did the long slow decline thing to the point where from this distance there's a bit of "well, we'd lost him already" though I'm sure my grandmother doesn't feel that way about it. My information is entirely fourth-hand, as my mother got it from her older sister, who had apparently been contacted by the sister who lives with my grandparents to start the telephone tree; what all arrangements are going to be made are still unknown, and this does not seem like the time I'll be driving up to NJ for any of it. I... at this point it's still just words; my grandfather was awesome, but he hasn't been mostly him for years now.

The other news is that the newest chemo option they've put my father on is working beautifully; not only is he feeling better and not experiencing ghastly side-effects, but this week's MRI is showing far less cancer than the one from September (and apparently the one from December when they decided to switch chemo options was worse than that.) So, signs are hopeful for that buying another 6 months of coherence, with possibly up to as much as 3 years (though that's in the 5-10% of people sort of range.) So, yeah. Not everybody's idea of good news, but we'll take what we can get.

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Yesterday involved a couple things that turned suddenly from stressful ordeals into very easy projects. Turns out the old insurance company could easily look up what version of Tetanus booster the stupid clinic that couldn't call me back after three weeks and four messages left gave me (and it was the one with pertussis in, so I shall not have to be re-vaccinated at the hospital.) And the drill-bit eating plaster walls bow to the power of little brass self-tapping screws, which are entirely sufficient for hanging pictures & other light-duty wall-penetrating needs.

Today, I went off to the doctor ready to be all belligerent about *not* being that mom who chooses to have her baby born on valentine's day (which was her suggested date for scheduling an induction, as she's on call tomorrow) which was also totally unnecessary. She says she's required to tell me that going longer with GD means a greater risk of having a large-bodied baby which can result in shoulder damage, and I think I shocked her a little bit by explaining that my mother, from whom I inherited my skeletal proportions, is 5'1" and had no trouble with my 8-1/2 lb brother. I'm not too worried about my kid being potentially about that size by next week sometime; I have the hips for this kind of thing (and not so much for some of the other things I've wanted to do, so I might as well get some good out of them).

The other GD risk is that there's a statistically slightly higher chance of fetal mortality for going past term, and so they hooked me up to a monitor for a while to check and make sure the kid is still being properly healthy. Turns out that not only does she graph beautifully, but I was as of this morning apparently having contractions at 6 minute intervals and hadn't noticed yet. There've been some stronger ones since, but on the whole I suspect I'm still not really feeling most of what's going on with my stomach muscles (we have a bit of a distant relationship on the whole, due to an early alliance against those foolish people who think sit-ups are a good idea...) I could just barely tell, sitting still and watching the monitor, that yes there was something going on when it registered things.

In any case, we're finishing off what to put in the hospital go-bags and I may end up with a valentine's day baby after all. (Which I'm ok with, so long as it's babies happening when babies happen rather than my making a particular decision in the matter.)

We find that everyone else we know is far more excited on our behalf than either grauwulf or I are at the moment-- I think it's an emotional sustain thing. I mean, there's not much point in either of us freaking out at the moment; there's still stuff to do, and I think it would be awesome if we could manage to continue getting actual sleep at night until the kid actually makes her appearance. Oddly, I'm usually terrible about stress in limbo states, but I think this is sufficiently life-as-usual (and I'm home, with a nice long to-do list to poke at) that it isn't bothering me so far. Calm is probably a good parenting trait for as long as I can hang onto it.

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Elephant baby has from its mother's womb been more-or-less timely ripped, proved to be female, and been named the same thing as my cousin's November-born daughter. We shall be trend-breakers and give our child a different name. In any case, baby and mom seem ok so far as I'm aware, though my news is all indirect.

My parents came up for a couple hours on Sunday to drop off a growing pile of things they had for us, which included the journalling my mother did (as letters to my father, who was off on a submarine at the time) from two days before I was born to slightly after two months of my existence. It's fascinating from a number of perspectives, both as a guide on some of what I might be looking forward to myself in the near future, and as a family history-- there are various listings of things given, many of which I still remember, like the hideous squeaky banana whose squeaker fell out around six years later, and one of which (an infant sweater/bonnet & bootie set from my father's aunt) is presently sitting on top of the baby's dresser, which itself was once mine. The language is full of various bits of slang that migrated out of the family vocabulary long enough ago that I don't remember them and which I kept being minorly surprised by, and there were several bits of family history that I had known about, but not realized that was when they happened. (One aunt's miscarriage, another's being sent home from the monastery at which she was a novice...)

My grandmother (mother of six) reportedly always felt that it was best to put off the having of the baby as long as possible, since it was always worse afterwards; she was speaking of post-partum depression, which my mother mentions in her journalling that she didn't particularly notice at all. My grandmother's mother got institutionalized by her husband for what was probably post-partum depression, after which her mother & sister made her divorce him-- not that this was the only reason-- my mother, so far as I can tell, pretty much missed inheriting any depressive tendencies altogether. I suspect the ability to eat whatever I darn well please is liable to offset a lot of potential misery on my part, and most of my coping mechanisms for dealing with mental strain are built around sense of responsibility, so I can't see myself falling into the handout-described state of not being able to muster the energy to change diapers.

Someone elsejournal was talking recently about being the last of a genetic line, and I had a disoriented moment of realizing that despite a thorough familiarity with dynastic concepts on large and small levels, I don't really think in that direction; my concept of my heritage goes backwards rather than forwards, I guess. Possibly the fact that I've had second cousins since I was in middle school may have made it something I never thought to think about. Miss Radiator and I are it for the maternal line, as it happens; out of ten biological cousins and my brother, I'm the only female on my mother's side (and my girl-cousin on the other side is very unlikely to reproduce.) But I see ancestry and all that from a very much "you are here" sort of perspective, rather than a torch to carry on. Probably healthier in the long run; I definitely don't want to place any pressure on the next generation to reproduce if she's not interested in doing so.

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I had my final ultrasound today (after getting rescheduled due to 1/2 an inch of snow on the grass friday) and the child continues to be exactly the size she's supposed to be and otherwise healthy-seeming. Apparently they can tell that's she was 7lbs 14oz this morning, and thus on track to be about 8lbs in time for her due date... although given that my counting date is this Thursday, the initial ultrasound date is a week from Wednesday, and today's ultrasound gives her a due date of the following Saturday, exactly what her due date actually is is anybody's guess. And as the tech mentioned, only about 5% of babies are actually born on their due dates, anyway. I'm guessing somewhere around the 17th or 18th, but I have no particular reason to think so; I don't expect they'll let her go past the 20th or so even if she'd like to. (My mother, for whom she's being named, was born on the 27th.)

Grauwulf's cousin, on the other hand, appears to have sired an elephant. His wife is due around the same time we are, and they've already scheduled her for a c-section on her due date as they're predicting the kid will be about 13 lbs by then. So far as I know, she hasn't been diagnosed with GD or anything else that's supposed to lead to oversized infants, and I have the obscure feeling that there's some kind of karmic changeling thing going on here. (This is also her third child, though, and the other two didn't have this problem.)

Meanwhile, the last-minute prep stuff continues; I have now got PUL fabric to make more waterproof diaper covers, and got accosted by a rabid manager at Babys R Us while in search of diaper pins. (He seemed to think I'll be in there all the time once the kid arrives. I'm fairly sure that once the kid arrives I'll be doing *less* wandering into random shops in search of things rather than more, but since what I actually wanted to do was buy diaper pins so I could go home and have lunch I didn't make a point of it.) I was also extravagant and parked in an "expectant mothers" space, since this is the first time I've seen one since getting pregnant and while I'm still perfectly capable of walking across a parking lot (and did so three other places this morning) at 38-1/2 weeks I think I'm as entitled as I'm going to get. I've definitely reached the point where strangers start trying to coddle me in public, though I find it somewhat less irritating to have people try to do things for me because I'm obviously pregnant than whatever "oh helpless female" reasons they usually have. Possibly also it helps that the people who've recently asked if I need help carrying things have all been female (ok, and grauwulf, but he's been doing that for a while, and does take no for an answer.) I did have to restrain myself from snapping at the socially clueless teen in Ikea who asked if she should push my cart for me (um, what?) but compared to my usual levels of annoyance at people who think it's being nice to interrupt me in the middle of doing things I am positively mellow.

Ikea and grauwulf and the hardware store have provided me with my last christmas present (we exchanged IOUs for large-ish things that we had to pick out ourselves-- grauwulf's was a new grill) and I have now got glamorous new desk surfaces in both the loft and the craft room, with vast quantities of drawers into which I haven't yet put anything at all. (ah, the potential!) And space to stuff quilts through my sewing machine without running into anything (now that I am almost out of quilts for the moment) and still a great deal of moving stuff about left to do. But eventually there *will* be room to move in the craft room, and maybe even sew baby clothes & stuff.

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My parents were up here for dinner last night, and brought two *more* boxes of picture books, most of which belong to my brother. I'm fairly sure that I now have more picture books in the house than anyone I know, *probably* including my mother. Sometime in the near future, I shall have to go through all of them and exile the ones I can't stand the thought of reading more than once, although I think that is probably a task that can be done a few books at a time with an infant around if I don't get to it before then.

( more pre-baby stuff )

I seem to be mentally signing up for modified versions of things which I then completely fail to mention to anyone else. First was the Sew Fortnightly challenge, which I find somewhat inspiring despite not entirely following any of the rules; my bonus project was finishing knitting the Laminaria that got stalled out when I ran out of yarn a row and a half before the end... but I haven't blocked it yet because things. I completely fail to have anything from XX13 among the patterns I want to make, but I finished up the modernized version of the Lewis & Clark era dress I started a while ago, in which I can now match (or is that clash with?) my horrible tacky teapot. With hook-front closures suitable for nursing in. And as for UFOs, I've finished or repaired about six or eight things off the mending pile, several of which I'm actually even keeping instead of sending to the thrift store. More shall follow presently.

Second is Mary Robbinette Kowal's Month of Letters challenge, which I hope to adapt to the thing I was planning on doing anyway of pre-addressing envelopes and having a baby announcement/year-in-review letter ready to print up when we have specifics. I trust I'll be able to handle a couple sentences a day of personalization to add after the fact as I send things out... If you want to be part of this and I don't have your current address, feel free to e-mail or message it to me. (Unless I have no idea who you are, in which case I may not add you to the list.)

...and then there's the bit where I'm mad enough to try to sign up for the Coastal Plain regional add-on to my Master Naturalist cert. Which may or may not crash and burn as a plan, since the first training day they want me at is the day before the baby is due. If she holds off long enough for me to go to that, everything else isn't until April, which (barring surgeries and unfortunate complications) we should theoretically be able to manage somehow. We'll see. (Yes, you are welcome to laugh at my optimism now.)

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I have finished not one but two baby quilts, one of which we're even keeping. Pictures exist, and may be posted eventually. I'm working on sheet sets for the crib mattress (not that it's particularly recommended to have actual top sheets for an infant-- sleep sacks are also on the list-to-make, and I've got a couple secondhand-- but if I do top sheets & pillow cases now, I don't have to later), culling the mending pile and various random crap, and then there's the nursery paint issue.

So... there was that bit where the shingles on the new roof didn't quite overlap with the old roof well enough, and since the *entire time* the addition was being put on we had ALL THE RAIN (most of which we haven't seen since...) there were enough moisture issues in the old part of the attic that much of the paint in the old bedrooms did unfortunate cracking & chipping things. So we have chippy paint in the nursery-to-be, and I bit my tongue and trusted in the negative lead paint test (as there's no point in testing if you're not going to believe it anyway) and sanded & washed the walls yesterday. For the record, sanding vertical surfaces is not kind to the wrists. And then I made grauwulf mud a couple holes, and now I have to paint things and hope it's better enough to be worth the effort. Because the "right" thing to do would be to knock out all the plaster and the trim and replace the walls entirely, preferably adding insulation behind them, and that is not going to happen in the next couple weeks. In any case, we have good paint with primer, and a somewhat smoother surface which is now dry, so it should hold for a while. Plus furniture that's going back in the problematic corners...

Grauwulf also floated the intriguing notion of covering large segments of wall with sheets of plexiglass, or possibly flat-board surfaced to be magnetic or doodleable or cork board or something, at which point we could anchor them to the trim in some fashion and ignore the stupid plaster entirely. This seems like an excellent idea to float to a small child of an age to start wanting to help customize her own environment.

In any case, I now need to have lunch, and then find the last bits of painting equipment that only got half-way to "put away" after the last time I used them.

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