Phoning It In

I am phoning it in today, because I have spent a great day napping with the baby and now I'm playing Rock Band with my husband.  He is playing Medium, I am playing Easy and spending more time updating my hair and outfit than I am playing songs.  Every dollar I get, I immediately go and change my hairstyle.

So instead, here are some recent pictures of the baby:

Hello, my name is McScreamy.  I don't like that toy, no, not at all.

Top Chef is so prosaic, you know?

Random Thing I Thought Today

You have to stop crying before you walk into WalMart.  

That's TACKY.

Correspondence File: 1/13/09

Dear Lady at Target with the Open-Mouth-Coughing Kid:

Give me a break, lady! I've got a three week old here! One of the reasons we are at Target right now instead of Walmart is that I can't expose her to that level of degradation yet. And here you are with your kid that is coughing continually, open mouth and all. Just spewing all kinds of illness around everything, like a firehose of germs.

And you're following me!!

Like a homing missile petri dish, just everywhere I go I hear that KOFF KOFF KOFF and see your kid hacking all over everything. We are trying to keep out of your way, but the goddamn stroller turns like a palsied flamenco dancer* and this is our first trip to a store with the baby and we're one big cluster-you-know-what.

But seriously, get out of my baby's airspace or I'm going to full-body tackle you and your typhoid family and slather you with Purell.

In Good Health,
Salome

* turns out the stroller's front wheel was locked and I didn't know. I discovered this halfway through my first walk around our street with Auden. I reached down, fully prepared to bust the wheel in order to make it turn, and realized it had the lock set. Hee.

Musings

I am hopelessly in love with my daughter.

Every expression on her face.  

The way she jerks her head randomly.  

The way she does this huge squeak inhale.  

The way, when she's getting mad, she pumps one leg rapidly, like trying to start a tiny baby motorcycle.  The mad look she gets when we delay getting her food to her.  The blinking awake of this tiny life.  

I don't know how much of the behavior we're seeing now is an indication of her personality, but this newborn is goofy.  She's smart.  She's generally good-natured, but possesses a fiery temper. When she gets really furious she cries in a way that sounds like an angry duck.  WAH WAH WAH.  

I wonder if she'll ever know, 15, 20 or 30 years from now, how I held her in my arms and tried to keep my heart inside my body, tried to keep my emotions from pouring out of my skin and flooding the city I live in.  I so incredibly love this little girl, I am so completely and utterly charmed by this person, I almost can't stand it.  I look at her sometimes and I'm surprised my husband doesn't hear the pop of my heart as it swells beyond its borders. 

And she's not even smiling at us yet!  

Her tiny smiles, right now attributed to gas, or urination or the contentment of falling asleep, are enough to achieve world peace, they are enough to quiet my screaming heart.  They are enough for me, forever.  

They melt me, utterly.

For so long I have examined my life and my decisions with a critical air of disenchantment.  

I now look down at my sleeping daughter's face and I feel I've accomplished greatness.

She's Not Sleeping

She's not sleeping, and it has been five hours.

The Pope isn't feeling well, he retreated to his quiet guest room hours ago.

HOURS AGO and still, she does not sleep.

She is now fed twice, rocked three times, and jiggled in the way she likes many times, too many to count.  Diaper changes:   two.  She's been swaddled, she's been unswaddled, and the whole time she will not stop fussing.  She will doze, she will catnap, but she will not sleep.  

I am losing it, folks.  She needs to sleep, goddamn it.  

I will lose my fucking mind in a second.

In all of this, every time my patience just wears out and snaps, I look at my baby girl and love her more than I could possibly express.  I roll my eyes, I curse out loud and then I reach down and see her alert eyes, and I kiss her cheek, I kiss the soles of her feet, I whisper to her that I love her so much.  

What she does to me!

This kid is killing all the toughness inside of me.

Lucy picked tonight to need me again, after three weeks of being the most perfectly behaved cat I've ever seen.  Tonight, she is trailing beside my feet, winding her way in my walking path and yowling at me.   I love her dearly, so will not kick her, although the temptation is great.  She finally climbed up on the baby blanket and slept beside me.  

I can wash the blanket.  

I love the cat.

So, how are you doing?

17 days old

We're hanging in. I haven't worn clothes other than pajamas in three days and I'm not sure when I last showered. The days blur into the nights, and it seems like I have nothing to show for my hours awake. I'm sleeping fine, but today started crying about a $60 heating bill on our empty house in Seattle. Seems like someone set the thermostat up and left it like that, in our vacant house, with us having no jobs. $60 seemed to unwind me. I am now having a wee glass of white wine, to bolster my Irish heart.

Our daughter is LOVELY. The hugest joy of joys. My darling girl. If you've called, thanks for calling. I'm nowhere near wanting to be talking on the phone right now. It would be awesome if you want to reach me, to email me. The phone ringing right when I'm going down for a nap, or getting her down for her nap, really bothers me. I won't answer if I'm feeding her, and the answer to your question is I'm ALWAYS feeding her.

And now for the photos!!!

Welcome to the World, Pup

The Pope and I welcomed a baby daughter on Friday, December 19th.

Her real name is Auden.  

She was born at 1:13pm.  She weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces and was 20.5 inches long.

She is without a doubt the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.  

I can't stop staring at her and telling her I love her.  

I have never done anything in my life that made me so instantly and completely happy.  

Birthday

Posting very quickly to say that in four hours we will check into the hospital to have the Pup.

They will be inducing me at 7:00am tomorrow morning.  

The next time you hear from me, I will be a mom.  

How exciting!!!!!

Love,

Sal, Pope and Pup

Goodbye Seattle

Our house sold today at 10:45am.

For real, and true this time, we are free of that burden.

I wish I could tell you that I'm whooping and hollering with joy, and dancing around the house like a maniac, but in reality it was pretty anti-climatic.  The Pope says it is because the house just pales in comparison with the impending birth of the Pup.

I would like to believe that the birth of the Pup is impending, but I'm actually getting fairly discouraged that it will never happen.

And please don't comment and suggest I have sex because honestly, NO.  

I would rather have a root canal than get funky with it at the moment.  

I have never been so lumbering and huge.  

I know exactly what sex does to the cervix, and all of that, and still, there's absolutely no way unless I was drugged into a coma that anyone will be getting their freak on with me.

And so, having used the last of my hip hop analogies for sex, I will go read my book.   

Three Days to Go

Until I'm officially pissed off that this baby isn't born yet.

I am hurting, y'all.  The latest discovery is a shooting pain in my left wrist.  Like a sciatic spasm of my carpal tunnel.  It has been happening all night.  

This is in addition to the true sciatica pain that shoots down my left leg upon occasion, those occasions growing ever frequent these last few days.  The pain is so sharp, so intense, it causes me to do a silly John Cleese walk when it happens.  

I guess that's all.  The baby pains are either not bad, not present or so familiar that they now go unnoticed.  

A couple of things I've been thinking about lately:

Memo to everyone:  Starbucks is NOT good coffee.  I'm coming from Seattle, where they first brewed their burnt version of coffee beans and made the word "latte" common in our vernacular.  But they are the WORST coffee roaster in Seattle.  They were ubiquitous, on every streetcorner, muscling out the independent roasters and building a huge administrative complex near the sports arenas (football and baseball) with their signature mermaid looking over the city.  But the smaller roasting shops were where the truly great coffee was.  Where the baristas took the time to talk to you about their life, their dreams, all while making a latte that made your toes curl, with taste and strength.  They would draw flowers in the foam on top, and the foam was something you could eat like custard, not the fluffy nothing taste of Starbucks' foam.  Once you went indie, you never went back.  For me to stop at a Starbucks, I am slumming it.  McDonald's has better tasting lattes than Starbucks.  It is true!  Do a taste test.  

At least in Seattle the Starbucks baristas were consistent in their drinks.  Down here in Sacramento, you've got essentially teenagers trying to make coffee, and the drinks are all over the place.  Some have 1/3 cup of foam on top, some have too much milk, others are lukewarm, others that I've ordered with some seasonal spicing (which is rare for me) have the spicing all down at the bottom, not having been stirred.  That's a gross discovery.  I got a hot chocolate the other day at a Starbucks inside Safeway, which is still the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, like who needs a huge ass latte while you're grocery shopping?   Or who is going to sit at a grocery store and tap away on their laptop?  The ambiance is horrendous.  Anyway, this hot chocolate was so chocolately that it made my eyes cross.  Almost undrinkable.  Don't they have standards of how a drink should be prepared and taste?   At those indie shops in Seattle you may have waited an extra 3 minutes while someone took care to prepare your drink, but in the end you got something worth waiting for!   Down here you get rude service and a poor quality drink.  It is disgusting.

Conspicuous Consumption:  I will admit to being as bad as everyone else when it comes to shopping.  For the last several years, at least 5, I've been in a financial position to buy almost anything I wanted.  I've never been wealthy, and my tastes are pretty simple, but I rarely worried about money, never really went without something I wanted, and generally bought something every time I went to a store.  Well.  That has, shall we say, changed.   Now I am shocked at the consumption everywhere.  In this time of a serious recession, a man was killed at WalMart so that people could get in to get deals on 50" television sets.  This on Black Friday, the biggest Christmas shopping day of the year.  But who buys 50" television sets as gifts?  These were people buying things for themselves, killing someone to do it.  It was shocking.  

A side note, about the shooting of the two men at a Toys R' Us in California.  The shooting occurred as a result of a fight between the dates of the two men.  The women got in a verbal argument, then there was a shoving match, and then both of the men pulled out guns and shot each other dead.  I was telling the Pope about this one morning and he said, succinctly, "glad they're out of the gene pool, I suppose."  

This is the wild world we bring our baby into, with every intention of raising it to be a good human being.  Not many visible examples in the world today.  

I was going to rant more, I've had a few things that have been bothering me lately, but my wrists are hurting, and the three nuts I just ate have given me raging heartburn.  You'll excuse me while I go sit my lard ass on the couch and cry.  

Wish me labor,

Salome

Great Joke Courtesy of Devi

Why does the shark like to swim in salt water?

Because she's allergic to PEPPER!!!!!

Not Having Baby, Just Lazy

You know what's good?

Nilla wafers dipped in Nutella.    I have eaten almost half a box of Nilla wafers this way.

Except they're not Nilla Wafers TM, they are Safeway (tm) brand Vanilla Wafers.

Real Nutella, though, I found it one day at the Grocery Outlet.  I'm sure it was confirmed dosed with botulism in order for me to get it at $1.99, but it is Nutella, so suck it up intestines, here we go.

Well!  We are dilated 1 centimeter, which doesn't seem like much since it has taken approximately 3 days of intermittent cramping to get there,  our pelvic station is -1, which is good, and we are effaced 50%.  Which is unchanged from last week.  They tell me not to obsess about that effacement (to which I laugh, because they CLEARLY don't know my OCD with Google) because apparently you can efface to 100% overnight.

The baby is a huge monster, normal for tall people, and totally making me feel better about the whole problem quitting smoking thing I was having there for, oh, 8 months.  

Rest assured, guys, I have not had a cigarette in over a month.  I've been done.  My mom read somewhere that breastmilk of smokers tastes like smoke and when she told me that, I was done.  Well, not really.  I was done after the Pope was let go and I smoked four packs in seven days.  After that powersmoking binge, my vigorous and vibrantly moving baby stilled for two days.  I went to the doctor's office in a panic and spent 20 minutes hooked up to fetal monitoring to make sure that the baby was still happy and healthy and thank god it was.  THEN I was done.  Then I was so, so soooooooo way done. 

You know, things got so bad there, so many punches thrown, that by the end we weren't even ducking them.  We'd just look down, take the hit and then keep slowly moving, lost in our daze of what else could happen.  

Except that I've become a kind of ostrich hydra.  Every time some worry rears its head, I say to myself, can't fall apart over that, bury it.  Then the next thing, then the next thing.  Maybe one day all of these heads are going to look up from the sand and blink at me expectant-like, and I'll have to reckon with them.  Or maybe, the mountains I saw will just stay molehills in the dirt behind me, and I'll keep slowly moving.  

Speaking of my mom, she predicted the following on 10/14/08 (which oddly would have been my 8th anniversary, had I stayed married to my first husband).

Girl

Born December 6th

8 pounds, 3 ounces

21 inches long

Any predictions from the Carcharodonna readers?   

Too Much Information in 3...2...1...

So, today I received an unpleasant surprise.

It seems that checking your cervix to see how far effaced you are is NOT comfortable.  

And when I say it is not comfortable, I mean that I almost slapped my doctor.  

Eeyagh.

The baby dropped two days ago.  It felt like someone was pushing down on my stomach, these brief but strong feelings, three times in quick succession, and then all of a sudden I could take deep breaths.  My heartburn also pretty much stopped.

Let me pause and reflect, "thankyougodthankyougodthankyougodthankyougodthankyougod."

Heartburn sucked.   Heartburn sucked in WAVES of suck.  Roiling, burning, gigantic waves of suck.  I fell asleep one night last week with a Tums in my mouth, and woke up with a trail of pink dried across my cheek.

The trade-off is that I have to pee CONSTANTLY.   Two nights ago, I peed five times in 30 minutes.  The urge was URGENT.  I would hoist my body up, disentangle myself from Lucy, pad over to the restroom and tinkle out about three teaspoons.  I do all my tricks, I lean very far forward, I wait a few seconds, I sneeze (this one is a sure-fire squeezer).  When I am sure I am done, I stand up and immediately feel the urge to pee again.  At one point, in extreme frustration, I mentally decided that I would pee the bed.  I would just do it.  My husband loves me, and he feels so sorry for me, he won't mind.  Well, he will mind, but I will act horrified and disgusted, and I will try to cry and he'll forgive me.  

The belly is huge.  It has its own zip code.  It has its own laws of gravity.  Walking around trying to support it and keep my balance now requires the waddle.  The other day I was sure I'd flattened the arch in my foot, just by wandering around the house.

We signed another offer on our house today.  This is the third.

We are happy, but it is hard to let go of our doubt and frustration.  We've been happy and excited two times now.  Two times now the deals have fallen through.  This deal represents the absolute bottom of our finances.  We don't make any money.  Before we countered the absolutely absurd* offer we received, we figured out how much we owe on the mortgages, how much the interest will be, how much the commissions will take, closing costs, etc....and countered with a number that allows us to clear all this.  That's it. 

*Absurd = Offering $300,000 for a house currently listed at $334,950.  

I am resurfacing from a couple weeks now of worry, doubt and fear.  I will say that the Pope and I are having fun together, and that is so incredibly rewarding.  If I have nothing but him, and our baby, and our kitties, then I am still very rich.  

We went over to my sister-in-law's house (the Pope's sister) last night for dinner, and we just had a blast.  I sat there, surrounded by my husband and his wonderful family, and we were all laughing and laughing, and talking, and marveling at the nieces, who are spectacularly interesting, and I couldn't help but think about how lucky I am.  How blessed we are, and how important it is to realize that.  

I hope I keep realizing that.  

Aaack

Sometimes I just think things that are so mean.  So uncharitable.

I just want to crack my chest open, take out my heart and stomp on it a couple of times.  

Dear Baby

Dearest, darling baby,

Today is Monday and you have been kicking my left ovary all day.  Or punching it.  It is actually extremely painful, and I wince and shudder every time you do it.

To pay you back for this, when you are a teenager I will tickle you until you pee.  

In front of your friends.  

Or your prom date.

You're welcome,

Mom

Attempting Normalcy

In a nod to my husband, who looks super-darling sitting on the couch worrying through a football game, I am eating trail mix the RIGHT way.

I am not:

1.  Eating all the M&Ms out.

2.  Then eating all the raisins, delighting when I find a brown M&M I missed.

3.  Scrounging for and finding the cashews.

4.  Eating all the almonds.

5.   Walking over to the garbage and throwing out the remaining peanuts, because they are cheap filler nuts and bleccch.

That is all, it has not been a very interesting day and I am suddenly extremely uncomfortable.  My belly is huge and it gets in the way of everything I do.  I can barely breathe and if I eat something larger than a plum, I feel as if I've gorged in Roman times but been denied the vomitorium.

Weight Loss Secrets - Third Trimester of First Pregnancy

Yesterday at the doctor's office I found out that I have only gained 9.8 pounds at this stage of my pregnancy. I have 5 weeks until my due date. The baby is fine, the baby is healthy and happy, and my fundal measurements are excellent, perfect for the stage I'm in. There is no cause for concern, I'm told. The nurse actually told me not to tell anyone about this, because pregnant women everywhere will be upset at my genetic tranquility for pregnancy.

So I decided to blog about it, naturally, and tell everyone how I've managed to do this.

1. Overeat immediately upon getting engaged, and rack up the poundage to a terrifying state that gets you enlisted in your local Weight Watchers meeting after an unflattering photo is taken of your alarming lack of chin.

2. Drink heavily for many many many years preceding your weight gain.

3. Exercise only when in fear of death. i.e. Don't run unless you are being chased, get winded and smoke heavily when you attempt to garden, consider lifting the weekly wine purchases to be all the "conditioning" you need. 

4. Gain and lose the same 2 pounds for three weeks on Weight Watchers while introducing all kinds of leafy green vegetables into your diet.

5.  Get pregnant after almost a year of trying, presumably because the leafy green vegetables hit your ovaries first.  They certainly did nothing for your thighs.

6.  Negotiate transfers to be closer to family now that you're pregnant.  You have stopped drinking immediately, which surprises the hell out of you.

7.  Lose your job when the transfer for you doesn't work out.  You are still craving and eating lots of green vegetables, although pickles gross you out, inexplicably.

8.  Have the sale of your house fall through minutes after the moving company drives away with all your belongings.  Pop Tarts subsist you through the move, which you perform alone,  four months pregnant, while your husband fulfills his obligations to his idiot company who have no sympathy for your situation.  Obligations that he cannot be excused from include Miniature Golf, and last-minute impromptu dinners for "team building."

9.  Have the SECOND house sale fall through when the buyer is an incompetent deadbeat who can't really afford the house, with an estranged wife who is taking legal advice from her friend Doofus McIdiot, who is not actually a lawyer.

10.  Get your husband's company to let him go three months after you lost everything to fulfill his transfer commitment.  It is best if they do this on the last day of the month so that your health insurance expires instantly.  

11.  Voila.  You have only gained 9.8 pounds, yet you manage to have a happy, healthy baby in there. 

Baby, I promise you that I will never treat you the way life has treated us while we were waiting for you.

Under Pressure

I wake up in pain. Every morning, no matter the position I'm in. My back recently, aching. For weeks now, my hips, or one hip, or my knee. My hands have been numb in the morning for months. First just the thumb through middle finger of both hands. Now one entire hand is numb, either hand, each hand, one per morning. Sometimes it is two hours before the feeling comes back.

But every morning, I wake up and feel like a car accident was survived during the night. For a few minutes, I grimace quietly and try to shift appendages, to release the tension and get the pain away. Usually at this time it is just barely light out, the husband and the cats have been sleeping soundly. Lucy is attuned, she knows when I wake up, and her stuttering, crackling purr usually starts up within a minute. Just saying, Hi Mom. If I look over, there are her green eyes, peeking at me over the covers, smiling sleepy at me these first moments.

Sometimes I can't imagine the love I'll feel for this child, because the love that swells and lifts me bodily when I look at Lucy is frightening enough in its intensity.

From the Universe......

A smackdown of such proportions, I cannot contemplate.
I know that everything will get better, but the fear right now is almost crippling.

I also know that we are not the only ones in this troubled time that are undergoing this type of uncertainty over our future, but I am having trouble figuring out what the lesson here could possibly be.

Idle Chatter

I have exactly 15 eatable cookies out of the batch I made this morning.
What with the first batch being undercooked (there is a difference between "chewy" and "intestinally inadvisable") the third batch having the oven turned off accidentally (wtf?) and then the makeup baking having been forgotten completely until they were brown as the bottom of my shoes, we didn't come out with many. Which is okay, because I ate the weight of my left boob in batter as I was making them. Why is it that baking cookies sounds like so much fun when you first think about it, and then by the third batch you can't imagine what sounded fun about this, and how big do I have to make them until this $@%$%#! dough runs out, and then, NO I'm not going to scrape the bowl, fuck it, I've been standing here for hours and I just remembered I don't actually LIKE cookies.

What a difference a neighborhood makes! We have a new visitor to the house, a young girl kitten named Thunder, who is enamored with the admittedly handsome Leo and who comes by to hang out, sleep on the patio and make moon faces at him. Leo is alternately irritated, scared or preening. Lucy hated her on sight and spends her time crouched in the house, ready to bitch out should the occasion warrant itself. In our old house we had nothing but butchy feral strays who came by to terrorize, intimidate and pee over everything.

I am currently enthralled (and occasionally, rarely, every once in a while disgusted) with my pregnant body.

Discovering new symptoms and then Googling them is very entertaining and is keeping my mind away from the apocalyptic future that awaits us because we haven't sold the house and tallying up what we've lost makes my heart rip itself to shreds and pound on my ribcage in terror.