What a Life!

…and what she really wanted to tell you.

Q: Are you dilated yet?
A: You can walk around dilated 2 or 3 cm for three weeks so it really doesn’t matter.

Q: Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl?
A: Yes, it will be one or the other.

Q: How big are you? [from a telephone conversation]
A: Huge. About to explode.

Q: Are you dilated yet?
A: You can walk around dilated 2 or 3 cm for three weeks so it really doesn’t matter.

Q: Do you know what you’re having?
A: We’re having a giraffe!

Q: Are you dilated yet?
A: The answer is the same as it was when you asked me five minutes ago. Seriously…no changes.

Q: How much more time do you have?
A: Did you just say what I think you said?

Q: Are you dilated at all?
A: You can walk around dilated 2 or 3 cm for three weeks so it really doesn’t matter.
Q: Well, I was just wondering if you were significantly dilated.
A: If I was significantly dilated, I would not be talking to you.

Today I am officially 39 weeks pregnant. Yes, still pregnant.

I’ve had really bad sciatica throughout this pregnancy. I finally started going to the chiropractor at the beginning of the third trimester, which has really helped. I’ve also talked with a lot of people who sought chiropractic care during pregnancy and delivered before their due dates. So even though Ben was born after his due date, I decided that I ought to be prepared for this child to arrive early.

Yes, I still have a week to go. And I’m still very prepared to go early. I know that when I go into labor, it will hurt and I will immediately wish I wasn’t in labor. I know that after the baby arrives, I will be getting up three or four times every night and I won’t be able to just sit on the couch whenever I want and knit. I’ll be tired and sore because there is a lot of healing that has to happen after one gives birth. I will feel even less motivated to do things, at least for a couple weeks, than I do now.

But for goodness sake…my hips hurt and I’m tired of being pregnant!

Last night I woke up with leg cramps so many times. I’ve had it happen once or twice in a single night, but not five or six times. I took a warm bath last night and a hot shower this morning, which usually helps with the hip pain (and I’m sure it did), but I still feel like both hips need to be replaced or I will fall when I walk.

Previously I was keeping myself occupied by getting this done and that done and the other thing done before the baby was born. None of them were all too important really – they were just things I wanted to get done. I still have a half completed list of things I theoretically want to get done, but quite frankly, I no longer care. My hips hurt, okay? I need to buy groceries, but I have a feeling I will just be limping through the store.

Someone put me out of my misery, please.

But today isn’t a good day because my midwife isn’t on call. Tomorrow, my least favorite midwife is on call until 3:00 when my midwife goes on call for the weekend. But I don’t want to have the baby tomorrow evening because Steve has tickets for the football game which is 11:00 Saturday morning and I want him to be able to go and have a good time. When the football game is over, Steve and Schon are going to bring home some furniture that Steve’s mom is giving us. By that point, the day will mostly be over. Sunday isn’t a really good day either, just because it isn’t. And Monday my midwife will no longer be on call. So the light at the end of the tunnel is very dim if it is in fact visible at all.

I think I’m going to go to McDonalds for lunch and have some French fries along with a fish sandwich and maybe a milkshake. Someone mentioned French fries the other day and they sounded really good then, and they still sound really good now. Perhaps the lubrication from the grease in the fries will make my hips better…who knows?

I will say this, though. I’ve decided that there are some things that I really like to do that I don’t do often enough, and I need to start making a point to do them. Blogging is one of those things. So forgive all the whining and know that I’ve treated myself to at least one fun thing today.

Cheers!

In the time between when I used to blog “regularly” and now, I have taken up designing with my knitting. It isn’t that I didn’t have design ideas before. I was known for feeling free to change things here and there, but I still followed the basic structure of the pattern. Now I’ve gained a nuts and bolts understanding of how to make garments that fit which means I can knit without a pattern.

Oh, I’ve made wonderful things. The joy of having a baby is that baby’s are small and you can use leftover yarn from other projects to design sweaters that knit up quick and are great experiments in design. So not only have I made wonderful things, I’ve used up a lot of leftover yarn from completed projects.

But here is the problem that has arisen – I can’t just knit anymore. I literally cannot follow a pattern. I’ve tried, but I get about halfway through and I have a better idea so I rip it all out and do it over my way. It’s fun, but it slows progress, and it’s sad when you can no longer be satisfied following a simple pattern.

Take, for instance, my current project: knitting wool pants for baby. The pattern I intended to use is one I actually helped design and slaved over for hours with the designer. It’s worked from the waist down and has great shaping techniques that make it work well over a variety of different diapers. But as I am knitting, it is so plain. And I keep thinking, What if I knit up from the cuff? How could I do the crotch differently? What designs could I add that would dress them up a little?

I’ve seen many patterns for knitted pants, and all the ones written for diapering are from the top down and the ones not intended for cloth-diapered babies are knit from the bottom up. The top-down ones are all seamless and the cuff-up ones are not. Otherwise there isn’t a big difference beyond the shaping or lack of it. I have this odd desire to try knitting a pair “the other way” just to see if I could do it. Shaping would be a much bigger challenge, but it could still be done. My mind is a whirl and I just feel compelled to try.

So I’m looking at a half-knit pair of longies and seriously thinking of ripping them out completely and starting over using a different method. Yes, another half-knit project ripped out so I can try it another way just to see if I could come up with something better. Why oh why do I do this to myself?

Yes, I’m still alive. I’m about halfway through what is supposedly month seven of pregnancy number two. This one has been much more difficult than the first, not from a medical perspective – everything is fine on that front – but from a sanity perspective. I don’t remember being this tired when I was pregnant with Ben. But then I didn’t have a toddler to chase around the house either. Ah, the glories of pregnancy!

Steve told me this morning that my belly is now bigger than a basketball. Thank you, Steve. I must confess that I do enjoy sitting on the couch watching my belly rock around as this child moves. With Ben, I had no clue what position he was in…I just felt him move. With this child, I have figured out the secret code and I enjoy watching my belly move (something I never saw with Ben). Perhaps it is the lack of muscle tone with subsequent pregnancies that is making this part of it so much more enjoyable.

The weather is finally starting to cool down, thank goodness. I actually have the windows open at the moment. It’s so nice to air out the house and not worry about dying of a heat stroke. There were a few 100-degree-days in July when I just hibernated and lived in the moment to get through it. A few things in my garden got baked as well. Next year I shall do my planting sooner so I can harvest some things before the heat kills them. Wish me luck!

So perhaps now I shall start blogging again. I’m always trying to get my act together so I can get more things done. I’ve gotten better over time, but you could still consider time management and productivity my number one guilt-enducing issue as a mom. But soon we will have a new child in the house and it will be fruitbasket upset all over again.

I’m still here. I have plans to post belly pictures and updates on my knitting soon. But right now I need to go find out what my toddler is doing…

Hey! The sun is out! I think I can be happy again!

We haven’t seen the sun since at least Thursday. And I have such a hard time accomplishing anything when there is no sunshine. Friday we went to play group and came straight back home. Saturday we went shopping in the rain. Sunday we just stayed at home. Today the sun was supposed to come out in the afternoon, but it’s 9:31 folks and the sun is shining. I am so happy I almost don’t know what to do with myself!

I’m sure it’s too wet to do anything in my garden. We were supposed to get three inches over the course of the weekend, but we haven’t put our rain gauge back out yet this spring so I do not know if we got that much rain.

Steve was going to paint the windows this weekend – obviously that didn’t get done. It’s only a few more weeks before he starts back with summer classes again so the rain killing one weekend of what he might have gotten done was not appreciated. I mean, it could have rained during the week, you know.

But seriously, I think I’m going to go upstairs and open all the windows. I’m feeling deliriously happy at the moment. Perhaps I have WAD (Weather Affective Disorder) instead of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). Who knows? Oh well!

People talk about what is important to them. Here are some of the words Ben uses most often:

“Daddy!”

“Bye-bye.” When Daddy is leaving for work. He waves, too, when he says this.

“Hat.” His first word, still one of his favorites.

“Outside.” When I put my walking clothes on or get his jacket.

“Shoes.” “Socks.” He loves them, is obsessed with them, but if we let him wear them inside, he takes them off after a while. Actually, he takes them off outside too. Yesterday I let him stay outside an hour after I saw him take his shoes and socks off. It was 40 degrees outside. His feet were still toasty warm, though.

“Truck.” He loves playing with his trucks. When he wakes up in the morning, the first thing he looks for is a truck to play with.

He says other things, but those are the things he says the most.

Things Ben never says…because they’re not important to him?

“Mommy.”

Steve tries to console me and tell me that since I am always there, Ben thinks I am an extension of himself. I’m part of his landscape, a constant in his life. Everything else comes and goes, so he talks about it. But Mommy is always there.

I don’t know. Most of the time when I leave, it’s in the evening and Ben is busy getting ready for bed. Sometimes I’ll leave for a bit on the weekend, and he’s happy to see me when I come home, but he doesn’t run over to the door and say “Mommy! Mommy!” like he does when Daddy comes home.

When he wakes up in the morning, he comes out of his room. Sometimes I’m the first person he sees, but he never stops looking until he finds Daddy. Then he follows Daddy around all morning until Daddy leaves for work.

I try to tell myself it’s just an extension of the “break” I get when Steve is home.

But it’s still hard not to feel rather small.