Baby Bed

Last night while I baked Thanksgiving pies, Daniel assembled the crib. Now our little Leland nook is all set up and ready for a baby boy. Leland's nursery is also a shared office space, so Daniel and Leland are going to chill together in their man cave all the time. I'm just waiting for the day that "No Girls Allowed" poster shows up on the door.

The aquarium, one of Daniel's favorite hobbies, is sure to be a lot of fun for Leland as well. It will also double over as a noise maker and a night light. A very expensive night light.

My sweet friend Roseanna Hatton hand-sewed these sweet little fox and owl pillows for Leland. Roseanna is also pregnant, and her baby girl (Leland's girlfriend,) Lyla is due on December 13th. We are so, so excited to meet sweet Lyla Grace soon!

The canvas with the writing on it was painted with love by Leland's Aunt Audrey. It features the lyrics to my favorite lullaby, "You Cannot Lose My Love"which makes me cry every single dad-gum time I hear it. It's by Sara Groves. Go figure. Here's how it goes:

You will lose your baby teeth.

At times, you'll lose your faith in me.

You will lose a lot of things,

But you cannot lose my love.

You may lose your appetite,

Your guiding sense of wrong and right.

You may lose your will to fight,

But you cannot lose my love.

You will lose your confidence,

In times of trial, your common sense.

You may lose your innocence,

But you cannot lose my love.

Many things can be misplaced,

Your very memories be erased.

No matter what the time or space,

You cannot lose my love.

-Sara Groves

Agh. Now I'm crying.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. God has been so faithful. I am thankful for His providence and provision, and for the love and support of our family and friends this year as we've prepared to welcome our little one.

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" Says the Pregnant Lady; "Everything is Meaningless."

I don't even know how many weeks I am anymore guys. I lost count somewhere around a thousand. What I do know is that these days, anytime someone calls me and I don't pick up, they leave me an excited voicemail asking, "ARE YOU HAVING A BABY?!"

Sadly, I'm not.

I'm never having a baby.

I haven't had one. Single. Baby.

And at this point, I'm starting to think there may actually be four or five inside me.

Don't ask me how they missed them in the ultrasounds.

These babies are ninjas.

But on a serious note, there's something I've been putting off telling y'all for a while now. I'm not actually having a baby. I know this probably comes as a shock to those of you who are still naive and pure of heart, and still believe that pregnancy ends in labor, which, in turn, ends in the birth of a baby. But as those of us who are a thousand weeks pregnant can tell you, babies are not born into this world. It is simply not the reality we live in.

I was once like you. I used to call Daniel in a desperate panic and have him fly home from shoots in New Orleans when I had 10 contractions in an hour, because I, too, believed in labor. But not anymore. I have become, as my sister Haley so aptly coined it, a Labor Atheist. Contractions are meaningless. I've been having them for weeks now, and sometimes they are painful and come every two to four minutes. But now, I just ignore them. Fool me once, contractions, shame on you. But until a baby physically comes out of me, I will believe no more of this poppycock about "labor" and "birth". What's that you say? There's a puddle of amniotic fluid on the floor? Ignore that. It's nothing. It, too, is meaningless.

Now that we've established that I am not having, nor will I ever have a baby, let's talk about why I've fallen off the face of the earth.

The real reason have been missing so many calls from my loved ones is because I spend an insane amount of time napping. Most women report that in this stage of pregnancy it's almost impossible for them to get any sleep at all, so I'm not complaining. But I do have (sort of) good news for those women: it doesn't matter. No matter how much sleep I get, I'm still a total zombie when I'm awake. The only difference is that I get to enjoy long bouts of unconsciousness, and that helps the time pass. You could achieve the same effect by hitting yourself over the head with a frying pan occasionally, if you were so inclined.

Every so often, though, I will have one really good day where I will experience a burst of energy. The cycle has gotten to be pretty predictable. I usually have about two or three down days, followed by a day of feeling normal, and then two or three more down days followed by a day of raving lunacy.

On one such occasion last week, I woke up at 6:30 am, baked banana bread from scratch for breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, washed and folded all our laundry, sewed some pennants for Leland's room, made some thank you tags and bows for the goodie bags I'm assembling for the birth team, (this was before I'd given up all hope,) cooked homemade soup, and wrote, addressed and mailed all our thank you notes.

Another time, after catching up on some basic chores I'd fallen way, way behind on, I vacuumed our entire house, including many of the walls, (not a joke,) mopped the floors, and crawled around the perimeter of several rooms with cleaning spray and a sponge scrubbing all the baseboards. I'm not going to say I felt great that night. Or for several days afterwards. Or even that I will ever fully recover. But I'd been lying around on the couch for days at that point, staring at the dirt, silently seething and plotting my victory over it. So when I collected enough strength to do something about it, I showed no restraint.

Each time I finish one of these cycles, I get exceedingly desperate for Leland to come quickly. Because if birth really does exist, and it happens during the part where I haven't touched a dish for days and no one in the house has any clean underwear left, I'm just not sure what we're going to do.

That's about all I've got for today. If I keep being pregnant right through Thanksgiving, I might have some pictures of the crib to post soon. If not, I'm probably just going to post pictures of Leland's face at the rate of 12 per hour for the rest of my life and not bother setting up the crib until he's about six months old.

Happy Due Date, Leland

Dear Leland,

Today is your due date.

Just sayin'.

Love,

Mom

Third Trimester Highlights

32 weeks

Purchase absurdly enormous body pillow. Bring home to full size bed and sad husband. Enjoy first decent night of sleep in weeks.

Heaven

Birth class instructor teaches Daniel and I a neat trick: after birth, instead of bathing the baby to get the vernix off, "rub it in like lotion" to "protect the baby." Unclear what we are protecting baby from. Try hard not to make eye contact with each other and risk laughing.

33 weeks

Mom comes to town for a wonderful shower with sweet Axis ladies. Feel the love.

Daniel assembles stroller, stands back and laments its incredible size. "It's so big. I didn't know it would be this big." He's right. It looks like a boat.

34 weeks

Notice first stretch marks on stomach. Soon thereafter, notice girl ahead in line at coffee shop wearing midriff top. Grieve for approximately one millisecond that I can "never wear a midriff top again." Snap out of it, recalling that in the 24 years I've had to try this out, it's never once struck me as a good idea. Promptly get over it.

Get dressed for dinner with a friend. It's cold out; wear red maternity sweater dress I've been looking forward to bringing out. Feel really cute until I look in the mirror and realize I look like a Christmas bauble. Resolve that getting dressed up is no longer worth the effort.

In a dream, Daniel and Nate genetically engineer a son using their own DNA plus that of Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon, and various other male celebrities. Their baby will be super hot, genetically superior to other babies, and due 3 months after Leland. Daniel doesn't give a lick about Leland, but is totally obsessed with his and Nate's hot celebrity baby.

Wake up totally pissed at Daniel, stay in a rotten mood all morning. Daniel doesn't know what he did.

Week 35

Daniel and I are 2 years old! Celebrate with a short trip to Chattanooga. Reserve a hotel with very few pictures on the website; don't know what to expect. At least seventeen cats is what to expect.* Have a great time, see aquarium, eat dinner at the best restaurant in the world. Decide to stay in Chattanooga with the cats forever.

Week 36

At my appointment, chiropractor corners me and begs me not to vaccinate the baby. Wish he would stop using words like "child abuse" and "propaganda;" feel very uncomfortable.

Baby drops.

Earlier today

Midwife tells me Leland is measuring a little ahead of schedule. Next week they'll check again, and I may have an ultrasound to determine if the fetus is too strong.

*At the hotel, the tip envelope has a handwritten note on it reading, "anything you can give will help feed the cats!" We get the feeling this whole operation is about the cats.

A Challenge

During the last 20 minutes of our childbirth class last night, we worked on a relaxation technique that involves deep breathing and massage.

I triple dog dare you guys to lie down on the floor with a dozen pillows around your body while listening to the sounds of soothing music and my instructor guiding the men through how to give a buttocks massage, then have your derriere awkardly massaged for the first time in your life in a room of people you don't know very well at all, then lift your head up from your pillow to see all the men concentrating really hard on massaging their wives butts. I dare you to do these things and not laugh. I was able to stifle it pretty well in my pillow so I don't think the whole class knows that I'm not mature enough to handle the seriousness of labor. But oh my goodness. I am not. It is all so very very funny.

Now This Is Happening

There's so much to do. So naturally, I'm sitting down to blog about it.

This past week I went to a used bookstore and found a few of the books you all recommended, then ordered the rest on Amazon. I made some good headway on a couple of them this week at work. I was initially expecting to spend much of my free time trying to keep up with all my reading, but then I remembered that I work with the most wonderful supervisors in the world, and as long as we don't have any customers and there's nothing else for me to be doing, which is very often the case, I can read all day and they don't mind a bit. It really is very helpful that I can read at work, since it frees up my days off to work on all my other baby projects. At work, as a courtesy to everyone around me, I've been making a concerted effort to cover pictures of anything alarming, like babies crowning, with post-it notes. Don't want to scare off all the customers.

Tonight I'm attending an open house for Nine Months and Beyond, a doula service in Nashville. They call this event a MaterniTEA Party, and the idea is that you can meet and interview doulas on their Baby Ejection Squad, or whatever they call it. (Probably not that.) Meanwhile, Daniel is currently on his way to Athens, GA to get a tattoo to commemorate Leland's upcoming birth, which means that I'll most likely end up choosing a doula on my own. I hope he likes my choice. And I hope he loves his tattoo. Here's the design:

Juuuust kidding. More on the tattoo later.

This morning I was lying in bed thinking about all the things I need to do in the next three months, and it occurred to me that I wasn't sure when to pack a hospital bag. So I checked it out on my phone. And wouldn't you know, there's a whole website dedicated to the packing of hospital bags. Of course there is. Here's what it said:

"We recommend that you pack your hospital bag by the end of your second trimester. Although this may seem early, it's better to be safe than sorry and you never know if you'll go early."

Guess what today is? The last day of my second trimester. I'm taking a trip to Target and packing today. Who knows what could happen if I didn't have it packed by tomorrow! I'm so glad I found out before it was too late!

Tomorrow marks the first day of my final trimester, as well as the first day of our birth class. Then on Monday I have my monthly (soon to become biweekly) prenatal appointment and Daniel and I are going to our pastor's house to talk to him and his wife about this whole Becoming Parents thing.

Today it feels like I looked up and all at once we have actual concrete things that we can do to prepare to welcome this child into our lives. It's very exciting, because up until now it's just felt like a lot of waiting around. I'm aware that it's common to get impatient toward the end of the third trimester once you can't breathe anymore and you're running to the bathroom every five minutes and you've completed all the major preparations. For now, though, I just feel elated that I can do things. I can start packing for the hospital, setting up the nursery, writing a birth plan and doing stupid looking pretend-pushing exercises with a room full of giant pregnant women and their husbands, (all of whom have a far away look, as though trying to recall how, exactly, they got roped into this class,) and all of those things are perfectly appropriate for this stage of pregnancy. It really is time to start getting ready to have a baby. It's almost time to have our baby!

I Feel Like I'm Cramming for Finals

As of yesterday, I now am 26 weeks. This means there are exactly one hundred days left before Leland is due to arrive. HOLY SMOKES people!! Time sure does fly when you're having fun! And by "having fun," I mean perpetually vomiting and crying and waddling around out of breath and feeling like a heifer. Fun! So I guess it's time to start thinking about getting this baby out. And also, what the heck I'm going to do with him after he gets here.

In the spirit of preparing to get Leland out, Daniel and I just enrolled in a 10 week childbirth class that starts meeting next week. I realize this is an extraordinarily long birth class, but I'm glad of that. My goal is to have an unmedicated birth, and I know that unless I do everything I can to prepare myself mentally and physically, that is one goal that doesn't have a snowball's chance. To say that I have a "low pain tolerance" would be an understatement so comically enormous that it might actually break the Internet, which is most certainly unequipped to support such an outrageous fib and would be crushed instantly by its magnitude. The truth is, I'm a major baby. I'm one of those charming people who copes with pain via loud complaints and dramatic moans. It's very endearing, I'm sure. And Daniel really, really hates to see me in pain. Let me rephrase that: Daniel really hates to hear me in pain. It really has nothing to do with human empathy or compassion. He's not particularly disturbed by the suffering of others, (which is something we'll address in another post, perhaps...) so long as they keep to themselves and don't go on about it. But he sure does hate it when I'm sick or injured, because he knows I'm going to be a real pain in his butt about it. I force him to commiserate with me. So anyway, I'm fully aware that if I went into labor tonight, before going through a rigorous training program, I would bust through the doors of labor and delivery demanding the immediate attention of an anesthesiologist, and maybe also a little bit of crack cocaine. Haha, just kidding about the cocaine part. Maybe. There's actually no telling what I might do when I'm in pain. Remember that time I hurt my eye and cried in front of strangers all week? Good times.

Another way I'll be preparing for birth and beyond is by reading alllll the books. Here are a few I'm bound and determined to read in the next 14 weeks.

One of my friends who delivered both her girls naturally recommended this book on childbirth:

And I've heard good things all around the Internet about this book on newborn care:

I'm also going to read these parenting books, both of which have been recommended to me multiple times by trusted sources:

Regarding the last two, I'm aware that during Leland's first year much of this information won't really be applicable, but I'm eager to start preparing anyway. I have a hunch that when he does start needing guidance, instruction and correction, I might not have time to sit down and read a book right away. I think I'll be a little preoccupied trying to keep him from hiding Daniel's wallet in the toilet or painting the nursery with his own poo. I'm sure I'll reread both of these in the future, but it won't hurt to go ahead and start mulling them over now.

While I'm on the subject, do any of you have books on childbirth, newborn care or parenting that are must-reads for new parents? Did anyone do well with Baby Wise? Want to try to convert me? Now's the time! In 14 weeks, I probably won't be reading much, and even if I were to try, I have it on good authority that my brain will have turned to pudding from sleep deprivation, and I will probably be completely illiterate. So this is a limited time offer, people! I may never read another book again! What are your favorites books? 1-2-3- GO!