Waiting

Waiting
Originally uploaded by Spamily

I think I give this baby at least another week in utero, maybe more. The prenatal instructor said that first babies come an average of eight days after the "due date," and I don't feel like this one is in a hurry, even if the head is down.

Sleepers and onesies and socks and diapers and receiving blankets are slowly accumulating in the nursery. We're going out tomorrow for a changing pad to go on top of the dresser that used to be full of yarn.

J., the aforementioned prenatal instructor, has picked up on the grief and fear that are still lingering from the miscarriage two years ago, and suggested an extra hypnotherapy session to help me let them go. I find myself awfully skeptical, and yet willing to grasp at anything that will make it hurt less. This baby doesn't deserve to have birth slowed or made more difficult by anguish about what might have been. So I think I'll take J. up on her offer, and see what happens.

In cat news, Martha has been unbelievably clingy the past couple of nights. bringing her snake directly onto the bed next to me, and spending most of each night curled up half on top of my belly and half on top of the body pillow. Yesterday when I was puttering around in the nursery, she and Charlotte both came tearing up the stairs and then spent a while running around the room, wild-eyed. There's a disturbance in their Force. Poor kitties. They don't know the half of it yet.

Thirty-nine weeks

It is getting harder and harder to haul myself off the couch. When I sit on the exercise ball, my belly touches it. This baby is riding low.

I am still making it to my FitMom classes -- last night was yoga -- and this afternoon I'll be out of the house for quite a while, first for a massage appointment, then for some shopping, then for a haircut. (If I want a nap today, I'd better have one now.)

The painter finished last Thursday. The nursery is a nice cheerful yellow with red and green here and there. The master bedroom is a dark indigo-purple, slightly darker than before. It looks fabulous. The piles of crap are diminishing slowly; yesterday we got rid of the big pine table that had been my desk for years. I posted it on Freecycle.org, a network intended to keep stuff out of landfills by making it easy to give things away. Within a few hours I had a response; a single mother of three is moving out of her basement apartment and needed a new dining table. We probably could've gotten $40 out of it if I'd tried to sell the thing, but giving it away to someone who really needs it was much better karma. Now to move along the old CD cabinet, my old nightstand, and a box of tumbled marble tiles.

Mr. K is under the gun for a big deadline at work; he pledged that he'd be able to finish this piece of work before the baby showed up, and so he's really feeling a lot of pressure. I find myself getting nervous that the baby will come before he's had the chance to learn enough about labour and birth. I'm glad we've hired a doula.

Man. I am exhausted. I think that nap is a good idea. (Hello, baby. You sure are active today.)

(By the way, I did vanquish the bootie pattern. The results are ridiculously cute. Pictures forthcoming.)

There oughta be a disclaimer

This pattern for knitted booties ought to have a warning on it:

Warning: not suitable for pregnant women

It is way too fecking complicated for my poor shriveled brain.

I will vanquish it. I will.

The nursery

The nursery
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The baby could show up any minute now and still be considered full term. The picture shows what the baby's room looked like as of yesterday. You might notice the dearth of baby-related stuff and the surplus of random crap.

We spent yesterday evening mucking the room out (into the study, which was previously pretty much done and is now unusable), and also doing lots to move stuff away from the walls in the master bedroom. When my midwife told me to stay away from paint fumes, I decided I didn't want to leave all the painting responsibilities on Dave's shoulders. I also decided that it would be a very good idea to cover the flat indigo paint in the big bedroom with an eggshell paint, so that when the kid gets mobile and starts leaving marks everywhere we'll be able to scrub them off. And I didn't want the painting going on with a baby in the house, so I broke down and hired a painter. He will take three days to do the whole job, and it will look great, and it will be done.

He started today. The room in the picture is now almost empty, and it's a nice yellow with a red bulkhead and green closet doors. Tomorrow he'll do the windowsill, the door, and the baseboards, and then he'll get started on the bedroom. Nice guy, highly recommended by others in the building. So: yay.

My feet and ankles are sausages. I'm finally getting stretch marks across my belly. I grunt a lot when I move around. I'm glad I'm not working anymore, because it's so much effort to get anywhere, and I get exhausted very easily. But even with all the discomfort and unpleasantness, I've really loved being pregnant. It's amazing to know that my body can do this, can build a tiny person by combining two cells. I'm a little sad that this part of the process is almost over.

Thirty-seven weeks

Yesterday the primary midwife (M.) and the student midwife (C.) made their home visit. The cats were friendly; Martha certainly did turn on the charm. M. and C. had a look around the place, deemed the master bedroom an appropriate place in which to give birth, and then examined me. Blood pressure 110/80, fundal height 36cm, baby's heart rate 144bpm, head engaged in the pelvis, body starting to turn so that the back is toward my front. This last in particular is very good news, because I'm told it's extremely painful to give birth to a baby whose skull is pressed up against one's tailbone. (This is what's known as the dreaded back labour.)

Plus, we've made it to 37 weeks. The baby could come today and be considered full term. People keep telling me that first babies are usually late, though; we could be waiting for another five weeks. I hope that labour waits for at least three more, because the prenatal classes that we're taking end on October 4.

I'm not sure what to think about these classes. I've been very glad to be able to approach this birth with so much attention to its emotional and spiritual aspects as well as to its physical ones; the traditional medical model of care tends to ignore all the touchy-feely stuff (literally, with babies often being whisked away to warming units when they'd do far better to be lying skin-to-skin on the mother's chest). And even though I'm more than a bit of a hippie, I find myself oddly resistant to the idea of self-hypnosis, and I'm having a hard time achieving the deep relaxation that we're being taught. The classes are paid for, though, and I'm sure it'll be good for me to hold a lot of my fears about labour, birth, and being a parent up to the light so that I can try to let them go. It is nice to be in a class in which everyone has a midwife, not an OB.

Plans for the next week: exercise class tonight at 7:30. Lunch with the old boss and his wife tomorrow at 1:00. (I have to figure out a nice gift to give them. Suggestions welcome. They've been very good to me.) Trip to the west end tomorrow evening to look at the contact sheet for the pictures we had taken last Saturday, and to pick up another dozen and a half cloth diapers. (Doug: we're planning to wash them ourselves.) Then back out east to greet Teezonk and two other friends who are coming for the weekend.

Saturday is the neighbourhood garage sale; if I weren't so lazy I'd have spent part of today making price tags for all the stuff we need to get rid of. Saturday night we're having dinner at the Thai restaurant owned by one of my former students. (I hope she's there; I'd dearly love to see her.) Sunday we see our friends off and then get to work moving furniture and boxes of crap so that the painter can show up on Monday morning to work on the nursery and the master bedroom for three days.

Monday is lunch with my awesome trainer, with whom I hope to start working again a couple of months after the baby comes, and then yoga class in the evening. Wednesday is lunch with my friend Mika, and then another prenatal class in the evening.

I write all this here mostly to keep myself from forgetting something. I'm looking forward to getting my brain back someday. It's not a bad brain, when it has enough serotonin floating around.

I'm going to go downstairs and get some more food and water, and put my feet up, and finish this second baby hat. I like knitting for babies: yesterday's hat took, yup, one day.

Baby-related consumer-based activities

Yesterday we dropped a lot of money on cloth diapers (yes we are planning to use cloth diapers), a diaper pail, diaper covers, and a baby carrier. On Thursday, after we dropped my parents off at the Buffalo airport, we went to a Babies-wah-Us* and bought a co-sleeper bassinet that attaches to the side of the bed. It's exactly what we wanted, but we couldn't find the Arms' Reach brand in Canada. We also bought a couple of onesies and a couple of sleep suits with feet. One of them has little trains on it because Mr. Krapsnart is such a railfan. High cuteness.

*Our friend Steve K., lexicographer extraordinaire, calls it this because the backwards "R" is pronounced "wah" in the Cyrillic alphabet. I love hanging out with language geeks.

The other thing we did yesterday was go to a professional photographer who shot pictures of me and the belly (clothed and not), and pictures of me, the belly, and Mr. K. We've been together for more than 14 years and had never had a professional portrait taken before. We'll have a contact sheet (she uses film!) next week, and some prints sometime after that. I am very excited about this, and very happy to have found a good photographer on short notice. (Had tried Heather Rivlin a while ago, but she's booked at least eight months in advance.)

I feel like every step we take toward getting ready to have a real baby around will delay the imminent arrival that little bit more.

People have been asking where we're registered. This is a very good question. The answer right now is that we aren't. This morning I tried registering at the Sears Canada website. Feh, I say. Feh. The "Register online" page was nearly impossible to find, and once I'd filled out our information (which I hate sending over the Internet) I discovered that there seemed to be no way to add items from the website to the registry. So I called the 800 number and, after being talked at for ten minutes by a particularly loquacious CSR, confirmed that no, there is no way to do everything online; to add items you either have to go to the store and fire a scanner gun at the things you want, or sit at home typing in numbers from the (paper) catalog.

Grr. So much for Sears.ca, then.

(Martha is washing Charlotte's head as I type this. They usually have quite an adversarial relationship, so this is nice to watch.)

Even though we've bought some stuff there, I don't think I want to register with Babies-wah-Us because they seem to have been pretty crappy corporate citizens over the past few years. Amazon.ca doesn't have all the baby stuff that amazon.com has, and most things coming in from amazon.com would be subject to Canadian taxes and import duties on arrival. So I'm at a bit of a loss about a registry. It would be nice to have one so we could specify "no pink or blue pastel" (one of the biggest reasons we haven't been forthcoming about whether this baby is a boy or girl, even though we've been 95% sure for months*) and "no branding, especially no Disney." Much of what we're buying is in bright colours (babies see them better!), and, well, don't get me started about Disney. (They bought Pooh Bear, dammit. And never mind their stranglehold on the American media, and the sexism and racism in so many of their products, and and and... Like I said, don't get me started. I'll know I've lived a bad life if I die and find myself eternally trapped in Disneyland.)

*Recently I was talking to a friend about boy and girl babies, and mentioned that one of my cousins and his wife had been expecting one and been surprised by the arrival of the other. My friend's response: "That would have been such a disaster! We'd have had to redo the whole nursery!" I don't get it; I really don't. Everything we have so far is unisex.

And yes, I freely admit that my stances on corporate and personal social responsibility are inconsistent and even at times hypocritical. I could be far more diligent than I am about refusing to buy anything made in China; I could spend a lot more time researching the provenance of what I buy; I could get off my ass and actually move the money in my RRSP out of the big corporate funds where it lives now and into more socially responsible funds at the credit union. [FWIW, the bulk of my investments, made back when I was living la corporate vida loca ten years ago or so, are in ConglomMutualFundsCo's ostensibly "socially responsible" fund, which has done much better than many of their other ones.)

But: I live in a big city and almost never drive; I haven't eaten meat in 15 years; lots of my non-pregnancy clothing is made from organic cotton; and I do my damnedest to avoid buying anything made by Nestlé. I'm going to have to think about all this stuff a lot more so that I can explain it to our child over the next few years and provide enough education and facts to enable the kid to make her or his own decisions.

This is the long-winded way of saying that no, we are not registered anywhere, and probably won't be. We really appreciate the inquiries, though. You guys are awesome. If you really want to send us something, drop me a comment or an e-mail and I'll send you our address.

Almost 36 weeks

Almost 36 weeks
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The scary thing is that this is the biggest my tits have ever been.

Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes

This morning started at 7:00 when the alarm went off. We lay there dozing through the national news on CBC, me with my head on Mr. K's chest and my leg across his legs, Martha curled up in the small of my back. Charlotte, as always, was at the foot of the bed.

I got up at about 7:40 and got into the shower. After I was clean and dressed, I came downstairs and had some breakfast: a scrambled egg, slices of cheese, and a pile of alfalfa sprouts on a wholegrain English muffin. Mr. K has become very efficient at making my little breakfast sandwiches. I put on a bit of makeup (concealer under my eyes, some definition for my eyebrows), poked around on the Web for a bit, and finally got out of the house just after 8:45.

The Pigeon Man was out this morning, lying on a small mound of grass in the little parkette he frequents, shaking out a bag of bread to feed the masses of pigeons and sparrows that were clustered around and on top of him. He always looks terribly unhealthy, just inches from death with his sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, but he's there almost every day, pulling on his giant foul-smelling stogie and letting the birds surround him.

As I walked north I didn't see the tall, nervous, thin woman who always seems to be in a rush to get to work. Nor did I see the squarish red-haired guy with the chinstrap beard.

The streetcar was relatively empty and I got a seat with no trouble. I'd forgotten the new September Metropass, but the very kind driver let me on anyway and even gave me a transfer so I could get on the subway. The chimes of the cathedral announced nine o'clock as we went past, letting me know I was on time.

I got onto the subway and rode to work. Took the stairs out of the subway station, and the two flights after I got into the building. Went into the tiny little teachers' room, chatted a bit with another teacher, gathered the books I needed, and went off to class, where I had one (1) student.

This routine, with minor variations (usually more students), has been my weekday morning for months now. Today was its last hoorah. I taught for a couple of hours, and then cleaned my stuff out of the fridge, said my farewells to my boss and his wife (they're taking me out for lunch next week), and left.

This is the seventh job I've left since I finished university. It doesn't get easier to walk away. This is the first time, though, that I've had someone kicking me from the inside to remind me why I'm going.

I've been thinking a lot about the work I do and about how it's compensated: even though there are more letters after my name than after Mr. K's, I make a fraction of what he does, and my jobs are far less stable. I discovered a week or two ago that I am most likely not eligible for any sort of maternity leave because I've been officially self-employed for the last eight months (read: working for a place that's too small to afford a payroll system).

The work I'm drawn to -- teaching English as a second language within the realm of social service -- is traditionally underpaid. There seems to be an assumption that because it's good, meaningful work, often in the nonprofit sector, those who do it shouldn't expect more pay. Aren't you committed to the cause? How dare you want more money? Shouldn't you be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good? (This hasn't been the case at all at the job I just finished, but then that job wasn't at a nonprofit.)

I find myself wondering about the degree to which the inequity of compensation between jobs I can get and the job that Mr. K has is linked with gender: when I go to professional conferences, I can't help but notice that 90% of my colleagues are female. Even the ESL jobs that aren't connected to social service are usually underpaid and unstable. (At one conference, the [male] keynote speaker noted that ESL teaching is "the armpit of academia." ESL programs in schools are often the first ones to be cut when budgets get tight.)

And the instability of my pink-collar job means that I don't get benefits when I have to take time off to do the unpaid work that women have been doing for millennia. This isn't what I had in mind when I finished my degree at a feminist women's college.

I'm feeling deeply dissatisfied by the lack of structural support available for women who find themselves in what are traditionally "women's jobs" and need to leave for a while to bring new people into the world. People keep telling me I'm lucky to be able make choices, but even if I had a job that guaranteed me a maternity leave, it just wouldn't make any financial sense at all for me to keep working and Mr. K to drop to only 55% of his salary so that he could take time off. For economic reasons, I have to make exactly the same decision that a working woman did 40 years ago.

So that's what's been kicking around in my head for the past couple of weeks. Kicking around in my belly is a baby, whose imminent arrival is freaking me out no end. Baby baby baby.

My parents are here, and they and Mr. K and I spent the afternoon poking around baby shops. We have bought almost nothing even though I'm due in less than five weeks. Right now the baby's possessions add up to this:

• a dark blue Wellesley onesie
• twelve small washcloths
• three receiving blankets (two of which were gifts from friends)
  
• a pair of soft-soled shoes (also a gift from friends)
  
• one pair of socks (gift from my parents)
  
• one bib (gift from my parents)
  
• a travel playpen (a gift from Pina and Ian, given when they visited and their then-13-month-old needed a place to sleep)
• a sling (also from Pina and Ian)
  

So far no diapers (we're planning to use cloth), no co-sleeper or crib, no big pile of onesies, no diaper cream, no nipple cream, no "so you've gone and had a baby" books, no changing table, no bedding, no curtains, no car seat, no stroller. The nursery looks like a storage room: it is currently full of crap purged from my study (soon to be our study, but currently in use as a guest room for my parents) and stuff that Mr. K needs to deal with. We haven't even bought paint yet.

I am simultaneously equanimous and overwhelmed.

I guess we're keeping each other

After eleven years of living together and almost nine of marriage, it's finally happened: we've merged our book collections. I am thrilled about this. We merged the CDs long ago, but now I finally feel completely married. Phew.

The merger is a result of having to consolidate Mr. K's study into mine so that his can become the baby's room. Even though we've been working like dogs for a couple of weeks now, remarkably little has happened in what will be the nursery; it's all been going on in my room and the master bedroom.

Mr. K has complained for years that he's tired of having IVAR shelves. I've lost count of how many times I'd suggested Billy, only to have him veto those as well. So we've lived with IVAR for more than a decade, and it has served us well. Last weekend, however, I suggested getting an IVAR desk, and that seemed to push him over the edge. On Sunday he phoned from IKEA and said, "How about some Billy shelves?"

I am proud to report that I didn't climb through the telephone wire and hit him.

So now we have Billy shelving in the study we will share. Installing it involved taking all the books off the old shelves, disassembling the old shelves, assembling the new shelves, and putting most of the books back onto them. They have somewhat less capacity than the old ones, so there've been piles of books sitting on the floor quietly awaiting new homes.

Some of the IVAR has gone into our bedroom closet, which is (thank you, idiot architects and idiot builder) too shallow to hang clothes in. (We had to spend a large chunk of money six years ago to get a wardrobe and drawers installed along one wall of the bedroom.) All the trade paperbacks went in there, as did my collection of film books.* That closet is now done, yay.

* A great interest in silent film a few years ago resulted in the accumulation of a decent little library about it. My changing interests are reflected in my books: I have collections about not only silent film but representations of the female body, knitting, writing, teaching ESL, weightlifting and triathlon training, and Shakespeare. And that doesn't touch the novels.

Because Mr. K was out of town for the weekend helping his parents get their place ready for their 50th anniversary festivities in a couple of weeks, K. and J. came over today to help me move the five-foot solid pine table out of the study and assemble the new computer desk, which is considerably more complicated to put together than the Billy shelves were. Despite some very frustrating moments resulting from our not having read the directions carefully enough, we all managed to maintain remarkable equanimity and good humour. Hooray for us. I now have a new, fully assembled desk.

Left to do: take down the other wall shelf so that the printer can go on top of the desk. Plaster over the holes in the wall, and sand, prime, and paint them. Empty the contents of the large pine dresser (a ridiculous quantity of yarn and an embarrassing number of unfinished knitting projects) into big plastic tubs (yet to be bought) that will go into the linen closet. Move the dresser out of the study. Put my computer desk into place and reassemble the computer. Move Mr. K's computer desk into the study. Buy a four-drawer filing cabinet and fill it with the contents of both two-drawer filing cabinets. Dispose of the two-drawer filing cabinets. Sell the large pine table. Sell the big queen-sized futon that used to be our couch. (Snif. So many guest-based adventures happened on that futon. I'll be sorry to see it go.) Get a smaller pullout sofa to go into the study so that we still have room to put up guests. Paint the baby's room. Move the dresser into the baby's room. Get a changing table and a crib, preferably one that can be converted into a bed.

I get slightly dizzy thinking about all of it. And I don't stop working until the middle of September, and my parents arrive on August 23 to stay for two weeks. I still don't know where we're going to put them.

Best student error I think I've ever received, in a short essay about earthworms: "For instance, earthworms destroy the soil cover by taking neutrinos from pants."

Memo to my students: do NOT trust the spell checker. Just don't.

(Beware the pants neutrinos!)

Seven months

Duck suit
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The nesting instinct has kicked in and we are trying to (a) excavate space in my study and (b) consolidate the contents of Mr. K's so that we can turn his into the nursery and move his stuff in with mine. There is a large, slowly disintegrating pine dresser (from IKEA, hence the disintegration) in my study that is full of yarn and unfinished knitting projects. There are also a half dozen large shopping bags around the house full of same. The knitting muse, once so much with me that I could hardly put my needles down, has been mostly absent for the past few years. She'd gone on holiday before, but never for this long.

I had at least half a dozen projects so close to completion that all they needed were a few hours' work. To wit: this duck suit needed some ends darned in, and the eyes and buttons sewn on. The nesting instinct is so powerful that it yanked the knitting muse back from vacation and forced her to sit with me as I went ahead and finished this damn thing. Hooray! One project out of a shopping bag and into... um... I guess, another shopping bag that will eventually fill up with things for the baby. We'll keep that new bag in the bedroom so I can at least feel like I've accomplished something in the study.

I also finished a child's sweater (but can't yet figure out how to blog more than one picture at a time, so you'll have to check my Flickr stream to see it). That one is going into the mail, so at least that's something out of the house.

Then there was the sock that just needed the toe stitches grafted together. I'm working on the mate for that one right now. Should have it done in a couple of days, and then I can make a baby blanket. I'm thinking a much shorter version of Alice Starmore's "Little Rivers" wrap, in bright red superwash sock yarn.

Knitting in sock weight yarn is not going to make much of a dent in the stash. Sigh. But at least the return of the muse seems to mean that I can stop with the compulsive Sudoku-ing.

The pregnancy continues and the baby is moving a lot. I am still coughing (after twelve weeks), with no sign of infection; the new theory is that the cough is somehow connected with the unbelievable heartburn. Thursday night and again last night, the cough woke me up in the wee hours and got so bad that it sent me flying to the washroom to puke. I guess the baby doesn't like Betty's black bean burritos. Alas.

At least coughing this much is making my abdominal muscles stronger for the birth. I really am feeling mostly positive about all this, even if my navel is disappearing.

Backup midwife

Met the backup midwife today, and really liked her. She said that my glucose tolerance test came back fine (yay!) and that the baby's head is already down. She also pointed out that the baby had a foot up under my ribcage on the right. Yes, thank you (oof), I had figured out that (oof) a pretty powerful limb was there (oof). So far, all seems to continue to go well. Thursday is the 29-week mark.

We will meet the spare emergency auxiliary backup midwife in two weeks.

Still having trouble grokking the idea that there's going to be an actual baby. People keep asking whether we've bought anything or registered anywhere. We have bought one thing: a dark blue onesie with the name of my alma mater on it. My fitness instructor says you really need only two things when the baby arrives: diapers and nipple cream. I'm down with that. (Although a good friend also recommends lots of soft washcloths plus ass cream. Makes sense.)

The post about home birth may have to wait for a couple of weeks. I accidentally left the sheaf of photocopies from the student midwife at the in-laws' house, and today I finally returned the copy of Ina May Gaskin's Spiritual Midwifery to the midwives' library. I'm waiting for my own copy to arrive from Amazon (haven't been able to find one in a bookstore). It's worth quoting. So far it's my favourite book about pregnancy and childbirth by a long shot. It was published in 1977, so all the pictures are of hardcore hippies and lots of the birth stories are full of words like "psychedelic" and "tantric" and "heavy." The mellow vibe is bringing me great joy. Ina May and her colleagues at the Farm Midwifery Center attended 186 births before anyone had to have a Caesarean; between 1970 and 2000, the Farm's Caesarean rate was 1.4%. (The US average in 2001 was 24.4%.) These women know what they're doing.

Outside babyland: Spent the weekend with the in-laws. Slept in their RV, and took the cat in with us. He spent most of the night on my pillow, crammed up next to my face. He is large and orange. I approve of him.

Also, a new student started in my TOEFL class this morning. He's from Russia, and he looks about 15. His mother brought him in this morning and warned the staff that he was shy. Well, yeah, I'd be shy too if my mother were shepherding me everywhere. Poor kid.

Time for the bed. I love the bed.

Filler

I'm working on a post about the safety of home birth as compared with hospital birth for low-risk pregnancies, but my attention span is so short this morning that I'm going to have to come back to it later. In the meantime, I thought I'd post a little bit of filler. Here are some links to my favourite websites these days.

• Cute Overload, which manages to be insanely cute and yet not cutesy. I know everyone already knows about it, but I link it anyway because it makes me so happy.
• Waiter Rant, written by a forty-something former seminarian who manages to be both deeply compassionate and bone-wearily cynical. Compelling snapshots of everyday drama plus trenchant little character studies: it's a great read.
  
• Working America's Bad Boss contest, with thousands of entries submitted by people who have had to endure incompetent, criminal, and even psychotic managers. (Why, yes. I do still have some unresolved anger toward my old boss, who made it impossible for me to continue in the best job I've ever had. Somehow it's comforting to read about people who are even worse.)
• Mimi Smartypants. I still love Mimi Smartypants.
• Ask Moxie, sensible and sensitive advice about raising kids.

There. That oughta hold the little bastards.

Insert amusing title here

My belly continues to get bigger. The placenta's in the front, so most of the sensations from the baby are somewhat dulled, but Mr. K finally did feel the kicking for the first time two weeks ago today, a few hours after it had awakened me at 3am. So far that's the only time that the baby's movement has interfered with my sleep.

Oh: sing ho for the comically large body pillow. I'm sleeping so much better with it between my knees and under my belly.

Today I put my hand on my belly at lunchtime, and felt something that resembled kicking, except that it came at very regular intervals. Hiccups!

In (somewhat) non-pregnancy-related news, last week I had (halal) pizza with two former students, one from Sudan and one from Iraq. F., the former, is a force of nature, big and beautiful and outspoken and funny. "How is your baby girl?" she asked. I asked her what made her think it's a girl. She said, "I already told you this one would be a girl." Oh. Heh. Okay, then.

S., a very smart woman of humour, dignity, and good will, was telling me about her brother's being kidnapped in Iraq and brutally beaten for four days. Amazingly, when the four kidnappers -- who took him at gunpoint in broad daylight as he went to buy stock for his grocery store -- realized that his family couldn't afford ransom, they let him go, just dropped him off on the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere. He was so badly hurt he could barely walk, but somehow got himself to a police station. After his family came to get him and bring him back to their town, word went out on a PA system that he was home safely. Fifteen hundred people showed up to the impromptu lunchtime celebration. S. said that out of forty-one people kidnapped that day, he was the only one to come home. For a few months afterwards he tried to readjust, but finally realized that he couldn't stay there and get over the trauma. Late last week he left Iraq for good, to move to Syria.

Ayup, destroying the country's infrastructure and leaving it open for mercenaries to abduct and beat civilians at will sure was the morally correct thing to do.

Can't think about it too much. It makes me too angry. Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant, but what's happening in his country in the name of the United States of America is far, far worse. Americans were supposed to be the good guys.

I hope we're doing the right thing by bringing a child into this fucked-up world.

An era ends

Dammit.

The third trimester looms

Lots happening but I'm too tired to write much. My feet and ankles have started swelling and it's getting harder to sleep. Mr. K bought me a body pillow. Hooray for the body pillow.

Evidently post-nasal drip happens to some women during pregnancy because the body is making so much extra mucus. I'm one of those women, and I've been coughing for seven weeks now. Sick. Of. Coughing.

I don't have anything serious to complain about, though. The baby is active and everything seems to be going well. I've found a great chiropractor who specializes in treating pregnant women, and I've hired a doula who comes very, very highly recommended. Tried prenatal yoga yesterday: didn't love it, but should probably stick with it. My balance for the tree pose is somewhat lacking.

I've discovered a marvellous Thai restaurant half a block from work. Gotten lunch from there three times in the past week. Today's lunch (with one of my colleagues, who is leaving in a week or two because he's about to burn out, alas): fish cakes, mango salad, and coconut rice. Yum, yum.

Some guy tried to pick me up as I was walking down Eglinton yesterday. I'm not used to having people try to pick me up, so the whole experience was strange and slightly unsettling. He stopped me to comment on my dangly moonstone necklace, asked several questions I didn't readily understand ("Are they your moonstones?" and "What are you doing?" at the top of the list) (and no, Mr. Friendly, my necklace did not come from the moon), and then said he hoped I'd join him for a beer. Guess he must've missed the wedding ring and the six-months-pregnant belly. Flattering but weird.

C., another colleague who is leaving soon (she's going back to school, and I'm taking over her job for a week starting next Monday until the new guy can get trained), told me today that her sister-in-law just lost her baby at eleven weeks. It's hard to talk about miscarriage: hearing about other people's experiences just dredges up so much pain and sadness. People mean well when they say things like "At least you know you can get pregnant" and "It's for the best," but dammit, all the hopes and dreams that were starting to take root are suddenly devastated, and for a long time every passing pregnant woman or tiny baby is like a knife to the heart. C. and I talked for quite a while; I think she's going to go visit her sister-in-law this weekend to help her grieve.

The Esquivalient One (to whom I wish peace and happiness as she tries to sort out her career and her relationship with her sweetie -- been through the rough patches myself, and yea, verily do they suck) mentions that she is careful about her blogging in order to maintain a narrative flow. A noble, considerate goal, that: makes reading her stuff more than worthwhile. All I have energy for right now, though, is brief little snapsnots such as this one.

I can stop whenever I want to

We were on our way out of the building earlier to do a bit of shopping, and a guy in the elevator noticed me staring at a Sudoku puzzle. "Now when you have to do one of those in the elevator, that's addiction."

So I hit him.

(Not really.)

Pet peeve: the word "soduku," both written and spoken. "Su" means digit in Japanese, and "doku" means "single." I was reading somewhere that people are stupid.

Reunion was marvellous. Started it by working out at the Sports Center (whose selection of free weights sucks, alas: there's not even a squat cage or a proper bench press setup). Watched myself doing sets of 95-pound deadlifts in the mirror, looked at the pregnant belly and the muscular shoulders, and thought, "Yes. Perhaps it is possible that I don't suck as much as I once thought I did."

That moment alone was worth the trip.

Update

1. My grandmother died at about five after one Denver time this afternoon, when all the family members were out of the room and the nurses were getting ready to give her a bath. I knew this was how it was going to happen, that she wasn't going to die with family near her. She held on for more than 72 hours after they stopped giving her fluids. Stubborn as anything, right to the end.

2. Mr. Krapsnart is officially a citizen of Ireland: the certificate arrived this morning. The application process was long and expensive and worrisome, because we were afraid the papers wouldn't come through until after the baby came. But because they did, the baby is now eligible for Irish citizenship as well, and therefore for an EU passport. Mr. K was so happy this morning that there were tears in his eyes. Kiss him: he's Irish.

I might just have a half pint of Guinness this weekend to celebrate. So there.

Absolution

Mimi has not died yet. She is septic and has had a heart attack, and the doctors have given her nothing except morphine for 36 hours, and yet she continues to hang on by her fingernails. Nobody is surprised.

My mother (who has not slept in those same 36 hours) told me in no uncertain terms not even to think about going to Denver. She told me to go to Reunion and take care of this baby. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. Bless my mother.

Saw the midwives today and heard the baby's heartbeat again. I don't get tired of that sound.

I am nearly out of grandparents

1. My classmate's baby did not survive.

2. My 92-year-old grandmother, whom I as a child adored beyond words, will probably not make it through the night.

The years have mitigated my adoration. Oh, the stories that abound about her manipulative nature, her narcissism, even her cruelty toward the people she was supposed to love. Her expectations that unfathomably rude behaviour was, from her, completely acceptable, because she was a Lovely Lady, wasn't she?

Neither my mother nor her sister knows where the will is. Word came out recently that one does exist, and that it disinherits all five of us grandchildren by name. Why is it, then, that she asked one of these grandchildren (the only male) to hold her medical power of attorney? To prompt one last pointless, malignant rift in the family? To show one last time that dammit, she still has control?

I have so many fond memories of being a small child and visiting my grandmother's house. My mother's doll Gary still rests in his pram in the basement, exactly where I'd leave him 30 years ago. I remember how special I felt when I was in that house, how loved I was, how much I enjoyed the little rituals -- the big red chair coming upstairs so that I could be tall enough at the dinner table, the old bellows organ in her living room moaning below the pumping of my feet as I picked out a melody on the keyboard, the giant music box in the room where I'd sleep being cranked into life so that it could play its big steel discs of old, old songs.

The visits became infrequent after we moved east, two thousand miles away, when I was four. My parents tell me I lamented moving so far away because it meant that I couldn't live in the house next door to Mimi and take care of her when she got old. For years the letters and presents came, and Mimi's telephone number and the melody it made when I called it are still burned into my brain.

It wasn't until years later that I understood why we'd moved.

The tales of the machinations, the snubs, the cutting remarks, the moments of high and manufactured drama: these aren't really mine to tell, as she was only ever sweet and gentle to me. But the effects of her carefully concealed, vicious nature poisoned my upbringing something fierce. My grandmother, Iago.

Next weekend is my fifteen-year university reunion. I've registered and paid, and we cashed in a pile of frequent flier miles in order to go. I was already girding for an emotionally draining experience -- being back in the area where I went to university always makes me sob unpredictably and uncontrollably, for reasons I don't yet completely understand -- but I need to go. I need to see the campus that I still dream about, I need to see my dear friend AM (she is a couple of weeks more pregnant than I am, and she did so much to help me get through my time there), and I need to show the place to my baby, even if my baby is still in utero.

I am terribly conflicted, though, about not going to Mimi's funeral. The major reason I'd want to go is to support my mother, who was and is so damaged by her own mother. But I know that the politicking (now there's a charitable word) among the extended family is going to be nearly unbearable. The financial reasons not to go are not inconsiderable, either. Everyone I've talked to tells me to skip the funeral, go to Reunion, and get my mother up here in a month or two, when the initial shock has worn off and the real, far more solitary mourning has begun.

But the little, innocent, loving four-year-old Emily would never understand in a million years.

I don't know what to do.

Wow.

Last week David Bowie showed up for the encore of a David Gilmour show at the Royal Albert Hall, and helped out with the vocals on "Comfortably Numb."

The thought of hearing Bowie's voice singing "Hello... is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me..." makes me weak. I think if I'd been there I might have passed out.

Update: yes. Oh, yes, oh, yes.

P. S. I am very amused to note that mentioning my nipples on Fark resulted in a whole bunch of hits on this site yesterday and today.