Because we will obviously never again be able to get to any type of store that sells cleaning supplies, I have stocked up. I am now ready to admit I have caught a case of nesting.
Method
Archive Page 74
Inspired by Kristin’s genius, I’ve been rewatching Felicity — from the pilot to, I hope, the series finale. I’m currently in the midst of the sophomore year. Because of her break-in to the campus pool, Felicity has found herself doing community service at the University’s student health clinic, which has lead her to stage a sit-in to protest the school’s policy forbidding the clinic’s distribution of the morning-after pill. This happens right on the heels of Ruby learning she is pregnant and her decision to have her baby. Not a coincidence, I realize, but it also doesn’t feel as convenient and contrived as it sounds. When Ruby learns she is pregnant, she begins to cry and I cried along with her. It is heartbreaking to see a woman — just barely out of girlhood — have to face something as life-altering, daunting and confusing as finding herself pregnant with an unplanned, and unwanted, baby.
Anyway, watching these episodes of Felicity has provoked me to write about something I have thought of frequently since I found out I am pregnant: I am so lucky.
I am so very grateful for a million things, as I hope I make clear, but I truly wish I could thank all of the medical professionals and political advocates who have come before me — and continue to fight to make safer, better and more accessible medicine — who have made my access to birth control so easy. I think often about how limited in their choices women used to be — like, say, the choice between a relationship and an education — and it can easily bring me to tears when I think of how lucky I have been not to have had to make those choices, or how difficult it must have been for other women faced with such a choice. When I went to college, it was easy to get birth control from the student health center. Yes, the morning-after pill was not as easy to come by as it is today, but it was still available. The pill and condoms were abundant and I never felt there was any judgment over birth control options. During my junior year in college, a friend of mine had a scare and we walked right over to Planned Parenthood on East Mifflin Street for a free test. While the scare was real, though ultimately unfounded, the solutions were easy to access.
I grew up in a time, and with a family, in which I always knew I had options and support. It breaks my heart to think that there are women all over the world who don’t have either of those two things.
My real point, though, is that I never forget how very lucky I am that I was able to get pregnant when I wanted to. I mean, we were able to make a real, actual choice. I know we didn’t have control over whether we conceived, but we could choose — and did choose — to try. And I think that’s just amazing. I wish that for everyone. I try very hard never to take it for granted that I am so damn lucky to have been able to get pregnant on my own terms.
(A few of my) favorite things
Published January 31, 2012 baby stuff , bling blog 2 CommentsTags: pregnancy
I think it’s high time for a visual post. I think I’ve been too wordy and boring with these posts. So here are some pics. They aren’t very exciting pictures, but I’d like to share a few of things that have helped me along in my pregnancy.
My hero, Aaron
Aaron has been a total trooper. He has done a million things that I’ve asked of him and a million more without me even asking. I can’t imagine going through any of this without him — and I don’t want to.
Gracie
There are not words to express how great Gracie has been. She comes to my side (or, more accurately, my belly) every time I cry after a bad day or have a mini breakdown, worrying about how everything will get done. She sleeps beside me at night and cheers me by bringing me a toy every morning. She is truly the greatest.
Body pillow
In November, my friend Andra gave me her pregnancy pillow, which was a Boppy Total Body pillow. The Boppy preggers pillow has quite a unique shape; it’s sort of serpentine with two differently-shaped pillows on each side connected by a very thin, long layer of pillow. If that makes any sense at all. Anyway, within hours of Andra giving me the pillow, I took just about the best nap of my life. I hadn’t slept that well in months. But something strange happened…as I worked my way into the third trimester, the pillow’s magic started to wane. I panicked a little, rearranged other pillows, tried flipping the pillow ends, tried wrapping the pillow all around me…Nothing seemed to work. I was uncomfortable again and there seemed to be no good solution. Until I bought the above-pictured body pillow from The Company Store. Cue music. Hallelujah! Heaven. I had had an excellent prenatal massage the day after my birthday and the masseuse had me use a similar body pillow. I felt like I could have fallen asleep on the table. After the massage, and an excellent lunch at La Baguette, Aaron and I popped in The Company Store to find a gargantuan body pillow on super sale. We bought it, took it home and I again had one of the best naps of my life. I don’t really know what to attribute the new comfort to, except maybe how much larger this pillow is and how it’s not been beaten down by my pregnancy body so it’s still fluffy and big. Whatever the case, I love this pillow.
Prenatal yoga
Prenatal yoga has been dreamy. I don’t always want to go, and sometimes I just do it from a DVD at home, but whenever I am done with it, I feel so much better. I know that everyone says that, but it’s true. It’s not pretty to watch my form (even calling it ‘my form’ is a stretch – pun intended), but I feel relaxed and looser after I do it. I just recently read an article in the New York Times Magazine about just how dangerous yoga can be. Of course, the article seemed to highlight moves involving headstands and crazy neck-stressing moves, and not the cat/cow poses I love so much, or the squats that hurt and the pelvic moves that help alleviate pain, so I don’t think I have much to worry about on that front. My hope is to do some postnatal yoga, as well.
Cupcake
This gorgeous cupcake was served at the Great Roe/Lund Baby Shower that was held last Sunday and it was even more delicious than it looks. I haven’t eaten a lot of cupcakes while pregnant, but I have eaten many more sweets than I would usually. I’m not sure if I have an actual increase in craving sweets, or it’s just that I let myself have cookies and ice cream far more frequently than I ever did when I wasn’t pregnant. In either event, though, I have enjoyed the sweet treats I’ve had. Yum.
Maps
Etsy. And Pinterest. Both of these sites have given me countless ideas for the nursery, and the rest of our house, and have made me feel more organized and less stressed about cute-ify-ing everything. I bought four of these maps off of Etsy and put them up in the dining area, replacing some ad hoc hangings we had there previously. The two maps shown are Madison and London (not shown, Florence & Rome). I just love the way they look — they have brought a crisp, clean look to a wall that had been really annoying me. I believe buying things like this fits in the category pregnancy-watchers like to call ‘nesting.’
Nursery corner
Decorating our make-shift nursery has been mostly super fun. Here is a picture of a lamp I love (bought from Urban Outfitters), a great radio my mom and Severa got me for Christmas, an adorable rattle from Land of Nod, courtesy of the awesome Tammy, and unbelievably cute mini-Chuck Taylors from Maggie (she had them sit atop the diaper cake she made us for the aforementioned shower). Oh! And a table from West Elm that was almost half-off with free shipping. Although we are limited on space, I think we have done well with what we have. I can’t wait to show you more pics. And that chair that you see in the pic? That’s just a glider placeholder — don’t worry, I will tell you the second the glider arrives.
Olivia and her tooth
This is a picture of my cousin Olivia, who was one of the greatest shower guests ever, helping us open all of the presents we were so lucky to receive. But I mean for the picture to represent my family in general because they have been indispensable and unparalleled in their love and support. We are so very, very lucky.
And let’s bring another edition of Naming Names to the table.
Wowsers. People are really bonkers about names. What’s in a name? Well, a quick google search can certainly answer that question for you. Or, at the very least, give you hundreds of opinions full of misspelled words, misplaced punctuation and confusing grammar.
As the due date approaches, the more I realize we do probably need to figure out a name besides Sweet Potato for the little sweet potato. As I think hard about a name for our baby girl, I have tried to be increasingly honest with myself. As I do so, I recognize how much I truly like the name Gertrude and specifically, the nickname Gertie. I mean, I really like these names. I know that many people, including several members of my own family, seem to think Gertrude is possibly the worst name ever created. Given such opposition, I decided to take my dilemma to the ultimate source: the internet. I googled “Should I name my daughter (my daughter!!) Gertrude” to see what the interwebs would tell me. Ok, I left out that parenthetical in my query, but let’s just pause: my daughter! Anyway, the answers I got were not pretty.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Some people chimed into others’ similarly posted question with responses that indicate that the entire world is not quite of one opinion on the name Gertrude. A few people are like me: they actually find it charming, full of character and truly sweet. Others, though, and the vast majority of the commentators, actually despise the name. In an effort to illustrate just how awful of a name Gertrude is, people pointed out the name contains the word ‘rude;’ the name is too heavy on consonants; and some 20th century murderer was named Gertrude (this same type of fact, though, doesn’t seem to stop people from naming their child Charles or Jeffrey or Andrew). Many people hinted that a mother who would name her daughter Gertrude should be simultaneously referred to social services and institutionalized. Someone actually stated that she would rather die than name her (fictional) daughter Gertrude. She. Would. Rather. Die.
Well. Now I know what the internet thinks of Gertrude.
As much as I love the name, and as much as Aaron really, really loves the name, I don’t want to give our daughter a name that the world almost collectively seems to hate. I especially don’t want to give her a name that she may hate. I’m not ready to complete scrap Gertrude, but I’m not sure I can get over all of the venom out there. Argh.
As I mourn the passing of the Packers’ glorious 2011-12 season, I am trying to keep my mind occupied with other things. After drying my eyes and taking out some crankiness on Aaron, I watched the Golden Globes. This effort was only moderately successful as the show wasn’t quite as entertaining as I needed it to be (though I probably expected too much by asking it to raise the bar in the wake of the worst Packer game of the season). As that’s now over, and I’m still feeling pretty morose (and AO is sleepily breathing quietly next to me), I’m going to try my hand at a blog post. A Blog Post to Move Forward with Life in the Offseason.
Lately when I hear the word ‘epidural,’ I find myself singing — to myself, in my head — “Epidural, Epidural, Ep-i-dural,” which is sung to the tune of ‘Rock Me Amadeus.’ Is this because epidurals and Mozart are two peas in a pod? Or maybe because ‘epidural’ and ‘Amadeus’ are the only four syllable words I know? Whatever the reason, the song in my head is quite catchy. And its existence also — not surprisingly — coincides with my rapid approach to the finish line. I’m staring down the barrel of under eight weeks until Baby Girl Sweet Potato makes her post-womb debut and I generally prefer to talk and think about and research mobiles on Etsy and Pinterest than read about what’s actually going to happen on The Day o’ Birth. I don’t think I can be that unusual in this regard. For one thing, I have always loved design and decoration more than human anatomy. For another, mobiles are cute and sweet and — to me, at least — gobs of goo and blood and who-knows-what and a baby coming out of me are anything but. This is not to say that I’m a complete ignoramus when it comes to birth; it’s just more that I’m not in love with the idea of what I need to do to get the Sweet Potato from one side of my body to the other.
For a long time now, well before I was with child myself, I thought, “Why not have an epidural?” I went through a period, when I was a child, when I would refuse pain medication or allergy meds — for things like headaches and, you know, my eyes swelling shut and things like that — because I thought that I was *strong* enough to just deal with it and that being so — strong enough — somehow meant something. I’m not entirely sure when I grew out of that stage, but I am so glad I did. I now take Advil when my head or uterus hurts (not while I’ve been pregnant, people – calm down), I take Zyrtex (the brilliantly affordable Costco variety) daily and in the last month I’ve been popping Tums — for the first time in my life — like nobody’s business. And I am glad that I feel comfortable and am able to take these brilliant examples of modern medicine. So, maybe not naturally but certainly not unnaturally, I also thought I’d go for an epidural and never look back. I had long been confused by women who rail against the epidural as somehow dangerous for the baby. Granted, I am obviously no doctor and, frankly, have a fifth grader’s sense of my own anatomy, but I still wasn’t sure how there would be nearly enough time for any harm caused by the epidural to reach an about-to-be-born baby. I now understand, though, that I was being too simplistic and not appreciating that anti-epidural women, or even women who are trepidatious about drugs and childbirth, have a range of concerns with medication at the time of birth. Of course there’s whether the baby will be affected, but also — and this seems to be the concern I hear most often — whether the drug will affect the woman’s experience with childbirth. It seems there are serious concerns about whether the epidural will prolong labor, increase the likelihood of a c-section, or cause the woman not to have the full range of her sensations and mental capacities so that she isn’t fully aware of what is happening.
I do think there is another component to the current and common aversion to epidural-y-ing it during the child’s birth. I think there are a lot of women who feel like I used to feel when I got a headache as a child; women who feel they *should* be able to labor without drugs or, “naturally” as they fancy calling it, and that they are a stronger or better or more womanly or certainly more motherly person for doing so. I think, though, that there are also a lot of women who choose to go drug-free for all of the reasons listed in the previous paragraph, and probably a million more I don’t know about, and because they simply want to know and feel what it is like to bring their child into this world uninhibited by any alteration.
I admit that this last possibility only recently occurred to me as I began to really think, for the very first time, about what I wanted to do when the time comes. Because, it seems, that the time is coming no matter how many mobiles I look at, no matter how many Packer games are won or lost, and no matter how much I worry about whether we are ready. And as I think about whether to epidural or not, I realize that I just don’t know. I definitely want the epidural as an option on the table, and I still tend to lean toward making the whole experience the least painful that it can be, but I also admit to a curiosity about what it will feel like, how much I can handle, and whether Baby and I would fare better meeting face to face, for the first time, drug-free.
So, I continue to read things like this. And I appreciate hearing from my friends who made the choices they made — I have friends who have epidural-ed, c-section-ed, vaginal birthed sans meds, and home birthed and I think they are all amazing. I try very hard to understand and respect women who feel very strongly about these issues, while recognizing that I cannot manufacture concern for issues that don’t worry me so much and that it doesn’t make me an insta-bad mom for concentrating my worry on things other than whether Baby Girl will be affected by an epidural.
The thing is, I don’t have to please or impress anyone else. Life is hard enough without adding unnecessary pain and stress. So, I think I’ll just keep reading and thinking and listening and, in the end, make a decision that I think is best for me and for Baby. And maybe even Aaron.
