Raven mother

I discovered that in German, "rabenmutter" (raven mother) is a put-down, a derogatory term for a mother who doesn't care about her kids - particularly mothers who put their kids in day-care to go back to work. A mother who flies away from the nest, so to speak.

But since I don't have a gut-level grasp of the implications, to me "raven mother" sounds really cool. I am a raven mother, hear me caw!

In other news, this morning Annika would not put on pants except the ones with dinosaurs on them. Pink flower-embroidered shirt, and T-REX pants!

Letters and Adventures

We're back from our 4th of July trip to Oregon, and I will blog about that in more detail soon.

For now, what I wanted to do is to post the first in what I hope will be a series of monthly letters to Annika. I'm shamelessly stealing this idea from Heather over at Dooce.com (a wonderful blog in general, but especially when she's writing about her daughter). I like the concept of not only writing regularly about each month's new developments, events, joys and sorrows, but to address it to the person who's most likely to be interested later on. I'm starting with Month 3, because I found it easier to write than months 1 or 2.

______________________________________________


Dear Annika,

At the start of this month, you started "Trena-care" and I went back to work. This required some adjustment for both of us, but all in all, it seems to be going well. Aerik has repeatedly declared his love for you, and Trena has negotiated with your dad so that Aerik may ask you on a date when you're 25. Anyone else must wait until you're 30. Kira is not sure whether you are something that might be good to eat, something to play with, or just a thief of Trena's time and attention.

When you look up at me with your sapphire x-ray eyes as you drink from a bottle, I wonder what it is you can possibly see in me. You look so knowing, so wise - and then you forget to coordinate swallowing, sucking and breathing, and start coughing and spluttering. The expression on your face says that you're a little annoyed that the bottle is trying to drown you.

Sometimes when you smile, you scrunch your nose and gasp in glee, and you look as though I just told you the most outrageous, juicy piece of gossip imaginable. It must be fun to watch grown-ups get so giddy every time you grin at them, and then make absolute fools of themselves trying to coax another grin out of you. But the best smiles are the ones you give me for no other reason than that I've magically appeared at your crib in the morning, or after a nap when you've started fussing.

According to the Authorities, babies your age should get "tummy time" to encourage upper body strength. You have a goodly amount of strength, you can hold your head steady, you can support your entire weight on your legs, but being placed on your stomach makes you grumpy. First you squirm, then you start making frustrated little noises, then you start to fuss - it's like you know you can't justify really crying hard, so you just go "Wah. Waawaah. Wah. Weh. Wehwaawaahweh." All the while, trying to use your legs to crawl, but not succeeding because you haven't yet figured out that your lower half won't move forward unless you use your arms to move your upper half forward at the same time.

This, obviously, is not your favorite activity. Your favorite? It's a close call between having a boob in your mouth, versus lying on the changing table kicking and squirming. You get so excited, and jerk all four limbs around so emphatically that it always puts me in mind of a marionette whose strings are being pulled by some kind of maniac. At times you look as though you yourself aren't sure who's controlling all this activity - your eyes get really wide and surprised-looking, and your solemn expression doesn't at all match the flailing and kicking.

You've gotten very good at cramming your entire fist into your mouth. Your dad and I look at the fist, and then your tiny rosebud mouth, and wonder how you do it. And recently, you made the astonishing leap of reasoning that if you can put your hand in your mouth, and if you can grasp an object in your hand, then that object can also be shoved into your mouth. You put a fuzzy toy alligator into your mouth the other day, and then made the most awful face, probably because fuzz on your tongue offended your aesthetic sensibilities. Those are some big words for someone who can, at best, say "ah-goo".

About two weeks ago you started sleeping through the night. At first, we would only speak those words in whispers, lest they turn out to have been simply a sleep-deprived hallucination, or a one-time deal. But now, we can reliably get you to sleep sometime between 10 and 11, and you sleep until 6 or 7 am. After the first two months, the sleep deprivation that made us feel more dead than alive, this is our idea of heaven.

I wonder if there is such a thing as too much affection - I have to fight the temptation to squeeze you too hard, to eat you alive with kisses. So far, you don't seem inclined to protest being gobbled and tickled and cuddled, and I intend to make the most of it before you're old enough to say "Aww Mom, stop it!" and push me away.

Love,

Mama

Vaccinated

Friday, Annika had her 2-month visit to the pediatrician. She's now 10 lbs, 13 oz., and nearly 24 inches; in other words, she's growing just as she ought to be, and the doctor was impressed by her muscle control and her vocalizing - while the doctor asked me questions, Annika carried on her own monologue of coos. I think she intended to distract my attention and re-focus it on her. It worked well, I have to admit.

But then, after all the happy fun stuff, she had her first round of vaccination shots. Four of them, in the thighs. Baby skin is tender, so maybe I shouldn't have been shocked and horrified when she bled. But I was. As soon as the nurse was done, I picked her up and held her, but that didn't do much to quiet the screaming. So I put her to my breast, and like magic, she stopped crying and nursed instead, and soon had apparently forgot her trauma. I, on the other hand, walked around for the rest of the day with a bloodstain on my shirt and an ache in my throat whenever I thought about it.

But I confirmed, then, that all the struggles I've had with breastfeeding, the pain and the tears and pumping and the exhaustion and questioning my own sanity and pumping and guilt and frustration and lost sleep and did I mention pumping? Yes, all of that (I'll write in more detail in another post) and finally I'm certain it was worth it. Because even though the breast isn't her only or even main source of food, it's the one thing that is guaranteed to comfort her. It's hard to even express how much that is worth.

Perspective

For a while now, I've been certain, but without evidence other than intuition, that this baby will arrive early. I've been told several times by the nurse-midwives at the birth center that first babies have a tendency to be overdue, so I shouldn't be surprised if nothing has happened by my due date.

On Monday at my appointment, I got the first hint of evidence that I might possibly be right: the cervix is still closed, but has gotten softer and thinner (a process called effacement), and the baby is positioned fairly low in my pelvis, with her head down. Neither of these things necessarily mean that labor will start soon, but they're some of the preliminaries. I asked when I would be considered far enough along to deliver at the Birth Center, and the answer is "it depends." If there are no complicating factors whatsoever, they'll allow it at 36 weeks - a milestone that I just passed yesterday. If the mother is positive for Group B Strep and will therefore need antibiotics during labor, they require 37 weeks or better. I haven't gotten my culture results yet to know whether GBS will be an issue or not, but I'll soon find out.

I was excited both by the news that pre-labor changes are starting to happen, and that if labor did start early, I might be able to deliver at the Birth Center earlier than I thought. On Tuesday morning, it seemed that labor might actually be imminent - the baby had shifted even lower, and I was getting cramps that felt a lot like menstrual cramps. Braxton-Hicks contractions, probably; there was no distinct pattern to them. The intensity would vary, but I couldn't distinguish the beginning or ending of individual contractions. By the afternoon, the cramps had faded, and by the next morning, the baby had shifted position slightly so that she didn't seem to be pressing downward as much.

Although I knew that I should be feeling relieved, I was mostly just disappointed. It's difficult to be patient at this point, even though it's irrational to want to hurry things up - physically, it's almost certainly easier to be pregnant than to be recovering from childbirth and dealing with a newborn. But that didn't stop me from being cranky and wondering how I can possibly make it through another month - possibly even six weeks - of the various discomforts, plus the waiting and wondering if every cramp or backache just might be the start of the real thing.

Sitting at my computer and looking, I guess, for commiseration, I did a google search for "tired of being pregnant." As it happened, one of the first things I came across was the opposite of what I was looking for. It was a blog post written by a labor & delivery nurse, about how she is tired of pregnant women whining at 34 or 36 or 38 weeks that they're tired of pregnancy, ready to get the baby out, and want to be induced or c-sectioned. She raged against women who don't seem to realize or care that an early baby is more likely to have trouble breathing, trouble nursing, trouble fighting off infections, and convince their doctor to give them an early delivery. She held that women who carry their babies full term should be thankful for it, and think of all the women whose babies were premature and didn't make it, or had serious problems because of it. The post ended with "Go ahead readers...flame away at me over my opinions on this subject []", but the long, long string of comments that followed was almost entirely from moms who agreed, because they'd had a premature baby themselves, or been induced early because of pre-eclampsia or other complications. Many of them said something like "I would have given anything to be pregnant for longer, and it drives me crazy when women who stay pregnant for the full term complain about it!"

It made me feel guilty about wishing that mine would be early, even though I would never have an induction or elective c-section to bring it about. I don't feel too guilty about it, though, because every woman who's getting close to term gets impatient. But that dose of perspective did make me realize that I shouldn't feel too sorry for myself - I'll take all the pains and annoyances of late pregnancy over coping with a baby that's not ready for the outside world yet.

Goals, 2008

I've never been one for resolutions. Not at the new year, or really any other time. The cynic in me says that if the resolution-maker (whether it's me or someone else) really has both the desire and the ability to change, they would already have done it, and not waited until January 1.

But the idea is firmly entrenched in our culture that the transition from one calendar year to the next is an ideal time to take stock of where you've been, and where you're going. 2006 and 2007 were eventful years for me, with a lot of changes that I would not have foreseen. At the beginning of 2006, I was a graduate student in Kansas, working towards a PhD in ecology, living in an apartment, with no near-term plans of buying a house or starting a family. The end of 2007 found me in Pennsylvania, employed at UPenn in a cell biology research lab, while simultaneously making gradual progress on a Master's, discovering the joys and pains of homeownership, and expecting a baby girl in April.

So, they're not exactly resolutions along the classic lines of "lose weight, quit smoking, spend more time with family." But I do hope to achieve certain goals for 2008:

- complete my Master's degree at KU
- increase my salary
- add $8000 to our savings/investments
- write to one friend or family member each month

These are the primary goals, and I figure that with a new baby that will take up much of my time and energy, that is plenty. There are numerous lesser goals or related aims that I could also list (get more organized, get parts of the thesis published, get various things fixed or improved around the house, and so forth), but I'm sticking with goals that are quantifiable, so that at the end of the year I can easily say whether or not they were achieved.

Many people that know me might be surprised to see that two of my goals are financial in nature. In the past, I was never especially interested in money. As long as there was enough to meet our immediate needs, and preferably to put some into a savings account as well, I didn't care how much we earned, or how much we spent. But owning a house and preparing for parenthood have changed my perspective. As the one who does most of the banking and bill-paying, I had become vaguely aware that since we bought the house (almost exactly a year ago), our bank account wasn't shrinking, but it also wasn't growing. It occurred to me that this was a worrisome state of affairs if our expenses were slated to increase and/or our income would decrease. I decided that a more proactive approach was needed, and that I should learn something about managing money other than "don't spend more than you have." So, I used Quicken to help me collect data on our spending, and I started borrowing books about personal finance from the local library. Together we started talking about planning for the future (farther ahead than next month's bills), about budgets and saving and strategies for investing. So far, we're only two months into our efforts to be more financially responsible, but I think we've made a lot of progress. We've set up a budget that should be workable when the baby arrives, and that includes saving up some money. We're still pondering what to do with our savings once it has been set aside; I still feel like I have a lot to learn about investing. Overall, the plan is to keep some in savings, and to invest some. The allocation to each, and the types of investments we make, have yet to be decided.

Have a geeky Thanksgiving!

Maybe you're the sort of person who has always wondered what cranberry sauce looks like if you let the juice crystallize, then look at it under a microscope. Or maybe you get a thrill from saying "Please pass the Meleagris gallopavo!" Or perhaps you're just attracted to bright colors and shiny objects. If any of these apply to you, go check out this article at Wired.com.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-11/st_thanksgiving

In other non-Thanksgiving related geeky cheekiness, I recently found decorations for our little one's room when they move out of the nursery. Every child has to learn their ABC's, right?

http://www.tiffanyard.com/nerd.htm

Names

Here is a list of the first names that we're presently considering, in alphabetical order. Comment on which ones you like or don't like, and why. The middle name will probably be Rose, after her dad's grandmother.

For those of you looking at this list and wondering where the "interesting" ones are, do not fear. They're just posted on a different blog.

Amalia
Annika
Anya
Eleanor
Eliana
Eva
Evelina
Lily
Maia
Miriam
Stella
Sylvia

Pincushion

Many of the annoyances of pregnancy are generated by one's own body, but there are some that are external. This morning I went to get blood drawn for the second part of "sequential screening," which is a series of tests including ultrasound and bloodwork to look for Down's Syndrome and related chromosomal abnormalities. It's not the principle of such testing that annoys me, it's the practicality of the way it's implemented. It would be nice if there was a consolidated prenatal care center that served all the various needs, but at the two hospitals I've gone to for care the two times I've been pregnant, that's not how it works. You end up going to the ob/gyn's office for regular checkups, which are very brief after the first one. There's a separate facility for high-tech ultrasounds, and a lab across the hall where they collect blood samples for bloodwork, plus for my initial round of "test-everything-possible" bloodwork I had to go to Qwest Diagnostics. Between the ultrasound appointments, the regular prenatal checkups, and other stuff like the bloodwork, it seems like just about every week there's some appointment that demands my time. And it'll get worse - in month 8, the prenatal checkups will be every other week, and in month 9 they will be every week.

Looking on the bright side (sort of), I guess it's good training for the frequent visits to the pediatrician after the baby is born.

Peaches and fluffy clouds

The project of painting the baby's room is finally complete! For those who haven't seen this room in person: it is a very small room, about 8' x 10', that is connected by an open doorway to the master bedroom (in the picture, the door would be just outside the frame, to the left) and has a small closet and a door to the hallway. We imagine that its original purpose was either a sitting room or a nursery; the previous owners were using it as an office.

I'm pleased with the peachy-tan paint and most especially with the "sky" ceiling. The leafy wall lamps are a tad too big for this room; they'd look more at home in a living room or dining room, and we might very well re-use them at some point elsewhere in the house. But since none of the upstairs rooms in our home are equipped with light fixtures on the ceiling, our options are more or less limited to floor lamps or wall lamps unless we did some major re-wiring. Ignore the blue tape on the floor - we're not quite done cleaning up the painting mess.

Next we'll get a crib, move the dresser back into the room, equip the top with a changing pad, drag upstairs a comfy reclining chair that we inherited from my grandma, and the room will be about ready for its new occupant.

Mini-update on the mini-human

I had a regular pre-natal checkup this morning, and all seems to be well. At this stage, such appointments are very brief - weight, blood pressure, urine sample, and a check of the fetal heartbeat with Doppler, then "Any questions?" and if not, I'm on my way. At first, I felt sort of ripped-off - I have to make the trek to the ob/gyn office for less than 10 minutes worth of care, when I'm not sick?? But all those routine things really are important to keep tabs on during pregnancy, and it does provide an opportunity to get information. For example, I had been wondering if it's recommended to get a flu shot during pregnancy, or if it could be risky for the baby. The answer is that it's safe, and definitely recommended.

The doctor asked whether I've felt the baby moving yet, because it's around the time that its movements start to become noticeable. I think I've been feeling it move for the last 2 weeks or so, but it's hard to say for certain. Things feel generally "different" in the lower abdominal region, but there are two distinct sensations that I'm about 80% convinced are fetal movement. One is little brief jerks that feel a lot like when you get a muscle twitch, and are probably kicks. The other is a strange shifting/crawling feeling that's a little bit like butterflies, or a mild version of the feeling you get on a rollercoaster; I figure that might be the baby changing positions or rolling over.

15 week ultrasound

On Thursday afternoon, my husband and I went to Abington Memorial Hospital's Fetal Diagnostic Center, which is where they do all the high-resolution ultrasounds and amniocentesis and whatever else might be done to make sure that babies are developing properly.

I wasn't quite as nervous this time as I was with the first high-res ultrasound at 11 weeks. That time, I was (I think) outwardly calm, but inwardly biting my nails and squirming. I had a sort of negative association with ultrasounds because with my first pregnancy, I had no signs that I was going to miscarry until I had an ultrasound and learned that all was not well. So when I got pregnant again, I was pessimistic and refused to get my hopes up too much, but that didn't stop me from being very, very jittery about what the ultrasound would show. It was a major relief when the 11-week ultrasound showed that things were fine, but I was still a bit nervous - things can still go very wrong later in the first trimester or even early in the 2nd.

I relaxed when the technician said "There's the baby!" almost as soon as the ultrasound device touched my belly, and it was clearly baby-shaped, and moving. She proceeded to take a series of measurements of just about everything, all the while narrating what she was doing and pointing out what was what. I was amazed at how much can be seen now, and how much the bone structure has developed since last month - you can easily see the ribs and spinal column, arm and leg bones, etc. First she measured the dimensions of the skull, and the brain inside. At this stage, you can clearly see that there are two hemispheres, and there's still some space around them inside the skull. Then she looked at the heart - now evidently a multi-chambered thing although you couldn't easily see all 4 chambers at once. The heart rate is 144 beats per minute, which is normal for a fetus at this stage, and already much slower than the 163 of a month ago. Next she measured the abdomen, and pointed out the stomach and bladder. She looked at the arms and legs, took measurements of the femur and tibia, checked the spine, and used some sort of temperature monitor (I think?) to measure the blood flow through the umbilical cord and the blood circulation within the fetus. We also got a look at the face both in profile and from the front. The frontal view looked spooky because the ultrasound shows both the flesh and the bones under it, so it looked sort of skeletal.

The one thing that caused any concern is that the placenta is "low-lying" which means that its edge is near the cervix. That is a potential problem because if the placenta covers the cervix later in the pregnancy, it tends to bleed, and it makes a c-section mandatory. But fortunately, the placenta generally gets shifted upward as the uterus grows, so for now it's just something to keep an eye on.

All in all, I was very happy with the whole thing. I have another one scheduled in a month, and at that time we should get to find out the gender. I can't say I have any particular "sense" of whether it's a girl or boy, and waiting another entire month to find out seems way too long. On the other hand, knowing the gender answers only one aspect of the question "Just who is this new person?" And that question gets answered little by little over a span of about, I'd say, 20 years.

Blue Moon Faery

I'm working on a cross stitch based on Beth Hansen's artwork, "Blue Moon Faery." It is going very slowly, because it's a large piece with approximately one zillion small stitches.

Here's a picture (of the artwork, not of my crafting).

Although it may not be finished in 6 months, which is when our new arrival is due, I'd like to hang it in the nursery. I told my husband I thought she would make an excellent baby-watcher. The conversation that followed made me laugh... he pointed out that traditionally, the fae are not exactly to be trusted with babies. "Well, she is pretty though. She looks nice. And all friendly-looking faeries are good... right?" Much snickering followed. But we reached a compromise: I can hang the fae lady in the nursery as long as we also put a dragon there to keep an eye on her.