Baby Stuff

Lately, I’ve been feeling like a human petri dish.  This past month, I’ve mostly just been getting sick and getting better, and getting sick.  My immune system is totally unconcerned with keeping me well, it seems, because whenever I come across germs, my body welcomes them and tries to give them a hospitable environment to flourish in.  It’s been a surprise to me, because even though pregnant women are in the immuno-compromised category of people you’re supposed to be careful around (like elderly people and cancer patients), I really thought I would do better than this.  Usually if I'm taking Vitamin D3, I don't get sick.  So much for that.

 Today I’m just feeling worn out and sniffling and sneezing a bunch, and that’s worlds better than the respiratory flu I had a couple weeks ago, so life is pretty good.

Other than that, pregnancy has been going well.

I had an appointment with my midwife this Monday and did my glucose test; it came back great, and my iron level was also great, so that’s good news.

When we peeked at the baby, she was not breech anymore.  My midwife said that at this point it doesn’t really matter what position she’s in, because she can still move around a lot and as her head gets bigger (and heavier) that will help her move into the right position.  But, babies that are breech when it’s time to be born are usually babies that have been breech the whole time, so it’s still good to have seen her in a different position this time.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to feel the baby kick (or move around?) a lot more than I used to.  Jeff felt her kick for the first time a few weeks ago, and that was cool.  The baby likes cookies.  When I eat cookies she moves more.

We bought a nursery set.  I had been watching on KSL for a used set in good condition, and we ended up buying a crib, changing table, tall dresser, and glider from a very nice family that was moving to Cyprus.  It was quite an ordeal!  The night that we picked it all up, it snowed.  So, we were trying to disassemble and move everything downstairs, (without me helping much since furniture is heavy), keep it dry, and load it up in our truck, and then secure it all. 

The hardest part was securing it.  We had brought tarps and a few bungees, and a roll of string, and we thought we had things pretty well secured, but then once we headed home we realized we had done a terrible job.  So, we got off the freeway at the first exit and parked to re-evaluate the situation.  (It was a good thing we stopped when we did, because if we had gone much farther, we definitely would have lost the mattress on the freeway.)  In the freezing cold, we tried to tie the tarps down better, and keep the drawers from coming out of the dresser, and keep the mattress from falling off.  After another hour of that, our fingers and ears were all numb, we’d done the best we could figure out, and we were also out of string, so we took State Street (instead of the freeway) and slowly drove home.  We made it.

Now, I’m disappointed with the furniture.  It’s built well—it’s solid wood, without laminate or particle board—but now I realize it’s much more worn than I realized it was when we were buying it.  So, I want to re-finish it all, but that is a Big Project, and definitely one I don’t have time for, so instead I need to just be happy and quit worrying about it.  I also want to reupholster the glider, because it has a couple stains on it.  Jeff says if it isn’t good enough, we needed to decide we were spending more, and just not buy this stuff to begin with, because refinishing furniture is way more work than it is worth.  Fair enough.  My secret plan is to be content with it for now and then either refinish it or upgrade for our next baby.  Maybe I’ll get used to it and it won’t matter.  When you're starting out, you don't have to have everything brand new and perfect. 

Even though I think the furniture looks kind of ugly, it still feels good to have things closer to ready for the baby.  Now, if the baby were born, we would have somewhere to put her, and somewhere to rock her, and a place for her clothes.  That’s progress.

We are going to paint the nursery after all.  I ordered the milk paint and it came this week.  I’ll probably write a separate post about that, because it is going to be a project, for sure.

The other thing that is on my mind lately is naming the baby.  We still don’t have a name picked out.  People keep telling me “reassuring” stories about not knowing what they were going to name their baby until it was born.  I hate those stories, because I think that if we still don’t have a name picked out when she is born, I think most likely Jeff and I won’t look at her and both instantly and independently know that she’s supposed to be named some special, previously unknown and unconsidered name.  Instead, we’ll look at her and think: “Oh, no, now she’s here and we only have a few days left to figure out what we’re naming her, but we still have no clue!”  And, usually, if you don’t know someone’s name it’s because they’re a stranger; I want to put her name on stuff, and be able to introduce her to people, and have some budding sense of her separate identity, and have her belong with us and be part of our family, and I feel like that’s disrupted by not even knowing her name or who she is.

Naming people is tough.

Other things have been happening too: we’ve been attending our Brio Birth classes, I started participating in our city’s “University” program, and my business has been…interesting lately.  I’ll save those things for another post, though, because I need to get back to being productive.