Forecast Calls for Baby

Diapers at the ready

 Our life is currently the calm before the storm of baby.


The nursery is set up and clean. The carpets are vacuumed; the lawn is mowed. We are (mostly) well-rested.


Hurricane Bun is scheduled to make landfall on Saturday. Meteorologists are notoriously bad at predicted the weather, but prognosticators are even worse at predicting baby touchdown dates.


"We may not know much," Carrie said, "but we know sometime in August we are having a baby."

The nursery is set up ... and clean (for now).

The Mural's Mistakes

Recently we finished painting a Sol Lewitt-inspired mural in the baby's room. Looks awesome, right?
I'll let you in on a secret: up close you can see dozens of errors, from the minuscule to the painfully visible.
The most obvious are even noticeable in the above photo. Look at the top yellow stripe, immediately to the right of the door. We spilled blue paint in that section, and couldn't effectively wipe it away. There are two green spills in the large orange stripe, including a rather obvious one on the door. Four coats of orange couldn't cover it up. Our favorite mistake is a drip of green (green was our nemesis in this project) on the white doorframe.
Throughout the drafting, chalk-lining, taping and painting, we reminded ourselves that we were creating the mural "out of love, not perfection."
Becoming parents, after all, requires coming to terms with our imperfections.
We know we are going to make many, many mistakes as new parents - perhaps dozens in the first week alone, millions throughout the bun's life.
In addition, the bun - being a product of the two of us - is going to reflect our flaws back to us.
We have to learn to accept our own and each other's defects, because the bun will be imperfect in many of the same ways Carrie and I are. In order to love the bun fully, we must accept those flaws, forgiving mistakes and imperfections with an open heart and remembering that an awesome work of art isn't eclipsed by a few green drips.
A bun raised with love, not perfection, is the goal.

"In the End, You Win the Prize"

Last night we attended the second of two classes at the hospital, called "Labor Day" and "Labor Therapies."

A helpful laminated poster showed us
what to expect during the stages of labor

Taught by a silver-haired nurse with 48 years of experience ("Now we have computers; that's a new thing," she said), the classes brought two of the women in our classes to tears, as the abstract concept of childbirth became more real.

The classes taught us useful tidbits (when to go to the hospital, a short overview of breathing techniques) and included a demonstration of the mechanics of delivery using a baby doll and stuffed pelvis.

Overall, though, the nurse spent much of the five hours imparting her own brand of homespun wisdom. Here are some choice quotes:

"I don't make no bones: labor hurts."

"It's work. A lot of things in life are work."

Holding up a plastic model of dilation, she helpfully clarified: "Your cervix is not plastic."

"The floor of the vagina is the roof of the rectum."

On childbirth: "It's wet business."

On the benefit of breathing techniques during contractions: "When we're distracted, we're not thinking 'uterus.'"

"Gentlemen, you don't have to push - because your pushing is not going to help the baby."

The nurse advised us not to blame our child for years to come if labor is difficult or doesn't go as we planned. "It's not the baby's fault if you have a hard labor."

In some cases, she said, breastfeeding is hard because a woman might have flat nipples. "Sometimes you have great equipment and the baby is just lazy."

"The milk comes in such cute containers."

"I hope ladies planning to breastfeed weren't turned off by the ladies in TIME magazine with their bazoombas hanging out, breastfeeding eight-year-old babies."

The nurse reminded us not to get frustrated if the baby doesn't interact much at first: "Keep in mind, newborns are little lumps."

"No matter what choices you make, in the end you win the prize - a son or daughter."

"It is real. There is a baby at the end of this."

"Your Baby Is Not a Construction Worker"

A sign we saw en route to "Baby Beginnings" class.
Despite the misspelling, it echoed my feelings exactly.

There are some scary things that could go wrong with a newborn, but many other things that could - and likely will - go weird.

We went to our first birth class at Delaware County Memorial Hospital last night, titled "Baby Beginnings." It lasted two-and-a-half-hours, about 30 minutes of which were a blow-by-blow of ways a newborn baby might look funky (white flakes, white spots, dented head, blue hands, etc.) which were illustrated with visual aides from the 1980s.

The spunky and hilarious nurse (a mother of four, herself) who taught the class shared hard facts along with her "mama-knowledge," such as the advice for moms to wear a bra the first time she has sex with her partner. Otherwise, she said, prepare for your partner to get sprayed with breast milk. (Her impersonation of the noises and gestures her husband made while unexpectedly doused in coitus-induced breast milk was the comic highlight of the class.) This happens, she said, because the chemical (oxytocin) released during breast feeding is the same one released during sex.

Carrie and bun on Mother's Day.
We're officially in our third trimester!

The nurse also shared much helpful advice about breastfeeding, including demonstrations of various positions for the deed, such as the common cradle position, the useful football position (she struck a Heisman pose with her baby doll), and the elusive Australian position, which she claimed she only saw once, at Disney World. One dad in the class noted that the Australian seems to be what the mom on the cover of this week's TIME is utilizing.

The nurse also recommended not bathing our babies too often, since the newborn is not going to get very dirty, except for the places (mouth, hands, butt) that we're going to be wiping all the time. "Your baby is not a construction worker," she said.

At first, she added, we should only give the baby sponge baths. But once the umbilical stump falls off, full baths will be OK. She warned us about the odor produced by the umbilical stump.

"It smells like rotting flesh ... because it is rotting flesh."

The Trouble with Letting Go

All change requires some degree of letting go. The bigger the change, the more you must let go.
I'm not very good at letting go.
I have a lot of books. Many of them I've never read, and will likely never read. I have three copies of August Wilson's Fences, a play I've been intending to read ever since I saw Wilson's The Piano Lesson on Broadway. When I was 13. In 1990. Yes, three nearly identical copies.
It's on my list to finally read this summer. No, really. Consider it done.
I also own a lot of CDs. When we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I loved nothing more than going to the cavernous record store Amoeba and buying a dozen used CDs for around $20. Some were real finds - beloved (but obscure) artists, whose records I still treasure.
However, have you ever heard of the metal band Squatweiler? Yeah, neither has Wikipedia. I've had that CD for a decade.
I sampled the first track yesterday. It's most definitely not my cup of tea. I've moved that album twice, including across the country from Menlo Park, California to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
And so this past weekend, I began the laborious process of cleaning the cluttered office to make space for the baby's room.
Some decisions were easy. Yes, I can get rid of those albums and books I don't recognize, and eliminate duplicates. But those are a small fraction of my book and CD collections.
For now, I'm fooling myself by thinking the rest can go in bankers boxes in our storage spaces. Because I apparently truly believe that someday I will remove R.J.B. Bosworth's 692-page history book Mussolini's Italy from a dusty box in the attic and sit down for a scholarly look at my homeland in the mid-20th century.
All change requires letting go. Most of the time that process is painful, but worth it. This one's a no-brainer.

And yet discarding these CDs and books means facing that fact that I will not accomplish everything I'd hoped in my life. I will probably not someday sit down and read the 10 plays in the anthology Alternative Japanese Drama. I will probably not master all off the accents in Stage Dialects (the book and three companion cassettes). I'm not going to overcome my tragic tone deafness. My chance to master the violin is past.
No one accomplishes everything they hoped to when they were young. It's a sad fact of our abbreviated lives. But if the impending addition to our family forces me to consolidate and prioritize, that's probably not such a bad thing ~ and likely long overdue.
So thanks, little Bun.

Things are Quickening

Carrie's been feeling kicks/flutters for a week now. She said that at first they felt like the bun was lightly and intermittently tickling her from the inside.

The pokes have gotten more frequent and more vigorous, so Carrie is concerned they could eventually feel like karate chops to her abdomen.

On Wednesday, our midwife Moon (that's really her name; I am not making this up) told us that the moment a pregnant woman feels a flutter is known as the "Quickening."

The occasional kicks are reassuring, of course, given our history. If their presence is comforting, though, their absence can be a bit frightening.

Fortunately they never leave for long.

One night I asked Carrie to let me know every time she felt a flutter. Eventually, Carrie was saying "kick" so often, I felt I had been adequately brought up to speed.

Last night, I finally felt a couple of these kicks myself. Twice in succession, my hand could discerned a slight but present pulsing inside Carrie's belly.

I've decided to name the first time a dad feels a flutter the "Hastening." It's less romantic than the "Quickening" but that somehow seems appropriate.

We fathers-to-be are at a slight but tangible distance from the biological magic churning inside our wives' tummies. It's like riding inside a Toyota Camry in the adjacent lane of the Electric Mayhem Bus.

Movin' right along ...

The Singular Plural

Two of my favorite people

Typically when Carrie leaves for a conference, or other multi-day excursion, I say, "Take good care of you; you're my favorite person."

On Tuesday, Carrie left for a conference in Georgia and I found myself saying, "Take good care of you; you're my favorite people."

Pregnancy is an amazing trick. It's made Carrie plural.

On the phone last night from her hotel, she told me that she often imagines that if she wants and likes something, the bun (our other name for the "tiny monkey") does too. She craved and enjoyed nachos for dinner; surely the bun did as well?

Since the two are sharing oxygen and nutrients through their bloodstreams, distinctions are in fact difficult. Does this mean the bun loves me already? Carrie insists he or she* does. 

"I've started to wonder if it's going to be traumatic for the bun to come out. I go back to being singular," Carrie said last night. "And then I won't know what the bun wants."



*For the record, we're not finding out the sex of the tiny monkey beforehand. I suspect this will be the subject of a future post.

Trying to Stay Positive

Google tells me I first registered this blog in August 2009. Yet this is the first post. And it's not because I'm lazy.

For the past three years, our lives have resembled an absurdist comedy, like Waiting for Godot or The Bald Soprano. Time has completely lost all meaning, and we've been stuck in a cycle of hope, joy, loss and sorrow that can best be described as existential. Endless doctor's appointments and ultrasounds and blood work and hospital visits have yielded nothing but angry anecdotes about insensitive doctors (especially the infamous "Doctor Boatshoes"), and a growing disconnect from longtime friends who've had babies.

Yet the current "cycle" (see photo, above) seems inherently different from all the last. We've made it safely and smoothly into the second trimester. Our last doctor's appointment lasted a-minute-and-a-half. The anxiety has begun lessening, although the terror has risen. Hope inevitably leads to sorrow, right?

I'm restarting - or perhaps more accurately, finally starting - this blog as we prepare to announce to the world our news. Yes, we're going Facebook official tomorrow. I worry that this is further evidence that we're pushing our luck, tempting the fates to once again shoot us down. And yet ...

We've begun to refer to the fetus in Carrie's belly as "the tiny monkey."

Estimated date of arrival is Aug. 4.

At last, we're ready for lift-off.

Right?