Wallydraigle

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

I sojourned in the land of Mullet

but have returned to the sweet promised land of Jaw-Length Bob with Bangs.

My last haircut was freaking awesome. Probably my favorite ever. It was short and fun and... really high-maintenance. Like, I had to actually do stuff to it so I'd look female (have you seen my jaw? it is, shall we say, very masculine). Usually "stuff" meant just flat-ironing the crazy Zac Efron swoopy bang thing down and putting some goop in it once it was dry, but for me tha's a lot. Like a prom 'do. Oh, and my hair now grows at the speed of light. It's always grown fast, but pregnancy really kicks it into high gear. Within a week of getting this haircut, it was already looking like something with a nasty flu had died on my head.

So, of course, I waited two months to get it cut again. All because I don't like talking on the phone. In the meantime, the hairs on the back of my head just sprouted like crazy, leaving me somewhere between this:

and this:

Great for laughs, not so great for feeling superfabulous. Because when your belly resembles a basketball, and your waddle resembles that of a mare in labor, the attractiveness of your head and its various *accoutrements is pretty much all you've got. In fact, you don't even have shoes because the single most important thing to a very pregnant lady is shoes that slip on and off easily, preferably without the need to bend over at all. And this is winter in Wisconsin, so that leaves out cute slip-on shoes, and all we're left with are nursing clogs with very functional soles.

*Firefox Fail #3574: "accoutrement" is in their dictionary, but its plural is not. Lame.

So. Haircut. The mullet was funny for a while, but my vanity couldn't take it. And I went back to Bob. Bob is cute, and with him I feel feminine, even when I let my hair just air dry. Bob grows out nicely, so that if my terror of the telephone keeps me from making an appointment for two months, no worries (so long as we don't go past shoulder length). Long hair, no matter how it's layered, makes me look like a boy in a wig. A stringy wig that got rolled in grease. And short hair, as I've learned, makes me crazy, no matter how good it looks for a week.

But I am sick of Bob. I have had Bob since about sophomore year of high school. Bob is comfortable and suitable and right, but so are old socks. I want to trade him in for a newer model, but all the newer models turn out to be Mullet in the end. And Mullet don't treat me right.

Monday, December 14, 2009

A whole bunch of boring...

...but I wanted to write some things down.

I don't want to jinx it, but The Child has suddenly started sleeping like a champ again. She's still teething, she still has her grouchy days, and she even just had a growth spurt, but sleep she does. I have no idea what happened, but I am so very grateful.

I didn't realize how crummy I'd felt all the time until I felt uncrummy. Like the last seven months are this haze. Sure, she's had periods of decent and not-so-awful sleep off and on over those last months, but nothing like this. For about three weeks now, I've gotten eight or more hours of sleep almost every night. In fact, I don't think I've gotten this much good sleep since I was about 8.

Unisom helps, of course; I've never sleep well, even without interference. It also helps that I just stopped caring. The trip to Denver was so awful (speaking ONLY in terms of sleep; everything else was wonderful) that I think something snapped. I hear her cry for a few minutes over the baby monitor at 10:00 at night? Let her. She'll live. It used to be that would have my stomach in knots for the next half hour. Before we go to bed, if she wakes up for real, I'll go in, give her a drink of water or a hug or a song or some Tylenol, but once we're in bed, I shut our door and turn the fan on high. We'll hear her if she's really screaming, so I'm not worried about anything bad happening to her, but if she wakes and just fusses for half an hour, I don't know about it.

I was pretty desperate when we got back from our trip--so short on sleep, so frazzled and so pregnant--that I started doing that out of desperation. I felt terrible, but I knew that she was well-hydrated, that at worst she might be having some tooth pain, and I needed to function as a mom. A few days later I forgot to shut our door one night. Not a peep from her all night. Or the next night, or the next. And she's now taking one three-hour nap in the middle of the day instead of two short ones. All three of us are happier. The house stays cleaner, I actually feel like playing with her and carrying her and talking to her, and James comes home to a wife who is (usually) happy and has some energy left to care about him. I cannot believe the difference in myself.

And, of course, now that she's sleeping beautifully, we have a trip to visit relatives in Indiana coming up. I think it'll go better. It's a much shorter trip, for one. And despite my attempt at optimism, I'm mostly expecting it to be a total nightmare, which means I won't be taken by surprise again. I am concerned about sharing a car with one or two more people this time (MIL and James's brother). We've warned them, of course, but there's really nothing that prepares you for it. Or they might be thicker-skinned than we are and have no problem with it. Or Grace might not scream the whole way.

*Naomi shakes with laughter for five minutes straight*

Ahem. I know I shouldn't be such a pessimist, but I've always found the pessimism serves me well. I always expect the worst that my mind can come up with, but I don't really worry over it--at least, not too much. I'm rarely surprised by bad things. I can't imagine the constant disappointment that must come with optimism.

We had church yesterday at 4:00. Our normal meeting place was booked, so another local church let us use their building in the afternoon. We should have church at 4:00 EVERY WEEK. The morning wasn't a frantic scramble to get showered and dressed and to get The Child fed and changed and strapped into the car seat, followed by hours of attempting to keep a cranky baby happy through church, followed by lunch for her in the car on the way home and trying to keep her from falling apart (we used to try to keep her awake, but, as you know, we recently learned that was completely unnecessary, since she doesn't sleep in the car) before getting her home, changed into regular clothes, and into her crib, where we'd hope she'd not be too overtired and thus sleep for more than 45 minutes. Yesterday, we woke up at 9:00, had a nice morning, The Child got her three-hour nap, we went to church, and our friends got to see that she isn't this whiny, unhappy little gremlin all the time.

I'm painting a really bad picture of Sundays. It's not all cranky baby and frazzled Naomi and James. That's just a part of it, and it's something that most church-going parents deal with, so we're not special or anything (well...). I love our church, and when we do miss it I feel kind of blah for the rest of the week.

Anyway, halfway through the sermon, a bat started flying around! He was just a little guy, and very cute. It's probably the closest I've ever gotten to a bat outside of a zoo. The Child was pretty thrilled, to. The best part was watching a bunch of the guys flail around the back of the room with coats every time he'd circle back there. I think they finally shut him in the kitchen.

Afterward, we went to our pastor's house for a meal, and Grace held it together much longer than I'd expected. We really do need to get out more with other children. She just doesn't know what to do around so much commotion. I'm sure having another baby around will help a lot, but I do wish she weren't so shy. If one of us is holding her, she does great. She smiles and flirts and waves. So I know she's not stunted. Much of it is my fault. I like to be comfortable in my house. If I want to go out with friends, I do that, but getting out of the house with her is a lot of work for a lazybones like me. Sigh. I'm sure having two is going to give me a real quick lesson in what the words "hard" and "a lot of work" really mean.

Her nap is almost over, and what do you know, I'm actually looking forward to her being up and about again. The old one-hour naps just didn't do that for me. It's sad when you often spend so much of the day dreading your own child's presence. It's such a relief to be rid of that.

Friday, December 4, 2009

I want to move to Devner

I think I am finally recovered from our Thanksgiving trip to Colorado. That, and I've learned to take my Unisom early enough at night that the stupor has lifted by the next afternoon.

This means I feel like writing an entry! That, and the vague memory of my sister waving a knife around in the air while proclaiming, "I don't care what you write about us and our family! Just write something already!" has me good and scared. She can be... intimidating.

(Dear sister, I love you. And you're totally fun and awesome.)

The visit itself was great. The drive there and back? Not so much. I don't think I've ever been so close to sticking a fork in my ear.

And, as far as sleep goes, Thanksgiving week wasn't all that great, either. It was like having a newborn again, I swear. The Child just decided that sleep was optional, and we were going to have to deal with it. Thank you, Child.

(I do think much of that had to do with teething. Two molars have just broken through, and when I stick a finger in her mouth, it feels like at least three more teeth are on the way. I think this is terribly unfair.)

Anyway, we had a blast even in the midst of bone-crushing weariness. The weather in Denver was perfect for most of the week (at least it was to this Wisconsinite), getting up into the sixties on our last two days there. My sister and I spent a lot of time laughing, too, though I don't think I could have been laughing a whole lot if I had 423 relatives and five small children under my roof for a whole week. I think it helps that they have a hot tub and plenty of wine. That and she runs a ridiculous number of miles every day.

I wish I could tell you more, but I don't really remember much in the way of events. I remember having fun, and I remember going shopping a few times.

I do remember packing. My goodness, people, never let a pregnant woman do all the packing. The day before we left, I spent hours in the kitchen putting together a gazillion chicken wraps for the trip out there (it took that long because my attention was constantly divided between that and keeping The Child alive). They sounded mouth-wateringly delicious at the time, and it was Very Important that we have good food for the drive.

I ate two. And then they were horrible to me.

So, thirteen hours of off-and-on cooking/child wrangling and one hour of frantic packing. In the two days leading up to the trip, I got a total of seven hours' sleep. And then we drove for 18.5 hours. Stupidity, thy name is Naomi.

Speaking of stupid, I cut a finger open for the millionth time on my mandolin slicer. See, it's only a time saver and a convenience if you don't use the stupid food holder. That food holder makes me insane, and it doesn't work unless the food I am slicing is exactly the right size and shape (it's good for potatoes and onions, and that's about it). So I keep not using the food holder, and I keep cutting myself. Yesterday I hate to slice up a bunch of carrots real fast, and it's not even possible to use the food holder for carrots. So instead of just using a knife and cutting board like a person with a brain would do, I started running carrots through the mandolin.

And then I yelled, "Oh s***!" at the top of my lungs (sorry, Mom, and whoever else may be reading this; I do have very CLEAR recollections of you and Dad using bad words at certain urgent times, though, so you can't be too hard on me). And then I stared stupidly at the blood pooling around my thumb and thumb nail for about thirty seconds. And then I yelled for bandaids. I cut deep enough into the side of my thumb that it even got my nail bed, which I'm sure will be super awesome fun as it heals. I think it stopped bleeding about two hours later. Thankfully, I cut a flap instead of a gouge (which, the thing is sharp enough that I could have done just that if it hadn't run into my thumb nail), so it didn't gush like it could have.

So, now that you are all thoroughly grossed out, I will leave now. Twenty minutes until The Child gets up from her nap. I need to go do something productive. Like play a video game or nap or something.

Edited to add:

The food! How did I forget about the food?

Best Thanksgiving meal ever. My sister and her friend did almost all of it. We pretty much just ate all day. Which actually works out well. If you start with some appetizers in the early afternoon, you don't gorge yourself to the point of illness when you sit down, starving, to the evening meal.

There is a picture on Facebook of my gnawing on a turkey leg, but I actually didn't eat much at all. I eat constantly, but since my stomach is now the size of a walnut, I can only eat three bites at a time. The turkey, which my brother-in-law grilled, was amazing. Best turkey ever. He brined it overnight in some kind of concoction, and then it cooked all day and made us all very happy.

Also, we have settled on the first name Emeline (pronounced "emma-lean") for 2.0. And I like Emma for short instead of Emily. Emily's very pretty, but I like Emma better.

I know, totally not what I had in mind, right? But it's so feminine and pretty and old-school and unusual, yet still normal. I like the names Emma and Emily a lot, always have, but they've become much more common over the last few years. So Emeline works. We think we like Adele for the middle name, but that's still up in the air. I had in mind a name that would mean something, either definition-wise or as a family name, or something, and this doesn't at all. I don't even know what Emeline Adele means. But it's just... pretty. And my grandma's name is Emma Adelaide, so it's kind of family-ish.

We can FINALLY ditch "2.0" and "The New One" and "This One" when we're talking about her. I mean, calling a baby 2.0 is amusing and all, but giving her a name makes her more real, more of a person in my mind. It's nice.

*or Emmeline. I am trying to figure out which spelling is more normal. I like weird names, but not weird spelling. Makes sense, right? Actually, there are about 40 different ways to spell Adele, too, so we have that to work on also. Goody!

Thursday, November 12, 2009

More of a basket case than I seem

So, you know how I'm always saying, "Oh, I have no friends here, and it sucks, and I suck at making friends, and what do I do blah blah blah?" Well, I fully acknowledge that it's my fault. I think it's totally unfair that an extrovert gets saddled with sometimes crippling shyness (THANK YOU evil evil elementary school classmates), but that's my problem to deal with, not this mean, unfriendly town's. Well, what makes it worse is that James has a coworker who lives right here in town. Within walking distance of our house. His wife is a SAHM, and they have a two-year-old and a newborn. They are normal and nice people. They shower and do not smell of dirty socks. And yet! Here I am, a hermit in my own house while prime friend fodder lives just a mile away. Idiot.

Well, today we're bringing dinner over to their house (see above, regarding newborn and two-year-old), and I am flipping out. What if the food sucks? What if they die of food poisoning (seriously, I kept sniffing the meat as I cut it up, absolutely CERTAIN that the meat I'd taken out of the freezer just yesterday was maggoty and rotten)? What if I say something wildly inappropriate (okay, so that's a given, and I should just learn how to recover gracefully in these situations instead of worrying about the inevitable happening)? It's times like this a beer would be really handy. I actually laid awake at night, worried sick about how to make conversation without making a donkey's rear of myself.

And do you know what? All this stupid worry always turns out to be for naught. Sure, I say inappropriate things on a daily basis (I have this compulsive need to make everything funny, which means I sometimes do things like make fart jokes at the dinner table), but no one even notices except me. And when I've finally gotten to know people well enough to share with them that I was absolutely terrified of them for the first three years of our relationship, they say things like, "What? Really? You seem so outgoing."

Hah.

The dinner I am making is this fajita stew. It is fabulous. And it takes five minutes to prepare (provided you do not have a clingy fourth-grader-sized toddler hanging off your hip and screaming in your ear). I've made it twice before, and each time I'm surprised at how good it is. The best part is that you can use a super cheap cut of beef, and it's still tender and full of flavor. I love red meat like I love cheese and chocolate, but I refuse to pay $4/lb for a round steak, thank you very much (on special! in the middle of Farm Country, USA! I do not understand!).

Even The Child loves it. We always go through a few minutes of breathless anticipation before we try to feed her a new meal. Will she eat it? Will she get enough food for dinner that she won't be cranky all night? Will we want to kill ourselves for not making something else for dinner?

These days she rarely rejects anything we feed her, so long as she sees us eating it first. But it still happens. And since I'm evil, I won't just give her something different. She gets other dishes, of course, but only what I'm already serving her. So if all she gets for dinner is apple sauce and Cheerios, that's her problem. Except that it's also our problem because she makes it our problem. As I said, though, this is rare anymore. We actually have a bigger problem with finding enough foods for her to eat. The other day at lunch she had a bowl of stew, a scrambled egg with spinach, two fruit cups, some oatmeal, yogurt, and a trillion Cheerios. I started a mental tally in my head of all the foods in the fridge that were good for her to eat without any preparation. If she hadn't stopped after the Cheerios, it would have been a dessert of shredded cheese in milk. And yet, she's still a string bean. I wish I knew her secret.

I realize there will probably come a day when she's suddenly a really picky eater, but I'm hoping her current zeal for any and all foods means there's a chance she won't go through that stage. Or that it will be shorter. Or less severe. And this is where all you experienced parents clutch your bellies as you laugh and laugh and laugh.

All right. Lots to do today. I need to get off my rear (no small feat these days, by the way, despite my tiny weight gain; it seems I'm a thousand times less coordinated this time around than I was with Grace).

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Babies plural will probably do me in

I had a horrific dream last night. Thankfully, it was an absurd horrific dream, not a realistic horrific dream, so it was easy to shake once I was awake (unlike the ten or so times I've dreamed James has died in a car accident or shooting or whatever). I still woke up sobbing. I dreamed Grace had Alzheimer's. Which is really stupid, of course, but I dreamed I watched my baby lose her mind, and it cast a bit of a pall over much of my day. I kept watching her play so sweetly and thinking, "If she turns out to be a drug addict, I'll remember her at this age, and how horrible will that be?"

Yay for crazy pregnant ladies.

I know I haven't been around much lately, either reading or writing. The Child has shorter and shorter naps, and when she is awake, she is more and more demanding of my time and attention, so I just don't feel like being on here when she is asleep. Lame explanation, I know, but napping is one of the most important things in my life right now, when I can manage to fall asleep.

I did manage to start V, finally. I've been meaning to watch it since it premiered, but kept napping instead. So far, so good. I love seeing all these old Firefly cast members. Speaking of which, if anyone watches Castle, how awesome was the Halloween episode with all the Buffy and Firefly references?

Anyway, V was pretty awesome, and I like seeing the lady who plays Juliet (Lost) in a less annoying, less smirky role. Also, I have a girl crush on Inara (can't remember real life name). She's so pretty.

Doctor's appointment yesterday. Nothing exciting. Finally got to see my favorite doctor of the bunch, Dr. M. And I completely forgot to ask him his opinion on a VBAC. All of the other three have expressed pretty varied opinions (I like this; I realize doctor's offices have to have set policies on certain things, but I also like that they're individuals with their own opinions, not a hive mind), so I very much wanted his. Oh well. Next appointment, perhaps.

2.0 is hyperactive. She is awake and kicking all the time. Grace was more prone to sporadic (yet violent) outbursts. This one just does lazy somersaults all day.

Speaking of Grace, she has now learned a new word. "Block." Only, it comes out "bop," and she applies it to all smallish toy-like objects, including my spice jars. She may also have "up" and "hi" and "bye," but the verdict is still out on that. Those teeny little one-syllable words are so hard to distinguish from pure coincidence. Throw in our own conviction that she's the most intelligent child on Earth, and it's pretty much impossible to figure out.

Her sleep is still unreliable, but it's no longer beating me relentlessly into an endless gray fog of hopelessness (sounds melodramatic, but that is exactly how I start to feel after just a few days of interrupted sleep). She'll go two to three days at a time now without incident, which allows me to catch up a little on sleep. I'm still a little dull in the head, which I think also contributes to my not writing. But! It seems things are getting better. And I hope I haven't jinxed it all just now.

The other night, she woke up at 5:30 in the morning. I brought her some water, and she downed about four ounces in one go. Then she snuggled up to me against the crib rails, and I started singing to her. Halfway through "You Are My Sunshine," she pulled away, looked up, put her hand on my cheek, and said, "Mama." Devious child got at least five extra minutes of cuddling just for that--after I picked my dead body up off the floor. I am such a sucker.

James is also "mama" now, by the way, which is endlessly amusing to me. If I exclaim, "Daddy's home!" or ask, "Where's Dada?" she goes completely nuts with excitement, though, so it's not as if she doesn't know his name. When he's in the room, I pretty much cease to exist. This bothers me less than you might think. If we were both away from her all day, it would probably hurt, but I enjoy the break.

I'm still swimming, hurray! It's getting harder. Most of the time, when you exercise regularly, things get easier, right? Well, not so much when your drag coefficient increases exponentially by the day. I do a lot of kicking, not so much actual swimming. It is very hard to keep my midsection afloat. I would think I'd become more buoyant, what with most of this weight being fat and water, but that's apparently not the way it works. Pregnant ladies get more awkward both on land and in water. Awesome!

The best part is getting out of the pool at the end of a workout. "Beached whale" has become a cliche because it is so true. I refuse to use a ladder. This is stupid. But still, I refuse. So I thrash my way up onto the edge of the pool and then struggle to my feet. It's not the weight so much as it is tired muscles and terrible balance on slippery tile. (actually, I'm still -3 lbs for weight gain) Still, I look like a beached whale. A beached whale trying to climb a ladder. A rope ladder. With missing rungs.

Also, I don't have a maternity suit, so I just look like I have the most bizarre body shape known to mankind. When your torso is the length of a postage stamp, that skinnier space between the bosoms and the belly is essential. Well, with a regular old suit, that space is webbed over in lycra. I look like a pumpkin stuck with four toothpicks and a cantaloupe out the top. We won't even get into how idiotic I look in a swim cap to begin with.

This is okay, though. I'm already feeling better about myself, even if the swimming itself isn't getting any easier. I sleep better, and I have more energy when I'm awake. It's a glorious feeling, this being able to function like a normal human kind of thing. Almost forgot what it felt like.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I'm a little stoned, so this may ramble a bit

Don't worry; the drugs are fully sanctioned by my doctors. And yes, everybody's fine.

Nothing like getting kicked when you're down. I was just getting over that stupid cold, FINALLY, when Mother of All Headaches stopped by for a visit. Well, okay, I've had worse headaches. Lots worse. But it's been years. And a lot has changed since then, like having a boisterous toddler (almost toddler, actually... dawdler?) and a boisterous fetus. Even though it totally ruined the weekend, I must say the timing on this headache was perfect.

It started as a nice, meek tension headache sometime around Friday. I usually ignore those, since there's not much I can do about them except wait for my neck muscles to unclench (thank you, pregnancy, for robbing me of my sweet, sweet ibuprofen; well, actually, until 30 weeks I'm allowed to take it when absolutely necessary, but I limit myself to the really bad headaches). And then I was really stupid and gorged myself on sugar Friday and Saturday, forgetting that sugar is a migraine trigger. It's been so long since I had a migraine that I haven't had to worry about it in ages. Anyway, the real beating started on Sunday, and James--wonderful James!--picked up the slack like a champion. Cheerfully, even. I think I'll keep him.

So I spent Sunday moaning and clutching my head. And since there was no light/sound sensitivity this time around, I just thought it was a really bad tension headache. Of course, then the throbbing temple vein and the nausea set in on Monday, and I figured it out. Thankfully, I had a doctor's appointment yesterday. That meant I didn't have to deal with The Child all day and feel guilty about lying on the couch and moaning instead of showing her love and affection an all that other garbage kids apparently need in quantity.

Headaches make me stupid. Stupider, at least. I get dull-witted and slow and kind of look stoned. Sometimes I mouth-breathe because *smells make it hurt more. I also hate it when people think I'm stupid, especially doctors. Not that any of my current doctors have treated me that way. But people in general (and here I'm talking about my experiences waitressing) often treat me like I'm dumb, mostly because I still look like I'm about twelve. And I turn into a blithering, inarticulate moron whenever I'm nervous. So. I promise this is going somewhere.

(*Do you have any idea what kind of superpower Migraine Nose and Pregnancy Nose become when they mate? My goodness, people. I was lying on the couch last night while James fed The Child, and I could smell the fruit cup from there. I had a blanket around my head, and I was twenty feet away, facing in the opposite direction. There's got to be a market for this.)

I hadn't intended to bring up my headache with the doctor, because what's he going to do about it? (see previous, regarding headaches making me stupid) But when he walked in (and by the way, he's a new doctor with the practice, and I love him every bit as much as I do the others, and where do they find these doctors?) and asked, "How are you today?" I said, "I've had a headache for three days, but otherwise I'm okay," intending to explain to him that headaches make me stoopid, so he would have to speak slowly and in small syllables.

Instead he said, "Oh?" all concerned-like, and then, "Is it a migraine? Does this happen often?" and a bunch of other questions I don't remember because I was too busy drooling on my socks. At that point I hadn't figured out if it was a migraine or not, so my answers were pretty useless. But he gave me a small prescription for oxycodone just so I could function until the headache went away.

Oh, and the baby is fine, and I'm gaining weight, finally, despite going days where all I can eat is lettuce. Another reason I love this practice: they listen to the woman who is actually carrying the baby. When I say something like, "Well, I think this baby's going to be a lot smaller than Grace was," I don't get patronizing head pats and stupid smiles. Dr. R told me that a woman's feel for the baby's size is about as accurate as an estimate made from ultrasound. Well, a woman who's had at least one other child to compare it to, at least. And I'm almost certain this baby is going to be small compared to The Child. Yet another reason I'm leaning more heavily toward a VBAC, but we'll wait and see on that; it's still early yet to judge the size on this one.

(I'm really sorry for the rambling, by the way. Headache is mostly gone, but I took another pill a while ago, and it makes me a little garrulous and incoherent. It also makes me really emotional. The I-love-you-so-much-I'm-crying kind of emotional, which is really weird and uncomfortable for me.)

So, I got my prescription filled (took forever because it was lunchtime), headed home, took some drugs, and then waited for the headache to go away. Only it didn't really go away. The pills definitely diminished the pain, and kind of wrapped it in a fuzzy blanket and set it far in the back of my mind, so it was no longer a flashing neon light directly in front of me. But it was still there. My mom stayed a while extra so I could lie down for a bit. And then shortly after The Child took her nap, and then James got home and did most of the parenting for the rest of the night. Cheerfully, again. I landed me a good one.

So, today has been better. I'm exhausted and my head is still protesting a little, but I got ten hours of sleep. Yeah, TEN. The Child has a sixth sense. Yesterday she was all sweetness and light and easy napping. And today has been more of the same. I keep telling people that 2.0 is going to be a nightmare from the start. She's got to be. The Child has used up all the good baby points for this family.

I've started swimming again. I know, I know, not supposed to start any new exercise during pregnancy, blah blah blah. Well, 15 minutes twice a week isn't going to bring on early labor. Especially when 8 of those minutes are spent panting in the shallow end. I needed something to make up for all the walking I'm not going to be able to do now that the weather's cold. And we are NOT going to have another winter like the last one. I didn't realize just how miserable I was until spring came, and I'd regained half the baby weight, and I could barely walk up a flight of stairs without dying.

The high school, which is just two blocks from us, has an hour of free lap swimming every Monday and Wednesday evening. It's a stupid time slot, and almost worthless, but I think I prefer it this way. If it were open every night, I'd feel pressured to go all the time, and then, of course, I wouldn't go all the time, and then I'd feel guilty, and after just a day or two of swimming, I'd quit entirely. This way I can keep reminding myself that it's only twice a week, and I can easily handle that.

I didn't go last night because my head was doing its best to force me into suicide, but I'm going tomorrow. As depressing as it was to get back in the pool and find out just how far I've fallen, I still felt really, really good afterward. My knee and foot didn't ache like they do when I haul myself around on land, and even though I'm out of shape, I'm still a darn good swimmer. It feels awesome to do something I'm good at. I'm not talentless, but I'm not a superstar in anything; I never was in swimming, either, but I think it's the furthest above average I've ever been in anything. Except for maybe Sudoku, but they don't hand out medals for that.

Monday, October 12, 2009

So much for my intuition

Well. We had a spectacularly awful night last night. I'm getting over that cold, which means I'm in the bark-like-a-seal-and-then-cry-when-your-throat-turns-to-sandpaper stage. Sometimes this cough goes away in a day or two. Sometimes it turns into a nasty little buzzard who hangs around for a week, waiting for my body to cool.

So when she screamed for two and a half, three hours last night, and I barked like a seal and cried for about the same amount of time, I felt about a thousand times worse than I did in the early mornings when she was first born. You're never going to get better! over and over again in my head. Add crappy pregnancy immune system to the lack of sleep, and we have a real storm a-brewin'.

CHILD! You used to sleep for 12 hours straight! What is your deal? I am not going to be a good mother if I'm sick for the next three weeks, ok?

I think she's getting a cold. And is on the verge of walking. Both would explain crappy sleep. But what awful timing. She was very good all day today. She hardly got a nap since today was a doctor's appointment, and we spent much of it in the car or at the doctor's office. I was optimistic about her sleep tonight.

WELL. We put her down twenty minutes ago, and she's still whimpering off and on. I'm probably going to sleep on her floor last night. Getting up out of my comfy, warm bed to go into her room every ten minutes and tell her I love her is just not something I have the will power for right now. James was up with her half the night last night, and he has to work tomorrow. I got a good hour and a half nap this evening, so I hope it works out.

Sigh. It is impossible to enjoy this pregnancy the way I did the last one. We'll have one or two really good weeks, and then she's right back to horrible sleeping again. This is bad enough when you're not pregnant. And sick. Blaaah.

On a lighter note! I had the 20-week ultrasound today. And... It's a girl! So much for "just knowing" it's a boy. Hah!

Crap. We have no girl names. I love Hava and Michal, but they're a little bit strange. Together I think they'd be really pretty. I love Ashira, too (one of my OD faves here has a daughter named Ashira). Most Old Testament girl names are really out there, though.

Anyone know of any other good female Hebrew names that aren't already used a lot? All the pretty ones, like Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah, are pretty common. I don't dislike them, but I prefer somewhat unusual names. I always liked having a name where, if I heard it in a crowd, I could be almost certain it was directed at me.