Dazzled

That, friends, is my baby girl.

I KNOW, I can't believe it either! I didn't realize how much I was expecting to hear "It's a boy" until I heard, well, not exactly "It's a girl" because when the tech said "See those three white lines?" I gasped and burst into tears. Well, maybe that's overstated. There was definitely a gasp, and there was some mistiness that took me by surprise because, while I'm known to be an easy crier, it's rare for me to produce those elusive and helpless happy tears.

I'm going to have a daughter. Steven's going to have a little princess (and he might need a few pointers from men who were terrified of baby girls until they had one of their own, so if you know anyone...). Alex is going to have a baby sister. He was excited when I told him. He jumped up and down and reiterated his desire to teach her how to walk and run, "but only inside, at least until we get her some clothes to play outside in." And while I'm still in a state of semi-shock and pseudo-disbelief and breath-holding awe, Alex has moved on to more pressing matters. Right now he's drawing pictures of robots and taping them around the house as decorations for some convoluted surprise party for Steven. When we dropped by my parents' house to show them the DVD of the ultrasound, I told Alex to share the big news. Wide-eyed and earnest, he told them: "We got a new TV!"

Life is amazing.

Cuteness Overload

Wow. I've got to stop these nostalgic journeys. Thing is, we rearranged Alex's room yesterday and removed the last vestiges of nursery from it; it's now officially a BIG BOY room. And I'm OK with that, of course, because he just gets better as he gets older, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little twinge when I stumble blindly upon (or go to great lengths to dig up) one of these reminders of my funny baby boy.

Poor Charlie has only recently stopped fleeing anytime Alex gets within a 50-yard radius of her. I wonder how she'll react when we bring home another human puppy. My guess is that she'll keep a safe distance but (again) be a devoted if rather hands-off surrogate mama dog. She'll plant herself in front of me and bat mercilessly at my legs if I don't answer baby's cries as promptly as she thinks I should. She'll lick tiny feet with a kind of reverence (but only when the owner of the tiny feet is sound asleep). Jack ... well, Jack is Jack. He will passively tolerate being spat up on, pushed and pulled, and having his lips flapped around by chubby baby hands. He will serve as a furry step stool and a reliable source of infant amusement. All he'll ask in return is to be allowed to lick all traces of food, milk, juice, and unidentifiable stickiness off the child as he sees fit.

Day after tomorrow, we'll have a better picture of what our future holds.

Tripping down Memory Lane

I’ve been indulging in a little pictorial nostalgia recently. Several things have become clear.

1. My baby was very, very bald and had very, very big eyes. Like a Glo Worm.

2. I was very, very unprepared for motherhood.

3. Our old house was quite probably situated over a Hellmouth. (Maybe I should’ve warned the nice man who bought it from us after approximately seventy-five years on the market.)

We moved when I was 37 weeks pregnant. I picked up one end of a couch and my share of fairly heavy boxes in the process. We agreed not to tell our mothers that. The dogs settled in quickly, and Steven acclimated ... I never did. Before I could come to know the Stonehaven house as home, I had a baby, and my world turned inside out. We called him Alexander the Demander. I don’t think he was as fussy as we’ve come to remember. I think we were scared new (young) parents and everything was amplified and magnified until we found ourselves hopelessly confused about where we belonged on the spectrum of This Is Normal.



And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if he cried incessantly or a perfectly normal amount. We figured out that a few seconds outside would snap him out of those cries that didn’t seem tied to anything we could fix. We figured out that rocking him in the glider in his room with the lights off was akin to magic, and that he liked Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” a song to which I inexplicably know all the words. I learned to relinquish some measure of control because God knows you don’t have much when it comes to babies. Eventually, eventually, I didn’t overdo when he whimpered and I learned that getting a grip on ME was a prerequisite to soothing him.

Easily frustrated is my sweet boychild. Type A, like his grandfather and his mommy. Baby steps were never enough to satisfy him. Tummy time made him want to crawl, crawling made him want to walk, walking made him want to run. He’s doing 100-piece jigsaw puzzles on the computer now and grouching that it takes him too long. I wish he knew there’s time to reach all these goals. That one day he’ll be 31, expecting his second child, realizing that kids he used to babysit are graduating from college and entering the real world, and all the milestones will come in their own time. I hope he can come to see and appreciate himself for what he is and what he can do—both of which blow my mind on a daily basis.

“I hope we get an easy one this time,” said Steven, making me envision a warehouse of babies, row after row of bassinets, each tagged with a temperament and a number denoting level of difficulty. I agreed with him, remembering the infinite afternoons spent coddling and swaying, singing and patting and rocking and shushing. But then Alex ran into the room to give me a “golden ticket,” which, he explained, I could use to purchase prizes from his room, anything I wanted except for his cars because those are special and cost three golden tickets, and I changed my mind: I want our baby. I want Alex’s brother or sister, Steven’s son or daughter, my little bug. I want another big-eyed bald Glo Worm with Kermit the Frog legs, or a chunky teddy bear with untamable locks. Whoever we get will be just right for us.



Five days and counting till the Big Ultrasound!

Look out, literary world!

Alex wrote a book. It’s called Speeding Turtles. It’s adorable and I’m very proud. Why? Because I used to fancy myself a writer? Maybe. But maybe more because he is so proud of it. He had me read it to him as one of his bedtime stories the other night. He credits Steven with helping a little bit, meaning Steven was the ghostspeller. And that would explain the choppiness of these sentences from a child who hasn’t stopped talking since birth. Without a doubt, it went like this:

“Daddy, how do you spell ‘This turtle runs faster than any other turtle in the world, and nobody can catch him, even other animals that are actually supposed to be fast’?”

“R-U-N-S F-A-S-T.”

Close enough.

Of Christmas and Cult Leaders

Today I caved and broke out the maternity pants. Ample breathing room cannot be overestimated. Week 16 has brought nothing new or exciting except for this rapidly expanding midsection of mine, and I can’t quite stop trying to suck it in. It’s true what they say, though, that you show earlier with subsequent babies than with your first, and if it’s not true in your experience, I beseech you not to correct me. I’ve felt a few maybe-baby flutters within the past week and am eagerly awaiting the days when I’ll be shoving the kid’s feet out of my ribcage.

Christmas came and went with the customary blend of chaos and calm, impatience and panic and joy and melancholy, family and friends and too many awkward-shaped boxes to wrap, food prep and overindulgence and crankiness born of exhaustion. Alex was wildly disproportionate in his glee on Christmas morning, exclaiming stridently over a 20-cent Spider-Man Frisbee and a hollow plastic candy cane filled with Hershey Kisses, and dismissing the FRIGGIN TRAMPOLINE with a polite but disingenuous “Oh, wow, I like that too!” (In his defense, the unmarked box full of poles and netting didn’t look quite so impressive as one might have hoped and I’m not sure he understood exactly what it was.) He got lots of games with little pieces, and to my dismay I keep finding tiny bones from the Operation man lying around the house, and blocks of ice (from Don’t Break The) keep appearing in random places. Chutes and Ladders is a new favorite, although when he loses (and hard as I try sometimes when I’m not in the mood for the fallout, I can’t seem to throw a game of chance) he is not what one would call a good sport about it. “Oh NO!” he melodramas. “I’m not any good at it! I’ll NEVER WIN!” We’re workin’ on it.

Before:
After:

Our annual post-Christmas trip to Houston to see our Texas family was nice. My baby boy insisted on sitting in a seat on the airplane by himself, with the aisle separating him from us. He was content to “read” his books and look out the window and drink his Sprite and eat his little pretzels. I remember the panicky flights of yore, my carry-on filled with a solution to every conceivable problem: Boredom? Toys, books, movies, games. Sleepiness: Blanket, stuffed animals, pacifier. Meltdown? Emergency chocolate stash! Once, when he was about two and a half, he realized he had the upper hand (when we’re not surrounded by innocent captive passengers we never lose the upper hand, mind you) and began demanding a steady stream of Dum-Dums until we were safely on the ground and able to balance the power scale. I guess we have these things to look forward to from BB at some point, while Alex will no doubt opt to sit farther and farther away from us with each successive year.

He had a blast with his cousins, Elizabeth and Emily, and Steven’s friend Jeremy’s kids, Hunter and Tyler. Five munchkins between the ages of 3 and 5, running wild in the upstairs play room on the hunt for Alex’s “Mystery Maker” and their ever-missing light sticks. (We later realized why the light sticks kept disappearing when I overheard Alex say, “Let’s play Hide the Light Stick again!”) Whether a natural leader or a Jim Jones in the making, Alex gave me cause for concern with his bossy tendencies, which I’ve never had occasion to see on display quite so vividly. At one point he organized a cleanup of the playroom and I heard him announce, “I keep telling you! This is not play time, this is cleanup time.” (I had a talk with him that night about bossiness, and how to suggest things to friends instead of giving orders, and he did put the strategies into action the next day, thank God. Or maybe he was just lulling me into a false sense of security so that I’ll drink the Kool-Aid too!)


I enjoyed every second I got to hold my sweet 2-month-old nephew Charlie. I thought about asking to borrow him to tide me over until June, but, nice as my sister- and brother-in-law are, they might balk at fostering out their third-born. I did, however, do enough cuddling, smelling, kissing of peach-fuzzy head, and patting of puffy diaper-clad rear end to scratch my baby itch for a while.


And shhh, don’t tell him I told you this, but Steven admitted, of his own accord, that seeing Charlie got him really excited about ours. He can join the club.

My Son, the Philosopher

I had my second OB appointment yesterday, and Dr. Awesome perused my file and proclaimed, "You're perfect." Aw, you flatter me, Dr. Awesome. Good bloodwork, good blood pressure (whew), good baby heartbeat, good weight gain (if there is such a thing) at one pound after the nice nurse subtracted one because I was wearing boots. And! He told me that if I come back in five weeks instead of four, we can do my "big ultrasound." So on January 20 at around 10 a.m., barring baby stubbornness or unforeseen events, we will find out if we're having a John or a Jane. And no, those are not the names. It's hard to believe that my next appointment will mark the almost-halfway point of this pregnancy. Makes me feel, comparatively and in retrospect, like I gestated Alex for about two and a half years. This is flying by!

Speaking of the funny 4-year-old, he told us last night that, while he realizes that God gets to choose whether the baby is a boy or a girl, he certainly hopes God was listening when he put in his request for a baby sister. Why a sister? I asked out of curiosity. "Because," he told me matter-of-factly, "Girls are cute."

Less cute, more heart-wrenching was the conversation we had a week or so ago when I was putting him to bed. He went through his whole how-much-I-love-you routine, starting with "I love you ten million" (we never know what units he's using) and going all the way to "I love you up to the sky and around the world and past Heaven." Then, unexpectedly, he said, "I'll even love you when you die." He thought about it for a minute and added, "But that's going to be a looooooong long long time away, right?" After reassuring as best I could on such a landmine-dotted topic, he seemed not a bit soothed. "Why does life have to be like that?" he asked, frustrated.

I think he used to ask easier questions.

He has come up with his own surprisingly accurate theory on the logistics of childbirth. When the baby runs out of room in my tummy, he said, it will start looking around for the door. The doctor at the hospital helps the baby open the door, because, duh, babies don't know how to turn knobs.

The Joys of Being Neurotic

I’m brainstorming. It’s a sight to behold, let me tell you. Notes are scattered in front of me, scribbled on Post-Its of varying sizes, looking important and schizophrenic. Monday 10:45, says one ... I didn’t do anything yesterday at 10:45, so I’m hoping it’s old. I doodle my name a lot, it seems, in all its incarnations. I doodle the baby’s potential names, especially ones I know I’ll never have the guts to saddle the kid with for real. Christmas shopping. One of these Post-Its has names and abbreviations of what I can only imagine were intended to be gift ideas, but I can’t imagine why I would be buying my 4-year-old nephew a Psk CXp bd. I need to get better with my shorthand. Mostly there are random numbers with dollar signs that make me the appropriate degree of nervous: 895 minus 654 equals 241 and even though I don’t know what that 241 is, it seems ominous, right? S: 866.25 with an exclamation point next to it! VBC 715 with a question mark? Baby care, afterschool care, yack! It’s important, too, not something you can just close your eyes and point to and hope for the best ...

I’m a planner. Not because I’m so all-fired organized (Post-Its everywhere attest) but because I worry if I don’t have a plan in place. I worry if I do have a plan in place, but less, and for different reasons. The having of the plan is A-Number-One-Important; the plan can be tweaked and adjusted, reframed and repositioned, but its bones don’t change and that brings me some measure of comfort. Right now there is no plan. Or actually there are several completely separate potential plans, with corollaries, and I’m stuck at the crux of where all the paths branch off, staring down one after the other with panicked indecision. Wishing someone would push me down one, any one, so I can claim PLAN IN PLACE, NO TAKE-BACKS and go on about my business.

So while I wait for something to click, for a decision to make itself (hasn’t happened in my 31 years of life but that’s not going to stop me from waiting), I’m going to throw myself into the things that are fairly controllable and don’t require much in the way of choice. Beginning the slow process of clearing out the office in preparation to transform it into the nursery. Reading about what’s happening inside my body from week to week. Boosting Alex’s burgeoning big brother ego. Working. Freelancing to fill in the holes because my goodness formula has gotten more expensive in the past four years! Hanging with people who make me laugh. Reading mindless fiction (confession: I’m halfway through my second reading of New Moon, yes I am, don't judge me). Writing mindless nonfiction, so that I’ll remember this time in my life, years down the line, when the decisions have all been made and paid and become woven into the fabric of How It Is.

Stop taunting me with your secrets, future.