Life's been good to me so far

I want to tell everyone who is reading this, that I absolutely love you. I am so grateful for every well wish, every prayer, every candle lit - we are all so grateful for every donation, every idea, every place to stay, every care package.

I had a really hard time posting that last entry. I did it braced for criticism and judgement. I was totally expecting to hear whispers of locked posts talking where I couldn't see, and to have people popping over from communities to link me in snark places like stupid_free. I was projecting so much and bristling up, ready to just stay away from the computer.

Instead, I've found myself crying as quite a few people who I have little in common with and had no idea even read me have come out of the woodwork as long time lurkers, supportive of all we're doing, and even donated money. I've teared up again and again as people who I know have less than we normally do have said, "I wish I could do more", and I am just astounded that they are doing, at all. I've called Grant in surprise as real life friends I didn't even know were following this blog or pregnancy weighed in (positively).

It has added up in a huge way. We still have some bills that are backed up, but our grocery worries and our expenses of having to stay here another week, are covered. We were even able to pay for my mother's flight transfer so she could stay another week. Yesterday was a much happier, easier day than the day before, when we woke up broke and thinking she'd be gone in 24 hours.

:*)

I spent all day yesterday with a low grade depression clouding the back of my mind. Just feeling so much like I'm simply never going to go into labor, and like somehow I've gone from being more and more confident with myself, to letting doubts creep in because, damnitt, nothing is happening!!. Stupid though it sometimes seems to me, though, there really is something to the way the "energy around you" effects you...I spent the whole day yesterday with shocked strangers who heard my due date (after asking) saying, "Oh my God, you must be miserable!" and "What are they going to do?!" and "They let you go that long? Is the baby ok?" Even though I gave them all the counterarguments in a very seemingly calm way...it gets under your skin without you even realizing it's getting under your skin.

Today, I spent the afternoon with Nancy and her partner midwife. Nancy talked about the ICAN conference, about how speaker after speaker emphasized how drastically improved your chances of successful birth are if you wait for your body to be ready all on it's own. And how my due date was pretty much surely the 15th based on all available evidence, which means I'm not even post-dates yet (38-42 weeks is considered "normal", and I'm 41w2d). We also just talked about anything and everything, and casually took my blood pressure and laughed about how it's ALWAYS 110/70, and she palpated my belly and saw that Elise is still holding that perfect LOA position (back up my left side in the front, head down). My fundal height has went down again, to 40 cm (from 40.5, from 41.5), and they can feel that her head is even lower than it was before. The partner midwife got teary eyed feeling my baby, and Nancy did later on when she told me she wants this just as much as I do. I left feeling like I could go anytime, everything is fine and what have I been stressing about anyway? They really talked about how I will surely NOT be pregnant anymore in July, and I'm not going back to Florida without a baby, and that is that. They also fed me almond bread and cheddar cheese and grape juice and laughed with me at the nerve of nosy strangers. And expressed very positive attitudes about large birth weight babies.

Amazing.

Basically I woke up yesterday morning with a badly cramping abdomen, diarhhea and intensifying nausea. I was in the bathtub sure I would faint but unable to even call Grant to tell him I would faint. It just kept getting more and more intense; I had a LOT of sharp pain right up front under my herniated belly button. I was freaking terrified of going into labor like that, and so woozy and miserable...My mind was going a mile a minute but I had no energy and little ability to even move. The baby wasn't moving at all for what seemed to me to be very long periods of time. I felt really really afraid in general and like maybe a nice little morphine drip, catheter and IV was exactly what I needed, especially after I started puking uncontrollably a few minutes later. What a relief it could be, to just wake up feeling better and get to meet my baby...

After quite a lot of throwing up, though, I felt a tiny bit better in that way that throwing up can give you a reprieve. I came and collapsed in the bed in here and opened up my devotional journal. The page was titled, "God's Promises Are Sure" and listed the scripture, "He hath given meat unto them that fear him: He will ever be mindful of his covenant", and then went on to say, Father, being human, with human weaknesses, we may forget our promises to our children, but You never forget Your promises to us. You remain honorable and full of compassion even when we are weak and frightened...(more stuff like that for awhile, concluding with...) Sometimes my needs seem to be the most important things in my life, but I know this is only panic speaking. I need never panic again. Your promises are sure. Help my desperation of today give way to your reassurance and love.

So that sustained me throughout a long day of praying through the nausea and puking and half-watching bad, bad court tv (no cable) when it would ebb a bit. It also really renewed my general sense of confidence in birth. By evening I was finally able to keep down some liquids, and today I've been eating again, albeit not nearly as much as normal. I'm REALLY super dizzy off and on and kind of weak, but I think that's just lack of food. Tonight I finally seem to really be able to eat as I normally would, so hopefully tomorrow I'll be back to normal.

Grant is amazing. All day yesterday he was talking to my mom and Nancy on the phone to update them about me, cleaning out my puke bucket (!), checking on me, and taking care of all the kids/keeping them out of here. And in a really above and beyond way, too, like making caves out of furniture and coming up with pretend games and not forgetting the cream for Jake's red butt when he needed changing, etc. Today he took them out to the park and grocery shopping while I dozed all afternoon. With customers and his employee calling all the while needing answers to questions. He's passed out in the living room right now, and I really don't blame him.

It was weird, my body completely and totally shut down yesterday, labor-wise. Not a single Braxton Hicks the entire day, no discharge, nothing that's been standard fare for the previous week. It's all back today, though. Nancy was telling me over the phone this morning that she should have told me yesterday, so I wouldn't worry, that she's never ever seen a woman go into labor while violently ill; your body just knows it can't do both things at once.

I AM starting to get a little Alright, any day now..., about labor, but not too bad. I wasn't even 100% sure about my due date (though my fundal height has been at 41.5 weeks since I got here) and it was still 3 days further along than this, when I went into labor with Jake. When I could, today, I was reading Hypnobirthing or birth stories I found online. I feel like I'm in a much better headspace than I was even a few days ago, for birth. Except for the whole, "Can't stand for too long or I get really woozy" thing.

Anyway...I wanted to write about our trip to the New England Aquarium on Thursday, and post pictures from it, but I need to lay down again. So here are some more outdated pictures, concluding this past Wednesday. I'm planning on printing many of these journal pages, developing a lot of these pictures, and putting them along with many other things into a scrapbook for Elise.

( +15 )

Let's just say our last day of travel, and first day or two in Boston, were WAY more stressful than the first few days of travel were...It started with the traffic being backed up to nearly stopped for a whole hour north and south of Manhatten, on I-95. Then there is the fact that we didn't anticipate the tolls in that area being $6 each (yes, a few). Or gas at $3 a gallon.

Then there is Boston. It's IMPOSSIBLE to navigate this city!!! The streets all have names (no numbers), pretty much all of them are curving and twisting - generally a given intersection has in between 3 and 6 different possible turns. It's INSANE. And the hills, and the fact that for some reason the street you're ON isn't listed (only the cross street, no double stacked street signs showing both) and the street you're on is liable to turn into another street with no notice whatsoever. Finding our way around everywhere else we've been has been fine - this is insane. We're lost all. the. time. Grant has GPS and google maps on his phone, and we can't even follow the directions it gives us; they all involve alternate street names that the signs don't even say, or "left" but not whether that means the slight or sharp left, and all sorts of other things like that. For anyone who doesn't know how the other half lives, in Florida we have a flat grid system of sequential numbers, 4 possible directions per intersection, and both street numbers displayed on each corner. Sheesh. We seriously get lost going to the grocery store we've visited 3 times already, and can pick a place to go that's two miles away and spend TWO HOURS trying to find our way back. Nancy told me yesterday that she still gets lost regularly, and she's lived here for 10 years. ARGH.

The apartment -

Good: It's bigger than I expected, in a nice enough neighborhood. Very clean. The bed is comfortable. There are features I didn't expect, like a great massaging showerhead, On Demand cable system, and a very effective dishwasher and garbage disposal.

Neutral: We're adjusting to things we knew to expect, but still have to get used to, like going downstairs and across a parking lot to take out the trash, paying to do laundry on a different floor than we are on in tiny washing machines that hold less than half what ours at home does, and parking 2 blocks from the doors of the building (in 39 degree rain. With all the kids. And everytime you need to go get something else out of the van...).

Bad: NOT KID FRIENDLY. Oh, my gosh, it's EASIER to go be lost all day than it is to be here with them. Way easier. I don't even know where to start...the main thing, I guess, is that I just didn't remember how noise is in apartment living. Or else I'm used to concrete buildings with thick walls, built to withstand hurricanes? Because I lived in apartments a lot, in South Florida, and none of us ever had to tiptoe around or talk softly to be considerate. It was more like, "Don't BLARE your music full on unless it's Saturday afternoon, and no hammering in nails after midnight". Either way, every step every one of us takes ECHOES and booms. The walls are so thin that I can hear them halfway down this floor in the main hallway when I'm walking towards our front door - just talking, asking for things, playing, not even counting Isaac's screaming fits, that come several times a day and into the night. I've already been talked to by TWO different neighbors, both of which had really annoying things to say to me about parenting that were irrelevant to the noise (you can't take them out in this weather, you need to be careful with them on these stairs, they should be in bed by now, etc). We're on the corner, at least, thank God. Still. I was informed tonight that the building has a 10 pm noise limit? By someone else who wants to know who we are or when we moved in, because they "haven't ever seen us here before". Geez. I don't know how to keep an 18 month old from running around making noise on the floor. I can barely sort of almost keep a 3 year old from doing any running, hurrying or stomping. Aaron's going nuts trying not to jump, stomp or bang. I really don't know how any of you deal with this apartment stuff, with little kids. Unless this really is a flimsy building (without carpeting, even).

And, call me crazy, but I assumed several small children moving in for a month would mean the landlords would NOT do things like leave shoe boxes of their bills, glass ash trays and framed pictures, and toxic chemicals at floor level? I also didn't expect so many freestanding top heavy floor lamps or hinged glass doors with expensive items inside. I didn't expect "furnished" to mean someone else's contact lenses would be in the medicine cabinet and their tampons and underwear filling the dresser drawers and the window sills full of their stuffed animals. There is this huge walk in closet in our room...with her entire wardrobe and shoe collection stuffing it O_o Maybe I'm weird or paranoid, but I would feel so VULNERABLE leaving all my stuff in an apartment a family of strangers was going to be staying in for a month. There's a piggy bank full of change and what looks like a Master's Degree's worth of college textbooks and a full collection of fridge magnets...and some expired eggs and frozen meat and so on.

Also the floor is some kind of cool looking and feeling criss cross pattern of wood pieces...that Jake can dissassemble. Seriously, everytime we turn around there's a bare patch of concrete showing and he's running with double handfulls of what look like Jenga pieces. *sigh*

We're making the best of it. We went and bought some plastic, portable stacking drawers for the kids' room (which was big enough, and had nothing but a futon and night stand in it) - and an air mattress. And we picked out some fabrics at Jo-Ann's that we're going to use painter's tape to cover all the hinged glass doors up with (there are 8 in our room, 4 in the living room), and also cover all the look of "you're living in someone else's personal space" that are under them, in the process. It will just be big 5 foot panels of color and pattern. We're finally easing back into eating right, as well - 5 days on the highway got pretty gross, aside from our visit to Dama's house. I made us whole wheat blueberry muffins and scrambled eggs for breakfast, beef stew over brown rice for dinner, and warm cinnamon apple sauce for dessert. All very well received. We still ended up having crappy croissanwhiches from Dunkin Donuts for lunch, though :x I'm also putting the book collection to use - we decided to put Rowan of Rin and Harry Potter on hold for the month and read The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling's real chapter book) and A Children's Garden of Verses, while we're here and they're available.

What kills me is I haven't heard sound one from any other tenant in this place. I mean, nothing. In my room or the bathroom with the door closed, I hear EVERY LITTLE THING from the rest of the apartment. From down the hall, I hear our apartment. The one neighbor said we sounded like "a herd of elephants". But it's like we're tiptoeing through a mausoleum or something - I wonder if everyone else here keeps 3 pairs of socks on and a thick layer of wall to wall carpet, and whispers at all times. I definitely haven't seen any other kids.

And come to think of it, I've very rarely seen other kids out and about around town, either. In the grocery store or BJ's, even, which is where you would generally see kids. When I do, I see one kid with 1-2 adults. What the heck, man? I'm used to always seeing at least one other mom with 3 kids and a few with 2, whenever I make a big food run. People here aren't even asking when I'm due and acting congratulatory, it's just this pursed lip thing like they have to look away before they sneer. #$*@&#!!

Anyway. It's harder than I expected in many ways, especially after the highway and hotels and a friends' house were all such a breeze that G and I were both like, "We should travel all the time!"

Highlights -
-Driving through a parking lot I saw what I assumed was a big pile of some kind of foam insulation or something, filthy by the look of it. "That's snow" said Grant. No it isn't, I replied, but he insisted, so we stopped and he got out and kicked it and ice went everywhere. Cue crazy Floridians all playing and fighting in week old dirty snow that has yet to melt. The kids had a BLAST.
-A wonderful, amazing, anonymous woman from Canada emailed me several times and sent us a couple of things, before we left. RIGHT before we left, we got a package from her loaded with individually wrapped presents for each of us - several apiece. All for the trip. Activity books, art supplies, warm socks, cash for coffee, little car toys - so thoughtful and amazing. Anne, the children are constantly begging to open something else and I'm amazed at the care you put into everything. I keep meaning to email you, but things have been really hectic getting settled in. It will happen, though.
-We meet with Nancy tomorrow. She's thrilled that we're here.
-And I briefly talked to julierocket on the phone today.
-Grant is working so hard. He's been hauling and doing all the laundry, all the packing and unpacking of heavy things, all the running things up to the apartment and down to the van/trash. And still doing half of Jake/Isaac duty. He took A and A out on a hike in the nature reserve early this evening and the two of them came back thrilled and full of stories. It kind of blows my mind that we can somehow still love each other in the midst of everything else going on.

I feel alright, physically. My braxton hicks are still just 6-10 a day, but they're definitely stronger now than they have been before. I also suddenly have to get up to pee at least TWICE every night. I'm a bit dissapointed with myself for starting to get impatient already, when I'm not even "due", which should be my starting point for thinking of labor, until Sunday. But now that we're here and I'm so uncomfortable all the time and my circulation and hips are making me nuts and I can't keep my belly all the way covered in the cold...Blah. I compose myself by looking around at the still-disheveledness and thinking how much better it would be if nothing happened until I can get everything in order and we can be back in some kind of routine. I felt very sad and almost hopeless yesterday, just so depressed, because it was just all we could do to spread ourselves so thin to really be there individually for the kids we already have, and we were stretched sooooo far, that I just felt like the last thing I need right now is another baby :/ I know it's the circumstances - I did NOT feel like that at home, and today is better than yesterday. Still and all, 39+ weeks pregnant is not the tme for that to be what's going through your head. It would be a good thing to get things to a manageable enough point that we could actually fully appreciate this new soul before she's on the outside. I guess it's just being pregnant I'm tired of, really, since I'm at this very late stage and have been pregnant so much in the past few years. I'm ready to sleep on my stomach, be able to fit in a towel and not wonder if everything bothering me is just hormones, again. It would be nice to roll over in the night without the pain waking me.

Ok, since everyone else is asleep, I'm going to go and start editing and saving pictures. I'll get them up as soon as I can, but I can't promise any specific time. Maybe I'll do them in several posts because, really, there are just too many of them.

Today was EXACTLY what I needed!

Let me preface this by saying that Isaac got some severe and terrifying croup a few days ago, and we have spent this week going through a wringer of worry, fear, irritation, frustration and exhaustion. There was a whole night that neither of us slept because we were too afraid he would stop breathing. And it's viral, not something antibiotics can treat (you know it's bad since I took him to the doctor...) A major thing about it that has been making us insane is, he can't get freaked out. He can't throw a fit or start crying, or his larynx swells and his breath gets extremely hoarse and high pitched and he starts choking badly. So...we've spent over four days catering to The Tyrant's every whim, rather frantically. Even with us scuttling to accomadate him in every way, there've been quite a few scary crying jags. He has whined pretty much continuously; at the doctor's he was screaming bloody murder, thrashing wildly and choking and squeaking. Grant was holding him outside the door, and the ped asked me, "You have a lot of trouble getting medicine into him?" "How can you tell?", I replied, and he laughed a lot. Grant and I are both starting to go squinty eyed, longing for him to be better again so we can say NO YOU CAN'T! about anything at all and make him deal with it :x He has such an insane lot of totally unreasonable demands. And he's been watching Pirate Dora (the explorer) for the entire time - night and day, endless loop, KILL ME NOW. We KNOW YOU ARE THE FREAKING MAP, STFU!!!
Anyway, then last night Isaac was finally sleeping relatively well, and Jake got a mysterious stomach bug and puked the night away. He was waaaaaaaaay easier to deal with, only crying when he was overwhelmingly nauseas and ready to throw up, and clingy. And HOT. Poor guy. But on the heels of croup, we were just so spent, the both of us.

So this morning it was EXTREMELY difficult for Grant to get me out of bed. Going to my prescheduled belly casting seemed like a chore, albeit a necessary one because I've really wanted a belly cast. Little did I know that Grant was trying to rush me out the door and discouraging me from eating (totally weird...) because it was actually a surprise Blessingway. Melanie was at Kristin's house, and my sister showed up, too. They had copious lunch and decadant desserts ready for me, and a spa style bathroom set up with salts, homemade soaps, and towels set up by Kristin's huge, awesome tub for after I was done with the cast and needed to clean up.

It was really great. It started off rocky, because I sat on this seat while she started the first part of the cast, and all of a sudden out of nowhere got REALLY nauseus and dizzy...I could barely talk to complain about it, and sort of registered that they all looked pretty worried before I lost consciousness. Three times. Each time I would come around in a hazy way thinking, Whoa, I blacked out, and then be under again. Whenever I was semi-coherent I was sure I would puke - there was a bucket standing by and I remember at one point I was leaning back on Kristin with Melanie holding a cold rag on the back of my neck and my nausea pressure point (inner wrist) in her other hand, with Laura standing there with a bucket, but it was just surreal. Finally I layed down on the ground/floor (we were on Kristin's patio, big and private but still outside) and the cast crumpled off of me and I started to come around enough to feel embarrassed and focus my eyes. Sheesh man. I think it was a combination of major sleep deprivation, inadequate food today, sitting totally still and upright for a prolonged time with all this weight of unsupported breasts that I'm not used to, and hot weather + really cold strips of wet plaster on me.

Anyway after a few minutes of talking I got up and put on a bra (I'd been in just pants) and ate some of the wonderful food - Laura made me picadillo and black beans and rice and whole wheat crepes with fresh fruit filling and homemade whipped cream, and Melanie brought this INSANE awesome chocolate mousse cake with brownie base and a layer of dark chocolate ganache on top (!!) that went SO WELL with Kristin's extreme amount of overripe organic strawberries...yum man. After I had eaten like a pig pregnant woman and went to the bathroom and talked for a little while, they got out gifts. Each of them had a seed for me, that represented something - like Melanie chose a sunflower seed because sunflowers have SO MANY SEEDS :p and Laura gave me a spinach seed, because of Popeye and knowing I can be strong. And a bead, that I can wear on a labor bracelet. Melanie also got me a warm maternity shirt and knit me a scarf, for Boston, and brought a picture frame for me to put that first "just born" picture in, and a candle that had already been burned some, to remind me of all the women who've birthed before me. Kristin made me a sitz bath for after birth, completely from herbs that she grew in her garden.

For awhile there that nasty feeling lingered in the background ready to overwhelm again and I was afraid I just wasn't going to be able to do the belly cast at all, which was pretty dissapointing. But then we tried again with me sitting on the floor, tailor style (way better for my circulation) leaning against a wall with a pillow, and I had no problems at all. I really like the way it came out, though it's still "blank" and rough of course. Kristin is amazing, too, you guys should check out the amazing sKiLlz I'm getting for free here at her site - http://web.mac.com/jaydedj/iWeb/Kristin%20Jayd/Bellies.html If you go to the belly gallery, there is this one Where the Wild Things Are one that is *out of control*.

So then I went to the bathroom for my spa bath (alone) and as I stood there in the mirror I was struck by how, for some reason or other...I felt totally ok with my naked body. Somewhere in the midst of 3 other moms memorializing my pregnant glory (and all having to stop to whip out an imperfect boob to nurse someone at some point), and being taken care of and eating together, and looking at all of the different casts Kristin had already made...I just felt completely fine. With my saggy lower belly, with my huge herniated tree stump belly button, with my boobs that are no longer precisely where they were when I was 18. It was really peaceful and amazing. And I got in and scrubbed my moisturized-by-so-much-olive-oil skin down with homemade calendula soap, and then sat down in the HUGE tub and filled it up with several spoonfuls of these amazing homemade bath salts that smelled so good. And sat there for time out of mind, alone with the water noise (the tub probably took half an hour just to fill up) and thought about the fainting thing. I was really glad it happened, in retrospect - because I've never been in a situation like that, where I have some kind of difficulty and supportive, understanding people help me through it and then I go on about my business. It made me feel so good about birth - it wasn't "OH NO SHE BLACKED OUT, RUSH HER TO THE HOSPITAL" they just helped me through it - cold rag, physical support, laying down, juice, food. Then we went on about the belly casting. That's how I want my birth to be. I talked to Elise about it.

And when I came out we did a birth circle, with Ananda (the only child I'd brought along, who'd been happily watching or hanging out the whole time). We took one (very)long piece of yarn and all wrapped it around a wrist, with room for tying, and the promise that none of us would take it off until Elise was born.

By the time I left, I'd been there for SEVEN HOURS (and had no idea that much time had passed). Grant never called or anything, at home with all the boys including two recovering sickies. Annie was feeling special, it was raining lightly and I felt so freaking good. SO GOOD. And there was a package waiting for me!

I have a couple of people to email and one to call - I will do it, either (even) later tonight or tomorrow afternoon.

:)

I think about birth more and more. About reading Hypnobirthing and listening to the CD and doing the visualizations. About going to Boston and attending Nancy's childbirth classes. About having the right posture and the right chiropractic adjustments so that her position will be just right. And then I also think about not reading or studying or giving a shit, and having a frappuccino if I want one, because in the end it's an involuntary physical process and you can't stop the baby from coming out regardless. Sometimes I think that the only thing I have to fear, is fear. Which can actually impede your progress enough to make things much harder. That should make me feel very relieved, since fear is intangible and unnecessary. But if it can really have such negative consequences, how am I supposed to not be afraid of it?

Then I think, what am I afraid of? Dying. Or the baby dying. Ok, people don't just up and DIE having babies/being born - specific (and very rare) things have to go wrong (and, often, totally undetected, which is unlikely in my situation), I tell myself. So what in particular is it that I am worried could happen? For some reason I've realized I have this fear that my heart won't be able to handle the stress and intensity of labor and birth and will suffer some sort of thrombosis or embolism or something. I don't know where I'm getting this, except that I have low blood pressure, had scarily low blood pressure after my 3 days of Jake labor + c/s blood loss, and it would be the sort of undetectable thing that somehow explained why all my previous surgical deliveries were somehow necessary and valid after all. Yet, HELLO, after 4 major surgeries and all the OB and midwife care I've had in the past few years, someone would have picked up on it if I had any sort of heart condition or problem. My sister DOES have diagnosed heart conditions and had a natural birth just fine. I was never aware of my heart during my labor with Jake, either, and she says the same of her experience with Brian.

I think I'm afraid, more than anything, of someone pulling back the curtain and shoving me into the OR. Like, destroying this illusion I have that I could actually birth a baby naturally and leading me back to the reality of green tiles and a baby behind glass where I am not allowed to touch it. That Nancy will give me a few hours, nothing will happen, and she'll say "We really need to go to the hospital" and I'll get there and they'll seal off all the doors and rush in a team of people with forms to sign and masks on their faces. Everyone will speak right over my head as if I wasn't there, as the feeling fades from my lower body. But I will have "done all I could", since I searched so long and traveled so far.

I have these very lucid moments of confidence, these crystal clear epiphanies wherein I KNOW I can do this, and also that it is not even some amazing accomplishment; I am just a woman, and women give birth. Our bodies are designed to conceive, carry, deliver and feed babies. My body would not grow something that would then remain stuck inside of it forever; that's just silly. These are great moments, some longer or more powerful than others, but then something so simple - the mention of some other person's complication, the idea of how big this baby could end up being, the very idea of how hard it was to find ANYONE who believed in me this time around - will end it very abruptly.

The good news is that they come more and more often. I feel like it will be good for me to get some time totally alone, in Boston, to just...think and feel? Listen to music? Write stream of consciousness with nobody around to interrupt? Pray and study? I don't get a lot of totally alone. It's easy for me to avoid and deny, here in this house with seven other people and an endless stream of responsibilities. The moments of clarity are like pinpoints of light in this haziness I otherwise exist in, birth-wise, which is full of doubt, confusion, an urge to make this happen through copious planning and preparation alone, and, most of all, general avoidance of honest thought of any kind.

And when they come, I feel like jumping up and down screaming, or spinning in circles laughing. It's just so good. To imagine. It's like one more link in this long, long chain of patterns and intertia that I'm breaking bit by bit since high school. I want a newborn picture that is not strangers' hands in latex gloves holding my screaming baby aloft in a freezing cold, sterile room. I'd like a picture of myself without 50,000 things hooked up to me. I'd like to actually break through the gauze of precedent and reach down and feel my baby emerging from my body on it's own (!), real and alive. And to maybe be able to stand up the next day.

We leave so soon. Once I go to sleep and wake up, I'll be saying 13 days til we leave.

Posing for my Baby...

Slime.



( 1 more, similar but a better full side view )

Yes, yes I do have a bit more than a month to go. No, actually I am straightening my back as much as I can there. Yes, it does hurt. A lot, today. I sat on the floor leaning forward for far too long, folding clothes and cleaning out the kids' room, and I think my tailbone is actually padded with a layer of swelling, now.

Those are DDD breasts being dwarfed there. You can see my massively herniated (from previous pregnancies) belly button sticking out.

I keep thinking, shit...I'm going to have a 12 pound baby.

I got a phone call just after noon today, from Valerie - she's had a stroke, and is under strict orders now not to work, or travel, at all. She was heartbroken and nearly crying on the phone, saying I'm only the second person in her whole career that she's ever turned away.

I called Nancy again immediately, and it was her last day in Florida - her plane leaves early tomorrow (well, Sunday...it's 3 am and I say Sunday is still tomorrow until I've gone to bed and woken up again). She agreed to meet with me this evening in Delray (a 2 hour drive), free, bring the kids, let's get to know each other.

I was full of thoughts before we left. Like, well, I was getting used to the idea of staying home. And like, well, I had to sweep a lot of things under the rug in the name of finances and Grant's customers to get used to that idea - like not being at all comfortable birthing in the house with Grant Sr, and a whole bunch of other things. So maybe this makes sense and is forcing me in the right direction. Although I obviously don't think or hope God is going around giving people strokes just for my benefit; I believe it's bigger than that and all of our purposes and destinies and meant-to-bes can be entwined in really complex ways...Anyway. Just before we left we were budgeting and thinking and it's not quite impossible, the Boston thing, just very very difficult.

On the drive there I was full of...self revelation? It's easy to put on a brave face for the internet, for my mother and for my mother in law, but really - I have a lot of fear. I've grown up seeing the screaming agony of birth played out on tv, I've come from a long legacy of cesarean deliveries, and I've been brainwashed by the medical establishment, too. There are a lot of things I know, statistically, about birth that I sometimes have a hard time really REALLY believing - I'm unteaching myself left and right here. Being on the highway to Delray made me think of being on the highway to Boston and really...it was making me tense. Making it real. Everything, the "pressure to relax" knowing that you have to be calm and relax to progress and let your body work - I kept realizing my whole body was a knot of tension and breathing just to let it out, over and over.

Nancy was awesome. She had strawberries and almonds for the kids, and offered me the bathroom and water as soon as I walked in the door (the woman's been around some pregnant ladies). She took some time to tell us about herself and then opened up to any and all questions we could have. And after I heard about her unnecessary c-section, and then her HORRIBLE (bad episiotomy, poked and prodded nonstop, baby whisked away and poked and prodded for hours before she could see her, etc etc) hospital birth, and finally her awesome awesome homebirth and then the 5-6000 homebirths she's gone on to attend, most of them vbacs. Women who's water had been broken for days; who were 3 weeks overdue with a 12 pound baby; who were in labor for days and pushed forEVER, but then had their babies. Without any nonsense interventions. I felt so incredibly foolish explaining why I've had 4 c-sections...Because I was 18 and stupid and my OB had a 68% rate, and scheduled a pitocin induction when I was barely at term just because it was convenient and never gave it a chance to work...and then next time because he outright lied and said I'd die otherwise...and then because I couldn't find an OB/hospital to let me try and I wasn't comfortable with midwives yet and, oh yeah, that time my baby was misdated and came out premature and couldn't breathe and was in the NICU... Before I left she measured my fundal height, because we're trying to figure out about when I am due for traveling purposes, and it was so...liberating? Corny? Refreshing? She asked permission to touch my belly, she told me she was going to have to pull the waistband of my pants down, she talked to the baby. These are not things I've experienced before. The baby who's head down and on my left side as she should be, btw (not that she won't likely flip 3 more times before labor...)

The ride home was a little different. I felt good. I felt like we're all mortal and we're all going to die, and we can't really control when or where or how - but we can control the way we live our lives while we have them. The truth is I'm FAR more likely to be horribly hurt or die on the freaking highway driving the whole way to Boston and back, than in some freak birth complication, but THAT doesn't worry me at all - because it's familiar. I drive all the time. Well, women have babies all the time, too.

Having just hashed them out with Nancy, and then driving past Jackson Hospital, I kept thinking of all the different things it would be so nice to avoid - like having a needle stuck in my spine. Like not being able to just freaking SIT UP without pain for weeks. Like the whole first day of my baby's life being spent behind a closed door struggling to pee again once the catheter is out. I remembered the big old nasty hematoma on my spine, and how I couldn't even lean back in a chair for over a month without it jolting through my whole body, and forget laying on my back without my skin just crawling from the pressure and sensitivity - it's a physical memory and I felt it there like a phantom the whole way home. I was talking out how nasty it was to feel all the pressure and pulling inside of me, and the waves of intense nausea as stuff gets moved around, and the feeling when my lung got bruised with Annie, until Grant asked me to please stop because he couldn't handle it anymore on a full stomach.

And I was thinking how, on some level, it's easier for us - women who've had c-sections, I mean - to have another one and be pissed about it, than to really DO SOMETHING and not have it. Because regardless of how violated or robbed you feel or how your life was jeopardized or how your babies have suffered, you always have that little voice in the back of your mind, the what if, the Do You Want Your Baby to Die? that some nurse or OB has pulled on you. I hear so many women say that they have to have another one, nobody will let them vbac, etc etc. Women with 1 c/s, or 2. And it's like...You don't yet know what "Nobody" means. My options have shrunk in a direct inverse proportion to how badly I've wanted a natural birth.

Shari told us once in childbirth class that something people forget is that SHIT HAPPENS. Midwives are not Gods; neither are doctors. There will be the very rare freak complications that will kill a mother or a baby. They are few and far between, but women die of them in the hospital more often than out, and the bottom line is just that we're all mortal and we are not in control. She told us about a party she went to, outside in the summer with a big family reunion in attendance, and how this little boy had been running with a glass coke bottle and he tripped on a rock and fell. The bottle broke, and the glass lodged in his throat and he bled to death with two uncles holding onto him, both of whom were doctors. There is something about that kind of inevitability that gives me a warped sort of peace. There really is no point in worrying, especially when you're making the safest informed choices. I spent my whole pregnancy with Isaac having nightmares and laying awake at night, about dying in surgery. I was TERRIFIED and just KNEW I was going to freaking die on the operating table. Well, that was my ONE smooth-sailing, uncomplicated section, but my baby - who I always assumed would be fine, just possibly motherless - couldn't breathe, had tubes and wires all over - at one point it was We might have to do open heart surgery if this pulmonary artery is overactive. Life is funny like that.

I have a lot of little epiphanies, like when I remember how I was never actually SCARED and certainly never thinking of rupture, during my late miscarriage or during labor with Jake. Or when I realize that while my mom and nana had c/s, I am built like my cuban family, exactly, and they have all had babies no problem - even HUGE diabetes babies that were upwards of 15 pounds! I imagine a baby crowning and I get all giddy, and - I actually believe I can do this.

Lastly, babyslime linked to this documentary trailer in naturalfamily and I think it's worth watching. I will be seeing it when it comes out. The movie is called, "Pregnant in America". Click to view.

But I have caught up on my friends' page now. Let's see...

-Friday I took the kids for a walk up to the grocery store, and on the way home this random guy pulled a bit ahead of us and parked at a house that's up for sale. He got out and started pacing on the sidewalk, talking on his cellphone. I paid him little attention. Ananda, Aaron and Isaac were on the sidewalk and I was pushing Jake and groceries in the stroller on the edge of the street. Close enough to talk and all, still. Anyway we get close to this guy and he starts plowing through the middle of them repeatedly in his pacing, even doing a figure 8 through them at one point, and as he turns around then I noticed he HAD HIS PENIS OUT AND WAS JACKING OFF. He leered at me, seeing me seeing all, and started walking back towards them, at which point I started screaming at him, telling him I was calling the cops, etc. He pretended he didn't speak english at that point - total bs, I could tell - and so I told him in spanish, still at full forcefull volume, and acted like I was digging in my purse for a cellphone that didn't actually exist there. He got in his truck and drove away. I was not able to get the plate number, but did call the police after arriving home anyway, with his and his truck's description. It was NOT THE FIRST COMPLAINT IN MY AREA. Ugh man. I feel like I can't take the kids for a walk or something now. Luckily he was creepy and getting in their space to an extent that A and A were majorly averting their eyes and seem to have seen nothing - they assumed he was saying "really bad stuff in spanish" on his phone, and that was why I yelled at him O_o

-On that store trip I took a cue from ariellejuliana and bough clementines, which the kids have WENT CRAZY WITH. Seriously, we've went through 6 crates so far and are working on a 7th...since Friday. Each crate has about 30-35. The amazing thing is that at our local store here, the crates are only 1.99 each. So I'm just trying to run intereference and force them to eat meals sometimes, lest they all get horrible diarrhea.
Annie: These are better than candy. They should replace candy with these.
Me: Beaming with pride.
Annie: Well, I would miss chocolate...
Me: Thinking I agree.
Annie: CHOCOLATE COVERED CLEMENTINES!!!!

-Saturday we had a metrorail adventure. The kids love riding that thing.

-Sunday we finally used our Miami Seaquarium free passes. Ananda, my budding marine biologist, was totally in a state of bliss. They sat right on the wall behind railings during a dolphin show, getting splashed all the while, and the orca show was awesome for me just because I got to watch it take her breath away. Honestly though, a 7000 pound whale leaping into the freaking air is enough awesome on it's own.

-And today I have an appt at the center. I'm getting an ultrasound to check out placental placement and reassure myself that this giant draining belly of mine is not twins, but let's not be coy...I'm all aflutter to see the sex. We'll be leaving in about 30 minutes, but it's an hour each way and I'm liable to be there for an hour, so it will be awhile before I'm reporting back. I was irked that it has to conflict with PATH, but it's the only time during the week that their sonographer is available and I've (hopefully) delegated well enough to my co-leader that we won't be missed.

For those of you who wanted to see my "Born Cuban, former Madonna and Motley Crue fan" crazy necklace, here is ( a pic of it )

And for those of you who have expressed interest in my belly...
( Doesn't exactly scream 'not due until April', does it? )