Category Archives: Pregnancy

And the stockings were hung…

Posted on December 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

By the chimney with care…

Sometimes things turn out just the way you imagine they might… Next year there will be four.  Four stockings.

I grew up in a four stocking family.  And soon so will Emily.

I have a fireplace.  In our  new house.  And greens on my mantle.  And Burl Ives has told me the story of the Misfit Toys several times already this month.  It’s almost perfect. Next year there will be four stockings.  And then it will be perfect.

Merry Christmas, Baby D.  No stocking for you this year.  But next year.  Next Christmas you might even be walking.  Quick drunken steps from the foot stool to the couch.   It will be hard to remember a time when you weren’t here with us.  See you soon, sweetheart.

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Mommy’s Capricorn

Posted on December 12, 2011 | 1 comment

So, I was having a little bit of a mini meltdown.  But it’s over.  The maternal hormones have levelled out and I am ready to have a baby.

And this is how I know.

Every day I drive past a few farms.  My favorite of all of them has quite a few goats.  I am a pretty big fan of goats.  They are cheerful little creatures.  They make me smile.

It’s not lost on me that I am gestating a Capricorn.

I slow down and I smile at the goats a couple of times a week.  And today I thought maybe I’d even stop and pay them a visit. I pulled in the driveway and made Em jump in the car. I told her it was a surprise.  I guess she knows me better than I imagined.  Right away she asked me “Is it a cute animal, Mom?”

“Yep.  Two of them.”

We pulled up next to the fence and when I rolled down the window at least a dozen goats started running towards us.  And all of a sudden…. I felt the “Oh my god, they’s so cute….” totally overwhelm me.  Because it wasn’t just a bunch of cute goats.  It was goats AND FUCKING PONIES!!!

Guys.  I’m gonna make it.  I only have to be pregnant for five more weeks.  And there are goats and shetland ponies less than half a mile from my house.   And they are crazy cute.  It is hard to be filled with rage and anxiety when this little buddy will come right up to the fence and smile at you.  With the goats serenading you in the background.

 

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Heads or Tails?

Posted on December 12, 2011 | 8 comments

Moody doesn’t really begin to describe it.  There’s a 50/50 chance I will begin to cry every time MQD puts his arms around me lately.

And since my brother is not here to say “No shit” I will chime in on his behalf.  I am a crier.  I have always been a crier.  But the tears of late are not of the “Jeez, I have so many feelings” Hallmark commercial tears ilk that have plagued me all my life.

They are the ugly, make your face all splotchy tears that came from a place of anger and fear and pain.

Sometimes it is hard to reconcile the two people that live inside of me.  Three, if you count Baby D.  Happy Go Lucky Kelly wishes Doom & Gloom Kelly would take a hike.  It might leave more room for Baby D, and maybe s/he’d quit poking me in the ribs.    Not likely but a girl can dream.

This hasn’t been the most glamorous of pregnancies.  I never realized how fortunate I was before to feel so great so much of the time.  I have complained about my heartburn.  But heartburn is tolerable.  I was completely ill-prepared for the day in and day out aches and pains.  The can’t get out of bed flu like feeling of all over tired.  The pain in my hips.

I am six years older.  I sit all day now, instead of working two jobs on my feet as I did with Emily.  Every pregnancy is different… blah blah blah…

I went in to labor last time strong.  I was walking daily, miles, not steps to and from the door to the car.  I was positive that an unmedicated birth was in my future.  I was ready.  And beyond hopeful. I was sure.  And I failed.

This time I am afraid.  I know how many things can happen, how many things can be outside of your control.  My body feels weak.  And tired.  And yet I am hoping to make it happen this time.  Because I don’t see myself doing it again.  I see our family of four as complete.  And I don’t want to do this to my body again.

So, it feels like my last chance to make it right.  For me.  This body I have struggled with loving, I want to see it do what it was designed to do.    I want to feel it this time. I want to be in awe, just once, of this body.

But it isn’t the pregnancy and the labor experience that has me inside out.

Last night I finally found the words.

It’s the baby.

I am ready for this baby to make me feel good.

I know it will.  I know when I can put my chin against my chest, my lips resting on a tiny little head, arms and legs all squished against my chest, my hand curled around a tiny little baby butt.    Breathe in baby smell and exhale every fear I have carried in my heart for the last year, I know I will feel nothing but love.

But now.  Now I don’t feel love all the time.  Sometimes when I reach out for MQD I see this man I have been married to for less than  year, I see this  life I had been waiting for for so long and I can barely reach my arms around his waist. My face no longer fits in his neck as it did the day we were were married, his arms no longer create a space for me where I feel safe.

All I can say through tears is that I just wish it would all go away.

I don’t want to be tired.  I don’t want to be cranky and short tempered.  I don’t want to spend the next six months in a newborn haze.  I want to rake my leaves.  And stay up late and wrap Christmas presents.  I want to drink Grasshoppers and write Christmas cards with this man I fell in love with.  And be a newlywed. I want to roll down the hill with my kid in to the leaves we just raked.

But I can’t.  Because I am tired.  And dairy makes my heartburn worse.  And I am too busy being weepy and peeing every five seconds and I can’t even get up off the couch anyway.  Walking to the mailbox makes my hip hurt some days so there is no hill rolling on my agenda.  Because I am fucking pregnant.

And “fucking pregnant” doesn’t make me feel full of magic and love.  It makes me feel full of a lack of gratitude for this beautiful thing that is happening to us.

And even though I am nine feet wide, he finds a way.  To wrap me in his arms and rock me back and forth and say “It’s gonna be ok.  You don’t have to do everything yourself.  I love you.”  And he smiles.  And as quickly as Doom & Gloom Kelly arrived she is gone again.  And “Get a Load of THIS, shit, we’re gonna have a BABY, y’all!” takes her place.

And I am smiling, and hopeful.  And excited.  So maybe the smile is forced.  But I am hopeful.  And excited.

[Note:  Dear Baby D, If you are reading this you are no longer a baby.  You are probably a tech savvy pre-teen.  And in case you are reading and thinking “Holy shit, you didn’t want me!!  You said it!!  That you wished “it” would go away!!” I have two things to say.  Watch your  mouth, we don’t swear in our house (ha!) and of course I wanted you.  Some days I wanted you so badly I was ready to reach down my own throat and yank you out by the feet.   Because I wanted you. Out here.  With the rest of us, please.  So I could have me back, too.  Because contrary to what you might think the world does not revolve around you.  Now, go clean your room. Love you, Mom. ]

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Soup

Posted on December 7, 2011 | 3 comments

At first glance you wouldn’t guess that the ornament that says “God made the beautiful skies with stars like twinkling eyes” would rank high among my all time favorite ornaments.   I don’t exactly go very far out of my way to keep the Christ in Christmas.  But this ornament has something special inside.

A little Kelly, circa 1979, plastic dress up shoes, Raggedy Ann pajama top, Dorothy Hamill haircut.  Behind that pantry door was the first and maybe second of what would be many marks indicating the heights of everyone in our family.

On the back it says “Love, The Speedys, Xmas 1979.”

The Speedys lived next door to us when we first moved in to the house I grew up in in 1979.  They had two teenage boys and a huge dog.  Sue Speedy liked to garden and she did so in a manner that made her appear as though she had just stepped out of an LL Bean catalogue.  I remember her seeming so put together.  Decked out in the best of early 80s fashion, whale turtlenecks and duck boots.  There were snap dragons planted in the island between our yard and theirs and I can remember sticking my finger in and out of the snapdragon’s mouths while my mom chatted with Sue.

This ornament is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.  The first, of course,  being that it has a picture of me.  And if you read here, you know I am wildly fascinated by old pictures of myself.  Heh.  But this year it took on an even greater degree of interest.  Christmas, 1979.  My mom was pregnant with my brother.  Not very, as he was born prematurely six months later. But she was pregnant.

I remember the snapdragons that spring.  I remember Sue Speedy’s duck boots.  I remember my brother being very small.  (Or at least I think I do. The line between photographs jogging your memory and real memories made up of smells and “brain movies” is fuzzy to me.)  But I have no memory of my mother being pregnant.  None.  I remember the way her perfume smelled, the way she looked in this amazing water-colored silk dress.  Her closet.  But I don’t recall her being with child. Strange the things the mind omits.

I wonder how Emily will recall this pregnancy.  If she will remember the nights I climbed in her bed.  Because pregnancy induced insomnia had me pacing the house and her steady breathing and warm little body relaxes me.  Last night as I slid in beside her she rolled over, brushed her hand across my face and said “Sleep, Mommy.  You need to sleep before the baby gets here.”

Earlier in the evening I was overwhelmed.  A sudden rush of “holy-shit-we-are-going-to-have-a-baby” consumed me and I sat down on the couch with a huge exhale, called MQD and said “I can’t make dinner.   My hip hurts, I am tired, I just can’t.”  Kindly, he said to just tell him what I’d like for him to pick up and he’d get it on his way home.  Ever the pregnant woman I was not satisfied with this answer and complained that the pressure of having to make up my mind was making me feel like I was going to cry.

Em sat beside me on the couch.  She put her arm around me and kissed me on the cheek.  “Just let it out, Mom.”  I smiled at her wordlessly.  She held my hand.  “We can get Mexican food?   Yanno, Mexican soup.”

She’d effectively broken the spell of my bad mood. “Sweetheart, I don’t think we have ever had any Mexican soup.  Do you mean Chinese food?”

“Yeah, Mexican soup is Chinese food.”

Of course it is.

And so I wonder if she will remember when we sat on the couch, side by side, because she no longer fits on my lap.  And she offered me Mexican Chinese soup and held my hand.  “We’re a perfect little family.” And my eyes teared up, worried that somehow I was destroying our perfect family of three with the new addition.  She continued, “and it will be even more perfect when the baby comes.”

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Counting down the days…

Posted on November 30, 2011 | 6 comments

The countdown is on.  To Christmas.  To Baby D.  To figuring out how to be a work from home Mom of two with a new house she loves.  I fear without a little direction my musings over the next few weeks could be more of a report.  There are x number of days until Christmas.  The following parts of my body are either leaking or aching.  This is what I am afraid of today.  And this is what I am excited about.

While that all sounds fabulously interesting I though I might use some of my favorite Christmas decorations and ornaments to tell the story of the 25 days leading up to Christmas.  I can’t promise that I don’t sneak in a little “Here is a snowman, see his big fat ass, that reminds me my hip aches and my boobs are dripping” but I am gonna give it my all.

The year my father sold the house I grew up in my brother and I sat on the floor in the basement.  One at a time we went through boxes of ornaments.  One for me, one for Scott.   Together we divided up our childhood, one we shared.  I eagerly await the day he and Lauren (and Baby!!) return from Hawaii so we can share a Christmas together, our families.  And so I can sneak a peek at the ornaments on his tree, the ones I have long since forgotten.

The first ornament I chose in the Great Ornament Trade of 2005

To kick things off, an all time favorite ornament.  I love this picture. This is an ornament my mom made I’d guess 1982ish?  Mom and I are wearing clown costumes she made for Halloween in 1981.  Later the clown costumes were resurrected for  the Clowntastic Event.  The Clowntastic Event was an elementary school party rivaled only by the Wild Rumpus the following year.

Kelly, 1982

 I am reminded of being just about this age often lately.  The other evening Em and I were laughing on the couch, about nothing.  The same laughter that I share with no one else besides my mother.  There is an easy laughter I share with her; there is nothing unsaid, nothing to question, just pure living in the moment.  A moment that brings us both to tears laughing from time to time.

As a kid I thought that my mom did it all for me.  That she was a Mother, and a Mother only.  And as I lean back against the couch and laugh with Emily I wonder if Em has any idea what a genuinely good time I am having. I look at this picture of Mom and I in our clown suits and I wonder how it is that I didn’t see that smile.  Not the smile on my face, but on hers.  We had such a good time.  We still do.

Someday Emily will realize that while I do love her madly it wasn’t always to put a smile on her face that I suggested we got out for a few, just us.  Or snuggle on the couch and have a Ladies’ Night.  I just like her.  She cracks my shit up.  Sometimes I hang out with her for me.  I suppose I could just tell her.  But that would ruin the whole Mother of the Year thing I have got going.

My clown costume has long since been passed on elsewhere, but Mom's makes an appearance from time to time. Not long before MQD and I were engaged it came out for a night of gin and tonics and dominos.

 

Looking at this succession of pictures, you can see it happen.  How the daughter becomes the mother.  In the first picture, there we are.  Two distinct clowns.  In the second, Mom’s hair  bow becomes my tie.  In the end her costume has become mine.  But I am still wearing the same Raggedy Ann-esque wig from the very beginning.  This is either an allegory for something very deep or it is much, much simpler.  My mom and I are a couple of clowns.

25 days until Christmas Eve.  And I’d guess about 25 more years before Em realizes she is turning in to me.

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The Book of Love

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 20 comments

It’s no secret I am a bit of a sap.  When we packed away the many keepsakes from our wedding I was careful not to put them all in to a box.  A box we’d not see again until we sold our house or Emily had a hankering to take a nostalgic walk with me.  All too often we box up our most precious things to “keep them safe.”  I contend we should use them.  Touch them.  Let them remind us of the days long gone.

Our ringbearer carried our wedding rings on a little plate.  A plate that says “With This Ring.”  (Purchased on Etsy from Paloma’s Nest!)  I’d considered framing it in a shadow box, but instead decided to slide it in to the box of Christmas ornaments.  Every year we could take it from it’s little box and I could tell the story of how this was the bowl that held our rings before we were married, just days before (or after!) Baby D was conceived.  We would hang it on the tree and smile at one another.  Sneak a kiss amidst eye rolls and ewww’s from the kids.  (I had this all planned out,  I am both a sap and a planner.)

This year we opened the big box of ornaments and it was on top.  Em carefully removed the box and said “Mom, you should do this one” just as MQD said “Be careful with that one.”  I carried it in to the kitchen to shorten the long red strings we had used to tie our rings to it. This was when my plan started to go awry.

I dropped it on the floor in  the kitchen.  And fell to my knees as though Lee Harvey Oswald had shot it from my hands.  Stunned.  Sobbing.  Em rounded the corner and began to cry hysterically.  MQD followed, fully expecting to see a dead animal, I am certain.  One we own.

Four, maybe five seconds, I cried.  And then I stood up.  And pulled my shit together.  This was not a sign.  Our marriage did not crumble on the floor in the kitchen.  We are tougher than a ceramic plate.  And we have Liquid Nails.  I might have cried a teeny bit more as I got the glue out from the laundry room cabinets, behind the door.  Where Em couldn’t see, my face tucked in to MQD’s neck.  I think I said something profound and explanatory. Something like “I am so fucking sentimental.”   And then I got to gluing.

Next year when we take this little ceramic bowl out from its box, there will be two stories.  The one about how this little bowl held our wedding rings.  We will still sneak a kiss and smile.  And then the three of us, Em, MQD and I will look at the baby and I will say “I dropped this bowl on the floor the Christmas I was pregnant with you.  I was all butterfingers and bat shit crazy.”

Marriages and families and even keepsakes are just one story piled on top of another.  Some good, some not so good.  But it’s a great book.  So you just keep on reading.

The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing
But I—
I love it when you read to me
And you—
You can read me anything.

~Peter Gabriel

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Someone really should have been playing Taps

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 2 comments

Shame.  I don’t really have any.   To that end when I do something particularly inane, something that might actually embarrass a person capable of feeling shame, I like to share it with facebook.  So everyone can delight in my foibles.

This morning I left the house in a scrunchie.  Twice actually.  The first time it was not even quite 7:30 in the morning and I was picking up breakfast items from Weaver Street Market just down the street.   I was going to let that slide.  But then I did it again.  I was making  a habit of this.  Scrunchie wearing.

photo courtesy of the Huffington PostI am not the only woman on the planet guilty of this heinous crime.  But I refuse to allow myself to let Hillary Clinton guide my fashion choices.  Stacey & Clinton, yes, Hillary Clinton, no.  So, that’s no excuse.

I don’t even know how it is that I still own a scrunchie.  And when I tossed it out on to the internet this morning I didn’t expect to get a reaction.  But it seems people feel strongly about the scrunchie.   And for the most part, they feel appalled that I own one.  I am a girl that wears cropped overalls for fuck’s sake.  So, for me to shock and appall my friends with my fashion choices, this is not an easy task.

I did two things today that were unusual.  I wore a scrunchie while not washing my face.  Out in to the world.

One can see from this picture I am also wearing Vibrams, a bold fashion choice.

And then, I succumbed to peer pressure.  The fashion conscious among us, you will be pleased to know this…. I threw that fucker away.  It was the last one.  I have had it for at least twenty years.  The rubberband inside that scrunchie must have been made of steel. And there, in the dog park, I tossed it.

The folks at the dog park were treated to my smiling face sans scrunchie.

"Have some humanity. Haven't any of you ever had a dream?" ~Tangled

Big day for me.  This morning I set myself some out loud Life goals.  And then I pitched my scrunchie.  I’m not sure it is gonna help me right away.  But as soon as I stop carrying around this basketball this shit is gonna get REAL.

Just not yet.  I’ve got about seven more weeks of being barefoot and pregnant.

And really when you look this hot, who would notice one lousy scrunchie?

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You can get anything you want… at Alice’s Restaurant

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 11 comments

Thanksgiving has always been a time of reflection for me.  Not in the “Oh, I have all of these things to be grateful for…” way as many do.  But in a Virginia Slims kind of way.

It seems I have a tendency to clean “emotional house” around this time of the year.  Perhaps it is the impending new year, or simply the realization that I do have so much to be grateful for and that there is no reason to hold on to what is long gone or to that which really doesn’t serve me.  Whatever the reason, letting go is not my thing, but in November I do my best to look forward.

In 1993 I spent Thanksgiving crying because my high school love broke my heart. But later that afternoon I dismantled the shrine to him in my room (compete with black candles and glossy 8x10s, what?  Don’t judge.)   I think it set the tone for me and many thanksgivings to come.

Years later I had a turkey sandwich in my car and I drove away from the beach to Chapel Hill.  I found an apartment that weekend.   It was harder than dismantling the boyfriend shrine.  But it was worth it.

November of 2008 I sat at table with old friends and new.  I sat across from a man I had met only a month earlier.  I hesitated to say aloud that I was grateful for him. For the future I could already see, smell, taste.

The following year was a difficult one.  I thought I had grown so much, had come so far.   When in reality I had so much further to go.  MQD gave me a push, a shove in the right direction.  And in November 2009 I pushed myself onward towards my future one more time.

Last year we gathered around that same table.  Friends, old and new, and that man I had met.

That man that was my husband this year.  And we had Thanksgiving with those friends that every couple should be lucky enough to have.  The friends that are your family.  And your neighbors.  Without whom you’d lose your mind.

There is very little from this past year I want to leave behind.  My fears, my insecurities, maybe, but even they have taught me so much about who I am in the past year.  I thought I’d try something new this year.

It’s no secret that I am a chickenshit when it comes to making goals.  To saying out loud that there is something that I want.  I have worked hard at letting go for the last decade.  2012 will be the beginning of what I hope is more than just a decade of holding on.  Of putting down roots.  Of making a home.

These are lofty goals.  But simple when you break them down in to actions instead of ideas.

This year I will make at least one new friend.  A mommy friend.  That intimidates me.  I will invite her and her kid to my house and I will not worry that she will see me use the Walmart brand of disinfectant near my children, or that she will sniff out the paper plates that hide in the back of my cabinet  (thereby proving that I am not as green as I strive to be.)

I have fantasized about a spring or summer monthly potluck of sorts for years.  This spring I will do my damnedest to make that happen.  So I can hold on to those friends that I have made here even though our lives are pulling us all in different directions, towards our own homes, our families.

I will swallow my phone phobia and pick up the phone at least once a week.  I was laughing on the phone with my grandmother the other day about how when you don’t have a glass of wine or three in the evenings it is even harder to pick up the phone.  A newborn is not conducive to wine drinking or long chats on the phone. But once a week I will pick up the phone and call.  Someone that makes me happy.

It’s easy to allow the Newborn Cave to swallow you whole.  The velour sweatsuit starts to look like dress up clothes if you put it on fresh from the dryer.  Working from home will allow me to stay engaged with people through a computer screen.  In my bathrobe, baby on the boob. But I am going to give it all I’ve got to stay connected to real live humans.  People that wear belts.  And eat at tables, not at the kitchen counter.

This is me, putting it out there.  I am going to blow dry my hair at least twice a month.  And make a Date.  With someone that is not a personal trainer or a blood relative or married to me.  I will likely show up with a baby on my boob.  But I will be out there.  Maybe even wearing a belt.  And real shoes.  Putting down roots. Making a life that is moving forward, not just away from something, but towards something.

I will reach out to the casual friends that I see at social functions organized by my more… organized friends.  The women that I am so happy to run in to.  That make me laugh until my sides hurt.   (I’m looking at you, Caroline.  This is your shout out, as well as a fair warning.  I am coming to a bottle of white wine and a table near you, Springtime, 2012, be there or be square.) And to the women that I am so lucky to already call my good friends.  Whom I see not nearly enough of.

Because holding on to what you’ve got is just as important as letting go.

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There is a first time for everything…

Posted on November 23, 2011 | 4 comments

In preparing for Baby D’s birth and planning a birth at the birth center I am hoping to avoid many of the common interventions in a hospital birth.  But to be plain I am trying to avoid  the hospital all together. I am committed to keeping our birth  out of a hospital  unless medically necessary (and while I might have some  narrow views on what constitutes a “medically necessary” birth) I am not anti-medicine across the board.

Almost eleven years ago I walked in to a hospital to apply for a job. Applying for a job is nerve-wracking but couple that with my almost phobic fear of hospitals and it was a tough morning. Ultimately, I had the pleasure of working at The Outer Banks Hospital for five years.  With only twenty-one inpatient rooms it was just the right size to help a girl like me get past the fears. That institutional, terrifying smell of clean was somehow less frightening in a hallway that is only twenty some yards long. A small hospital. A relatively small group of employees. Soon enough I grew to feel safe and comfortable inside that  building.  My skepticism surrounding modern medicine was trumped by my faith in the individuals I met that put everything they had day in and day out in to helping people.

Since moving to Chapel Hill I have been to UNC Hospital twice. Both times to see new babies and their parents.  The fears I was accustomed to feeling as I walked through a hospital’s doors had all but left. I chalked it up to a great experience at the hospital in the OBX. I thought maybe I wasn’t afraid anymore  of those big buildings with their orangey bleachy smell and the white coats hurrying from one place to another.

Night before last Em was sick. Sicker than I have ever seen her. Granted she has been very lucky in her six short years.  She has had an ear infection, a rotten cold she can’t shake. But never had I held her little body in my arms as she vomited for hours on end.  Barely awake, her eyes would flutter as she tried to fight sleep. Rolling her on to her side time and again, replacing soiled towels with clean ones and holding her hair out of her face – a parent rises to the challenge.

If you are me, a parent also has a sense of humor.  Behind her in bed I would rub her back.  Jumping up at her slightest movement to grab the trash can from the bedside table.  I couldn’t help but chuckle as I imagined the following morning, the dark circles beneath her eyes.   Would I tell anyone that they were not from lack of sleep at all?  But from being repeatedly hit on the bridge of the nose with a small plastic trash can as I aimed her face towards the trash can, and away from my new white carpeting?

I was worried about her.  But a stomach bug is a stomach bug.  This one was vicious  but I assumed it would pass.

Late the next morning I picked up the water bottle from the bedside table. I had filled it at least twelve hours earlier. There were  less than three ounces missing. I started to contemplate the possibility of dehydration. I tried  to convince myself that I could just take her in to see her pediatrician if she needed fluids or some high test anti-nausea meds.

When the nurse at her doc’s office called me back and said she thought I should take her in to the ER my eyes welled up. I was afraid. And I had to be the mom.  I jumped in the shower. I had been awake for 30+ hours and I needed a quick cry and to clear my head.  I was going to take my baby to the hospital.  But she would be fine. Stomach bug.  Worst case scenario was IV hydration.

I called MQD.  I refrained from sending hysterical text messages.  And off we went.  From the back seat she looked so tiny.  Her voice so weak.  “Mom, I did make it to six before I ever had to go to the hospital, Mom.”  I smiled.  She sure did.  And so did I.

An hour later when MQD walked in to her room at UNC I exhaled.  She told him she had made it to six and a half.  We joked her about fudging her age a bit.  Some Zofran and another hour later she’d had a Popsicle.  And kept it down.

Not long after that I saw a smile.  The nurses and docs never asked about the dent on her nose from the trash can bludgeoning.  This morning we are 18+ hours puke free.  Sipping Gatorade in bed.  Watching movies.  Milking it for all its worth.

I am still kind of scared of hospitals.  But that smile was worth a million scary walks through automatic front doors.

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Movie Night

Posted on November 18, 2011 | 1 comment

On Tuesday evening I walked around my house like a hormonal pregnant woman, bitching that it was hot.  In my defense it was 78 degrees in the living room at 5 pm.  The afternoon had been in the upper seventies, maybe even low eighties. We opened windows and turned on ceiling fans and I couldn’t get cool enough.  We had chicken and a big salad for dinner.

A strange day for a November in North Carolina but I embraced it.  In fact, I was moved to paint my toenails.  Barefoot and pregnant in the Cackalackey.  November, be damned.  At nearly 32 weeks pregnant it was a thrill to reach my own feet.  Even if I had to bring my feet and toes up in to my lap, contorting myself on the couch seems preferable to just leaning down lately.  However it had to be done, it happened.  I painted my own toenails.  And Thanksgiving and Christmas and The Baby seemed a million miles away.

Last night I snuggled up on the couch.  Under two blankets and I kicked the fireplace on.  Em and I looked at recipes for Thanksgiving and planned out potential holiday desserts.  (She continues to campaign heavily for donuts, silly kid.)  I sent Em up to pick out her books for bedtime.  Among the books she chose was last year’s copy of “T’was the Night Before Christmas.”  This morning the sheets felt cool when I slid my legs over the side of the bed.  There was frost on the ground and the last of the leaves have fallen from the crepe myrtle.  Warm socks and corduroys and turtleneck sweaters.  Tonight I will make meatballs for dinner and we will snuggle up as a family and watch a movie.

Our first Friday night in the new house, just the three of us. Eight more.  We have eight more Fridays between today and our due date.  Eight Fridays.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and a few birthdays in there somewhere, too.   Two Charlie Brown specials and Jimmy Stewart’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Order plantation shutters and get them installed.  Bring down all the Christmas decorations, put them all up and then take them all down and put them back in the attic.  There’s a lot to do in the next eight weeks.  Plenty of time.  But only eight Fridays.

Eight nights with my feet in MQD’s lap , my skinny-mini little girl curled up next to me.  A movie we have seen a thousand times playing on the television.  I don’t get to hold her in my arms often anymore.  I’d watch anything just to hold her, smell the back of her neck, feel her freezing little feet up against me for 90 minutes.

Nine Fridays from now my arms will likely be full.  Of a brand new baby.  And as prone to the drama as I am even I must remember that Em won’t be headed off to college.  She will be glued to my side, quite likely.  Falling in love with her baby brother or sister just like me and MQD.

The eighth Friday is January 13th.  Seven years earlier on January 13th I found out I was pregnant with Emily and my whole world changed.  I was going to be a mom.  And now I will be a mom all over again.

They say no two kids have the same mother.  I hope I like being this kid’s mom as much as I have loved being Em’s so far.  Emily’s mom is strong and unafraid of change, in spite of all of her insecurities and her best efforts to get in her own way.  Emily’s mom became MQD’s wife.

This kid better turn me in to Wonder Woman to top all that.

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