Baby is not here yet.
I haven’t been able to update because my parents came to town on Sunday and we’ve been running errands galore since then. We’ve taken what used to be Jake’s room and then became an empty room and made a complete baby room out of it. It has a crib with a mobile, matress, sheets and bumpers, drawers full of clothes and a changing table, a bed (which was there for guests and will stay there) full of stuffed animals and toys. Two vibrating bouncers, a baby monitor, a playpen thingie, the stroller, a closet with diapers, nail clippers, thermometer and baby medicine, books, video tapes, and a box full of toys. Most bought and all set up in the last four days. I also have a rocking chair with ottoman in the living room and a pack’n’play with crib and changing table in the bedroom.
We have packed our hospital bags which are to be finalized today. I’ve made 5 hospital CDs for labor. We bought the bestest camcorder: JVC’s Everio which was something we drooled about but didn’t think we could get. Presents are so wonderful. The camera is packed and so is the camcorder. The birthing ball is blown up and pillows are ready.
I’ve already read the first six chapters of The Baby Book and watched The Happiest Baby on the Block with Jake. We made a list of possible names for girls and boys. We’ve cleaned up the rooms and washed all the baby clothes and toys we received. We bought extra detergent so we don’t have to leave if we generate baby laundry faster than we can go out. I don’t need formula since, hopefully, I come equipped with the baby food. I do have to eventually get a pump but we’re going to wait a bit on that.
My doctor’s out of town until Monday so I hope the baby can wait that long, but otherwise we seem to be all set. Or at least as set as we’ll get. Now all we can do is wait and hope that labor isn’t too too bad and much more importantly, that the little one is healthy.
We’re waiting for you anxiously, little baby.
I am an avid reader. If the excerpts and the 50 books links aren’t enough to convince you, let me assure you that, under normal life circumstances, I read one to two books a week. I love reading and I’ve loved reading ever since I was little. So, it was a bit odd that when I got pregnant, I didn’t rush to buy all the books on the subject or visit the plethora of websites that giver advice and information.
My first hesitation was statistical. There’s a higher than average chance of having a miscarriage in the first three month of a pregnancy, especially with the first pregnancy. Thus, I told myself that I didn’t want to get excited and caught up in all the reading. That felt like a pretty legitimate reason not to buy anything.
Once the first trimester was over, I was so busy throwing up that I didn’t want to get up from bed, let alone go out to buy books. So another two months passed and I still hadn’t read a word about being pregnant or the baby growing inside of me. (Not to lie, there was one website I went to ocassionaly which told me what week I was in and what that meant.)
On Month Five, once the puking stopped, I decided it was time to go out and purchase some books. Since my pregnancy was already almost at the end of its second trimester, I didn’t want to spend too much time or money on pregnancy books. Instead I bought books on the baby’s first year, teaching sign language, helping your baby sleep, etc. I bought only one pregnancy book that was supposed to be fun. I came home and read that one first.
After 60 pages, I had to put the book down and I never picked it up again. The same thing happened this week when I attempted to read our Childbirth Preperation class book. I can’t seem to get through these materials. A jaded person might claim it’s because I am not excited about the baby (which is definitely not true) or I am in denial somehow (which is also absolutely false). I am no longer feeling bad about not wanting to read. I’ve decided it’s healthier not to read.
There are about 10 pages in each of these books that tell you what a “normal” pregnancy/birth is like. The rest of the several hundred-page book talks about things that can go wrong. Or it talks about things that will definitely happen and that aren’t pleasant. Like bleeding or severe cramps or acute pain. While it’s a good idea to know enough to be able to differentiate between the normal and the abnormal, I am not sure that knowing the details of how painful labor might be will help me go through it more smoothly.
I figure that at this point the baby is big enough that it will hurt no matter how the baby comes out. I also know that the six-week class gave us more than enough information on what to expect, what’s a bad sign, and when to goto the hospital. The rest is stuff I don’t need to know.
I am going to stick to baby books instead.
As a child, I often wondered what made someone an adult. When was the magical time that you crossed over from being a child to being a responsible adult? My mom looked liked an adult. She acted like an adult. Her face, her conversation, even her toes were those of an adult. At the time, I figured once I was over my teens, I’d be an adult, too.
As the years passed, I didn’t feel like an adult and I didn’t think I looked like an adult. Not the way my mom did. Even though I discovered that she can behave like a child, too, I still thought my mom was more of a “grown up” than I was. College didn’t change that. Neither did moving into my very first apartment. Neither did getting a full time job and making more money than she ever did. It felt like maybe I was never going to grow up.
Lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe crossing over the threshold to having my own kids is when I cross over the threshold to becoming an adult. This is officially the time when I am going to be much more concerned about another living being than I am about myself. Not that there aren’t times I put myself after Jake or my family or a friend. But this is permanent and it’s constant. This little baby, and later the child and even the adult, will always come before me. I will have to learn to push other people away kindly but firmly to protect the well being of my baby. I will have to learn to make major progress on my “hangups” because now they are affecting an unsuspecting third party who never signed up to deal with my issues. Even if I don’t feel it, I’m going to have to learn to act the part of a grown-up. It’s all a bit overwhelming and scary. What if I mess it up?
I know what everyone says, “all you can do is your best.” But this is a huge responsibility. It’s not something to be taken lightly. I think my mom always looked like an adult cause she had us very young. She was only 21 when my sister is born. She learned to grow up very quickly. Over the years she adopted and looked the part of a grown up. And now it’s my turn. And I plan to take it seriously.
Though I still don’t think my toes look like a grown-up’s.
I don’t have much to say today. Or at least I am not in the mood to say it so I thought I should point you to Oso’s thought-provoking post on happiness. It’s worth the read.
I commented that I tend to be less happy when I’m free and he replied that he does that, too, but it’s mostly due to avoidance. I agree with him partially. Sometimes there is a genuine issue brewing under and in that case it’s really a bad idea to avoid it and repress it down further so it’s harder to recall next time. Some stuff gets represed so much that we don’t even know it’s there anymore. That’s bed news cause it is bound to come up eventually and it’s not a pretty picture when it does.
Having said that, I do think that sometimes it’s best not to have too much time to think. There are times when I have nothing better to do and so will take a small thing and blow it right out of proportion. I will spend a huge amount of energy stressing about it and I will make myself miserable. All this not because the issue really warrants being sad, but because I have too much time on my hands. How pathetic is that?
The good news is, once the baby comes, too much free time won’t be a phrase I can utter until the baby is in college.
One of the saddest things for me is to realize when a friendship has deteriorated so much that all of our conversations are empty. It’s one thing to acknowledge that it’s over and stop calling each other, but an entirely different ballgame when we continue the appearance that all is fine but we both know it’s not.
Recently, I’ve begun to notice that some of my oldest friends have become such acquaintances. We can talk for 50 minutes about absolutely nothing. And I don’t mean that in the nice way where you are chatting about the random fun stuff you did that day. I mean in the way where you both know the conversation is dragging. You’re not saying anything of substance and the conversation will never leave the realm of “fakeness.” I know that I should let go of this friendship regardless of its history. I know we both already have. But it’s so hard to take that last step.
To admit that sometimes things just fall apart for no reason and when people don’t stop to recognize or address it, it gets to a point where there’s no turning back. Where you wonder what held it together to begin with. Where you can’t remember the beginning, only this very sad ending.
Having these conversations physically pains me. But at the same time, I am loathe to let go for some reason. I don’t want to admit it’s over. It’s as if my admittance will make it end.
So I just sit there and play along.
Since Jake and I moved to San Diego a year and a half ago, we haven’t made a huge number of friends here. It’s a combination of a lack fo effort and lack of circumstance. We both work from home. My office has a total of seven people and he works for himself. Having come from huge Wall Street firms, our current setup isn’t condusive to making work friends. We attempted to go to a few meetup events in the beginning but just got lazy.
This is why I had assumed that I wouldn’t have a baby shower. I figured I wouldn’t have anyone to invite. But four different people offered to throw us a shower and in the end we had fifteen people over on Saturday for the baby shower. It turns out we have more local friends than we thought. It’s amazing how little things make you realize the day to day things you take for granted.
Major thanks go to my friend Cynthia who really did 99.9% of the work. To Ashlie who surprised me and came all the way from St. Louis just for the shower. To Jess and Chris who, even though they didn’t actually get to make it since the weather was extremely uncooperative, had intended to drive all the way from San Fran for the day. And to Stacey who drove down from Palm Springs in torrential rain. And to everyone who came and intended to come.
It appears we, and our soon to be, are luckier than I ever imagined. We are surrounded by amazing people.
We’re down to four weeks left. Fact is, only 5% of pregnant people actually deliver on their due date. So most people say that our potential delivery period is somewhere between two weeks from now to six weeks from now. Either way, it’s coming sooner than we can imagine. The most popular question I’ve been asked latety is: Aren’t you curious?
Don’t you want to know if it’s a girl or a boy?
Of course I’m curious. This baby has been growing in me for over 8 months now and I am curious about all of the details. Does s/he have long legs? Are all the organs in the right place? Everything ok with the limbs, the brain, the eyes? Will s/he have blue eyes like Jake? Will s/he have colic?
I am desperately curious to meet my baby. I pray that all is well and she or he will be born and live to be very healthy and happy long after I’m gone. I have a million worries and another million hopes. And in my list of ‘things I really hope for,’ gender isn’t number one. It isn’t even in the top ten.
When I seriously sit down and think about it, I’ve decided that I don’t have a significant preference of gender. I know some pretty awful women and some pretty awful men. What I care about much more is that our baby turns out to have a mild and pleasant personality. That she or he is a moderately easy baby and child. That we do right by him or her. Those are the things I care about. I’ve met enough atypical examples of each gender that I know having a girl doesn’t guarantee any information about the sort of girl we’ll end up with. And same goes for the boy. We already have too many assumptions on the toys our kids will like or the life they will lead depending on the gender they are and I want to make sure I don’t fall into the typical pitfalls.
So when I am honest with myself, it really doesn’t matter to me what gender the baby is. The main reason I am annoyed we don’t know is because, in English, I have to refer to the baby as ‘it’ since we can’t justifiably use he or she yet. Whereas, in Turkish, we don’t have gender-specific pronouns, making the ‘it’ equivalent not such a derogatory word to use. This is one of those cases where pronoun ambiguity would be in our favor.
So, any premonitions? Girl or boy? (Oh, and we’re 99.9% positive that there’s only one so don’t even go there!)
This is one of those weeks when I wish things could slow down a bit. I have too much catching up to do with my life and I can’t seem to get it all working. That’s partly why I haven’t updated in a while. I have many things I want to write about but I don’t seem to catch up ever. I have too many emails and only more are piling up before I get through the list.
I’d say downtime will come with the baby but we all know that’s a lie. I figure I should do it all before the little one comes since life as we know it will most likely be over with the arrival. Hope to catchup and get back into the groove in the next few days.
Hope your holidays were fun.
Since New Year’s is my most cherished holiday, I have an inclination to make a lot of resolutions. I tell myself each year that this year will be the year I turn the corner on many things. This year I will learn to ride a bike. This year I will drive completely on my own. This year I will learn to take things less seriously. Less personally. Less emotionally. And, of course, most of it never happens.
I’ve come to believe that things happen one of two ways: out of severe necessity or because it’s time. In 2004, I quit drinking Diet Coke because I got pregnant and I knew that for a person who drank 8 to 10 cans a day, switching to 1 a day wasn’t a realistic option. I started drinking a ton more water, eating healthier, trying to keep my yoga to a regular schedule, stress less, and give up the need to lose weight. All for the same reason. The baby to come.
I moved leaps and bounds in driving in that I’ve become a lot more comfortable and can hold animated conversations while I’m driving. This didn’t come out of hours of practice like one would think. It actually seems the less I drove, the more I became okay with it. I still have a huge way to go on that but somehow the time must have come for me to relax a bit because I did without a personal effort or vow to do so.
As for reading more, learning more, being happier and calmer. Those came and went with the hormones in my body. To be fully honest, I can’t even remember the first four months before I was pregnant. I can’t remember how it felt not to feel so big and clumsy. Not to have to pee every five seconds. Regardless, most of this year felt like it wasn’t in my control and I learned quickly to keep up with the necessary and let go of the trivial.
Which brings me to 2005. I am now wise enough to admit that I cannot make a single resolution that I am guaranteed to keep in 2005. I cross my fingers and toes that the baby will come close to on time and the labor will be as bearable as possible and, most importantly, the baby will be healthy and happy. If all those things happen, I am willing to consider 2005 a good year.
Most of my wishes for this coming year involve others. I wish for Jake’s business to prosper. I want us to have a happy balance and a healthy approach to building our family. I hope the baby has an uneventful, happy, colic-free year. We will be starting the year with a lot of visitors which means that we’ll be surrounded by family more than we’ve been in the last ten years. I hope that it strengthens our bonds and starts us off in a good track.
I know that I won’t be able to control most of what goes on this year (and probably all the others after this one). I hope I learn to relinquish the need to control quickly and learn to live my new life as wonderfully as possible. I make no resolutions this year, except for one which I think is necessary:
I will learn to go with the flow.
May 2005 bring all of you prosperity, luck, health, and ample joy. Thank you for stopping by.
I never considered myself to be a creative person. I always wished I were but never really thought I was good enough. Nonetheless, I constantly felt the pull of the artistic world and minored in Art when I was in college. Most of what I did then was two-dimensional digital art. I tried my hand in calligraphy and design as well.
After college I took several three-dimensional graphics courses. I took a clay course and another college-level design course. I never has the guts to take a drawing class, so the last time I did that, I was around ten years old. Having taken so many courses, I still had never tried anything that would be considered crafty since elementary school.
My last year in New York, I took a current affairs class at the New School. The class was huge and the teacher lectured all but the last ten minutes. It wasn’t the kind of course that required note-taking, mostly active listening. In my second session, I noticed a woman knitting during the class. It seemed to me that knitting was a perfect way to multi-task in this case.
I went out and bought some yarn and picked up basic techniques here and there. Since then I have knit a lot of scarves and I am now working on a baby blanket. Ten months ago, my friend Cyndi and I decided we wanted to try making jewelry. We went to a bead store, bought a whole bunch of beads, took a free class and got started on our earrings. She did a lot more and I still have catching up to do but it didn’t take us too long to get the hang of it.
Last week, I decided to try another crafty project. When the baby comes, I want to scrapbook the first year of the baby’s life. My dad has albums from our birth that has cards, baby teeth, our umbilical cords, locks of hair, etc. I always thought those albums were fantastic and I want to make one, too. I didn’t want the baby to be my very first scrapbook ever so we went to the scrapbooking store, which is a place you can leave entire paychecks without blinking an eye, and bought a whole bunch of stuff for me to scrapbook our cross-country trip. I printed around 100 photos and made an outline.
What I should have known is that the cross country trip is a huge project and it will take forever for me to finish it. I have been working on it actively since Thursday (hence the lack of updates) and I am on page 41 of 58. When I reach 58, I still have to go back and add all the text. I am not exactly sure what I was thinking.
At this point I will be all scrapbooked-out by the time the baby comes.
I don’t dance. I used to years ago but I never enjoyed it. I always felt uncoordinated and awkward. My friends used to time their moves to the rythm of the song and I felt stupid and out of place. Eventually I just gave it up. I decided it wasn’t giving me the joy or sense of freedom people talk about. I’m sure a shrink wouldn’t approve of my giving up but I don’t miss it much.
My baby, it appears, loves dancing. S/he is already dancing and s/he’s not even out yet.
One of the things you’re supposed to start doing in the third trimester of pregnancy is to keep “kick logs.” These are typically done after dinner while you lay on your side. You take thirty minutes or one hour and count how many times the baby kicks in that time frame. Or you can count up to so many kicks and find out how much time it took the baby to kick that many times. This is so the doctor can make sure your baby is okay. A moving baby is a healthy baby, they say.
I’ve never had to do one of those logs. As soon as my body is in bed, the baby decides it’s time to dance. I generally count until 100 before I give up. We seem to reach three digit numbers in less than 20 minutes most nights. Just to give you a sense, they say to worry if the baby kicks fewer than ten times in a 24-hour period. Obviously, that’s not a problem we have.
Last week, I had a long week at work and noticed that the baby wasn’t kicking as much as usual. We were still easily over 50 in a day but for my baby that’s not a lot. I decided to wait until Friday to see if it was work-related. As we guessed, come Friday night, the minute my vacation began, the baby began dancing. S/he didn’t stop all weekend. At points it was so strong that you could see my entire belly shift to one side and come back or stretch in ways that look like they must hurt. But they don’t.
The kicking never hurts me. I love it. It’s like a way for the baby to talk to me before we get to meet each other. I know s/he can hear me now but I can’t hear the baby yet and such we communicate through the kicks. As long as s/he doesn’t keep it up once s/he’s on the outside, we’re good.
Firstly, I apologize for the lack of updates. I’d blame it on my exhaustion, my lack of time, my lack of ideas but this time it was something much more mechanical than that. Our not-very-bright ISP forgot to pull out the static IPs from the DNS pool last week causing major net problems for us all week last week. Which meant our connection went down every thirty seconds. I had a hard enough time working from home and didn’t have the energy to fight the ssh connection that allows me to post my entries. We’re back now, though, and all should be fine.
When I first got pregnant, other mothers told me that everyone would now touch my belly and they would all tell me what to do. I figured since I still don’t know that many people in San Diego, the chances of people touching me weren’t very high and also I have no problem telling people to get their hands off of me. However, I wasn’t prepared for how hostile I would really feel.
It seems that I automatically have a negative reaction to people’s comments regardless of the intention with which it’s delivered and how close or foreign that person might be to me. A few months ago, a friend told me that I really should get some maternity pants instead of unzipping the regular ones I wore. Instead of agreeing with her logical comment, my first hunch was to say:
“Fuck You.”
Thankfully, I didn’t actually say it out loud. But since then, I’ve noticed that everyone’s opinions on what I should and shouldn’t do is automatically greeted by my inner reluctance. I feel like telling them all off. For some reason instead of interpreting the information as helpful, I am processing it as confrontational or patronizing. And I am way too exhausted to be patronized.
So that’s how it goes.
“You really should have the baby’s room ready by now.”
“Fuck You.”
“You really should be exercising more.”
“Fuck You.”
“Are you seriously not taking any time off work? That’s crazy; you should take off starting the beginning of January.”
“Fuck You.”
I know some of this is good advice but I can’t seem to acknowledge that right now. What I need more is someone to spend time with and laugh with. I need a lot lot more sleep. I need to relax and know that everything will be okay with us and with the baby. I need someone to have fun with and not unsolicited advice. I am sure I will regret not listening to these wise people some day real soon, but for now I really just want them all to fuck off.
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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