Just thought y’all would find this amusing…

Last week, I took Signe to my office to meet my co-workers. Remember the obnoxious colleague who kept making inappropriate comments about how enormous my baby would be? Yeah, she made several comments about how she’d never seen such a tiny little baby. “She’s so tiny! It’s been a LONG time since I’ve seen such a small baby.”

So apparently, all that girth was just me being fat. Bitch.

I’m sorry for the lack of posts over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been kinda busy, what with the constant feedings (breastfeeding is much harder than I thought it would be), crying jags (stupid hormones), and hours-long stretches where we just stare at her and marvel at how cute she is. But I did want to post an update on how things are going.

First of all, I’m overwhelmed, in just about every way possible. I’m overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of her, by the lack of sleep, by the feelings of responsibility I suddenly feel. But mostly, I’m overwhelmed at the beautiful but excrutiating sense that I’ve just signed myself up for a lifetime of constant worry, fear, anxiety, and knowledge that I’ve never been in love like this before.

Don’t get me wrong, I love GTB as much as I love Signe, but it’s different. The primary difference is that it took some time to love GTB this much. I didn’t fall as completely, instantly in love with him as I have with her. It’s actually a little painful, and it makes me weep on a daily basis.

It’s easy to be in love when your baby is a really good baby. Signe rarely cries, and mostly just wants to eat and sleep. She does have stretches where she’s awake for a few hours at a time, and we’re not totally sure what to do with her then. But she’s good natured and patient with us as we figure it out.

She’s also a phenomenal pooper. I guess it’s really normal, but I’ve never heard a baby poop with the force and decibel level this kid does. There is never a wonder over whether her diaper is dirty. Her explosively audible BMs announce their presence with authority. I was expecting to be elbow deep in poop, but who knew something so cute could be so vulgar?

Despite her love of sleep, GTB and I are both a little sleep deprived. She’ll sleep for 3-4 hours at a time, but it often takes two hours to nurse her and then get her back to sleep. By the time I’ve peed and fallen asleep again, she’s been sleeping for an hour and I’m only another hour or two away from her next feeding. This is not new information to anyone who’s lived with a newborn before, I’m sure. And my 20-minute power napping ability does nothing to combat the constant sleepiness. It takes a good two hour nap each afternoon to feel human again.

What else? Niles is taking it all in stride. He does seem to notice she’s here and that he’s not getting as much attention, but so far he hasn’t pooped on my pillow or anything. He gets a little pissy if I’m late with his morning feeding, which I often am.

That’s about all the update I have the energy for right now. I’ll post more, along with pictures, at a later date.

And please forgive any typos or run on sentences.

This past weekend, my body and my baby decided that the unofficial end of summer should also mark the end of my pregnancy. So, appropriately enough, I went into labor on Labor Day. On September 2, Signe Rose arrived.

I won’t go into the whole birth story; it’s pretty graphic. Suffice it to say there were over four hours of pushing and a vacuum extractor involved. The end result though was a healthy and beautiful little girl named Signe Rose. And despite some co-workers’ insistence that she’d be enormous, Signe weighed 7 pounds 10 ounces, measured 19 inches long, and is practically perfect in every way.

We’re in deep smit, but we’re also exhausted. I’ll post more details later.

So far, this has been my morning:

I woke up happy, but then remembered the email exchange I had with HR yesterday about how the short-term disability policy I’ve been paying into for two years now might not cover my maternity leave.

Then I remembered that today is payday, but that my paycheck will only be half of what it normally is because of some glitch in payroll that they are fixing by only paying us for one week of work rather than two. And no, they don’t plan to reimburse us for the lost week of work. Ever.

I walked out of my house to get into my car and saw that someone egged me last night. And I had just paid to wash my car yesterday.

I’m still pregnant and this baby doesn’t seem to want to come out. I’m dilated, effaced, walking on a daily basis, and had accunpuncture on Wednesday, and she still seems happy as a clam in there. I guess my belly is so comfy and all the baked goods I’m feeding her have her convinced that she’s in no hurry to join us in the oxygenated world outside my uterus.

But really, this is what’s ruining my day. It’s bloody genius. And it’s totally going to fuck with every bit of momentum Obama may have had on his side after last night’s speech.

I’m so pissed.

Now I know why people don’t walk through Columbia Park after dark.

My friend Ingrid emailed me today to see if I wanted to get together to commiserate about being super pregnant. I told her tonight was my only available night this week and that I was dying to go for a walk. Forgetting that it gets dark a little earlier now that it’s late August, we agreed to meet at my house at 8 p.m. and to walk the loop around Columbia Park.

The park is awesome because it’s tree-filled, which means you are protected from the heat of the sun when it’s hot and from the rain when it’s stormy. Unfortunately, those trees also make it kinda creepy when it’s not light anymore. You can’t see more than about twenty yards into the park from the street after the sun goes down. GTB and I have long speculated that there must be all kinds of debauchery that takes place in there at night.

And now I have proof that we were right.

On our second loop around the park, it was not quite dark yet, but it was dusky. We approached a garbage can that had a pile of clothes next to it. As we got closer, we realized it wasn’t a pile of clothes, but a passed out man with a syringe lying right next to him. Ingrid, being much more Christian than I am, stopped to see if he was OK. I saw the syringe and thought the best thing to do was to get to a payphone and call 911. Once Ingrid saw that the guy couldn’t be roused, she ran looking for a payphone. We found one a few feet away and she dialed 911 as we heard sirens approaching. The 911 operator told Ingrid that help was on the way and to flag the paramedics down. So there we were, two hugely pregnant women, running toward the other end of the park trying to get the medics to hurry in our direction.

We stayed by the unconscious guy until they broke out the crash pack and throat tube thingy. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to handle watching them pump his stomach so I asked Ingrid if she wanted to stay. She said no so we moved on. Our previous conversation about the aches and pains of pregnancy suddenly seemed trite and we both felt pretty lucky that the worst going on with us was sore hips and frequent pee breaks.

I don’t know what happened to the guy and the syringe, but I do know that I won’t be taking any more non-daylight walks through Columbia Park.

Just wanted to post an update that I’m still here, still huge, and still pregnant. Miss Signe doesn’t appear to be in any big hurry, despite the fact that we can both feel how uncomfortably cramped her quarters are getting.

At my doctor’s appointment two weeks ago, I was already dilating and effacing (if you don’t know what that means, you’ll have to look elsewhere for an explanation because I don’t want to get too graphic, not yet at least). I’m hoping at our appointment today, the doctor will tell us I’ve progressed even further and that all systems appear to be a “go.”

I’ve been trying everything I can to encourage this baby to vacate the premises, short of drinking castor oil or putting evening primrose oil suppositories in my hoo-hoo. Those seem too extreme. But I’ve been taking walks, drinking pineapple juice and red raspberry leaf tea, etc. This Wednesday, I have an accupuncture appointment. We’ll see if that does anything to get her moving.

There are two family birthdays this week. GTB’s mom is this Thursday and my brother’s is Saturday. So if she wanted to be born one of those two days, that would be pretty cool. A Thursday birthday would also mean I was having her while Obama was accepting the nomination for president on the anniversary of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech. That would be awesome.

Though, despite my motherly intuition being off about whether she was a boy or a girl, I’ve had dreams and other strong hunches that she’ll come on September 1. Labor Day. Get it? Ha!

I’ll post more news as we get it, if we get it. And I apologize to those of you who yearn for funny posts that aren’t about my gestating state. This is all that’s on my mind right now, so it’s what you’re getting. Sorry.

UPDATE: Doctor says I’m now 2 cm dilated and 80% effaced. Not really “news” per se. But in case you were wondering….

I’m now 37 weeks along, which means Signe is full term and if she was born today she would likely need no interventions and would be perfectly healthy. It’s quite a milestone.

It also means that I could go into labor at any second. However, it could also be another 4-5 weeks. As a control freak, I am driven a bit crazy by this kind of unknown. So I’m doing what I can to retain some semblance of power. Her room is ready. Her clothes are washed. The car seat has been installed in my car. The hospital admission forms have been filled out and mailed in. I’ve started packing my hospital bag. And so now, my focus turns to the music I want piping out of my iPod while I’m in labor.

Not knowing if I’ll need something to help me relax or something to help energize me, I’ve been pondering the playlist for several weeks now. I was thinking I’d make a long mix of soothing sounds. But now I’m thinking I just want to write down a list of things that will suit whatever mood I’m in and, more importantly, won’t annoy me. Then I can just point to an artist on that list and make GTB put on what sounds good at the moment.

So far, the list consists of:

Feist
James Brown
Interpol
Death Cab for Cutie
Broken Social Scene/Kevin Drew
Radiohead (but only In Rainbows or OK Computer)
Sujan Stevens (but only Illinois)
Yo La Tengo

You’ll note that several of GTB’s favorites aren’t on that list. There’s no My Morning Jacket, Hold Steady, or Guided By Voices to speak of. I feel a little bad about that, but, like I told him last night, if we decide to have another kid, he can be the pregnant one. And then he can pick the music for when he’s working on getting 8 pounds of kicking, screaming flesh out of his pee-pee hole.

In the meantime, dear readers, do you have any suggestions for good laborin’ music?

Probably my least favorite late-pregnancy symptom is this wicked insomnia. It’s 2:26 a.m. and I’m WIDE awake. And it’s far from the first time I’ve been online, reading, or watching TV at some ungodly hour. It’s miserable.

I talked to my doctor about it earlier this week and she thinks it’s totally normal, but she did offer a prescription of Ambien. I want to avoid that if possible, even though it’s been proven mostly safe for pregnant women. So I took her recommendation of a nightly Benadryl or Unisom. Though she told me to call her if I changed my mind about the Ambien.

I have taken Unisom a few times and have found that it makes me really groggy the next day, so tonight (or last night, I should say) I opted for a Benadryl. Several hours later, here I sit, still awake.

Suddenly, Ambien is starting to look pretty good.

Just a few minutes ago, as I was watching the Olympics, as NBC came back from commercial a screen flashed up that said “This encore presentation of prime time Olympics is brought to you by Ambien.” Followed immediately by an Ambien commercial.

That is some fucking brilliant marketing right there. I kinda want to get a prescription just to reward them for that stroke of genius.

Then again, that might be the sleep deprivation talking.

My doctor says I probably won’t get much bigger. Let’s pray she’s right.

You know those catalog people who hunt you down and send you endless supplies of Victoria’s Secret and Oriental Trading Company glossies mere minutes after you move into a new place? They are psychic, I swear. I always kinda knew this, because of the fact that it only took a few days to start getting craptons of mags at any new residence I moved into. But apparently, they also know when you get knocked up.

A few weeks after our first prenatal appointment, I started receiving Lilian Vernon and Little Explorers and Pottery Barn Kids. This was OK. Pottery Barn Kids has some damn cute stuff. (Not that we can afford any of it, but still…) But over the weekend, I got my first copy of Coldwater Creek.

I double checked the mailing label to see if maybe it came to, I hoped, “Resident.” No such luck. It came addressed directly to me.

So I guess I’ve gone from the Vicky’s Secret and J Crew demographic to the Land’s End Kids and Coldwater Creek phase of life. Kill me now.