Communication

"Snack?"

"You're hungry, sweetie? What can I get you?"

"[mumblemumble] crackers."

"Okay. Do you want goldfish crackers?"

"No!"

"Fine, geez. What crackers do you want?"

"Grandma crackers."

"Grandma crackers? Did grandma give you special crackers this weekend?"

"Grandma crackers."

I pull out every type of crackers we have - Wheat Thins. Stoned Wheat Thins. Carr's. Organic Stoneground Wheat...

"No! Grandma crackers."

"Sweetie, I'm sorry, I don't know what grandma cra...ohhhhh wait. Do you mean these?"


"Grandma crackers! Yayyyy!"

True Pet Owner Confessions

I am not in love with my cat. That's no surprise to readers of this blog--or to those who have actually met her and, against all odds, lived to tell the tale.

I am biding time, waiting for Desdemona to cross that ninth feline life off her list and come back in the tenth as a cockroach. Or a Republican. Or whatever it is that one earns by sucking for the better part of 16 years.

Once, I adored her. Those were the days that she curled up in the crook of my neck at night and licked behind my ears, purring so loudly that I had to shoo her off the bed to get some sleep. The days that she was shitty to me only part of the time, even if she was shitty to everyone else in the world all of the time. Still, I was happy for whatever affection she doled out, especially when it was just Desi and I; the cliche twosome of single woman and single cat. So, she bit the occasional visiting relative or one-night stand--what can ya do.

And then Nate came. And Desi sank greatly in importance.

Soon after, the dog came.

And in very little time, I loved the dog more.

I know, I am terrible for saying as much. But Emily didn't hiss at all my friends, she didn't puke on the bedspread, and she was far more likely to play with a ball of string and far less likely to eat my visitors whole.

We could do things with the dog. Take her for drives in the country. Sit at sidewalk cafes slugging coffee while she panted at our feet. Walk her around our West Village block and determine which local celebrities were nice based on who took the time to pet her when she crossed in their paths and demanded it. (Answer: Steven Colbert yes, Maggie Gyllenahaal no. Amy Sedaris yes, Paul Rudd no.)

Desi was a pet but Emily became family.

She was my laptop screen saver and the home picture on my cell phone. Enough said.

Suddenly I understood what all those so-called dog people saw in their pets. Why they included them in their Christmas card photos. Why those with otherwise impeccable taste walked around with T-shirts and key rings proclaiming I [HEART] MY COCKAPOO-LABRADOODLE MIXED BREED.

(At this point I must be clear that while I did understand these things, I did not do any of them myself. The closest I came was emailing puppy photos of Emily to the relatives. In fact, if Nate called me "mommy" with her it made me squirm, with the image of Parker Posey's character in Best in Show in mind.

Come to think of it, when my dad and stepmother got a dog-- their "baby"--and then tried to figure out what my relation was to it, I had to cry uncle on the bizarre bi-species family stuff. I think they called me his sister--making my daughter the dog's niece? Um...no. I'll be having none of that.)

I loved Emily not just because she was Emily, but because she made me see that I was indeed capable of taking care of something without killing it. She no doubt paved the way for Thalia, and for that I will always be indebted to her.

But once Thalia arrived, to whatever degree Emily had been our baby, she wasn't anymore.

Not really.

I just don't feel it.

Am I horrible? Am I alone here? Please don't tell me I'm the only one in the world.

Emily is still loved, to be sure. Especially by Nate, who amazes me in his ability to remember that the dog needs a cuddle or a treat or a belly rub or a bath, even when there are a million other things going on in our lives. The dog accompanies us on long trips, or weekend stays at my mother's house. She sleeps on the bed with us, and she gets the expensive dog food. To say nothing of the table scraps that fall around the high chair, making her better fed than Thalia most days.

She is not a neglected pet in the least. But she does not occupy the same place in my heart that she did two years ago.

I'm so sorry Emily: I adore you, if not your flatulence.

But we have two children. And you're not one of them.

"Who Does the Baby Look Like?"

At any given moment:

Me

Nate

Thalia

Anyone but Thalia

Grandma as a baby

Susan Powter

Her cousin Brodie

My second cousin Jamie

An old Vaudevillian comedian

My stepmother's father (see above)

Peter Boyle

Winston Churchill

The one of the 3 Stooges who was bald

E.T.

Uncle Fester

Her cousin Bea

Bam Bam Bigelow

I don't care who she looks like...all I know is ever since she came along,
there are a LOT more toys around.

The Other Side of Awesome

I didn't spend a lot of time during my pregnancy writing about the fear that I wouldn't be able to feel for this baby as I did with the first. Not because it wasn't one of the foremost fears on my mind--which it was; oh my God, was it ever--but because it just sounded so cliche as far as writing goes.

Is there any more of a repeated refrain with second-time preggos than "how can I ever love this one as much as #1?" No, in case you're wondering. There is not. Even the tried and true maternity clothes rant is a far, far distant second.

Whenever I was tempted to write about it (although indeed I alluded to it briefly here and there), I instead channeled friends and family talking me down. I imagined the anecdotes dispelling my worries, the heartfelt advice, and the bordering-on-cheesy analogies: Your heart is not a balloon with a limited capacity for love, but an universe of affections with borders that stretch to infinity. (Gag.)

And then I kept my feelings mostly to myself, trying to have faith that everyone was right, that I wouldn't be the one and only exception to the rule--a new mom looking at this new baby and thinking eh, maybe we can trade her in in a few months for a different model.

My fears stemmed not so much from the fact that I love Thalia beyond belief, but that she is amazing. More than amazing--Spectacular. Magnificent. Of course it's every parent's right and obligation to believe this about his or her own child, but I say it with absolute go-ahead-and-hate-me-if-you-want-to conviction. She's smart. She's funny. She's intuitive. She's kind. She makes up songs about her day and loves even the unloveable cat, and choreographs dances to her favorite cartoon theme songs. She exudes extraordinary spirit and sense of self at 22.5 months, and I feel privileged to know her, let alone to mother her.

Amazing.

Now couple this with the constant reminder throughout my pregnancy that "the second baby gets all the traits that the first one didn't take" -- and you can see where I might have been a wee bit nervous about the human being about to shoot down my birth canal.

All the traits the first one didn't take? Yikes.

I mean Thalia's not a kleptomaniac or a serial killer...

In other words, I had come to the erroneous conclusion that there were only two options for my children:

Awesome. And shitty.

Like that was it. Black or white. A or B. There was nothing in between, nothing.

It sounds so stupid now: Well, if Thalia is social, this one will hate people. If Thalia smiles all the time, the new one will be bitter and angry, eschewing lollipops and kittens and humanity at large.

I'm pleased to announce that so far as I can tell in Sage's brief 12 days, I was totally, absolutely, completely wrong.

I'm here to reassure those who need reassuring that there's a continuum of awesomeness in children that I hadn't considered. You can be both awesome and a terrible sleeper as Thalia was, and you can be awesome and a spitter-upper like Sage. You can be awesomely social like Thalia, or awesomely observant like Sage.

My children are not the same. Not even. But they're not opposites either.

And the heart? It seems to be a wide, expansive universe with borders that stretch to infinity, capable of holding all the love in existence.

(Gag.)

---

Huge congrats to the beautiful Mrs. Q on her new daughter after one of the most insane birth stories ever (and so well told by Fairly Oddmother). Sage can't wait to meet her new playmate--or at least lie around in close proximity to her as they simultaneously stare off into space.

A Public Service Announcement

So you know how after you have a baby that they tell you to relax? Not lift anything? Like, say...a toddler? And that not lifting anything, like, say a toddler, might include carrying her two blocks to the pediatrician when she doesn't feel like walking?

Probably a good idea to listen to the advice. Or you might have to deal with repercussions like, say, strained pelvic ligaments, which keep you from being able to walk without moaning for four days.

Good times.

Milestone

When that umbilical cord stump falls out, it's a bittersweet moment. I'm staring at the last physical remnant that says this little girl, only 8 days ago, was a part of me. She lived off me. And now she'll never need me quite in the same way. For a brief moment I consider saving it, placing it in a keepsake box in the back of a drawer or photographing it for posterity. I pick it up, tenderly, and decide its fate.

Then I realize I'm looking at this bloody brown clotted stump of nastiness. Ew.

Garbage for you.

If I need a reminder, I'll just look at her belly button.

Sleep-posting

My functioning brain cells are currently in the low single digits. So much so, I actually had to turn off Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School because it was demanding too much of an attention span. So I'm going to try and condense the past four days into the bite-sized information morsels of a FAQ page.

So...how did it go?
It's true what they say about the second time. Soooo much easier.

How was the pitocin?
My body magically went into labor on its own that morning. Thanks to Joy for reminding me to shave, if only because doing so gave me enough time in the shower to notice my mucus plug depart down the drain. Speaking of which, could there be a more disgusting term for anything anywhere? Was phlegm ball taken? Prepartum loogie mass?

(Okay, that's braincell-less digression number 1)

Hit the hospital around 6:30. Contrax started around 8, pitocin at 8:15 (which never went above a 1ml drip , which is hardly an induction at all). By 10:30 I asked for the blessed, glorious epidural. I'm pretty tough but I'm no masochist. Slept for an hour or so, was fully dilated when they checked me at 12:30, called the parents and got ready to start pushing.

How long did you push?
I had the understanding it would take about half the time it did to push first go around. So, 20 minutes or so was my expectation.

I pushed once before hearing, "There she is! There's the head! Now stop pushing...we have to prep the table!"

She was born one push later. No burning, no tears, no stitches, no major trauma. Just a big, round, plump, squishy, healthy baby covered in goo, squirming on my chest.

How was Nate?
Amazing through the whole thing. Supportive, and uncharacteristically hand-holding and wonderful. Besides, he's now in love with my OB after she sat down for 45 minutes and traded political conspiracy theories with him.

He then turned the subsequent couple of hours into a video game, watching the other l&d patients' progress on our monitor (it displays all of them for the nurses) and doing color commentary: Okay- looks like 403 is beating you. I think she's going to go first. Oh wait, room 407 is having lots of contractions now. My money's on her, although you're pretty close behind. Wait! We have a dark horse in the race now, room 409 who's contracting once every 3 minutes...

Nate is very happy to declare that I was the winner. Whoo!

How did you get to the name Sage?
Love the meaning, the sound, the herb, the color...and once I realized Nate didn't say no to it right away (like, um, every other suggestion I had), I had a pretty good idea it was going to stick. But with all the amazing name recos from readers over the past weeks, Thalia and Sage will have a pool of doll/stuffed animal/pet names for the rest of their lives.

Who does she look like?
Nate: A baby.
Me: Nate's sister Lexi. Sometimes my mother. Sometimes her cousin Bea. Sometimes this guy I worked with like 15 years ago.

Is she anything like Thalia?
So far not a bit. Except for being perfect and all.

Thalia was smiling and alert from moment one. This little girl took her own sweet time getting acclimated to the world, opening her eyes, interacting with us. I caught a first beautiful little smile this morning. It was gas for sure, but as an indicator of what's to come, I'll take it.

She's also sleeping somewhat well--clearly exhausted from the past 9 months of destroying my innards nonstop--although she did nurse pretty much every hour last night. Sigh, say my poor abused nipples

So how are those boobs?
I'd prefer that you call them by their proper names: 90-pound milk bags of doom.

How's Thalia doing with it all?
She amazed us with her total lack of predictability in asking to climb into the baby's bassinet at the hospital. Has a toddler ever done something like that? Never. Not possible.

So original! So free-thinking!

Overall, she seems surprisingly adaptable to the changes. But who can blame her - she's gotten more presents and balloons and ice cream and cookies since this baby came along than I think in her entire 22 months combined. I'm sure by now she's like, "bring on more babies!"

You know we really only came here to see baby pictures right?
Oh, um...yeah. Right. Sorry.

Joining the Ranks of Martha Graham and Salvador Dali

The lovely Sage Alexandra made her way into the world at 1:31pm on May 11, 2007 weighing in at 8 lbs even and measuring 21 inches long -- making room for 8lbs and 21 inches worth of spicy tuna rolls.

Mom and family are doing well, and apparently, I hear little Sage is a sleeper.

Liz wanted me to thank everyone for all the support and well wishes. She'll be back shortly to fill your blog readers with exciting tales of labor, delivery, and beyond.

-- Kristen (Motherhood Uncensored)

Birthin' Babies

My OB looked at the blue sticky note dangling from my file this afternoon and remarked, "so, I guess we've got an appointment tomorrow, you and me."

We do?

For what?

"For induction."

Wh-a-a?

"You didn't know?"

No, no one told me. I thought it was next week. Monday. Maybe Tuesday. But nope...tomorrow it is.

5/11/07

Weird to know the birthday in advance, isn't it?

(On a side note, Nate was cute this morning. He said, "so, I know you're a little worried about dealing with pitocin...would it be easier just to schedule a C-section instead? I mean, don't people just do that?" My OB got a kick out of that one.)

So unless the cramping from today's membrane stripping (not nearly as burlesque as it sounds) turns into contractions tonight, I will be induced tomorrow early morning in a sunny hospital room overlooking New York's East River. Sorry to disappoint you but there will be no frantic rush to the hospital story. No water breaking in the middle of Haagen Daaz story. No pacing the Brooklyn Promenade at midnight in labor story.

Just a scheduled car trip across the Brooklyn Bridge and up the FDR drive in the traffic-light wee hours (5:30 is pretty wee to me) of the morning.

I'm grateful for the time to plan, actually. As my friend Hally says, it suits my anal Virgo ways.

What this plan-ahead Virgo hadn't planned for however is just how hard it was to send Thalia off to Grandma's for the night. Saying goodbye to her was unexpectedly heart crushing, knowing that the next time I see her, everything will have changed; she's trading in her only child status for good. For better. For sisterhood and solidarity and all that good stuff. But I admit I'm mourning the end of this part of my journey with her. I will always remember this last week we had together, just the two of us--singing to videos, playing picnic with her animals (PARTY! she would scream, hands raised in the air, with every "cupcake" she served), knocking down towers of blocks, cuddling on the couch.

Above all, I'll remember the moment that she pulled up my shirt, looked at my belly and said, "baby's coming. Open the door."

Indeed.

"Remember, no eating after midnight," the nurse reminded me as I tried to contain my emotion and anxiety behind my sunglasses.

Which immediately made me think of what to have for my last meal. I was thinking pancakes. My friend Danielle suggested waffles. Either way, I know what I'll be having tomorrow night.

Oh, the Missed Opportunity

Forty weeks.

Forty whole weeks--plus a few days, come to think of it--and not once did I take advantage of the remarkable opportunity Baby Plus Prenatal Education System offers pregnant women to "give their babies a head start."

A head start.

With prenatal education.

From the website:

BabyPlus is a series of 16 scientifically designed sounds that resemble a mother's heartbeat...

This "auditory exercise" strengthens learning ability during the developmental period when the advantages will be most significant for a child. BabyPlus is the first educational tool designed for prenatal use that has been proven effective. BabyPlus children have an intellectual, developmental, creative, and emotional advantage from the time they are born.

Oh man, bring on the mommyguilt. I did not give my daughter an intellectual, developmental, creative and emotional advantage by strapping a fanny pack on twice a day and playing whale sounds into my gut. Which means...she will be disadvantaged.

Goodbye top preschools.

Goodbye college scholarship.

Goodbye Nobel prize. I think I'll miss you most of all.

The testimonials on the website are my favorite part. Apparently, thanks to the BabyPlus, little Bailey Sky latched on right away! Ryleigh shares with her friends! Camdyn sleeps through the night! Calen never cried except when he was having gas!

(You can only hope that with their above-average intelligence, that these children will not grow up to work at Wal-Mart, as their names might indicate.)

I just want to see one testimonial--just one--that says:

My little Haydyn was as dumb as dirt. So for baby #2, I decided to try the BabyPlus. I'm happy to report that little Brit'ney Heather (pronounced Ether--the H is silent) has mastered chess at 20 months even while her five year-old brother is still struggling with Candyland. We owe it all to you, BabyPlus!

The crazy thing? They've sold 100,000 of these things since 1989.

I'm in the wrong business, readers. I needs to gets me some snake oil to sell.

Bad Mommy

First, let me say...nope, no baby yet. I'm hanging tough with the help of Ben, Jerry, and your exceedingly good wishes. In the meanwhile, enjoy my current Time Out Kids column which I wrote a few days ago, while I could still complete sentences that sounded sort of like English and not aboriginal grunts.

------

This week my friend and blogger extraordinaire Rebecca Woolf posted a brilliant essay seeking to understand why parents are so afraid to admit that we’re good at this parenting business. “Claiming to be bad parents is the new I’m fat,” she writes.

I loved it. (But then I love everything she writes.)

The same way we don’t want to say that our kids are smart in front of other parents, we are so quick to proclaim—even exaggerate--our own failures. For fear of being competimommies or alienating potential friends and mommygang compadres, we instead take comfort under a cloak of feigned incompetence and overstated shortcomings.

Shut UP. You’re thinking. Your own blog tagline is “I don’t know what I’m doing either.”

I’m self-deprecating, sure. And I often don’t know what I’m doing. Do you?

All the time?

Really?

Liar.

It's okay. Ease up on yourself a little bit, mamas. Bushwacking your way through the parenting jungle blindfolded (okay, blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back in a monsoon during a total eclipse) doesn’t automatically make you a bad parent. Surely there's a distinction between winging it and blowing it entirely.

Which is why I’m never going to say I’m a bad mom.

Okay, so I do. Sometimes. Facetiously.

Like I fed her peanut butter twice today because reheating the couscous that Nate left in the fridge feels too much like cooking. Oh, and it’s not organic peanut butter – it’s Skippy. Bad mommy.

We watched six consecutive episodes of the Wonderpets. Before breakfast. Bad mommy.

I cleaned out Thalia’s pack n play (a.k.a. the repository of toys n’ crap) and found two paper clips a button, a ball point pen, a deflated balloon and some plastic bags. Bad mommy.

Dr Sears sez: Limit juice consumption to 6 ounces per day. Oops.

Read between the lines and you won’t conclude that I actually consider myself a bad mommy; my self-assessment is more a sarcastic nod to the Judgy McJudgersons out there who have deemed themselves official arbiters of good and bad parenting behaviors--which is where I think so much of the guilt comes from in the first place.

Who are these people anyway?

I mean, besides Dr Sears who makes it perfectly clear that if you haven’t mastered the 47 various breastfeeding holds and don’t cosleep with your children until they ace their PSAT's you’re doomed to raise a brood of serial killers. Or worse, minimum wage fast food employees.

Is there some sort of Bad Parents Council of America? A group comprised of psychologists and researchers and a token marketing executive from Fisher-Price? Are they ones who surreptitiously phone the media with leads for the next mommywars story? (Moms who drink at playdates! Type A moms! Sic ‘em, Meredith.) Are they the people who invented Turn off the TV Week, or, as those of us with pre-preschoolers prefer to think of it: Ew Why Does Mommy Smell Like She Hasn’t Showered for a Week Week?

If so, I’d love to have a little sit-down with them, that they might consider wielding their collective influence in some constructive ways. For one, helping to get more moms to distinguish good/maybe not-as-good parenting choices from good/bad parenting.

I’d also like to warn the council that their influence trickles down to some parents who then wield the information indiscriminately and with sometimes brutal imprecision—think Luke with a light sabre, pre-Yoda.

I still sting a bit from the woman who googled crying it out leading to depression later in life, and came across my emotional post about trying in desperation to get my amazing non-sleeping baby to sleep by crying it out. This benevolent reader took a few minutes of her precious time to post a helpful comment suggesting I should be sterilized for doing so, since “even animals treat their children better.”

(The weasel came to mind immediately. They sometimes spare their offspring any pain of the world simply by eating them.)

Portrait of a child traumatized by CIO.

I laughed at her of course, then forwarded the email onto friends so we could make sarcastic jokes at her expense. But in the back of my mind, I had to question whether I was a bad mom for the choice I had made.

The answer, I'm happy to say: A resounding no. I’m insecure but not so insecure that I will let any idiot with an agenda and an internet connection make me question my parenting instincts for more than a moment. And I think that alone makes me a pretty good mom.

To say nothing of the fact that I've got a good kid. Her grandparents will back me up on this one.

It’s Mother’s Day this weekend. Here’s a suggestion: Why not give yourself the gift of a much needed break. Grab a full-fat latte with a shot of caramel and make a few mental notes about why you’re a good parent and not a crappy one. You can even jot them down and send them off to Rebecca for all the mommyworld to see. I guarantee you'll get some amen, sister's and cheesy virtual hugs in return.

Now pass the Skippy. I've got a kid to feed.

----

You'll find my Monday posts cross-published every week at NYC family online resource to the stars, Time Out New York Kids. Except for the next few, when I'll either be on maternity hiatus or in the mental ward.

May 6

"Well I guess we didn't win the car," were the first words out of Nate's mouth this morning--his way of acknowledging having slept through the night without a mad rush to pack a peanut butter sandwich before hightailing it to the hospital.

The free car was the least of my thoughts this morning.

I'm now officially past my due date of the 5th and on my way towards the 7th, shattering our nine month-long fantasy of having a first child born on 07/06/05 and a second on 05/06/07.

The weather is beautiful, I'm on hiatus from my dayjob, and I'm feeling about 600,000 times better than I did at this point in the last pregnancy.

So how come every time someone asks me how I'm doing I feel tears stinging the backs of my eye sockets? I'm fighting the urge to let them flow freely in front of people or I'll have to explain my feelings. Which I can't. It 's just visceral; the effects of an evil, inebriating cocktail of of anxiety, frustration, hormones and too much Entenmann's coffee cake that wreaked havoc on my blood sugar.

Yes, I feel claustrophobic in my body, itching to shed this bloated shell of limitations and discomfort. I hate my reliance on Nate, my mother, strangers, to reach that doodad for me or bend down and get that thing, or please, please, can't you rub my back, just the right side, I know you did it every night for the last week but it just hurts that much...

But despite whatever physical afflictions I'm enduring (and whining about despite my self-loathing for doing so) the emotional purgatory of the unknowable is my real Achilles heel. It always has been. I'm not one for sitting back and waiting for life to happen, and when I can't make it happen, just the way I want it, it tortures me.

Suddenly I'm envying those celebrities with their scheduled C-sections and simultaneous tummy tucks. Britney Spears, my mommy role model. Who'd have ever thought it.

I Hate Being Late

I have about 10 hours left, give or take, until I it is officially my due date. And then another 24 hours until I am past it.

This is not a bad thing per se, since as we all know, gestation time is officially anywhere from 38-42 weeks and the 40 week mark is simply an estimated date based on....

Oh screw that.

It sucks.

Although I will say the relative suckage does not nearly compare to the suckage I experienced when Thalia was overdue a whole ten days, two years ago. This put me smack in the middle of a July heatwave, so bloated and cankled and miserable that I could hardly move my fat ass from the ugly glider chair that I enigmatically purchased a few weeks before. And so my mother graciously came over to keep me company on my due date, June 26, to help me bide my time with something more productive than logging onto pregnancy message boards and coming up with snarky responses to questions like OMG I accidentally got a drop of Ben-Gay in my mouth! Did I hurt my baby?

My mother--along with Nate--decided that what I needed was a hobby to occupy my hands and time in the coming weeks. Something simple, calming, productive.

Together they concluded I needed to learn how to knit.

(Please hold your laughter, those who know me and my astounding lack of craftiness, dearth of small motor skills, and pathetically infinitesimal attention span.)

I always envied those who could while away hours with the meditative, rhythmic click click click of the needles, who seemed to experience some sort of inner peace along on the way to a beautiful little set of handmade alpaca baby booties. My sister-in-law is awesome at it, as are my mother and my grandmother. So I figured, it's in my genes. Why not give it a shot.

How hard can it be if it's the preferred hobby of arthritic centigenarians worldwide?

My mother presented me with some beautiful yarn to get my imagination flowing, along with some wooden beginner needles. I started to imagine the pride with which I would tell strangers on the street where my newborn daughter got that beeeeeauuuuutiful hat or beaeeeeeuuuuutiful sweater. I would attend those hipster knitting classes in the Lower East Side! I would make new knitting friends! It was all just too perfect.

And then I tried to cast on. Which is knitting-speak for tie a freaking knot on the needle, all except you, Liz, who is not capable of such a difficult task.

90 minutes later--I do not exaggerate--I had not yet cast on.

We looked at websites, we tried animated demos, my mother attempted a dozen ways in which to communicate exactly which way to pull the yarn through the loop so that when I did, it would actually remain on the needle. None of it worked. And just when my frustration was reaching a peak, Nate, who I thought was merely watching this all quietly from the corner, holds up a pair of needles with a stretch of yarn dangling elegantly from it and says, "Look. Like this."

If there ever would have been a time to justify stabbing someone with the pair of 4" embroidery scissors that lay at my feet, surely that was it.

I finally threw up my hands in exasperation and allowed my mother to get the thing started for me so the day wouldn't be a total waste.

The stitches were a bit easier. I did a row, then another. Then another. Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one. Suddenly it seemed...can it be? Is it possible? I was knitting!

Then...

a dropped stitch.

And another.

The realization that the only remedy was to undo an hour of work and go back to the wretched bumpy bit of yarn.

Redos. Redoing the redos.

Finally, holding up my handiwork to see exactly what I had been working on for the past several hours.


With God as my witness, I will never go knitting again.

False Alarm, Nothing to See Here, Carry On...

Nothing like an hour of false labor last night to bring to (unflattering, fluorescent) light the fact that I'm totally unprepared for the real deal.

I had dozed off during part 2 of The Mormons on PBS - which is truly a testament to my late pregnancy fatigue. Because trust me, there is little more entertaining in this world than watching Nate hem and haw and eye roll and grunt and shake his fist and make these bizarre guttural animal sounds towards pretty much anyone defending his former religious upbringing. Still, my eyelids felt heavy and by 9 or so I was under the blanket on the couch, pillows under my wreck of a lower back, sound asleep between my flatulent dog and my flatulent sigOth. Bliss.

At 10 sharp I woke with such a pain (Such a pain, I had, oy!) that I bolted upright. After an hour of alternately rocking back and forth like Rain Man, lying in bed trying not to cry, and pacing the apartment breathing in absolutely non-Lamaze sanctioned ways, Nate asked if maybe he should get the car.

Get the car.

Because in New York, you don't have a car at the ready by your front door. You have to call your garage with some notice (provided they're still open if it's nighttime), walk two blocks to get it, then drive the long way around the neighborhood until you're back in front of your front door. Unless you want to deal with a taxi. Which, well, driving up the pathetically paved and potholed FDR drive in a rainstorm is not exactly a magical journey in Cinderella's carriage.

Also he asked whether he should call my mother. Because that is our brilliant childcare plan for when the time comes: Call my mother who lives a good hour away in the best of traffic conditions to come stay with Thalia while either I go to the hospital alone or--well, I don't know what. Incredibly well-considered, I know. Plan B is that the baby holds out until May 9 when my city-dwelling father is back in town from vacation. Plan C is too ill-conceived and embarrassing to even say out loud.

"I don't know if you should get the car," I answered. "Which probably means no. But I just don't know what I'm feeling right now."

"Well is it labor?"

A simple yes or no was all he was looking for, judging from the way he was rocking from side to side, his eyes as wide as the moon. But I couldn't muster either. Instead what came out was something like. Well it's contractions. I don't know. Maybe. The baby's kicking me. Or kicking an organ. Or an ovary. Something. It hurts. I can't breathe. It feels like labor. It doesn't feel like labor. It's not regular. It's every 4 or 5 minutes. It's definitely contractions. I don't know if it's labor contractions. I don't know.

"Doesn't fetal movement slow down when you're in labor?" he asked.

"I don't know, does it?"

"I think so."

"I have no idea."

"Maybe not."

A thoroughly competent team, the two of us.

More pacing. More breathing. More getting back in bed. Then out of bed. And all along, all I can think is that I hadn't charged my cell phone, I didn't know where my camera was, and my hospital bag needed some serious attention. Worse, my hair looked exceptionally crappy since I didn't bother drying it that day--meaning I would forever be immortalized in the baby's first photos looking like Don King on a bender.

More moaning. More clutching of internal organs. Then - a rush to the bathroom. After which all pain miraculously and hastily subsided. Nate noted that I didn't look "white and ashy" anymore. I could breathe again.

I didn't need a lift to the hospital. Evidently I needed a Colace.

Today's plan: A little less folding and refolding of newborn clothes, a little more reading up on birthin' babies.

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Thank you so much to Pundit Mom for nominating my Letter to #2 for an April Perfect Post Award. It's always nice when the essays that mean something to me also mean something to someone else--especially someone whose own writing I love so much. In fact, if I had gotten my shit together in time to bestow an award, it very likely would have gone to Pundit Mom's own wonderful essay at HuffPo called I am not the Babysitter about her experience having an adoptive daughter from China.

For more good reading check out the other winners at Petroville and Suburban Turmoil.