Skipping Town

I don’t know why this strikes me as so strange—but it occurred to me when I hit 37 weeks that I have a real baby in my uterus. “Real” as in “more or less complete.” If the baby were born today, she’d be a viable, real baby with lungs developed enough to breathe on her own—and that viable, real baby is what I’m currently carrying around. This may not make much sense; and she's been a real baby for a while now. But it’s just strange to think that it’s an actual, full baby in there, one who could, at her whim, make a grand entrance tonight if she wanted to. Let’s hope she doesn’t want to. We have almost exactly three weeks worth of preparations to do. However, today is a rare fall-like day—gloomy sky, cool temperature—and, if I were our baby, I would definitely want my arrival day to be one of true fall, not an 80-plus-degree fake-fall day. I would want to arrive on a day when a pumpkin might conceivably decorate our porch in the atmosphere in which pumpkins were meant to live. (Altho...

This weekend Andrew and I went to San Francisco for our “last” weekend away before the baby comes. Now that my due date is less than three weeks away, we’ve decided we should probably keep our radius from the hospital to about, oh, five miles. So we wanted to have one “final” trip before we hunker down close to home. I’m compelled to use quotation marks for words like “last” and “final” because I’m confident we will still take weekend trips once the baby arrives. Not right away, of course, but eventually, especially when she’s still small enough to be more or less easily portable. But this weekend did have the feeling of some kind of closure, ending, a final trip—without quotation marks—of the kind we know. It surely won’t be the last trip we take that’s just the two of us, but it was the last one where we won’t be arranging for caretaking before setting out—and worrying about the baby once we’re gone. In her pre-born state, she’s both with us and not with us, and as long as I can feel...

The bump is definitely more pronounced these days, sticking out in an almost aggressive way. The bottoms of my shirts no longer reach my body. Because Andrew pointed out the other day that I was "wearing sweatpants" with some degree of alarm, I will point out that these are not sweatpants. They are yoga pants, and I was on my way to yoga when these pictures were taken. However, since I am 9+ months pregnant, I would be fully within my rights to wear these pants whenever and wherever I wanted to, even if they were sweatpants.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed about eating a piece of chocolate cake. I tasted every forkful, every crumb. I was filled with guilt the entire time in the dream, knowing I shouldn't be eating it, knowing it could lead to a monster-sized baby, and yet I continued on. This is among the most pathetic dreams I've ever had. I've never really had a sweet tooth...until now. My pregnancy-induced glucose intolerance might finally make me into a stridently dessert-loving person once the sugar prohibition is repealed.

With just four weeks to go until my due date, I’m becoming a bit overwhelmed by the reality of what’s about to happen. I can’t quite put my finger on any specific piece that suddenly seems so big; but something we knew all along—LIFE IS GOING TO CHANGE—now seems somehow more urgent, more all-consuming. Parent-friends have told us some of their own experiences of how much their normal routines changed with the arrival of a child (no time to read the New York Times ; no more going to the bathroom as a solo activity), but of course this is difficult to understand from an outsider’s point of view. No time to read the paper? Surely I’ll have time to read the paper . (I hear you laughing, friends.) What seems to be my sticking point is that our big change has a date attached to it. Not a firm date—October 17 may very well come and go with no baby, or the baby may decide to arrive before that—but a date nonetheless, a more or less fixed point in the month of October that will mark a genuine b...

There was a baby in our nursery this weekend, and a baby in the car seat we now have installed in our car. There was a baby crawling on our floors and taking a bath in our tub. We heard a baby crying during the night, and giggling during the day. Thanks to Michelle and Tessa’s visit, we’ve seen first-hand how our house looks (and sounds) with a baby in it. We had a lovely visit; we went to the farmer’s market and the pool, and on Saturday we drove to Lake Tahoe, where we met up with Beth, Nate, and their babies—a whole crew of children. We sat on the beach (the lake is back to being unswimmably cold), ate lunch on a blanket on the sand, and swam in the pool at the Hyatt where Beth and Nate were staying. After so many hours of birth- and baby-related classes, this weekend proved to be the “observation” portion of our training for parents-to-be. It’s nice that our observation subjects were so cute, and so fun to be with. It was pretty cute having Tessa explore the dustiest corners of our...

Bright and early Sunday morning, once we’d left the hot-air balloons behind, we found ourselves seeking breakfast in downtown Reno. At that early hour, the streets were deserted, the casinos and sad-looking souvenir shops still closed up tight. The Nugget, however, a dingy old-school casino, was open, and we traipsed through the small sea of slot machines to reach the diner in the back—a place I’d read had a good cheap breakfast. Unfortunately, my pregnancy-related glucose intolerance made the $1.99 breakfast special—two pancakes and an egg—forbidden. So Andrew got the special and I got eggs and (whole wheat) toast. The food was fine, but this was, hands-down, the dive-iest breakfast place we’ve ever been too. We considered doing some slots on the way out, then decided that a lucky win might put us in physical danger from the few other patrons, so we continued on our way. There were still several hours until check-out at the Grand Sierra Resort, so we took a nap and then did a little s...

Well before dawn on Sunday morning, Andrew and I roused ourselves and headed out into the chilly desert night to see what had initially been our main purpose in coming to Reno this weekend: The Great Reno Balloon Race. We drove to a park in downtown Reno and, blankets in hand, followed the crowds flocking to a large open field in the middle of the park. The field was packed, but we found some space for our blanket and settled in. Just before 5:00am, five hot-air balloons not far from us began inflating. As they filled with air, they began righting themselves until there was a row of fully inflated balloons in front of us. This was the beginning of the Dawn Patrol, the first event of the day. Though about a hundred hot-air balloons would be participating in the day’s activities, only these five would be ascending in the dark of night—something that’s apparently quite difficult to do, due to quickly changing atmospheric conditions. At the direction of a very dramatic, low-voiced announce...

After the camel races on Saturday, we were relieved to head back to civilization—which in this case is a dubious term, seeing that we were headed to Reno. But being eight-plus-months pregnant makes me a bit wary of being in the middle of nowhere for any real length of time; at least in Reno we’d be able to find a hospital should little Whittemora (her in-utero name) decide to make an early debut. In any case, along the way we stopped at a dramatic overlook, where we could see mile after mile of absolutely nothing, with a tiny Reno in the distance. Our home for the weekend was the Grand Sierra Resort, a large hotel and casino containing several restaurants, shops, and other amenities for those inclined to stay inside the resort for days at a time, where we’d gotten a room for $70. We were given a room Andrew deemed unsatisfactory, and were then inexplicably upgraded to a Deluxe Suite, which we estimated was three times the size of Andrew’s studio in NYC. There was a dining area, a livin...

Early Saturday morning, Andrew and I packed up the car and drove two hours east to Virginia City, Nevada, thirty miles or so south of Reno, where the desolate desert landscape convinced us we’d fallen off the edge of the earth. We were headed to this unlikely destination to witness Virginia City’s 50th Annual International Camel Races, an event Andrew had stumbled upon while perusing Reno websites last week. Once he discovered it, we both agreed it was something we had to see. We had so many questions—the largest being, can camels run? So we set out to see for ourselves. The day kicked off with a parade through the center of Virginia City, which is set at the end of an extraordinarily winding road where you see nothing but scrub and sand for many, many miles. The town itself is straight out of the Old West, with covered wooden sidewalks, old-timey signage, and the feeling that not much has changed in about two hundred years. In the parade were camels, some police cars and fire trucks, ...

Andrew and I had a fabulous, strange, funny weekend in Reno, which will be the subject of several upcoming posts. In the meantime, here are a few shots of the bump from the last couple of days. She is getting more insistent in her movements—perhaps she’s frustrated by her increasingly crowded conditions. Or perhaps she’s growing at a monster pace (I hope not). What it really seems like, however, is that she’s just getting impatient at being left out. I think this little one is ready to see the world, even if that world is NorCal. In Virginia City, Nevada: In downtown Reno: At the Nevada Museum of Art:

This afternoon, Andrew’s office gave us a baby shower, a shower that, fortunately, did not involve playing any sort of video games. We got some lovely gifts—we are getting more ready for the baby by the day. Andrew had suggested we present to his co-workers some of the names we’ve considered and discarded over the past eight months, so I compiled a list before going to the office. It was interesting to look through our old selections and remember when they’d been candidates, however briefly. I selected the most unusual names—Andrew stirred up office-wide mirth a while back when he told everyone he wanted a “plural” name, like Evans or Brooks. Books was on the list, too—Books Littell. (If I ever decide to write some sort of noirish detective novel, that will be my protagonist.) But the name that got the most reaction this afternoon was Schwesty, a name from Andrew’s side of the family. We’d never seriously considered Schwesty, but it’s been fun seeing people’s reaction to the name. It d...

Last night, Andrew and I experimented for the first time with some “practice labor,” which entails my holding an ice cube in my fist for sixty seconds while we try different pain management strategies. This was surprisingly difficult—it really hurts—but even the few times we did it were instructive as far as showing what kind of breathing, massage, and encouragement might be the most effective as we (I) attempt to do the birth drug-free. Of course, I have no idea how to compare the pain of holding an ice cube in my palm to the pain of a contraction—I have no frame of reference whatsoever, but I suspect contractions are worse. Worse, much worse, but also different. And I’ll be in a different frame of mind during labor, too—much more focused and determined than I was as I sat on the couch last night, The Office on mute in the background. But in lieu of an actual practice labor, we’ll continue with the ice cubes. We have five weeks.

Andrew’s sister, Katherine, and her boyfriend, Patrick, visited us from Florida this weekend, and we did our best to show them the best NorCal has to offer. When Katherine visited us a couple of years ago, it rained the entire time she was here—it was the most rain we’d ever seen before, or have seen since. Fortunately, the weather cooperated this time, refraining from both rain and the 100s. Friday, we took a day trip to Tahoe, where we all swam in the lake and had a picnic lunch on the sand. The afternoon grew windy, and there were kite surfers in the water, some of them becoming airborne for several seconds at a time. Before heading down the mountain we showed Katherine and Patrick around the Cal Neva. Andrew and I provided our usual contribution to its upkeep and bankruptcy proceedings via the Lucky Duck, Triple 7s, and Wheel of Fortune quarter slots, while Patrick had some ridiculously good luck, at one point winning sixty quarters with his first spin. Belly in Tahoe Katherine and...