Skipping Town

A happy follow-up: Andrew unexpectedly returned tonight, bearing dinner made by Mom and a chocolate milkshake. And so the day ends pleasantly. Seventeen days to go.

Today was not a good day. Andrew, Lucia, and Mom came to visit, which was both great and awful, because seeing Lucia just makes me frantically want to go home. I was so miserable after her departure that my pulse went up enough to alarm the nurse, who advised me that getting so upset was not beneficial to me or the baby. Not good. Then, on a day when Andrew brought breakfast but I had no outside (edible) food coming to me for either lunch or dinner, the selections were the following: a hamburger for lunch (completely inedible, so unappetizing I had to cover it up on the dish) and a chicken breast dry enough to be a scouring sponge for dinner (75% inedible—I had to eat something). Not good. I was weighed this morning, and I’m teetering on the edge of a New Frontier: 149 pounds. Not good. (Actually, in truth, this is neither good nor bad, since that’s only 29 pounds total so far. It just shocked me.) Then, this afternoon, I had an eensy bit of spotting; however, on a floor where bedbound...

This morning, at 6:00, I was woken from a sound sleep with this greeting: “Good morning! I need to draw your blood.” Lovely. I asked her to draw it from my hand; she agreed, and stabbed me painfully, but then said she was sorry but she had to stop because the vein “blew up” and she didn’t get enough blood. So then I had to have it in my arm. And my hand, six hours later, is still sore. A pretty much fantastic way to start this Sunday. The sky wasn’t even light yet. It’s been a week, and I’m tired of being here. I feel like being here is pointless. Nothing has happened since Sunday, my non-stress tests all come out fine, and other than some uterus “irritability,” which I’m assured is normal, I’ve been as fine as I would have been had I never bothered to come in last week at all. Meanwhile, my new roommate with marginal previa has been bleeding constantly for the past twelve hours, and timing regular contractions—she should definitely be here. Me, I’m not so sure. But every time I ask a ...

Yesterday, Mom and Lucia found themselves entangled in a grand, frantic adventure. In the morning, they went to a music class, and when it was time to leave, Mom realized that Lucia’s beloved plush Elmo was gone. Since Bibi isn’t permitted to leave the house, Lucia’s regular traveling companions are Elmo and her pink corduroy Cat; “Cat Elmo,” she says whenever we’re preparing to go anywhere, and she hurries to find them. “Cat Elmo.” She goes nowhere without them. And now Elmo was gone, naptime was approaching, and disaster loomed. On the advice of someone in the class, Mom checked out a toystore on 7th Avenue; they did not have the right size Elmo. After she called me to report on the loss, I called all the other Park Slope toystores and finally found one that claimed to have Elmos in all sizes—of course, this was a store about fifteen blocks away. I told Mom to go back home, put the stroller inside, wait on the stoop, and then get into the car I was going to call for her. In the backg...

Last picture of just us three?

Here I am early on the fateful day of my hospital admission, cavorting happily in a pumpkin patch. Little did I know where I'd end up later that night.

So I think this new little one might just be the athletic daughter Andrew is hoping for. Each morning when I go for my non-stress test, whichever nurse is watching the heartbeat has just one comment: Your baby is so active! Yesterday, each time she moved (which was pretty much all the time), her heartbeat went up to 200; she was described as getting “overexcited.” Today wasn’t quite as dramatic, but it was still high, into the 180s. They’ve been keeping me on the monitors a few extra minutes to make sure the baby gets back to a normal baseline (around 150-160), which she always does. I really imagine this baby coming into the world with bright, curious eyes and kicking, excited feet, ready to squirm out of my arms and start exploring. She just has to quiet down a bit for the weekend. Andrew left today for Florida for Katherine’s wedding, and having the baby while he’s away seems like a pretty ridiculous prospect. So for the next two days, my goal is modest: keep calm, stay still, drink...

Here are the happier things I’m reminding myself of now that I’m facing a three-week hospital stay. First, we’re lucky to have health insurance; one thing I’m not worrying about right now is how we’ll pay for everything. I can’t imagine coming here, tests flying right and left, and dreading the bills to come. Second, we’re lucky I’m already 34 weeks along; the baby is doing well and though extra cooking time will be best, she will be okay if she decides she’s had enough of the womb. And third, we’re lucky Mom could come to stay with us and take care of Lucia. No amount of motherly pride wants Lucia to be miserable in my absence, and “Gra’s” appearance yesterday thrilled Lucia. A nurse told me she’s heard suddenly hospital-bound women trying to hire nannies over the phone, so we’re lucky that Lucia is in such good hands. All of this is good and bright. But it’s still hard to be here, not because it’s boring and tedious—it is, but I have lots of things to do—but because it is just comple...

That’s right: This is my fifth day in the hospital. This week has been more than a little surreal. After our lovely pumpkin-picking day on Sunday, and a relaxing, normal evening, I found myself talking to Andrew on the couch one minute and frantically calling my doctor the next. By 10:00pm, I was at the hospital; later that night, I was admitted. And it looks like I am here to stay until the baby is born, which will be on October 27—37 weeks—as scheduled, or the minute I have any other bleeding, which could be anytime. Though we had high hopes that our planned ultrasound on Monday would show a miraculous migration of the placenta, this was not the case. I still had the ultrasound on Monday, but I was wheeled down in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital gown; and the scan still showed complete placenta previa. Sunday and Monday nights, I got steroid shots to bulk up the baby’s lung development in case she was born sooner rather than later. But since Sunday, I’ve been fine—no contractions, n...

With fall suddenly in the air, Sunday morning Andrew, Lucia, and I set out for some good autumnal fun—pumpkin patch, livestock, apple festival—at a farm in…Long Island. It wasn’t exactly a rural setting, but really, with a toddler, this was all the farm we needed. Lucia seemed at home as soon as we arrived, rushing up to each animal pen to greet the animals, often in their own language: “Hi, geese! Honk honk!” “Hi, chickens! Bock bock bock!” When we reached the pick-your-own pumpkin patch (a bit of a misnomer, since the pumpkins had already been freed from their vines and were waiting, artfully arranged in the field, for camera-wielding parents like us), Lucia was beyond excited. She immediately selected a tiny gourd-pumpkin and then rushed around, climbing over pumpkins, sitting on pumpkins, attempting to pick up large pumpkins, smiling happily when she succeeded in lifting smaller pumpkins. Nearby, some medium-sized pumpkins were strewn around a grassy field, and for a while we were ...

I just had to take some pictures the other day of Lucia’s extreme joy and excitement over her snack: a bowl of Honey Graham Bunnies.

Last night, I sent Andrew on a thankless errand, an errand of the type that might make any man question the wisdom of having gotten married, or having gotten married to a particular woman: I arranged for him to pick up two secondhand nursing bras I purchased from someone on my neighborhood parenting listserv. Andrew is, it has to be said, adamantly against my purchasing used nursing bras, and I completely understand this. It is a strange thing to buy used, I admit. But when really good nursing bras cost $40-50 or more, and when my size in the first week post-birth might be radically different from my size a week later (or even just days later), it just seems logical to me to have a couple of larger-size options that I can wear a few times then set aside. Anyway, I purchased two secondhand, high-quality, large-size nursing bras that I will put in my hospital bag in case I have a repeat experience this time around of being horrifyingly, nightmarishly, grotesquely engorged. Fingers are cr...

I had a very strange experience yesterday at my first-ever acupuncture appointment (a Hail Mary attempt at moving my placenta). When I’d talked to the acupuncturist on the phone, she said she’d worked with placenta positioning before and seemed fine with having me in. But when I arrived at her home yesterday afternoon, she said she’d actually been feeling uneasy about it because she felt it would be a waste of my money—if I weren’t so far along in my pregnancy, there’d be more chance of the upward-pulling energy having an effect. Furthermore, she’d double-booked my appointment. To apologize, she said she’d do a basic stress-relieving session at her kitchen table for no charge while her other patient was having his full treatment. So that’s how I found myself with five needles in my head, sitting at this woman’s kitchen table while a housekeeper tidied the counters and a young man (her son?) talked on a cell phone in another room. Before beginning the needling, however, the acupuncturis...

I have little to say about this issue, mostly because I was rendered speechless by this issue’s cover image and main headline. The image is of Tori Spelling and her two children, dressed up as “Old Hollywood.” The headline: “Tori Spelling stars in our Halloween Spooktacular!” To make this issue even less appealing, the following headline is the following: “We adopted our baby on Facebook!” It was enough to make me consider not reading the issue at all. Nonetheless, I persevered. The first thing to point out is that the magazine has once again undergone a redesign. GoNe ArE the RaNdOmly capitalized section titles; in their place are tiny, nearly unreadable section titles, half in lowercase, half in ALL CAPS, like this: “right now | BUZZWORTHY”. (I have a suggestion: Why not just use the standard initial caps for titles?) We still have a ridiculous amount of celebrity nonsense, including interviews with someone from Gossip Girl and someone named Natalie Morales (am I the only one who doe...

Just as I am unable to stand or walk for long (or short) periods without being seized up with contractions, so too am I unable to formulate enough coherent thoughts for a long blog post. And so I will recount some random recent bits. We went to Ikea on Saturday to get Lucia her birthday present (adorable table and chairs). She was fairly docile for most of the shopping, which we tried to do quickly; but she eventually began writhing in her stroller constraints and making one loud, persistent demand: “BUNNIES. BUNNIES.” Annie’s-brand bunnies, both cheddar and honey graham, are her current favorite snack. At home, when I suggest alternate snacks, she says “Bunnies” with a decisive nod, as though there were clearly no question about what snack should be served. At Ikea, “BUNNIES. BUNNIES” became more and more wildly proclaimed. Instead of giving her more bunnies, like I should have done, we decided to go eat lunch at the café. Of course Lucia did not eat even one bite of her mac and chees...

Lucia is wielding two-word sentences right and left these days, and she’s come up with a few shortcuts for things she says frequently. “Homama” is her version of “home to mama,” which is what I say when an animal at the park scurries away, or when a child in a book goes off somewhere. “She’s going home to her mama,” I say. Lucia nods and agrees, “Homama.” Even at the end of our Five Little Pumpkins book, when “the five little pumpkins roll out of sight,” she announces that they’re going “homama.” There are some things, like bathtime or going grocery shopping, for which Lucia wants to be accompanied by both Andrew and me. At these times, she makes her request known by saying “Daddymama.” It’s two words blended into one, with the emphasis on the first “ma”: “DaddyMAma.” This morning, for the second time since moving here, I went to church, trying to shore up our status as bona fide parishioners so we can have our new baby baptized without having to get married for the fourth time. The id...

Dear Little One, One morning this week, when you led the way to the living room—your arms full of your stuffed-animal entourage—and we sat down on the couch to read the first book of the day, I was shocked to see that seemingly overnight you looked older. You were wearing mismatched pajamas and just seemed more kid-like as you giggled over something and smiled your toothy smile. After a while you said “Eat! Eat snack!” and we went to the kitchen for breakfast. Each morning, we go outside with Daddy and wave to him when he goes to work. But now you join me in asking him if he’s remembered important items. Each morning I ask if he has his phone; now you, as we emerge onto the stoop, say, “Phone? Keys?” It is very cute, and helpful. (It would have been even more helpful this week if you’d asked Mama if she had her keys; I locked us out for the first time on Tuesday.) You’re growing fast, and your 18M summer clothes are pretty much unwearable now. But you are too slim for 2T pants, so we a...

First, a breakthrough: This morning, when I brought Lucia to a friend’s house for our weekly babysitting swap, she put on a wobbly but brave face when I left and, my friend texted a bit later, cried for only twenty seconds before going off to play with little T. She played happily the whole time (I heard her laughing when I got to the door at pickup time!) and greeted me with a big smile and a cheerful “Hi!” instead of dissolving into plaintive tears at the sight of me. I was thrilled. Perhaps because of the more trying episodes in weeks past, or perhaps because this is just a stage she’s in, Lucia has become extremely focused on babies and mamas and the fact that one can’t be (and usually isn’t) without the other. When she spots a baby on the street, she not only says “baby” but also “mama” or “daddy,” depending on who’s pushing the stroller or carrying the baby. She says the word-pair seriously, with a little nod of approval: “Baby. Mama.” “Yes, a baby with her mama,” I say back. “Ye...

Last week, I had another ultrasound, which showed that my placenta still has not moved. At the doctor’s appointment that followed, a C-section was scheduled for me at the end of October, at 37 weeks. I will continue to have scans right up until then, so there’s still hope, but still. My doctor also prohibited me from traveling, warning me that if I went anywhere I could be stuck in a hospital there for the rest of my pregnancy. Also, because she revealed that the awful belly discomfort I’ve been having in the evenings is actually contractions, I’m now to “rest” in the afternoons. She has three children, but I suspected for a moment she’d never been around a toddler. So, no good news, just worry—and a search for a mother’s helper to allow me my afternoon “rest.” The search so far has been unfruitful; Park Slope is full of mothers, which is probably the problem—finding a mother’s helper just may be as competitive as finding a good apartment. The woman I was slated to interview tomorrow c...

Belly with field of mint.