From the category archives:

Being pregnant

The great shoe purge of 2009

by lcreekmo on June 14, 2009

None of these fit.

I was so worried this would happen again. And until the very end of my pregnancy, it seemed unlikely.

My feet have grown another half size.

If I weren’t already sure that the baby is the “third and last” child, as I’ve said ad nauseam, this would be the final straw. Because I’m having to get rid of the vast majority of my shoes, just like I did when the 10yo was born. [Yes, she's 10 now. It's been a busy few weeks here at Fixin' Supper.]

Some of these fit. Sort of.

Even my list of shoes that still fit is fudged. The clogs and the duck boots really do fit. The brown heels sort of fit. And the sandals don’t really. But I LOVE those sandals, and they don’t hurt, so I’m going with them for the rest of this summer, anyway. Meanwhile? Every single other pair of shoes has got to go.

First to be replaced: The Sauconys. Then, some black heels. Then I guess I should buy some brown heels that really fit, instead of just sort of. And I’ll be praying for lots of rain this summer so I don’t look too stupid in those duck boots.

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Garden update, 4/19/2009

by lcreekmo on April 19, 2009

Despite what seems like never-ending rain, I’ve been doing a lot of garden work in the past couple of weeks. A lot of it has involved transplanting half the tomatoes I started from seed into regular pots, out of their seedling trays. I need to do the other half today.

But I’ve been delaying about one of the most manual-labor-y tasks I have in the garden — and I finally decided yesterday morning that I simply couldn’t delay one moment longer: I had to build the trellises if I wanted to get the tomatoes in on time.

[Now, right off the bat, we can acknowledge that this is pregnancy nesting in some form, because I've planted tomatoes well into May and still gotten lots of fruit. But, I don't plan to be doing any planting in mid-May this year, and we'll certainly have tomatoes a lot sooner if I hurry the heck up and get those plants in the ground.]

So yesterday, I had Ashby help me unroll the fencing I’d bought to create the trellises from, I cut it, and I wired it to the poles. For the most part, it was like building a chain link fence, if you’ve ever done that. A lot of pliers and wrapping wire and crimping it. While no one would call that fun, I’m pretty good at it, and I find a lot of satisfaction in accomplishing manual tasks like that.

Let me NOT recommend this method of trellising to you if say, you’re 36 weeks pregnant and you have had rheumatoid arthritis, so your hands get tired and cranky easily anyway.

I’ve had trouble with my hands swelling the past couple of weeks, due to the pregnancy, but as long as I don’t use them in some way really out of the ordinary, they’re always better in the morning.

Building a fence or a trellis does not fall into “the ordinary” for my daily activities.

So I knew after getting the first two trellises set up that my hands were going to be in bad shape. But I figured, no need to go through this twice. Might as well push on through.

I got all four in place and secured, but it started to rain as I was finishing the last one, so I took that as a sign. It won’t be too much effort to finish it up later this week once the weather improves. [It's pouring rain at the moment.]

Let’s just say my hands were not amused. And of course, after I finish doing that kind of work, I’d normally pop a couple of Advil…which you can’t do while pregnant. I barely did anything with my hands the rest of the day, and spent quite a lot of time with them over my head, but they kept me awake a decent portion of the night. The whole pregnancy swelling thing is strange to me. It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but once you get past a certain point, you are hyper-aware of your hands or feet. You can’t stop feeling them.

They are much better today and should be back to normal tomorrow, based on my recovery from other over-the-top things I’ve done recently. And as soon as we get a couple of sunny days later in the week, I’ve got a lot of tomato and cucumber plants and lima bean seeds going in the ground.

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Garden update, 3.14.2009

by lcreekmo on March 14, 2009

Unrelated: I am beginning to think I could spend about 2/3 of the day handling email every day, and still not keep up. Increased volume on all fronts this week has been overwhelming. If I haven’t answered you, I’m trying.

Back on point: We’ve gotten a lot done in the garden in the last 10 days or so, but very little of it is finished, or more importantly for our purposes here, fun to look at.

We’re a little less than half done building a brick path around the garden. It’s somewhere around 1 3/4′ wide all around the inside of the fence. We’ve just been scavenging bricks from various folks in the neighborhood who are doing projects. I have to say, it’s one advantage of living in an older area — there’s rarely a shortage of people tearing up old sidewalks and/or cleaning out basements and discovering big stashes of bricks. I don’t know what people living in the suburbs do when they need a bunch of free bricks.

The path work has been slow and painful, but mostly because I started on the hardest side. Once we finish the north edge, the rest should be a lot faster. When I bought this house 4 years ago, half of the backyard was gravel. I don’t mean pea gravel or paths. I mean, gravel like a driveway. Even worse, it wasn’t in the driveway area, which was nicely paved. The gravel was just in the yard.

Now, don’t get me started on the crazy guy who used to own this house. Let’s suffice it to say, that was just one of the unusual features I’ve since updated. In the case of the gravel, I paid my regular yard guy and his crew to pull it up and haul it out by hand — wasn’t really possible to use a Bobcat or anything because of the layout of the yard. It took them 2 days. And they put down grass seed and in general, things are lots better. But there are a few areas of the yard that still have a lot of stray gravel. And the north garden path is one of them. So before we can place the bricks, we’ve had to pull out a lot of gravel.

The other interesting thing I’ve found is a full-sized cinder block buried right below the surface on the east path. Maybe 3 inches down. I’ve never dug that far there before, since it was under the path, and not where I plant, but the block had to go if I was going to lay my new-found bricks there.

This is one of those things that you know you should not be doing when you are 30 weeks pregnant, but that you do anyway.

You will be pleased to hear that once I dislodged the block and pulled it out of the hole, I left it there til Ashby got home, and I had him move it out of the way til I can decide how it may be useful.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week beating myself up for not getting things planted faster, but thinking back, I haven’t wasted any good days. There’s just a lot of work to do in your garden in the spring that doesn’t necessarily involve planting anything, and we just haven’t had that many good days yet.

We’re still 3-4 weeks from our last frost date, so the minute things improve outside [cold and rainy again today], I’m slapping some peas in the ground, and more lettuce and spinach. Oh yes. The two things I have gotten planted: Two adorable little lettuce plants. Two days before the sleet this week. I’m scared to go look and I have a lot more lettuce seeds starting inside anyway. And some spinach seeds, which I think will be OK.

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Some things I don’t understand

by lcreekmo on March 3, 2009

  • I am not a neat person — ask anyone who knows me. But I am apparently the only person in my whole house capable of seeing, and reacting appropriately, to dirt. I promise you the other 3 inhabitants of this house could happily live in one of those crazy-people houses piled to the ceiling with newspapers and decades-old dust bunnies. At least I don’t like dirt and clutter and fix them when I see them.
  • My until-now precious, compliant and obedient 3yo has turned into a holy terror in the past 2 weeks. He’s been punished [severely] twice for hitting the dog. [The dog, bless her heart, just stands there and looks balefully at him when he does this. My screaming at him how any other dog on the face of the earth would have bitten his face to shreds seems to be making little impact.] He’s gotten a sassy mouth [including calling his father a "stupid dumb-o" last night at dinner] and he willfully ignores all instructions [including important ones like "Stop that right now!"] At this point, I’ve decided that there must be some really poorly behaved kids in his new class at school, because the only other change in his life recently has been to spend more time with me. Let’s just leave that where it lies, mmk? We’re all hoping this is a very short stage.
  • Bizarrest pregnancy symptom: My arms fall asleep all the time. While it was bad enough that this happened every single night [have to sleep on my side now, and both top and bottom arms are prone to falling asleep], I am now able to trigger this reaction just by moving my arm in a certain way. It basically feels like I’m hitting my funny bone 25 times a day, and my funny bone runs the entire length of my arm and hand. Good times.
  • Metro advertises that the recycling truck runs in our neighborhood on the 1st Tuesday of every month, beginning at 7 a.m. I don’t live anywhere near the recycling operation center. And in 4 years of living in this house, the recycling truck has never reached my house after 6:50 a.m.

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I also have pregnant brain.

by lcreekmo on December 6, 2008

Because the whole point of the last post was originally going to be the dream I had last night. But after all that TMI about my medical history, I couldn’t remember last night’s dream. So I stopped with the painted baby dream from the night before.

But I’ve just remembered! OK, here we go.

Like many other people, we’re trying to economize this year for Christmas. I’m starting a business [more on this topic very shortly!!] to consult with organizations on their web strategy. I’m really thrilled about this new venture, but suffice it to say, Two weeks into starting your own business, and you shouldn’t expect to be making $1 million a day. So we’re being careful. And I’m more than content with that. In years past, I’ve had a very hard time balancing what I assumed were my kids’ outsized expectations about gifts, and my own internal clock that said, Really, if you get more than one present, isn’t that Christmas automatically? And what’s the point here, after all? And I always erred on the side of my kids’ expectations. This year, I’m leaning much more toward my own inclinations.

So Ashby and I agreed we’d be low-key with our gifts for each other. Maybe not get any, even. [OK, OK, I have a few things hidden back for him. But none are what I would have defined as Christmas-present-worthy in previous years. Just some small things I think he'll appreciate.]

But the WPLN newsletter arrived the other day, and there it was, on the cover — Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion would be at the Ryman in early May. My love of Garrison Keillor knows few bounds. So I handed the newsletter to Ashby and said, This is all I want for Christmas. He agreed, and so this morning, I’ll be online right when the member ticket presale begins.

We have no reason to expect we won’t make the show…but. The baby is due May 20, nearly 3 weeks after the show. So I guess there is a really outside chance that the baby could come early, like, the day of the show. We have absolutely no reason to suspect this will happen. Everything appears perfectly normal so far. But I guess there’s a small chance.

So, last night, I dreamed that Garrison Keillor called me up just before leaving to come to Nashville in May. And he was asking how I was feeling, if I was sure we’d make it to the show. It was quite a long conversation, with him offering some advice about babies and kids. But mostly, he was concerned that we’d be at the show.

I was quite flattered, even in my dream.

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Pregnant dreams are awesome. By “awesome,” I mean bizarre.

by lcreekmo on December 6, 2008

In two weeks, we have the ultrasound to find out if this baby is a boy or a girl. Well, as I had to explain to the 9yo [who, to her credit, didn't understand why you would go to so much trouble to find out the sex], the test is actually to make sure the baby looks OK — no gross abnormalities. All arms, legs, etc., just one head, blah blah blah. But while you’re poking around, you can find out the baby’s sex.

I know that there are at least two schools of thought on finding out the sex in advance. I am firmly, 100% in the no-surprises camp. You may find this strange when I also tell you I’ve turned down all of the tests they offer those of us who are “AMA” — advanced maternal age. No nuchal screen. No CVS. No amnio. No quad screen. No nothin’. At first, I was contemplating the nuchal screen. [Let Blonde Mom explain the nuchal screen to you. Excellent info.] My doctor asked me, Well, what do you plan to do with the information?

Hmm. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Even if the baby were more likely to have Down Syndrome, I knew I wouldn’t be having CVS or an amnio, both invasive tests that carry a slight risk of miscarriage. I would just know that there’s a slightly greater than normal chance the baby had Down Syndrome. And my doctor pointed out, she’s seen lots of parents spend the next several months worrying, to no real effect. Either the baby has Down’s or it doesn’t. You already know that.

When I was pregnant with the 9yo, my situation was a lot different. I had developed epilepsy at 25 or so. By the time I got pregnant several years later, my seizures were completely controlled with medication. But my neurologist and my ob/gyn were both reluctant to take me off medicine, since, as they wisely pointed out, my having a seizure was much more dangerous to the baby than my taking medicine. But I had had the misfortune to run into a nurse practitioner just before I became pregnant — who, upon learning of our plans to conceive in a routine background questionnaire, proceeded to lecture me on “how bad Tegretol is for babies.” Well, no shit, lady. I knew that. I also knew the slightly increased chance of birth defects with Tegretol [basically, during that pregnancy, I had the birth defect risk of a woman maybe 10 years older than I was] was negligible compared to the risks of having a seizure while pregnant. And that both my neurologist and my ob/gyn were thrilled and supportive of my decision to get pregnant.

Nonetheless, the nurse’s judgmental words and attitude stuck with me. And I worried myself half to death. The ex and I had not been planning to find out the baby’s sex — most of our friends had not, and it was a fun surprise at birth. But the day of the ultrasound, I remember very clearly saying to him: “I need some happy news. The sex is fine either way, but I need something tangible to know about this baby.” So we found out. And indeed, it was a very happy, certain thing to cling to the next few months.

From the time I got pregnant with the 9yo, I have never had another seizure. I continued to take medicine for several more years, but in the last couple of years, I convinced my neurologist that I didn’t need the meds anymore. Actually, I think what I convinced him of was that I wouldn’t be taking the meds anymore. I’m sure he and his attorney still think I need them. :)

In the intervening years, I also developed rheumatoid arthritis — kind of a 30th-birthday-present-from-hell is how I’ve come to regard it. [I'm a regular laugh riot today, I know.] I have been extraordinarily lucky with that disease as well. I took medicine for 5 or 6 years, and after a while, the disease was clearly in remission. In this case, my doctor convinced me to go off the meds, assuring me I could start up again with no ill effects if symptoms returned. Except for having the knees of a 50- or 60-year-old — residual damage from the first months after diagnosis when we had trouble getting the disease under control — I appear to be completely in remission. So, no harmful meds there, either.

All that to say — I no longer have the medical reason I wanted happy news the first time around. But I’m still thrilled to find out what the baby is. Because it’s just fun to know. That’s it.

All along, I have been convinced this baby is a girl. I realized about a month ago that I had begun thinking of it as a girl. I figured this is a really, really stupid thing to do, since it could just as easily be a boy. Nonetheless, my thoughts persist in that direction.

But two nights ago, I dreamed that we were at the ultrasound. And it wasn’t just a regular ultrasound. It was a high-tech, CNN-hologram, Star-Wars inspired ultrasound, where the image of the baby displayed not on a computer screen, but in a hologram suspended above my abdomen. And the baby was clearly a boy. Except right at the end, his face [previously black and white, like an ultrasound] was splashed with pink — like, Pepto Bismol paint.

What does THAT mean? I guess we’ll find out in two weeks!

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Pregnancy update

by lcreekmo on October 29, 2008

Now, I’m not turning into a pregnancy blogger. I actually have done a lot of cooking lately, but I need to get my pictures and my thoughts all in the same place. More coming on that front.

But in the meantime, I have two small items to share.

  • My next door neighbor is so far winning the “best reaction” contest. The 9yo is now in the habit of going around asking me, “Did you tell her/him?” [Whoever we happen to be talking to at the moment.] And so then she is excited to announce the impending arrival. This evening, our neighbor was walking up the drive as we came in from dinner. The 9yo rolled down the window to tell her our news. And upon hearing, Susan dropped her mail and her jaw. We all cracked up!
  • Second, I had given all my maternity clothes to a good friend a few years ago. I emailed her earlier this fall and said, Hey no big deal if you’ve given them away, but if you haven’t, can I get those back?? Heh. So they arrived this week and I eagerly opened the box, looking for a particular outfit I remembered. I wore it to work yesterday. Just as comfortable as I remembered from 10 years ago. But….let’s just say that pants looked really different 10 years ago. The pants were ankle length and very narrow at the ankle. So I put on my brown shoes, and there was a big problem. An inch-wide gap between my shoes and my pants. Sigh.

    I guess I am going to have to buy new brown shoes, which is a better solution than not wearing those pants again, sadly. My existing brown shoes work great with every OTHER outfit I have. But I am not exactly fitting in lots of those other outfits these days.

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