A Reading

A P.S. to yesterday's update. I was asked to be in a reading in mid-August--I'll write more about it later, but you can read about it here.

28th Week Update

Twelve or less weeks to go. Or a couple more, I suppose. I think less.

The most exciting event of the week was meeting baby Lucy! This is Lucia Armijo, the new daughter of Enrique/Henry and Caroline, our friends from Dean and Enrique's law school days. I got to hold Lucy and play with her during her tummy time and she even feel asleep in my arms. Sadly, I forgot the camera (as usual), but you can see and read about Lucy on Caroline's blog. She is tiny and adorable. It was great to talk with Caroline and finally meet Lucy.

In other news, Dean and I attended session one of "Make Way for Baby" last week. We go back tomorrow. Let's just say that the first session was not all I had hoped for. Mainly, the teacher was terrible. I am probably pretty judgmental of other people's teaching, but really, she was awful. She has a very confusing way of explaining things that involves starting whatever she is saying with the conclusion, then backtracking to an example, which she repeats four or five times (seriously, almost word for word), and then she works her way back to preliminary points, and ends by restating the conclusion. It's extremely irritating. Also, she said things I think are just wrong, such as "The baby sucks the calcium from your bones." And worst of all, she seemed embarrassed when she taught us about some of the laboring positions. Some of the class members were sort of giggly and shuffly about getting down on their hands and knees and such, and it was like she let the students' discomfort make her uncomfortable. Come on people, we're talking about giving birth. It's not the time to be modest. ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE THE TEACHER.

But, much to Dean's dismay, we're going back anyway, because we have paid. And despite it all, attending the class did make me feel better. It was nice to hear, in a hospital setting, about some of the things I want to do that I had anticipated the hospital being difficult about. I have reached a nice Zennish (can one be Zennish? or do you have to be just Zen or not?) state about labor. I have a plan and I am not interested in hearing any more stories or opinions about the whole thing, particularly anyone's estimations or descriptions of how much it hurts. (NOTE: That statement does not apply to all the moms I know, who have been great in talking and offering advice, or to anyone I specifically ask. I'm just tired of random people, such as, oh, the saleswoman at Gap, telling me their thoughts about giving birth. Another annoying thing random people do is say "Oh, you'll never sleep again.") I will write about my plan later.

The wiggle baby needs a new name. Well, obviously--but what I mean is that she has not been as wiggly. In fact we had an unscheduled ultrasound about it this week because I called my doctor about a few other questions and mentioned that the baby's pattern of movement had changed. (Everything I've read says to tell your doctor if the pattern of movement changes.) She was still kicking and moving, but she was not as wiggly. I figured the doctor would tell me it was fine and not to worry--but instead he said he would call for me to get an ultrasound if I wanted. After that, what are you going to do but get an ultrasound? So we got to peek into the baby's world another time. She is fine. Today she started wiggling again a bit. Who knows. Anyway I know that her repertoire has expanded some. And I won't post the graphic picture that proves it, but we are very sure now that she is a girl.

What else? Dean and Luli (his mom) are going backpacking this weekend. I've been missing the mountains, but despite Dean's offer to carry all my stuff, I declined his invitation to join them. I've been doing okay walking up the Metro escalators, but I am not sure how I would do with mountains. Not to mention two nights of sleeping on the ground and not having an assortment of food, such as cold milk, banana bread, and watermelon Popsicles, to eat upon waking in the morning.



Here's Dean getting ready. Suki is helping. She loves maps.

And our garden is doing well. We have beans, tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers. In fact, I am signing off to figure out what to do with it all. I have been thinking of it all day as a "farm supper."



Here are the beans. Some are purple, but they turn green when you cook them.

If you have baby name ideas, I am officially open to suggestions.

Joy, Terror, Despair

Those are the three emotions I seem to cycle through on a fairly regular basis. To call them "mood swings" is a bit of an understatement. I'm talking extreme happiness one day, extreme sadness the next. Yes, I know--the hormones. But it's been interesting to consider what else causes these feelings.

The terror should be pretty obvious. I am having a baby and I am going to have to figure out what to do with it--I mean her. I've read enough to know that there is no real way to plan for this. Of course on the one hand there are LOTS of ways to plan. We've picked out baby items. Set up a crib. Signed up for birth and baby care classes. I have read tons and tons and tons about pregnancy, labor, birth, the first year, sleeping, nursing, etc. But until it happens, I have no way of knowing what will actually happen! I don't know when the baby is coming, or how, and I don't know how long I will need to stop teaching after she comes. I don't know how nursing will go. I don't know if the used breast pump I just got will work. I don't know how much I will get to sleep. If at all.

I don't know from day to day if I will feel good, horrible or somewhere in the middle. I don't know if I will have a good writing day or be too tired or nauseous to write anything worth saving. I am a planner. I like to be in control. I like to make lists and cross things off as I complete them. Having a baby is a huge reminder of how out of control life really is. It's overwhelming.

Being overwhelmed, I think, mixed with the terror like some kind of cheap, sub par martini bar cocktail, leads to the despair.

But.

At the same time--actually NOT at the same time, but soon or eventually following--is the joy. I have a lot to celebrate. In fact (caution--swift mood-swing-like transition here--), I thought I would take some time to count my blessings:

1) I have a very healthy baby! This is too easy to take for granted. A friend of a friend is pregnant with twin boys and has had a really scary, difficult time. Each time I remember her I feel guilty for being blue about nausea, weariness, the uncertainty of the future, or just plain nothing. I am very, very thankful that the baby has been so healthy and happy. (Every time the doctor checks her heartbeat, he says, "What a happy baby!")

2) I have a great husband and partner. Dean is very patient, loving and supportive. He is very excited about the part where the baby actually comes, which I find very helpful and hopeful. If I say I am terrified, he waves his hand and says "It's going to be great!" (This COULD be annoying but isn't--it's actually extremely reassuring.)

3) I have a wonderful family. From parents to parents-in-law, sister to aunts and everyone in between, my entire family has been nothing but kind, loving, generous and supportive. The nameless wiggle baby is very loved already.

4) I have terrific friends. You know who you are. Without your endless and amazingly thorough advice, I would be a zillion times more lost and overwhelmed.

5) I have a flexible, relatively well-paying summer job that gives me time to write.

6) I have a flexible, relatively well-paying teaching gig for the fall, AND I found a great person to fill in for me for 6 weeks after the baby is born. Dean's job will allow him to stay home with the baby while I teach two mornings a week after that.

7) We have a lovely (albeit rented) home, well-chilled with central air, lots of good food, a soft bed, a soft cat (and soft pillows, a soft couch, six-and-counting soft, soft baby blankets...)

8) The blueberry cobbler I made yesterday turned out well! I am NOT a good baker, folks. This was a real triumph. I can go to the fridge at any time and get some, with ice cream. Yum.

9) We have home-grown tomatoes just steps from our back door.

10) Dean just came home and is going to cook dinner for me.

11) I have spent the last hour on the aforementioned soft couch, doing what I love (a.k.a. writing), with the wiggle baby kicking or bopping around inside me in a happy and reassuring fashion.

What more could a wanna-be poet and mama-to-be ask for?

Baby on the Fourth

Note pregnancy ticker to right

We are talking less than 100 days here, people. I think the 3rd trimester begins this week. Scary.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I'm posting a lot today. It's feast or famine with the posting, I guess. Monday is my day off, and I have either bad allergies or a cold plus residual travel exhaustion, so I am sitting around all day.

I was going back through my email earlier today and came across this video sent by my cousin-in-law Suzi from San Fransisco. Suzi is a teacher-gardener and this video is about the community gardens she helps to run in San Fran. If you have a few minutes, you should watch it; it's EXCELLENT. The video, and a question from Liz about our composter and rain barrel, have inspired me to finally write a post about our garden, something I've been meaning to do for a long time.

It all started with the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I bought the book in the Charlotte airport last June on the way home from Heather's graduation. It's about how a writer and her family move from the arid west to the Appalachian mountains to try to grow all of their own food for a year. Actually, they don't have to grow everything; they get some of it (sweeteners, flour, wine) locally. They define "locally" pretty strictly; I think it has to come from their own town. Each family member is allowed one sort of "free pass item" that they are allowed to buy from far away. (I think they choose coffee, spices, chocolate and dried fruit.) The book records the year as far as planting the garden, watching it grow, harvesting crops (and animals), and planning for the next year.

It's a fabulous book. It asks extremely important questions about our food. How many of us can say we know where our food comes from and how it was grown? Who planted and harvested it? How far did it travel to get to us? Who fed and raised our meat, and what were those animals fed? Kingsolver points out food facts that we may have forgotten or never known, such as when certain fruits and veggies are in season. For example, if you live in the Northern hemisphere and are eating asparagus in September or cherries in January, those items had to have come from very far away (or California, I guess). She talks about the problems all that traveling causes for food, not only environmentally in terms of the fuel for shipping it, but also in nutrient content and, most simply, taste.

The book made both Dean and I nearly desperate to start our own garden then and there. Both of us grew up around gardens. There's a reason so many of my poems contain garden imagery--helping someone in a garden was a regular part of my childhood. My great-grandmother, grandparents, aunts, uncles and parents all grew gardens. We picked beans, snapped them, and canned them. We washed silk off corn and cooked and froze it. My grandmother cut up a plate of cucumbers and tomatoes to go with almost every meal. People cooked corn, beans, squash, okra, and who knows what else in every imaginable way. No one visited anyone else or let any visitor leave without a bag of whatever produce was in season at the time. At the time, I took all this for granted, or disliked it. When I was young, I never was one to enjoy getting dirty and sweaty and itchy in a garden. But after I read Kingsolver's book, I was in despair about not having a garden. It seemed not only like I had lost a piece of who I was but that I was in real danger of forgetting or never knowing one of the most elemental pieces of knowledge possible: how to grow food to eat.

So we really wanted a garden, but we couldn't have one right then, because it was June and too late to start a garden. Also we had (have) a very, very small backyard. At the time it contained two large trees. We grumbled and worried and tried to be happy with the couple of cherry tomato plants we had grown on our porch.

From this point the story is really mostly Dean's. Fall came, and I put my garden wishes on the back burner while I taught and wrote and read poetry. But Dean kept thinking and reading, and talking to Luli a lot about gardening and what we might be able to do with our small space. With the permission of our landlord, he cut down the two trees in the yard (with a handsaw). By early winter, he'd read Grow Vegetables: Balconies, Roofs, Terraces and Square Foot Gardening. He'd used some Christmas gift money to buy a set of grow lights, seeds, and various books and garden tools. He'd read the farmer's almanac. He had a spreadsheet, a whole calendar filled in with garden tasks, and a plan.

Thus began my role as garden helper. (By the way, by this time I was busy with the primary role of baby grower.) Every weekend, even in the dead of winter, Dean had some garden tasks for us to complete. We planted seeds and put them under lights. We watered. Later we transplanted. We cleaned up in the yard. One weekend Jim and Luli came to help us build trellises and boxes for the square-foot boxes. (Well, okay, they helped Dean while I mostly laid on the couch.) In the early spring we planted, transplanted, and watered some more. Every morning at 5AM the lights in the next room would click on, and at 9PM they'd click off. (Yikes, and that memory reminds me of nausea.) And our garden grew and grew, even inside.

When it got warmer, we put plants outside for a few hours at a time so they could adjust to life away from their lights. We dealt with sunburned broccoli and wind-blown tomatoes. One by one it was time to put the plants outside (a part that always made me sad in a way that I think might be particular to mothers or parents). After some of the plants were finally in the ground, Dean devotedly ran outside in a hail storm to put sheets over the babies. (The storm stopped 3 minutes later.)

Since then, we've planted, weeded, clipped, staked and re-staked. We've coaxed baby peas up their trellises and been astounded by tomatillos that are taller than us. We've had a bumper crop of kale and mustard greens, but, sadly, no broccoli--it grew up strong but never flowered. Right now we are dealing with what we think is "early blight" and blossom-end rot on our tomato plants. Both are caused my excess moisture, and we have had a lot of rain. We have baby cucumbers and baby squash. The beans are flowering. Zinnias, marigolds, basil and dill are doing very well, and we have sunflowers coming soon. Yesterday we picked 5 beets (and today I am wondering what exactly to do with beets). The radishes that did quite well have gone to seed (we let them grow because their flowers are pretty).

I'm really amazed that we done so much with a garden in just a year. Like I said, most of the credit is Dean's, but we've both learned a lot. Obviously, we still but most of our food from other places. We try to buy what's in season from farmer's markets when we can (although my weird food issues have made that harder lately). It's been really nice to reclaim some of my heritage in the form of this tiny, wonderful city garden.

Cloudy With a Chance of Showers

The nameless wiggle baby was given not one but two baby showers last week. They were wonderful! Everyone was so kind and generous.

The first shower, last Thursday, was a family shower planned mostly by my aunt Carolyn. Thank you Carolyn! And thank you to the rest of my family too. It was a lovely shower, with great food and super cute decorations. Not to mention the super cute gifts. The baby now has more clothes than I do. The days of documenting each individual baby item are over, I guess, but everyone picked out great stuff, lots of precious dresses and gowns and skirts and t-shirts and onesies. One particularly scary onesie says "sleep is for the weak." Yikes!

It was great to be able to talk to my aunts and cousins about pregnancy and motherhood. Collectively they have a lot of advice to share. When the shower began, I was a little sad that my grandmother could not be there, but I tried to be happy to feel her presence in all of the other wonderful women I was with.

Then on Saturday, Meg and her mom threw us another shower in Chapel Hill. It too was beautiful. I got to see lots of friends and family, and again everyone was so generous. The baby received more lovely clothes, blankets, lots of practical items like baby wash and outlet plugs, and lots of fun things like books and toys and a rainforest play mat and a piggy bank. It took Dean and I many trips up the back stairs to unload everything yesterday. I had fun sitting down with Dean to show him everything. Right now the baby stuff is in bags or small piles in storage, but we think that next weekend we are going to start setting things up so that we don't have to avoid tripping over piles of baby items for the next 3 months. I will post pictures when things look a little better.

We are so grateful to have so many wonderful friends and family members. Thank you all for everything! And if all this weren't enough, we have another baby shower to look forward to soon--Luli and Corrie are giving us another shower in August!