Our Rocking Chair

This rocking chair is the newest baby furniture addition to our house! My mom is responsible for painting this gorgeous piece of art, and last night Dave and I put it together - slowly. We are not the greatest carpenters.

We've decided that for now, the rocking chair is only allowed to be used when I'm doing something positive related to the baby - reading, thinking, meditating. The reason we've instituted this policy is because I'm beginning to feel a little stressed due to school responsibilities and health issues, so we've designated the chair as my special baby place. Rocking back and forth and thinking about the baby will give the chair good karma - and hopefully keep me sane until labor. After that, it's anybody's guess where I will find my sanity... hopefully when snuggling with my baby and husband.

Mass Chaos Ensues!

We've had a medically-intense week - three doctor's appointments in 7 days, another scheduled next Wednesday, and to top it all off, the veterinarian's office has become our second home due to Purna eating a large wad of ribbon and undergoing emergency surgery on Monday. Whew! The smell of antiseptic is coating our winter jackets!

On Monday, the baby weighed in at a whopping 6 pounds, and I'm on modified bed rest for the next two weeks (we'll be at 36 weeks then) to keep baby from pushing through to the other side. It's too early, baby. You need to stay in there a little longer and bake. But baby is ready to see the world and play with all the great toys we've been given... baby wants to come now, even though our due date is still 6 weeks away. The doctor said our goal is to have the baby hang out for two more weeks, and then we'll see what happens. All of this information led to Dave having a major freak-out and deciding last night that no matter what, he had to put the crib together. JUST IN CASE.

Well. Like I said, I'm on modified bed rest which means I wasn't going to help, and we didn't call a friend over because it was Friday night, and so Dave disappeared into the back room for 4 hours to battle the crib directions all by himself. Let's just say that some major steps in putting together this most important piece of furniture were missing, Dave got cranky beyond belief, and I slept through it on the couch. But now... TA-DA! The crib is ready, except we have no sheets or anything, but still...

Then this morning on the way to pick up a prescription, Dave installed the infant car seat, too. JUST IN CASE. So now we're closer to being ready for the big arrival, even though we really need the baby to stay put for at least two more weeks. Hang on, little one. 'Cuz once you come out, there's no going back in.

How Do You Put a Baby in a Car Seat? Verrrrrry Carefully

Dave and I are practicing to be parents, but it's a little difficult without an actual human being to test our skills on. This weekend we decided to open the box holding the car seat and stroller and see what we could figure out. After some finagling, we finally got the teddy bear strapped into the car seat - aren't we glad we DIDN'T try this out on a human, or else we might have dislocated an arm. The stroller, however, is still lying prostrate in the back room, ready for one of us to screw on the wheels. We think it looks great in that heap. Very user-friendly.

Crib Crisis!

Dave and I thought we were being responsible by ordering and paying for our crib 4 weeks ago. The crib would take between 10 and 12 weeks for delivery, so by ordering early, we were giving ourselves a lot of time to put together the baby room and move out/rearrange the other furniture. We pride ourselves on being organized like this.

And then Babies R Us called on Thursday to report that the crib we ordered had been discontinued, and it took the company 4 whole weeks to report this information to us. Suddenly, we were in crisis mode - we only have approximately 10 weeks left in this pregnancy, and the crib might arrive post-delivery if it took the manufacturer 12 weeks to deliver it! Not that the crib arriving late would be horrible, but still... our organization didn't matter. We no longer had a crib, the one and only piece of furniture for the baby that we've actually bought.

And shopping for a crib in early January had been a pain - we didn't realize how picky we were until we got down to buying one, and then a lot of little things mattered. For example, not all cribs have a drop-down mechanism for one side, and as a petite person, there is just no way I can reach into a full-sized crib and pick up a baby with my short arms. Not to mention the process of changing the crib's sheet. This drop-down feature was important us, and you'd be surprised how many cribs don't have this. Apparently all Americans are now American Gladiator-sized. As are their houses, because many of the cribs we looked at are too large for the baby's bedroom.

Also, we live in a geographical area where baby furniture is relegated to Babies R Us and Target - we looked in regular furniture stores, but no luck. And forget specialty baby boutiques - they don't exist in Central New York, nor could we afford a $900 crib. So our choices of merchants were limited if we actually wanted to see the crib first. We had looked at some cribs online, but without being able to actually see how tall they were, measure them, play with the drop down sides, and see and feel their materials, I didn't want to buy something sight unseen. Some cribs are made from something called, "Manufactured Wood" which is plastic with wood grain painted on it - I never would have known this unless I got to see the stuff in Babies R Us and decide we weren't putting our kid in a plastic crib with painted-on wood grain.

So Friday evening before dinner, Dave and I dragged Paula and Azzy to Babies R Us to find a crib pronto. Even though we had spent a lot of time there already, the store manager who called about the discontinued crib reported that they had new models on the floor, and they were giving us a 10% discount on any other crib we bought. And lo and behold - we found one we liked even better than the original crib, and it'll be arriving next week.

Crisis averted!

A Brief List of Updates

Just to keep you up-to-date:

1. Today is the beginning of week 27 - it's the last week of the Second Trimester!

2. I had a 3 hour fasting glucose test last week, and I passed with flying colors! This test diagnoses gestational diabetes, which is a growing concern for pregnant women. Special thanks to Dave for always making me eat my vegetables - it helps that he makes such great food. Last night he made his first sauerbrauten roast with cabbage and potatoes... what a feast!

3. In the past week both Dave and I have dreamt about the baby as a human being, and both of us have attached a face to the baby in our dreams. It seems strange to dream about someone's face whom you haven't even met.

4. I can no longer read aloud - I become winded and start panting like I just raced up the stairs two-at-a-time. My lungs are squished!

5. We bought a crib. It was becoming an existential dilemma, but then we asked our landlord John point-blank what he thought, and he gave us some very sound advice: all new cribs are built with safety in mind, so go with what you like. It was a good thing we went ahead and ordered the crib, too - it takes 10-12 weeks for delivery, which in my book is cutting it a little close.

6. We are starting a baby registry, but we aren't going to tell you the site yet. I need to tweak a few things first.

7. My uterus is the size of a basketball, which is exactly what I look like. A basketball with four limbs and a head. Today I tried on four different shirts while getting dressed, and when Dave asked what was taking so long, I told him that I felt like a lump. He said, "You don't feel cute and pregnant and adorable, which is what you are?" I reiterated that, no, in fact, I felt like a lump. But it's nice to know that my husband isn't thinking, "Why is there a lump in my bed?"

Our First Foray into Baby Land

Dave and I made our move yesterday, walking back through Target to the scary area where large strollers rise up to the ceiling and infant car seats fall off the shelves at any false move. We weren't there to buy anything, just to get a handle on all this information and get a sense of what's what.

What's what? Dave battled a stroller and still couldn't figure out how it folds up in one motion. I was unable to unhook an infant car seat from its car base. Neither of us knew why the infant area is filled with all the baby princess gear (you can even buy a car seat in hot pink that says, "I'm a princess" all over it. Scary.). Most of the car seats are too heavy for me to pick up (now imagine a 12 pound child in it at the same time). I suddenly wished we didn't live on the second floor of an apartment with no elevator (I told Dave that baby and I will only be going on stroller outings if Dave helps me carry the stroller down the stairs every morning before he leaves for school next summer).

In a word we were: overwhelmed.

So we came home and I took a nap and Dave did chores and then we spent the night going through the baby name book instead, coming up with a list of potentially catastrophic names for baby:

Llewelyn
Dickran
Rainbow
Avril Lavigne

Picking out names for a child is still overwhelming (Do I want to say the name Simone for the rest of my life?), but somehow it feels more manageable at this stage than looking at a crib and wondering if baby's head will somehow get stuck in there or if baby's fingers will be crushed by the infant car seat mobile that you wind up and it plays "It's a Small World After All."