In Which She Finally Comprehends the “Point of No Return”

Posted on 4/14/2008 by cheesefairy

I was reading ask moxie today and the the topic was parenting two children; this woman who has a 3-year old and a 6-week old is wondering when it’s going to get hard because so far it’s smooth sailing. Hooray for her! I read through all the comments with this giant Eeyore Balloon of dread over my head because everyone’s experience is different and you can be sure if you read 55 accounts of having two children, you will pass over the ones that are delightful and focus on the one where the older brother pushes the younger sister down the stairs while smearing poop on his face. If by “you” you mean “me” and I do.

Then I came across one commenter who mentioned how terrible hard it is to parent a toddler whilst pregnant and I have seen recent evidence of this at Her Bad Mother as well so praise be, it’s not just me, but what the woman in the comments said that gave me pause was: Well, I’ve heard it’s easier to take care of a newborn and a toddler than be pregnant and look after a toddler, so at least things will get better.

My brain has seized on this. Is it true? Could it PLEASE be true? I think I will believe that it is true! Yes! That’s what I’ll do, I’ll just BELIEVE some random stranger’s “I heard” that was probably gathered by talking to the old biddies at her baby shower who also predicted she is having a girl/boy because she is round/pointy/oblong/grumpy/fat/not fat/greasy/purple. YES! I will believe.

I have a friend on facebook who was my best friend in grade 3. She is a lovely woman who has two children of her own, both under the age of 5. She has said to me a couple of times in the past weeks that I should post pictures of myself because I must be so cute and also I must be so excited and wheeeeeeeeee! And I thank her dearly for her confidence and I appreciate – though do not comprehend – that she thinks women my size are cute (perhaps she is still picturing me in grade 3? I was pretty cute in grade 3) but I cannot for the love of all that is sensible understand how she has forgotten how truly, hugely and magnificently it sucks to be in one’s last week or two of pregnancy, no matter how good the preceding 30X weeks have been. It sucks bad when it’s your first child and you don’t even realize how much better it was then until you’re doing it with your second.

So in case anyone is searching, and so that I can read this again if I ever contemplate pregnancy (Insert LOUDEST HA YOU EVER HEARD here) and so that I remember to check my head if I ever so much as present a sweet hand for patting a pregnant woman’s 39 week belly, literally or metaphorically, no matter how good my intentions, here is a brief list of things I can no longer do because I am so damn pregnant.

1. Walk for longer than 20 minutes
2. Sit for longer than 20 minutes
3. Lie in one position for longer than 20 minutes
4. Stand in one position for longer than 5 minutes
5. Bend at the waist
6. Squat or crouch
7. Wear any shoes except the really big ugly ones
8. Wear any underwear except the Old Navy Amazing Lace Maternity Underwear, of which I own 6 pairs and whose Amazing Lace is starting to deteriorate.
9. Wear any clothing comfortably. It is either too tight or too loose.
10. Tolerate the cat.
10 a. At ALL.
10 b. No seriously I am going to kill and skin it.
11. Eat within 1 hour of going to bed. Even ice cream.
12. Roll over. I have to get out of bed and get back in. Luckily I also pee all night long every 2 hours.
12 a. Because my bladder is never truly empty.
12 b. Oh and when I do pee? I have to perch on one butt cheek in order to wipe and often I have to lean against the nearest supporting wall so that I don’t fall off the toilet.
13. See any beauty in this experience at all.

The best parts of my day are as follows:

1. Trombone is really excited to see me every morning.
2. Toast and peanut butter. Can’t live without it.
3. My shower. Even this, during the week, has taken on a dismal pallor as Trombone no longer wants to be in his bedroom while I shower so instead of playing quietly as he did my first week at home, now, when I really need the shower, he hollers, “Mommy daddy trombone! OUT THIS ROOM NOW!” the whole time.

Luckily, I know the cure for all of it (including the slightly desperate #13) is to have this gorgeous baby because the only thing from the above list that won’t change at that point is my feelings towards the catt. And the shoes, which I don’t care about.

I am not thinking about my labour and delivery. I am past caring. I am not thinking about what it will be like to have 2 small children. I am going there, no matter what. Right now I am at the “carve this baby out with a spoon” point that Sarah so eloquently expressed at around this stage in both her pregnancies.

So I am making a positive-thinking leap to the moment when I first see my second-born child. (hopefully she does not have a full set of teeth including one resembling a machete as she did in a recent dream Aiii!) To the early euphoria of post-partum I Can Conquer The World, and even to the ensuing weeks and months where I might be crying all the time and covered in breastmilk and newborn poop (and its crazy stain) but at least I will be able to lie on my back in bed and kneel on the floor to read a story with my son without having to wait for SA to come home and help me up and walk uptown to the Most Depressing Mall in the Universe (arrival at which location is definitely NOT its own reward) without feeling as though my internal organs are trying to break through my pelvis, one jarring footstep at a time.

Right now, I think that would be enough. I know I’m wrong. Just let me believe a little while longer.

Posted in babby, the parenthood, trombone, whiny | 10 Comments

For Those About to Rub My Feet: I Salute You

Posted on 4/11/2008 by cheesefairy

Today I went to a spa. Not my natural habitat, to be sure. Saint Aardvark’s parents gave me a gift card for Christmas and I saved it till now so that I could have someone else clip my toenails at 39 weeks pregnant. I meant to go last Friday but due to a staff miscommunication my appointment was taken away from me. To me, it was no big deal. My toenails remained unclipped for one more week. But the spa is an EXPERIENCE SPA so all 12 front desk staff & hostess-type millers-about were very concerned about my less-than-celebrity treatment. Especially, I think, because of my size. They: small, well-groomed women. Me: large, unkempt and with nothing to lose. So to make up for the inconvenience, they gave me a free paraffin treatment. I had no idea what this was but it was free, they said, and an upgrade, they said and I am no dummy. Upgrade me!

Off we went, into a Treatment Room, which bore a rather startling resemblance to a labour and delivery room. It had a semi-reclining bed, the lights were sort of low, except for where my Therapist sat at my feet in a bright spotlight. Lots of confusing instruments lying about, looking sterile. And there were lots of towels. But then there was the piped-in, “relaxing” music. You know, Enya. Enigma. Which I’m pretty sure you won’t find in a hospital. Not for long, anyway.

There was also one song, it was some kind of chanting, Enigma-style, with a oong-chucka oong-oong chucka beat and when I listened closely to the words, I slowly and with horror realized she was spelling “C-A-N…C-E-R,” breathily and repeatedly. Seriously. It’s enough to turn your baby sideways.

Anyway. I was reclining rather uncomfortably with my feet soaking in a bowl of warm water and my therapist came back and put my hands in sandwich baggies full of warm wax. Then she put my baggied hands into terrycloth mittens. Then she placed both hands on my belly. The warm wax dripped out over my left wrist and puddled on my shirt. I just watched. This was the paraffin treatment. After an hour the baggies came off and my hands were very soft.

Meanwhile, she filed, buffed, sanded and polished my toes. Oh and massaged my feet. Hello. Much nicer than labour and delivery, on reflection. Cancer song or no.

I learned the following fun facts about my spa therapist.

1. She hates her younger brother.
2. She wants her boyfriend to propose already. It’s been 3 years! Mostly because
3. she wants 5 children. And also,
4. She has performed Brazilian waxes on women who are as pregnant as me. And I quote,

“I was like, OK, if that’s what you want. So I like spread it on real quick and pulled it off as fast as I could and then got out of the way! Because, like, what if labour started or something!”

5. She has heard of those water births but she’s not so sure because the water would get all bloody and stuff. Wouldn’t it?

(How about you have one kid to start with. See how that goes before you commit to another 4.)

Sweet girl. Was very easy to chat with and very kind to my feet and lower legs. Am sure she told next client all about me and how I hadn’t had a pedicure in, like, over 2 years!

When I paid at the front desk, after twice declining the complimentary makeup touch-up (I was not wearing any makeup at the time. I did not understand the offer. I did not say.) the front desk Honchette said, “Thank you so much for coming back after last week. You know,” and here she leaned in with a great air of conspiracy, “we found out what happened. And we made some changes around here.” It sounded really ominous. My god! Did they have someone killed? I looked around and noticed a few personnel changes. I nodded politely, tipped well and left, suspecting that somewhere in the world, there is a newly fired spa therapist sticking tiny pins into a pregnant voodoo doll.

Posted in babby, outside | 5 Comments

It’s Verbal Flu!

Posted on 4/10/2008 by cheesefairy

First, let me say how much I truly, madly, deeply lurve my dear Saint Aardvark the Carpeted. This morning I was doing something relatively uncomplicated on my computer, she is a sweet iBook who is 4 years old, I think, and the computer seized, as she does, and while I put a spoon under her tongue and gently wiped her drool, I might have sworn out loud a little bit.

SA said, you know, one of the things I could do today is take your laptop to a doctor and get a new hard drive put in.

And I said, well, I mean, it’s not urgent or anything.

And he said, well, actually it kind of is.

And then I thought about the endless days of breastfeeding that (probably) stretch in front of me and the blogging I will definitely need to do about said days of breastfeeding, not to mention that Trombone knows that “Hey Hey” plays on “Mummy’s ‘puter” even when it refuses to play on the television; it plays over and over and over and over until he is in a Bedouin Soundclash coma, which is just how I like my children, so I said, um, yes. Please. Fix it.

So not only am I typing this from a desktop? machine? is that what they’re called? but I have my email and I have my imported bookmarks and I have much better posture for it. Let us all sing a quick song of praise for the computer geek. What the hell, let’s have a quick clap for the wolfman while we’re at it.

As to other reasons why Saint Aardvark rules with a fist full of dark chocolate, that is to say, benevolently and deliciously, he is home today, a Thursday, because yesterday all the things I have been doing for the last 2 years caught up with me and I succumbed to one of the following: flu, exhaustion or early labour. I have a couple of symptoms in each category but I mainly think it is the exhaustion because my main symptom is, well, exhaustion.

Yesterday morning I promised Trombone we would go to the beach. He has a few books about beaches so he was pretty sure we would have a delightful time building sandcastles and swimming with whales. As I did not want to drive for hours to get to the beach and back, I forsook my favourite beaches of Spanish Banks and English Bay in favour of Barnet Marine Park, which is 15 minutes by car from our house. We built a sandcastle and knocked it down several times and we waded in the water in our rubber boots and chased some Canada geese and came home. We napped and I expected to wake much refreshed but did not. I woke more tired. And could not conceive of going out again, even though it is our routine to do so and it was not raining oh praise be! I could not do it. I could not. I wanted to, sort of. Mmm, I felt obliged to. Instead I slouched on the couch and let Trombone help me feel better by bringing me cushions and blankets and books and crackers and raisins and anything else he thought might make me stop crying.

Which I wasn’t actually doing. We’re just still pretending that mummy cried too. The empathy is strong with this one.

Anyway, I googled “early labour feels like flu” (yes, you can laugh; SA did and I didn’t have the strength to beat his monkey skull so I’m sure as hell not going to track each of you down) and got a bunch of promising returns but then when I read them all, I realized that everyone says “flu” when they mean “diarrhea.” I don’t have the runs. FLU is not GASTROENTERITIS. There is no “stomach flu” there is no “24 hour flu” there is no “I pooped out eighty-five rivers of nasty sludge flu.” Flu is short for influenza and it means achy, fevery, shivery, nose runny, can’t get off this couch no matter how hard I try. So stop screwing up my google results, all y’all.

Ahem.

And I know you’re not supposed to google things when you’re pregnant, but you may recall that my last labour was induced with some fairly serious drugs so I had
Stage one labour: no labour! followed by
Stage two labour: HOLY SHIT LABOUR followed by
Stage three labour: a baby!

In other words, I am basically at square one noob with this. Maybe it’s knowledge common to everyone but me that women who are about to have babies go from feeling on top of the world to feeling like they are lying in a puddle of poop at the bottom of it. All things considered, I suspect it is more like my body saying, yo. Do you have any idea how much trouble you will be in in approximately 2 weeks’ time? Will you SLOW THE HELL DOWN already? Thanks! and then once I’ve stopped idiotically carrying my toddler down flights of stairs, allowing me to go into labour sometime next week.

Where was I? Ah, yes, defending myself against non-existent internet trolls. Also a symptom of early labour, no?

On the couch this afternoon, watching TV because my laptop is away, remember, I watched a show called “Other People Screw Up Parenting; You Feel Better About Yourself!” or something. It was one of those noon-hour shows on the life network that follows a couple home with their new baby for a week. And maybe it was the hormones I am currently stewing in but I very nearly looked up this guy, the new father, and went to his house to kick his ass.

First thing I see, he’s rocking his baby girl in a bassinet, pontificating, “I guess I’m just not as scared as [partner] is. I think babies can sense that fear.” Then he’s hovering over his partner while she changes a diaper on the squalling newborn (oh, I had forgotten that part about the HOLY SHIT YOU’RE CHANGING MY DIAPER AND I MUST SCREAM!!! Remember to find earplugs.) and it occurs to him to mention, “Did you put the Vaseline on her?” (like, will she DIE without it?) And the best of all: they’re sitting on the bed at 3 am and he’s got his face in his partner’s boobs, trying to adjust his newborn baby’s latch. “No, no,” he said, “she has to be facing THIS WAY.”

Look, you. Until your boobs feed this baby? You need to be facing OUT OF THIS FUCKING ROOM. Bring me a donut.

I would have said.

I’m scared for them, actually, Gina and Jason. Because at the end of the show, there’s a 6-week check-in and she’s all, “Hmm, things were rough and all but then one day I told him how I felt and things got better.” And he says, “Yeah, and I still can’t believe it; now she cleans the house too! I love her now!” And she says, “You didn’t love me before?” and he says, “Sure, but I love you more NOW,” and he’s smiling like he’s kidding but I don’t really buy it and neither does she, I don’t think.

Oh dear. No more television for me, I don’t think. Fluxhaustion or no.

Posted in babby, bloggity!, everything, music, outside, television, the parenthood, trombone | 7 Comments

It’s Been Almost 24 Hours

Posted on 4/7/2008 by cheesefairy

And still, all I can think of to write is Anne Murray, Tom Cochrane and The Guy From Triumph Who Isn’t Either of the Cool Guys But Instead Looks Like A Mortgage Broker all have the same haircut. I know this because I tripped over the Juno awards last night and I watched 10 minutes of it. Surprise! Canadian award show: still very bad after all these years! Also, Anne Murray sounded weird. I don’t care if she’s a living legend. She sounded like she hadn’t sung in 5 years.

What the hell did I do today?

1. Got up too early. I am frantically reading Babycatcher because it is the best book to read in the last 2 weeks before birthing a baby. Seriously. It’s chapter after chapter of quirky, fun, “women are incredible” labour stories as told by a midwife named Peggy Vincent. There are a couple of sad stories too. But mostly you want to raise your fist to the sky after every chapter. I read it at the end of my pregnancy with Trombone and this go-round at the library I picked up another book by another midwife but it was the opposite of Babycatcher. It was all miserable stories about hospital births gone wrong and how they would have been better with a midwife. Possibly. Not good for the insomnia, though. So I took it back and got the one I wanted. Anyway, I was reading last night until well after 10 pm which is, itself, well past my proper bedtime. Thusly, 6:15 this AM came awful harsh. I couldn’t figure out why last week’s trumpeting of sunshine out my butt had changed so abruptly into sour old man breath in my face. After an afternoon nap, I got me sunshine back. Also, the rain stopped, which was nice.

2. Went to the library again. Twice in one week. Trombone found the room of toddlers listening to storytime somewhat alarming so we steered clear – and clear again when he headed for the copy of Manga Hamlet (Um?) – straight to the oversized story books and then to the videos for a copy of the once much-hated and now much-wanted “tiger movie” (so named because it has a tiger on the cover) which teaches you how to count to 5. Three weeks ago I took this movie out thinking he would love it and he cried all the way through. Today when I said, “Let’s go to the library,” he said, “Yes! Tiger movie!” Go. Fucking. Figure.

3. Let a man into my house and he fixed my dryer oh sweet happy day. The cloth diapers will no longer be crunchy from drying on a rack. Not that I really care, because I don’t wear cloth diapers. And just think of all the energy we saved by not using our dryer since the middle of January. Just think! OK, done thinking now. Thanks.

4. Made dinner.

5. Played an elaborate and very extended game of “mummy cried too!” where I pretend to cry, Trombone comforts me and then I have to say, “Is Trombone sad?” and give him a hug and then I have to say, “Don’t be sad! Be happy!” and then he shrieks and usually trips over something in his excitement.

6. Read “Bunny’s Noisy Book” 5 times.

7. Just now I am drinking an orange soda and watching my abdomen undulate accordingly. Hippo is low, low down but I do not believe its birth is imminent. That’s for all of you who are just checking back for photos. Give it another week, I think.

Posted in babby, bloggity!, books, trombone | 1 Comment

Groove

Posted on 4/4/2008 by cheesefairy

On Monday, this past first day of the rest of my life, I panicked. As though I was back in my first few months with a newborn; what do I do now? nothing is fun! send it back! With a half hour’s thought I quickly fell back into my old routine. It’s only been 9 months, after all, since we did some variation of this every day:

breakfast
go out
come home
lunch
nap
go out
come home
dinner
ohthankgod! dad is home
bed

That day we went to the park to see the ducks. Woefully unprepared, I watched Trombone stomp through puddles that were not just dirt and rain but also goose shit. And pigeon shit. And seagull shit. I cringed just a little when he stomped so heartily as to splash my feet and, more importantly, the pants that I am wearing every day until the hippo births. I tugged at his hood to prevent him from throwing himself whole-soulfully into the duck pond. We sat on a bench and shared a banana and a slice of bread. When he was done snacking, he said, “Oh – KAY!” and hopped off the bench, renewed.

It’s hard to explain what it feels like to be the solo caregiver again. To feel at once nervous about the responsibility but also at peace because I know I can do it and because it is so much better right now than it has been for the past 9 months. To be getting to know my son again, not in snippets via other people but in full-contact, endless days and total immersion. Sometimes, truthfully, I am not conscious of the line between the mundane and the sublime, so drunk am I on his earnest retelling of the day’s events and so delighted by his greeting the squirrels in the park as enthusiastically as he greets me in the morning.

Not that I stopped loving or understanding or caring for Trombone during the time I was back at work. Just that I didn’t have enough time to truly appreciate his beauty. There was no time to dawdle. We had point B to get to.

I had forgotten what bliss it is to just have time. To go where we want, to take as long as we want to get there, to read 18 books in a row. To let him sleep till he’s done. To let him eat bowl after bowl after bowl of cereal. What else do we have to do?

Which is not to say I’m not grateful for naptime. Or the moments when we don’t talk.

In this first week together, we have been so gentle, so lovely with each other. There has been more sleep and fewer tantrums. I can see where our frantic daily routine for the past year has really messed the boy up. Running constantly does make you feel like a hamster in a spinny wheel, complete with bared teeth and a tendency to run for dark corners every time someone opens your cage door.

Our exclusive time is scheduled to end in the next few weeks, when the New Baby of New Baby fame arrives. Till that day, I am trying to just enjoy these days together. Ambling down paths in the late afternoon, digging holes in dirt piles, discussing his favourite book’s plot and characters ad nauseum, moving gracefully towards the day’s end instead of barreling through each and every 24 hours in search of the weekend, of respite.

Physically, I am limited. I can’t run with him down the street or lift him over my head or even change his diaper in less than 10 minutes. But emotionally I am completely available and totally free. The endearments trip off my tongue. I want to give him all of me while I can because I know one day I won’t have it all to offer. And one further, farther-off day, he won’t accept. For now, we are happy in our bubble together.

Posted in babby, the parenthood, trombone | 5 Comments