growing baby

The baby’s room is basically ready at this point. The most important fixture in the room is naturally the crib—we have gone with the white/chocolate colored Babi Italia “Scandi” crib mainly for its contemporary look, and it’s fit very well. We’ve been pretty happy with the way the brown of our couch worked with a greenish wall, and the crib’s colors didn’t disappoint either. To make the room happier, we had applied giraffe wall graphic stickers from Wee Gallery — I think they really help make it clear that this is a baby’s room. Thanks Grace and Marty for the stickers!

Giant thanks to Linda’s parents for the crib and mattress, Sabrina for the sheets, and to Ellen’s mom Mary for the wonderful blankets you see draped over the side. You’ll also notice a “Mateo” pillow in the crib—thanks Kate and Dan! And of course, thank you to everyone who gave us a ton of clothing, blankets, and other goodies that are in the drawer below the crib.

We anticipate that the bulk of actual baby work for a while will take place on the changing table (and on the changing pad—thanks Marla). We got the table itself on Craigslist: much less expensive than buying something else brand new, and just as pretty. The baskets (thanks Ellen and Mary!) are full of diapers, blankets, sleep sacks, baby care items, etc. Thank you everyone for those! You will also notice a ton of diapers on the bottom shelf: even though we’re going to try to cloth-diaper the baby, we intend to use disposables when going out and early on when we’re going through them every few hours. Thanks to last-minute help from Olga and my Dad, we managed to qualify for a promo from Amazon that gave us a significant supply of Seventh Generation chlorine-free diapers. There’s also some books from our wonderful friends and relatives to keep us and the baby entertained and educated as he grows. I’m sure that we’ll be making a lot of “moo” and “oink” noises over the next few years. I also suspect that given the giraffes on the wall, we’ll be learning how to make giraffe sounds…

In addition to giraffes, there are also monkeys, a rhinoceros, bears, cows, and many many other wonderful toys that you’ve all given us and Mateo. For now, these are resting above the futon in the room (except for the monkey, who seems to prefer a monkey-hanging-pose apparently), and waiting for the baby to a) be born and b) grow old enough to play with toys. The futon, needless to say, is key to our ability to sustain a growing kid in the first few months: sometimes it’ll definitely be too much to crawl from bed to the baby’s room in the middle of the night—the futon provides a much needed middle ground. By the way, the bag in the lower-right corner is the hospital bag for when the time comes.

Finally, take a look at one of the walls in the room – it’s full of pictures. These were drawn by Linda’s friends at her baby shower last month (well, my picture got added to the mix, hee hee!). Giant hugs to Linda, Marla, Hilary, Geneva, Mary, Ellen, Christina, Ana, Courtney, Sabrina, Laura, (me), Larissa, and Rachel.

Other than the closet (which will remain hidden, thank you very much), you’ve now seen it all!

Baby is due today, but unless he’s very speedy he’s not going to make the deadline.  (He clearly takes after his parents.)  In the meantime, Ilya and I had a lot of fun taking due-date pictures at the beach today.  I love the pictures!  Some are rather more scandalous than I thought they would be given my prude-happy self–and I also discovered the makings of my first stretch marks, sigh–but on the whole I think I’m a cutie-pie preggie.  And I can’t wait for baby to come out so we share pictures of our new boy next!

 
You can also see the rest of the photo set from our extra-special due date!

Normally, when parents want their kids to come out soon, they try all sort of “induction techniques” of dubious quality. There’s bouncing on the ball, drinking raspberry tea, nipple stimulation — we’ve even heard of someone having herbs burned near the woman’s toes (though it wasn’t really made clear how this was supposed to do anything).

Linda’s new approach is decidedly contemporary. On Thursday, she had entered into a contract with Mateo that he would be born on Friday — if Linda meets a certain set of conditions. To fulfill the contract, Linda had to cook chicken, make potatoes, craft a salad, and eat it — and all the baby would have to do in return was to start being born already. Linda executed the contract (Mateo’s kick served as his sign of agreement), and began meeting her set of responsibilities.

Alas, the baby did not hold up his end of the bargain, despite the completion and ingestion of the chicken/potato/salad project. Clearly, we now have the right to pursue various remedies, and this may have to get solved by arbitration in the next few days.

Baby’s due in three days and I don’t think he plans on coming out early!  He seems very comfy inside and has actually started moving more recently instead of less.  I’d always thought that the more squished he got inside, the less he would wiggle.  In fact, this morning, he threw a punch that took my breath away for the first time. 

In the meantime, I’ve been “nesting” with my dissertation.  It’s all done, so I’ve just been reformatting it to fit UCLA’s filing standards and arranging signature stuff with my committee.  It looks like, unless baby is really late, my heroic mom will end up filing the dissertation in my stead. 

Of course, what I really need to be doing is “nesting” at home–there’s tidying up to do and we still need to decorate the baby’s room.  I just need to get Ilya home early enough that we can start nailing up the pictures  without annoying our neighbors.  Maybe tonight?

I hope baby comes soon.  I’m crossing my fingers for tomorrow!

This week was exactly like last week: good weight, blood pressure, baby’s heartbeat, and still dilated at one centimeter. 

Now back to the diss since: 1) Melissa said that if I think I’m tired now and don’t want to write the diss, wait til the baby’s born; and 2) my mom said that for the next two years I’ll be so tired that if I have a chance to stand still for a moment, I’ll fall asleep against a wall.  Yikes!

I’m full term!  Baby is ready to arrive, healthy and good to go.  Of course, he probably still won’t come for another while yet, but I can technically say “any day now.”

That also means I’ll be keeping this post short.  I’m not fond of the idea of revising my dissertation in between labor contractions…

The big news at the OB’s today is that I’m effaced and one centimeter dilated!  Effacement means that my cervix has thinned and softened enough that it can begin dilating–it needs to open to 10 centimeters before it’s time to start pushing the baby out.  And I’m one centimeter ahead of the game which will hopefully mean just that much less work come labor day.  Of course, my OB said I could stay at one centimeter for several more weeks–this isn’t an indication at all of when baby might arrive.

In other OB news, my blood pressure is perfect, my weight gain is great (25 pounds), baby’s heart rate is just as it should be.  My strep B culture results also came back negative, so I won’t need antibiotics during labor.

In other piggie news, I just ate ice cream with hot fudge.  And it’s not even 10 am yet.  Uh oh.  But I promise to eat a veggie-licious lunch!  That promise is easy to keep since my sister came over and made a delicious Indian vegetable stew for me on Monday.  I’m really getting totally spoiled since my mom also came over this past weekend and made several different delicious dishes for me.  I could get used to this!

We’re really getting ready for baby.  His crib is ready and now his carseat is installed–and inspected!  When Ilya and I went to the CHP for their free inspection of the carseat installation, the inspector told us that most people installed their carseats incorrectly–and, in fact, that in her five years working there, she only remembers about five people who didn’t need any corrections.  Here’s just more proof that I married the right guy: Ilya’s carseat installation was perfect.  The inspector only offered one suggestion to prevent problems in the future–and that was just a suggestion, it wasn’t strictly necessary.

The inspector also told us not to put a mirror in the backseat or any additional cushioning in the carseat.  Apparently the mirror–which we were going to use to see the baby while driving since the baby is facing backwards–could fly off and hit the baby during an accident.  And she said that any additional cushioning wasn’t tested to see how it interacts with the carseat during an accident and therefore could be unsafe.  I was surprised to learn both those things, especially since we were planning on using both a mirror and more cushioning to keep baby’s neck from sliding from side to side.  I feel like a bad parent for wanting to ignore her instructions and use cushioning and mirrors anyway.  Hm….

Well, at least the carseat itself is safe!

The Bradley class is over, and I’m actually very happy to have taken it. Going into the class I definitely had some hesitation about being able to help Linda with the birth — or just what to even expect at the birth. The class was actually very slow moving, but the teacher had very calmly explained all the risks of interventions, gave ideas on what to bring to the hospital, and how to help Linda relax and deal with the contractions. While I’m sure that Linda is still quite nervous, at least my outlook on the process is a lot more clear now.

At the last class, our teacher invited a pediatrician friend of hers — and not only was the pediatrician extremely helpful in just going over some of the things she sees in parents and kids in the first few days and weeks of life (jaundice? usually not a problem. don’t bring poop to the doctor, just describe it. etc.), but she looked like Alyson Hannigan. So half the time I was googling “Alyson Hannigan sister” to see if it could possibly be her twin. Alas, it wasn’t.