10.17.08 ~ Week Thirty-Four

I’ll start this by apologizing for neglecting our turkey blog for so long. The pace of life has really picked up over the last month. For me and Jason it’s been all baby prep or work all the time. I’ve been attending yoga on Monday and Wednesday nights, we started Lamaze class on Thursday nights, we’ve been to Baltimore two weekends in a row, and had Jeff here in New York one weekend to help set up the crib and changing table, and I’ve been working on my empirical paper as well as a sprinkling of NCCF projects. In addition, mix in an infant CPR class, pediatrician selection, a CBS appointment, another maternity clothes shopping trip, and Jason’s slightly under-celebrated birthday and you’ve got a pretty good picture of our last month.

One of the highlights of this past month was definitely my baby shower which Jason’s mom hosted for me at her house in Baltimore. She creatively chose little turkeys as the theme (in honor of this blog of course!) and designed invitations and decorations with little turkeys on them. It was very cute and very well done. Jason and I hitched a ride with Kim and Greg on Friday night and in one short weekend we went from having almost nothing prepared for our baby to owning just about everything we need for his arrival. In fact, I’d argue we have more than we need. Shortly after I arrived at Carol and Tim’s for the shower, the house began filling up with guests. Even though some of my favorite people (the majority of my siblings, Jill, and Pia to list just a few) couldn’t be there, I looked around the room and realized that just about every single person who was there has known me, Jason, or both of us since we were kids. It was heart-warming in the most literal sense of the word to know that this group of people, who have known us for so long, was there to celebrate the little baby swimming around in my belly and cheer us on as we prepare for his arrival. Perhaps it’s the third trimester hormones pumping in full force, but as the days count down toward our due date I am getting increasingly sentimental about the weight of what we’re about to embark on. And with that I feel more connected with and grateful for all of the people in our lives who are genuinely as excited as we are for our little baby to be born. Our proverbial “village” - our tight nit (and at the same time geographically diverse) community of family and friends - our numerous safety nets - together make a pretty strong force who will undoubtedly contribute in shaping who our child will become. I feel a little like I may have discovered the meaning of life – and it’s really valuable, but not really at all complicated.

The weekend after the shower, Jeff came up to New York with a car packed full of the gifts. Jason’s birthday was largely marked by numerous trips up and down our apartment stairs bringing in boxes of baby clothes, books, blankets, burp cloths, towels, sheets, books, and gear. After everything was in we left the boxes scattered all over the apartment and headed out to a nearby Italian restaurant to celebrate a little more appropriately. We had a very nice dinner and then headed home and had some birthday cake among the boxes parked on every surface in our apartment. The next morning we got up slowly, ate breakfast, and then headed to the Ikea in New Jersey to pick out a crib and changing table. In my opinion Ikea is basically Hell on Earth. Despite their best attempt with Swedish meatballs and the “ball room” I think the store has little to offer in terms of a positive shopping experience. It’s overcrowded, almost impossible to find employees to help you, and increasingly full of particle board instead of wood furniture. But after hours of walking through the show room mazes, tracking down Ikea employees, investigating the ingredients in mattresses, and hauling boxes off the warehouse shelves, we were finally headed home with Jeff’s car once again full.

Jason and Jeff got to work with building the crib and dresser while I unpacked the boxes. After hours of work I am sad to say the apartment looked even worse than before. I’m not sure why it’s some universal law of organization that things always have to look worse before they are better – but it’s true. Our apartment looked like we had just moved in, thrown a keg party, and then were hit by a hurricane. However, after a few more hours of work on Sunday our floor and furniture reemerged from under the rubble and Jason and I finished cleaning up and putting things away as Jeff headed home. Once we were finally done, I had a great sense of accomplishment and relief. Since I’ve been into “nesting” since the age of twelve, being pregnant and having that additional urge to organize is almost excruciating. And therefore, the weekend with Jeff here was for me like crack is for a junkie. Both Jeff and Jason generously entertained every ridiculous request of mine (like moving the entire bed to vacuum up the dust under it and taking all of the books off of the shelves to clean). Since Jason willingly married me knowing I’m like this he gets a little credit – but Jeff, the innocent brother-in-law, deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The good news is that their pain and suffering was not in vain because I am more than happy with how the apartment is set up now. The crib is in our room next to our bed (where the desk used to be), and the changing table/dresser is out in the living room next to our couch. We moved some things around in the living room and reorganized so that the entire bottom shelf of our bookcase is dedicated to baby books and toys. All the baby clothes are washed and folded and neatly put away in the dresser and we have diapers and wipes poised and ready to go. We’re so ready it’s frightening.
Another big preparatory act is our weekly venture into the world of Lamaze. We’re attending classes at the Roosevelt Hospital where we’ll be delivering. The class meets every Thursday night for three hours through the entire month of October. Our instructor is a very nice woman named Jo who tries her best to be entertaining, funny, and friendly, but who (poor woman) was set up to fail in my mind from the beginning. Since I used to attend my mom’s classes when I was younger I have a deeply engrained notion for how a Lamaze class should go, how the teacher should teach, and what we should learn. And although Jo seems to be covering most of the same topics and techniques my mom also covered, I still feel that the room we’re in isn’t as nice, the information we’re getting isn’t as clear, and Jo isn’t my mom. Maybe it would have been awkward for Jason and me to attend my mom’s class, but I’m starting to feel like it would have been the only way to be really satisfied with the experience. And I can’t imagine a thicker sense of awkwardness than the one that occupies our Thursday night class every week. The group is very small which makes it very uncomfortable to do activities that involve other people in the class. For example, on the first day of class she paired us up with another person (not the partner we came with) and asked us to first talk with and then introduce that person. The introductions were full of random information gathered during forced small talk like “um, this is Jason, he’s an Orioles fan” and “this is Nina, she once drove her car from Texas to Baltimore”. But complaints about awkwardness aside, I do feel the class is of value to us. At a minimum we’re getting weekly exposure to the hospital floor on which we’re going to give birth. We’re also spending at least those three hours every week visualizing labor, delivery, and our individual roles in the process. And I’ve found that the Lamaze breathing, relaxation, and positioning techniques overlap very nicely with what I’m leaning in my yoga classes. Taken together, I’m practicing breath and body awareness techniques three nights each week. And I imagine that all that practice can only come in handy when I’m in the middle of labor and there is no anesthesiologist or epidural in sight.

I will try and update this blog more frequently from now on since we’re getting close to the end and things are getting more suspenseful!