Getting there

It's getting close. I can see the finish line. 270 pages written and, I think, about 20 or 30 more to go. Three to five weeks until the little guy arrives. I'm almost there. A baby and a novel. Somehow this feels like this might be the most productive (passively and actively) nine months of my life. Still a ways to go, but this feels pretty good.

Things have slowed down lately without the cadence (and the free time) provided by Cora's nanny share. This is our second week without it, and I am finally tucked away in my neighborhood coffee shop again while she enjoys a play date with one of her favorite little girls and our incredibly energetic, fun babysitter--a woman who teaches PE to elementary kids all day long and still has energy to babysit, work at a coffee shop on the weekends, and play soccer several times a week. I left the house listening to Cora and her friend shrieking while they catapulted themselves off the downstairs couch onto a giant pile of pillows, blankets, and down comforters--one of C's most favorite pastimes, as loftily illustrated in the photo above.

Cora's first flower arrangement

Cora's aunties helped her pick flowers and arrange them in a bud vase. She loved all the praise for using her small fingers to press the stems carefully into the vase, and took the privilege seriously when she was allowed to carefully carry it out to the table for a fancy dinner of quesadillas (her very favorite meal).

She gave my tummy kisses this morning. She likes to say, "Kick for your big sister!" although he rarely cooperates. He's busy right now, doing a small jig in my belly.

She's asleep. She had an active morning at Sheri's house while I plugged away at my novel. (I'm nearly 260 pages in and I still have more to go. I just wrote another five pages and I'm ready for a break.) We ate a picnic lunch in the backyard and planted carrot seeds in our garden, then raced around and tickled each other. Well, she raced. I guess I sort of waddled. Hopefully she'll wake up soon so we can go for a walk around the lake.

I have been feeling emotional about the changes ahead, about the fact that she will no longer receive my undivided attention. I know it will be a good thing, and that she will handle it fine, but I also know it will be a transition for us all.

Last night I felt him kick and I wanted to pour a thousand words of love into his ears. This pregnancy has been distracted and busy and I wanted to explain to him that he will be another great, bright light in our lives, and that we are getting more and more excited by the prospect of meeting him soon. Only 6-8 more weeks to go.

Oh, Belly

This morning was the first in a long time that we didn't have a play date or event scheduled. Cora and I went to Green Lake and walked around, picking apple blossoms and counting dogs along the way. We ran into a few friends and played at the park. I say "play," but really all it involved was Cora swinging on various swings for over an hour: the big swing, the red bucket swing, the baby swing, and back again. We took a break for a moment to play on the merry-go-round but it was far too passe for her. The swings are where it's at. She's in a major swinging phase, feels very grown-up, and is trying to figure out how to pump her legs.

The cool thing is that I plan to walk around Green Lake more often. The weather is improving. I don't have constant contractions. And worries about the baby getting enough oxygen have diminished considerably since Monday's doctor appointment (I'll explain that in a second).

My belly is feeling quite large these days: it's a basketball-positioned, right-out-in-front, large and in charge, 31-week-old belly. Phew. I feel huge. And I gained six pounds in 2-1/2 weeks to back up the feeling. Fabulous. (Honestly, as long as the baby is healthy and I'm feeling good, I'm happy. Knowing the path ahead toward being able to run again and having my body back, I can sometimes feel a little, oh, chubbalicious, but that's alright. I can hang, people. It's cool. Just remind me I said that when I stand on the scale two months after delivery and running feels like carrying a backpack of bricks.)

I found out some good news at my doctor's appointment on Monday. At our 18-week ultrasound we had discovered that the umbilical cord was implanted on the edge of the placenta, called "marginal cord insertion," which can sometimes result in growth restriction for the baby due to a potential lack of nutrition and oxygen (since the cord isn't implanted in a more secure, central part of the placenta where the majority of blood vessels are). Considering that Cora was only 5 pounds, 13 ounces at birth, I couldn't help thinking, Well, geez, how much smaller can we go? However, the good news is that our 28-week ultrasound presented great statistics, the baby is well within normal ranges, and also the cord is no longer on the edge of the placenta. My doctor was surprised. She said it was pretty cool, it appeared that the placenta had worked to compensate for the issue and had built itself up around the cord. That made me very happy.

So, 7-9 more weeks to go. I love single digits! I am so excited to meet this little person. We still have a lot to do to prepare.

And, lastly, I'm almost done with my novel. I can't believe I'm finally writing that sentence here. It looks like if all goes well I will, indeed, have a draft before the baby arrives. I have a few more chapters to go, but I can see the end. I'm at 228 pages and anticipate about 30 more. We'll see. I'm getting warmed up here and will soon tuck myself onto our couch and get going.

Confessions

I'm trying to believe that we're going to have one of these in just three months. A lil', wee, curled up, sleepy babe that dozes all day and wakes all night.

I am intermittently overjoyed, shocked (even though this pregnancy was planned), overwhelmed, and awash with feelings of guilt because I dread the sleeplessness yet I can't wait to meet him and cuddle him up in my arms, a real, live, small little being.

Right now he's kicking at my belly, probably protesting the influx of too much food. I seem to be extremely into eating all the time. Breakfast, snack, snack, lunch, snack, snack, snack, dinner, snack. Um, yeah. I just finished a plateful of salt and pepper ridge cut potato chips. They were delish, but not exactly full of the nutrients my growing babe really needs. Fat, salt, starch, yes. Vitamins? I'll have to get back to you on that.

I've also been distracted by how to accomplish a shared room with a 2-1/2-year-old and a baby. Granted, we're not going to attempt the shared room until the littlest is four or six months, but still. Phew. It's intimidating. I have to keep reminding myself that if all else fails, we can move downstairs and put the two kids in separate rooms upstairs. I've staved off anxiety by flipping through a recent spring copy of Pottery Barn Kids, finding peace in the uncluttered representations of perfect shared room bliss. All the combos of pinks and blues and toy boxes and loveliness makes it all look so idyllic.

I'm all for shared rooms. I think it's a great way to get kids to bond and learn important lessons about sharing and boundaries. But the wake-all-night sleep pattern of a newborn and the uninterrupted sleep habits of Cora feel highly at odds with each other.

Still, somehow if I focus on the idea of decorating the room for functionality and harmony, I feel better. I'm not thrilled about painting the room a third time in just a few years, but I feel like it would be a good way to jump start the process. Plus I really want Brian to paint a mural on one of the walls.

Aside from general young family angst, I have a few things I need to get off my chest:

1. I haven't written anything in my novel for TWO WEEKS.

2. One day, instead of writing, I watched Cutting Edge 3 while Cora napped. Yes, in case you are wondering, that is the third in a series of teen ice skating dramas. Don't ask why I chose it. It's enough that I am confessing it to you.

3. We spent nearly $1,100 on food in February, not counting nearly $300 on going out to eat.

4. I recently read (in a magazine in my doctor's office) that cell phone use while pregnant and during young years is linked to a 54% increase in behavioral problems, major depression, and messed up brain waves in kids. It's caused me to feel a bit obsessed and worried about how much I used my phone for conference calls and chats while pregnant with Cora. I think I'm officially going to get a pay-as-you-go phone in April when our two-year contract is up with AT&T. I even turned off the wireless on our modem because supposedly that is bad for their brains, too.

5. I have been looking on Redfin lately. (That's a real estate site.) I'm committed to staying here, but I still like to go there and look at big houses on big lots in areas where I don't think we want to live. Let's face it, I have a problem, people. It's better if I just don't go there, but I do. I'll have to work on that.

6. We are putting in 64 square feet of raised bed gardening space in our backyard and I'm sooo excited about gardening with Cora and harvesting good food. I'm even excited about learning how to can what I hope will be an over-abundance of good produce. However, I am intimidated about growing starts or mapping out how best to use two 4x8 beds, and how to manage Seattle weather. I mean, it was nearly summer on Saturday, 60-degrees and sunny and blue blue blue. Today it snowed. Nothing stuck, but still. Snow? Now? After the crocuses have shot up and the cherry blossoms have started their snowflake descent on our lawn?

7. I miss my body. I miss running and wine and braxton-hicks-free living. I miss feeling in charge of my life.

On the budget front, one thing I've noticed is that January's thrifty days provided some shopping training. Instead of anticipating a cart bursting with hundreds of foods and flavors, I've started to get a better sense of how to walk out of the store for under $100 a week. Along with our CSA deliveries, that means that we might be able to come in at under $150/week, which is great. More on that soon.

Tea and 37,054 words

It's a foggy morning. Clouds hang outside our windows and hover beneath the trees. I have a cup of dark, decaf Irish Breakfast tea, and three whole hours to write. The only sound in the house is the hum of our oil furnace. Cora is at her nanny share this morning. I left her at Jane's house, inspecting their very cool kid's kitchen and chatting about what she planned to eat at snack time.

Our little boy is kicking. That's the first time I've written those words. Our little boy? We found out about a week ago and it's still surreal. I can't get over it, and I'm thrilled.

I've been pretty exhausted this week. I'm finding that I'm just physically more prone to exhaustion in general, and my body will tell me when it's time to stop--usually that means I'm lying in bed with cramps and contractions thinking, "Oh yeah, I'm pregnant. I guess I can't do everything in one day." I'll hit 20 weeks tomorrow--halfway there!

So I've been trying to take it easy...and that brings me to a discussion I had with Brian the other night: Since when did making burritos turn into a two-hour dinnertime adventure?

Answer: Since I started roasting and pressure cooking the rice with spices and chopped tomatoes, and soaking the beans overnight and pressure cooking them with garlic and cumin seeds, and making refried beans with fried onions, and making tortillas from scratch, and mashing the avocado, and cooking the corn, and cutting the tomatoes and making the salsa, and chopping lettuce. This was after a day running around town and parks with Cora. The meal was delicious but let me tell you, that is a weekend meal. No more Thursday burritos of that caliber for awhile. I was lying on my bed with contractions before dinner even began. I AM PREGNANT. Remind me of that sometime, will ya? Burritos used to be a lot easier when we had canned beans and premade tortillas and a quick pot of rice on the stove.

So. The food has been delicious, this budgeting experience has been very valuable toward helping us realign our thinking--how much do we spend? How do we eat? What are our goals when it comes to food? I'm enjoying the whole thing. However, I have to make sure the meals are less labor intensive to avoid going into premature labor, you know what I mean? Simple will be the goal and theme next month--both in preparation and ingredients. I'm excited about it--sort of like a new monthly challenge. I want to try making more meals with fewer flavors, highlighting herbs and sauces and fresh ingredients. I'm working on our weekly menu right now, but I'm not sure when I'll post it. Hopefully soon. I'll do a monthly budget recap next week, too.

Yesterday as I was writing, I looked down at the page counter and was surprised to find that I'm nearly to 120 pages. Slowly, slowly goes the tortoise. So, I'm returning to my tea and my 37,054 words, and hope this morning will let me get lost in that adventure until Noon.

Quiet day

This pregnancy has been one marked more frequently by fatigue, cramping, and spotting. Yesterday night I felt exhausted and crampy and sure enough by the end of the day I was spotting again. Not a lot, but it stresses me out for obvious reasons. Every time it happens I worry--even just a tiny bit--that this is the moment when the beautiful pregnancy is signaling that it's almost over. That said, it helps that this is my fourth or fifth time spotting with this pregnancy, and I can still feel the baby kicking.

I decided to make it an easy day, as low-key as possible. Cora and I ended up sipping chamomile tea after breakfast, painting at her easel in the kitchen, playing with her dollhouse (which today mainly meant walking the paper dollhouse dog on a long leash around the house) and catching a break of sun and springlike weather in the backyard. We ate a leisurely lunch of burritos stuffed with chicken, kale, corn, olives, and cheese (she claimed she didn't like the kale but she ate it anyway) and then sat back on the couch under a blanket and read 10 stories.

She's battling sleep right now. Even though I'm tired, I'm downstairs doing this instead of trying to nap in the next-door room. Vegetable broth is cooking on the stove and lentils are soaking for tonight's soup. We'll bake a new GF sandwich bread this afternoon when she's done napping.

My sister sent me home the other day with several books, and I'm well into The People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, which is proving to be the perfect combination of mystery, adventure, and culture for cozy January nights.

These mild, Northwest mid-winter sunbreaks confuse our plants. I noticed today that, along with a million weeds, we have bluebells pushing through the ground. Bluebells in January? The earth is soft and everything smells rich. Cora and I talked about our apple and pear trees and the site for our garden (I'm so excited to start growing food!), and wandered around studying birds and rocks and moss.

I think all my pregnancy hormones have catapulted me into a relative state of domestic bliss. This is nothing like the wanderlust I felt last year. I've never felt so much contentment from cooking and quiet afternoons of writing.

Now if only the little lady would fall asleep and I could write a few paragraphs of my story.

Gratitude and an oversize lime

Once again, after taking a hiatus from writing here (and, alas, writing in general), I feel a bit tongue-tied. That's what happens when I take a break. It's like living in a new city and knowing only a few people, hiding away and being quiet for days and then showing up at the grocery store and running into an acquaintance. Talking at a time like that can feel canned, like you're listening to your own voice and wondering whose it is.

Where do I start. Ooh, I want to dive right in but instead I think I'll take a more meandering path, by starting with the fact that this fall here in Seattle has been a wrinkled experience. Unlike my sentiments in my last post, I have settled into the reality of not going to the park with Cora and running three miles in the sun on a daily basis. Still, I remember the summer enough to be sad about having to say goodbye. I really miss running. It made me feel happy, and strong, and incredibly motivated. I've also become more accustomed to the rain and even willing to listen to people explain to me why they like it. I especially like listening to it at night, drumming on our rooftop and windows and reminding me how content I am in this house while Cora dreams in the room next door.

I've been cooking a lot more, too, which is characteristic of this time of year. I've made a fair number of soups. Chicken soup, noodle soup, chili, tortilla soup, vegetable soup. And roasted vegetables, tamale pie, lasagna, enchiladas, noodle casserole, baked mac 'n cheese and quiches, salmon and potatoes.

Oh, and amazingly delicious gluten-free bread based off this awesome recipe from Gluten Free Green Mommy. It's really good and worth the long list of flours and baking agents.

We've been using the oven a lot more and it reminds me that it's one of my favorite ways to cook. Right now I'm thinking about diving into the world of sauces--white sauce, brown sauce, reduced sauce, balsamic, mustard, curry. Sauce.

All that cooking would lead one to believe that all I've wanted to do is eat, right? But no. I've been mainly dragging through the days, dealing with a fondly remembered phase of life, one that involves feeling tired and sick in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening. Sound familiar? That leads me to the big news: I'm 11 weeks pregnant and aside from a yucky cold, I'm feeling much, much better. I just read that at 11 weeks the baby is the size of an oversize lime or a plum. How cool is that?! That's the reason I haven't written; I haven't had anything else I wanted to write about but every time I sat down to talk about being pregnant, I remembered there were still a number of people who didn't know, and it seemed unkind that they'd find out on my blog. So I'd delete the post, log off, and take a nap instead. There are still a number of people who don't know, but since this forum is meant to be very much of a diary for me, I've decided not to worry about it so much.

Eleven weeks. We decided to have another baby, and then I was pregnant. I felt pregnant pretty much immediately, and took a pregnancy test six days before my period was due. I will never forget reading the results in the morning and shrieking out to the kitchen to hug Brian, then Cora (she had no idea why, but she was excited nonetheless).

As any seasoned parent knows, being pregnant the second time around is fairly different. I'm certainly not seasoned, though; it's a new world to me. For one thing, I've just been a heck of a lot more tired. Keeping up with Cora, carrying her, hugging her, chasing her, tickling her, cooking and cleaning, and doing it all day long while feeling close to vomiting is more physically tiring, for me at least, than it was working at a full-time office job. However, I do get to take afternoon naps, which has been luxurious.

Also, this pregnancy has been more physically challenging in other ways. I've had spotting and cramping, which can be more common in a second pregnancy, particularly an active one, and there have been days when I have been so tired I haven't known how to approach the onset of another day. I haven't been running and the early-morning writing I loved so much has been nixed for obvious reasons (the notion of rising at 5:15 sounded about as lovely as eating a dirty shoe, and anyway I can't drink all the caffeine necessary to make it work).

Luckily, my all-day sickness started to wane at about 8-1/2 or 9 weeks, which was much earlier than it was with Cora. And, lo and behold, we've seen the heartbeat of our new little bean. There is nothing more miraculous, me thinks, than the image of a tiny person in my abdomen, lodged there cozily, with a beating heart. I've reentered that stage of going for a walk with my small family and suddenly realizing that there are four of us present. Disbelief still reigns sometimes, and June 18th feels like a long time away, but as my faith has grown that this little person will, indeed, be sticking with us, I am getting more and more thrilled to think about the things to come: butterfly movements, an ever-growing belly, elbows in the ribs, kicking and turning, and silly food cravings that must be met. More than anything, I am looking forward to dreaming about who this little person will become, what its little hand will look like against Brian's, and how it will be for Cora to hold her sibling for the first time.

For now, I am trying not to think (too much, at least), about the sleep deprivation and 2-hour feedings, the challenging world of nursing an infant and trying not to fall asleep while entertaining a 2-1/2-year-old, and all the roller coaster rides associated with becoming a bigger family. That's why it takes nine months. Plenty of time to get as adjusted to and prepared for the idea as possible.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. You'll find hundreds of gratitude lists online these days. I have deleted this list several times because it feels embarrassingly narcissistic to yammer on about my life in a list (because, ultimately, I'm not going to list things beyond my own personal microcosm). And also because the list somehow sounds a bit like the dedications I made to people my Senior year in high school. However, I'm stubbornly keeping it here for the sake of posterity. And because it fits with the premise of this blog--to be openly thankful, and to dream. So, I am joining all those other online lists sending my gratitude up to the sky to mingle with yours and season the months and years ahead.

Gratitude for:

*Cora's hands, her wit, her sensitivity, her bright eyes and mind, her nearly-2-year-old response of "No!" to nearly everything I ask, her desire to party with her animals all day long, and her ability to dance and jump at the same time.

*This new babe in my belly, working so hard daily to rapidly divide its cells and become a PERSON.

*Brian's love and patience, his depth of creativity and his ability to work hard on anything he sets his mind to. Especially how he manages to come home smiling every single day and be funny and silly and sweep Cora up in his arms and give her a huge hug. He's making memories for Cora every time he does it, and I love him dearly for that.

*The ability to have choices in how we construct our lives right now.

*Brian's job. I am so grateful that he loves what he does, that he has found a good company to work for, and that he lives out his dreams in small and big ways each day.

*This house. I like the way the living room feels at night when we wrap our feet under blankets and read books or talk. I love tucking ourselves into our bed and listening to the wind and rain.

*My family, immediate and extended, especially for my mom and sis who live nearby and are so invested in being close.

*My friends. I miss many of them and wish we saw each other more often, but I love following their interesting lives and seeing where our paths intersect.

*Our collective health. This has been an odd health year for Brian, Cora, and me, but I think in many ways it has been valuable. It's helped me to focus on the power of the mind and the importance of being positive, the relative strength of the human body, and the ability to repair oneself.

*The ability to fill our refrigerator with nourishing food, and to know there are friends who will join us to eat, celebrate life, and fill our house with laughter and giggling children.

*Last, but not least, the enduring interest in writing. The book won't be done by the end of this year, but I know it's still there, waiting to be written. I'm thankful the idea is percolating and willing to wait.