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LuLu's Land of the Fey

All the news that bores the pants off anyone who cares.

Monday, June 02, 2003

Robert suggested I keep a blog of our having a kid, so I guess that's what I'm doing here. Not that I'm pregnant yet--we'll save that kind of excitement for later.

Right now, it's all about preparing. Reading up on the subject. (Will would be so proud of me--he reads about 10 books on any new endeavor he begins, and I can only imagine that, were he pregnant, he'd be reading What to Expect When You're Expecting and The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy, et al.)

But I digress. My point is, I'm studying. Preparing. Psyching myself up. Etc.

I can't imagine what my life is going to be like a year from now. I mean, I can imagine the obvious. Big, sweaty, bulbous. Feeling like a Weeble-Wobble. But the changes that are going to come, changes that I can't even imagine, much less try to figure out how to assimilate into my life--those changes scare the shit out of me.

The pain thing scares me pretty badly, as well. I'd be lying if I said differently. I shat a turd the other day, after a night of heavy drinking and eating bread and sugary stuff (I don't eat carbs, so that's kind of important information) and it hurt so much, I was afraid I was going to pass out on the toilet. I mean, I was at the point of vomiting, it hurt so much. (And no, it wasn't hangover--I've had this kind of pukey-feeling excrement before with nary a drop of alcohol.) If one dump makes me feel that much pain, what's it going to be like to have a larger thing passing through one of my orifices? Yikes, indeed.

So I'm trying to do it the right way, though. Mostly. I refuse to give up caffeine completely. All the books I've read so far say that a little caffeine isn't bad for the baby, so I don't see why I can't start my day off with a cup of coffee like usual. I just need to find something else to drink for the rest of the day instead of the Diet Dr. Peppers I am so fond of. Maybe I can go back to Diet Root Beer. I'm already taking vitamins that have folic acid, among other things, but I'm sure when I visit my OB/GYN, she'll want me to take some other, special prenatal vitamins. Which is fine--she's the expert--I'm just the chick who's willing to let her husband knock her up so she can have a kid. Ask me about art or literature, I'm something of an authority. I can talk about those things and know what I'm doing, usually.

Childbirth? Don't know squat. Which is pretty funny, since I'm 27 this year and I have high school students I teach who know more about it than I do. I'm definitly one of the older moms I'll know. In East Texas, being 27 and married for 9 years without a kid is tantamount to announcing to the world that you are barren and unable to produce any fruits of your relationship. Tell people that you chose not to have kids all those years, and you might as well admit to eating babies. At the very least, you will be given dirty looks at family gatherings and people will feel it is their duty to tell you what a shitty person you are for not giving your parents grandchildren. Point out that your parents are grandparents several times over through your siblings (which is true for both my husband and myself) and they just roll their eyes, as if they have realized how stupid you are and wish that they could make you grasp the gravity of the situation.

Robert and I are going to have perhaps the most anticpated baby of all time. The Phantom Menace of babies. Our families have been asking for this gift--grandchildren! nieces and nephews! more nuts for the family tree!!--since the second day of our married life. In my defense, I was 18 years old and quite frankly, the idea of spitting out a living, breathing, screaming being scared the bejesus out of me. Also in my defense, it still does. The pain is the least of it. That's a short time, compared to the rest of the production. I mean, I teach teenagers, for crissakes. I know what these little buggers turn into. Even those with the best parents and the best raising have moments of shit-headedness. I always half-joke that any time I feel like I want kids, I just go in to work and the feeling completey evaporates.

But the other day, I was at a family get-together (not officially a reunion, but a big gathering, nonetheless) in which I got to visit with my Aunt Cathy's 4 kids, and their 9 respective kids, as well as my brother and his 2 kids. Eleven kids ranging from 1 month to 13 years old. To say that the weekend was loud would be a gross understatement. There were little boys running through the house, screaming like wild indians. There were prima donna little girls, all swishing around and acting like the prom queens I always made fun of.

And there was my new nephew, a little over a month old and totally amazing. I couldn't put him down. I changed diapers. I fed him. I rocked him to sleep. I sang to him. I told everyone I was getting my baby fix so that I wouldn't feel the need to have one any time soon. The old "I'm borrowing your kid until he screams his head off so I won't want one" trick. And they bought it--why wouldn't they? I've been giving them the "I'll get around to having kids one day" speech for too long for them to get their hopes up. They have given up on me and Robert ever feeling like we want to have kids. They are all hoping we accidentally get pregnant because they are convinced that that is the only way they will ever get any kids out of us.

The turning point, I think, for me at least, was one point during the weekend when Robert was holding the baby. Don't remember how it came about--the kid was probably just shoved into his arms at some point for a photo op or something. Dunno. Anyway, I looked across the room and saw my husband holding an infant. And suddenly, it just came very clearly to me. This is it. This is the time I was waiting for. This is that magic moment I've been telling myself would happen someday in which I was suddenly convinced that I really need to have kids and moreover, I really want to have kids, but that I kind of figured I was lying to myself about.

I said very quietly to him, "I want one of these," and left the room.

And that was it. We didn't talk about it on the way home because my dad was with us and neither of us wanted to make a life altering decision in front of an audience. We stayed up late that night, well past midnight (which, for us, is quite late) and hashed out all the reasons not to have a kid. Then we listed all the reasons we wanted to have a kid. The pro list was quite a bit shorter than the con list. Didn't matter, though. We were resolute and quite solidly decided.

Flash forward to today. We have been looking at information on the internet. Robert has been crunching numbers, as that seems to be what men enjoy about the whole pregnancy process most. I have been reading books. We have discussed names for boys and girls. We have decided that we need to wait until late August/early September to start trying, since I teach and I really don't want to have the baby right before the school year is out, especially as I'm beginning a new AP Studio Art program this year and it's pretty crucial that it go as smoothly as possible. I have a prenatal counseling appointment with my OB/GYN at the end of this month. So I guess the ball is in motion. We can still chicken out before fall arrives and decide not to do it. But right now, I don't want to.

I had a dream a few months ago. I guess it was a dream. I think it was a sign.

I'm a pretty notoriously bad gardener. I kill plants. Dead. I walk through nurseries at WalMart and other stores and plants that I'm looking at kind of wilt, slumping over until I walk past them, fearing that I will choose them to take home with me to die. It's pretty embarrassing, but it seems to be true.

I had this dream, though, that I was being told to try gardening again. And don't just do the wimpy stuff like transplanting established plants into a flower bed. I was supposed to grow some seeds. I was given the impression that if I could somehow make something grow in the ground, then that would be my sign that it was time for me to start having kids. That I was responsible enough for kids, as it were. That maybe I wouldn't forget to feed them or change their diapers or something.

Anyway, I told my husband about the dream, and I told my best friend, and then I forgot about it. Done. Fini. Over. But then we started trying to sell the house. (I live an hour away from my work and driving sucks.) And one of the things I decided would be good to do was try to plant some plants out in a defunct flower bed I made several years ago. Nothing big. A rosebush. Some marigolds. A jasmine vine over in the yard. No big deal.

My husband reminds me of the dream and asks me if I'm trying to send him a signal. "Nope. Just want to put some pretty flowers in the flower bed so that people who come by to see the house will see something pretty and maybe it will help convince them that they need to buy the house." True enough.

But then I saw some seeds I wanted. Now, in my defense, I have wanted moonflowers and four o'clocks and other vining things for quite some time. I couldn't find any at the nurseries, though. So I bought the seeds, much to the chagrin of my husband ("Are you sure you're not telling me something?"). Soaked them in water, like you are supposed to do. Put them in dirt, like you are supposed to do. Nurtured them, like you are supposed to do. They got amazingly out of control on the workbench in my garage with the heat lamp focused on them and me watering them.

Frankly, it scared me. I've never had any luck with seeds. So I let them die. I stopped watering them. I would leave the lamp off for days at a time. And most of them died. The four o'clocks started wilting and withering. But the moonflowers didn't. Curious, I brought them out of the garage, into the sunshine on my back deck and set them out. As luck would have it (for them), it rained off and on for the next few days. So they got sunlight, water, and air. And they are thriving. They are almost a foot tall now, with no help from me. They have shiny, bright leaves on them, and each stalk has several groupings of leaves instead of one measly leaf on each stalk (as I've had before).

I haven't killed them. I remember to water them a few times a week. I turn them around periodically so that they can grow in the other direction and make their stalks strong on all sides. In the other flower bed, the marigolds are, while not thriving, still hanging in. The rose bush, after me thinking it was dead all this time, has put out new growth and has some shiny green new leaves growing its middle. Even the jasmine seems to be doing pretty ok. I haven't killed them.

I didn't think about the dream until the other day when I was telling my best friend about me and my husband suddenly deciding that it was time to have kids. He said, "Well, I guess the Goddess was trying tell you something, after all." To which I replied, "Um, what?" And he reminded me of the dream.

I don't have prophetic dreams. I don't see the future. Never have. I believe some people do, but I've never been one of those people. But this once, I'm wondering if maybe I didn't see a glimpse of my path?

Anyway, I think that's enough rambling for now. I plan to add to this blog a lot when I finally do get pregnant. I'll probably do a little bit between now and then, but mostly, I'm going to just do what I've been doing. Read. Study. Prepare. Psych myself out. Etc.

I'll figure it out.

.: posted by amy 10:57 PM