Bliss of Life

I’m sick.

It’s probably a sinus infection from all the cedar pollen (and my body’s unwillingness to get along with it.) We’ve spent the last two days in bed, me and baby, drinking lots of orange juice and snuggling with Meester Kitty. Last night, Ben had to be a single parent in our prenatal parenting class with Carrie Contey. He came back full of information about lotus birth, doulas, and water birthing.

Since I’ve had to take it easy, the baby seems a little confused why we’re not getting up in the morning and going about our day. She/he tries to make up for my lack of activity by doing some somersaults and high kicks. And even though we’re having some kitty troubles, the baby and Meester are becoming fast friends. They’ve been playing a little game for the past two days. Kitty comes and lays on my belly and the baby starts poking up at him until I change positions or kitty gets bored. I think they’re going to be great friends.

So tomorrow while Ben is using some PTO (paid time off) to knock out painting the trim in the baby’s room/yoga room (an activity that he shared his feelings  in his blog about just yesterday) I’ll be in bed, making fast work of yet another box of tissues.

Yesterday afternoon my friend Elizabeth, a.k.a. Guru Datta, gave birth at home to a 9 lb. baby girl. Elizabeth is already a super mom with a 10 year old daughter and a 6 year old son. She is one of those women who can do forty thousand things in a single day and still be the picture of grace. I am so grateful for her friendship during my pregnancy. She has been the bulk of my pregnancy support system. Right now, she is starting her 40 days of rest with her baby and family, which is traditional after the birth of a baby in the Kundalini Yoga lineage, so it may be a few weeks before I get to see her and meet her new daughter.
As for me, I’m still shaking my fists at that darn cedar pollen. Sleeping is difficult right now, because my sinuses are working overboard, but I was able to grab a few hours of shut eye last night. A cold front blew in yesterday bringing some serious pollen stirring winds with it. Yesterday, the forecast said that rain was on the way, but so far no such luck. So it looks like another snotty day for me.

I woke up this morning feeling sick. My first thought was that my loving father shared his cold with us, me and the baby, but a trip to the doctor revealed that it’s just a cedar allergy. I haven’t had problems with seasonal allergies in a couple years. It kind of threw me off guard. Judging by the cedar pollen count, I’m sure I’m not the only one who is dealing with unexpected seasonal allergies right now.

A pollen count of 100 is considered high. It is currently over 9,000.

Since taking antihistamines are out of the question right now, I’ve decided to just take it easy. Instead of painting the baby’s playroom/ yoga room, I’m hanging out in bed working on the baby’s first knitted blanket.

Baby seems to be feeling fine, kicking and squirming away. In the past couple days, the baby has started moving around a lot whenever Ben is talking. It’s like the baby is reminding me that the whole family is together.

And just for kicks, here is a picture of my current nemesis. Look at it standing there pretending to be so sweet and innocent.

Some folks are cat people — some are dog people. We are both. It’s our version of a blended family. And like any family that is expecting a new member, we are experiencing some growing pains. One by one, our four-legged family members started to sense that something is up, but it was the smallest of our four-legged-family members, Meester Kitty, who caught on first. I’m not sure what clued him in, but since he figured it out, it’s been one kitty challenge after another.

Having lived with Meester all but the first couple weeks of his ten year life, I can say that he is the sweetest kitty EVER. That being said, he’s having some kitty trouble dealing with the coming changes. At first, he became clingy, but just with me. If I was sitting on the couch or resting in bed, he was in my lap or on my chest kneading. Then clingy also included the unsightly behavior of barbering, which is pretty much what it sounds like — excessive grooming to the point of biting or licking off fur. He’s done it before when he gets a hold of foods that disagree with him or when certain seasonal allergens are in the air, but he’s never done it to this extent. The poor kitty looked like a straight haired, long-tailed, hunchy-backed poodle. It wasn’t pretty. So after trying various homeopathic and flower essence remedies, I pulled out the big guns, Benadryl spray. Because the spray is sticky and mats on his shorn fur, it always gets him to stop barbering, at least temporarily.

Vs.

So now, where there once was just skin, pasty-white kitty skin, there is now fur. But the kitty challenges don’t end there. Sensing that his self-mutilation wasn’t getting across the full extent of his current anxiety and irritation about our growing family, he decided to make the whole house his litter box. I’ll spare you the play by play, but I will say that sniffing out the location of cat pee has become a stinky game of hide and seek.

I am open for suggestions.

I’m throwing in the towel for a weeklyish journal. I’ve fallen behind and while I can still catch up, my mind just isn’t allowing me to think in those kind of terms anymore. Most days I feel I like I have so much to do like, paint what will be the babies playroom and start knitting blankets and socks, but all my desires are usually cut short by the need to eat or rest. So instead I’m changing my format to short little updates that will be easier and faster for my torn attention span.

As for me, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m slowly getting over another bout of food poisoning. The frustrating thing is that I can get sick from things no one else will, simply because my digestive system is taking about one fifth the amount space it used to. But there are no complaints here. I’m enjoying my new tenant.

In the past week, I’ve realized that what I thought were muscle spasms in my diaphragm caused by stretching, is actually a little hand or foot reaching up to check out the unused space below my ribs. Most of the time the baby seems to hangout below my belly button and occasionally, I’ll feel a strong thump just above my navel, so when I do feel a sensation of movement below my sternum, it catches me by surprise.

As far as the baby goes, she or he has started doing a lot of moving at random times of the day and night, and I love it. I have a habit of saying, “Hey baby!” and “What are doing in there baby?” every time I feel movement. The other night I woke up to the baby doing what felt like repeated black flips. I was trying out a new pillow that allows a pregnant woman to lay at an angle that resembles resting on your stomach, when I started to feel the baby moving. My linear-thought-challenged-pregnant brain thought, oh, the baby’s rearranging the furniture. She/he probably needs to use the space more efficiently.

Here is a picture of our new pregnancy/co-sleeping pillow and two of it’s many uses.

Baby Research

Ben hasn’t been at work since December 20th and he doesn’t go back until January 7th. This couldn’t come at a better time, since I can’t seem to get enough of him. I feel kind of like a clingy teenager in love. Other people can come and go, but if I had it my way, Ben would with be with me every moment. From what I hear, it’s normal, but it was completely unexpected by me. I’m used to him traveling a few times a month, usually without much warning ahead of time. So being at home alone is something I got used to a couple years ago. But now, if Ben’s home with me, I want him in the same room — preferably, right by my side. If I see him sitting at the dining room table, doing something on his computer that isn’t his homework, I feel rejected. There is no sense to it. It’s just how I feel. Lucky for me, he doesn’t seem to mind too much.

The entire two-and-a-half weeks that he was off work, I barely let him out of my reach for more than a few hours . We spent the week making research trips to Babies R Us, Austin Baby Store, and Ikea. I had no idea how much cloth diapers have changed since the days when my little brother used them. Now they come prefolded and prefitted with little elastic leg openings. Some have built in covers, some don’t. And they come in all different colors. The ones we decided on are prefitted with built in covers and could only be engineered by rocket scientist. An elaborate snap system that allows them to expand with the baby, so you don’t have to buy three or four different sizes.

It feels good getting the baby necessities sorted out, but even though I have a couple baby outfits hanging in my closet and a growing belly whose current occupant likes to do somersaults while I eat, there is still a dreamlike quality to all of this. It’s surreal.  My guess is that this will change later in the pregnancy.  Judging by look on my friend Elizabeth’s face, who is ten days away from her due date and already talking about doing acupuncture to induce labor if the baby doesn’t come in the next six days, that dreamlike quality disappears somewhere in the eighth month.

Road Tripping Away the Holidays

The weekend before Christmas Ben and I packed up the dogs and headed down to Corpus Christi to see my brother Christopher. We also surprised my Mom who went with my step-father JJ. She had no idea we would be Corpus. Christopher’s two-bedroom apartment was a little cozy with all of us staying there, but everyone was very generous with their sleeping needs, so that I would be as comfortable as possible. Christopher slept on the couch, Ben and I took his bed, and My mom and JJ shared twin sized guest bed. My bachelor little brother even did some holiday decorating. He put up a Christmas tree. Yes, it was decorated with shotgun shells and fishing lures, but that was more decorating than we did at our house.

We left Corpus on the Sunday before Christmas Eve and headed for Houston to see Ben’s family, but we took a detour to Padre Island Beach, so the dogs could run. It took Dexter, our blind miniature schnauzer, a few minutes for him to realize that he could go anywhere he wanted without running into anything. He ran zigzagging lines from the water to the sand dunes. It was like he was five years younger. After that we made a pit stop in Port Lavaca to see my Aunt Ollie, her husband Joey, and their little girl Lauren. We were also greeted by my Uncle Henry and his partner Robert. We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Ben’s Family. It was a good visit.

The Aches-and-Pains Update

While I really appreciated having the opportunity to see all of our family, it took a lot out of me. I felt so much like a scrooge this year. I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t spreading much Christmas cheer. The hours spent in the car were hard on my body. The car ride made me aware that sitting upright for extended periods of time puts a strain on the muscles along the backside of my ribs, causing cramps and spasms. Yuck! And my lower back, which already tends to sway, feels like it might snap in two, if I spend too much time on my feet. Also, I’m having a hard time keeping my sacrum stable. The ligaments in my sacrum, which are normally loose, are all over the place right now. The slightest unaligned movement, like lifting a laundry basket or getting into our bed that reaches hip height on me can cause them to slip. The sensation of walking with my sacrum out of alignment reminds of pushing down on the break the pedal of a car when the brake pads are completely worn down — metal on metal, or rather bone on bone. And just to make my pity list complete, the bones of my feet have started protesting. They’re having to carry almost 30% more weight than they are used to, and they seem to be handling it about as gracefully as I handled the holidays. But even as I type this, I can feel our sweet baby swimming around inside of me, making it all seem so trivial.

120th Day Celebration

December 16th marked the 120th day since the conception of our baby. In the Kundalini Yoga world, the 120th day marks the day that the baby’s soul enters the body and remains there. For me, the day felt like a dream. Several friends came to chant and offer their intentions and blessings for the baby and us. The energy in our house was rich with love. After that, it was time to chow.

Thanks to Ari, our resident yogini photographer, I have these pictures to mark the day.

Siri Guru Dev, Dawn, and Kirti

Our meditation circle.

More of our pictures can be seen on Ari’s flicker blog

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whatnot/sets/72157603484659340/

Just one Pea

Something happens when you’re pregnant that will almost never happen at any other time. People you barely know, and even those you have never met, will come out of hiding just to tell you their birthing horror stories. If it’s a scary birth story they want to tell, it doesn’t matter if they’ve ever actually given birth. They know someone who knows someone who has been born, and boy were they lucky because ______ (fill in the blank with another birthing horror story.) And if you happen to be planning a home birth, you get all sorts of comments from well meaning people like, “I hope you’re close to a hospital,” and “I have a friend who had her first child at home, but she’s pregnant again and trying to decide what to do with her child while she’s giving birth at home, because things could go really, really wrong, and the child would be there!” As if being pregnant makes you immune to thinking about the what-if scenarios.

For the most part, I’ve managed to dismiss most of these kinds of comments, with one exception — the one that went something like, “Are you sure there’s only one in there?” The first couple of times I heard it, it was mildly amusing. Then it became slightly insulting.  I began to feel like I was the size of a moose, and what was there to do about it? Nothing. Until finally, I succumbed to worrying. If there was more than one baby, I would need a hospital birth, something I’d have to prepare for emotionally and mentally. I think it may be the opposite for a lot of western women, but for me, hospitals are a place where I find it challenging to maintain my own sense of power. So to ward off the negative mind, we decided to have an ultrasound.

The ultrasound went well. It was really fast, but it was also a little uncomfortable on the belly. The baby was super active the whole time, and we could see all its little baby parts clear as day. We chose not to find out the sex, because I like surprises and for the life of me I haven’t been able to properly surprise Ben in the 10 years we’ve been together.

So all is well in baby-growing land. And just in case you’ve never been pregnant, or you encounter someone who is planning her pregnancy and birth in a completely different manner than you did, here is a piece of unsolicited advice. No matter how much you love and adore her, please do not burden her with your concerns. She has enough of her own. The only thing she needs to hear, is that she looks radiant.