Archives: March 2007
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Well, my dawgs have come and gone... it was so, so awesome having them here. However, there is a definite difference between being in your late twenties and hoping to make the most of Paris while on vacation, as opposed to being in your late twenties and seven months pregnant and in the middle of exams. All things considered, I held up very well. But the proof that I couldn't have kept the madness up much longer lies in these two facts:
1. I almost fell asleep while watching "Grey's Anatomy" the day after their departure (crime of all crimes!) and
2. I actually DID fall asleep at eight o'clock the following evening. And woke up at seven am. THAT'S 11 HOURS.
I went through a slight dip in morale after their departure, partially because it is normal to feel the sudden shift in energy levels but also partially because I had been putting off thinking about a lot of things while they were here that I didn't necessarily want to think about. Nothing like hilarious conversation and constant activity to distract you for a solid week. No worries, though: the slump lasted 48 hours -- at least 20 of which I spent sleeping, and now I am back on target.
Two things have helped with this.
The first is that my job has picked up in momentum. My boss managed to procure some Very Fancy Art and has had me calling Very Important People in Important Cities like London and New York to find out about said Fancy Art's worth. This is totally insane to me, as I am not the type to call up and ask about important artworks, but here I am. Doing it. I've conquered a fair amount of I'm-not-good-enough demons this week, basically forcing myself to get over my meekness and just act like I know what I'm doing. (shhh -- I think I fooled them!)
The second is that I went to see the midwife today. At my birthing center, 80% of your prenatal care is done by the midwives, and you sort of meet them on a rotating basis. I didn't have such a good experience with the last one, mainly because she would not let the subject of The Boy and his lack of enthusiasm drop. I know that they're supposed to treat the whole person and not neglect the potential emotional and psychological factors at play. But I also just didn't feel like telling her all about the drama, and overall didn't vibe with her at all. And then when she said, "We should slow down. Am I talking too fast for you?" I actually thought I might get a little huffy with her. I didn't, but still. I didn't want all of my midwife experiences to be like that.
Today's midwife was a whole other story. I just can't explain her energy. She was so calming and soothing, and I felt like I could tell her anything and she would have had just the right response. In fact, I did tell her a fair amount more than the previous midwife, and she was great about it. Clearly, she has chosen the right career. Plus, she gave me the good news that I have only gained half a kilo since my last visit, so my weight gain is now right on target. The irony being, of course, that I had completely stopped watching over what I eat. So it goes to show that your body is going to do whatever it's going to do; might as well relax about it and have an extra helping of granola.
I'm getting put on iron supplements as she thinks I might be slightly anemic (it seems like I ALWAYS am) and then I have to go through the not-so-pleasant gestational diabetes test next week. But otherwise, all is good.
She asked me today, "So, is the father tall?"
"Yes," I answered, "Just a little bit taller than me. But much thinner!"
She laughed and said, "You're going to have such a beautiful baby."
And I don't know why, but it was the first time anybody has said that to me where I really got excited -- almost like she was capable of predicting that sort of thing as a midwife, nevermind the fact that she has never met The Boy. It was something in her tone, and the way she said it as she was searching along my belly to see where he was -- something I couldn't quite place that made me actually believe she knew it already. It made me positively giddy.
I really, really hope she delivers little Romulus. I would love to have someone so calm there with me. According to my friend who also gave birth at this birthing center, the only people in the delivery room are the mama, the papa (or partner/friend/support type), the midwife, and a newborn nurse. She says it's very intimate -- and I can see how it would be more so than in a big hospital with 12 interns staring at your crotch hoping to learn something. So I would love it if I could be working alongside somebody who makes me feel confident and calm; and I believe the midwife from today would do so.
A litlte busy over here. In a good way. Time is flying with the visitors. That always happens, what with the walking and the scenic outings and the outrageous conversation. Lots of activity and laughing and then I drop into bed at night and pass out cold. Mysteriously, I cannot sleep past 7:45 am anymore. Even on a Sunday.
Also, the sun just came out.
And tomorrow I have a midterm I have to study for.
Ironic, after three consecutive days of cold and rain.
Omar and Fred (not the French version) are on their way here from the old U.S. of A. I am so excited to see them -- and I can't even remember the last time the three of us were in the same room together. Good times ahead.
Unfortunately, I did something, somehow, sometime and absolutely destroyed my back, and I am afraid it will hinder my ability to fully enjoy my time with them. I'm having serious pain, just below my shoulder blade on the right side. There's not a whole lot I can do for it besides sit and lie down a lot, but I'm not doing very well with either solution. If it doesn't get better by the end of the week, I am going to have to see someone.
I took this upcoming Thursday and Friday off of work because your homies are only in town once every 5 years or so. I plan on spending much of my extended weekend at the movies or sitting on my ass -- I will chalk it up to back recovery time. I have a midterm on Monday but otherwise I am going to let my four-day pause serve as a genuine break. I'm getting the feeling that April is going to be a tough month.
My only major project is to head out to the Marché Saint Pierre to buy some fabric. I have projects!
Otherwise, this weekend was a serious doozie emotionally. The Boy and I did some painful but important talking, but it wasn't easy, and I think I am just now recovering from it. I did some crying, which was probably both healthy and necessary, but it sure would be nice to have everything be all hearts and bunnies.
Romulus is now big enough that I can actually see - from the outside - when he moves, sometimes even being able to make out which direction he's going. I always wonder what he could be thinking -- "Much more comfortable over here by the bladder, indeed. Let me just see if I can get my feet juuuuuust right so that every time mama moves, she feels like she could pee her pants." Sometimes he really works up a sweat in there, burrowing around and clearly getting in some good cardio. Yesterday in class, he was moving for a solid half hour, the most yet. I was almost self-concious about it because I could clearly see my stomach rising and falling THROUGH MY SWEATER. Trippy.
Ok, I have to head out and make some last minute preparations before my crew gets here tomorrow in the early am. I realized today that they might want some pillows or something.
Thrice in this pregnancy, I have gotten a terrible, screaming headache within 15-20 minutes of waking up. I've never gotten migraines, but hopefully this is the closest I'll get. When I get these raging pains, I am especially sensitive to light, so I just get in bed for awhile and close my eyes (usually fall asleep) and an hour or so later I am all better. I can't figure out what it's due to, exactly, except perhaps an extreme case of dehydration. I've noticed that I'm usually pretty dehydrated in the mornings, no matter how much water I drink the previous day. My very well researched medical solution is just to chug the water, rest my eyes, and feel better shortly afterwards. At least thus far it has worked.
This morning's episode, however, was unfortunate, as I had class from 9-12 and then the same class again from 12.30 to 4.00. I woke up at 7.20 and was back in bed by 8.00 -- I normally have to leave the house at 8.15. But there was no way I could sit on a hard wooden bench in a bright yellow room in that state. I said, "You know what, kid? You're pregnant. Stay home when you don't feel good." So I did. I have a hard time allowing myself to do this, but it seemed like the right decision at the time.
I woke up at 10.00 a new woman. As I had skipped the first class, I couldn't exactly go to the second, so suddenly I had hours and hours stretched out before me. For a moment, the thought of all that free time terrified me. What am I going to do with six extra hours? And then I started dreaming up ideas (go to the movies? find out about cell phones for my upcoming visitors? web design?) when I remembered that the Salon du bébé was taking place this weekend.
Read more »My apartment has two rooms: one big main room with an open kitchen and sitting area, and then a bedroom. The main room is extremely quiet, nothing but the hum of the refridgerator. The bedroom is also quiet, but one side wall lines up with the neighbor's bedroom wall. The first two mornings in this apartment, his alarm woke me up. It is set for 8.00. I can make out the words of whatever song is playing on the radio station his alarm is set to, that's how clearly I can hear through the wall.
This isn't really a problem as he is a quiet neighbor and seems very respectful. I am a little worried about the baby crying at night and keeping him up; I think I might have a talk with him if I sense it gets to be a problem. For right now, we have a few months of relative quiet to enjoy, first.
Yesterday was an exhausting day, I can't even express how tired I was by the time I got home. I've noticed that I am slowing down some now, yet I think I am still doing just as much activity. I'm not sure how this is working out mathematically, but it means that I am steadily more and more exhausted each night.
Last night, I got home about 8.00-ish, talked on the phone some, and then opted to settle in bed for a bit and watch the second half of a "Prison Break" episode that I had had to cut short a few days prior.
I watch everything on The Boy's laptop, and I attach headphones to save him from having to listen to the tinny sound of escaping convicts. Occasionally, we'll talk a bit while I'm watching, so I leave one earphone in and one out so that I can hear him if he calls to me from the other room. He'll often just shout out requests for translations, which I provide, but I often have to ask for him to repeat the word in question as I'm usually a little distracted by the action on screen.
Last night, I thought I started getting some weird sort of interference on my earphone, and I plugged up my free ear to double-check if I was hearing correctly. No, no, the muted noises I heard weren't coming from the laptop, so I paused the show and tried to figure out where they were coming from. Suddenly, I recognized all-too-clearly the sounds of my neighbor and his girlfriend in bed. It took me about 2 seconds to figure out what was happening because, as I have said, I can pretty much hear everything.
I jumped up and ran into the other room and said, "Hey! Guess what! You can hear the neighbors having sex!" The Boy looked at me like I was crazy and said, "I'm working..." but giggled a little to himself. I clarified, "Remember how clearly you can hear the radio? This is just as clear!" And it's true. I definetly heard the intimate details of their love life for those 10 total seconds it took me to both hear and understand what the ruckus was.
So then, being a perv, I ran back into the bedroom to double check.
"Oh. Well. That didn't last long," I said, curiously disappointed.
So I might have a harder time having that is-the-baby-bothering-you conversation with him in a few months. I mean, now that I know something so personal about him. I feel a little sorry for his girlfriend, too.
I rediscovered television after seven long years sans. I have already mentioned a slight obsession with "Grey's Anatomy," and I am afraid I followed a good friend's advice and took a liking to "Prison Break" over the past few days. What is it about that Scofield character that I love so much? Anyway, I'm only on Season 1 episode 4 but I can tell I am in this for the long haul.
Sometimes I have a slight problem with the (totally illegal, I'm sure) Chinese web site that has uploaded all of these episodes. I'm not downloading a thing, but I watch on their little player. It's like YouTube, if you will, but with Chinese subtitles.
Occasionally, the site just can't handle its own traffic, I think, and I have to pause the show and walk away for a half hour, twenty minutes, and see if the show is ready to be watched or not. This can be a painful experience after a particularly dramatic moment, and "Prison Break" is full of 'em.
This happened recently in the middle of episode 4. To ease the tension, I thought, "Why not watch a goofy show in the meantime?" See? I am helping my TV troubles with further TV. It's genius.
So I watched an episode of "Scrubs" to kill time. Any "Scrubs" fans would know that J.D. passes out whenever he poops, but I was thrilled to the bones to find out that all of this is due to repeated vasovagal syncope. I got sort of freakishly excited when he was given his diagnosis, because that was actually a medical condition I knew a little something about. I myself was diagnosed with it in 2002, after a year in which I fainted five times for seemingly unrelated reasons. And no, it was not while on the toilet. Turns out, my heart occasionally thinks I'm dying so it starts pumping like crazy, and it sends too much blood to the brain. It's pretty neat, actually, because I get about three minutes' warning before going down for the count. Apparently, I just need to drink more water, which I have been doing for five years and haven't fainted since.
BUT! I got a little aggravated at the "Scrubs" team beause J.D. was diagnosed after Dr. Cox took a blood sample. According to Wikipedia, you can't be diagnosed with vasovagal syncope by blood. You've got five options: a tilt table, a loop recorder (?), a Holter moniter, an EKG, or an electrophysiology study. I know that I had the good fortune of doing a tilt table test, in which the nurses tried out a variety of things that *might* make me faint while strapped to a table. They kept trying and trying until they found something. And that was pretty awesome, especially when I had to interrupt their conversation about paint colors to let them know that I was pretty much destined to go down. The creepy thing about the tilt table is that they don't actually give you the satisfaction of fainting, they just spin the table to a horizontal position so that you never actually fall. I guess that's the safer bet, but it made things worse to feel like fainting and then get spun around 90°.
So anyway. Can you believe it? A little inaccuracy by the "Scrubs" writers, and I caught it. Hard to think such a credible, medical show would be so sloppy.
I have been absent for a variety of reasons. Things have been a little up and down here, but, on a positive note, at least I can officially declare that God decided to skip winter this year entirely. Every year, I feel March is the great disappointment. You feel like it should be spring already, but usually March spends its time clinging to February's cold weather while throwing in unending rain. But here we are, March 5 and it has been sunny and beautiful since late February.
I haven't even been up to much of anything, besides working and then working and then doing some more work. I am finally getting towards the end of the web project for my job. It's tough because it requires some pretty tricky stuff, and I don't really have anybody I can turn to for instruction or help besides The Boy. Luckily, he has been an absolute angel about it. Secretly, I think he enjoys being able to strut his stuff (in php). So it will be finished soon, and I will have a whole slew of new web design tidbits in my brain that weren't there a few months ago. Not a bad thing. It was slow-going, but the end is in sight.
I also got a new crappy sewing machine to replace the sewing machine I fried. It's nothing fancy, but it works. On Saturday, I learned how to thread it and sew my first few stitches using the terribly confusing owner's manuel. It is a French course and a sewing course in one! "Presser foot" and "spool" -- both words I did not know before. Also, the manuel is very poorly translated from German, so there are a few points where the syntax is just a little off. I am going to try to buy some material this week and work on a very simple pattern my mom bought me a few months ago. I'll post the results, however catastrophic they may be.
Finances are super tight right now because my old landlord owes me a significant chunk of money and has yet to pay me back. I was sort of depending on that cash, but she technically has until the end of the month to give it to me. Once she does, I am thinking of enrolling in a 60-euro sewing class I found that's right around the corner from my work. It's a 3-hour class where they give you all the materials and everything, and at the end of the class you walk away with either a baby dress or a baby button-down shirt. A little guidance, plus the satisfaction of having successfully made something (anything) seems worthwhile to me.
Otherwise, I am going to self-teach my way through the sewing in the same way as I did with all this web stuff. It's good to have a new hobby. I remember when I first started learning web design, I felt totally overwhelmed and confused, but I also felt a very calm sense of determination. If I just picked one thing, I would start to dissect it and see where it led me. I spent hours and hours learning .css -- it was so confusing at the beginning. But it was very rewarding to see where concentration, time, and effort could get me, and six years later it's pretty crazy where I've ended up. So I am hoping to employ a similar technique to learning to sew. Pretty soon, I'll have plenty of time on my hands, too...
I met with a midwife last week who I pray will NOT be delivering Romulus. It's not that she was mean or cruel or anything, but she just rubbed me the wrong way. I like hippies as much as the next guy, but there's a certain type of hippie -- the kind that talks with that overly-"soothing" voice -- that I have a difficult time with.
Granted, I was a little edgy going into the office. I was absolutely exhausted as the appointment was at six and I had spent the morning running a bunch of errands and the afternoon at work. I kept drifting off in the waiting room, so I had a bit of a time getting oriented once in her office.
But what really bothered me was that she asked me to take off my shoes so she could weigh me (yay! weight is on track now!) and then, without thinking, I started putting my shoes back on. She had said something about how she was going to examine me, but she had told me to keep my clothes on, and I guess I just put the shoes on as a reflex. As she saw me doing it, she said, "No, I said you need to get on the table. Keep your clothes, but you need to not have your shoes on..."
A little flustered, I said, "Sorry, I don't know why I was putting them back on."
And she walked over to me, put a "supportive" hand on my shoulders and said, "We're just going to take a deep breath. Is everything ok? Slllooooooowwwww down. Am I talking too fast for you, maybe?"
I can't explain why it aggravated me so much. Maybe because I was tired and just didn't think about the shoes, and I didn't appreciate her making me feel like I was a stress basket who needed to take deep breaths. Maybe it was because I really didn't want her to be "comforting" me when really I just hadn't thought about what I was doing. Or maybe it was because, although I had just spent 20 minutes telling her my life story in French, she seemed to think I couldn't understand the language. Not sure.
Anyway. I see a different midwife in a few weeks and let's hope we get along.
So that's it. A very calm week spent mostly working with an occasional foray into the wild world of sewing. Clearly, things are out of control around here.
