Sunday, September 30, 2007

So... Where did I leave off?

Oh yes... with the Whole Foods Sneak Preview. We've been back several times since Monday evening. The actual opening was on Wednesday and we went for the breadbreaking ceremony in the morning, and then went back again in the evening to pick up some dinner. The place was a mad house. The lines to check out were so deep that it looked like the immigration stop when you fly into another country. SO many people. But clearly the entire neighborhood is happy the store is finally open. No more crummy produce or meat from Safeway! Hooray! And we can walk there. Awesome.

What else happened this week of note? On Tuesday I made a surprise trip to Labor and Delivery to have a peek at the kiddo. I was worried because there had been no movement for most of the day -- very unusual. So I called L&D, as I've been instructed to do at this point, and asked if this kind of drop in movement is normal or to be expected in anyway. I was expecting the nurse to tell me to drink some apple juice and lie down for a while and see if anything happened. But no, she went straight to "Come on in, and we'll check it out!" Yikes! So I hopped in my car and drove out to Walnut Creek. When I got there I found L&D. The nurses buzzed me in, and took me into triage. They hooked me up to the fetal monitor immediately, and to my relief that little heartbeat sound started woosh-wooshing immediately. That pretty much satisfied me right there, but the nurse was not finished. She hooked me up to another monitor, this one to make sure I wasn't in preterm labor. Double yikes! I was definitely NOT ready to think about taking a baby home on Tuesday... After being on the monitors for a while (probably 20 minutes?) an OB/GYN came in to look at the print outs and to talk with me about what was going on. She was very positive and thought that the monitoring showed that things were probably OK, but wanted to do an ultrasound in addition, just to check for other functions, and also to see if we could see any movement (because I still wasn't feeling anything). Thankfully the ultrasound revealed a little baby that was just thrashing away, pounding and kicking my placenta which was actually absorbing all the shock of contact, making it impossible for me to feel anything. We also checked out the lungs and heart, and everything was operating properly. The OB told me to be sure to call again, and come in, if I stopped feeling movement again, but we were all feeling pretty confident that all was OK.

On Wednesday it was back to Whole Foods for the official grand opening, but I already yammered about that. Henry was happy to find that they sell bagels that are actually made in NY -- they taste great, just like NY bagels. I guess the bagel shop ships the bagels to CA and Whole Foods finishes cooking them in the store in the mornings so they can be sold hot.

Thursday evening we had our hospital tour, which was awful. I was glad I had had a preview a couple of days before, because all I could focus on during the tour was how annoying the tour guide was. I don't know if she thought her job was actually to be a stand up comedian or what, but she put on this crazy act for the whole tour. From the get go I felt like her treatment of the tour was making a joke out of everything. It made me so uncomfortable that I couldn't even bring myself to ask any questions whatsoever, for fear of being treated like a straight man in a comedy club. I appreciated the fact that she was trying to keep the tour from being overly serious, but it was really taken to an extreme. I'm looking forward to the evaluation form coming in the mail. You can bet I'll be filling that one out and sending it in... And if I hear her voice in the hallway when I am in labor or in recovery, I'll be sending my doula out to make her go far, far away.

Friday morning was the day the lactation station was finally delivered. Hooray! Too bad it also coincided with a high-anxiety day. Fortunately the anxiety seems to have passed (for now), but I was just feeling so overwhelmed and scared about what it is going to be be like to actually have to take care of a baby. As much as I've had a pregnancy that I won't be sorry to leave, I am not feeling very ready to actually accept what that means -- the fact that there will be another person in this household who is going to depend on us for everything. That is terrifying! We've been working so hard to make room for things, and as I mentioned last week I had a bit of an anxiety attack when we picked up our babyshower gifts from Babies R Us. For a week I'd been staring at the huge box with the crib in it, and for a week the anxiety had been building. On friday morning we moved the box out of the living room and into our bedroom, which is when I really lost it. I'll make a long story short. We'll be setting the crib up, but not in our bedroom -- the room is just to small, and I felt claustrophobic even thinking about having it set up in there. It will be in a corner of my crafty/reading room, and I think that will be fine. My mom spent a lot of the afternoon with me on Friday and helped me get through this enormous freakout, and then helped me figure out where we could put the crib where it would be serviceable and would not cause me stress, and I felt a lot better by the time she left.

This weekend has been pretty good. Saturday was hectic -- I had not gotten much sleep in friday night (oh the insomnia!). I had acupuncture, and then went with Mom and Henry to the farmers market, got my nails done. I needed lasagne for dinner so we wound up at the Olive Garden, where I also managed to pull a muscle in my back that made it really hard to move and breathe. Fun! This morning Henry went back to Whole Foods to get me some arnica and some watermelon. The arnica seems to have worked fairly well on the muscle spasm, and the watermelon is just plain yummy. We spent the afternoon at Allyndreth's MBA graduation. Congratulations, Al! She's worked so hard for this.

And now we are staring down the barrel of another work week. I'm finding myself wishing that it was the last day of October, rather than the last day of September right now, but no... it is not. Too bad, because I would love to go on leave right this second. Day by day I get bigger and bigger, and more and more tired, and cranky too, making it really hard to do my job. But do my job I must, for another five weeks that is...

Since I still have this month still looming between me and the month where the kiddo is due, I am hoping that I can focus on the good parts of pregnancy from here on out, so that I end this experience on a positive note. I do think in some ways that even though so much of this has been so unpleasant, I will miss pregnancy -- I'll miss the movement deep inside me, I'll miss the peace and quiet that comes when it is just me and the kiddo inside during a restful moment, I'll miss the intense love rushes that I experience from time to time that are so all consuming.

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