35 weeks and a new discovery

Tyler's closet!

Maternity clothes are such a pain. I tried to buy pants wayyyy back when I totally thought I was showing, because OMG just LOOK at this 16-week belly, I look soooo pregnant!! (Uh... no.) Anyway, when I bought them, I tried to think ahead and get pants that would last me the whole pregnancy by getting them in size huge. Turns out I am apparently not ever going to reach size huge, and those pants still look like clown pants at 8 months pregnant. So I've ended up constantly wearing the one pair from the Gap that I bought "to hold me over" until I got into the bigger sizes, and I'm too cheap to buy any more.

Shirts, on the other hand... I have about 4 shirts left that are long enough to cover my belly. Again, I refuse to buy more shirts with just over a month left until my due date. But Tyler's closet has tons of shirts that are definitely long enough, if I'm willing to roll up the sleeves and don't mind looking like I'm wearing a tent (I do not mind. All I do is sit at home anyway). Score!!! Besides, swimming in his clothes makes me feel like a little tiny person again, something I miss very much.

So, 35 weeks. It seems like it's getting so close now! I had one wonderful baby shower that my friend threw for all the dental girls, and a lot of girls came. Her fiance is an amazing cook so the food was delicious, and everyone was so generous with the gifts. Every single thing we got, we really really needed! It was so good to see everyone too, since I don't see them at school anymore. I am smiling just thinking about it. I'd post pictures, but I didn't take any and I haven't seen any on Facebook yet so I'll have to hold off on that. Some of my mom's friends are throwing me another shower this Sunday, so I'm really excited for that. My mother-in-law is even flying out from North Dakota to come to it! She'll be here tomorrow, I can't wait to see her. She's the best... she flew 2000 miles to surprise me at my bridal shower not too long ago, and now she's doing it again for my baby shower! I'll definitely make sure to get some pictures from this shower and post them.

After the shower this weekend, it's go time-- time to pick up anything else we need, make sure we have enough little green and yellow onesies and sleepers, and organize the nursery before this baby decides to make its appearance. 35 weeks marks the end of the terbutaline for me, so who knows when that will be?

Oh. I forgot. We might know exactly when that will be, because my doctor thinks the baby is currently breech. I haven't had an ultrasound to confirm; I will have that at my next appointment if the doctor still thinks the head is up. She said babies can usually flip up to 36 weeks, so I've been doing all sorts of crazy pelvic tilts and positions and bouncing on an exercise ball... we'll see if any of it works (I am skeptical, especially since I can still feel that little head poking up from under my ribcage. Maybe it's a butt??).

So send me some good baby-flipping vibes, because a c-section realllly is not what I'm after here! I'm not going to do an external version (where they try to flip the baby by manipulating your belly) for various reasons, so if the baby is still breech in a week, I guess we will be scheduling that c-section. Until then, here's hoping baby figures out which way is down!

If you don't have anything nice to say...

I've been a slacker when it comes to blogging lately. And I'll tell you why: I feel rotten. All I have to relate to you are complaints, and nobody wants to hear that, right? To be fair, I should have written this in the morning, because then my body is far less tired and sore from lugging my belly around. Tyler calls me Grouchy McGroucherson in the evening. But now that I've started, I can't stop the complaining, so here it comes... like word vomit...

I've had contractions for six weeks and counting. Some days they are better and I won't have a single one; other days I will have them several minutes apart for hours at a time. I wonder if I'll have anything left when it comes time for true labor. I wonder if I'll recognize true labor when it starts.

Sometimes it feels like my pelvis is splitting open. This is probably because it is. I have always had the hips of a ten year old boy (read: nonexistent), and a baby is going to have to come through there somehow, so I guess they are making themselves ready.

Having a big belly sticking out in front of you makes your back really, really sore. By the time nighttime comes, there is no position I can get into without wanting to cry. Right now I have my Snoogle wrapped around my waist, and that seems to be helping, but usually I just end up going to bed because I just can't sit anywhere.

There are other things... I feel huge, I pee all the time, I don't sleep well, blah blah blah. The looks I get from strangers as I waddle past them have slowly transitioned from "awww, what a cute pregnant belly" to sympathy/pity or "please don't let your water break on my shoes." Then again, other things have gotten better, and I should probably focus on those things instead-- less heartburn, less trouble breathing (maybe the baby has dropped?), more rest since I'm out of school, and every day that goes by is one more day closer to meeting my baby. I have to say, though, overall-- I'm kind of over it. I want my body back!

Anyway, on to a different topic that involves less whining and violins. We started childbirth classes about two weeks ago. It's an interesting experience. It definitely makes labor seem like something more real, something in the near future that is actually going to happen to me. Which is good, not bad. I've been putting off thinking about labor because I'm not good with pain (I know nobody likes it, but I'm a pretty big wimp, if you couldn't tell from the first half of this post). At least Tyler isn't like this one guy in our class: we had to go around the room the first day and say what our expectations of the class were, and the guy's wife said something like "to increase my confidence about birth" and her husband glared at her and said aggressively, "we want to go NATURAL. We want to learn how to go DRUG-FREE for our BABY'S sake." And she was just quiet. I felt really, really badly for her-- it's not your body, you jerk! Let her decide for herself! What a nutjob. I do think Tyler thinks somewhat less of me because I've never made it any secret that I plan on getting an epidural, but at least he supports me and lets me make my own decision. (My sister-in-law has had two kids, both with four-hour labors and neither with any kind of pain medication, and I think he thinks I should be like that too, at least a little bit.)

Anyway, I'm rambling so I'd better quit. Goals for next post: sooner than two weeks from now, and to write it in the morning when I'm a happier pregnant lady!

32 weeks: I am hugenormous.

That's a technical term, hugenormous. Learned it in med school.

To show you that I am not even a little bit kidding...

Yikes!! I've been having a growth spurt lately, or baby has, or whatever, but still. My belly sticks so far out in front of me that I'm starting to become afraid that I'm going to tip over when I stand up. I wake up in the middle of the night and whichever hip I'm laying on has either become numb or is in severe pain. People tell me this is from staying in one position for too long. I am not fooled... I know what this is: I have gotten so fat that my body is literally crushing itself under its own weight.

Okay seriously now. You may have noticed that the belly pics have become far less frequent... this is because I hardly recognize myself when I look in the mirror, and I don't like it much. Yes, I know the rest of my body looks mostly the same as it used to, but I still feel like my face is puffy and my arms and legs are chubby and so on and so forth. I could obsess about it forever, but instead I choose to avoid mirrors... and cameras!

Sigh. I've posted about this before, and yes it's all in a good cause, but sometimes when I'm having these growth spurts I get pretty down on how I look these days. It doesn't help when my brother tells me things like "you shouldn't eat so much if you don't want to get so fat" when we're eating lunch together. Ugh. You should never say anything like this to a hungry, hormonal pregnant woman who is only/still several weeks from her due date. It might make her cry hysterically for over a half hour, not that I did that or anything. Hrmph.

The name game

Some couples discuss names for their future children while they are still dating. Or engaged, or just married, or while they're trying to conceive.

Unfortunately, we are not that couple.

We're entering the home stretch of my pregnancy, but we still don't have a name for this baby! We have a few front-runners (see polls to the right), but we probably won't decide on the final name until we actually meet the baby. For some reason, I keep thinking that it's wrong to give someone something as important as a name before you've even seen them in person. What if we settle on Andrew, and it doesn't suit him at all, and he looks like a Ben? (Disclaimer: I do realize that brand-new newborns all look like they should be named something along the lines of... Conehead. Or, Gremlin. Monkeyface. Okay, I'm stopping.)

Tyler has decided that the perfect name for a little girl is Baena, pronounced Bay-nuh. Yes, you read that correctly, no need to go back and read it again. It's after this genus of prehistoric turtle that he studies (Eubaena). I have nothing to say to this except: no, over my dead body, not in a billion years, no. I don't do made-up names, and either way, we are not naming our potential daughter after a dead lizard. However, he has stubbornly referred to the baby in utero as "Baena" for so long that now I think of it as Baena too. Here's hoping that the nickname doesn't still stick once the baby joins us in the outside world.

So, it seems that for now we're going to stay with Caroline Anne or Elisabeth Anne, and Benjamin Ranse or Andrew Ranse. Then we can make the final decision when the baby comes. For what it's worth, my favorites are actually the poll winners-- Caroline and Benjamin (although Andrew is Tyler's grandfather's name, and his health is poor, so we might end up going with Andrew for that reason if it's a boy). It's so hard to pick a name for a baby, though. Names are so huge... what if he or she hates the name later on? I guess you can only do your best and try not to get all crazy and trendy. I've always loved my name, and I want to do the same for my baby! I suspect that naming it "Baena" is not really the way to achieve that goal, though...

...And in with the new

A couple of my college girlfriends came to visit me over the last couple of days (which was so much fun!), but now they are gone and I am here alone again with a lot of time on my hands to think... I wish Tyler would come back from New Zealand.

Anyway, here's what's going through my head...

It's 2009, finally and already. I spent the last few minutes of 2008 lying in bed in the dark with my hands on my belly, feeling the baby roll around in there, and thinking about how one year ago I never, ever thought I'd be where I am. My life was so incredibly different last New Year's. I was just married, and dental school was mostly what took up my time and energy-- I was still in med school classes then. We lived in our old apartment. Babies were the last thing on our minds.

In 2008, I finished med school, we went to the Bahamas and Peru, I took the boards, I found out I was pregnant, we accepted the fact that I was pregnant, and we got excited and got ready. We moved. I developed complications and I left school temporarily. One year later, I feel like I'm a totally different person, or at least I'm in a totally different place-- I'm not even in school, and we're about to be responsible for this little person for a really, really long time, and I'm just as terrified as I ever was that I'm going to screw it all up.

I mean, in theory, I pretty much know what's in store for me in 2009: have the baby, figure out how to be a parent somehow, get to know our baby, go back to school to finish my degree. (Or at least go back by next January... that still hasn't been decided since the dean won't get back to me.) But really, who knows? I thought I knew exactly what 2008 was going to be like. Hell, I thought I knew exactly what the next 5 or 10 years were going to be like. But I had no idea what was coming, and I guess you never really do.

I don't mean for this to sound all melodramatic and depressing, because that isn't at all how I feel. I'm excited and grateful for our baby, even if I'm kind of nervous about how I'll handle things. My main worry is that I won't achieve my goals when it comes to my career, because even though I'm very motivated to go back and finish up (and then start working, because staying at home full-time has never been something I wanted to do), I feel scared that it won't happen, because if there's anything 2008 has taught me, it's that your life isn't necessarily always in your own hands. Is this new person, who we are somehow already in love with even though we've never met him or her, going to make me change my mind? I do still want to be a dentist so badly...

Anyway, I watched the clock click past midnight and hugged my belly and told the baby "I can't wait to meet you this year" before going to sleep. Whatever happens, I know that if we do things out of love, it will all work out. Now if Tyler would just come home...