Flannery turned three months on July 30, the same day that Clive turned 10. (Happy Birthday, Clive!)
The household has settled into calling her Flansie or Flansie-Mo, with the occasional Flansie-Mouse, on the part of Anselm. This is how nicknames evolve, and I love it.
[Read more…]On Wednesday morn, I packed the Kranslings up
And hurried into town and to the store
For Clive to have the chance to look and choose
The trappings for his birthday: plates, and forks,
And cups, and straws, and little checkered flags
He wants to put upon his cake. He said
That they would ornament a race track’s end.
(This next line took a while for me to write
As Jeremy sang a while a song that he
Had made for the unfortunate event,
The expiration of the heavy cream
Which would take place (he said) upon the morrow.
And it was most distracting. Where was I?)
Oh yes–I was to say that Clive is ten
And yet he still persists in those first loves
That captivated him at two, and three,
The Cars that colored all his thoughts and play
And favorite songs, and favorite colors, all
Encompassed in his love. It has been long
Since he has mentioned anything with cars,
Yet here we were, planning a race track cake.
Our Clive is nothing if not wholly thorough,
Consistent as a metronome’s refrain,
Yet hardly to be called predictable.
We said the race track would be chocolate.
Two other errands we had to complete:
To find some drinks* for Daddy at a store
That sells them at a discount. After that
We had to go to Wal-Mart for to find:
Some chlorine for the pool; baking soda;
A box of Borax. At the first Mart
They didn’t have the chlorine, so we drove
South to another store to find it there,
But had no luck. I got the other things
And had each child choose for himself a snack
As I was glad they hung in for so long
While I had looked for chlorine. We came home
Much later than I thought we ever would.
And we were tired. Poor Aurick had no nap
And it was almost dinnertime. I put
him down–and Flannery–to rest a while–
I set myself to rustle up some food–
And Elvie saw that in the southern field
Some twenty-five balloons had come to earth.
We ate, then cleaned, then read, then went to bed.
(We tied the balloons to a steady post)
And I sat up to type this little blog
While Jeremy sang about the heavy cream
And Flannery snoozed. (She’s sure to wake up soon).
Today while in the car, our Ephraim said
He thought that he would name this current year
“The Year of Blessings”. And I think he is right.
*San Pellegrino
Dear Aurick,
I am writing this post for you many months after it should have been shared. You turned sixteen months on the seventh of February; I am writing this on the sixth of July. Those last few months with Flannery’s pregnancy were difficult, and your monthly updates were something that slipped through the cracks. I hope you can understand. (Though, now that I look at it, it seems a lot of people are missing their sixteen-month posts. There must be a lot of cracks around that age.)
Flannery turned two months on June 30.
She is called Flannery, Flansie, Flansie-Mo, Pretty Girly, Miss Foofy-Britches, and just plain Baby.
She’s stretched out on the bed next to me, wearing the little strawberry sleeper that she has singled out as the one she likes to have blowouts in the most. (Seriously, she poops more in this sleeper than any other. I don’t understand it.) Eldore is next to her, trying to find a comfortable spot to sit, and she follows him with her eyes, gaping and enraptured. She is enraptured by a lot of things these days, finally (I assume) being able to see things a little more clearly. She loves to look at people, at her toy owl, at the canopy over her bassinet, and (thankfully) the camera lens.
One month ago I published my post detailing my 39th week of pregnancy and lamenting that I would surely see forty weeks pregnant for the first time, unless something drastic happened later that day.
That drastic something did happen at approximately 8:50 p.m. with my water breaking while eating chocolate chip cookies and watching Princess Mononoke with the kids.
Flannery was born two hours and fourteen minutes later.
Now she is one month old.
[Read more…]I turned 39 weeks on Sunday, April 24.
I have never, ever been 39 weeks pregnant.
I am not sure what the deal is.
Sometimes I worry that I’m doing something wrong.
So the time I thought I’d never see was here. I didn’t have very much to show for my being so far along. I wasn’t experiencing a lot of contractions. I had spent the last two mornings pulling Aurick and Beatrice around to yard sales in a wagon, and it hadn’t triggered anything at all.
[Read more…]Well, this is typically the week! 38 w 2 d is the furthest I’ve ever gone in any pregnancy. The breakdown is:
Ephraim—- 37 w 1 d (emergency induction)
Eldore—— 37 w 6 d
Clive——- 38 w 1 d
Anselm —- 38 w 2 d
Elvie ——- 38 w 2 d
Beatrice — 38 w 2 d
Aurick —– 38 w 2 d
So when they told me so many months ago that my due date was May 1st, I rolled back the calendar two weeks and said “so probably this time, then.” Right around Easter, if everything goes according to pattern. It’s the best one can do to try to schedule an unschedule-able event, just hazard a guess.
That guess was complicated by the fact that by the time I was 38 w 3 d my doctor would be out of town. I was really hoping I would have the baby before that happened.
Well, I didn’t.
I woke up that morning with contractions. They were irregular when I timed them, varying from 10-20 minutes apart. This isn’t too shabby, really. The contractions I had with Eldore and Aurick were around 10-15 minutes apart. But they didn’t last more than a couple of hours. So I decided to forget about contractions and make a coverlet for our bed instead.
I’ve had the fabric for a year, so it this project was quite overdue. I was hoping that crawling around on the floor pinning things together might help kickstart some things. At the very least it gave me something to distract myself. But no contractions showed up again, unless they were disguised as irritable uterus nonsense (I really can’t explain how frustrating that is, to be trying to be tuned in to your body but your body just keeps making one big contraction that won’t go away.)
The good news is that the coverlet is the perfect weight for us for the warmer months, which is what I was hoping it would be.
After finishing that project, I headed into town to walk around the mall for a bit. Mom went with me in case something drastic happened. In the car on the way to town, though, I had two or three quite painful contractions, and by the time we got to the mall I actually just wanted to go home. I did try to get out of the car, but I couldn’t walk very well (dumb hip.) So we just went back home.
I felt better after lying down, and Jeremy and I went out to dinner that night as our ritual “last hurrah”. I didn’t seem to be feeling anything else, though the whole day was reminding me quite a bit of the day before Aurick was born, just in terms of pain and antsyness.
Nothing happened all night.
Nothing happened the next morning.
My attitude upon waking up at 38 w 3 d, as pregnant as I’ve ever been, with not even the sniff of a contraction was, to put it mildly, abysmal. I walked on the treadmill for almost an hour after getting up. Nothing. I cried all through making breakfast and through eating breakfast. Clive, the most sensitive of the kids, apologized to me over and over that it was so hard for me, and in returned I apologized over and over that I was such a mess.
Here were his main points:
Having people in your life is inconvenient. The easiest thing to do is to isolate yourself so that you may always control things in your proximity.
Having children is inconvenient. They require many things from you, but most of all they require you to deny yourself and relinquish control.
Having a baby is very inconvenient: it hurts; you can’t control the process; you can’t predict its outcome, its timing.
Mommy is feeling all of this most acutely. That is why she is crying.
(100% correct.)
Now:
You other children have arrived in such-and-such way, in such-and-such time. But Flannery is her own person. She is not anyone else. She is not bound by any other expectation or pattern. The most beautiful thing about this trying time of waiting is that it is reminding us of her personhood, her uniqueness. We can rest assured that she will come when she needs to.
And if our regular doctor is not there, we’ll be fine. It won’t be the first time that a nurse has delivered us. (100% correct. Anselm and Eldore.)
After breakfast I called my doctor’s office to just make sure, before he left town, that there were some kind of notes in my records alerting whomever ended up delivering me that I have a history of fast labors and to please not send me home if I show up with irregular contractions 10 min. apart, etc.
It does say I have a history of “rapid delivery”. That’s good enough for me.
But I learned that, though I had thought he would be in that day, he was not coming into the office at all that day. I had already missed the deadline, basically.
I felt strangely relieved to know that. It was already too late. He’d be back the following week, when I was 39 w 2 d–if I was still pregnant by then.
Well, you can’t be worried about something when it’s already happened. I cleaned all our bedrooms that day. I didn’t pay any attention to irritable uterus or contractions or anything. It was a great day. And 3 p.m. rolled around, and I wasn’t anxious. We roasted hot dogs outside in celebration of Eldore’s having learned to ride his bicycle with no training wheels, even standing up while pedaling. We had storeboughten cupcakes with purple icing that turned everyone’s mouths violet.
Our weekly ultrasound was good as always. I got to see Flannery’s hair, which seems to be quite long–maybe as long as Eldore’s? The tech pushed gently on her and her hair waved back and forth in the amniotic fluid. So long! Everybody has had a full head of hair except for Elvie!
She is so cozy in there, squished up with her hand curled beside her face. Her feet have been curled up rather than stretched out these past two visits. I don’t think she has the space to keep them down by her head anymore.
She is anterior. That is nice to know.
Cervical check showed 3-4 cm and 90% effacement. Progress! That was very encouraging, and a bit more like I’m used to, though still about a week later than I’m used to it. Perhaps Flannery is not as far along as we think? At any rate, if she needs to stay in, she needs to stay in.
It’s still hard to get an idea of “when” just from the dilation. With Beatrice I was 4 cm for three weeks. With others, like Clive and Eldore, I was 4 cm for a week or so. Other times I’ve lasted at 4 cm for just a couple of days. And of course, with Anselm, I was 4 cm overnight while walking, walking, walking.
What the progress means to me is that I’m almost halfway there, dilation-wise. That is such a relief. I thought I may go into labor and just be a 2.
We went ahead and scheduled an appointment for next week, with the hopes that I will have to cancel it because she is already here.
On Friday and Saturday–38 w 5 d and 6 d–we went to neighborhood yard sales where we could get out and do a lot of walking. I hoped it would stir something up, but no luck. All it did was make my backside hurt. Oh well.
It’s not been that long ago, but I hope I can even remember what happened this week. It all seems something of a blur.
Now officially “early term”, we braced ourselves for Flannery’s imminent arrival. But everything was still too early for me to be very comfortable. I stopped the epsom salt baths as I mentioned in my previous update to see if that would have any effect, but I didn’t try to do very much to bring on labor or augment anything. If I felt any contractions (usually I was just duped by irritable uterus pains) I would try to rest and see if I could tell what they were up to. (Spoiler: usually nothing.) I don’t know how much stopping the baths did except allow a few more aches and pains to poke through my daily reality.
[Read more…]I wrote during Elvie’s pregnancy that the 36th week brought the Antisocial pregnant mother out in me. I certainly began to feel that this time. While for the 35th week I said I had the desire to slow down and just be with the kids, this week I felt like crawling in a hole and disappearing. I don’t have any explanation for these weird swings in mood. I can say though that hiding is simply not an option, so I did not indulge that particular desire. I felt it, though.
[Read more…]