Big Baby
By dates, I reached 37 weeks of pregnancy on Friday. That means that now the kid will not be considered premature, even if I go into labor and deliver in the next 30 seconds. S/he is fully cooked and can show up whenever the mood strikes without any health professional batting an eye.
I, on the other hand, have been talking to the fetus about March 2. There's still kind of a lot to do around here, and I'm just not feeling quite prepared for the arrival of an infant. I mean, jeez. A newborn baby. They're so... you know... time-consuming. Labor-intensive. Inconvenient.
It really is good that there's no turning back now, because I might be tempted. I have so wanted Cassie to get to have a sibling, and that really is worth a whole lot to me. Yes, yes it is. But I've never really been wild about this whole going-through-the-postpartum-period-again business. And now that it's approaching fast, I am finding myself to be no more enthused than ever.
Labor is okay with me. I mean, I'm not exactly looking forward to it. It's intense, and it hurts, and it's tiring. But the first time around, it really was pretty much just a hard day's work (10 hours, first strong contraction to "it's a girl"), and I imagine it will be fairly similar this time. (Thanks to my mom, for the birthin' hips.)
One thing that's different about labor this time, I have to admit, is that I've thought about it very, very little. When you've never done it before, it's hard not to obsess and worry. My biggest fear was losing control and being rude and mean and yelling and stuff during transition. And as it happened, well, maybe I wasn't chatty and sunshiney and the perfect hostess or anything, but I was okay. I said please and thank you (between contractions, we're talking) and had a tiny bit of a sense of humor. Generally, I was more or less myself, plus loud moaning, which worked out fine. But I'd done a lot of emotional preparation. Pete and I went to Bradley classes, and I read books about labor, and I journalled and thought and dreamed and processed. This time around, I have trouble keeping my mind on thoughts of labor for more than 20 seconds. I just kind of... don't care. The first time, I made special mix tapes for myself and mixed selected essential oils into unscented lotion, and poured them into color-coded bottles. I packed the going-to-the-hospital bag carefully and well ahead of time. Pete bought the requisite new garden hose so that I could labor in the water. But in the end, none of it got used. That all was very much not what labor looked like for me. Dilating was a brisk and almost business-like (though noisy) affair, and pushing (for 3 hours, as Cassie finally turned occiput-anterior and then made her enormous way out into the wide world) really sucked, but there was nothing scented-lotion and soothing-music about it. It was just pain and exertion of an almost prosaic, if unusually intense, quality. So it's hard for me to even pay attention to that coming up again. I guess there doesn't seem to be anything to be done to prepare, not really. And I'm not worried about it. It's just there.
Having a newborn, on the other hand, does kind of worry me. It sounds difficult and exhausting and thankless. It sounds significantly Not Fun. And whereas with the first child, all you have to do is get through it however you can, it feels like with the second, you also have to be mindful of making it as easy on the older sibling as you can. You can't just totally shut down all auxiliary systems and go into pure survival mode. You have to try to keep things seeming sort of normal, to the extent that you can.
I don't know. We'll see. Maybe it won't be so bad. At least babies start getting more interesting after not too long. Those first little glimmers of this being an actual individual human rather than only a mooshy blob of infant need--they start showing up fairly early, I think. And it helps.
I had an ultrasound on Friday. The midwives wanted to check on the size of the fetus, what with gestational diabetes and all, despite my good glucose control. (Oh, and did I mention the fact that Cassie weighed 10 lbs. 4 oz. at birth?) The ultrasound size estimate was 8 lbs., with a projected fetal weight gain of 1/2 lb per week from here on in. So this is likely to be another Cassie-sized critter, more or less, which is pretty much what I anticipated. That's what it feels like. Anyway, they got some kind of nice pictures of the face of this kid. It has big cheeks and pouty lips, and its face looks kind of smooshed down into my pelvis. Its expression can only be said to be grumpy. Very, very grumpy. Which I have to admit, kind of makes me like him/her even a bit more than I was able to before. Certainly being smushed upside-down into a cramped, hot, infinitely humid, muscle-walled hell-hole seems to warrant a certain darkness of mood. And then also I think, hey, if we're able to just sit around and be grumpy together, we'll probably be all right after all.
I, on the other hand, have been talking to the fetus about March 2. There's still kind of a lot to do around here, and I'm just not feeling quite prepared for the arrival of an infant. I mean, jeez. A newborn baby. They're so... you know... time-consuming. Labor-intensive. Inconvenient.
It really is good that there's no turning back now, because I might be tempted. I have so wanted Cassie to get to have a sibling, and that really is worth a whole lot to me. Yes, yes it is. But I've never really been wild about this whole going-through-the-postpartum-period-again business. And now that it's approaching fast, I am finding myself to be no more enthused than ever.
Labor is okay with me. I mean, I'm not exactly looking forward to it. It's intense, and it hurts, and it's tiring. But the first time around, it really was pretty much just a hard day's work (10 hours, first strong contraction to "it's a girl"), and I imagine it will be fairly similar this time. (Thanks to my mom, for the birthin' hips.)
One thing that's different about labor this time, I have to admit, is that I've thought about it very, very little. When you've never done it before, it's hard not to obsess and worry. My biggest fear was losing control and being rude and mean and yelling and stuff during transition. And as it happened, well, maybe I wasn't chatty and sunshiney and the perfect hostess or anything, but I was okay. I said please and thank you (between contractions, we're talking) and had a tiny bit of a sense of humor. Generally, I was more or less myself, plus loud moaning, which worked out fine. But I'd done a lot of emotional preparation. Pete and I went to Bradley classes, and I read books about labor, and I journalled and thought and dreamed and processed. This time around, I have trouble keeping my mind on thoughts of labor for more than 20 seconds. I just kind of... don't care. The first time, I made special mix tapes for myself and mixed selected essential oils into unscented lotion, and poured them into color-coded bottles. I packed the going-to-the-hospital bag carefully and well ahead of time. Pete bought the requisite new garden hose so that I could labor in the water. But in the end, none of it got used. That all was very much not what labor looked like for me. Dilating was a brisk and almost business-like (though noisy) affair, and pushing (for 3 hours, as Cassie finally turned occiput-anterior and then made her enormous way out into the wide world) really sucked, but there was nothing scented-lotion and soothing-music about it. It was just pain and exertion of an almost prosaic, if unusually intense, quality. So it's hard for me to even pay attention to that coming up again. I guess there doesn't seem to be anything to be done to prepare, not really. And I'm not worried about it. It's just there.
Having a newborn, on the other hand, does kind of worry me. It sounds difficult and exhausting and thankless. It sounds significantly Not Fun. And whereas with the first child, all you have to do is get through it however you can, it feels like with the second, you also have to be mindful of making it as easy on the older sibling as you can. You can't just totally shut down all auxiliary systems and go into pure survival mode. You have to try to keep things seeming sort of normal, to the extent that you can.
I don't know. We'll see. Maybe it won't be so bad. At least babies start getting more interesting after not too long. Those first little glimmers of this being an actual individual human rather than only a mooshy blob of infant need--they start showing up fairly early, I think. And it helps.
I had an ultrasound on Friday. The midwives wanted to check on the size of the fetus, what with gestational diabetes and all, despite my good glucose control. (Oh, and did I mention the fact that Cassie weighed 10 lbs. 4 oz. at birth?) The ultrasound size estimate was 8 lbs., with a projected fetal weight gain of 1/2 lb per week from here on in. So this is likely to be another Cassie-sized critter, more or less, which is pretty much what I anticipated. That's what it feels like. Anyway, they got some kind of nice pictures of the face of this kid. It has big cheeks and pouty lips, and its face looks kind of smooshed down into my pelvis. Its expression can only be said to be grumpy. Very, very grumpy. Which I have to admit, kind of makes me like him/her even a bit more than I was able to before. Certainly being smushed upside-down into a cramped, hot, infinitely humid, muscle-walled hell-hole seems to warrant a certain darkness of mood. And then also I think, hey, if we're able to just sit around and be grumpy together, we'll probably be all right after all.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 2:38 PM
4 Comments:
I'm sure you will all have a lovely time being grumpy together. It sounds kind of cozy, actually.
I'm 39 weeks with my second child and you just summed up exactly how I feel about all of it. At this point all I want from labor is for it to START--I've had regular low-level contractions for 48 hours and nothing's happening. I realize that after he's born I'm going to look at this as the "easy" part.
"go into labor now and deliver in the next 30 seconds..."
wishful thinking?
Not to worry! The best thing about the second baby is that you delete all the extraneous worrying over meaningless nonsense which accompanies caring for a first born, which leaves plenty of time left over for doing other things - like spending time with your oldest. And you have much lower expectations of yourself, which is also a relief!
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