Countdown

I walked into a Mexican restaurant to pick up lunch and the woman behind the counter said, "Wow, still working, huh?"

I guess the entire city is waiting for the Big Day.

Which is imminent, or so I hear. The 38th week is considered term, 40 is ideal, and no one starts worrying about inducing or cesareans until week 42. It turns out that, as with almost everything else about pregnancy, calculating the "due date" isn't as scientific as you might think. It's a guess based on fairly arbitrary questions and our current 365 day in a year convention, with some ultrasounds and some tape measures liberally thrown in.

I am "due" on April 10th. I plan to work through the 13th, a fact which inevitably creates bemusement on faces. "But," they splutter, "April 13th is after April 10th!" (Maybe they feel that since all my brain cells are impaired I am unable to do simple arithmetic.) I nod at this sage observation, and quietly explain that, since I can't possibly predict the actual date, I picked an end date that was reasonable for the majority of the statistics; most first babies are late, not early, and in my family in particular there's a history of lateness. If I go early, chaos will ensue anyway. If, on the other hand, I am late, I will go stir crazy if I have nothing to do but sit at home. This seems entirely reasonable to me, but then, these are people who offer me chairs and demand I sit down (I've been sitting down all day!) or apologize when they've made me "walk all the way over here."

I've been berated for not packing my hospital bag, as well. Every expectant mother knows that you have to pack your hospital bag way in advance because, well, you just never know when you'll have to go there. Every expectant mother also knows not to rush off to the hospital at the very first sign of labor, so the question is: why can't you use all that waiting time to pack the bag for the hospital? And furthermore, this isn't a vacation.... how much stuff could I possibly need to bring with me? Yet, there are countless lists out there for the packing impaired to choose from.

So, we're waiting, we're enduring, and yes, we're still breathing, walking, talking and working. Stanley Hilarius is inevitably dropping and things are slowly coming to their hopefully happy conclusion. We'll let you know how it goes.

And the hits just keep on coming...

I'm not tired of being pregnant, per se. I'm tired of other people.

"When are you due?" is the new "Nice weather we're having." Only more nosey and less relevant. Especially when it's been asked by someone who has already asked you this question. Here's a hint, people, it hasn't changed from the last time you asked me.

Here's a good one: Put your finger directly on a pregnant woman's belly. She won't mind. After all, it's not like you're touching her... oh wait, you are. But she won't mind. Then ask this amazingly dumb question: "What's this?" And remember, she won't ever say something sarcastic like "that appears to be my stomach." And if she's rude and says something like "please don't touch me," don't take it personally. Those raging hormones make her say things like that.

If you are extremely obese, try making a pregnant woman feel good about her self-image. Say something like: gee, it looks like you're trying to imitate me! She'll find that amusing. See, she's grimacing right now.

And if you're a midwife or an obstetrician, here's a neat trick. Each time your patient comes for her now weekly visit, grab hold of the baby's nether regions through the mother's sensitive belly and give them a good shake. Everyone will enjoy that because then baby will wake up and move around indignantly. Well, mom will get a few kicks in the ribs. But she's used to that so it's okay. And that'll make her look forward to next week's visit even more!

What could be worse than nine months of stupid people? Oh, probably 18 years of stupid parenting advice. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Non-Alcoholic

The whole thou-shalt-not-drink-while-pregnant line has been blown way out of proportion here in Puritan, Prohibitionist America. Case in point: while the AMA's official line on the subject is no amount of alcohol consumed while pregnant has been proven to be safe (their official line on just about everything to do with pregnancy, as they don't test drugs, recreational or otherwise, on pregnant women), the myriad pregnancy experts have taken up the call and twisted it to: even the smallest amount of alcohol could harm your baby!

Making it sound like if you accidentally swallow your mouthwash anytime during those tedious nine months, you might as well go to jail for child abuse right now. All hope is lost. Now everyone knows that pregnant women can't drink at all lest their offspring have more than one head, and so the option isn't even there. But they have no compunction about drinking around a pregnant woman. The thought in the back of everyone's head is that, as long as she's not an alcoholic, she couldn't possibly mind, right?

My husband and I love wine. The taste of it with dinner, and the romantic idea of it: a warm glass of red by the fire in winter, a chilled glass of white of a hot summer's evening. We love the idea of wine so much we make wine, lovingly squeezing fruits of their essential juices, adding yeast, and letting nature do what it does best. Our traditional New Year's celebrations include an expensive bottle of champagne, which we consume the whole of (the only time we down an entire bottle of alcohol) all the while describing its properties in admittedly layman's terms to keep for prosperity. Sometimes we even talk about our goals for the New Year.

This year, of course, all that has been curtailed. For both of us.

We were recently at a friend's house for dinner. Bypassing me, the host asked my husband if he wanted a drink of some kind. My husband shook his head. "Alas," he said, "I'm pregnant."

The host looked from me to him incredulously and blurted, "You're both not drinking together??"

Heaven forfend we agree to do something together. Like, say, get pregnant.

To me there is no other way to go about it. You're either both on board or not. There were a number such conditions I laid out before I agreed to go down this road, not the least of which was that if I couldn't drink, my husband couldn't drink. Or put another way: if you drink, I drink, and you wouldn't want to harm your unborn child like that, would you?

But I don't have to threaten my husband to make this journey into as much of a partnership as we possibly can. There is, in reality, very few things that he is able to do or sacrifice during the nine months of gestation, so those conscious efforts to stay on the road with me are essential. Instead of making this a non-choice that only I have to make, he's made it into a positive choice for both of us. We're both not drinking. Not because one of us is pregnant, but because we've decided not to imbibe in alcoholic beverages for a period of 9 months.

Everyone deals with pregnancy in their own way. Some women don't feel the need to involve their partners. Some women either don't have partners to involve or have partners who are just getting dragged along for the ride. I personally think that's a sad and lonely way to go about this journey, but that's just my opinion.

Our long abstinence is almost over and we're glad. There are still some Nazis who claim that alcohol and breastfeeding don't mix, and I'm sure they don't if you plan to get plastered every night. But we plan to enjoy our New Year's eve champagne soon after Stanley's born, maybe right there in the hospital. And we plan to sample the fruit wines that have been aging in the basement, and we plan to savor our first glasses of red and white wines as the sun sets on our early spring evenings.

Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. I think everyone should try it. You don't even have to get knocked up to do it.

Small Miracles

As we sat on extremely uncomfortable chairs being forced to watch our 13th or 14th waterbirth on the childbirth educator's favorite DVD (..and who knew there were so many birthing exhibitionists out there?) I sat trying not to fidget and ended up contemplating my navel.

Which, miracle of miracles, is still there.

It might not be much longer. It's gotten much flatter and drawn out in the past few weeks, and Stanley really doesn't have too much more room to grow without taking up that small amount of space which used to be my fairly deep, round, innie belly button. On what used to be my fairly flat, hard stomach. Oh yes, those were the days. They were good times, those days.

I monitor my belly button's progress because I can't really gauge the progress of anything else. The days simply plod on and though we are marching inexorably closer to the fateful day, the bodily changes aren't fantastic enough from one minute to the next to really pinpoint any succession.

Still, we're ending our 34th week here and we've still got our navel. We still don't waddle, we've only had one incident of swelling ankles, and the need to urinate, contrary to popular myth, is really quite manageable. There's been no heartburn to speak of. Sleep is uncomfortable at times but not completely impossible.

Hey, I strung sap tubing a few days ago while slogging through a foot of snow. You can't say the old girl's had it yet. Suffice to say we're hanging in there. The heck with the miracle of life; I'm counting the small miracles now.