This picture looks as if I’m showing off the bandaid, but in fact I’m showing the foot and the attached skinny leg. But tell me the truth: my hand looks like the hand of Miss “I Think of Myself as a Model” on those Baby Einstein videos, doesn’t it? It’s something in the pose, as if I were conscious of how I wanted my hand to look in the photo. I swear I was thinking only of the foot at the time, and of keeping my hand from blocking a single toesie.

Notice I was not wearing nail polish. My plan was to wear my new L’Oreal Blush It Off, which is just as good as Sundry says, but the little pamphlet from the hospital said no nail polish. Well, bah.

Henry nurses every two hours for an hour. I am glad I have been through this before so I’m not panicking at the way half my time is spent pinned down to a chair. This part improves with time. And already he is not literally nursing every two hours: he often does, but then there are a few longer stretches in there.

A few weeks ago I read a post, I think it was on Playgroupie but I’m too aware of the countdown of the Nursing Clock to go look, about cracked nipples. I think my brilliant suggestion was Lansinoh. I would like to change my answer. My new answer is: Cut them right off, because it will be far less painful in the long run. Save Lansinoh for something less painful, like, say, a leg amputation. And I would like to add that everyone who says that nipples don’t crack if you’re “doing it right” can BITE ME (please do not, already too sore). The lactation consultant who came to see how things were going at the hospital said she doesn’t know why anyone says that, since she herself got cracked nipples when she breastfed, and if a lactation consultant doesn’t know how to do it right I don’t know who does, and neither does she. I wish she would spread the word to her colleagues.

I sure am glad I have all the bigger clothes I wore before I looked right in maternity clothes, because that’s all that fits right now. I had jeans in one and two sizes too big, and a couple of men’s t-shirts that I wore Every Single Day, and that’s what I’m wearing now. I think otherwise I’d be freaking out, and so I would like to take a moment to re-state what I think is an important rule for pregnancy: buy yourself a very small wardrobe of bigger-than-usual clothes. They’ll get you through the “don’t look pregnant, just look fat” first half of the pregnancy and then they’ll serve you again post partum. I’m getting steadily smaller, but I still look about 4 months pregnant. It’s sad but there it is, and it’s a whole lot less sad if you can wear some comfy big clothes instead of having a choice between (1) squeezing into clothes that won’t even button, and (2) wearing maternity clothes. Both depressing options.

It’s nice to see my body deflating. I didn’t retain a lot of water this time, but I retained enough that I’m happy to see my foot bones looking so pretty. My calves look all slim, too. I see my face returning to normal, which is such a relief: all through the pregnancy I think, “Oh, I am AGING and I am so much less cute than I used to be, and why is my Good Skin all blotchy and pore-y and shiny?,” and then I deliver the baby and there’s my face coming back to me, cute as ever, albeit with undereye circles that rival an eclipse.

On the other hand, I’ve lost the Goddess of Fertility look I’d gotten used to. It’s lovely to walk around feeling all gorgeous and round, even if you’re also feeling heart burn, shortness of breath, and shooting pelvic pains. Now my look is, what? Goddess of Awnings and Rashes? There is a–*shudder*–FLAP where my stomach was. And pretty much everything they put on or in my body in the hospital left a mark: the adhesive (back, hand, chest, stomach, neck), the enormous synthetic underpants (whose brilliant idea were those?), the fentanyl (which feels delicious but makes me itchy).

Edward is crying “Lah! lah!” (lap), so that gives me a good ending for a post I wasn’t sure how to end anyway. Thanks, Edward!

It makes my mother heart happy to read all those comments about how beautiful my baby is. But it also makes my mother heart nervous and darty-eyed, because the truth is I deliberately chose an exceptionally flattering photo of the child, and now it occurs to me that if I post any more photos you will discover the truth, which is that…..well….

Let me put it this way: every baby is beautiful in his or her own way. Which is to say that even this baby’s love-eyed mother knows not to enter him into any beauty contests:

I mean, the comb-over alone would disqualify him.

The thing is, I never think my newborns are particularly…attractive. I stare at them for hours, endlessly fascinated by their every detail, so I speak as one who has had time to judge. When the nurse says, “Oh, he’s beautiful!” I think, skeptically, “Uh huh.” If anyone says the baby is cute and I accept the compliment without arguing, I imagine them snorting behind my back, “She actually thinks that thing is cute!”

Oh, I’m FOND of the baby, clearly! And there IS beauty in the eye of this beholder! But it is difficult to get photographic evidence of that kind of beauty.

I am stealing a moment to blog. My goodness, a newborn certainly is a time-sucking vortex! Yesterday was gone before I knew it. My hospital bags are still on the kitchen floor. I have a huge intriguing baby present I haven’t even opened. The mail from when I was in the hospital is still on the counter, and I have to be careful or there will be bills that get away from me. …No, I am not going to think about bills right now, or I will trigger a whole series of panicky “Must do this right now!” thoughts and I will never get any blogging done ever again.

I am too scattered to even know what to blog about. Normally I think of something as I’m going about my usual morning routine, and the topic gradually fleshes out until I’m ready to sit down and write it. Since the baby was born, this is more how I’m thinking:

1) Flowers make such a great hospital-room present. My parents gave me a huge geranium and the whole room looked prettier.

2) Two paramedic students sat in on the c-section. I loved that. One of them let me squeeze her fingers while I was getting the epidural, a gesture I would have thought was useless but to my surprise it seriously helped.

3) I tried to start baby-name conversations with several nurses, but got nothing good. One said, “Yeah, Madison is getting really popular.” Hey, great insider information!

4) A newborn has, like, no butt at all.

5) Paul and the kids cleaned the fridge while I was in the hospital. I hadn’t realized the shelves were see-through.

6) Hey, I’m doing great! Hardly any postpartum sad feelings at all!

7) *weeping*

8) I did not bake even one single muffin too many.

9) Must choose baby announcement photo open that present write thank-you notes unpack hospital bags find that hospital pacifier make baby’s 2-week appointment bring baby to see the bus driver put deli turkey on the list email friend about being home eat breakfast take medicine see if Paul can manage to do a load of laundry help Rob with his homework remember to get out the gifts for William’s teachers.

It is a good thing we didn’t arrange to meet earlier, because here it is 9:20 p.m. already and I am just getting to this. I had forgotten, perhaps through biological necessity, how much time everything takes when there’s a newborn. We’ve been home more than eight hours, and all my hospital bags are still sitting on the floor in the kitchen.

Anyway! You are not interested in the status of my hospital bags! You want to know if there is a BABY. And there IS:

Henry
May 31, 2007
8:35 a.m.
8 pounds 2 ounces
21.5 inches long

I can tell I’m not firing on all….eight? is it “eight”? cylinders…..is it “cylinders?” Hey, what’s that expression I’m looking for that means I’m not exactly running at full mental capacity? This afternoon I was hungry, and I had a nice heaping bowl of vanilla ice cream with Keebler “Bug Bites” (glazed cinnamon graham crackers in appetizing insect shapes) broken into it–and then I suddenly realized I never had lunch. I got all distracted, I guess, and then when I was hungry I looked at the clock and thought “Snack time!” It was convenient that I didn’t realize this until after the ice cream was down the hatch, wasn’t it?

Whatever Paul has, they gave him an antibiotic for it, so I’m glad he stayed home, and I told him so in a grudging tone of voice. I do wish he’d found out some of the little details such as what he has and whether it’s safe to be near a newborn with it, but he’s got a call in to the nurse now because of what I can only assume was intense pressure from me–all I remember is all the light leaving the room and there was a voice like thunder, and then suddenly he was making the call and also hiding behind the microwave cart.

Around lunchtime, Edward’s cough got worse and he was digging at both ears, and Elizabeth started coughing the way Edward was yesterday. I was reluctant to go back to the pediatrician after yesterday’s “Whooping cough? Pfff. This isn’t even a cold” session with Robert, but I thought, what if we get up tomorrow and he’s even sicker? So I just took them both in, and they both have colds. Well, it was worth two co-pays to be able to tell the disapproving maternity nurses that what our children are hacking all over the brand-new baby is only cold germs and not plague.

Now, let’s see, when will I be back again to tell you about the baby? It seems to me like it will be a million years from now, on the other side of an unfamiliar galaxy, and yet if everything goes as expected I should be back home on Sunday afternoon. I’ve scheduled a session of “weeping with homesickness for my quiet, immaculate, food-serviced hospital room” for right after I get home, but after that I should be free. Er, assuming I work up the nerve to ask Paul if he can watch all five kids so I can go blog. Maybe we should plan to meet up Sunday evening, after (four of) the kids are in bed.

Hey, that’s a good thing to think of. As soon as I thought of Sunday evening, I started thinking of a sweet little BABY and how much fun it would be to post his beautiful-in-a-mother’s-eyes-if-not-technically-in-anyone-else’s photo–as opposed to what I’ve been thinking of most of the day, which is having a tube put into my spine, and the way they always call in these offensively burly guys to lift me from one table to another, and the way the nurse asks Personal Bathroom Questions in front of Paul. Our Sunday night arrangement is way better to think of.

I took Rob to the pediatrician yesterday, and the pediatrician said he doesn’t see how it can possibly be whooping cough. Then he retracted that statement, saying that whenever he says something like that, he can almost guarantee the test will come back positive just to show him doctors shouldn’t get too full of themselves. (Ha ha. Thanks for giving my child WHOOPING COUGH with your HUBRIS.) He thinks it’s probably not even a cold, just seasonal allergies. But in any case, the test results for whooping cough won’t be back until Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. This is me, not freaking out about the minuscule risk that we might expose a zero-day-old baby to whooping cough.

Now Edward and William are coughing. Listen, I am this close to kenneling these children for the next week. If the rates were reasonable I might throw Paul in, too: this morning he said he hadn’t wanted to tell me but he’s had a sore throat for two days and today it’s worse. He stayed home from work, which is actually good timing because he can help with the kids while I bump around the house like a caffeinated bumblebee.

Normally he wouldn’t go to the doctor for a sore throat, but I am getting really jumpy about all this illness and I said he had to. I believe my voice got a little shrill. I’d been up since 4:30 (couldn’t get back to sleep after third pee of the night) dealing with the existing situations (note to Rob’s teacher about the doctor appointment; email to my in-laws explaining that if they send me last-minute crucial contact information at 8:00 tomorrow morning, as they have done twice before on my c-section date, I will not be here to receive it), and I was in no mood to add yet another complication. If he’s contagious, he can stay home tomorrow with all the children and I will go off to the hospital free and easy and not give any of them a single thought.

I feel queasy and fluttery. This day is the one day of the entire pregnancy that doesn’t seem long. I gave the twins baths, and I’m on a second load of laundry. I don’t have much I need to do, but I want to have plenty of hours to let that truth be felt. I want to be able to go into one room and then another, seeing the empty laundry baskets, the empty trash cans, and the fresh sheets. I want to visit my muffin stockpile in the freezer. I want time to go over my hospital bag list twenty extra times to make sure I’m not forgetting anything that will make me unable to have the baby after all, and I want to re-read the hospital pamphlet so I won’t forget not to get up at 3:00 a.m. and eat a steak. Oh my god, what if I lose my mind and accidentally eat BREAKFAST in the morning? What THEN? I need to re-read the pamphlet right now.

Lisa was wondering what new baby things were out there, and what I’ve bought for the new baby so far. You want more talk about baby things? Welllllllll….OKAY.

The twins were our last babies for sure, so we got rid of their infant car seats, so I needed to buy a new infant seat for this baby. I chose a Graco Snugride in the Devon pattern (what? fabric pattern is a crucial issue). I also bought itsy bitsy baby socks: I like the six-packs they have at JCP because they have good thick ribbing and seem to stay on the baby’s feet better than some, although socks and baby feeties are natural enemies. I bought a couple of packs of Carter’s onesies, because most of our onesies were shot after four children; Carter’s and Old Navy are my favorite onesies because they’re softer and stretchier than Gerber, and hold up better as handmedowns (our Gerber ones got all droopy). I’ve also bought a number of tiny little blue outfits, most decorated with puppies, when I found them on clearance. The socks and onesies we actually needed, but I have no excuse for the outfits. We have tons of boy clothes, especially in the sizes that don’t get a lot of wear.

One of my most-used baby items is a vibrating bouncy seat. Some babies hate these, but all of mine so far have wanted to marry it. Our bouncy seat broke when the twins were just outgrowing it, so I bought a new one: a light blue Just One Year one, on clearance of course at Target (this is the version that replaced it; it’s very similar to the one I have).

Something I saw while buying the car seat is this hot little number: the Graco SnugGlider car seat swing frame. You put the car seat right into it, making your car seat into a swing. But it is $50, which seems steep for that little frame: it comes in a box the size of two shoeboxes end to end. If this new baby loves him a swing, though, I will reconsider buying it; my excuse will be the trip we’re going on when he’s about 3 weeks old, and how handy it would be to have a portable baby-quieting device along for the hotel.

I’ve been hearing a lot about the Bumbo and how awesome it is, and it’s something I’m considering for when this baby is a little older. My babies are always a little late on the physical development (I’m sure it’s because they’re too busy learning physics and calculus), so something that helps the baby sit up a little earlier would be nice. With so many children roiling around the house, I wouldn’t want to be a baby lying vulnerably on a blanket.

I’m still looking for a perfectly sized diaper bag. Regular diaper bags are too big; I didn’t even need one that large when I had twins. The one I use now is called a “short trip” diaper bag, and with careful packing it holds four diapers, one of those slim boxes of diaper wipes, two sippee cups, two bibs, and a baggie of snacks, plus it has a couple of compartments I use for things like acetaminophen, a plastic bag (in case I need a Grossness Containment Chamber), and a small bottle of hand sanitizer (which, according to my alert, “finger on the pulse of mass forwarded email” mother-in-law, I should stop letting the children drink). This bag is perfect for a couple of toddlers, but not big enough for what I now will need to add: a fresh baby outfit for after he poops/spits all over himself, a few baby diapers, and a folded-up blanket for concealing scandal during nursing.

Chime in, all you pregnant people and new parents: what great new baby products have you found? Give me an excuse to go out shopping. Um, in a few weeks.

The buzz is gone. It left when I went to bed, which gives support to Trena’s theory that loopiness can be the baby cutting off the blood supply to the brain. It was fun while it lasted.

This morning I’m crampy, as I have been for a couple of days, fueling my constant “Labor?…….labor?…….labor?……” soundtrack. I’m also feeling less excited and more nervous. I’ve been so impatient for the c-section date, counting weeks and days and saying things like “This is the last day of the calendar week before the calendar week the baby will be born in! Yay!,” and now there are two days left and I am feeling a little queasy.

Today I had my pre-op at the hospital, to which I had to drag three children. Lucky anesthesiologist, asking me important medical questions over the din of Edward naming everything he sees (and continuing to name it again and again until I repeat it back to him), and Elizabeth protesting the whole concept of the stroller. Meanwhile I was signing the paperwork, which says basically that I know I could die during the c-section, and that if that happens I totally understand. Sign here.

Tomorrow, then, will be my last day of being able to do anything. On Thursday I have to leave the house at 5:50 in the morning, so Thursday is not a day to be finishing up the laundry or baking a final batch of muffins. All there will be time for on Thursday is gathering up the last-minute things: my pillow, my journal, the book I’m reading; my face lotion and my brush. Main fret: that I will forget to set my alarm, or that it will not go off. For my last c-section, I set three alarm clocks and a kitchen timer.

The school nurse called and asked me to come get Rob, and I did. The school nurse wants me to have him tested for whooping cough. WHOOPING COUGH. Do you think it’s okay if I choose not to freak out about this? I feel as if I am at full freak-out capacity, and can’t add one more issue. Not only is whooping cough dangerous to small children and especially not-yet-vaccinated newborns, but if Rob has it he can’t come to the hospital when the baby is born, and he is so excited to do that, and he would be so disappointed, and also, frankly, it would be a hassle to figure out what to do with him instead. So I am just going to pretend that all this can possibly be is a cold, and that I am taking him to the pediatrician this afternoon just to be a completely responsible person who pursues every possibility. Because I think that is in fact the case: I think he is very unlikely to have whooping cough, and that all the appointment will do is set my mind at ease. So I would like to set it at ease now, instead of spending the whole afternoon pacing and worrying. And I would like not to think about the school nurse, who, when we picked up Rob, asked if any of the other kids were coughing, and when I said no, but that Elizabeth had a runny nose, said soberly, “Yes, that’s how it starts.”

I don’t know if any of you have experienced a good prescription painkiller, or perhaps the similar feeling–from what I’ve heard–produced by certain non-prescription substances. The feeling is familiar to me from postpartum, when the lovely lovely pills put a barrier between me and the other feeling, the one where I’m imagining my baby as an old man and weeping because life is so very fleeting, and then thinking about how I have made a terrible mistake to get married and have children, and then thinking about how I will never be able to cope with this new workload because it is too much and I have really gone too far this time. Then it is time for my painkiller and I see why people who have lives that are genuinely unhappy–rather than made temporarily unhappy by hormonal adjustments–might resort to such substances without the authorization of a physician.

Tonight I have that painkiller feeling, but with nothing to explain it. I was washing the dishes, and my hands and the bridge of my nose started feeling…tingly. And I felt distant from what I was doing, and inclined to admire the soap bubbles and wash the dishes more slowly to appreciate the roundness of the plates and the sparkly way the water was running over them. BUZZED. But why?

When I am 38 weeks pregnant, I attribute everything to possible labor. Crampy? Maybe I’m in labor! Lower back a little sore? Maybe I’m in labor! Not hungry? Maybe I’m in labor! Feeling buzzed for no reason? Hey, it COULD be labor.

Underneath the “whoaaaaaaaa! look at my hands!” feeling, I started getting stressed: if it were labor, I’d still have last-minute things I’d need to do–but darned if I could make myself do anything except look at the pretty bubbles. Then, suddenly, I was galvanized. I separated out the “fun things for the kids to do while waiting around at the hospital” stuff from the “fun things for the kids while Paul is trying to handle all four of them at home” stuff. I packed up a few more things that can be packed up now, such as batteries and a tiny screwdriver for the little games that will certainly run out of batteries ten minutes after we get to the hospital. I put a book of Sudoku puzzles in my hospital bag, and remembered to include a pencil.

And I calmed the hell down, because it’s not labor. Early labor feels very little like “yummy painkillers!” and very much more like, “Ouch ouch ouch damn it this hurts!”–as I remember it from my firstborn, anyway.

Now I’m lethargic again, but still with that strange high feeling. I think I’ll go sit in the recliner and admire the weave of the fabric until Thursday.

Paul and I are having a little disagreement, and I’m hoping to add people to my side.

I have heard that if you want to have a tubal ligation at the same time as your c-section, OBs usually have a cut-off date for making that decision. That is, they are not going to allow a 39-weeks-pregnant woman to come hobbling in all swelled up and miserable and say, “Tie those tubes! I’m never having another baby!”

When I heard this, it made perfect sense to me. Many a woman has decided late in pregnancy (or in my case, in the barfing early part of pregnancy) that she never wants to go through this again. Then the baby is here, and the swelling recedes, and time goes by, and a baby starts to seem like a great idea again.

Furthermore, I think I have heard of this “decision cut-off” many times, and from many sources. Unfortunately for my argument with Paul, I could only think of one specific friend who had claimed to have this situation with her OB, and I’m fuzzy on the details because it has been a long time since she told me about it, and she and I aren’t friends anymore so I can’t call her and ask her. Paul seems to think that every time I hear a fact, I should write down the time, date, and people involved, and then get the document notarized.

You would think that Paul would not care if I claimed incorrectly that some OBs had a certain week before which you had to say you wanted a tubal ligation during your c-section. But he cares very much, it appears, very much indeed. He immediately started plugging terms into search engines, and then saying confidently that he could not find one single reference to any such thing. He demanded, as I’ve mentioned, to hear my sources–ideally with telephone numbers so that he could interview them himself.

It threatened to turn into a fight, except that I had just eaten a large bowl of chocolate ice cream with crushed oreos, and I was feeling mellow, and also I am far too large to storm out of the room, and so I wasn’t rising to his challenges, and so eventually he rolled his eyes and went back to playing a computer game, on which he vented his crabbiness instead of doing it at me, to which I say good deal.

I then did a little more searching myself, but all I found were references to a 30-day waiting period in general–that is, unrelated to pregnancy, just that many states and health plans require non-pregnant women to wait 30 days after making the decision before having a tubal ligation.

So here is what I need from you. Ideally, I need first-hand stories about you and about your personal OB, and about your personal OB telling you that he or she would need to know before Week X if you wanted a tubal ligation at the same time as your c-section or else he/she wouldn’t do it. If you are without personal stories, secondhand stories are also good. In fact, I’ll even take, “I heard one time that some girl…” stories.

Also, in case any of you were wondering what Paul was wondering, this is not something I’m even remotely considering for myself. It was that I wanted to use the cut-off date as an example in an email, and then I got disproportionately interested in the subject when I couldn’t quickly find the information I was looking for. Then I made the mistake of mentioning my search difficulties to Paul, and here we are.