I am getting seriously difficult to live with. It is mostly general crabbiness and general being sick of pregnancy, but it is a far-reaching thing, encompassing tone of voice and quality of complaints. Last night I was. . .I think “weeping and railing” is the phrase I want here.

It started with a tooth. I hate going to the dentist, but a year ago I went. I had four fillings done. We don’t have dental insurance, so including the exam and the x-rays, this was no small commitment. One year later, my tooth is chipping away around one of the fillings. What this says to me, in my current frame of mind is:

1. Dentists deliberately do bad work so that you will need to return.
2. They will keep doing more and more work until you have no teeth/money left.
3. If I hadn’t gone last year, I wouldn’t have this problem now.
4. My teeth will all be gone by the time I’m 40. And I’ll have spent tens of thousands of dollars on them by then.
5. I’ll have to get dentures, and I won’t be able to eat anything I want anymore.
6. THEN I’ll miss biting into an apple, even though I have a whole pile of apples in the fridge right now that I cut up if I want to eat them. Later I’ll think, “Why oh WHY didn’t I bite into apples when I could??”
7. Dental work costs so much, it’s a luxury service. It’s unfair of them to promote it as a basic essential.
8. Oh my god, how are we going to afford dental work for a family of seven?
9. I wish we had dental insurance.
10. Even if we did, it wouldn’t cover enough.
11. Life sucks.
12. I’m going to have to make an appointment and just shut up and pay them whatever they tell me to, but for when? Before the baby? After the baby?
13. What if I wait, and then it gets suddenly way worse when I’m, say, in the hospital?
14. Is it starting to hurt now? I THINK IT’S STARTING TO HURT NOW!
15. How are we going to pay for this, considering Paul just had $3000 of dental work done, and now we’ll have a $1000 hospital copay because of the stupid insurance increase?
16. Etc.

Anyway. This morning I called and made an appointment. For four days after the baby is born. And now I’m thinking I should ask them to do work on my BRAIN while I have my head under a bright light anyway. What was I thinking? I’m barely going to be WALKING at that point. Sure, Paul will be home that week, which is why I made the appointment for then, but we’ll have to load all five children into the minivan so he can drive me a mile to the dentist’s office, and then he’ll have to do it again to pick me up.

Oh, so I was saying that it was tooth agitations that set me off last night. It was right before bedtime, so I thought, “I won’t think about the tooth now. There’s no point. It will only keep me awake.” So I tried to think about other things. And what I thought about was how I should really get up the courage to ask the OB/anesthesiologist about having the epidural taken out the night of the c-section rather than mid-day the next day, because I hate not being able to move, but I’m probably too chicken to argue about it, and maybe I’d be wrong about that idea anyway and would be writhing in pain in the middle of the night with the doctor shrugging and saying, “Well, you insisted.” And about how the only thing that has worked for the pain afterwards is Perc0cet, but last time I got a rash and so they said I can’t take it anymore, but now what will I take? Vic0din and Tylen0l 4 and Demer0l have all failed me. And then I thought about how we need to get the oil changed in the minivan, like, two thousand miles ago, and how Paul and Rob need haircuts, and about how we need to install the infant car seat rather than just having the box taking up half the minivan. And I thought about how mad I was at the Target automated refill system, which left a message on our answering machine WHILE I WAS AT TARGET PICKING UP A PRESCRIPTION to tell me I had a prescription I needed to pick up within 3 days or they’d return it to stock, and how because of HIPAA they can’t tell me over the phone what prescription it is or anything, and Target is 20 minutes away and I really don’t want to go twice this week, and CRAP. And about that program we watched on TV that showed scarily blank-faced children staring at a TV screen as the voice-over explained that by letting our children watch TV and play video games we were bringing them up to relate only to technology and not to other people.

Paul is good at times like this. Just for starters, he doesn’t argue with a pregnant woman on a tear. He doesn’t say in an exasperated voice, “Well, why don’t you just do something about it instead of complaining and fretting?” He says, about the dentist, “Don’t worry. Make the appointment. It will be fine. This is what money is for.” And if I refuse to be comforted, and I burst into tears and go on about everything we’ve spent money on in the last year, and how it means we have NONE LEFT, he doesn’t say I’m being irrational, or say, “Well, if you hadn’t spent money on ____,” or think I’m attacking his earning power. He says, “I know,” understandingly not patronizingly, and then says, “Oh, did I tell you the cute thing Edward did earlier?” and tells five funny/cute child stories in a row. He says, “Why don’t you close your eyes and think about how not sleepy you are.” He tidies the blankets. He lets the window stay open even though he’s freezing, because he knows I’m overheated and short of breath and the cold fresh air helps. Furthermore, last night he went to the grocery store to get some mid-week things (we are always out of milk and fruit), and he came home with not one but two pints of Dove ice cream for me, and he had to guess at the flavor I’d want because I’ve only ever bought the bars, not the pints, and he picked the flavor I would want more than any of the others.

This skill of Paul’s (not the pint-picking, but the whole “letting the storm blow over without fighting it” thing) is a good thing, because I am aware that I am becoming impossible, and that it is almost certainly because I am at full-term as of today–but that doesn’t mean I can force myself to be rational about it. And since next up is the postpartum period, it’s not as if things are going to improve anytime soon.

I want to send you over to Shauna today, because I love the topic of gift-giving and she is working it. I want to read lots of people’s answers to her questions.

Also, I meant to say about the free bone marrow registration post from the 14th: spread the word.

Also, I would like to say that I am tired of my maternity shirts. And that I have hit that point where even though it’s unlikely and not really something I should be hoping for, I keep thinking how great it would be if I went into labor and we could get this over with. I’ve only gone into labor one time, with my first pregnancy, when my water broke at 37 weeks 6 days. How come that has never happened with the other pregnancies? I always make it to my 38- or 39-week c-section date, even when I was carrying twins. That’s good, of course that’s good, and genetically lucky, and I am grateful. But.

Here is something Paul cannot master, no matter how many times we have calm and reasonable discussions about it: when to buy grapes, and how many of them to buy.

If they are awesome grapes, firm and with that frosty opaque look, and they are at a good price per pound (say, $1.29), he should buy LOTS. If they are crappy grapes, soft and with sour, already wrinkling skins, and they are at a bad price per pound (say, $2.79), he should buy NONE. Of course, there are many tricky places in between these two situations. There are awesome grapes at the high price end, and there are crappy ones at the low price end, and there are pretty good ones at the sort of high end, and there are decent ones at the sort of low end, etc.

So before he goes to the grocery store, I try to explain the continuum once again. Good grapes don’t have to be cheap, but he should buy smaller quantities as they get more expensive. Cheap grapes don’t have to be as good as expensive grapes, but we won’t eat many if they’re not good.

He comes home from the store with gross, browning, wrinkled grapes at $3.19 a pound. At least he only bought a pound and a half of them (I would not have put it past him to buy five pounds, remembering the “we eat a lot of grapes” but not having room in his brain for the “not if they suck”), but still: $5 worth of grapes? When they’re no good? That’s a lot of money on bad grapes.

If I’d done the shopping and the grapes were $3.19 a pound, I would have bought them only if they were glorious, perfect grapes–and even then, I would have bought about half a pound of them, just to tide us over; and in certain moods I would have bought not one single grape, on the principle that grapes should not be $3.19 a pound. In any case, at $3.19 a pound, anything less than perfect puts us in the No Grapes shaded area of the graph.

I realize this is a significantly more complicated situation than the “get out a fresh roll of toilet paper when the old one is getting close to being used up” one (which he has also failed to master). I don’t expect him to make exactly the same call I would make, to the dollar or to the pound, and it would be ridiculously controlling if I did, especially because sometimes he’s right where I would have been wrong: he comes home with 3 pounds of expensive grapes that turn out to be worth every single penny because of their amazing deliciousness, and in fact prove that I am in some cases overly thrifty to the point of missing out on the joys of life.

But I think that in general, he should be able to understand that “expensive” and “yucky” belong on one end of the grapes graph, and “cheap” and “perfect” belong on the other end, and that things change gradually as you move around within the range of possibilities. Balances tip. Judgments must be made. Sometimes grapes are purchased and sometimes they are not. Sometimes quantities are large and sometimes small.

Seven paragraphs on grapes? Well, I meant to tie it in with his overall inability to make shopping decisions (buying chips not on sale and from the most expensive store, buying things without even looking at prices, etc.), but I seem to have run out of steam.

Awhile back I talked about bone marrow donation. I mentioned that the cost of getting on the registry might discourage people from signing up, but that if you were willing-but-moth-walleted you should contact the National Marrow Registry about the various opportunities to sign up for free. For example, I signed up for free when a local boy needed a transplant and there was a big drive paid for by his church and family.

Anyway, Tessie has drawn my attention to their current drive: from now until May 21st, it’s free to get on the registry. Go over to the National Marrow Registry right this minute and do it. It’ll save you $52+, and it’s a good thing to do.

Good morning! Two weeks and three days left! I’ve gone from feeling as if it’s too early to do things to feeling as if it’s too late to do things. I’m so tum-heavy and immobilized, what I work on now is the exhausting task of finishing all the ice cream before the baby gets here. I only have three more appointments left: one more routine OB appointment, one pre-op with the OB, and one pre-op with the anesthesiologist. And there are three half-gallons of Breyer’s. I think I can make it.

Last night William was up crying and saying his ear hurt, so this morning we’re headed for the pediatrician. I hope he does have an infection, because that means we’ll have to go to Target to pick up the prescription, and I can do a little shopping while we wait. Also, the other possibility is that he has so much wax in his ear it’s causing him pain, and that’s grosser, harder to fix, and more seemingly indicative of neglect and filth, so I’m voting for the infection and the cruising of clearance end-caps.

Thank you to everyone who gave input on the 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner issue. I’ve bought five different kinds, and I’m trying each one for a week; I’ll do a report when all the results are in. I recommend this experiment to anyone waiting out the last few weeks of pregnancy. It’s fun and it’s distracting, and it leaves you with a bunch of 2-in-1s for after the baby is born and you feel like you have about 30 seconds to shower before the baby’s crying drops you to the floor in a seizure.

You know what else I recommend for the last few weeks? EARRINGS. From the neck down there is nothing to buy: it’s not worth it to buy more maternity clothes at this point, and shoe shopping is pointless if your feet are larger, wider, or puffier than you hope they’ll be after the baby is born. But earrings! You can still buy and wear pretty earrings. Target has about a zillion pretty pairs that cost in the $6 range. I’m trying not to go completely nuts.

Mother’s Day sure is a busman’s holiday, isn’t it? I was reading blogs last night and this morning, and so many of us spent the day collecting our paper cups of dandelions and then doing laundry and wiping down the counters. I discovered that my little Mother’s Day gift to myself was getting to do today everything I didn’t do yesterday. I read a column a few years ago by a mom who wrote, basically, screw the sweet little cups of weeds, I want to see some WORK done around here. She got such negative feedback from people saying she should appreciate the loving gestures, but I get her point: sometimes the way to show love to a mother is by not expecting her to do all the crap work.

Happy Mother’s Day, all you mothers!

Happy nausea, shortness of breath, needing to pee every five minutes, heartburn, stretch marks, permanent tummy softness, permanent rib expansion, and let’s not discuss labor and delivery.
Happy doing it again a year or two or three or more later.

Happy not knowing why they’re letting you just take the baby home from the hospital when you have no qualifications whatsoever and probably can’t be trusted to do anything right.
Happy on-the-job training.

Happy worrying that the baby isn’t breathing.
Happy waking the baby up checking.
Happy feeling like a Reader’s Digest joke about motherhood.

Happy worrying that you don’t love the baby.
Happy worrying that you no longer love your husband because you love the baby so much.

Happy thinking you’ll go insane.
Happy thinking you already have.

Happy cleaning up poop.
Happy cleaning up barf.
Happy not minding it as much when it belongs to your own child.
Happy still gagging.

Happy feeling like you’re doing everything wrong.
Happy feeling like you’re figuring things out.
Happy feeling like no, you’re still doing everything wrong.

Happy wondering if you should be worrying more.
Happy wondering if you should be worrying less.
Happy wondering if there are things you don’t know you’re supposed to be worrying about.

Happy toddler years.
Happy teenage years.

Happy first day of school, waving goodbye, crying all the way home, fretting all day.
Happy first day back the next year, thanking god the summer is over.

Happy crayon drawings all over the refrigerator.
Happy finger prints all over the walls.
Happy learning more about cleaning supplies than you ever wanted to know, between this and the whole poop/barf thing.

Happy never being able to hear bad news about children again.
Happy feeling like you have an automatic bond with all other mothers.

Happy worrying about dentist bills, orthodontist bills, glasses, sport fees, new clothes.
Happy investing in the future of no one you’d rather spend money on.
Happy still wishing there was more money and that children didn’t use up so much of it.

Happy crying at weddings. Happy crying at births.
Happy moving up from mom to grandma. Happy watching it start over again.

Happy Mother’s Day.

I remember learning in a high school psychology class that the average person can keep about seven things in mind at the same time. Add an eighth and one of the first seven gets knocked out.

I’m reminded of this when Paul seems able to retain only a very small number of household instructions. If I say, “Do not put food down the sink. We do not have a garbage disposal,” he will stop putting food down the sink. If I say, “Please take out the trash when it’s full, rather than standing in the trash can to compress the trash so tightly that it can no longer be removed without ripping the bag,” he will start taking the trash out instead of stomping it. But then if I say, “You can’t just rinse a cup when you’re done drinking out of it and put it in the drying rack, you have to use actual soap and washing motions,” he will wash his cup–and then scrape food off his plate into the sink.

I am not sure I can adequately express how frustrating this has been over the dozen or so years Paul and I have shared a household. It isn’t as if I’m a difficult, controlling person making up complicated, arbitrary rules. I think the things I ask him to do are intuitive, or at least easy to remember once mentioned. I think a normal person should be able to retain the information that if you put sticky brown soda in a cup and then you put your germy mouth on the edge of that cup, a little swish with cold water is not “washing” the cup. I think a normal person should be able to remember that information even if I then add new information, such as that if your shoes track huge clumps of mud down the hallway, you should clean that mud up rather than leaving it there.

But apparently he can’t. Before we were married, I got as far as calling around to find out the cost of studio and 1-bedroom apartments, thinking that probably I shouldn’t stay with a man who was going to drive me so crazy. After we were married but before we had children, I wondered if I should be willing to help him pass on his genes. Post-children, I’ve again and again felt despair, like I’m shackled permanently to someone who would whistle in a clean-conscience way as he peed into a kitchen sink filled with dishes. (In the interest of fairness, I should say that he does not in fact do this. As far as I know. But then again, I didn’t realize until recently that he wasn’t washing his cups.)

There comes a point where it is useless to continue trying to change someone. I think I reached this point ten years ago or more, but I can’t make myself stop trying. It just seems so REASONABLE that he should learn these things, and so UNREASONABLE that I should have to keep mentioning them in my kind and patient and trying-hard-not-to-be-shrill-or-naggy voice.

I have realized that I am in a pickle if I want to leave the house after the new baby is born. I have a double stroller. I have two toddlers. Where does the small baby go?

I could put the infant car seat in one of the two stroller slots, but then I have a walking 2-year-old. I don’t know about your 2-year-olds, but my 2-year-olds are not of the sort who trail behind me placidly like Mary’s little lamb. Mine are the sort who need complicated restraint systems, and, in a perfect world where such things were not so unfairly frowned upon, muzzles.

So the toddlers will go in the stroller, and then I suppose I need a frontpack carrier for the new baby. I have tried frontpack carriers with every baby so far, and every time I have been sorry after about 5 minutes. My back starts aching, and soon it is the predominant sensation in my universe. Perhaps it is because I am tall? Perhaps it is because I am “long-backed” (a nice way of saying “short legs for her height”)? Perhaps it is because I have crappy posture? Whatever the reason, frontpacks have, to date, been a failure. But I don’t see any way around it other than (1) buying a triple stroller, which, no, or (2) not leaving the house.

Whenever I mention frontpack infant carrier failure, people mention the Baby Bjorn. It’s wonderful, they say. It doesn’t hurt your back, they say. It is comfy-comfy-comfy, they say. It makes you coffee in the morning and brings it to you in bed, they say. It is well worth the eighty-for-god’s-sake-dollars, they say.

This is where you come in. Are you a Bjorn Againer? Or do you recommend a different frontpack? Or have you found they’re all terrible, and you personally would vote to put the new baby in the stroller and put a muzzle and leash on one of the toddlers?

Sorry to spring a Christmas song on you like that, but it’s going through my head incessantly and I want company. Besides, I’ve thought of it as more of a back-to-school song ever since I heard it in that commercial where the parents are springing through the store tossing school supplies into the cart while the children drag sullenly behind.

The song is going through my head right now because for me, this is the best part of the whole pregnancy. Every time I look at the calendar to see what appointments I’m forgetting today, I can see “PRE-OP” and “C-SECTION” way at the end of the month. I bought the car seat this weekend, and it struck me that I did that none too soon. When Edward is on the changing table, I sometimes crick the drawer open a little to peek at those teensy sleepers waiting for the new baby. I could pack my hospital bag this very afternoon and no one would accuse me of jumping the gun; in fact, a few of you are probably thinking, “She doesn’t have her bag packed yet??”

I’m tired and I’m sore, and it takes serious resolve for me to do an errand. When I stand up, it takes me half a dozen steps before my body remembers how the walking thing works. I change positions often, and none of them let me breathe normally. But the whole pregnancy has had its discomforts, and at least these discomforts are accompanied by the thought of only 3 weeks and 1 day left to go, as opposed to, for example, the morning sickness at 7 weeks, which was accompanied by the thought of 32 weeks left to go.

Earlier in the pregnancy, I tried not to think too often about how much time there was left. Now I think of it many times a day, with relish. “Three weeks and one day!,” I thought this morning. This is the Christmas Eve of pregnancy, and for me it lasts from 30 weeks until the c-section at 39 weeks. Next up: Christmas, which is on May 31st this year. Then: the post-holiday blues, which start the day I get home from the hospital.

One of my favorite games to play during pregnancy and child rearing is “A Year Ago Today, A Year From Now.” I made that name up on the spot. Great, yes? You’d better agree, because I am too tired and pregnant and sore to think any better than that.

I will demonstrate how to play. Let’s say you are not pregnant right now. Assuming current ovulation and a fast conception and also that you are female and of child-bearing age (this game allows all such assumptions), one year from today you could have a 3-month-old baby. A baby who doesn’t even exist as you think about it now! Isn’t that crazy, that you could do that, that you could change your life so much in a year?

I was thinking of this tonight as I was looking at the calendar and realizing that the next time we turn the page, I’ll have a fifth child. One year ago, I wasn’t even pregnant; in fact, I was almost five whole months away from missing my period and taking a pregnancy test. I was still breastfeeding the twins, who hadn’t yet had their first birthdays or started walking; they were still babies. How can things have changed so much in just one year?

One year from now this baby will be about to have his first birthday. He’s not even born yet as I’m typing, but in one year he’ll already be shedding babyishness like summer cat fur.

Hey, this would make a good question for a mini-essay comments section, wouldn’t it? Or you can do your own post and link to it in the comments section. Where were you a year ago, and where do you think you will be a year from now?