The Final Countdown

Thirty-nine and a half weeks.  Theoretically I can deliver at any time but that's not really how I roll. Do you want the run-down?  Me too.  Here goes:


Emotionally: Sometime last week I hit a brick wall.  Not crying yet but I feel like I could...if pressed.  On the whole, I feel extremely lucky to have hit it so late.  I think I must have wanted to cry for a good three months of my pregnancy with Zac.  To counteract the weepies I am making myself busy with a few last-minute things that only sort of need doing--lunch with friends, Pinterest crafts, dishes...(Okay, maybe the dishes need doing.)

Feels like this...

Warrior One looks like this...

Physically: My last appointment (a week ago) was disappointing.  No progress at all.  And that's a bummer because Little Sister is making me pretty uncomfortable.  Her thing now is to wait until I have some Braxton-Hicks contractions and then she goes into Warrior One.  But last night I had several honest-to-goodness contractions (the best description is that for me they have an epicenter and radiating pain--often going down my legs).  Naturally they went nowhere but I have high hopes (foolish, foolish woman) for my appointment tomorrow. ("Oops! I broke your water!  But you're at a 6 anyway!  Off to the hospital with you!")
My sciatica is really bad.  Really.  I have a Pavlovian response to the doorbell ringing (rolling eyes, muttered oaths and gritting my teeth while I stand up and hobble to the door) but once I'm up and going, my gait is nothing short of the beauty of a lumbering elephant pitching across the Serengeti. 

Familial-ly (What do you mean, 'It isn't a word.'?):

• Nathan is a rock star.  Aside from the fact that I loathe all of his name choices, he is a practically perfect man in every way.  He'd like to be biking to work (what with the gorgeous weather of late) but is skipping that to be more accessible. 
• Jonah is a 12-year-old hoodie wearing, Minecraft-playing punk.  That's probably the only thing you've noticed if you are a casual observer of our home life.  But I have to say, he is totally awesome.  He happily babysits often (and no one has complained about his rule), tells us 'thank you' for a ton of things (I think repeatedly drumming it into him that gratitude is the font of all virtues is starting to pay off.), and is a darling (usually) with his younger sibs.  He is happy about the baby.
• Laura wants to name Little Sister Jackie or Georgia.  She is terribly put out when we suggest something she doesn't approve.  We have plans (plans can go awry) to bring her to the hospital during the labor (because no one tucks into a corner with a book and zips her lip like Laura does) and have her step out for the delivery.  I wouldn't do it with most kids but she is practically un-shockable and won't be scarred for life if I barf in front of her.  But I'm not the screaming-down-the-house kind of laboring woman and I think we'll brush along just fine.  She, in typical Laura fashion, has her hospital bag packed and makes sure to tell me every night that I should wake her up if I go into labor.

Laura and I: 38 weeks

• Spencer started baseball last week and is just so happy to have something to do. He is as easy as ever and wants to name the baby 'Abby' (and the way his ears go up when he says it is just the most darling thing ever).  His teacher probably thinks that Spencer is neglected and homeless because those weekly homework pages (involving serious parental aid) aren't doing themselves and I sure am not.
• Zac is doing well.  We were sick for quite a few weeks together but I think the clouds are clearing.  I feel a bit bad, actually, about all the sun we've been lucky enough to enjoy this spring.  I just can't make it out to the park like I used to and Zac is being raised by the good folks at The Backyardagains.  He likes the baby and the thought thereof but I'm curious to know what shakes out when the rubber hits the road. 

Zac says that he's prepared to share his dinosaur with Little Sister when she comes.  "I like sharing."

Birth Plan: This is a funny one.  In the past I have wondered to myself why I didn't really try to deliver drug-free and maybe that's nagged me some.  But now I remember, "Oh yeah, I don't like pain."  If it happens, it happens but I hereto resolve to cut myself slack and metal havering.  Natural childbirth is not a priority for me but a healthy, gorgeous baby is so there you go. 

Nesting: I got the shower re-caulked.  The house is clean but not pristine.  It's just too hard to maintain right now since I can't get around and I no longer feel like a crazed lemming, gripped (even mythological-y) by forces I cannot control.  And that is all very well.

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37 Weeks

I suppose we're overdue for an update.

Callings: I was released two weeks ago from being RS President (Sunrise, sunset) and, even though I knew it was coming, I felt a little reflective and pensive when I got the word that Bishop wanted to meet with me.  Was I ready?  Had I learned everything I was supposed to? Was I good with God?
By the following Sunday I was feeling a little anti-climactic. (I had a lot of business left to clear up but I was done-ish.) By the following Thursday I was happy (very happy indeed) to know that, whatever problems, arose I could hand them over to other, capable hands.
I find that, over the last year and 8 months, I have been reflexively (throughout the day) checking the plethora of RS concerns off a list in my head and it was had to get out of the habit of doing that.
But that said, it was really nice to put that away and focus on my health and my family right now.

Baby: Kicking the tar out of me.  I can hardly believe she'll be here in less than a month! 

Baby shower: An embarrassment of riches. Gorgeous knitted riches.  Lovely friends and family (Debbie came too!  From Seattle!  As a surprise!  She brought DIL Rebekah and grandbaby Henry with her too!) surrounded me and I just felt like the luckiest duck. It didn't hurt that most of them are D.O.N.E. having babies and used the occasion to get something gorgeous for a new baby.

Name: No, none yet.  We've got plenty of Nosy Parkers telling us what we ought to name the baby but I mostly think their taste stinks.  Little Sister is going to name herself, I suspect, when she shows up and tells us all about her fabulous self.

Health: We've been sick for a month.  Three different colds, mucus, the lot.  Zac and I have spent a LOT of time together as he only went to school for two days this month. (At $56 a pop.)  It wasn't how I hoped this month would go but we'll get through it.  Sciatica is still a...ah...haha...pain in the rear.  But I am otherwise doing great.  Really.  God is being very kind to me.

Nesting: I vacuumed out my freezer recently.  I hope to re-caulk and scour the shower over Spring Break.  I painted a wall in the 'sew-sery', had a minor aesthetic break-down (No room can serve two masters!) over it, and rallied nicely.

***No pictures were harmed in the blogging of this blog as the camera is over on the counter and I will probably have to pee if I have to stand up and get it...

Journaling

Meet my new journal--a question a day

I was reading through old posts the other night with Nathan and laughing with him over our messy life and my protestations that I was definitely, totally, positively done having children.  I suppose this is what happens when my hubris tries to tell God how to manage His business.
Anyway, it reminded me how much I love being able to look back at those things and I hope (resolve?) to do a better job of getting stuff down without feeling too guilty about what I haven't managed to catch.

• I mean, have I even mentioned Jonah's braces?  And head gear?  Ugh. And he's still gorgeous.  
• Or how my sciatica is so bad this time that I have to cross my fingers sometimes just to cross a room.  
• Or how Zac has molluscum (but hasn't had the croup or an ear infection in forever and is potty trained and his stutter is almost gone) and it drives us crazy but how I love the darling he has become.  
• Or how Spencer comes home from neighbor boy's house every time with a puffy eye from his dog. 
• Or Laura pouring and pouring over baby name books for the last 5 months--making a long list of girl names and grudgingly compiling a short boy name list until it all became moot and her joy at having a little sister no longer had to be contained.  
• Or Nathan tirelessly making the same six meals for three months straight while I hid, pasty-faced and nauseous anywhere where he wasn't.
• Or how I've foolishly embarked on making an authentic 1850s pioneer get-up for Laura's 4th grade class expedition including drawers, chemise, corded stays, two petticoats (corded and tucked), and a gorgeous dress with a hand-gauged waist.    

The moral of the story is: But some blogging is better than no blogging.

Cha-cha-cha-changes

So I haven't touched base in, like, forever.
The important thing is not to cast blame or to point fingers. The thing to remember here is that any blogging is good blogging.
So, I'm pregnant.

25 weeks.  Hark!  I spy a third trimester on the horizon.

Let's hit the highlights of the last 6 months:

• We went to Colorado to see Tia and Suzanne and family.  
• Zac began stuttering.  It freaked us the heck out.  It was really, really bad, really, really fast. But, though it's been like a roller-coaster, we're on a down-swing right now and I have high hopes that it's in secession. (Until the South rises again!)
• I got pregnant.  On purpose.  With a great deal of thought and due diligence.  But I want to kick anyone who suggests that I did this to get out of my calling.  Because that's what's going to make being the RS President easier--20 weeks of barfing.
• Zac finally potty-trained! On the first day of pre-school, while we were there, after weeks of terror and fretting on his mother's part...This kid, I tell ya.
• I threw up until I was at 20 weeks! Nathan was heroic.  Zac provided a lot of play-by-play commentary while squatting by the toilet with me.
•  I have really bad sciatica.  But on the up-side, my varicose veins aren't annoying me.  It's like they're saying, "It's okay.  We're making a person here.  You can be pretty later.  But I wouldn't go near the pool for a while and, oh, maybe you should slap on some more eye-liner." 
• When Laura wants to know how things are she reaches for my tum and says, "How's Betsy Trotwood despite the crushing weight of inter-generational Chinese debt?" 

Little Sister...(oh, didn't I tell you I'm having a girl?!) is doing well and we're terrifically excited about it.  I'm due on April 11th.

The Matt Two: The Matt Strikes Back

I had a little downtime on Thursday afternoon so I decided to make a dress.  It's not as simple as that really.  I've had this fabric (sort of a royal blue and grey ikat) forever--I bought in on clearance at JoAnne's with that darling Christmas gift my BIL Matt got me.  But it wasn't speaking to me.

I confess to being a little Michelangelo-esque on this point.  He said something along the lines of, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”  And that's how I approach fabric.  I don't often think, "I need a sheath dress!  Off to JoAnne's!"  It's more like, "I dig that pattern.  What does it want to be?"  And this blue thing did NOT want to be a sheath dress, or a midi skirt...

Even though this one is a little tired looking, I liked the idea of a kimono sleeve on a traditional bodice.

I finally Pinterested some things that caught my eye and ransacked my patterns.  Of course I didn't have anything like what I wanted but I found the top from Simplicity 7503 (a pattern I've used before but less successfully) and a pocket from McCall's 3693, used a simple gathered rectangle (in three pieces so I'd get my side seams) for the bottom, and the sleeves...I tacked a piece of computer paper onto the tissue bodice following the shoulder line and cut the fabric generously.  A Franken-pattern par excellence. 

I wanted a summery dress I didn't have to wear a cardigan with and didn't have to worry about gaping or garment lines showing.  I like how the very mod fabric is refashioned into a pretty, traditional silhouette. I call it The Matt Two: The Matt Strikes Back or:

A Pocketful of Pebbles

I've been picking up Mrs. Miniver again this spring and she has a chapter with that name:
“As she walked past a cab rank in Pont Street, Mrs. Miniver heard a very fat taxi-driver with a bottle nose saying to a very old taxi-driver with a rheumy eye: ‘They say it’s all a question of your subconscious mind.’
Enchanted she put the incident in her pocket for Clem. It jostled, a bright pebble, against several others: she had had a rewarding day. And Clem, who had driven down to the country to lunch with a client, would be pretty certain to come back with some good stuff, too.
This was the cream of marriage, this nightly turning out of the day’s pocketful of memories, this deft habitual sharing of two eyes, two pairs of ears. It gave you, in a sense, almost a double life: though never, on the other hand, quite a single one.” 


Now my pockets are plenty big for lots and lots of pebbles.

So, things I learned:

• Pockets.  What on earth was I afraid of?  The directions on the pattern were rubbish but I am not the daughter of a draftsman for nothing.  Understanding how a two-dimensional picture translates into a three-dimensional dress is something Dad would probably be awesome at.  It's never too late to take up sewing, Dad!
• I learned how to hand-tack neck and arm holes. I was more used to thinking that I had to either top-stitch or blind-hem stitch (neither of which are really discrete on an arm hole).  My new Visiting Teachee Paula (whom I probably didn't assign myself for the sheer amount of sewing advice she could give me) fixed my wagon and as a result, all the seams are lovely.
• At some point in every sewing endeavor, my husband will say that it looks like a pioneer dress.  You just have to keep going.
• Paula also walked me through a fitting issue I had (Oh, my kingdom for a dress-form!) that led to some unpicking and a re-worked dart.

And I love it.  I still haven't decided if it needs a bright yellow necklace to accessorize it with but I'm looking...

Spring Frock

Let's just say up front that this was a difficult pattern for me.  McCall's 6503.  I chose it because I wanted to try out the midriff band and thought that it could be a good jumping off point for a neckline I had in mind.

Which is probably where I went wrong.  I mean, it turned out pretty much as I'd hoped but drawing out a new pattern piece and finagling it into place is something that I haven't mastered and my mood last weekend wasn't conducive to patience and order. 

I was up in Marysville with Suzanne and Deb and wanted to very much impress Suzanne on the easy, breezy do-ability of pattern sewing.  But this was neither easy nor breezy.  The raw material was a Goodwilled sheet (that I love--pale, pale flowered patterned that cost me 2 bucks-ish) which is always a mite scary as you can't just run back to JoAnne's if you get liberal with the cutting shears.

I cut the pattern papers (Suzanne's eyes widened.  'My, that took a long time!') and then the pieces (of which there seemed many) and then was able to get the darts and bodice pieces out of the way while she was out jogging.  I really thought I had it made.  The darts are always the fiddly bits.

But it's never too late to be wronger than wrong.  I was using Debbie's serger because I love sergers and wanted to be done fast but several times, I'd be reading the ancient and obscure dead language and ciphers pattern directions and be hopelessly lost.  ('Debbieeeeeee...')  And then I'd have to clip along the serged line and begin again.  Suzanne was never ever going to sew from a pattern, I was sure of it.

It also didn't help that the stupid midriff was sized for anorexics.  So...that's why I call this:

Plural of Gusset

I Can Read!

Agatha didn't mind staying home with her children...at least, not as long as she could watch The View

So while I was burning bridges and taking names in the Guerra de Madres (Hey!  I speak Spanish now!), I came across a lot of material that interested me but that I didn't quote directly.  Here's some of that:

Some tweets from Pundit & Pundette:

The value of a mother raising her children is not fundamentally economic, any more than the mother/child relationship is economic.

It could be the easiest thing in the world and it would still be infinitely more valuable than, say, being an RIAA lobbyist.

Motherhood is not a "job." A child is not a product. A home is not a factory.

The above makes a really good case for not framing the terms of the choice to be an at-home mom in language that doesn't suit it. 

Beryl loved choices but she didn't love her hair.

I also mentioned a long quote in the comments section of the other day's post from G.K. Chesterton.  He has more to say that I think bears reading if you'll excuse some of the out-modedness of expression as he draws the line too brightly for current sensibilities for keeping women out of the world of specialization.  But he makes an important case for the broadness of domestic life rather than narrowness:

Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original and artistic tales, but tales--better tales than would probably be told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position. I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a general servant...

Betty sometimes wondered if she was simply a tool of the patriarchy...

The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. 

And that IS how I feel about it--that active and interested parenting/homemaking requires skills that I had not even thought of developing, spanning a range of talents.  It's only as narrow as I make it and as my husband likes to say, I'm 'broad where a broad should be broad'.

Anyway, I hope all of this is taken as I meant it--a clarification for the reasons and meaning that goes into my...well, after that, I'm not about to use the word 'job'...vocation and not a degradation of the considered decisions of others.
Sincerely,
The Management