On birthdays...

Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'm feeling a bit Eeyore-ish about it. (It's also our tenth "birthiversary," but that's another matter.) Tomorrow I will be thirty-two years old, and my mom will call and sing the happy birthday song to me at some point in the day, just as she's done thirty-one times before (I assume). There was one year when she didn't call until late at night, and I had gotten old enough to think I didn't care and thought it was kind of ridiculous anyway, but I found myself a little disappointed when I thought she wasn't going to call and sing Happy Birthday that year. She did call, and after that I stopped thinking it was so ridiculous.

Little traditions are nice. And having your birthday be a little different than every other run-of-the-mill day is especially nice. I'm not sure if that is a practical expectation anymore, though. It seems like once you reach a certain age or post in life, your birthday becomes just another day in your life of routines and adult responsibilities. That's a little sad to me. I already have to share it with my wedding anniversary for the rest of my life (and only a week or two after Mother's Day every year to boot), but for it to be just another day...well that's just a little depressing.

So I sat here for the better part of an hour tonight (during the time when I am routinely doing my evening chores of dishes and laundry and picking up a day's worth of crap off the floor) searching for a bakery in the area that would sell me a birthday cake tomorrow without having ordered ahead. And then I realized that I can't get an Italian cream cake because Miriam can't eat pecans. So then on to finding specialty cupcakes. But then it just seems kind of anti-climactic to me to go buy myself an assortment of cupcakes to share with my family after another bland-o dinner at home (that I had to cook and clean up after). So I thought about calling a friend to meet up for cupcakes, but then I realize just how few people I even know here, let alone call a friend. It makes me want to send a birthday cupcake to everyone I know on their birthday, just in case nothing else out-of-the-ordinary happens on their day. But the fact of the matter is I probably won't even get around to sending them a card or calling them because life is just like that when you get older and weighed down with responsibilities that are time- and energy-consuming. And that's why everyone else isn't making big hooeys for each other's birthdays anymore. We make big hooeys for our kids' birthdays now. Not each others'.

So what do I expect for my birthday? A 4am awakening that keeps me up and down for up to two hours in the night. Groggily rolling out of bed when absolutely required to make breakfast happen. Lamenting that once again I didn't get up before Miriam and take my shower and get ready for the day so that we could make use of that tiny gap of time between breakfast and morning nap time (or rather nap attempt). Showering and getting ready while Miriam is having nap attempt. Lamenting after Miriam doesn't take her nap that now it's too late in the morning to go anywhere now that I'm ready because Miriam will need a nap in an hour now that she didn't take a nap in the morning. So we just settle for eating early lunch and putting the girls down for rest time, resulting in Miriam's nap. And the the rest of the boring blah-blah-blah that always happens.

That is, unless I make a hooey about my own birthday. Walk the girls to the donut shop that's practically in our backyard for kolaches in the morning! Find some time in the day to buy cupcakes! Hang up the birthday banner! Order pizza for dinner, even if we do have to eat it at 5:00 to get Miriam to bed before her sleepy slump! Put a candle on my cupcake! Heck, I might even rent myself a chick flick if Britt has to work from home!

Maybe I'll fall asleep dreaming up something fun to do with the girls tomorrow instead of dreading the mountain of dishes I neglected tonight so that I could shop for birthday cupcakes and read blogs that I haven't visited in ages. And now I'm an hour past bedtime so they are just gonna have to sit there and wait until tomorrow. The birthiversary.

Now I'm curious to see what the day will bring.

Christmas Surprise!

The last time I posted, I was sporting a giant pregnant belly and anxiously awaiting the birth of our second daughter. That was a year and a week ago. Miriam Adeline joined our family last year on Christmas day, of all days! And what a day it was. We woke up to discover that Santa had left Ava "even more than she asked for" and played for a while. Shortly after 8am, I declared that Britt and Ava should go make breakfast and I'd be there as soon as possible. Nestled in the recliner, I knew it would be a while before I could get in there to help. I wasn't feeling very well, but I didn't seem to be in labor.

Before I could even begin to hoist myself out of the recliner, I had my first contraction. I think it was around 8:15 or so. My contractions came fast and furious, just as they had with Ava. We all ate breakfast, and I insisted on taking a shower and getting ready for the long, exhausting day to come, while Britt helped Ava get dressed and "packed" for a day away from home and made necessary phone calls and preparations for the hospital trip.

We got to the hospital about 10am. I waddled and contracted my way from the parking garage to the maternity ward, panicking many a passerby. Ava was cool as a cucumber, reassuring everyone we encountered that "everything is normal...Mama is just having the baby today!" I loved having her with us. My labor was moving quickly, so they didn't dawdle about getting me settled and monitored. I was already about six centimeters when I got there. Gin and Nathan made it to the hospital in time to take Ava for the day. Gin stayed with me while Britt and Ava went down with Nathan to switch Ava's carseat to their car. I had a huge burst of progress while they were gone, and the doctor was called to come for my birth surprisingly soon after Gin, Nathan, and Ava left to have Christmas dinner with Gin's family. She immediately announced that as soon as she broke my water, we would have a baby. Sure enough, seven minutes later, Miriam was looking right at me and I at her, amazed that she had arrived so swiftly! What a birth!

Miriam Adeline was born on December 25, 2007, at 12:37pm. 7 lbs, 3 oz and 21 3/4 inches.

Besides meeting my daughter, one of the highlights of my day was seeing the joyful expression on Ava's face when she saw her new baby sister for the first time. (Thanks, Nathan, for capturing it!) She has spent the year thoroughly enjoying her new role as big sister. She just adores Miriam!

This was a family Christmas picture I never expected to take! Miriam wasn't expected until January.

Now she is a year old, almost toddling, and ever a delightful person. We are so glad she's come! Happy birthday, Miriam! What a wonderful Christmas present you were!

37 weeks and counting...

(photo taken at 36 weeks)

Well, it's official. The babe has made it to full-term! I could give birth to her at any time, and no one would stop me. I'm already two centimeters dilated, which could stay that way for weeks or it could mean things are heading in the direction of a Christmas surprise. We'll see! Meanwhile, I'm getting bigger by the second. The new sunburst pattern of stretchmarks around my navel suggest that this one is carried far differently than her big sister. My belly literally hangs over onto my lap when I sit. I feel the pressure of this mass plopped down on top of my thighs. It's rather odd, and I don't remember late pregnancy being this way with Ava.

I decided to take the plunge and use cloth diapers this time around. I always felt bad about how many diapers we contributed to the landfill with Ava. That was bad enough. But when I learned about all the horrible chemicals that modern conventional diapers expose babies to 'round the clock for years, I couldn't, in good conscience, use them primarily again. I know it will be an undertaking all my own because I have extremely little support in this endeavor. All the naysayers will be vocal, I'm sure (whether verbally or nonverbally). And it may not go well, but I have to try. Our shipment of itty-bitty cloth diapers arrived yesterday, and I was so excited to see them and touch them and show them all to Ava, who was quite excited herself. But when we began educating Britt on the use of said diapers that evening, I started to feel pretty intimidated by the whole idea because I don't honestly know the first thing about this effort, really. I only know what I've read online and hope it works out well enough. I know that cloth diapering is not hard, but because I feel all the negative vibes coming from everyone else, I am concerned that it won't go smoothly, and not only will I hear about it, I will have invested a lot of money into another failed project. We'll see. In the meantime, it is fun to look at all these super cute, teeny-tiny diapers and imagine my own little bundle in them very soon.

Very soon! Stay tuned...

30 weeks

Wow. Thirty weeks down. This baby is coming. Soon. My nesting instinct kicked into high gear sometime over the last week or two, but seeing that Babycenter email ("Congratulations...you are 30 weeks pregnant!") really sent me over the top. I'm a lot more excited and eager to meet this little girl than I've felt up to this point, especially since the baby's chances of survival and thriving beyond this point are very good. So to that end, I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief and finally just enjoy what's left of the good weeks...the ones where I am still fully functional and sleeping relatively well every night. But on the other hand, I'm freaking out a little too. There is so much to do and so little time left. And such stressful timing with her birth being hot on the heels of Halloween (costume-making), Ava's birthday party, Britt's birthday, company two weekends in a row followed by one weekend away (for early Thanksgiving with my folks) and a mid-week Thanksgiving trip, Christmas decorating and wrapping (because I am determined it will be done very soon after Thanksgiving this year so I can just sit and enjoy the last weeks of this pregnancy and not overdo it), and then before you know it...Christmas. I have so much to do! I have gifts yet to buy, and I'm behind schedule! That was scheduled to be done by the end of October! People are not cooperative in giving gift suggestions in September and October. That makes it rough. Plus, I commited to making my daughter a native American costume for Halloween to save us from spending fifty bucks plus tax and shipping for ordering one online. She's supposed to wear it to school on Tuesday. Guess what I'll be up late doing tomorrow night. Our boxes are still not 100% unpacked, nor have I yet invented homes for everything in this house (hence the boxes). I need to revamp my blog situation before baby comes. I need to make mailing labels for Christmas cards and birth announcements. I need to choose birth announcements! You are supposed to up your bra size twice during a pregnancy, and I'm still bustin' out of the ones I have always worn. Bra shopping is annoyingly time consuming! I really need to find time to inventory all of Ava's baby things so that I will know what needs to be replaced for the baby and remind myself what we already have. So many things. There's just so much more regular life to take care of this time in addition to all the nesting desires. I can't do it all at one time, and I realize it's probably fair to say I can't do it all...period. So I just go from one day to the next doing what must be done that day and hoping it all comes out close to even in the end. (And that the baby doesn't decide to join us way early!)

All of that having been said, something magical happened to me today too. At thirty weeks, I finally felt gleeful that I'm having a baby. Really excited. I've always been happy about this pregnancy, but I started out feeling so guarded and tentative and it's only moved into stages of relief and reduce anxiety in small increments as the weeks have progressed without incident. Understandably so. A friend of mine who had a miscarriage fairly recently mentioned to me that she's afraid her experience will take away some of the joy from her next pregnancy, even if it's successful and easy. I admitted that that was the case for me, certainly. But it gets better a little at a time. And though I may only have ten weeks to feel really excited instead of thirty-four this time, I will live it up as much as possible, savoring every flop and kick and hiccup in my belly, even at 3AM when I'm up (again!) to pee or drink a glass of ice water because I'm so hot (thus ensuring that I'll be up again to pee before daybreak). She finally started feeling like a real person to me within the last few weeks. Not just this little being inside me that I know intellectually is my child, but a real person with a name and a personality and a self. A person who is aware, at least to some degree, of my presence, my voice, my demeanor, my love for her. My daughter. My child. My "longed-for child." Miriam.

I celebrated my newfound excitement by buying her some very cute newborn clothes today. And I finally enjoyed every minute of it. She's coming!

Reality check

I'm having a baby. I'm twenty-six weeks and three days pregnant, and strangely enough, there are moments when I sort of forget that I'm pregnant. Then she moves and snaps me back into reality, or I try to move and immediately remember how unwieldy The Belly is getting. I have two daughters now, and sometime within the next three months, I will know both of them. And sometimes that's just hard to wrap my brain around.

I'm finally having a baby. Really.

We welcome glad Easter

The snow fell softly in the night. We didn't even know it was happening. Imagine our surprise Saturday morning when Britt looked out the window, expecting to find no evidence of the predicted flurries, only to find our little slice of the world covered in white wonderment. I felt a twinge of sadness for the frozen, blossoming trees, but I delighted in their snow-covered beauty nonetheless. I had already put our winter hats and gloves away, never expecting to see snow only five days after an eighty-degree afternoon. We bundled up and went out to enjoy our (probably) last snow for a long time. Ava and I were feeling poorly, so the novelty of snow wore thin pretty quickly, and we went back inside. The snow melted (well, all but the few chunks of snowman that held together, juxtaposed with the bright green grass it lay atop), and we welcomed a cool but otherwise spring-like Easter day.

My family didn't observe Lent. (Or Advent, or anything else related to the liturgical church calendar, for that matter.) The church that finally did nurture us spiritually observed these traditions, but it was just a taste for us, as we knew nothing about them. We stopped short of actually giving anything up during Lent. I think I have always been a bit put off by the idea that one can be blessed spiritually by giving up chocolate or fried foods to help you remember Christ's suffering. I sort of like the idea of adding a spiritual discipline to your life during the lenten season, which is apparently another way to observe Lent, rather than giving up something mundane. (Though, I realize that for many people these "mundane" things are big temptations or whatnot, so it can be a source of insight...anyway.) So this year, as I was talking through my feelings on all of this, I hit upon something that could split the middle for me--worry.

I worry far too much. So I decided the thing that would benefit me most to give up wasn't TV or carbs or meat but worry. Several people expressed disapproval of this "counting" as a lenten promise, as you can't promise not to worry. True. But I can commit to realizing when I am doing it and how often it happens and attempt to curtail it with prayer and faith and trust in God. Spritual things. All of this would amount to spiritual growth, even if it didn't make me feel as deprived as those chocoholics who gave up chocolate. But for now I just don't think giving up TV would make me suffer in a way that would really make me feel Christ's suffering anyway. How can any of us know that? Maybe I just don't get it yet. And that's fine. I'm learning as I go. That's the whole point. Just making an attempt at something for the purpose of experiencing Lent had an impact (beyond just remembering that Christ died for us), even if it wasn't a traditional choice in the observance of Lent. And maybe next lenten season, worry won't be worth giving up because I won't be relying on it so much.

Goodbye, Granny.

My Granny passed away yesterday, and even from all these miles away I can feel her absence. I can feel all the years of not knowing her more. I don't know her stories. Her obituary on the funeral home's web site revealed one such story. Apparently, she married my grandfather in the fall of 1934, in Mineola, Arkansas, and then the following spring they walked to Texas together! There must be dozens of those little stories that I'll never know. I only know her hugs and cold fried potatoes waiting for us late at night when we arrived at her house. And heating water in a big pan on the stove to pour into the bathtub when we had to take a bath. Partyline phones to play on with my cousin Donna. Yellow cake with chocolate icing. (And Granny would let me have a big piece.) The broken deep freeze was just a cupboard for dry goods, housing sugar and flour, and best of all chocolate Quik. Gooey oatmeal and free reign of the sugar bowl. Always a spit can beside the bed. ("Ptooey!") Granny would give me little jobs to do, like heading up the road to the neighbor's house to buy some of their fresh eggs. (I marveled at the idea that they had their own chickens and eggs.) We could walk to the Red River from Granny's house. Sometimes we did. At Granny's house I was free to run around and play outside, explore, step on the "puff pods" Granny called "Devil's Snuff," sometimes ride a horse. And while I was freely being my tomboy-est self, Granny's stories were all in the house. I guess I missed out on that part while making some favorite childhood memories. But I knew she loved me and liked me. And I loved her and liked her too. She's probably the only person I will ever know who always wished you luck, just for good measure I suppose. I don't think I ever looked Granny in the face without seeing her smile back at me. Maybe it's best that I wasn't there for the end, to remember her sad days, no longer smiling. Maybe it's best that I feel a million miles away right now and can't be there for her funeral. Maybe that will keep me remembering her smile and hugs and lucky wishes most. I will miss her dearly.

Her obituary also read: "An iron-willed housewife and mother, Alma would begin her daily routine before daybreak and toiled non-stop ‘til well past sunset." I should strive to be more like Granny. I may not look up one day to see that I have five children, sixteen grandchildren, forty great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren, but I hope to have even half of the love in my life represented by those numbers.

Goodbye, Granny. I'll remember that your house was always a happy place. And I'll remember you smiling.