New Goal: Beer

Non-alcoholic beer is not the same, but it tasted pretty damn good the other night. I got the Guinness kind, so I could go around saying “Guinness is good for you” in an Irish accent (and because I figured it would taste at least somewhat decent). I had it ice cold, which is pretty much the point of beer in my mind, and I felt great sipping from a beer bottle again, like any normal summer evening by the grill. Last summer, probably a week before Wyatt died, I bought a six-pack of non-alcoholic beer. I had one before he was born; the rest I only recently cleaned out of the fridge and dumped down the drain with a sad face. I thusly decided it would be courageous and important for me to buy a six-pack and get through it this time. A triumph over beer, if you will. Tomorrow, when it’s 100 degrees, I’m going to sit at my patio furniture in the shade and enjoy another cold beer. For the sake of my goal, of course. 

A journal or two

For Baby Wyatt, a journal’s all I really have. So, it’s pretty important, as you can imagine. I write him letters once in a while. Less often as time passes. Then I feel guilty of course, but I try to catch up and tell him everything he’s missed. Which doesn’t feel like much in the shadow of his little baby angel self. But I recently completed the first journal and had to buy a new one. I felt a wave of accomplishment, signing off on that last page, knowing that I was sticking to something I told myself I would do for him. I know he can’t read yet, gosh, he’d only be 11 months old, but it feels good to share and just feel sad and let the tears fly once in a while. I don’t always cry, but I would say usually I do. There’s too much loss in there because I just wonder what he would be doing if he were here instead of there. I think this journal will help my living children—God willing—understand him better and maybe know him a little more. I dunno. I did get a cute new journal with dogs on it though, so that’s pretty great.

For Baby#2, I started a journal pretty much before I knew I was pregnant. I was kicking myself for not keeping better track of my pregnancy with Wyatt; it’s all I had. I thought it was annoying to see people’s “Month X profile photo”s on Facebook and therefore never even took any myself. I thought I’d jinx myself for doing stuff like that. Well.

So, Baby2’s first journal is on my computer, so it’s not the letter-writing kind, just an update on Baby2 and my life. I put in photos from every week and try to come up with enough stuff to write about that it fills a page. The first few weeks were pretty boring, just about me being nervous. But now it’s getting hard to fit it all on just one page. This also brings a feeling of success: I’ve got stuff to talk about and share again! I suppose this is my plug for journals. Gooooooo journals!

Boob class

Trust me, the boobs in breastfeeding class are not like a nude beach and not even like porn. If they weren’t so science-experimentily intriguing they would be gross. I don’t have anything against boobs, I just never really thought anything of them before. Breastfeeding nipples are like tea-time saucers, complete with full tea-stains, the breasts like enormous water balloons, the skin like stretchy marbled paper. My size A-Bs have not prepared me for this. Apparently you have to hold and squeeze your breast a little, which makes for awkward naked positions (and does look like porn—aggressive boob-squeezing porn). It is fascinating and scary at the same time. I know that my own breasts have the capacity to become quite large, as was evidenced by the week following Wyatt’s birth, and I trust they will do the job when the time comes, but oh dear do I have to look like that? The videos were helpful, I suppose, and we learned a lot of interesting and intelligent ideas about breastfeeding, but I still wanted to laugh and point at a few things. (I know, I was getting all mature with the wills and estate-planning; so I’m backtracking, kill me). Overall, I am quite grateful for booby class though because what the heck do I know about feeding a baby with lumps on my chest? And Hubby can’t be that mad that he got to look at real and fake boobs for two hours, right? Bring it on, milk ducts!

The Back is Back

the "blue steel" look
doesn't really show the pain

Over two months ago I wrote about my aching back. Well, I didn’t complain about it too much between now and then but man, it is time to readdress the painful situation. Perhaps my back is trying to make up for lost time because it’s been pretty awful. It’s like a stab wound right where my hip meets my leg, so by 4pm just getting up from my chair or walking across the room brings a repeated sharp pain. Now I know this is part and parcel of lugging around an ever-growing baby: it’s a combination of hormones that relax all my joints and a general increase of weight and imbalance. I know pregnancy makes people feel different and, usually—at least at some point—crappy. But it’s still annoying. And painful. And I can still complain about it and think it stinks.

I am sure I will be back, complaining about my back again, before Nugget joins us, so I won’t say too much more. But I will say it feels like my added 15 pounds is entirely in the form of little jerky jackhammer guys wailing away on this one specific spot on my body, trading shifts so at no point can I get relief. And that’s a lot of little jerky jackhammer guys. 

Crib strength

We did it: we bought a crib! Baby Nugget will have a sleepy-time home other than at its mama’s breast or in some sling or something. And it’s not even some stupidly expensive, enormous, ridiculous looking contraption that also turns into a toddler bed, big kid bed, marital bed, Cuisinart, and wipes the baby’s butt for you (although that would be a nice perk). It’s simple and normal (and safe). Hooray!

This actually wasn’t as difficult a purchase as I expected. I still think “well, crap, what if we set up this crib and no baby gets to use it…” but I didn’t have a panic attic or start crying when forking over the credit card. I really thought this would be a bigger step for us—making a pretty big purchase for a baby we haven’t met yet—but I played it totally cool. I’m not sure what that means, but it feels good to look back and think my behavior was unexpected in a good way. We’ll see what happens when it’s time to set up said crib, but for now I am the victor!

Wills and things

Here is something grown-ups do: make wills. You can imagine how I felt about doing such a grown-up thing: weird. Since Hubby is a lawyer, he was able to get one of his buddies to help us perform such an adult act (and not F it up). It was even written in language I could understand, so it seemed to be a pretty legit document if I do say so. We brought some witnesses down to the notary and got those wills signed and delivered. So, now they’re real and everything. Baby#2 has a place to go if its world collapses. Our “money” and “assets” have places to be. Even the dog has a home—actually, any dog we have (sorry Puppy#1, but there will come a day…). I feel, well, grown up!

We also did some medical power of attorney documents. I like to call them the plug-pulling papers, but they’re a little more than that (a little). It’s hard to think about having to make ridiculously difficult decisions about Hubby if he becomes “incapacitated,” yet I feel very smart making and discussing such decisions now, under no duress. In fact, I was sitting in some sweats, probably eating a snack. No duress here. But there is a small dark cloud over all the anal planning-ahead going on around here. It’s just that we never got to this point with Wyatt. Poor Baby1 came too early to get any of this special grown-up behavior. He never got to know us as the responsible-on-paper parents we are. It stinks.