Light and Momentary

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"Oh, halfway!" said a friend yesterday, when I told her I would be twenty weeks along today. I said, "No, I'm not halfway." (I was a little cranky because she had just commented on big I was. She was thinking I was earlier in the pregnancy.)

Twenty weeks isn't the halfway point of an average pregnancy, because for the first two weeks of a standard forty-week pregnancy you're not pregnant. On average, a woman is halfway through gestating at 21 weeks.

I, however, am...above average. (Note the positive spin I am attempting to give this, like focusing on the "advanced" in "advanced maternal age.") My boys have all been late: 6 days (Alex and Marty), 10 days (Joe, and I started telling people who commented on my belly that it was actually my pet watermelon, because late pregnancy messes with my head in a big way and I cannot handle questions like "Didn't you have that baby yet?"), and 8 days (Pete). Mean length of gestation: 273.5 days. I haven't told anybody my actual due date since I was pregnant with Alex, and this time around I just say, "I'm expecting the baby to arrive between Christmas and New Year's."

I'll be halfway in 10.75 more days (she said pedantically).

Feast of St. Martha

For almost nine years now I have had a little postcard hanging in my kitchen, a print of Vermeer's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. I love it because it is a beautiful piece of art, for one. Occasionally when we lived in Edinburgh and I had a little time to myself, I would go to the National Gallery and just sit in front of it. I love it also because it reminds me that the main thing is not whether my pie crust flakes or my souffle puffs: the main thing is whether I am cooking for the love of God.

Sometimes in my kitchen I get these glimpses of what holy hospitality is like. Sometimes I realize that my ego is getting in the way again, making it about the food and not about loving service. Always, from Edinburgh to the Midwest to the East Coast and back again, St. Martha with her basket of bread has been nearby as a gentle reminder to keep on choosing the better part.

This morning I made oven pancake for breakfast and prayed for my children while I sliced nectarines. Together we read the story of St. Martha from Ethel Pochocki's little book, More Once Upon A Time Saints. (Lest you imagine a cloyingly perfect scene, let me hasten to tell you that the two younger boys complained about the presence of nectarine in their oven pancake and Alex interrupted to say, "Cthulu have mercy!")

Pochocki retells the gospel stories about St. Martha and then adds the legend that she and her sister were cast adrift during the persecutions and wound up on the coast of southern France, where she lived the rest of her life. There were dragons in the countryside near her village, but Martha dispatched them with holy courage and a little holy water. Tonight we will have a St. Martha dinner: pan bagnat, with ratatouille, and perhaps a pithivier if I can pull it off without getting cranky. (It would be the height of irony for me to get myself in a tizzy over puff pastry when I am ostensibly remembering the life of St. Martha.)

I have to stop at the grocery store to get zucchini for the ratatouille and frozen puff pastry because I am not crazy enough to make my own on a 90 degree day. If they happen to have any dragon steaks on sale, I am totally revising the menu.

More Blessed To Give

When I was a kid, I thought "it is more blessed to give than to receive" sounded like a scam. If you could persuade people to give you stuff, because they thought they'd be blessed that way, then you'd get lots of stuff. Which was clearly better, sappy sayings aside.

I don't think I knew it was Jesus who originated that particular saying. Also, I was eight years old. I've learned a thing or two since then.

Remember when I was making socks for my friend who was having trouble? I gave them to her yesterday. I had no idea -- none at all -- how blessed I would be in the giving. I am feeling a little shy about posting the end of the story, because it sounds so improbable. But here it is anyway.

My friend reads my blog, and I was prepared to take down that sock-knitting post if she wanted me to. I've known her for a while and I'd never seen her so far down. I could imagine that if I were in a bad spot, somebody else's description of my troubles, posted on the internet for all the world to read, might be the last thing I'd want to see.

But she didn't want me to make the post go away. In fact, the next time I was at her house for coffee, she said the sock-in-progress got her back to Mass. I cried right there in her kitchen -- I still can't think about it without tearing up. I had been really worried that she was staying away from church. At first I wanted to say, "But the graces! The community!" Etc. I knew that wasn't what she needed, so I just prayed and knitted her socks and let the Holy Spirit do his job instead of tripping over myself to do it for him.

She sought a little help to get unstuck. I cast on the second sock and kept praying.

Last week at the park she said the most improbable thing of all: she said knowing that I was making those socks for her pulled her out of her funk. She said she couldn't explain it (socks??) but maybe it was the Holy Spirit.

This was a humbling experience for me. I've been discouraged lately about a couple of long-term situations where I seem to be getting celestial voice mail. I don't know exactly what I was expecting when I started knitting these socks, but it was not a rapid and dramatic answer. This situation reminds me that God's timing often isn't what I think it will be. It reminds me that a small sacrifice, offered with love, can bear unexpected fruit. It reminds me that hope begets hope. And it chokes me up, every time I think about my smiling friend.

It's easy for me to look at the socks and see their imperfections, like the slight lopsidedness in one of the kitchenered toes (note to self: grafting is better done when all is quiet, because it's easy to get distracted by spontaneous wrestling matches). But she says that they're beautiful and comfortable and that she'll treasure them, which reminds me that I don't have to love perfectly to make the effort of loving worthwhile. The whole thing makes me want to knit her another pair -- who knows what might happen next?

More blessed to give indeed.

Garden-Impaired

In the spring when I should have been setting out petunias, I was alternately struggling to finish the spring semester and lying on the couch moaning. Ergo, no petunias. Instead I have a breathtaking crop of weeds in the beds around my house. This afternoon I went out and hacked and pulled and wrestled several cubic feet of them down to the curb (doing a less thorough job than I might have liked because when I pulled out my gardening gloves they were filled with insect egg sacs -- ick!). I still have more to do but I am going to replace the gloves first.

I aspire to be a gardener but I do not even know where to start. Fact 1: I have killed mint plants. Mint plants! Fact 2: I have killed hostas. (Actually it was a late frost that killed the hostas but then they didn't come back the next year. I thought hostas were supposed to be tougher than that.) Fact 3: I do not have a lot of time for gardening.

If you have any recommendations for me -- plants that will thrive in partial sun under benign neglect, favorite websites, any tips or tricks or what have you -- lay them on me, please. I live in a pale yellow house and so red and pink flowers are probably mostly out. I'm willing to pay for some perennials but I don't even know if I can put them in the ground right now. I need to figure something out fairly soon or the weeds will come creeping back. Not even creeping -- they'll come galumphing boldly while their vorpal thorns go snickersnack (she types ruefully with her scratched and sweaty hands).

P.S. My brother, who comments here as Stephen, is 29 today. He is ushering in his thirtieth year with a frenzied effort to finish his dissertation, due to his committee tomorrow for his defense in two weeks. Want to wish him well?

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

I persuaded the checkbook to balance and the washing machine came back from the dead again. I am caught up on laundry but for one load of clothes that needs folding. I turned 38 yesterday and have been enjoying Carrie Newcomer's new CD, a gift from my husband.

My early research project director accepted my revisions (I did not succumb to the temptation to include a couple of knock-knock jokes to see if she was actually reading the revised version), so as soon as I get comments back from the two people kind enough to proofread it for me, I'll get it printed up. Dissertation ho! (I hope it's clear that it's ho the interjection, as in Yukon __, not the noun.) On Friday my advisor, to my immense surprise, said I should consider myself done for now with reviewing the literature and move on to drafting. (Then she gave me ten more papers to read, but I'm not really complaining.)

Joe is visiting my in-laws this weekend and I am missing him something fierce. It's very quiet without him. Baby, on the other hand, is getting rowdier, thumping me harder and more often. I had persuaded myself that either I had an anterior placenta that was keeping me from feeling movement or else something was wrong.

In a few weeks I am taking the train to Chicago to meet up with all of my college roommates. We are going to see Melissa Etheridge, whose early albums were pretty much always on the turntable or in the tape player (aren't we old?) when we were living together. Funnily enough, three of the five of us are married to the men whose antics inspired us to belt out "Like the Way I Do" with such passion. (I bet I can still recite all the words to that one, though I haven't heard it more than a decade.) What were you listening to in college?

I will leave you with a recipe for the Best Sandwich in the History of the World, a sandwich I've made twice in the past week after thinking about it for a year: pan bagnat. Over and out from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Doctor Says...

...don't sweat it. Take the propranolol every day if I want to. He's not worried at all, not in the slightest, about a 10mg dose.

My interim plan is to take it just on the days when I want to run. I'll go back in a couple of weeks for a prenatal, and I'll time the medication so I've got the maximum dose circulating at my appointment time. If the baby's heart is blipping along at 150 bpm, then I won't worry about fetal bradycardia. Even though the doctor's not concerned, I'd just like to make sure.

I don't think I'll go back to the cardiologist unless my arrhythmia gets worse. (It may; I had an episode late in my pregnancy with Pete that was more intense and slower to resolve than anything since then.) From his perspective, my diagnosis is so not a big deal -- benign, easily managed with low-dose medication, just an annoyance that makes me glad to live in the 21st century.

Phew! Thanks for the advice, everybody!

Twitching

Oh, help -- can anyone help me? I am lost in an eddy of the space-time continuum in which addition is not commutative.

I have a confession: I am a checkbook obsessive. I will spend an hour searching for a nine-cent error. You can tell me all you want to about the value of my time being higher than that, but I get an absurd amount of satisfaction out of tidy rows of numbers, all of them RIGHT. Conversely, if one (or, horrors, more) is wrong, then something is deeply wrong in my little world.

Tell me tomorrow if you think that's whacked. The acoustics are too bad here in my eddy for me to hear you today.

The bank and I agree that the last time I balanced the checkbook, we were square. We also agree on amounts deposited, checks cleared, and electronic transactions. So if I go back to my last balance and add the deposits and subtract the withdrawals and remove the transactions that haven't cleared yet from consideration, I should get the same number as the bank, right? Right???

Euclid help me, it's not working. I have added up and down and sideways. I have combed through my entries for errors. No dice. There is a stubborn $24.92 difference between my bottom line and the bank's. Aaaarrrggghhhhh.

I decided that there was a maniacal little gremlin in my calculator, cackling away as he spat out the wrong numbers. I decided to use the calculator that lives in the computer instead. But I also decided to share the woe before I tried again to paddle out of my eddy. Any fellow obsessives out there? Please send chocolate.

Risks and Benefits Again

I have a benign heart arrhythmia. Before I got pregnant, I was taking 10mg/day of propranolol to control it. I stopped taking it as soon as I found out I was pregnant, thinking I'd rather deal with the arrhythmia than expose the baby to any unnecessary drugs. (Also, taking pills made me gag.)

When I called the OB's office to set up a first prenatal, my doctor's partner was worried about the propranolol. My doctor, on the other hand, said, "Oh, no, it's one of the safest things you can take to manage an arrhythmia in pregnancy." I knew that there were risks associated with taking the drug in late pregnancy, but I had thought that I could take it from the feeling-better stage until close to term.

I have been itching to start getting some exercise again, but I have to take the medication for that to work. If I try to go for an unmedicated run, I last about 300 yards. I can push myself to keep going, but after 10 minutes or so I'm going to throw up in somebody's yard. With the drug, I can chug along for half an hour or more -- or at least I could before I spent all that time lying on the couch.

Pregnancy is hard on my mental health -- it really cranks up my usual tendencies toward anxiety and hypersensitivity. Exercise is good for my mental health, and, obviously, my physical well-being too. I went for a couple of gentle runs in the past couple of weeks and was excited to get back in the groove.

So I was really bummed when I went to pick up my prescription refill and the pharmacist cautioned me sternly about propranolol in pregnancy. It's a category D medication in the second and third trimesters. It's associated with a whole lot more problems than I knew.

Some of the difference in her reaction and my doctor's reaction has to be related to dosage. In some of the research they were looking at women taking 16 times the dose that I take. But the pharmacist had that information in front of her -- if she was concerned, shouldn't I be concerned?

I guess if neither my OB nor my CNM is worried about my taking 10mg/day, I don't need to have a cow about the pharmacist's reaction. One possibility might be to take a pill only before exercising, maybe 3 days a week, and live with the arrhythmia the rest of the time. (It's been better than usual since I've been pregnant, which is the opposite of what I expected.) Maybe I could also request a referral to go back to the cardiologist for more information about the whole pregnancy/arrhythmia thing -- my OB said he wanted to talk to the cardiologist anyway.

I'm upset that something I thought was a great idea (getting more exercise, with a little pharmaceutical assistance) met with such a negative reaction. (See above re: pregnancy, mental health, adverse effects.) The list of potential side effects for the baby is troubling, but I don't have good information about incidence, dosage effects, etc. I'm not sure what to do. Any thoughts?

Old Before Their Time

I was tucking Joe in on Saturday when he sighed heavily. "I don't know if I'd want to be married or not," he said. "I'd have people asking me for things all the time, like wanting granola bars at 10 in the morning."

I assured him that the joys of having kids outweighed the inconveniences.

"I don't know," he went on. "It'd be a lot more expensive. I'd have to buy food and health insurance for four people, or maybe more."

I reminded him that God provides, but it still makes me chuckle. Health insurance? What kind of 6-year-old worries about the cost of health insurance 20 years from now?

Today I was feeding the kids overprocessed frozen chicken things for lunch (because I am still queasy -- grumble grumble) and Alex was saying that his favorite was the chicken Kiev, with its fake butter filling. "My arteries are probably going to explode," he said, "but it tastes good."

The kid is 11 and he's worrying about his arteries? Where are they getting this stuff?

Next thing I know the 3yo will be telling me about his lumbago.

House of Four Boys, Again

Joe the 6yo, who has no /r/, announces that the upside-down laundry hamper is his gun turret. He climbs inside and begins firing at imaginary bad guys. His brothers hear it as "gun toilet." Apparently it doesn't get any more hilarious than climbing inside the toilet to shoot at bad guys.

Inevitable?

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me too much: in a house with four boys and a walnut tree, there will eventually be a green walnut going through a windowpane. Sigh.

Risks, Benefits, Looming Catastrophes

I saw my OB this morning. He is a very pleasant guy, UK-trained and personable, and he seems to be convinced that I'm going to have a catastrophic hemorrhage when this baby is born. My two younger sons were born at home, one with a family practitioner and one with a CNM. While I would go back to the hospital in a flash if this pregnancy turned high-risk, I plan to stay home this time too. We've had an HMO for a couple of years now, and along with prenatal visits to my midwife I'm seeing an in-network OB so I can have my tests covered. I was up-front with him about my plans to stay home as long as I stay low-risk.

He has spent a fair amount of time telling me I could bleed out and die.

When my second son was born in an Edinburgh hospital, I was quite anemic going into the delivery and the third stage was actively managed (i.e., more tugging on that cord than I was comfortable with). I lost an estimated 850 ml of blood, but the hemorrhage was easily controlled -- one shot of methergine and that was that. I have no wish to repeat the experience, since the recovery was rather grim, but I also don't think it's an enormous red flag in my obstetric history. I have since had two perfectly normal births with utterly unremarkable third stages, and while I accept that I could hemorrhage again, I'm not losing sleep over it.

When I met my midwife during my pregnancy with Pete, the first question I asked her was what she carried to manage PPH; she said she always had pitocin, methergine, Cytotec, and IV fluids. I live half a mile from the hospital. I will pre-register there, just in case. I will transfer in a heartbeat if there is a problem. My midwife is licensed and legal; she would accompany me, chart in hand.

It doesn't seem very likely to me that I'm going to exsanguinate under those circumstances. Hemorrhage, maybe; lose my uterus, remotely possible; die, improbable. Call me an optimist.

I spent some time this morning trying to respond to the doctor's concerns: I didn't have even a hint of uterine atony after Pete's birth. I'll reconsider my plans if I'm anemic in the third trimester. My midwife can take the same first steps to intervene at home that she can in the hospital. I think, though, he has it burned in his brain: Homebirth = Too Risky. (Oddly, he has focused exclusively on the risks to me, not the risks to the baby.) But I believe I have read every paper published in English on homebirth safety in the past 15 years, and the results are clear: planned attended homebirth is a safe option for low-risk women carrying full-term vertex singletons. (Don't even get me started on Amy Tuteur, who should serve as a caution to any would-be amateur epidemiologists.)

I  am feeling a little cranky today because I threw up my breakfast (at 16w5d! on Unisom! enough already!) immediately before going to the doctor to hear about my impending demise. But I will end on a happy note: I am grateful for this baby, whose kicks and flutters are making me smile every day now, grateful for a thus-far low-risk pregnancy, grateful for my midwife. My first visit with her was such a welcome contrast to my first OB visit. Afterward I told my husband, "I wish every pregnant woman could see someone like her." I'm glad I can.

The Reluctant Scrapbooker

Oh, my friends, I hate dealing with pictures. I love having the pictures neatly arrayed in albums. I love looking back at my sons when they were two, five, eight years younger than they are now, and seeing how much they have changed. I love the details that the pictures bring back to me, like how utterly un-childproof our house was before Alex started crawling, and how bright the orange living room wall really was in our rented Edinburgh house. (Britons seemed to us to go in for brighter interior walls than Americans, perhaps as a remedy to the all-too-frequent drabness of the weather.)

I wish I could get someone else to make the albums, though.

Last summer I caught up through July 2007, but I hadn't done a thing since then. I had my FIL's vacation pictures from August to deal with, perhaps three dozen of them. No one needs three dozen pictures of a week-long vacation, but I wasn't looking forward to culling them.

I find album duty stressful because I'm worried about what will happen if I don't do it -- the younger siblings who will say, "But where are the pictures of me?" and the queries that will be unanswerable if I don't answer them soon ("Why does Pete have that colander on his head in fourteen separate pictures?" "Uh...he had a secret yearning to be a noodle?"). I do not have grand ambitions; I do not own a corner rounder and I have never put cute little die-cut soccer balls around anybody's first soccer pictures. I slap them in albums, with occasional captions if I know I'll want to remember something later.

Today I bit the bullet and started organizing the five envelopes of pictures from Snapfish that had been awaiting my attention. I finished August, vanquishing the messy pile of vacation pictures, and September, and all but the last day of October. I am out of blank album pages or I would have cruised ahead into November. I suppose it should feel like I accomplished something, but all I can think is UGH! Eight more months to go!

Do you like scrapbooking? I probably can't even call it scrapbooking, what I do, but albuming isn't a word. (Scrapbooking wasn't a word fifteen years ago, I guess, so maybe I could lobby for albuming: Is scrapbooking too hardcore for you? Do Creative Memories parties fill you with performance anxiety? Call Albumers Anonymous, where we will assure you that we are also months behind and don't even plan to make up for it with pretty little patterned background papers.) Are you caught up on pictures? Do you feel guilt about the whole stupid thing? Any success stories of child conscripts who have come to love scrapbooking and have taken the noisome task off their weary mothers' hands?

Was this the whiniest post ever? Here are some pictures to compensate. Here's Pete last summer, washing the van. Elwood is building the kids a treehouse, and here the younger boys are enjoying it. Here is the treehouse in perspective. (I love that tree. It blooms beautifully every April and it shades the south side of our house all summer long.) The older boys are getting ready to dig into Alex's half-birthday baked Alaska. (When you have a birthday that falls between Christmas and New Year's, you get a half-birthday celebration too.) And last, here is a pair of Quill Lace socks, which I finished weeks ago but for weaving in the ends. That took me until this week to accomplish. Even for a person who loves crazy socks, they're pretty...vivid.

June, the Wordle

Because I do not want to revise the stupid results chapter, especially those stupid histograms that were enough of a pain to generate the first time. (Who, me? Bad attitude? Why on earth would you think that?)