True love is...

I should be glad that to the majority of the people reading this blog, I'm just the crazy, anonymous (blogger previously known as) Prego. For those of you who do know me personally... I apologize for this post, but it probably doesn't surprise any (either) of you that I would openly discuss this on my blog.

One of the less-glamorous parts of childbirth (okay... having been through it, I can tell you there is nothing glamorous about childbirth unless you're fortunate enough to be packed with enough drugs that you aren't aware of the absolute lack of glamor) is the fact that a child's head simply is bigger than a 10 cm. hole that your vagina becomes. Physics are just not on the side of that once-happy little orifice. And for most women, this results in tearing in a very unhappy place (or, if it doesn't tear, the doctor will often take the liberty of cutting in said unhappy place).

After birth, the doctor will stitch and mend and try to piece together what was once your taint. I got stitched. It was very uncomfortable afterwards (especially since I had a HORRIBLE upper respiratory infection... imagine taint stitches, PLUS uncontrollable coughing). I was told the stitches would dissolve within 7-10 days. Okay. It's now been 13 days and I was wondering if the stitches had dissolved yet.

I'm also very very squeamish about stitches, needles, blood, etc. I didn't want to feel around down there to see if there were stitches. I'd probably -- most definitely -- pass out.

And this is where the true love of a wonderful husband comes in. I've made strange requests of A. in the last 10 months, all of which he's dutifully carried out. Or laughed at me and told me I'm batshit crazy. But today he came home and I cautiously started out with my wary "Baby?..."

"Uh-oh," he sighs. "What now? More Oreo pie?" (Edwards makes a fabulous Oreo cream pie that I cannot recommend highly enough.)

"Um, no...." I said. "Will you check and see if my taint stitches dissolved?"

The end result was a little bit of gymnastics and flexibility that hadn't been tested in god-knows-how-long (Crazy Prego wanted nothing to do with that horrible act that put us in this sticky situation), a flashlight, and a whole lot of love and patience on A's part. I know he's often the tragic hero of this blog, falling into dog shit and all, but this was one instance where I cannot praise him highly enough. I love my husband and the fact that he tolerates my craziness.

And my taint stitches have indeed dissolved. If you were wondering.

Lessons from Mommyland

Things I have learned in my first eleven days of parenthood:

• As a breastfeeding mother, I've learned that one of my boobs is retarded. No, really. Ol' Lefty just can't keep up with her asymetrically talented sister on the right. This is evidenced by both quantitative evidence (when I pump the tanks out, I get almost twice as much milk out of the right boob), and qualitative evidence (due to lack of milk production, Ella sucks harder on the left boob -- and besides the soreness from the extra suction, I'm also convinced my daughter has five rows of razor-sharp teeth hidden in her mouth, which only come out when she is suckling).

• My daughter knows exactly what she's doing when she poops. She especially likes to poop while she's feeding, and she will actually stop suckling as you feel every little muscle in her tiny little body force out an ungodly, unnatural amount of poop. I really don't know how she keeps so much poop in her body, or how it got there, but it comes out frequently and with FEELING. And there are seedy things in it. Where she's getting seeds, I don't know. I'm starting to wonder if A. feeds her seeds. Like how he feeds Bodhi peanuts, even though he claims he doesn't do that, either. But again... the evidence is in the poop.
  

• Sleep? At night? HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Baby E will sleep through the majority of the day as peacefully and calmly as the Christ child. Not a single peep out of her, even when she's awake. Guests visit and comment on what a good baby she is. But I think something happens at night where my child is replaced with a screaming, roaring banshee beast, because as soon as there is even the slightest evidence of A. and I getting into bed, it is instantly SHOWTIME. At this point, she is inconsolable. No clean diaper, full boob, heartfelt rocking or firm burping will calm her. But again, mind you, this does not begin until the exact second that my head hits a pillow.

• Correction. The aforementioned phenomenon also occurs as soon as the microwave goes off, signaling that I may have a chance at a warm meal. No sleep or warm food for the reproductively-capable.

• There are often jokes about little boy babies peeing on their parents during diaper changes. Someone failed to tell me that little girl babies, and their tiny little urethras, have impeccable aim as well.

The ultimate lesson I've learned thus far? I still have way, way more to learn. That's okay. That's what Google is for.

God, I've turned into one of THOSE parents...

I swear I'll post an actual post one of these days with things I've learned in my first week as a parent -- it's golden material, I promise, it's just all up in the inner workings of my sleep-deprived (deprived doesn't even BEGIN to scratch the surface, is there a more extreme version of "deprived"?) mind -- but in the meantime here are a few new pictures of Baby E...

Yeah. They let US take a baby home...

(If you cannot identify the movie reference contained in this post, then you can just leave and not come back. We don't want your type here...)

Breast pump shopping with (the blogger formerly known as) Prego and (husband still known as) A:

A: "So you can adjust the speed of the breast pump?"
Prego: "Yeah, apparently..."
A: "Well, I like this one... this one goes to eleven..."

So, um, guess what I did?

Yeah. I popped out the kiddo...

LITTLE MISS "E"
Born February 15, 2008
4:19 p.m.
7 lbs., 7 oz.
21 in. long...
... and absolutely fabulous. :)

I spent almost exactly 24 hours in labor, about 13 hours of which I actually felt. Modern medicine, I love you. I'll give the full scoop eventually here, but in the meantime, I just wanted to drop the news. Now if you'll excuse me, my boob service is requested...

... oh hell, but here's a picture to pique your interest:

Vanity, Thy Name Is Pregnancy

I've been reading -- and re-reading -- the signs of the onset of labor, hoping that maybe there's some sort of sign I've missed (ie, an infant's head hanging out of my vagina). Unfortunately, there's not. And as my due date approaches tomorrow, it still doesn't look like Little Miss E is coming out anytime soon.

One of the first signs of labor is a nesting urge, I'm told. I kind of did all that already... there's not much else to clean and I've taken to micromanaging everything in the house. It's not even a matter of cleaning things, it's more an issue of, "My mother-in-law is going to be here and I don't think I'm going to meet her standards." I mean, cripes, I sprayed down the dog with doggie perfume because A kept saying he smelled like pee (the dog, not A). Don't need no in-laws thinking I don't keep my dog clean and smelling like "fresh spring."

But this is nothing compared to the overwhelming vanity that has swept me. I think my biggest fear of delivering this child is the after-birth pictures. I'm sure it won't matter to me when the time comes. I am sure mid-labor Prego isn't going to give two shits if her hair is perfectly blown out, but God knows pre-labor Prego does. I don't care if the kid is swinging like George of the Jungle out of my crotch when we leave for the hospital, I'll be damned if I'm leaving this house without my MAC eye shadow, Lancome mascara, and Aveeno moisturizer.

My biggest pregnancy peeve is hair control. For some reason the few salon spas in town that do bikini and Brazilian waxes are a little wary about ripping hair painfully out of the crotch of a woman who is 9+ months pregnant. So I pose this question: do you understand how difficult it is to shave/trim the pubic hair on a pubic area you can no longer see? I know, I'm way too open about this subject, but seriously? It's the hardest thing I've ever attempted. You try to move your basketball-sized gut out of the way and it turns into a guessing game of feeling around and wondering, "Would hair be here?" I don't know if Helen Keller ever tried to shave her naughty bits, but I'm guessing it would have been a very similar process.

I don't know why I feel the need to shave down there, right now. But I figure that this kid has enough issues coming out into the world -- it's cold, it's bright, and there's someone screaming like a banshee and screaming words that she'll later be told she can't say in public. Last thing I want to do is add to her frustrations by allowing my pubic region to turn into a horrible jungle she has to climb through. It's labor and delivery, not the final physical challenge on Double Dare.

Whenever I feel the Braxton Hicks contractions kicking in, I immediately go shave my legs and put on a fresh coat of polish on the toes. If those piggies are gonna be up in the air in stirrups, they're going to look good. Somewhere between enduring my screaming, begging for death, cursing my husband and denouncing the existence of God, damnit, those OB nurses are going to look at my toes and wonder where I got that fabulous cabernet color (it's Opi, by the way).

Is it bad when I go back and read my blog posts and even I can admit I sound crazy? I really need to pop this kid out and return to sanity. Sweet, sleep-deprived, puke- and poop-covered sanity.

Nope. Still pregnant.

I swear to Christ that Little E is taking her sweet ass time making her grand debut. I mean, I understand that it's nice and warm in there, and it's like, three degrees out here right now. But in all seriousness, it's not funny anymore. She's found the sciatic nerve and has been having a hell of a time with that. I would gladly trade it for the heartburn and rib kicks back before she started descending.

It's all fun and games til none of your clothes fit anymore and you can't get off the toilet without grabbing for support.

So here are a few of the tactics A and I have resorted to in our attempt to lure Little E out:

-- Promises of candy.

-- Calmly telling her about the beautiful world waiting for her and all the people that love her. (Some weird hippie web site told me to do that, and I have a feeling she realized it was all a bunch of hooey. She was unimpressed.)

-- Yelling at her to "GO TO THE LIGHT!!!"

-- Reverse psychology: "FINE! DON'T come out! We aren't ready for you anyway, so you just go ahead and take another nine months for all I care!!"

-- Offering to pay her a dollar. (Hey, when you're a fetus, one George Washington's a lot of green.)

And so the great prego standoff continues. I'm going to go insane very soon here.

I would've become a unibomber too.

That title alone probably just put me on some FBI warning list.

I've been on maternity leave for a week now and am due to pop literally any day now. Being the fact that it is cold, it is snowy, and I have no money, I have had no urge to really leave the house, so I've just been moping around trying to find new things to obsess over and clean. The house is spotless. The nursery has been arranged, rearranged, ransacked, cleaned, arranged and rearranged again. And organized. And filed. And color-coordinated.

That was my first day of maternity leave.

Now I'm just to the point of extreme boredom. And newly added to the list: bored and miserable.

Being sick sucks no matter what your present physical condition. But it REALLY sucks when you're nine months pregnant. It's just a typical February-style cold: cough, snot, sneeze, cough, fatigue, rinse, repeat. In the beginning I was afraid to cough, especially on the toilet. It's amazing the rationale that takes over when you're "down to the wire" pregnant. I am seriously convinced that if I cough too hard while I'm making a tinkle, I will plop out a baby. The normal, rational person that I once was knows this is crazy. Crazy Prego tells her to shut the hell up.

So now I'm bored, very pregnant, AND sick. I'm seeking out projects for the sake of having something to do, since I've watched every DVD we presently own, and every season of Arrested Development and The Office. Sitting around stranded in the house makes you crazy. I don't think that I want to blow anything up, but ask me again when I'm done with my most recent project:

A's mom bought us address labels for Christmas. You know the kind, with little cartoon pictures of every family member -- even the dog -- with our names? Well, around Christmas time we were still set on "Sophia" being the name of Fetus, so all the address labels all say "Sophia" under the little cartoon of a baby girl. My newest project? Going through all 250 labels and white-outing (whiting out?) "Sophia" and carefully going back in and writing the baby's official decided name. YES. I HAVE GONE CRAZY.

By the way, our decided name is:
ELAINE LOUISE.
Lainey for short.
Miss Lainey if you're nasty.

Lainey or Lainy. A likes the second option but it just looks like a misspelling to me. I like it with the -ey. But, hey, if we have a legal name decided on to put on a birth certificate, we can tackle the nickname later.

Super Tuesday's tomorrow. That'll give me something to obsess over besides Britney Spears' meltdown. I'll come out and just make my political preference known, even though I keep swearing I wouldn't on my blog:
That's all. I'm going to go finish knitting a dress for Bodhi. We are scheduled to have a tea party tomorrow. Then I might go out in the street and yell at passing cars. I don't know. We'll see. It's a pretty busy day tomorrow anyway...

Shit.

There's disharmony in the casa del Prego. Two members of the house are at odds with each other and there doesn't appear to be an end in sight. I'm talking, of course, about A and my dog, Bodhi (that's pronounced BO-dee).

A has never been a fan of Bodhi. He has never been OUR dog, he's always been MY dog. A's always had issue with him, primarily because he was a product of my last relationship (my ex bought him for me, though even in that relationship Bodhi was clearly and definitively MINE). He's little and yappy and sheds a lot and he's definitely not your typical "I'm a punk rock guy and this is my killer dog" dog material. But damned if I don't love the little guy, and I love Bodhi even more. *rimshot* Seriously, A's not totally anti-Bodhi -- I've caught him being sweet him to before, and occasionally I'll catch Bodhi perched on A's lap when he's at the computer. He dislikes Bodhi at times but deep down he's a softie.

But it's a volatile relationship at best.

Our biggest issue with Bodhi has been shitting in the house. He's housetrained, and he knows better. That's the problem with papillons -- they're a fiercely, fiercely smart breed. He takes out his frustrations with us by shitting in the house. If he doesn't get his way, he will go over and take a dump somewhere. If we can catch him, we punish him, which has happened a few times, but the majority of the time it is something we don't find until later. And when we do find it and holler at him, he does the whole "Shit, I'm sorry" dog routine. So I know he knows better. It's gotten worse since I've been pregnant. The Dog Whisperer would have a hey-day with it. It's not like we hadn't let him outside in hours or anything. It's a deliberate act on Bodhi's part to get attention.

Most of the time.

The other night A was getting a leftover burger out of the fridge and somewhere in the midst of trying to get a bun out of the bag on top of the fridge, he lost his grip on the burger (a good 1/4 lb. burger, mind you) and it went flying onto the floor. A's a germ freak and was done with the burger in that instant anyway (it isn't anything I wouldn't have rinsed off and nuked in the microwave, but that's me, I'm gross), but in a blink of an eye, Bodhi had grabbed the burger and taken it away to go maul. We were okay with it. But this is a quarter lb. burger and a 6 lb. dog. I figured, shit, we won't have to feed the dog for days at that kind of pace. A pouts about the burger. I make him chicken. Life moves on.

A goes downstairs to the basement (known from now on as "Aland") to play video games for a while. He has this monster-sized tub of peanuts down there and when Bodhi goes down with him, A feeds him peanuts. No matter how many times I have told A to stop feeding him peanuts because he doesn't chew or digest them, he continues to feed Bodhi peanuts. So now, Bodhi has not only eaten 1/24 of his body weight in burger, he's now chock full of peanuts. We go to bed, sleep soundly, Saturday comes...

Okay, I think I've got all the foreshadowing out of the way.

Oh, one more thing in the A-Bodhi struggle. A hates him on the furniture or in bed. Prior to dating/marrying A, Bodhi always slept in bed with me, and when A's not home and I'm lounging in bed like the pregnant orca whale that I am, I usually have Bodhi in bed. He's a cuddler, what can I say? So today after A left for work, I got Bodhi out of his kennel (where he sleeps at night) and brought him back to bed with me. (A pretty typical morning activity for me.) I fell back to sleep watching Arrested Development, and woke up to A coming home. He has the same nasty cold that I have, which has been going around, and since His assistant manager was a worthless piece of shit all week and called in three different days, A decided fuck it, he was going to take the afternoon off and come get some sleep.

That's cool. And I'm glad to have him home where I can pretend to nurse him back to health. (Not in THAT way. I just like feeling helpful. It's a newlywed thing I think.) So I get up and start to make him his tea. In the meantime, I realize something smells like shit. It's not unusual for the septic system to back up during the winter here, especially as cold as it's been, so I ignore the smell. It could've been me farting while I was asleep for all I know. Prego farts are the worst and sometimes I don't even realize they happen til I smell the aftermath. Gross but true. Sorry.

A's excited to be home and as he's telling me about how he completely ripped His assistant manager a new asshole this morning, he does a 4-year-old-style flying leap on the bed. This is the point where I see it on the bed. Not just dog shit. We're talking runny, looks-like-melted-chocolate dog diarrhea. If you could've paused the world for a minute just to see my sights zoom in on the dog shit in the bed, that's what happened. It all happened in slow motion. A's flying in midair toward the bed, I see the shit, and in my head I let out a slow, low-pitched, "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

A landed smack on top of the shit. And it splattered. This wasn't a little bit of shit mind you. A landed in the middle of dog shit quagmire.

Apparently the burger and the peanuts all caught up to Bodhi and he had taken a runny, disgusting shit in the bed while I was asleep. I didn't notice the shit because I'd gotten up so quickly when A got home so as to get Bodhi out of the bed. And because I hadn't expected anyone to be coming through the door at 11 a.m. A's back is covered in dog shit. The bed is covered in dog shit. A is PISSED. He goes chasing after the dog, who goes running under the bed, still leaking, mind you. And you just see big, shit-covered A diving under the bed after this poor little dog who just had really bad indigestion and probably couldn't wake my ass up to get me to let him out.

It was all quite hilarious. You'll never hear me say it around A. But it was hilarious.

So Bodhi is kennel-bound for today (after being let outside for a while to empty out the "tanks"). The sheets are in the washer. And A is freshly-showered and sleeping soundly on a stripped bed.

Welcome to my house.