10 days and counting

May is a gorgeous month here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Or at least it is gorgeous south of the City.  This weekend it was nearly 80F at my house, but a jaunt into the City uncovered a dampy, foggy wind and temperatures in the 60s. Needless to say, I didn't stay there long.

The pregnancy is going remarkably well, I'm told. No signs of preeclampsia, no gestational diabetes, I've kept my weight down, and all my bloodwork looks good. The latest ultrasound shows the baby in the desired head-down position. But at 38 weeks, I'm getting worn out, and the baby isn't showing any signs of wanting to make an appearance. My feet have started to swell, so I'm wearing flip-flops most of the time -- not the most stable footwear for someone who can't see her toes anymore. I've got a permanent crick in my pelvis/low back that sometimes turns into a sharp knife-like pain when I'm out walking--so I'm sticking close to home these days. It is getting more and more difficult to find food that agrees with me, so I'm mostly eating frozen greek yogurt, trail-mix, and rice with a bit of milk. My nose sometimes bleeds for no apparent reason, and my ring and pinky fingers are getting numb and tingly. These are all things that are known to go with pregnancy so I'm not worried, just tired.

This weekend I put together the last of the baby-related furniture and got things organized so that changing and dressing him should be relatively easy. I hope. I've been going through closets and dressers and dropping things off at GoodWill. Cleaned the guest room and prepped it for my my parents' upcoming visit. My step-mother is a nurse and it will be good to have her with me for the delivery. Moved most of the cleaning supplies out from under the sinks to the garage (it's never too early to start developing new habits). We've still got some bins to go through from the move into the house a year ago, but some of that will have to wait.

Our friends and family have been so generous with regards to baby gifts that I've had to add things to the baby registry. I'm not big on accumulating things that we won't need or use until months down the road, so most of what has been on the registry list has been newborn through 3 month needs. Our living room is full of cardboard boxes from Amazon -- we've been breaking them down and recycling them for weeks but more keep coming.

I'm already working on my to-do list once the baby is born. There are a lot of things I just can't do right now. Or don't want to do because it might bother the baby inside me. Like using the circular saw :)  I want to finish building the side panels on the rolling bamboo gate that camouflages the garbage bins, but handling lengths of lumber and using power tools isn't a good idea right now. I've also got a burning desire to move the gorilla storage racks in the garage, and that will have to wait, too. And planting. I've got a 40 foot long planting bed along the back of the house but I don't have what it takes to plant and maintain it right now, so I've held off on the tomatoes and carrots and snap peas. Plus, I need to dig down and put some hardware cloth in place to keep the gophers/moles out of the garden.

Well, time to finish this up. I've got plumbers coming in to fix the leak in the master bath soon. And I need to go over the bids for the sewer lateral work we're having done. And take my neighbor to the doctor this afternoon (she just got out of the hospital a few days ago). And then I get to nap :)

Two weeks until Delivery Day

We have a completely new HVAC system for the house as of Thursday. Boy does it raise and lower ambient temperatures quickly! And it's all high-efficiency so we'll see a difference in our gas and electric bills. We decided to get it done before the baby comes, instead of afterwards. Sometime in the next 9 months we'll have the floors insulated from the crawlspace -- before winter comes and the baby is crawling around on cold hardwood and stone tile floors. Of our 1900 sq foot house, only about 500 sq feet is carpeted.

I had someone come in to tackle cleaning the bathrooms and floors, and she did a beautiful job for a fair wage. I'll probably ask her back in a few weeks.

The Graco pack n'play bassinet has been put together and is situated by my bed. It's going to be a good height for handling middle of the night changes and breastfeeding. I've already got diaper-changing and feeding-related stuff in two canvas bins in the top half of the bassinet. God, I hope I'm ready for that!

All the baby clothes and linens that came in this week have been washed and stashed. Yesterday we stopped by Ikea to pick up a dresser and cloth bins to compartmentalize the drawers so those tiny little socks and whatnot don't get lost in the shuffle. M wanted to be a part of the baby furniture decision-making process, but he's only available on weekends, and our weekends have been full of classes and house-related projects and his usual techie puttering. Hopefully we'll get the dresser assembled today.

Speaking of classes, I had the breastfeeding class and the newborn care class yesterday. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I booked two 2.5-3 hour classes back to back. All that sitting in hard chairs made my feet and ankles swell. They're still swollen this morning. Grr.

I'm getting frustrated and tearful a lot more these days, mostly with M. I know it's not fair for me to expect him to read my mind and anticipate my needs, but there are times when I wish he was a better listener -- especially those times when I've had to repeat myself. He's also used to me being his reminder system, but I'm not very good at it these days -- not when my brain is mushy like it is now. Living with M is like living with an artist or musician or an absent-minded professor. He's always thinking and imagining--which I love about him. He's got a big, sexy brain. Before we lived together he'd forget to do things like make meals, do laundry, and feed the cat -- so I took all the domestic stuff on. And now I'm a bit overwhelmed. It's frustrating when he asks me about something as simple as how I make his bacon sandwiches -- which I make the way he told me he likes them -- but, I should be happy he's making the effort, right? Right. Right.

Sleeping is no longer the deep, restful sleep it once was. I'm constantly adjusting positions because something is tingling or I can't breathe right or the baby keeps pounding on the same spot like he needs more room. I'm resting/napping a lot more. I experience the burning-eye need to lay down two or three times a day now. The good news is that this phase is only for 2 more weeks.Once the baby is born I'll be sleeping less, I know, but I'll be experiencing a lot less physical discomfort (I hope) and much better mobility. Two improvements which should have a marked impact on my emotional state.

Still to do are the bag for the hospital, the installation of the car seat base, purchasing some newborn disposable diapers to get through the first few days of toxic waste, and finishing the re-organization of my bedroom so I'm not tripping over bins and boxes.

The soon-to-be-new-mom freak-out hour

We're moving the induce-by date up to the weekend of May 19-20. The weekend is more convenient for everyone, and if the baby is delivered Sunday afternoon between 4-7:30 there will be a ring-of-fire (annular) solar eclipse occuring over the Bay Area. Pretty cool.

I had an appointment with my primary care physician this morning per my obstetrician's recommendation.  I'm experiencing some mild angina-like symptoms along with the occasional flutter (arrythmia) and given that I've had hypertension since Hell Year 2008 and pregnancy adds extra work for the heart, it's probably a good idea to get a cardiac check-up prior to the delivery marathon coming up in 20 days or so. The EKG showed mild sinus tachycardia -- not unusual during pregnancy, so that's good. Next time my heart races and my BP drops I'm supposed to drink water as my doc suspects my blood volume is getting low.

The fact that we're counting down in days now, rather than weeks, has me on the edge of freaking out. This pregnancy has happened very fast seeing as I didn't know I was pregnant until I was nearly 16 weeks. So that is part of it. It also seems like there is so much left to do, and I'm really impatient with my physical limitations right now. I'm bringing someone in on Thursday to clean the bathrooms and the floors, especially since we're having workmen in this week changing out the HVAC system. New furnace, new ducts, new A/C this week.

Fortunately, I've had some friends step up to help me figure out how to organize the baby gear and determine what is still needed. I'm normally a very organized person but all the tiny little baby clothes look alike to me. Now they've been sorted into bins for newborn, 0-3, 3-6, 6-9, 9-12 and 1 year +. After a lot of hunting around, I'm pretty sure I'll be heading to Ikea this week to pick up some Trofast frames and bins for organizing all the baby stuff. Once he's off on his own in his own room, the bins will be great for toy storage and the like, but for now, I'll use them for storing diapers, ointments, clothes, even as a changing table. So much STUFF.

Everything is going to change very soon. I've lived a mostly tetherless, responsibility-free life for the past 25 years, and now, at a time when my friends are becoming grandparents, I'm having my first and only child. All my adult life I avoided even having pets because I wanted to be free to go places and do things without having to worry about who was watering, walking, feeding, and paying attention to pets. I avoided getting married because it didn't make sense if I wasn't having kids. I even avoided accumulating much in the way of things (except books) because it seems to me that people become owned by their things and tied to a place because things need space.

And now there is a baby coming, and I can't return him to the store if he's too much bother ;) I can't just make a quick 10 minute trip to the grocery store anymore. Every move is going to have to be planned, every moment of the baby's time accounted for so that he's not unaccompanied.  I've never minded being tied-up, but the knowledge that I'll soon be tied-down is freaking me out. 5 years ago someone I was dating told me I was commitment-phobic, and at the time, I thought that was rubbish. But CW was right about a lot of things, and it looks like he was right about that, too. I should send him an email and let him know. Men do love it when women tell them they're right :)

Nesting with trees

Nesting, or preparing a home for the arrival of a child, takes many forms. In our case, it's accelerating the outdoor projects we originally planned to do later this Spring / Summer.  When you buy a house, you really need to live there for a year, through all the seasons, and pay attention to the micro-climates around the home, before making long-term planting decisions, like trees. Sick or mis-planted trees make me very sad, and the leaf-curl on the espaliered peach tree influenced our choice of this house. M and I both felt sorry for it, silly as that sounds. But anyway, we've been involved with the house since March of last year, and I've been observing the patterns of light and temperature and water-flow, so I'm fairly comfortable making planting choices now.

We have a large patio area on the east side of the house that gets really good east-west sun along the fence-line for most of the day. There is a peach tree and a bottle brush tree planted there already, and then a big empty air-space above the fence through which we can see onto our neighbor's front stoop. We discussed planting something there, and M really wanted an almond tree, but I explained that almonds are drupes (like peaches) and can be rather messy for patios. They also lose their leaves in the winter like peaches, which means such a tree won't provide the privacy screening we desire.

I'm a big fan of trees that provide edibles, and being a native Californian, I know that citrus trees are in-leaf year-round, and have flowers and/or fruit for most of the year. M doesn't care for citrus fruits because they're too sour and have so many seeds, but mandarins / satsumas are an exception since they are sweet and seedless. When I told him that I wanted to plant a mandarin and why, he readily agreed. For some reason he didn't think they could grow here in the Bay Area, so from that point it was a matter of waiting for planting season.

Yesterday afternoon I got a call from the garden center a few blocks away that the Owari Mandarin trees were in, and there were two 10-gallon pots to choose from (as well as numerous 5-gallon pots). Since he was working from home and getting antsy anyway, M and I walked over (yes, walked!) and inspected the trees. I liked what I saw. Good growth, proper pruning, dark, glossy leaves, and fruit still on the trees. I preferred the one with the most fruit on it because I felt that it was an indicator that the tree would keep fruit longer. M picked it because he likes satsumas, and more fruit on the tree means more fruit he can eat :)

We then walked back home and drove my GMC to the garden center to pick up the tree. Once we got it home we tackled the next step: locating exactly where and how to plant it. M admits to very little experience with growing things, never mind planting them, so with my background in plant biology, he usually defers to my judgement.

We measured. We visualized. We placed it and moved it. And then, when M felt certain that the tree, once grown, would provide the visual screening we desire, we dug. Most people don't realize that when you're planting something like a tree, that you don't dig a deep hole. You dig a wide one, twice as wide as the pot. A wide hole encourages lateral root growth, which better supports the tree, and prevents a tree from getting root-bound. Many trees fail because the root system never branches out, it just knots in on itself, strangling the tree.

We've got great soil for citrus trees, and I know that because I can see twenty of them just walking around the block. Sandy and well-draining, with just the right amount of humus (decomposed plant matter). The digging was very easy. Even digging a foot down took very little effort. We dug a trench about a foot deep and 30 inches wide, placed the tree, mixed some commercial garden soil in with the soil from the hole, and back-filled around the tree, tamping the soil fairly lightly. We soaked the soil, which drained as quickly as expected, and later this morning I'll tamp more soil in and build a little earth ring around the tree to make watering easier.

Yesterday we actually ended up picking up three other trees. Two white double-flowering weeping cherries, and one pink single-flowering tree with the same weeping habit. I was very excited to find a Prunus pendula rosaea (pink single-flowering cherry), and to find one that was 6 feet tall was a real score. None of them are flowering yet, so we can't be absolutely certain that the trees we bought are as-marked, but they're beautiful and healthy and already producing buds. We'll plant them out in front of the house once the landscaping is done in a few weeks, but in the meantime they're sitting on the patio basking in the sun, and I'll give M some lessons on the care and pruning of top-grafted trees, which is what all three cherries are.

Looking out the patio windows, I can see bluebirds and hummingbirds flitting around. The sunlight is catching on a new web some enterprising spider built on the trellis we moved in order to plant the tree. The branches of the weeping cherries are moving ever so slightly in the morning breeze. Everything is quiet and peaceful, for now. I am savoring moments like this as often and as long as I can, because I know that in four months everything will change.