Prayers for Eddie

Eddie, the geriatric Cavalier, is being inspected today. Mike put on new front brakes (disks and pads!) this weekend, so there should be nothing else the old guy needs.

Come on, Eddie, make Mama happy!!

UPDATE (4:12PM):
Eddie passed with flying colors! The bath we gave him this weekend must have helped him to feel his best. Now all we need is the new registration card and new license plate sticker. Stupid PennDOT updated our address wrong (and I'd take the blame except that my handwriting is quite clear on important stuff--not Christmas cards and such, but stuff to the DMV, yes, and whoever entered it entered it wrong in TWO places: wrong house number and wrong zip code.) So our stuff got lost in the mail even though they cashed our check on Jan. 5. Greedy bastards.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Babies are expensive. I really can't even fathom yet what having a baby will cost, but this realization that we need someone to be with the baby all the time is very sobering. We have been well aware of the fact all along, but now we're trying to adjust our budget, and it became very real: We are going to take a drastic cut in my income, or else we will have to pay for full-time child care, which would mean a drastic expense.

I am strongly, strongly, strongly opposed to full-time daycare for countless reasons. The biggest reason is probably that it would just make me unhappy. I love children, and for some reason I have a feeling I'll especially love my own child, and I'll be damned if I'm going to sit in a grey cubicle for 8 hours a day and commute for 1 to 1 1/2 hours a day and let someone else play with my baby, especially when I'd have to pay them pretty much what I earn in take-home pay. Other reasons include that my degree is in child development and child care. And I personally think I'm extremely highly qualified to care for a child. It would be like a mechanic paying someone else to fix his car. It just doesn't make sense. My least favorite reason, because I know it's unpopular, is that I just hate daycare and I think it sucks for kids. Now, I'm not saying that I think no one should use it and you suck if you do use it. For a lot of families, it's a great option. Some parents aren't really into being parents, and that's okay. Not everyone can get excited about making snakes out of play-doh or tolerate 24-hour programming of Barney and the Wiggles. And I understand there are social benefits of a group care setting, especially in pre-school years. But for babies, I stand my ground: daycare sucks.

And I think I have a right to say so because I worked in one when I graduated college. As hard as they tried, they couldn't break me. I refused to succumb to the overwhelming morale of parents-are-the-screwups-who-derail-our-good-training. See, in a daycare, there are 4 infants per 1 adult. That's the law. (I mean, that's the maximum allowed by law, and the bare minimum allowed by management who steals from parents and pays underqualified transient workers minimum wage.) If a woman gave birth to 4 children, no one would ever, ever, EVER suggest that she should stay home and try to feed and care for all 4 of them until they were quite old, perhaps 9 months or a year old. But we don't bat an eye at allowing our 6-week old infants be in the care of a worker who is solely responsible for 3 other infants at the same time. I don't get it. But it's worse than this. Not only do they set the underqualified workers up for failure, but these underqualified workers develop patterns of care to deal with the fact that no one could possibly meet the needs of 4 infants simultaneously. Specifically, they don't pick up the babies. They can't. If you pick a baby up, it expects to be held. Well, no shit, Sherlock. Babies are supposed to want to be held. It's instinctual. And parents do weird things like hold their babies while they feed them, and rock them to sleep, and pick them up when they cry, which spoils the babies and ruins them for the daycare workers. They can't be expected to hold 4 babies while they eat, or rock 4 babies to sleep simultaneously, so they just don't do it. And this works, more or less. The proof is in the pudding. Most daycare babies sit on the floor, or sit strapped into a bouncy seat, and drink from a bottle that's been propped up for them, and make little fuss when you plop it in a crib. Sure, it's hard for them the first couple of weeks, and they cry a lot, but they soon learn that crying is pointless and no one's going to pick them up, and they get used to it.

To me, this is the saddest thing I've ever heard. Okay, maybe not the saddest, but it's right up there. I mean, it goes so strongly against every belief of child-rearing that is popular today, but very educated and wealthy people just ignore the facts and delude themselves into thinking that their baby's needs are met in daycare.

Okay, this is going totally off the subject. This post is about being out of money, and it sucking. It is not about daycare sucking. But to my little baby, if you ever read this, I want you to know that I won't let that happen to you. I may use daycare for short days a couple of times a week if Daddy and I get desperate for care and I still need my paycheck, but I won't leave you there to suffer. I will always be there to meet your needs, and I won't let anyone break your spirit and teach you that resistance is futile.

Back to money: it sucks to not have a lot of it. But I know that no matter how much you have, when you have a baby, it doesn't feel like enough. And I don't even really think we have anything to worry about. I know we'll be fine. But we have been getting along wonderfully with our budget since we got married, and now all of a sudden, we are going to take what looks to be a 20-25% cut in income. That's huge!! I'm not sure where we'll find 20-25% of costs to cut, but we can do it. But the garage door can't be fixed. The electrical system in our house can't be fixed. The windows can't be fixed. The roof over the side porch can't be fixed. We can't get a dishwasher. We can't get new speakers. We can't get new bedroom furniture, and we can't get a new car. The car thing is worrisome. I hope our little Cavalier can hold us and a baby for trips across the state, and I know we can make it work. Plenty of people go further with less. But the Cavalier is getting up there in age. A 5-year old car isn't old, but a 5-year old Cavalier is geriatric. But Mike takes such good care of that car, and I know it will take good care of us.

I hope.

Ten fingers and ten toes

I know you're just supposed to hope for a healthy baby, but I spend way too much time wishing for a cool baby.

But recently, I have been thinking more about just having a healthy baby--a baby without any terrible disease or delay. Is that greedy? Selfish? I wonder about the little person crawling around inside me, and I can't imagine it not having ten fingers and ten toes and a nice, normal face, and a head full of hair, and perfect little eyebrows and lips, and a cute little outie belly button and a smooth back with a perfectly fused spinal column. But what if it doesn't have all those things? I can live with an innie belly button. I suppose I could live with any of it. But it sure would be a shock, and I'm not sure how Mike and I would handle it.

I guess you take what you get and never, ever, ever forget to be thankful for it.

Doh!

We bought a new chair. (Well, my grandmother bought us a new chair. It's on our card, but she wants to buy it for us.) I love my new chair.

It really is my chair. I would never call anything in our house mine, like "my refrigerator", or "my cats" or "my mess." (I will take credit for "my pantiliners" or "my mascara.") But this is my chair. Really, though, it's mine and baby's. It's understood that while a visitor may end up sitting in my chair, when baby wants the boobie, I get my chair. And Mike may even enjoy my chair to rock the baby to sleep sometimes, but it's still my chair. It's girly, unlike the rest of our furniture, and it's for me and baby to cuddle in, and eat in, and get food all over, and get crumbs in the cushions, and all that good stuff. From the moment I saw it in the Levin showroom (classy, eh?), it beckoned me. And Mike tried to make me check at Lazy Boy or Ethan Allen (what does he think? Money grows on trees?) first, but no, no no... I wanted my chair.

So we bought it. And attempted to bring it home. But...

Doh! The chair actually flew off the back of the pick-up truck in transit. It bounced off the highway a few times, and now has a nasty case of road rash. Can you believe it?! This is why my precious chair is still sitting in the basement, wrapped in plastic. What do we do?? We tried the warranty, but of course, it's not covered in transit. This is because cheap dumbasses like me who don't want to pay delivery charges tend to do things like let chairs fall off the backs of trucks. Perhaps I should have learned from this lesson that you always let the company deliver it. Then they're responsible. But, no, I will continue to prefer to pick up my own stuff, thankyouverymuch. I don't know why. I'm not even remotely mad about the chair, or about the $100 or $200 it could cost to fix it. The chair was a gift as it was, so who cares if we have to invest a little into it??

Really, I just want my chair all in one piece. I want to sit in it and rock in it and pretend I have our baby in my arms.

But we have two options: we can get it repaired so it's exactly as it was on the Levin's showroom floor, or we can patch it up and have a slipcover made for the back, like one of those headrags that protects the chair from oils and other gross stuff on people's heads. What do you think??

Anxiety or love?

Is there even a difference between anxiety and love? I mean, I wouldn't feel anxious about having a child if I didn't love it, right? And I wouldn't love it if I didn't worry about it, right?

But this is a different anxiety than I've ever felt, and a different love. (I know that I can't possibly feel anything even close to the love I'll feel once I have the child in my arms, so don't get me wrong.) I love Mike, but I don't have an anxious feeling about his safety or his happiness at all times. With the baby, it's not even a feeling of anxiety about safety or happiness, it's just anxiety in general. It's anxiety about feeding it and clothing it and bathing it and keeping it from crying and perhaps most importantly, making it sleep!! Perhaps I'm confusing this anxiety about its wellbeing with actual anxiety about my life sucking for the next year or so. Perhaps I love this baby despite my anxiety, not because of it. (Er, I mean, uh, my anxiety isn't proof of loving it. My anxiety is hopefully just keeping my head out of the clouds.)

I am anxious that it will cry a lot, and that it will make me cry a lot, and that I will be sitting in bed, crying and paralyzed with fatigue for days on end. I don't function well when I don't sleep, and I haven't been sleeping well for a week or two, and I know that this is nothing compared with what lies ahead. This leads to perhaps my very very very biggest worry. I'm afraid that our baby won't sleep. See, I was a good baby. I was a sleepy baby. I liked to sleep, and I wasn't a scheduled baby. I just slept when I was tired. I would sit on the living room floor, looking at books or dressing a doll, and when the mood struck, I would just grab a pillow off the couch, curl up in a ball, and close my eyes.... and sleep. And according to my mom, if it was in the evening, she could pick me up and dump me in the crib or in a bed, and I'd stay there, lost in sweet dreams, until morning. (Come to think of it, not much has changed in the last 25 years.) Mike was a devil baby. (This is what I hear at least. I need more details.) But rumor has it that as a child, he did not sleep. He would stay up all hours of the night, and when finally exhausted and miserable but still refusing to sleep, he would have to be locked in his room and he would bang on the door screaming and crying for hours, until eventually he passed out on the floor next to the door. Is this characterization possibly true?? And if so, what if my child has his genes?!?!?

And this leads us to my more abstract and irrational fear (the sleeping thing is a very real problem, and therefore a rational fear.) But I'm afraid that, well, what if this baby isn't a good one? I mean, what if this baby sucks? What if it isn't cuddly, and it doesn't sleep, and it doesn't love me, and it doesn't do cute things? What if it doesn't latch on and nurse? What if it cries when it's held? What if it does nothing but shit these monster shits and have blowouts in the crib, on our bed, on the couch, wherever I set it down??? And then, the bigger worries: what if when it turns 13 it puts on a spiked dog collar, shaves its head and puts a padlock on its bedroom door? What if she sneaks and buys slutty clothes that she hides in her backpack and changes into in the bathrooms when she gets to school? What if he gets a classmate pregnant at age 14? What if she hates me and won't speak to me? What if he does drugs and fails classes in high school? What if she goes vegan and wears nothing but hippie skirts and refuses to wash her hair for a year? Or worse, what if he votes Republican?! (Joke; sorry, I had to.)

But I suppose these fears will never go away. Perhaps you have to trust the genes we brought to the table. Perhaps you have to trust that we will provide a supportive and loving environment that won't push our kids to the edge. Perhaps it's a little bit of, or a lot of, both. But we all know families who are good, and go to church, and the mom makes chocolate chip cookies before the kids get home from school and organizes bake sales, and the dad coaches little league and organizes car washes, and they still have kids who do drugs, drop out of school, even commit suicide. How powerless all parents must feel. And how dumb the others must be to not sometimes feel powerless. Maybe it's the ones who never question these things that are most surprised when little Bobby goes off the deep end.

Anyhow, I just want our baby to be a good one. We should be finding out in less than 7 weeks!!!

Nursery near completion!!

Check it out! The night sky is finished. In hindsight, I think we didn't plan it extremely well. Okay, okay, I didn't plan it extremely well. Mike just made me tell him where to hammer in the stars. But I realized that we should have made it so that more bigger stars are near the bottom molding and more smaller stars are near the top molding, so that it would give it some perspective. You know, so the stars nearer the "horizon" looked bigger, and the ones further away looked smaller. But whatever.

Also, you'll notice that the crib is put together!!! Now we just need a mattress so I can put a sheet on it and pretend I already have the baby. I have been practicing lowering the side of the crib one-handed as quietly as possible. Mike thinks I'm crazy. My mom doesn't want me starting with this "quiet" nonsense. (Oh, so my mom and I actually agree on this: babies tolerate noise as much as you allow them, and they learn to require quiet as much as you allow them. That is, if you allow them sleep in the bustling activity of the day, they will, just as they have done for the last 9 months in utero. If you always put them to sleep in a darkened, quiet room, they will need that, and will lose the ability to sleep through noise. So I hope to have the baby passed out wherever we are, and I'll just toss it on a blanket on the floor or something when it falls asleep [at first I mean, of course, when it's still immobile]. But, I also can remember some older babies that I babysat who were just hellish to get to sleep. And once you get the cretin to sleep, the tiniest noise will disrupt the sleep, and then you have a horrible, horrible, horrible crying baby who doesn't want to go to sleep all over again. So I know someday, sometime, I will need to open the crib without disturbing the baby.)

Anyhow, Here's another full shot of the crib. The cats have left it alone, because as you can see, they would fall through the springs if they tried to get in. They are dumb cats, but they're not that dumb. So the sooner we get a mattress in there and scare the shit out of them (therefore keeping them from every trying to get in it again), the better. I read that you can put a bunch of mini blown-up balloons in the crib, and if they jump in and land in that mess, it'll really upset them. Mike prefers the duct-tape method, which is laying cardboard or something with backwards duct tape all over it in the crib, and once a cat lands on duct tape, they're adequately traumatized to not let it happen again. We'll see. Anyhow, isn't the crib just beautiful?? I am so thankful to my old boss for donating it to us. But it turns out that getting a dresser to go with the set is probably going to cost far more than a quality crib would cost. But, if we were buying our old crib and recycling our old bedroom furniture, we'd have very nasty cardboard quality KMart furniture in there, and this way will be higher quality. Oh, hell, why don't we just buy one more KMart dresser to go with this set?? Who cares if we have to throw it away in 2 years? It'll cost like $50, and the kid will be scribbling on furniture with crayons when I'm not looking by then anyhow!

Sigh. We'll see. Oh, and yes, the window desperately needs something. I'm not sure what yet, but it'll probably get a roller shade for room darkening, and then just a plain valence. Knowing me, it'll be a white valence.

I suck at blogging

So, I have been thinking about blogging a lot. Sometimes I think that I should be sure to include some interesting posts that are not baby related or pregnancy related, so that, well, you know, I'm an interesting person and stuff like that. I mean, I really don't want to become one of those mothers who is incapable of talking about anything other than what little Junior did today or what kind of poop or cough he has or what I did buy or have to buy for him..... and I don't think I will.

But in the meantime, I'm slowly realizing that this is MY space, and I can talk about whatever I want, and I'll never have this time back, and if I want to go on and on and on about being pregnant, so be it. I was worrying myself into thinking that I should be writing for someone else's pleasure or entertainment, but phooey on that. I'm writing for me, and for my baby. Maybe when our baby is 13 years old, or 18 years old, or when she becomes a mother, she'll want to know what I felt when I carried her. She'll want to know what I hoped for, what I was afraid of, and God knows I'll want her to know what agony she caused me, and what sacrifices we made. (Okay, okay, so we really haven't made any sacrifices yet. But we will. I'm sure of it.)

And I was thinking then about how when I started, I wrote some very important stuff about whether I felt connected to our baby, and how I felt about it, and what made me worry. And now I've wasted several months not recording my feelings, and I already regret it. I don't want to miss the last 2 months. So I am going to write about how I feel. But I will separate the posts, for ease of retrieval when I need to see how I was feeling.

Back to blogging

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. We survived the holidays, and are lazily getting back to normal. We registered for baby, which was a very big and very stressful job to get out of the way. It's very sobering to see how much stuff we'll need to buy for ourselves. I know that it's time to figure out what we can do without, and what we can scrimp and save on. We are so lucky that Becca has given us some stuff to use, including a co-sleeper (worth at least $100), a front carrier (worth $80), and probably like 10 outfits, several of which are 0-3 months and will suffice for the first few weeks, and the rest of which are 3-6 months, and will probably last through June or so. I'm sure we'll end up with many more clothing items as gifts, but I'm hoping we get more t-shirts and socks and such than cute little sailor outfits!! And I read that if you're willing to do laundry every day (and what else is there to do when you have to sit at home alone all day?), you can get by with only like 6 outfits. I'm sure it'd be nice to have more like 12 or 18 outfits, but I think we'll survive on that front. It's when it's 6 months old, and then a year old, and so on that I'm worried about. We'll need a new car seat, a new stroller, new clothes, new diapers, new toys.... Oh well.

I have to do work now (my job has been busier, leaving me less anxious and more excited about leaving for a long break soon), but I have much to post. I haven't been journaling well, and it's high time I started recording my thoughts, as much for myself as for the baby.