It's all Completely Normal!

So has everyone finally emerged from their post-Thanksgiving tryptophan-induced comas?

We had a lovely celebration with symphony friends who take "orphans" (those without family in the vicinity) into their festive home for major holidays. Because El Bambino is now taking up a significant portion of the room previously reserved for my vital organs, I was immediately stuffed, despite the fact that I had had barely anything else to eat prior to the Big Afternoon Meal (appropriately BAM, for short). Call the multi-gazillion dollar diet industry: who needs bariatric surgery when you have what's probably at this point a 7 pound kid sitting on your entire digestive tract?

I brought a sweet potato casserole and a creamed spinach dip, and David made his famed caramel pecan sticky buns (a holiday tradition in his family) and a very impressive-looking apple pie. We had a great time.

We finally finished painting the nursery! I love the yellow we picked. It's a very nice buttery, mellow yellow, warm and inviting. We did two yellow walls and two white ones, all semi-gloss which the paint guru at Lowe's assured me was the easiest to maintain and clean, therefore ideal for a small child's room. We have our crib, which was delivered last week and is still in the box. Which means we still have to put it together. According to some of the people in our class, this is about as much fun (and as easy) as going through a revolving door with 3 pairs of skis over your shoulder. I am not looking forward to it.

We also finished our childbirth education class series. We got a fancy graduation certificate with the hospital's seal and everything. We were so proud. Graduates! We did it! So apparently now, we are fully licensed and allowed to give birth. Does this make me feel better? A little. Am I still scared to death of the complete lack of control and utter pain I'm going to have to go through during delivery? You bet your 36 weeks pregnant bachache I am.

My mother wonders how she ever had kids without taking those classes; they weren't around for me or my sister, but she and my dad took one when my brother came along in the late 70's. At the end of the class she looked at my dad and said, "how in the world did we ever have the first two?!"

I have to admit, the classes were really great. Our teacher, who looked to be about my age but has already had 6 children, was excellent, and I would say that at least 95% of what we learned was completely new to me. David was there for all of the classes and even attended one I couldn't make because I was out of town. The reality of impending parenthood is still daunting, especially now that it's so close and coming straight at me head-on like a speeding freight train. I have never been around a newborn child in my life, and that is nothing short of terrifying. Truth be told, until fairly recently (4 years ago when my adorable little niece Jenna came along), babies looked like little bald aliens to me. Their sheer fragility and utter dependency really freaked me out. Everyone tells you it's different when it's your own child, and hopefully that's true. I sure hope there's some powerful parenting instinct or reflex that kicks in once the kid is out, because aside from taking care of our relatively independent cats, I have absolutely no frame of reference whatsoever for what is about to happen to us.

Which is why the classes, for me, were so helpful.

Anyway, other than that, things here are fine. The discomforts of pregnancy late in the 3rd trimester (only 4 more weeks until D-Day!) are intensifying, but, like every unpleasant, disgusting, exhausting, or bizarre thing that can happen to a pregnant woman at any time, I am learning from our many pregnancy and delivery reference tomes that it's all Completely Normal. Some of us were joking in our childbirth classes that we could make a lot of money writing a book containing every possible bizarre, horrifying, or otherwise disturbing symptom we could imagine, reassuring pregnant women that whatever they were experiencing was Completely Normal. "Oh, so your lower back is throbbing in 5/8 time, while your baby is simultaneously kicking your bladder in 3/4 time, resulting in a stimulating Stravinsky-esque counterrhythm that is keeping you up all hours of the night? And your stretch marks have changed color from simple red stripes to a lovely pattern of army green and fuschia paisley? Oh, well, of course. That amalgamation of symptoms is completely normal at 36.5 weeks pregnancy. Don't you feel so much better now, knowing that your complete discomfort and total lack of control over what's happening to your body is Completely Normal?"

We could make a lot of money.

Work is thankfully relatively low key and a wonderful distraction from the physical and emotional realities of impending motherhood. This is such a blessing. We did one of my favorite pieces of all time last week, Sibelius's 2nd Symphony. It was so blissful. I just adore Sibelius. I used to listen to my favorite recording of it, one of my favorite CD's in my collection, all the time purely for recreational purposes: Yoel Levi and The Cleveland Orchestra, Telarc label. The first movement is enough to just turn you into a big happy pile of goo; about 7 minutes into it or so, the rest of the orchestra drops out and the immense warmth of the entire brass section playing a lush chorale sweeps over you. You can almost feel the clouds opening up and basking you in sunlight.

This week we're doing 3 performances of Beethoven's 9th, and next week I have two reading sessions before I go on maternity leave. Then I'm done and don't go back to work until April 1st. Time to nest, prepare, clean, organize, do mountains of laundry, and otherwise prepare for our little guy's arrival into our home!

Happy holiday season to you all, and may the season be peaceful and joyous for you. XOXO

P.S. Because of the due date being smack dab in the middle of Christmas and New Years, we decided to not send out holiday cards, but will be mailing our annual holiday letter in the same envelope with the birth announcements in January. This will conserve tons of paper, to say nothing of immeasurable amounts of new-parent energy/sanity. :D

33 weeks and counting...

So I'm in the home stretch (not to be confused with stretch marks, which, thanks to the luxurious Body Shop Cocoa Butter Body Butter my awesome sister gave me, have been kept at bay) of my pregnancy! Thank god. Because things are getting uncomfortable.

Oh, it's all normal. I had an appt. with my doc yesterday and she said that the discomfort, shortness of breath, fatigue, and puffiness are all within the scope of an otherwise healthy pregnancy. My belly is sticking out so far now, I can no longer walk without looking like an idiot. I have to waddle like a duck. It's no joke (though I'm sure I look funny). It's just impossible to walk normally and maintain a good sense of balance when your center of gravity is so weird with the baby weight so high up in your belly. And slow...I'm sooo slow these days. That's frustrating, but I keep reminding myself that I have to take it easy.

I blew through my latest James Patterson thriller, which was great (The Fifth Horseman), and have started a delightful - and entirely appropriate! - quality chick-lit romp called Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner. It's a sort of "Sex & The City"-esque portrayal of 4 women living in Philadelphia; except that all 4 women are all married and in the last trimesters of their pregnancies! The timing of my reading this couldn't be more perfect - the stories of their backgrounds, deliveries, prenatal yoga, the challenges of taking care of a newborn, and hilarious stories of the mother in law from hell (who buys her new granddaughter a sequined tank top that says "Hottie"!! Eeew!) etc. are so engrossing and I am just eating it up. I adore this author; she is one of my favorites!

Speaking of entertainment, did any of you see the Bionic Woman this week on NBC? Man, that show is phenomenal!

The baby is doing very well and so am I, despite the routine discomforts. My blood pressure is still normal - 122/74 - for which I am eternally grateful (thanks, mom, for the good genes!). And the baby, bless his sweet little heart, still kicks and nudges and flutters often. He's started to do these somersaults that make me feel like I have a chicken rotisserie going on in my stomach. It's truly a bizarre sensation. Yesterday the doctor said his growth rate, heartbeat, and movements all sound perfectly healthy and normal, and that's what really matters.

I'll close this post with a hilarious story of recently going through airport security. I had my horn with me, of course, and it was going through the conveyor belt to get checked out. I always watch the airport staff when this is going on. This guy stops the conveyor, squints his eyes, backs up the conveyer belt again and stops it again, and looks more closely at the monitor. He looks over to his colleague, and says, "hey John, c'mere." John walks over. The guy points at the monitor. "What the hell is that?"

At which point I lose it laughing. John looks at me and asks, "is it a trumpet?" I am impressed that he even knows that it's a musical instrument and tell him it's a french horn. (It's really just called a horn in the orchestral world but most people don't know that, so you have to say "french" to make sure they know which horn specifically.) The guy behind me in line is cracking up and gives me the thumbs up and with a huge smile on his face, says, "Awesome!"

Anyway, I hope this blog post finds you all happy and healthy and enjoying a gorgeous fall day. The weather here is chilly but sunny, and the leaves are still gorgeous shades of gingery-turmeric gold and other shades of wine, burgundy, and tangerine. Just beautiful. Write back and tell me what you have planned for the weekend!