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