Jeni says:

On December 6th, Andrew, Shelley and I went in for our So, You Want To Have A Baby And Were Supposed To Do So A Week Ago visit.  Everything checked out wonderfully, and we even got a sonogram taken.

I meant to post this the day of, but I managed to come home, take a nap, and wake up in some crazy pain.  ”Oh,” thought I, “I must be having cramps.  The doctor’s visit totally was supposed to make me crampy, so.”  And back to sleep I went, only to be woken up seven minutes later with the same pain.  The third time it dawned on me that oh, this debilitating regular pain might just be labor!

Oh yeah, it was totally labor.

Westley Charles Balch was born December 7th, 2010, 3:34 pm after twenty-four hours of labor.  He weighed — well here, you can see from the whiteboard from the hospital room:

His birth happened to fall on the day that our company released our big project, and so we have dubbed the seventh BABYCLYSM. I’ll write about labor later, because it definitely warrants its own post in which I can sufficiently expound on the concept that PAIN HURTS A LOT and then it stops and everything is awesome.

For now, life is completely changed around this tiny person’s existence, and it’s really not that bad in the least.  That is helped by the fact that family are all eager to tank him for us so we can sleep/get out of the house/retain sanity. Our doula also wrote up a birth story that’s about the geekiest thing ever, and I love it.  It, too, will be getting a post.

In the meantime merry Christmas, world.  Have a brand new human being.

Today, December 1st 2010, Westley is due to be born.

Okay technically that was yesterday, as it’s 12:48 am and here I am, still all big and pregnant.  What the heck, abdomenchild.  We had a schedule here.  An agreement. As in I agreed you’d be born today, and you can’t talk so that’s implied consent.

If you don't agree, stop kicking me! No? Okay then!

In all honesty, I really don’t mind.  It just makes a convenient talking point to feign frustration over.  Yes, I’m still incredibly uncomfortable and everything hurts, sure.  But that’s all so minor compared to the bigger picture, you know?  Besides, carrying Wes longer will mean he has extra time to develop in there, which is supposed to be good as long as we don’t go over two weeks.

Dr. Romberg doesn’t want us going over one week, though, so we’ve got a bit of a stepped-up schedule of Stuff To Do To Make Babby.  Today — technically yesterday — I went in for acupuncture a our first step towards getting Westley out into the world.  If you google “labor acupuncture” like Andrew did because we hadn’t heard of using it as a method to help things along, you’ll find that it’s a typical Internet topic: there are a hundred different opinions and they all pretty much even out to “inconclusive.”  I’ma link this one because it seems the most well informed.  And by well-informed, I may just mean that it has the most medically official looking website template.

Let’s talk about acupuncture!

I’ve never been really big on “alternative” medicine aside from massages, mostly because massages are awesome.  Suffice it to say that I was kind of skeptical about it, but Shelley spoke really highly of her to another couple at our advanced pain management class, so I wanted to give it a try.

Clearly, it didn’t magically put me into labor.  However, I do want to report that I was really impressed with the experience.  The needles?  Needles being things that normally hurt a lot?  Didn’t even feel them, aside from the ones that went between the big toe and regular ones.  Even when she twiddled with them to stimulate the pressure points, it didn’t hurt.  Wes moved a ton during the time I was relaxing, and I know he feels a good bit lower now than he did this morning when he seemed to be climbing my sternum.

Overall it was really relaxing, and I feel pretty well balanced-out in contrast to when I went in.  We have a followup appointment scheduled for Wednesday, but in our last prenatal visit, she said that she didn’t think I’d still be pregnant come Monday.  Which is a very eye-opening way to think about it.  No longer pregnant and meeting Wes, all before Monday?  I am so down.

I totally thought that the shower was on the 16th.  It was in fact on the 6th.  And thank goodness. Nesting instinct kicked in hard, and having so much awesome stuff to organize and wash and put away kept be sane.

Lookit the gift bags and the little diaper cake and the foooood.

Not gonna lie, I’ve never been to an actual baby shower before.  From what I could gather it’d be kind of awkward and involve people measuring my abdomen in toilet paper squares.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, thank goodness.  My mom and Andrew’s mom did the most amazing job of making it a really fun and comfortable time.  We had a ton of wonderful people come out to help us celebrate and it was just a really awesome time overall.

Plus there was DELICIOUS CAKE

I can’t thank everyone who came enough for sharing it with us, and for all the awesome things we got for the nursery.  That was such a great time.

Our workplace is amazing.  More specifically, our workplace Christmas parties are amazing.  Last year, Andrew won a $1K travel voucher that we never had a chance to put to use because of work/time/omgpregnant.  We realized that we only had a limited amount of time to use it before it expired and before we became the owners of a little tiny human being, so we figured that we needed to use it on up.  Plus, we could both use the break.

Plus-plus, a little thing like our anniversary.  Ninth anniversary, to be precise.  Nine years!  That’s very nearly a decade, which is a long enough time period to have its own special terminology.  By the time we hit ten years, we will have a…nine month old?  Does that work?  Wow.

We went to a local resort and blew the whole thing on too-expensive food and spa treatments, and it was lovely, even given the fact that everything really hurts these days.  Hoping to repeat the experience soon, sans the hurty.  And plus a baby.  Okay, hoping to repeat the experience soon, only with vast modifications.

There are studies that say that “pregnancy brain” is a myth.  Supposedly, being pregnant makes it harder to concentrate, impacts your day-to-day cognition, etc.

I don’t know who put together those studies but they are bunk. I call this very real phenomenon the Baby Derps.

This all started around…I wanna say the thirdish month?  I used to be pretty sharp, and nowadays I’m gonna go ahead and describe myself as the exact opposite.  Anyone who knows me well knows that I’ve always been pretty easily distracted by pretty shiny things, but now everything is like that.  Half the time I’ll be in the middle of something and realize that I’ve been staring at it thinking of like, dasies for fifteen minutes.

Hell of distracting.

I’ve heard from different new-mom friends that this lasts, that it doesn’t last, that it’s permanent and I’ll never ever be the same again moo ha ha ha. I can think of at least one that makes me worry, but all the new moms I know personally seem to be pretty on the ball.  They said this happens, and it passes, and that is comforting as all get out.  I’m very much looking forward to being able to concentrate again.

Also?  I’ve tripped over my own feet twice so far.  Come on self.

Allow me to show you what we got to watch as the introduction to our first childbirthing class!

No, I didn’t know who Johnny Bench was either.

This is why I love our doula.  She said that she had to endure dry, clinical childbirthing classes with her pregnancies, and wanted  to give nervous parents something more fun so they’d actually retain the information.  We went over a ton of stuff:

• Anatomy and how the baby actually gets out of there
• What to pack for the hospital
• Kinds of pain medications
• Breathing techniques
• Relaxation and meditation
• Stages of labor
• That ten centimeters is roughly the size of an expletive-deleted mayonnaise  jar

It was a ton of fantastic information, even though I was exhausted and had to sleep on the floor during the lunch break.  That was another cool thing, they had us bring pillows and a blanket and provided each couple with a bean bag for the moms to relax on.  So I had a wonderful little nest of pillows and blankets while Andrew got us food.  Weirdly, the hospital cafeteria food was pretty good.

We have the second installment of the class next Saturday, followed by breastfeeding class, baby care class, and then advanced pain mitigating class last.  Hearing all the information involved is pretty great, honestly.  It’s pretty calming to get it all laid out and have a chance to experiment with different techniques and positions.  That sounded wrong.

Well still.  IT IS.  DON’T YOU JUDGE ME.

Real posts inbound, I promise.  I’ma backlog them so I don’t look like I neglected blogging for a month.  Wait, my cover, it is blown.

I just wanted to make a quick note that I remembered the first song I want to be sure to re-learn all the words to, for singing to baby purposes.

If you’re my age and don’t love this song, then you are a robot.  True story.

I had what everyone was eager to tell me was my last birthday as a non-parent, and it was fairly magical.  Andrew had planned out a whole weekend of random goodness, including Charley coming for a surprise and getting to go see Serenity with Ron Glass there for signatures and a Q&A at the Drafthouse.

The Drafthouse has baby days, wherein Wes can come and see movies with us. GLEE

I think I had a dream where we sold our signed poster.  Weird.  Anyway.

This was the first birthday where I was actually able to ruin some of his surprises.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I wanted to.  But Andrew always manages to be sneaky about things and I never catch on, and now I did and I am just so proud of me! I think this is a sign.  Perhaps Wes will help me outsmart his sneaky, sneaky father.

It’s very odd to think that for my next birthday, I’ll have a nine-month-old-boychild.  Man for Andrew’s next birthday he’ll have a two-month-old. I do feel kind of bad that he doesn’t get a last hurrah, but then he is getting a son for his birthday.  A son and probably video games.

I had my gestational diabetes blood test taken today.  We should hear back around Fridayish if I have to go in for the four-hour test, which is reported to be fairly difficult to bear by several friends.  Today consisted of drinking this:

Medical sugar water.

It was timed – I had to down it in under five minutes – and then they drew my blood.  They’re gonna check it against my blood from when I very first became preggo and see if I’m anemic, and also check my sugar levels to see how my body handled that little bottle of awful orange water.  Here’s hoping that I’m neither anemic nor gestational-diabetic.

Now that I’m in the third trimester, we start having appointments every other week.  We also got a list of stuff to look out for, namely labor signs and signs of Wes not kicking.  No worries on that front, that’s for sure.  Squirmy little thing.

My dear, sweet friend Liam also linked me this monstrosity as an option.

Click at your own risk.

I use “friend,” in this specific instance, so very loosely.  LIAM THIS IS TERRIBLE.