Madeleine

Born November 4, 2009 - 5:04 PM
6 lbs 12 oz

Are you Polina?

Perhaps it is marginally inappropriate to appear so self-centered at the dawn of what’s supposed to be the most selfless event of one’s life. Nonetheless, I’ve managed to do so with limited shame. And though I may be masking deeper fears, worries and substantiated and unsubstantiated neuroses about this little (well, not so little – it seems the father’s genes are no joke) fetus-soon-to-be-baby, I find it easier to deal with what’s happening to me here and now.

I am now in the last two (maybe less?) weeks of this process. Long gone is the pregnancy glow; it’s been replaced by a constantly runny nose, swollen extremities, including my head, and severe carpal tunnel. All I have to do to confirm that I am not looking my worst is go to sleep and wake up the next morning; for the past month each morning has been more traumatic than the previous. We have acquired a great full size mirror for the bathroom that is tilted ever so slightly… my husband noted that this really gives the illusion of being slimmer than one really is. That was a relatively neutral comment to make if you are talking to a normal person in normal circumstances. Though I had suspected this sneaky law of physics before, I had successfully managed to chase it away.

This week I started working from home. It’s been great! This arrangement affords me the unbelievable luxury to step outside on lunch break. I dedicated yesterday’s lunch break to visiting the cleaners. I should note here that I take great pleasure in knowing store/restaurant owners and staff. I almost openly enjoy being known by my name, having the street cart coffee guy know how I like my coffee, etc..etc.. Lame? You bet, but at least I am honest. Well, the cleaners is owned by a super nice lady, Julie. Julie does a good job dry cleaning my clothes and even a better job knowing my name though I almost never come in. Yesterday, as I came in, Julie looked at me, paused for a second and said…”Are you Polina???” No, Julie, I am a beached whale who ate Polina. Julie reached over the counter and rubbed my belly for good luck. Thank you, Julie, thank you.

Keepsake

We painted the kids' rooms, the baby's - a pepto bismol pink (who knew my husband was so traditional) and my stepson's a bright green, his color of choice. Overall, we are a lot more colorful than I ever imagined myself to be, but perhaps, or actually not perhaps but certainly, it is a positive shift.

My newest source of stress is finding an appropriate baby keepsake book. Seems that the ones sold in stores are not flexible and don't allow me to take out the cheesiest of pages. Also, the persistent references to the parents as mommy and daddy annoy the shit out of me. First, JP is definitely not daddy, but papa. Whether I am mommy is TBD, but unlikely. I found great customizable books on etsy.com, a site where private sellers and small businesses market their homemade creations. I was pretty excited albeit the book costing thrice as much as a standard one... Until I showed my husband. We looked at the seller profile and turns out that she is not only a gifted craftsperson, but a mother, a wife, and a devout follower of her savior Jesus Christ. The immediate response I got from JP was "we are not supporting religious fundamentalists, forget about it." I, on the other hand, am very torn. Does being a devout follower of her savior make her work any less valuable? On the contrary, she would argue, her talents were given to her by Him and now I will get to enjoy the fruits. Maybe she was a crackwhore turned avid born again scrapbooker, who am I to judge? More importantly, can I find a better book somewhere else? I keep looking, but she, like his spirit it seems, is everywhere you type in "modern baby keepsake book."

Keeping up with my tally of people who gave me their seats on the subway. Add one more to each category; black men, black women, and white women. Go ahead and subtract from white men, they are now in the negative territory, pushing me around and racing me to the seat. Fuckers.

Not Contagious

"Ladies and Gentlemen, courtesy is contagious and it begins with you," says the automated announcement on my 5 train. Bullshit. Here is some unPC profiling/giving up your seat for me stats.

Black Women 3
Black Men 2
White Women 1
White Men 0
Asian Women 1
Asian Men 0

Oh, a few people also wished me and the baby well. You can draw any conclusions you want. All I need to know is if I park myself by a seated, well-fed Caucasian male from the Upper East Side, I will keep standing for the rest of the ride.

Because you see... courtesy, common decency, and general manners, they are not contagious, they are cultivated...sometimes by a gentle smack on the head at a tender age. So my little fetus, when she grows up, she better get her butt off the seat and offer it to some exhausted pregnant lady (wishing her well is optional, you gotta be outgoing and sincere with a slightly raspy voice: "Good luck to you, baby. Be careful out there...")

Itsy Bitsy News

As you might have heard, we are expecting a baby (I think that's the right way of putting it, cause WE are definitely not pregnant, but I am very much so)!!! I won't bore you with the details of my pregnancy, which you most likely have been bored by already if you are reading this blog. So far so good...

I've been inundated (self imposed) by the virtually unlimited and often contradicting information available on the web. By far, the worst sources of information are message boards. It seems it is a requirement to have an IQ of no greater than 85-90, live in some bumblefuck red state, and have an unyielding desire to share any idiotic thought that crosses your mind real time, to participate in the message boards. First, you have to learn the appropriate acronyms to be a respectable message board mom-to-be. There is DH (dear husband), DD (dear daughter), DS and some other dears I can't decipher. Then, there are teams, like pink and blue, green, purple and some other color. Then, everything is tagged with a date, including previous miscarriages and pet deaths.

To illustrate, a message board post looks like this:

"Is anyone else really gassy between 4:15 and 5:27 AM?"

Signed: Maryjoe (19) DH (22) DS (4) green team hoping for pink this time lol Mommy to Pookie and Nookie (maltese poodle mix RIP 3.2.08 mommy misses you) Miscarriage 4.2.09. 3 weeks and 2 days pregnant!

Some blogs, however, provide comic relief. The kind of dark and sometimes marginally disturbing comic relief I find to be reassuring and necessary. If you are pregnant or plan to procreate, check out exploitingmybaby.com.

A few words on my fetus development. It is supposedly at the stage when it can get hiccups. Poor baby...that must be mighty uncomfortable. My grandmother said someone who is also an expectant great grandmother in her English class said her great grandfetus is sucking its thumb in the womb. I can tell that my grandma really wants my fetus to get with the program and start sucking its thumb already. Of course, since she is super superstitious and won't tell anyone that there is a baby on the way (avoid the evil eye of ill wishers), she will only have the satisfaction of having her secret pride.

On a completely different note, here are my recent podcast favorites:
-Best of The Left (a brilliantly produced compilation of snippets from a variety of programs, including the Colbert Report, Rachel Maddow, the Onion news, etc.)
-NPR: Talk of the Nation Opinion Page
-TEDTalks
-TimesTalks
-NYT Book Review
-The Adam Carolla Podcast (lots of pee pee caca mastrubation humor, but entertaining enough with some great guests)

Also on repeat at least 5 times a day is the song Lena by Twee Belgen (I am sure most would recognize this techno?? piece by my husband's countrymen). It's all good until they start proclaiming their love for Lena in Flemish.

R.I.P?

I've been absent for quite a while now, with little, if anything to say. My grandfather passed away and with all things considered, and there are a few to consider, writing my blog became not secondary, but irrelevant. I am glad I waited or the entire entry would have been about my Jewish brethren who refused to bury him. However misplaced my anger and sadness, it would have been then and remains true. It seems, or perhaps it only became evident to me now with my grandfather's death, that death is all around me. It is mostly ugly and devastating, with no regard for the dying or the living, who, upon slightly deeper observation, are also dying. What an ill-designed process, driving people to create entire religions to substantiate nothingness. And the gentleman sitting across from me on the train, in western dress and the hand of god on his balding head, babbling 5 thousand year old nonsense, he is only hoping for the best, I am sure. And I too, I hope for the best.

John Updike died. He and my grandpa were the same age. My grandpa likely had not heard of Updike; and Updike, most certainly, did not know of grandpa. Of people I didn't know, he's made the biggest impact on me. The responses to the sad news flooded the New York Times site. People from all over the world wrote in expressing sadness, but mostly gratitude for his work. Here are just a few of my favorite Updike quotes:

"We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one."

"Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it."

"I don't think God plays well in Sweden," he said. "God sticks pretty close to the equator."

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”