Nesting Times Two

It turns out that I am not the only one around this house who is nesting.

Aside from telling some people we weren't ready to tell, my mom has been pretty good about not pressuring us about this pregnancy. She didn't push to know the gender, if she bought stuff before the gender reveal a couple weeks ago she didn't mention it, she's only touched my stomach once, etc. But now that we've announced the gender, I think she's starting to let herself relax into this pregnancy a little bit, too.

I came home a few days ago to find the garbage can that's usually in the pantry sitting instead out in the kitchen, piled high with stuff. And the shelves in the pantry were half bare.

She very proudly announced that that was the third garbage can full of stuff she had thrown away. Her goal was to clear a shelf for stuff we might need to keep in the pantry for Kiddo, and she did it.

I was very impressed. Being willing to throw things away - regardless of how expired they are - is not an easy thing for her to do.

She's not a hoarder in the sense of that show on TV where you can't even see the countertops or floors of the house and have to fight your way through piles of stuff just to clear a small pathway. She's always been very neat and organized, and her house (or now, her space in our house) is always clutter-free.

It's just that she was born while the country was going through the Great Depression, and I think that's had a life-long influence on her.

She has more mini shampoo and conditioner bottles (neatly stored in bins in her linen closet) than I would use in my lifetime, much less that she could use in her lifetime. One time several months ago I found a bottle of spices with a label from The Price Club, which was a store that went out of business when I was probably around the 8th grade, seriously. I tried to throw it out, but it upset her too much - never mind that she doesn't use spices when she cooks. (I waited a few days and then buried it in the bottom of the garbage can when she wasn't around. I don't think she ever noticed.) She had boxes of pudding mix that expired in the late 1990s, a dozen jars of white asparagus that were too good of a deal to pass up. (R and I don't eat white asparagus.)

Apparently all that stuff went out with the trash, because now there is some seriously empty space in the pantry.

If we're lucky, next she'll tackle our home office... :-) (That is our space, and it is not clutter free!)

A couple of other notes:

We start our twice-a-week non-stress test/biophysical profile appointments tomorrow. I'm thrilled to be getting a peek at Kiddo that often because it helps reassure me.

Today is Jan. 30 and technically our due date is March 30, so as of tomorrow we will be officially less than 2 months away. Since I'll be delivered early, we're actually less than 8 weeks away now, but it's a nice milestone. January has flown by. I'm very thankful for that.

R and I have ventured into baby stores twice in the past two weeks! We've only made it as far as the car seat/stroller section, but it's a start.

The Story Behind The Gender Reveal

Now that I've had a couple days to process, I thought I'd share the story of Friday's reveal...

I had ordered the cake earlier in the week, and we picked it up after our appointment on Friday afternoon. We wanted it to be a moment with just the two of us when we found out, and since my mom lives with us, that ruled out cutting into it at home. So from the bakery, we drove to a neighborhood park not too far from our house and walked to a ramada overlooking a small lake. (Well, technically to most of you it would probably wouldn't even qualify as a small pond, but we don't have much water where we live, so our perception of the size of a body of water tends to be a bit skewed.)

Anyway, it was a pretty setting. I had put R in charge of gathering the necessary supplies, and he had grabbed the cake-cutting knife and server we had used for our wedding, along with paper plates, etc. We cut it like we cut our wedding cake - both of our hands on the knife. I stared at the ceiling of the ramada as we sliced into it, but he had the camera in his other hand, so he was taking pictures.

When we pulled the knife out, I was expecting to see crumbs. There were no crumbs, but there was some of the filling on the knife.

My reaction was, "It's pink??!?"

I won't post the first picture he took of my face, but let's just say it's quite the expression. It's not that I was unhappy, it's just that we've known for 8 years (since our first adoption certification) that it would be more likely we'd wind up adopting a boy. We were/are open to either gender and any race, and the adoption professionals all told us that because of that, we'd most likely be matched with a boy. And the first two of our three matches were boys. (In the third one, which we were only matched for a few days, the gender wasn't known until the baby was born, and she was a girl.)

Because of those matches, we bought boy stuff when we were preparing. And the friend who gave us most of the baby furniture we have had two boys, so it's boy-themed. And of our normal embryos, 9 of them tested male and 6 tested female. And Kiddo has very long feet.

And so, because of all of that, my brain has been completely in boy mode for most of a decade.

So seeing pink was quite the surprise. I kept looking at the cake and saying "It's still pink!" Finally, after about the fifth time repeating that phrase, R said, "Yeah, I don't think it's the kind of thing that really changes over time...or with exposure to air."

He was great, as usual - he was able to wrap his head around the fact that it was pink right away.

Then we packed up, headed home, and invited his parents over for dinner. We had told them and my mom about the cake plan a while back but hadn't reminded them lately.

After we ate, I mentioned that we had dessert. They were kind of surprised, given that I'm supposed to be limiting my sugar intake. We had them close their eyes, and then R brought out the cake, which we had left in our car.

Their reactions were pretty funny. I video taped it, and we may think about sending it in to America's Funniest Home Videos someday.

R's mom's first reaction was puzzled: "Why is there a piece missing??" When I told them to look at the color, she said, "Piiink?" slowly and looked at us questioningly.

Then it dawned on my mom, who literally started screaming (no exaggeration) "It's a girl, it's a girl!" and pounding the table. Then she reached for the phone and began calling people, saying, "Oh my God, (friend's name), it's a girl, it's a girl! I've gotta go, gotta call more people! Bye!" There are some people on the East Coast who were probably awoken from a sound sleep (it was 11 p.m. there) and thought it was a prank call, because she bypassed the traditional niceties, such as mentioning who, exactly, was calling... :-)

For me, the surprise has worn off and now I'm just excited. But I do still think of things every once in a while that make me nervous.

For example, R was a Boy Scout, and his dad was a troop leader. Since I envisoned us with a boy, I also envisioned R being the troop leader. On Saturday, the thought occurred to me - can dads accompany Girl Scouts on camping trips? Apparently not.

"So you mean I'm going to have to learn how to pitch a tent and start a fire by rubbing two sticks together??" I asked him. "You know I'm not good with fire! I can't even light a basic match without burning myself!"

On the other hand, I have some serious skills when it comes to sniffing out a good deal on a hotel. Can't I just teach them how to make reservations instead?

Kiddo's Gender Revealed

We reached 30 weeks yesterday, and we stuck with our plan of finding out the gender.

Doing so has made all of this so much more real, and I am still processing all of it, so for now, I will just leave you with the picture:

Also, I've tried to comment on a bunch of Blo.gsp.ot blogs lately, but when I click on the comment link, I get a completely blank page. I thought it was something Google was doing as part of its SOPA protest since it started happening around that time, but it's still occurring as of today.

I've seen a couple other bloggers mention a similar issue, so apparently it's not technology being cranky with just me. There are one or two blogs I've been able to comment on, but for the vast majority of them, I've had no such luck. So please don't think I'm ignoring you - I'm reading, it's just that's all I can do at this point. Hopefully Google will fix it soon...

R Discovers the World of Diapers

I'm behind on the post I promised, although on the bright side it's in large part because I had a productive weekend nesting, i.e. cleaning up some of the messes I've let pile up in the house, and starting to research Kiddo stuff like car seats and strollers.

So, to fill in the gap until that post, I'll leave you with a bit of humor from R's online browsing session this evening...

Apparently, he caught the Kiddo-related research bug from all the info I shared with him over the weekend, because he's sitting here next to me exploring di.ape.rs.com.

All of a sudden, I hear:

(in an incredulous tone) "186 results??!?"

Followed a moment later by "19 different brands of diapers!" (still half incredulous, but now I can tell from a slight shift in tone that the enormity of all the different baby stuff that you need to wade through is starting to sink in.)

There's a big sigh.

Then, "Even better, here are diaper types..." And he proceeds to list off about 20 different ones. (Most of them, I can tell he has no idea what they are. But heck, neither do I, so there's no judgment from me on his lack of knowledge.)

That's followed by "17 different sizes??" and another big sigh.

And then, finally:

"So I think I'll leave diaper ordering up to you..."

Third Trimester! And Quick Updates

Yikes, I can't believe it's been two weeks since I last posted! I have lots of posts I want to write but haven't gotten to them yet. Hopefully I will have a little more time this week and next.

For now, some quick updates, and I will come back and do a proper post within the next day or so:

* I finally, finally, finally finished the last of the 3 papers I had to do for my fall class at about 2:30 a.m. today. That's part of the reason for my lack of posts - I made a rule for myself that I would not do anything else online until I got that done. It was due sometime around Oct. 23, which was about 10 weeks ago. I have no good excuse, just that I hit a writer's block with this particular assignment and couldn't figure out how to get through it. The professor was very kind to grant me an incomplete and allow so much extra time to finish it, and he was very generous to give me a B in the class overall. I would have been grateful for a C. I had toyed with taking a class or two this semester, but you'll be happy to hear that I have come to my senses and decided not to do that.

* I have gestational diabetes. The downside is that I have to stick my finger four times a day to test. The upside is that as a result, I am back to weekly appointments. Thank God! These last 2 weeks between appoitnments were some of the longest of my life, and that was the only time I had gone more than 11 days between appointments. They are going to start doing cord blood flow checks and biophysical profiles on Kiddo with this next appointment, and they're starting my twice-a-week non-stress tests and biophysical profiles a week early, during the 31st week instead of the 32nd.

* Kiddo was up to 2 lb. and 14 oz. on Friday, which measured in the 67th percentile. I was just hoping for more than 2 pounds, so I was thrilled we were so close to 3 pounds. It was the best appointment we've had so far, one of the happiest days of this pregnancy, even with the gestational diabetes diagnosis factored in.

* The doctor was a bit shocked that I was actually willing to have a conversation about delivery methods and a due date. Apparently the hospital only schedules four C-sections a day, so she said if that is a route we are considering, we need to get on the calendar now. We can always cancel if we decide to try for a vaginal birth, because apparently it's easier to schedule those closer to the day of. So we opted for March 23 or March 21. Hopefully we'll find out on Friday if she was able to get one of those dates.

And, for a bit of humor, I will leave you with a real conversation my mom and I had this morning:

In true Borderline Personality Disorder style, everything has to be about her, so she has taken on the gestational diabetes diet with a vengance and decided to do it with me. She has called at least half a dozen of her friends to tell them about the diagnosis and that this is how she has to eat for the next few months. (I haven't told R he has to change his diet one bit, so why she feels compelled to do this I'm not sure, other than because of her BPD.)

So this morning, she was looking over the list of portion sizes for each food. She has a huge sweet tooth (which I inherited), so she was very excited to see that cake was listed on there.

I pointed out to her that the serving size is 2 inches by 2 inches, and I held my fingers apart to show her just how big - or, rather, how small - that is. Her face fell, because really it's not more than two bites' worth of cake.

Then she thought for a moment, looked down at the list again, and said, "Yeah, but it doesn't say there's a limit on how high you can pile the frosting!"

Only my mother... :-)