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January 3, 2004

Rather than post a monster entry, I’m going to split the last 2 1/2 weeks up and postdate a couple entries. Hopefully they’ll all come out in the next couple days.

Week 33—New Year Dreams and Actions

The new year has begun—this is the year I become a mother. After 25 years as a perpetual planner, I have no idea what this year will bring. By next new years’, I will probably have a crawling infant. My mom likes to point out that I was walking by 9 months and I should enjoy the immobile months. Maybe the baby will call me mama by next January. Sometimes I regret our not having an ultrasound. I feel confident that the baby has at least one hand and two feet, because I’ve felt them. But if our child has genetic or less obvious physical abnormalities, it’ll be a surprise to us at delivery. Maybe our child will never walk or read. Or worse, love playing football =) It’s also very strange that the baby is either a boy or a girl but we don’t know which. Will I be playing trains on the floor with my son next year? Or dolls with my daughter? Perhaps I’ll have a little girl who wants to play with trucks in the sandbox all day. I spend a lot of time wondering who this person is. I can’t plan or make decisions about the baby’s personality, but there’s nothing to stop me from daydreaming about the possibilities.

Since summer, I’ve been telling myself and everyone else that I’d wait until after the holidays to really prepare for the baby. I knew we had most of the necessary clothes and equipment already, thanks to my mom’s garage saling, and she’d hand them over to us at Christmas. It seemed silly to buy other things until we took stock of what she had and I had a baby shower or two. Well, January has arrived and suddenly late February feels very, very soon.

I began the new year by taking advantage of some sales. I ordered two AIO diapers from Little Lambs and two covers from MotherEase. I like to think that between those and the half dozen contours I bought from a friend, I could now diaper a newborn for an afternoon. I’ve got aways to go establishing a diaper stash, but I’m holding out hope that I’ll receive some as shower gifts. We also picked out a dresser that matches our bed and nightstand. Dan got the new one and we moved his old one into the baby’s room. We’re trying to avoid obtaining baby-specific furniture like changing tables, and instead get things that will work throughout childhood, at least. We’ll likely also have two kids in that second bedroom for some amount of time, so a full 5-drawer dresser will be more space efficient than either a 3-drawer one or a 6-drawer one that takes up more floor space. All the furniture in our house except for those in our living room is light wood—either birch or maple—so we can move things around. After living in three places in three years with completely different layouts, it’s made arranging pieces more flexible. Some of our bedroom furniture are things my parents bought me at age 4 when I moved out of the nursery to make room for my sister. Twenty years ago they bought high quality things—we might as well make use of them. At the furniture store, I picked up a pamphlet showing the additional pieces that match the things we’ve gotten since the wedding. I figure that down the road, we could buy bookshelves or desks or bunkbeds that coordinate now that I know the manufacturer.

I enlisted my sister’s help to dig through my not-so-useful childhood mementos. She was brutal, helping me toss out 42 stuffed animals, boxes of artwork and school papers, and deciding which math trophies I really needed to keep. I held her back from putting wooden puzzles in the Goodwill box—my grandpa made them for me before his death in 1982 and I don’t care how toxic the sealant might be, I’m keeping them. I’ll just wait until the baby doesn’t stick everything in his mouth before taking them out of the basement. We reduced 8 or 10 boxes to 1 plastic bin (gotta love Target) and a couple small boxes with figurines and a china set that I’ll give to a daughter one day. Our basement looks so much better.

My indecisiveness was still overwhelming me, so I brought both Dan and his sister with me to the store to buy curtain fabric. I looked through enough sewing/decorating books to determine that I could make tab-top curtains without a pattern and it wasn’t worth buying a book that just says to make the material 2 1/2 times the width of the window. After searching through every fabric available, we found a dark red and off-white striped decorator fabric selling for $17 a yard. Ouch. I’m used to buying quilting cotton at $3 a yard max. Of course, all the decorator fabric was on sale except the brand we were looking at. I did have a 50% off coupon which ended up saving us $60. I’m trying to ignore the fact that it would be cheaper to buy curtains at Target. I gave up my idea to make a matching duvet cover when I realized it would require 12 yards of fabric. I’ll figure something else out. The baby room’s closet is really skinny (two feet) and doesn’t have a door, so I bought fabric to make a curtain for that, too. I also bought a yard of microfleece to use as diaper liners. They were out of solid colors, so I bought one with big yellow daisies on it. Does that mean my baby’s bum will smell like flowers?

The Saturday that I hit 33 weeks, I met up with Kathleen, another local iP board writer. She’s due a few weeks after me and I had fun discussing our cloth diapering addictions and questions for pediatricians. Hopefully her husband was happy to see her come home alive and well after meeting a random internet acquaintance. Now that I’ve traveled to Canada to meet women I’ve only known online, going to a coffee shop a mile away seems pretty innocuous. I haven’t met any axe murderers yet, just friendly mothers =)

My SIL brought me to see Big Fish, and I thoroughly recommend it. I think I’ve reached the end of my pregnant movie theatre days, though. I can’t find a comfortable way to sit no matter how engrossed in the film I am, so from here on out, I think I’ll wait until movies are available on video. I got through the LOTR trilogy, and that was my biggest movie concern. Everything else can be seen on the little screen.


TTM: Did you spend the better part of your third trimester wondering who your baby was? Am I the only one who decided during their eighth month to decorate their baby’s room after all?