not that you asked...

No more bedrest means PICTURES

We made a trip to my OB today to have my blood pressure checked and to make a plan for treatment. Last night I had another bad episode: difficulty breathing and a reading of 155/105, which probably doesn't mean much if you don't know anything about blood pressure, so I'll just tell you that when you get to 160/110, you're in danger of having a STROKE. The good news is that we adjusted my medication and I should be fine. The even BETTER news is that I don't have to be on bedrest anymore and everyone can stop panicking when I spend two extra seconds wiping off the bathroom counters on my Bathroom Break because I'm not going to collapse in the floor in a big dead heap leaving my husband alone and my children without a mother.

While we were waiting in the exam room for the doctor to appear, Dave leafed through a baby name book that was in the room. It occurred to me that we named Lucy without considering the meaning of her name, which is weird because it was something that was very important to me when we decided on a name for Asher. "Look it up," I told Dave.

"Lucy means 'light,'" he said. And then he flipped a few pages back and paused. "And Claire... means 'bright,' which means OH MY GOD WE NAMED OUR DAUGHTER LIGHT BRIGHT."

And I laughed so hard that I actually had to take pain medication for my incision even though I haven't needed it since Friday. Our daughter, Light Bright.

 
  
  

I'm not even allowed to get up to download some photos

Thank you all for the kind words and sweet comments about Lucy (Lucy Claire - officially named Friday morning). We are home. I wish I could say we are home and doing awesome and are loving our new lives as parents of two but things have been complicated and frustrating and I spent much of Friday evening - my THIRD DAY POSTPARTUM - back in the emergency room with sky-high blood pressure and shortness of breath. In other words, I am one of the rare cases of pregnancy-induced hypertension that are not immediately cured by giving birth. As a result, I am also on bedrest until things are looking better on the medical front. No one can tell me how long that will be. OH JOY. 

It's hard, and it's frustrating, and I cry about 18,000 times a day even though I know how lucky I am to be surrounded by family and friends who are helping us out so much. But I get down thinking about how much my very sensitive two-year-old needs some normalcy back in his life, even though the reality probably is that he's FINE, and basking in the attention he's getting from four grandparents and aunts and uncles, but I also know he wants his mom to be his fun, happy mom again after being away for so long and bogged down by that awful swollen pregnancy body and yet I am only allowed to expend enough energy at this point to take care of Lucy and myself from my bed. Asher has kind of just been farmed out. It kills me.

Also, only semi-related, I know I said I thought I was going to die of pregnancy when I was pregnant, but it turns out I didn't, so I'm going to die of bloody breastfeeding nipples instead. A five-pound infant might have a teeny tiny mouth, but it is a teeny tiny mouth of DEATH AND DESTRUCTION.

Also ALSO, the one bright note is that at least I beat Michelle Duggar in the baby race. SO WHAT IF SHE'S 16 CHILDREN UP ON ME, at least I delivered this one first. HA.

Lucy

Born Tuesday, December 16
3:30pm
5 pounds, 11 oz; 19 inches long

I hope you didn't want to hear about pregnancy

I’ve been watching a lot of TV lately. Mostly because I have no energy left at the end of the day to do anything else; sometimes even moving my fingers over a mouse pad is too exhausting to think about so even the Internet is something I get around to every third day or so. Last night I started dinner and had to bail out halfway through (only a nine-months-pregnant woman could legitimately require two nights to make a perfectly routine and simple dinner) so we heated up a frozen pizza instead. Unfortunately, however, I do not watch good TV. I watch crap. Not trashy crap, just a lot of HGTV and… well, actually, more HGTV. And I don’t know if you’ve ever watched HGTV for more than, oh, fifteen minutes, but if you HAVE, then you know they show the same ten commercials over and over and OVER again and of those ten commercials, five in particular make me want to pull my hair out and then do something really really heinous with it, like bake it into a pie and EAT IT or something. WHILE SCREAMING. (Lori feels the same way about the Nightly News. Which I don’t watch, because that’s when House Hunters is on, DUH.)

FOR EXAMPLE:

How is it possible that the Glade lady has ANY FRIENDS AT ALL, much less friends that show up to her home REPEATEDLY, only to look on in horror as she talks to baked goods/lies about buying cheap grocery store candles/wears COCKTAIL DRESSES AND PEARLS despite the fact that everyone else shows up at her house wearing slacks and turtleneck sweaters? The Glade lady is beyond ridiculous. (Granted, her hair is pretty awesome, I’ll give you that.)

That car commercial? Where the ladies’ shoes just start falling out of the sky? DOES THIS NOT STRESS ANYONE ELSE OUT? Personally, should this happen to me, I believe the first thing I would think about was whether those stiletto heels were doing any damage to my paint job. The lady in the commercial, however, just gets out in the middle of the street and starts tossing handfuls of shoes into the back of her car and I don’t know about you, but just because they’re FREE SHOES doesn’t mean you should just throw them into the car at random! MATCH UP SOME PAIRS, LADY, or else you’ll get home with 4,243 random shoes without mates and in MY opinion, shoes that fall from the sky are not really so much of a miracle if you CAN’T WEAR ANY OF THEM. (Do you think I’m supposed to assume they’re ALL HER SIZE, TOO? Well, I can’t. I’m practical like that.)

I really liked that electric broom commercial with the choreographed dancing, for some lame reason or another, but then Dirt Devil came out with something called the Kurv and something called the Kone and BOTH of these items have irritating commercials because the people demonstrating how the vacuums work are just a LITTLE TOO LIBERAL about what they decide to vacuum up. Like dry dog food. I don’t know about YOU, but if I spilled 30 pieces of kibble, I would SCOOP THEM BACK UP and deposit them in the dog’s food bowl. I don’t think Hambone gives a flying crap if his food touched the floor or not, do you? And while dog food isn’t the most expensive thing on the planet, it does bother me to waste it if it means I’m going to have to pick up one of those giant bags of it at Target that much sooner. Dude, those things are HEAVY and they take up the entire cart and the point size of the type on the bag lets everyone know that I’m the slacker who has an overweight pet who needs Weight Control Formula. There’s another Dirt Devil commercial where a woman is having her friends over, and they’re sitting at the dining room table, and one of them spills POPCORN, and the hostess gets out her hand vac and takes care of the mess. Um, I’m sorry, but what exactly does this say about the state of her dining room table? THAT IT IS TOO DIRTY TO EAT OFF OF. Insane, I tell you.

For some reason, I am more outraged about the Stanley Steemer commercial than Dave is, which I think is weird. It’s the one where the announcer says, “Kids, teens, pets, and husbands. Ever wonder how you can keep YOUR home clean?” And the dog is tracking in mud, and the kids are jumping on the furniture and the stupid, stereotyped Dad forgets to put the lid on the blender and sends some sort of smoothie beverage flying all over the kitchen, because all men ever do, after all, is MESS UP OUR HOUSES. And I think, DUDE, if someone made a commercial like that implying that WOMEN did something irritating, IT WOULD NEVER FLY. And yet, here’s this Stanley Steemer commercial, implying that all men do is mess stuff up. And it’s not that men DON’T mess stuff up (THEY MOST CERTAINLY DO), it’s just the idea that if someone made a commercial that painted women in an unflattering light, there would be boycotts and angry protests and demands for it to be taken off the air. Maybe men just don’t care enough. (MEN: I care FOR YOU! Down with Stanley Steemer! Also because they have this commercial, with the dog and the butt and what we are to assume are skid marks all over the carpet! Which: EW.)

Finally, I am still boycotting Charmin and all their Charmin-y products until they rid the universe of these ridiculous pooping bears. The latest commercial is the worst one yet, where one bear is bending over while playing football and another bear notices that there are bits of toilet paper stuck all over its butt. Now, I ask you, General Public, is this an issue you deal with on a regular basis? Is your toilet paper so cheap and awful that gobs of it are being left all over the cheeks of your butt and therefore require a tedious removal process? No, that’s right: I DIDN’T THINK SO. I can think of no one I hate more these days than the Charmin bears and the fact that they necessitate Extra Strong toilet paper. Because REGULAR toilet paper just WILL NOT DO.

Your turn! VENT AWAY.

OK, so at least we'll install the car seat this weekend.

HOOOOOO BOY, did the comments on that last post give me a chuckle. Trust me when I say that above all else, they were helpful. I had not thought about something as simple as just making a list and placing it somewhere near the bag, for instance. I have said before that I am not much of an outside-the-box thinker, so to someone like me, “packing a bag” means… well, PACKING A BAG. As in, I believed I should have prepared a fully packed suitcase with everything I could possibly need and want ready and waiting for the moment I am given the go-ahead to march into an L&D room and put on a sexy backless gown and a fetal monitor. It seriously did not occur to me to MAKE A LIST INSTEAD, and to have it at the ready should the need arise, but this is because I am a CERTIFIED MORON. But now I am so totally ON THIS, mostly because I love making lists. Sometimes? I make lists of things I have ALREADY DONE, just because I think it’s fun to see what I did. (Case in point: Most of my Christmas shopping is done, but I made a nice list yesterday of what I bought just so I could remind myself how successful I was at it. I even put the amount I spent next to the items listed by people’s names. I DID, however, stop short of putting down the ORIGINAL prices next to those items, too, even though it was tempting, because DUDE, did I EVER score some deals this year.)

Anyway, what made me laugh the most about the comments was all the talk about what you people packed to wear home from the hospital. And I’m not laughing AT you or anything, because I know you meant well. I’m laughing in more of a desperate attempt to DULL THE PAIN, because putting on clothes to come home from the hospital after I’d given birth to Asher ranks in the Top Three Most Humiliating Experiences Of My Entire Life. (Here is number one, surely you've already read it. I have never written about number two, but perhaps I shall one of these days.) Even now, thinking about it makes me feel slightly nauseous and weepy. And do you know why? Because I am the only person in the entire world who left the hospital after giving birth EVEN LARGER than she was when she went in. I AM SO NOT KIDDING ABOUT THIS.

Many of you said something about taking something you wore when you were about six months into your pregnancy that you knew would fit when you went home. HA, I say to this crazy notion. HA, and also HA. I had to send Dave home for clothes the last time (because I went in with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) and I specifically aimed him towards a pair of the stretchiest, flowiest, most comfortable pair of pants I owned that I actually had worn two days before delivery—as such, he was told he would find them clean and waiting in the dryer. I also asked for the biggest top I owned, which was this huge yellow fleece (men’s size XL, I SWEAR) that I’d worn something like a week prior to walk the dog one chilly morning.

They both fit exactly like SAUSAGE CASINGS. It was awful, and I cried. It made me feel disgusting and hideous and wretched. And it took me an excruciatingly long time to work up the courage to finally open the bathroom door and plop myself into a waiting wheelchair and let the nurse escort me outside. At five days postpartum, I may have lost six or seven pounds of uterine contents, but my body was still holding on to every bit of water weight it had been packing on for the last ten weeks. And it was A LOT OF WATER WEIGHT. More like water TOWER weight. (YES. THAT BAD.)

So I don’t know, maybe you can understand why I’m a little leery of attempting to pack clothes at all and am instead wondering if perhaps they will let me just wear a clean hospital gown home, if I promise to wash and return it the following week. I am getting nervous about the c-section procedure and I am getting anxious about handling two children especially now that the one I have seems to have decided that screaming around the clock is an awesome way to spend his time but I am absolutely TERRIFIED of finding myself in the same postpartum situation I found myself in last time, with legs the same circumference as Parthenon columns and index fingers that could plug up bathtub drains.

And this only MARGINALLY relates to the above, except that I can’t stop thinking about it, and that is the fact that once Dave surprised me by meeting me at the train station and taking me to Philadelphia for my birthday and he packed my suitcase for me and everything. It was totally romantic and absolutely wonderful and would have been the absolute sweetest thing EVER except that I had to conclude once we got to the hotel that he had never actually looked at me EVER IN MY LIFE, because WHY ELSE would he have packed jeans that I hadn’t worn in three years and the most hideous, gigantic sweater I owned at the time which I only wore outside to do yard work in the cold or to run to the mailbox? And yet he expected me to SIGHTSEE and SHOP and APPEAR IN PUBLIC in such outfits? He did bring me a decent skirt and sweater outfit to wear out to dinner, but no tights (had to run across the street to CVS to buy those in 15-degree weather) and let’s not even TALK about the underwear situation. (Just… no.) Still, it was one of the best weekends ever, because I am all about appreciating someone who is Making An Effort, more so even than appreciating someone who Gets That Effort 100 Percent Right, so I dealt with it, and we even laugh about it now. (Seriously, you guys, if you had SEEN those JEANS. I think they may have even been slightly TAPERED.) But now you also understand why I would never let the man near a hospital bag if I don’t absolutely have to, don’t you? Because even if he just misunderstood and made an HONEST ACCIDENT, how insulting would it be if he appeared bearing MY SKINNY JEANS? I’d have to use baby number two’s tax deduction money to cover his funeral costs.

Packing a hospital bag is IMPOSSIBLE.

So I’m working on packing my hospital bag. Well, okay, so I’m working on packing my hospital bag in between some other marginally useful things, like making decorative clothespins and alphabetizing the refrigerator magnets and contemplating making a batch of cookies that I have all the ingredients for except that I made a batch of those same cookies last year and they turned out something TERRIBLE, so I don’t exactly know why I feel the need for a do-over except that perhaps I have some sort of Something To Prove neurosis going on, in which case MAYBE THAT’S ALSO WHY I’M HAVING A SECOND CHILD. (Actually, no. The first one is pretty decent, so it can’t be that.)

Anyway, it would seem that someone who put together The World’s Biggest Hospital Packing List and then officially delivered a child in a hospital where she stayed for five entire days would have some idea what she should put in her bag. And I do, actually. Except it turns out that now I remember why I never packed my bag the LAST time I was pregnant, and the reason is because I’m CURRENTLY USING EVERYTHING I PLAN TO TAKE WITH ME. Everything except the baby clothes, because there is no baby here on which to put them. DUH.

I can’t pack my ACTUAL toiletries, because I suspect that sometime in the next four weeks I’m going to be needing them. I don’t know, maybe it would be nice to smell like BO at the Christmas Eve service? But I decided that out of everything I SHOULD pack in the event that I go into labor early or (GOD FORBID) am sent directly from a doctor’s appointment to the hospital, toiletries are the most difficult to round up or send a husband home for, since there are so many different little things I need to bring, so I invested in some travel sizes today at Target. One thing I do remember from the last time I was in the hospital was that I had so much difficulty just standing upright at the sink to brush my teeth that I didn’t care whether I was using my FAVORITE brand of toothpaste or not, only that I wasn’t brushing them with dish soap or zit cream. Ditto for my shampoo and conditioner and face wash and WHATEVER ELSE: I was in a lot of pain, and yet I was also disgustingly greasy, and so the only two things I really cared about were 1) getting all the necessary cleansing processes over with so that 2) I could get back in my Craftmatic adjustable bed and comfort myself by cramming another sleeve of Ritz crackers into my mouth. (I had to dust Asher’s head off a lot, because of all the Ritz fallout. They’re very crumbly, you know.)

So I’ve got toiletries covered, except that I want to buy two new toothbrushes, because… well, I don’t really know, exactly, except that having a shiny new toothbrush sounds like a nice thing to have in the hospital. (The second toothbrush is for Dave, because I am thoughtful.) Beyond toiletries, I’ll need some clothes to come home in. Which will be maternity clothes, because I will still be very, very fat, and very incisiony, and possibly swollen to the size of a parade balloon. But again, maternity clothes JUST SO HAPPEN to be the kinds of clothes I am wearing RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT, since I am at the tail end of this thing they call PREGNANCY, and I am down to exactly two pairs of pants, three t-shirts and a sweater. Frankly, I am not sure which of those I should be putting into a bag at this point, because what the hell am I going to put on myself if I cram 50 percent of my wardrobe into a suitcase? A suitcase that just sits there?

And then there are things that fall into the category of OTHER. Camera? USING IT. Cell phone? USING IT. Cell phone charger? USING IT (sometimes). Pillow? Laptop? Slippers? ALL UNPACKABLE AT CURRENT MOMENT, thank you for asking.

Really, other than socks, nursing/non-underwire bras, a bath towel and snacks for Dave and myself after delivery, there is absolutely NOTHING ELSE I can pack until either my water breaks (HA! unlikely) or until the night before my surgery, which I don’t want to really talk about yet, because the anxiety I feel about the night BEFORE surgery could make for an extensive post all by itself. (HOW DO PEOPLE SLEEP THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY KNOW THEY’RE HAVING A BABY? HUH HUH HUH HUH???)

I mean, honestly. When they tell us to pack a bag, what exactly do they want us to put in it? I am being COMPLETELY SERIOUS here. I honestly cannot imagine being able to pack a bag and have it ready to go without a moment’s hesitation. I need to use almost everything I need to put in it. Doesn’t everyone else?