Baby Shower

My mom will be Snapdragon's Naunie, so my Naunie needs a new name!

I'm not big on baby showers and didn't think I would have one, but my family decided to throw a joint pre-birthday party for Snapdragon and Giuliana last Sunday. When I was growing up, we always had get-togethers every month or two to celebrate all the family birthdays that fell in the same season, so it was not a big deal to call this one "baby shower." It was essentially the same as our regular family gatherings, with a few special touches. I brought cakes from Pastiche in Providence and there was a pile of pink presents as tall as a Christmas tree, but we mostly just sat around chatting and catching up.

We finally got to meet my cousin C's girlfriend, M. Since their little Giuliana will be just two months younger than Snapdragon, it makes good sense for us to try to get to know her and be nice. She is very . . . young. I suppose she must be at least 22, but she just seemed very young to me — brash and self-confident, telling stories that went nowhere. It was good to see that she was not shy around our big, loud family, but I'm not sure that genuine friendship is in our future. Still, she and C seem to be getting along well, which is a good sign. We will be glad to have a little cousin for Snapdragon, though we are still unsure about how permanent their relationship is. Of course, C will always be Giuliana's dad, but if they are not together, there is less of a chance that Snapdragon will see much of her cousin.

Of the 10 cousins on that side of the family, my sister is the youngest (14). One of my aunts has a brother with three little girls under 7 — we see them infrequently, but they were at the shower. They were very excited about the gigantic pile of presents and did not need to be coaxed into helping us open them. It was a whirlwind of pink paper and blond curls:

They were very sweet. I doubt anyone could see anything we opened, but what can you do?

It took most of last week to get all of the gifts sorted and washed and all of the thank-you notes written, but I managed. Luckily, sorting things into piles and pairing tiny socks does not take much brain power. I am TERRIBLE about thank-you notes — I always put them off until they become this huge, embarrassing, insurmountable task — so it felt good to have them all written and mailed less than a week after the event. Victory!

Updates

For the past few weeks, I have been struggling to overcome a bizarre mental paralysis that has made it difficult for me to do anything other than watch trashy TV and play computer games. Anything that involves mental exertion — even something as simple as updating this blog — has seemed like an huge, unmanageable task. Is this the much-talked-of "pregnancy brain"?

Anyway, a lot has happened, but it would be tedious to write a dozen posts, so I'll do bullet points:

• On the night of 8/18, I started having extreme pain just above my right hip. That's right where my ovarian cyst is, so I was worried that the cyst was twisting or rupturing. I tried to sleep and wait until my scheduled appointment with my midwife the next morning, but by 3 a.m., I was in so much pain that I decided to go in to the hospital. I called my parents, who were on vacation in Maine, woke up my sister, and drove myself to the hospital. I thought I would vomit in the car because the pain was so intense, but I made it to L&D. Of course, as soon as I got there, I felt much better, but they kept me for monitoring. I had an ultrasound in the morning, which showed that my cyst was fine, but I have a kidney stone. I don't think that was what was causing my pain because my kidneys are up around my ears at this point and the pain was just above the hip, but that's everyone's best guess. The ultrasound tech estimated Snapdragon's weight at 6 lbs. 13 oz.
• They also diagnosed me with polyhydramnios (too much amniotic fluid). The cut-off for this diagnosis is 25 somethingorothers and my fluid measured 25.8, so I had to see an OB to be checked. More on that later.
• I felt terrible about interrupting my parents' vacation, even though they were planning on coming back on Thursday morning anyway. They raced down from Maine — there is no traffic at 3 in the morning. Though I hated to bother them, I know that they would have been pissed to find out later that I hadn't called them right away. Everything turned out fine, but they would have been upset if I hadn't told them.
• After sleeping for less than an hour and a half on Wednesday night, I drove home to CT with my family. My mom rode in the car with me in case I needed to switch drivers. We ended up hitting a HUGE traffic jam — it took us almost 4 hours to make a trip that usually takes 2 hours or less. That was the real low point of the whole thing — I was on the verge of tears, tired, and missing Pete. It sucked.
• On Friday, 8/20, I spent the day shopping for the babies with my mom and sister. Our family threw a joint baby shower for Snapdragon and Giuliana on Sunday, so we needed to buy presents for the babies from our family and from my Naunie. It was lots of fun, but we were out for 6 hours and my feet were throbbing by the end. We spent all evening wrapping, which was easier on my feet. We wrapped Schnappi's things in animal-themed paper to cut down on the explosion of pink and pastel.
• Our baby shower was 8/22. I'll write a separate post about that.
• In general, August has been much more pleasant, weather-wise, than July, but these past few days have been brutal. It's so hot and humid that it's hard to breathe. I've been getting by with cold showers, drinking gallons of water, and taking air-conditioned car trips to run unnecessary errands. I know that it is not an earth-shattering revelation to note that August is hot, but pregnant hot is a whole new kind of gross.
• I'm pretty annoyed with my midwife. I had an appointment yesterday (8/30) during which she went over my ultrasounds and NSTs from my trip to the hospital. I am measuring "big" (39 cm instead of 37 cm) and she is concerned about the discrepancy in the measurements of Snapdragon's weight (6-6.5 lbs on 8/17 (63rd percentile), 6 lbs 13 oz on 8/19(82nd percentile)). I asked whether the discrepancy was really that big a deal — after all, don't those late ultrasounds have fairly wide margins of error? She looked at me blankly and just said that she was concerned because Snapdragon "grew so much" in just two days. WTF? She didn't grow — two different ultrasound techs made slightly different estimates, both of which estimated her weight as "biggish, but totally normal." Long story short, the midwife wants another growth ultrasound next week. Whatever. I think it is completely unnecessary, but at least I will get to see how she's doing. My next appointment with my midwife isn't until 9/9, so it will be nice to have some reassurance sooner than that.
• No matter what the ultrasound says, Snapdragon is BIG. Very big. I can tell you that without taking any official measurements. She moves around ALL DAY LONG and it is very uncomfortable. Between the vigorous stretching and the pelvis-pounding hiccups, I am feeling pretty beat-up. My skin is so stretched that the skin around my ex-belly button is numb. Come on out, Snapdragon! There is so much more room for squirming on the outside!
• Tomorrow is Sept. 1st, and Snapdragon will be full term! That means she is welcome to come at any time! I've got my fingers crossed for sooner rather than later. Obviously, she will come when she is good and ready, but I can't even entertain the idea that I could still be pregnant on October 1st. I am mentally prepared for 3 more weeks, tops.
• I've got my money on Sept. 19th — Talk Like a Pirate Day. Various nerds among our friends think that Sept. 22 would be a cool birthday because it is Bilbo and Frodo Baggins' birthday.
• My guess for birth weight is 8 lbs 12 oz, but I would be unsurprised if she turns out to be a 9-pounder.
• I am not scared for labor. I am awkward, uncomfortable, hot, bored, and tired. There is very little left to do to get our house ready for Snapdragon, so I don't even have any little projects to keep me busy. I have tried to do dissertation work, but that's not going so well. I am impatient to get started on this whole parenting thing!

That's it for now.

Last Ultrasound (I Think)

I had my last ultrasound today. At least, it should be my last ultrasound — the perinatologist has decreed that my cyst does not need to be checked anymore. Once Snapdragon is born, I will go back to see whether the cyst persists. If it does, it will need to be removed surgically.

Snapdragon is looking good. Her head is still down and she weighs between 6 and 6.5 pounds. If she gains half a pound a week and is born on her due date, she should weigh between 8.5 and 9 pounds. That's pretty standard for babies in my family, but is certainly on the larger side. Who knows how big she might get if she goes late. I feel reassured, though — if she is born in the next couple of weeks, she should be a healthy size.

Since FB is gone, my parents and sister came up to take me to my appointment. The doctor only lets one person in the ultrasound room with the patient, so my sister came in with me. I felt bad that mom and dad came up and didn't get to see the ultrasound, but, in all honesty, it was a pretty boring ultrasound. Snapdragon is so big that you can only see squashed parts — an elbow here, a femur there. The ultrasound tech could barely get her whole face in the frame. Most of the time, we couldn't really tell what we were looking at.

My parents are headed up to Maine to celebrate their anniversary. They're leaving B with me for a few days while they are gone. We will probably do something girly, though I do not know what. It can't involve much walking — my back cannot handle it anymore.

So Many Baby Girls!

It's been a big week for baby girls around here.

Congrats to Shoeless Pete and Jess on the arrival of baby Helen on Sunday, August 8!

Congrats to my cousin A.J. and his wife on the arrival of baby Ariana Eveline on Tuesday, August 10!

Add these to Lesley and Shaun's little Maya (born 6/30), Emily and Jeff's Lizzie (born 7/3), and my cousin Carlo's little girl (due 11/8), and it looks like my friends and family are working on producing an entire troop of Brownies.

FB's New Job

A few weeks ago, a friend of FB's who left The Big G to help found the company I will always remember as Twatter offered FB a job. This has happened a couple of times before — friend will call FB, they'll chat, friend will sing the praises of Twatter and flatter FB with compliments about his skillz, FB will politely decline job offer.

This time, the friend called at a time when FB was feeling a bit down on The Big G. He was transitioning off one project and onto another, thinking about all the things that aren't 100% perfect with the company, and feeling a little restless about the future of his career. So, he listened a little more intently to the offer and started looking into it. Last week, he flew out to San Francisco for a round of interviews which went pretty well — he got a formal offer at the end of the week.

All along, I have been supportive of his changing jobs, sometimes veering a bit too much toward advocacy for it. It's an exciting offer — a chance to work at a dynamic company with a bright future, an opportunity to work with exciting people on the cutting edge of his profession, an impressive line on his resume that offers some great perks (like a flexible work schedule). There are definitely drawbacks — he will almost certainly take a pay cut and he will work from home (great for plugging some holes in our childcare plans, not great for motivation and interaction with co-workers). Most distressing is that he will have to give up the benefits that made The Big G such a great employer — stellar insurance and 7 weeks of paid paternity leave.

Allow that to percolate for a moment. He is giving up 7 weeks of paid paternity leave approximately 10 weeks before I push a baby out of my vagina. The new job wants to give him one week off — he's negotiating for two. Either way, we will not get the 7 weeks of family time I had been looking forward to. Maybe it was always too good to be true.

I'm not going to lie — I am worried. This is not really an ideal moment for us to be switching health insurance. I am insured through the University, but have no idea what their maternity benefits are like because we have been using his insurance for all of my prenatal care so far. I don't even know when my insurance runs out — I was supposed to pay out of pocket if I wanted to be insured during my maternity leave, but didn't bother because I was double-insured anyway. I need to make sure I'm covered ASAP, even though it will probably cost me a few thousand dollars to cover fees that are usual taken care of by my grad student $ package. We would continue going to the midwives even if we had to pay the full cost, but I don't know if we could afford to keep seeing the perinatologists at Tufts if there is a gap in our insurance. My cyst has been stable, so maybe that's ok, but what if I need surgery in the fall?

I'm not as worried about the pay cut. We do not live extravagantly and have put away money over the last 5 years. The townhouse across the row from ours sold above the price we paid for ours after being on the market for less than a week, so I am confident that we could always go back to renting on short notice if we needed to liquidate quickly. This means we may not be able to move to a bigger house as soon as we would like, but that was always a few years away anyway. It still makes me a little sad — I recently found a wonderful house in an almost mythically good location for a very reasonable price, but FB has been so stressed out that I haven't even shown it to him.

I am worried about FB, though. I don't think he understands how hard it is going to be to start a new job at a time when he is going to be sleep-deprived and stressed beyond all prior experience. He is not a good sleeper at the best of times, and when he doesn't sleep well, he can barely function — he is grumpy, headachy, and lethargic all day after a bad night. He sleeps with a mouthguard because he grinds his teeth so hard in the normal course of events. I was hoping that his extended paternity leave would allow all of us to ease into a sleep pattern that would allow him to survive, but that isn't going to happen now. I'm afraid that the stress of a new baby plus the stress of a new job (not to mention a chronic ear problem that has been tormenting him for months) might be enough to send him into a total breakdown. It has happened before — not recently, but catastrophically, and those have been some of the worst times of my life.

Please, please, please be a good sleeper, little baby. I don't know what we'll do if you aren't.

For the record, I was an angelic sleeper as a child and was sleeping 6-hour stretches in my first week of life. FB, on the other hand, had inconsolable colic for months on end. These patterns have not changed discernibly in the intervening decades. I have teased FB that he will have primary responsibility for Snapdragon if she is colicky, since it is clearly his fault. The truth is that I'm terrified that she will be and he will be sorry we ever had her. I thought that we would be ok — that the long leave and the careful planning would allow him to adjust gradually — but now I'm worried that a cyclone of stress will set him back to where he was five and a half years ago, when I was honest-to-god terrified that I would come home one afternoon and find him dead.

Maybe that is just my hormones pushing me to concoct worst-case scenarios, but I have to be on top of the warning signs. And since I know that my #1 job in terms of mental health protection is to keep him from becoming overwhelmed, I can't help but feel like I'm staring down an oncoming train.

I should not get ahead of myself. Still, there have been some less-than-encouraging developments today. Though the offer is firm, FB is still negotiating the salary and benefits. He is supposed to hear the final compensation offer this evening. I encouraged him to wait until he hears it before giving notice at The Big G, just in case he decides to walk away, but he felt like he owed it to his coworkers to give them as much notice as possible. He thought he would be able to work until the end of July and finish out his current project, but I just got an IM saying that the Legal and HR people want him out ASAP because he is going to a competitor. ASAP as in tomorrow. He's stunned and unprepared and freaking out.

In all likelihood, I will look back on this post in six months and smile because everything turned out fine. I will have a happy, healthy baby and a calm husband who enjoys his new job. But the road to New Year's looks considerably bumpier today than it did a month ago. In my search for the silver lining, at least I can say that labor is not the scariest thing in my immediate future.

Family Leave in Sweden

There's a great article in the NYT about parental leave in Sweden. When a baby is born, the parents get 14 months of leave, 2 of which are reserved for the father (they can split the rest any way they like, but lose the 2 months if dad doesn't take them). Result: higher birthrates, more involved fathers, more equal pay for men and women. I'd pay higher taxes for that.

California Trip

Last week, FB and I flew out to California to attend his brother's grad school graduation. We were there for a whole week, visiting friends in San Francisco and Seattle and spending lots of time with FB's family. Some highlights:

• Up until this point, I had not sent FB out for any strange foods at ungodly hours. Our flight left Boston at 7 Eastern and landed at 11 Pacific, meaning that all I had for dinner was airplane food, so I was starving by the time we got to our hotel. There was a McDonald's next to the hotel and even though I am not a big McD's fan, I was desperate. I sent FB out for hamburgers, but only the drive-thru was open, so he had to walk through the drive-thru lane. He was successful and now we have at least one cute husband-goes-above-and-beyond-for-pregnant-wife's-food story.
• We managed to keep Snapdragon's name a secret, despite my FB's mother's many inquiries. She accepted that we would not reveal the name, but still pressed us for the initials, the number of syllables, etc. The only clue we gave was that the first name is not in the top 1,000, but is in the top 20,000. We also realized that Snapdragon will have the same initials as FB's father, but that will be a nice surprise for the in-laws on her birthday.
• It was rainy and in the 50s the whole time we were in Berkeley. In May. We lived in the Bay Area for two years and it never rained except in March, so we packed inappropriately light clothes. We were able to get by with new Cal sweatshirts and every poncho Walgreens had to offer.
• My in-laws do not fly, so they took a cross-country train to California with their best friends, B and K. B and K are train enthusiasts and they all had a lovely time. However, B and K are not very adventurous eaters, so meals with them did not take advantage of the many wonderful food options on offer in Berkeley. At least that meant that I was never tempted by the sushi I love so dearly, but cannot have.
• We got to see several of our friends from when we lived in San Jose. T is getting married in August and I am bummed that I will not be able to go to her wedding, but glad that we got the chance to sample cake from her favorite bakery. L is pregnant too (about 12 weeks ahead of me), and most of our visit was at an ideal pregnant-lady pace: air-conditioned movie theatres and very short walks around Seattle.  
• I did not enjoy the flights. I am not a good flier at the best of times and this was not the best of times. I feel huge and awkward, have trouble with temperature regulation, and have to pee all the time. These facts, combined with the fact that all four of the flights were more turbulent than average, made me fairly unhappy. I was glad to see my friends, but am very glad that I will not have to fly again in the foreseeable future.

Drama!

All of a sudden, there is drama in my family.

Two weeks ago, my cousin brought his new girlfriend to a family gathering for the first time. This week, he announced that she is pregnant and due in November!

They are adults (he's one year older than I am), but they have only been going out for a little while — they were not together at Christmas and his parents only met her at the beginning of March.

Of course, everyone's excited that we will have not one, but TWO babies by Christmas, but we're all a bit surprised. This sort of thing may work out for the best in Judd Apatow's universe, but it's a long shot in real life. Still, a baby is a baby and everyone loves a baby.

It's a strange situation. They are thinking about getting married, which I think is a terrible idea. By all means, move in together and see how you like one another, but I hope that they are not feeling pressure from anyone to get married just for the sake of the baby. If they move in together and still think they'd like to get married six months after the baby comes, that's one thing, but I hope they don't feel like they have an obligation to be married before November. Of course, some people get married in a hurry and have wonderful, loving, fulfilling marriages, so I'm not saying it's impossible. Still, babies need happy parents, whether those parents are married or not, so I hope they put happiness first, whatever they decide.

Frankly, I'm surprised she didn't have an abortion. I used to think that I could never have an abortion, but since I got pregnant, I know I definitely could do it during those first 12 weeks. I'm certainly excited about Snapdragon and am even growing to love him/her/it, but there was no magic moment of creation in which it became a separate person. It had no life apart from my life, no interests apart from my interests, no existence apart from my existence. If I had not wanted it, I could have aborted it without the slightest twinge of guilt. For those first 12 weeks, it was nothing to me but a bundle of hopes — without my emotional investment, it was just a tiny parasite. I suppose some people find that pregnancy strains their pro-choice political commitments, but it certainly hasn't done that for me.

I have no idea why she decided to have her baby and it's none of my business.

I guess it will be nice for Snapdragon to have a little second cousin. I was a little sad that he/she would not have anyone to play with at family gatherings. Who knows whether this baby and his/her mom will become permanent members of our family, though. We'll just have to wait and see.

One funny thing: Apparently, my cousin was planning on telling everyone at the family party two weeks ago, but when we butted in and told everyone about Snapdragon, he decided not to break the news. FB and I agree that this was a bad move on his part. Who could hope for better cover than another baby announcement? When everyone was crying and clapping and hugging me and FB, he should have just piped up, "Hey, us, too!" and piggy-backed off all the celebrating.

In Defense of Weddings

Recently, I happened across an article bemoaning the high cost of weddings. In general, I think that critics of expensive weddings make some good points — the median cost of a wedding in America is $17,500, people could use that money for other things, the wedding-industrial complex has lots of arbitrary "musts" designed to fleece consumers, we don't need no piece of paper from the city hall, etc. I certainly understand the appeal of eloping and then spending nearly 20k on a fabulous trip (that $ wouldn't buy you a garden shed in my city, so I won't say "or house").

Yet, I will speak in defense of spending serious money on a wedding.

When FB and I got married in 2007, we spent nearly $10,000 on our wedding and it was totally worth it. If I could live that day over again for a mere 10k, I would do it in a heartbeat.

We did not have a fancy wedding — we got married in the little church up the street from my aunt's house and had the reception in her back yard. I bought most of my flowers at Stop & Shop and cut many of the rest in my mom's and aunts' gardens. Another aunt made the invitations. I bought my dress for $110 off the rack at Macy's. The bridesmaids' dresses were $100 at the mall. We played music off of FB's iPod over a sound system borrowed from my uncle.

So where did all that money go?

We spent money on the things that would make the day great for our 150+ guests. We wanted to give our families and friends one wonderful day of enjoying one another and I think we succeeded in that.

About $1,000 went to cake. Rather than get an elaborate wedding cake, we bought about 30 cakes from our favorite bakery (Pastiche in Providence, RI) and had a cake buffet. Rather than choose one or two flavors, we ordered a bit of everything: cheesecake, carrot cake, lemon chiffon, chocolate, fruit tart, chocolate-raspberry torte, etc.:

Another $1,000 went to drinks: beer, wine, soda, water, and coffee. Three kegs of Sam Adams (lager, stout, and summer ale) took up a chunk of that, as did 2 or three cases of wine. There's a local soda maker up the street from my parents' house, so we got a dozen different flavors of soda in glass bottles. We filled some big tubs with ice and put pitchers on a table and people helped themselves.

About $3,000 went to food. My mother and aunts made vats of pasta salad and potato salad, piles of cookies, and vast fruit plates. The bulk of this money went to a friend-of-a-friend who is a BBQ competition champ — we hired him to bring his setup and make pulled pork, spare ribs, bbq chicken, and grilled vegetables:

An additional $1,500 went to two large canopies. It turned out to be a spectacular day, weather-wise, but you can never tell in New England. If it had been drizzly, we would have been very thankful that we had those tents, so I can't regret the money we spent on them.

About $2,000 went to the photographer. It was a big expense, but we treasure the pictures we have from that day. We had her take family portraits of all of the nuclear families and extended families, with everyone looking their best and all together in the same place. We gave those pictures as Christmas presents and everyone has them framed in their houses now.

There were other expenses here and there that made up the last little bit — church fees, gifts for the bridesmaids and groomsmen, a few hundred dollars on flowers, etc. In general, we didn't spend much on anything that wasn't directly related to making this a good party. I've been to plenty of un-fun weddings where I have eaten overcooked chicken and cardboard cake while attempting to avoid the dance floor, and I didn't think my family would appreciate enduring that on my behalf. Instead, we blew 10 grand on the best barbecue ever and it was awesome.

Perhaps I remember my wedding with affection because my beloved grandfather had a devastating stroke a few weeks later, so it was the last time we were really all together as a family. When I look back at the pictures, I see my mom talking to my mother-in-law's friends and my grandmothers eating lunch together while my high school friends play badminton with Pete's cousins and the younger kids splash in the pool. Both of our families are musically inclined and many people brought instruments, leading to an hours-long cross-family, friend-inclusive jam session. Everyone got to chat with everyone else and enjoy free beer and good food.

So, I suppose it's true that if we had eloped and saved that $10,000, we could have invested it and spent it on Snapdragon's college education in 18 years. But we wouldn't have had that day, and we would have been the poorer for it.

Housebound in the Vast Northern Wasteland

FB's mother and father live in a crumbling, mid-sized city in the Vast Northern Wasteland. Their home is not inaccessible — they live minutes from a major highway — but it is remote. On a day with good weather, it takes me about 7 hours to drive there (FB does not drive).

We generally visit the VNW two or three times a year: once in the summer, for a week and a half over Christmas, and sometimes for an incidental event (wedding, funeral, etc.). FB's dad comes to visit us in the spring, but in the three years we have lived here, his mom has only visited us twice (once for a single afternoon).

She always has an excuse for not coming to see us. She doesn't travel at all between November and April (the weather might be bad), she can't find the time (she is retired), she doesn't like to drive (even if FB's dad is driving). She is 62 years old, in generally good health, without any major physical limitations, and with ample financial resources. I know that it hurts FB's feelings to have her turn down his invitations again and again, but she seems unable to perceive his disappointment.

Two days ago, one of her last surviving relatives died suddenly of a heart attack. I had only met him once (at my wedding), but he lived relatively close by. I emailed my condolences to my mother-in-law and told her that we would be happy to go with her to the funeral.

This morning, I got an email from her explaining that she couldn't possibly go the funeral because she does not travel in the winter.

On Sunday, when FB called to tell his parents our big news, I sat next to him on the couch to listen in. After he broke the news, and after his mother told him that she was very surprised to hear it, given the fact that our house is not suitable for a child, they talked about other things. One of the topics was my father-in-law's college reunion, which will take place in mid-October. I am currently a grad student at my father-in-law's alma mater, and we live a mile and a half from campus.

"Perfect!" FB said. If Snapdragon is born on time at the end of September, a mid-October visit would be perfect. They could come a little early, stay a little late, see Snapdragon in all his/her post-fetal glory, and go to the reunion as well.

"Oh, no," says FB's mother. "I'm not coming then. I don't want to go to the reunion."

Sometimes I get angry with her obstructionism, but I try to keep my anger in check because I don't know whether her behavior is a manifestation of selfishness or of mental illness. I know that she has panic attacks in situations where she finds herself in an unfamiliar situation, especially if it is noisy or crowded. She has some sort of anti-anxiety medication prescribed to her, but she is reluctant to take it. As far as I know, she does not get any regular monitoring or therapy for her anxiety.

She describes herself as a "worrier," but that term does not do justice to reality. For years, she would not allow her sons to fly on the same airplane. She broods endlessly over bad weather, carginogenic foods, and the imagined presence of radon in her home. One of my major fears about getting pregnant was that I would be inundated with articles about the latest danger that would cause my baby to be born without a nose.

But the traveling thing makes me angry. I am happy to drive to the VNW a few times every year, but that will not be enough for Snapdragon. You cannot cultivate a relationship with a child if you only see him/her on major holidays. It doesn't work like that.

Her decision not to visit us, despite having the time, money, and physical ability to do so, is hurtful, but we are adults and can get over it. But what about Snapdragon?

Spreading the News (A Little Bit)

Today, FB and I had lots of fun telling our parents and siblings about Snapdragon.

We went to my parents' house for dinner and just slipped the news into the flow of conversation. My parents have been planning on renting a beach cottage for our family vacation this summer and when FB brought up the subject of dates, I said, "Well, we can't go in August because we're having a baby in September." General uproar. My dad dropped his fork, my my mom shrieked a bit, and my brother and sister were pretty much stunned. There was lots of hugging.

When we got home, FB called his parents. After he got both of them on the phone, he blurted out the news. I was listening in and the reactions were pretty much as I had expected: his dad was very pleased and his mom said, "Wow, I can't believe it," and immediately started worrying that our house is not child-friendly.

Then, we emailed the siblings that had not yet heard the news. We swore all to secrecy for a few weeks more.

Of interest: There is no good follow-up to "We're having a baby." After the initial congratulations and a few questions — When? How do you feel? — there's not a lot more to say. Everyone's a bit shocked and there isn't a lot more information to impart. In both conversations, we talked baby for about 5 minutes and then went on and talked about other things. I'm sure we'll find plenty to talk about as time goes on, but for now, there's not much to discuss.

Shallow Worries

 pb (B-Day +1) and her dad

At this preparatory stage of motherhood, I have many substantial worries: Will I be able to get pregnant? Will I be sick for nine months straight? Will the baby be healthy? Will I be able to hack childbirth? Will I manage to keep my baby alive once it's born?

All of these epic worries make my shallower worries seem unforgivably petty — so much so that I hesitate to mention them. But, if this blog is going to be useful as a record, I can't hold back.

One of my shallowest worries is that my baby will be . . .  unattractive. Not ugly exactly — but not within my frame of reference for attractive babies.

I should explain — my family are all dark-eyed, dark-haired, and olive-skinned, while my husband is the pastiest of redheads. All of my siblings have been adorable, round-faced, coal-eyed Mediterranean babies born with copious amounts of black hair. I hear that other babies lose their birth hair — none of us did (though mine did recede a bit from my forehead and shoulders).

Whenever I see a chubby, dark-eyed baby, I want to swoop in and kiss it. But I don't have such a thing for blond, blue-eyed babies. They're cute enough, but my brain doesn't seem to register MINE.

I'm sure I'll think that any child of mine is the cutest, sweetest, smartest baby alive, but the possibility of having a child who doesn't display the physical characteristics of my ethnicity is somewhat troubling. I imagine it's part and parcel of my larger guilt over not transmitting my heritage to my kids. I've taken their father's hyper-Anglo last name, I've abandoned my Catholicism, I've moved 100 miles away from my family, etc. I'm going to have to name Snapdragon Giovanni Giuseppe Luigino in order to assuage my guilt.

So maybe not that shallow. Still, in the scheme of things, a petty worry.

Eldest

I come from a big family. Not converted-schoolbus-for-trips-to-the-grocery-store big, but larger than normal: two parents, five kids, and a substantial menagerie.

I'm the first-born of five siblings:

• me, age 25
• brother BJ, age 23
• brother G, age 20
• brother W, age 17
• sister B, age 13

I always loved being part of a large family because our house was always humming with activity and no one ever lacked for playmates, sparring partners, or rides to school. We never had any money, but I didn't really realize I was missing out on anything. Besides, I always had a baby to play with or a younger sibling who wanted a Harry Potter book read aloud, so I was perfectly happy.

As I take my first steps toward starting my own family, I wonder whether I will be able to give them the sibling experience I had. I've always assumed that I'd have at least three children, but that was before I contemplated the reality of having to balance pregnancies with work and caring for more than one child at a time. I'm looking forward to a first pregnancy, but how do you do it when you're juggling a two-year-old and a kindergartener? Maybe there's a reason why BJ and I were born almost exactly two years apart, but the gap widened with each subsequent sibling . . .

In any event, Snapdragon will be our eldest child. Not only that — s/he will be the first grandchild on both sides of the family. I do feel a little bad about trying to bring a baby into a babyless family. Barring a catastrophic failure of latex, little Snapdragon will not have any cousins anytime soon. I'll just have to hope that the adoring attentions of a phalanx of adults will fill that void.