I made a mistake last week. All this time I have avoided reading anything in this blog back from the time I was pregnant with Devin, but I keep wondering how accurate my memory really is. When I start thinking, “Devin never did this!” and “I think Devin was positioned in this way…” I wish I had something easy to refer back to. So one night I just wanted to see. So I flipped back to February 2008 – far enough, I thought, to avoid that first week of March, to avoid any mention of the strange things that week before he died. Well I was wrong. I landed smack dab on a post about how much his movements had changed, how big he must be getting. So clueless, so naive. I stopped reading. I can’t go there right now. And it’s not out of concern for Kate – it’s guilt. Guilt that I should have gone in, guilt that I should have known better, guilt that somehow I should have figured out that he wasn’t okay in there. No matter what I rationally know, no matter what people tell me that it wouldn’t have made a difference, I will never get away from that guilt.

Kate is clearly demonstrating that babies do not suddenly stop moving at 35 weeks. In fact she has me completely amazed every night that she can be that active in there. Every night she does her octopus dance, legs kicking in rapid succession on one side of my belly while her fists punch me down below. I’m trying to spend more time sitting at my desk leaning forward, rather than in bed leaning back, because I’m pretty certain she’s anterior right now (sunny side up) judging by how her feet move all over my belly. Well she doesn’t like me slouching in the least – she never has, but now she pushes against my ribs when I do it. She’s not under my ribs – my uterus is still just below my ribcage, for the most part – but when she kicks upward she likes to push her foot out on the outside of my ribs, a big lump sticking out. At least I can put my hand there and hold her down so it’s not too uncomfortable!

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I interviewed a Pediatric practice today. They are a larger practice with long hours and available sick appointments, even walk-in hours every morning. They are also very close by, which is great. Their attitude is very pro-breastfeeding, though they don’t have a Lactation Consultant on staff yet (they recommend the LCs at the hospital and LLL of course). I told him I plan to breastfeed for at least a year and he said, “Great!” The downside – which I expected – was of course they are very pro-vaccination. Which would be a huge problem if I wasn’t planning to vaccinate at all, but for the most part all I want to do is delay some and space them out, which he said they would certainly work with us about. It just bothered me that when I mentioned it he kind of gave me a, “Oh… what have you been reading?” Just the attitude of… sigh, another one of those. But I get that attitude from our vets all the time so I’m used to it. At least I have one more thing checked off my list.

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I’ve been reading through all the books I have about pregnancy, labor and birth, and for the most part I’m not very excited by any of them. All of my pregnancy books are basically summaries of everything I already know. The birth sections are basic and short. Not helpful. So far the one that seems to be the most helpful is The Birth Partner, which is meant for, yes, the labor coach/doula. But I’m finding that it has a lot of very helpful information in it, such as how to recognize different stages of labor, what can be helpful in terms of position and support, information about when labor doesn’t follow the traditional model (like a slow labor, really fast labor, some minor complications, etc). I read a few pieces to Den, but mostly I’m just trying to take in the knowledge myself. I’ve marked out some charts and info sections in case I feel like I need to look something up when I’m in labor (or if I feel that Den needs to look something up, lol). I’m going to bring it with me as well as a breastfeeding book.

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Den set up the cosleeper. It was a project that looked very simple – I mean, it’s mostly already assembled, right? Just need to pop it open, attach some liners and stuff? – and yet so was not. It may have been the most annoying one so far. The instructions had little tiny diagrams of some parts, with mostly written instructions such as, “Lift lower bar.” What is the lower bar? How the fuck do you lift it? DETAILS, PEOPLE! So there was an awful lot of puzzlement and banging on things until the “ah-ha” moment when you find the right thing and suddenly NOW the instructions make sense. Now that we’ve done it once we could probably do it again in about one-third of the time. So now we have a cosleeper sitting in our bedroom – in the corner, I didn’t feel the need to attach it to the bed yet making it even harder for me to get in and out, Den can attach it while I’m in the hospital with Kate. It’s bigger than we expected. And, it looks really fucking cool sitting in our bedroom like some normal thing for a couple expecting to actually bring home a baby in a few weeks.

“I hope the dogs don’t try to sleep in it,” Den said as we stared at it with a sense of accomplishment and contentment. One side is down, ready to sidecar to the bed – the same height as the bed. “Errr,” I said. It did rather look like a couch – or very expensive dog bed. But the dogs sniffed it with minor interest – we’ve been moving things around and setting up new fancy objects for the last few weeks, what’s one more says they. Both dogs climbed up onto our bed and fell asleep. But 3am I was half-awake after having rolled over, stuck between asleep and awake, unable to drop right back off (this is normal for me, lately). And I heard a sound, a sound of paws. “GET OFF!!!” I roared, sitting bolt upright. Zeeke froze where he was, still on the ground but with his two front paws in the cosleeper. “Where, what, huh??” Denis jumped out of bed and flicked on the light. Sooooo the cosleeper is now turned the other way, dropped side facing the wall. (Note that were all 4 sides up there’s no way he’d be able to even attempt it, and once it’s attached to the bed to the bed he’d have to go through me and that aint happening. Dogs will not be allowed on the bed once Kate is here. It’s just that it was sitting there in the corner, accessible and unused, and who can blame him for looking for a nice place to sleep? But now he knows it isn’t his!)