Dec
7
There’s something a little endearing about people treating you like an invalid because you’re massively, bulbously pregnant, but it’s also a little . . . well, I’m not sure if humiliating is the right word, oh wait, yes it is.
Yesterday was my last day in Workplace’s UW-area location since Move Day is finally upon us—starting Monday, I’ll be driving from Bellevue to Magnolia, and while that doesn’t mean anything to most of you I bet any local readers are going duuuuuude, that fuckin suuuuuucks—and while I packed up my office in Workplace’s handily-supplied Rent-a-Crates my officemate kept fluttering about how I was making him nervous, like I was going to have the baby right there if I lifted one more box, and was I sure I didn’t want him to take my trash out for me because the idea of me going up and down stairs made him sad.
Granted, I wasn’t exactly the picture of health yesterday since the whole plugged sinuses/crammed-up lungs situation causes a lot of unflattering gasping and snorting, but sheesh. If I can still lift a thrashing, tantruming toddler who’s recently eaten his own weight in Goldfish crackers, I can lift a damn box of empty file folders.
Workplace has one of those water jug systems where if you’re the person who drains away the last drops in the current jug, you have to lift off the empty one and put a new one in. I live in constant fear of being the person who kills the jug, because the minute someone sees my giant self leaning over to get a new (admittedly heavy) full water bottle they feel compelled to offer help, and with certain people you can literally see the struggle going on in their heads: I should offer. No, would that be rude? Oh my god I have to offer, she’s going to have a baby right here on the floor, that would be so gross. No, it might be totally presumptuous to offer. FUCK IT I’M OFFERING. I work with a lot of engineers, you know. They aren’t comfortable making decisions unless they have all the relevant deciding factors on hand.
The thing I remember about this sweet/embarrassing tendency for people to hold doors and offer to lift things and so on, all while staring nervously at your rippling belly, is that it all ends as soon as you have the baby. Which is precisely the time when it would be most useful for some kind-hearted soul to hold open a door, when you’re staggering along with a carseat draped over one arm half-blind from staying up all night feeding a newborn while listening to This American Life on your iPod to stave off the oppressive loneliness one feels at 3:26 AM and you haven’t showered in 48 hours and there is a milk-barf stain on your left shoulder and OH MY GOD OPEN THAT GODDAMNED DOOR FOR ME RIGHT NOW.
But no, once the massive belly is gone, you appear all capable and shit. I am currently wallowing in fear about this, that I will NOT be capable. That the supposedly simple act of, say, taking a baby and a toddler to the grocery store in order to buy milk will literally kill me stone cold dead. I mean, how do people DO this? Sometimes I can barely handle one kid, and it’s been forever since I’ve seen the ass-end of 3:26 AM and I like it that way, and oh god.
I’ve been feeling more than a little whiny about the pregnancy lately, just getting overwhelmed by the discomfort of this never-ending shittastic cold combined with the sensation of carrying around a 30-pound backpack strapped to my front and thus finding myself acting a lot like this guy, but the truth is, at least the baby’s on the inside still. The other day he woke me up with a particularly brutal bout of wee-hour thrashing, and my first blurry thought was oh shit, the baby’s awake, I need to feed him/change him/try out that knee-jiggling method we did with Riley. But then I remembered: HEY! The belly is still a built-in 24-hour babysitter at this point! WIN.
I may look like an invalid, I may sound like a dying water buffalo, but by god I am still a very capable incubator. I have two more months to enjoy this surely never-to-be-repeated level of efficiency with two children, so I’d better try and appreciate it.
And now, for no particular reason, I give you: toddler as prairie dog.
Dec
4
I am doing a lot of mouthbreathing lately, thanks in part to the Cold That Will Not Die (aka the Virus That Caused a Thousand Cough-Related Pants-Peeings). My nose is officially FUBAR and I’ve grouchily resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably only breathe halfway normally again once the nice doctors hack me open like a gutted walleye and yoink out this sinus-distrupting baby. It’s enough to make a person look forward to major abdominal surgery, the notion that it might provide the ability to inhale without sounding as though I were crowning the Hillary Step on Everest. Well, that and the whole ‘magical birth of my second child’ thing.
Mouthbreathing makes me feel incredibly stupid—I mean, even more so than normal. I feel like a cross between a three-toed sloth and Paris Hilton, panting laboriously as I contemplate the most simple task. The other day I was trying to reduce a recipe and I stood in the kitchen for fifteen minutes, mouth slackly hanging open as I attempted to figure out what half of one and a half cups might be. I am not even lying when I tell you I finally used a calculator.
I received an email yesterday that included the phrase “f2f is high bandwidth” and even though I think of myself as being fairly well versed in silly tech jargon I found myself staring at the screen wondering if the person had accidentally sent me part of a text message zen koan.
Also, in the last several days I have 1) cut my finger while chopping vegetables, 2) rammed my toe so hard into a table leg I think it has permanently retracted into my foot by an inch or so, 3) shut my car door on my own leg, and 4) burned my hand not once, not twice, but three times on the edge of an electric skillet while making one (1) batch of pancakes.
I am officially so dumb I am a menace to myself and society at large. JB, who came home the other day to observe my car parked in the driveway with the passenger side door absentmindedly left wide open in the pouring rain, can probably attest to my reduced mental capacity, although hopefully he will keep those opinions to himself unlike the observation made to his brother over the phone WITHIN MY EARSHOT that Linda sure is getting big, I bet it’s going to be a hyoooooge baby.
(Note to male readers: mentioning your wife’s expanding girth in any way other than passionately crying out “My god, my god, she is a GLORIOUS VESSEL OF BEAUTY!” results in major deductions from your Yearly BJ Allowance. You can work yourself into a deficit situation in no time here, fellas, so tread carefully.)
Between the mouthbreathing and the Placenta Brain I’m hoping to make it through the next two months without earning myself a Darwin Award, but things are looking dicey. Even Riley had to help me out this morning: “Mommy keys right DERE.” And that was after I watched Blue’s Clues with him, where I found myself unable to walk away from the television before Steve did the Thinking Chair thing and revealed what the clues were—because I couldn’t figure it out for myself.
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