So... PREGNANT. I am. Yup. I, who always said not only never, but HELL NO, NO-WAY-NO-HOW, NEVER, have changed my mind and gone and gotten knocked up. On purpose, even. So there you have it. Thus far my due date is supposedly February 20th, since I am exactly 15 weeks pregnant as of today, but judging by when I believe the deed was actually done (or, as Brother #1 put it, the day the demon seed was sown), I think it will end up more like the 15th or 16th of February, thereby making the child an Aquarius rather than a Pisces. (Sorry, Oliver!) Anyway, apologies to any of you who are being informed via this rather impersonal format, and thanks to everybody to whom I’ve already spoken for all of your unexpectedly touching well-wishes. To answer a few common questions:
#1. Yes, we are both quite happy. Excited? Not really-- I always find it difficult to be excited, per se, about something this big-- cautious optimism is more the mood of this chapter. So excited, no, but happy, yes.
#2. Yes, I’m feeling fine. Weeks 7 through 12 were a bit rough in terms of morning sickness and being absolutely dead tired all the time, but all of that has pretty much abated now, so my only irks at the moment are boobs that feel like someone else’s unasked-for implants, and the yucky sore veins in my legs once in a while. Oh, but apparently, morning sickness is the magic wand I was always seeking with the power to get my weight under 140-- not that it lasted long, but I dropped twelve pounds in a jiffy! Anyway…
#3. No, we aren’t going to find out the gender beforehand. We do have a slight preference, but I wouldn’t want to be disappointed if the interpretation of the ultrasound happened to be mistaken, and Micheal just wants to be surprised, so for both these reasons, no.
#4. In regard to names: I have many (fabulous) ideas, and he hates all of them. Particularly with boys’ names. But I will win out in the end, and have a child who is not named after an apostle, or after every second person in the village.
#5. Yes, I know how I’m going to do up the room, i.e. mostly white and gray (with cool wallpaper that looks like a pencil drawing of a forest) and as simple as possible, with as few electronically beeping/babbling/trilling things, and as few bright, tacky cartoon-printed accessories as possible.
#6. No, I haven’t had any blood tests yet, thank the GODS. I think I’m going to have to get one on October 4th, though, when I’ll be 20 weeks and have my first appointment with the ob/gyn people in the maternity department of the hospital. (So far I’ve only been to the local GP a couple of times. I know, crazy, but that’s the way they do it here.) That’s also the day I’ll have my first (and possibly only) ultrasound. Anyway, if anyone has suggestions about how to lose an extreme lifelong needle phobia in six weeks or less, send it my way!
#7. Speaking of needle phobias, I am going to ATTEMPT to do a totally natural, drug-free childbirth. (Honest to god, I prefer pain to IVs. Even LOTS of pain as opposed to ANYTHING via an IV.) Of course, you never know how it will go on the day, but that’s my plan so far. (I will be ordering a Lamaze instructional DVD shortly, since there seems to be no actual class specifically in Lamaze around here.)
#8. No clue yet about breastfeeding or not. It still seems a tremendously freaky idea to me at this point, but then again, I suppose by the time it’s an issue, I will have already gone through some even freakier stuff, so who knows.
And finally…
#9. Yes, it will be strange to have a child who, for all intents and purposes, is not American. I had a bit of a wistful think about it a couple of weeks back, trying to acclimatize myself to the idea that my kid is not going to speak with an American accent, is not going to know what a grinder is, or a Dixie cup, or a quarter, nickel, or dime, or the meaning of a snow day, or the sound of a baseball game on the radio in the backyard or on a blanket at Hampton Beach. That they’re never going to walk to school through piles of blowing red and orange leaves, or wait for the bus beside a three-foot bank of dirty snow, and when they’re twelve, they won’t ask to go to the mall and the movies, it’ll be the “shopping centre” and the “cinema.” That they’ll never fully grasp the concept of Thanksgiving or Fourth of July, won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, won’t ride a yellow schoolbus, use blue mailboxes, go to a school or live in a city where they are the ethnic minority, won’t hear Spanish spoken on the street as much as English, won’t go to a YMCA summer camp, go on hayrides at a pumpkin farm, pick their own apples or strawberries, or eat toasted-almond ice cream or orange sherbet push-pops from the Good Humor truck in the summer. But then I realized that no one can give their child a childhood identical to their own, because the world just isn’t the same anyway. Even if I were to raise this kid on the exact street and in the exact house where I grew up, so many things have changed in the last thirty years, the differences between my experiences and theirs would probably far outweigh the similarities. Not to mention that, from an objective perspective, there are countless advantages to raising a kid in smalltown Western Ireland versus urban East Coast America. So… I will probably still be a bit wistful about it from time to time, but in general, it’s all good, and I’m looking forward to it.