Names

My first name, when I was growing up, was pretty unusual. I was the only one in my class, and I'm pretty sure the only one in my school, with my name. Fast-forward thirty years and my name is really, really common. It's... well, let's just pretend it's Emily. Okay?

So last week I was in Target, and because the management there is clearly out to get me they reorganized the entire store, deliberately hiding only the things I needed to buy. I trawled the entire toy section in hunt of Play-Doh and a puzzle. They were not. After twenty minutes, I gave up, rounded a corner and lo! where the shoes used to be, was a display of nothing but puzzles and Play-Doh! You think I'm joking, don't you. I'm not.

Anyway, it was a very disorienting experience, added to which that I had left a full, sleeping baby with MHH and ten minutes after driving off with Yehudis my cell phone rang and yup, she was awake. So I was distracted by that and looking for all kinds of things that I couldn't find in that ginormous store, and at one point I was turning circles around the household cleaners section in search of the red-and-blue Dobie pads that were always there before when out of nowhere someone I'd never seen before was looking right at me and saying my name over and over

"Emily! Emily! Emily!"

in a tone of... not annoyance quite but of heLLO, are you there?

I had no idea who she was. None. Didn't look Jewish. Clearly not frum if she was. Someone from work? Someone I talk to and email but never see? Friend of friend? Someone from college? From grad school? Uh...

I stared. No clue.

Then I realized that standing right in front of me was a little girl, somewhere between Barak and Iyyar in age. Emily. I burst out laughing and it was her mother's turn to stare at me.

"I'm also Emily. I thought you were talking to me and I could not figure out if I knew you!" I looked down at Emily #2 and said, "Did you know that your mommy picked the nicest, prettiest, most beautiful name in the whole wide world for you?" Emily #2 flushed and grinned and sidled up shyly to her mother.

It was cute. And it is a nice name. There are just an awful lot of us around right now. Mostly under aged ten!

If you will permit me a little nachas

Last week was rough. Sunday night I came down with a wicked sore throat and then fever which it took me until Wednesday morning to realize was strep. Once I went to the doctor and got penicillin it got better pretty quickly, but that was after more than three straight days of being good for very little. Barak does not react well to an out-of-commission mother and there have been tantrums, usually in the plural, every day; Iyyar is three and a half and has been, ah, trying, and of course Marika and Avtalyon need a lot of attention too. Thursday night I literally got two hours of sleep--Marika simply would not go to sleep, even snuggled in bed with me, and then Friday I had to make Shabbos since I'd been so out of it all week I'd done nothing. And the boys were all completely off the wall the whole afternoon and most of Shabbos too.

Sunday morning, with a lot of snow predicted, I had a coat I'd bought Abba in the wrong size that I needed to return to the mall--a mile away on foot. I thought Barak needed some Imma time so I told him that we were going to go together; I need to return this coat and buy Marika some socks and then, I told him, we can get some ice cream (there is a Ben and Jerry's in the mall). He was happy with this, so when Abba got home off we went.

Marika slept in the snugli the whole way there and the sidewalks were fairly clear, so we walked along, me on the sidewalks and Barak clambering over all available snowbanks, chattering along about pirates, snow, treasure, Lego, Purim and everything else. We got to the mall and--have I mentioned I hate malls? Well I do. I hate them, as in, they make my skin crawl and I break out in a sweat. Literally. I think the last time I took Barak to a mall was... actually I'm not sure he's ever been to a mall, except for the chareidi mall in Jerusalem.

We walked in and the first thing he said was, "Imma, this feels like an airport." I looked around at the vendors set up selling cell phones and earrings and... huh. He was right. But what does it say about us that my kid recognized "airport," but not "mall"?!

Anyway... we returned the coat, which itself took forever, after first standing in the wrong line for way too long. Then I saw they had baby clothes on clearance and stood there picking through 75%-off racks finding pants for Marika. Then I looked at onesies and got some of those, since I had the credit from the coat. Then we paid, which was a project because I didn't have ID (since when do you need ID to buy baby clothes?) and the manager had to be called, etc., and it was another ten minutes. Then we went down the escalators to Old Navy and I started picking out 6-12 month socks (she has big feet). All this time, Barak was the picture of the bored husband--staring off into the middle distance, or politely feigning interest in whatever I showed him. He didn't say much, even though this was taking way longer than anticipated and I was doing a lot of stuff that hadn't been on the original itinerary.

At this point I was really ready to get out of there--I was hot in my coat, the baby was starting to shift, and I wanted to get home. Meanwhile, shoppers were hustling around, kids were screaming, etc., and right next to us there was a child on the floor having a fit and demanding ice cream. Barak and I got on line to pay for the socks. "Barak," I whispered, "you are being a tzadik. You are being so patient. I don't like shopping either but you are being so cooperative with this." We paid, we went out into the main part of the mall and I got him his ice cream. I praised him again for not asking through all of our forays, even once, when he was going to get ice cream. He looked at me in surprise. "You said we were going to get ice cream at the end," he said. "I already knew when we were going to get ice cream so I didn't need to ask."

: )

Garbage

For some reason the word "garbage" has figured amusingly in the linguistic development of all three boys. With Barak, it was the laborious assembly of a very impressive sentence on sight of a gabage truck: "Garbidge. Chuck. Put garbidge innair!" Iyyar called garbage "jarba." And Avtalyon? He calls it "barkip." No idea why. He's also calling the baby Tayi. Oranges and grapes are "Pooz!" and "Navim!" courtesy of Asnat.

Anybody hear laughing?

I had a whole list of things I was going to do on this, my last week of maternity leave. I was going to catch up on laundry. I was going to get passport pictures for Barak and Marika, and file their passport applications. I was going to return the too-small Shabbos coat I bought Abba last week, and finish cleaning out the storage space in the basement.

Instead, I've had strep since Sunday, complete with raging fever and, you know, the attendant full-body misery. Which also has meant that I've been reluctant to have Marika in bed with me--I'm too out of it, and I'm so cold I want a big pile of blankets. She is not sympathetic to this, and has been waking up every 20 minutes or so all. night. long.

So I've done nothing. Except go to the doctor today, finally, to get antibiotics.

Bleah.

destashing

Even though a) my husband hasn't actually been accepted to the program he's hoping to attend next year, b) my Extreme Telecommuting request hasn't been approved, and c) we haven't figured out what we're doing with this apartment, we're still all proceeding as if this is all going to work out. I am cleaning, clearing out, downsizing and organizing; a huge bin of baby/kid clothes to be donated is sitting in the basement, and I have spent much of the last couple of weeks sorting through my stash deciding what to keep, what to toss, and what to give away. (Some of it is posted for sale on ravelry, and any of it that doesn't get sold is going to Cecilia and/or Sarah's knitting guild for Afghans for Afghans.)

I've also been going through the boxes and boxes and BOXES of papers that my heilige husband has been stashing away in the basement, and finding, ooh, all KINDS of things. Like the bus ticket for the bus ride from Baltimore to New York during which we got engaged. (Why yes, we DID get engaged on a Greyhound. Didn't you?) A few uncashed checks (Grandma E, it wasn't nearly as bad, I promise.) Random change, unreturned quizzes and homeworks from his high school teaching days, piles of notes, photocopied pages of gemara, articles, you name it. We have a milk crate full of empty binders now, and two large boxes full of shaimos, waiting for the pre-Pesach shaimos dropoff.

Right now I am in the stage of cleaning where everything looks much worse than it did when you started--piles of stuff everywhere, garbage being taken out multiple times a day. And, of course, I have several vultures circling the garbage constantly--my husband tries his best not to look, but the little boys are very prone to the "Imma! Look what I found! Look what I found in the garbage!" Oh look, it's the sharp stick-with-hook from a broken drop spindle! Back in the garbage, please, just because I am mean.

So far the only part of the Grand Plan that has actually been confirmed is that the holy Sarah Peasley has offered to adopt the lovely but aged Emese Cat, who I seriously don't think would survive the flight, much less the transition. She's going to be fourteen this summer and her nerves are, um, exactly what they've always been. Shot.

To accomplish this week: get passport pictures and passport applications for Marika and Barak (his passport expired in July), finish cleaning out office, and finish dealing with storage space. It needs to be empty before I can start filling it up again. I'm not actually packing anything until we have an answer at least on the telecommuting or on the program, and we might not have either until Pesach. I wish I could, because it'll be a lot harder to do this before my maternity leave ends--a week from Monday. It always goes so much faster than you think it will. This time next week will be my last day of leave. B"H for telecommuting--otherwise I'd be a wreck right now. As it is, I'm wondering how I will manage it, but I know I will manage somehow.

In the meantime, I am squandering precious naptime. Back to sorting through stash.

Pinch me

Tonight I was sitting in the kitchen nursing the baby as my husband and the kids finished up dinner. Barak saw my water bottle empty on the kitchen table and offered to fill it up for me; I said yes please, and he dragged a chair over to the sink and started filling the bottle up, which is something he likes doing. So there I was, baby nursing away, husband and Iyyar at the table polishing off green beans and fish sticks, Avtalyon in his high chair enjoying his spinach noodles, and me watching Barak, perched on a kitchen chair with his red stripey shirt, airplane kippa, and payes sticking out.

It doesn't seem real sometimes. It seems too good to be true, too good to be happening to me, and sometimes, I half expect to wake up back in high school or back at my old apartment, alone, to find it was all a dream.

No other place, no other time, is as good as this place, this time, right now. It's hard to think of asking for anything else, asking for anything more. Every time I start to say "please," all I can think is, "thank you."

And now, for something completely different

Like... a list!

I looked at the archives sidebar and realized that the number of posts I write annually has been going down steadily, by a few dozen each year. Okay, not surprising; every year I've been busier. But I don't want to taper off too much so I'm going to open this window in Blogger, go start working on a speech, and come back to do a new entry in my list every time I get stuck. Okay? Here goes:

1. Avtalyon has a Melissa and Doug firetruck puzzle that Yehudis found at a thrift store for $2. To say that he loves it is an understatement; he adores it. He sees it on the shelf and gasps: "Puzzle!" I bring it down for him and he wrinkles his brow and gets to work, with all seemly haste, busily dumping out the pieces, putting them together, moving them around. The best part? Every time he puts two pieces together, he has to stop to applaud. Just quickly, you understand, because he needs to keep going. So he'll put the pieces together, look up, gasp a little in pleasure, clap a few times to be sure I get the message, and move on to the next piece. When he gets to the doggie piece, he likes to point that out to me to. "Doddie!" He can put the whole thing together now, almost all by himself.

2. I have been insanely thirsty lately. It started in the ER when I couldn't stop refilling my water bottle and draining it, again and again; one time one of the nurses filled it for me and then saw me down the whole thing at a gulp. I didn't think twice about it but she stared. The whole time I was in the hospital I kept filling it and drinking it, probably drinking at least four liters a day; yes, the air was dry and I am nursing, but holy cow! I didn't even want Diet Coke (yes, you read that correctly)--I just wanted to drink water. I think Marika must be growing at a faster-than-usual clip; the ankle nametag they put on her when we arrived was digging into her leg when we were discharged, and she's out of all of her newborn stretchies already.

3. When Asnat is here, she often feeds Avtalyon oranges and grapes, and I like this because she has more time to cut fruit into little pieces than I do. Not surprisingly, he refers to almost all fruit in Hebrew, and every time he gets into his high chair, he asks for it: "Ahpooz! Anavim! Ahpooz! Bee!" That last, by the way, means, "please!" Asnat, being a true Israeli, does not insist on b'vakasha.

4. Avtalyon's second birthday is on Tuesday. I know he should get his own post. I KNOW. I'll try.

5. Both Avtalyon and Iyyar have seriously runny noses. Avtalyon does not appear at all bothered; Iyyar has a red rashy face and every time his nose starts to run, he informs me. "Imma! I have boogers!"

6. I went to my six-week checkup, a little late, the week before last, and found that I've lost more weight than I thought I had. In terms of X, where X is what I weighed when I got pregnant with Barak (the top end of the healthy weight range for my height), I was at X + 22, which was down 20 lb from right before Marika was born. I checked at home yesterday and am down to X + 17 (on my home scale, not a doctor's scale, but still). While absolutely bad, it is relatively great, and quite encouraging; the lowest I've been since Iyyar was born was X + 11, and that was when Avtalyon was nine months old and we'd just come back from Israel. Now, I'm only two months postpartum.

I really, really want to get back to X, and the idea of losing 17 lb somehow seems a lot less daunting than the idea of losing 21. Especially if we can manage to, you know, go to Israel, where I was able to lose a pound a week without even trying (granted, I was nursing exclusively, and I'm sure that helped, but I wasn't losing a pound a week after Avtalyon was born here--more like a pound a month.)

7. I'm sorry, I can't quite bring myself to blog the whole hospital experience. I sat down to do it a couple of times and I just... can't. An hour or so ago I picked up the backpack I had with me at the hospital, looking for something, and put my hand unexpectedly on a pack of hospital-issue baby wipes. And had a fear reaction that was so intense it was physical. I didn't really start shaking until I got home from the hospital, but I haven't really stopped since--and I still can't quite feel my knees. Tomorrow she's scheduled for a followup appointment with her pediatrician. We are hoping for no surprises or unexpected detours to the ER this time.

8. Barak has not had a new sweater for a long time--more than a year I think. I asked him what he wanted and he requested a "bright shiny red" sweater. I had the body of it in my backpack, and got a few inches of it done at the hospital and managed to join body and sleeves without holders or stitch markers OR the right length of needle; I'm about a third of the way up the yoke now.

9. Even though we don't really know what we're doing, I've started clearing out and packing; this morning I went down to the storage space (Marika has just started letting me put her down to nap again, as of 10:30 am) and went through baby boy clothes in sizes 0-12 and the 3T/boys' small stuff, which will be for Avtalyon and Iyyar respectively, next year. Barak is going to need a bunch of new shirts; he has pants and Shabbos shirts but no weekday shirts. I need to get those, 3T Shabbos pants, and a couple of size 4 shirts for Iyyar--there are of course hand-me-downs from Barak but not everything makes it long enough to move down the line. Marika, of course, has lots of cute new things (hooray post-holiday sales! I got 11 shirts/pairs of pants for her in various sizes for $36 at Children's Place earlier this week) and also got two shopping bags' worth of hand-me-downs from a local friend today, to add to the enormous box of hand-me-downs we got a couple of weeks ago from out-of-town friend with toddler twin girls. Both of them have excellent taste in clothes and Marika is now very well supplied with pink.

10. I realized today that it's entirely possible that we could be out of this apartment and in Israel in six months. MHH's contract is up mid-July. If we rent out the apartment I imagine we would hope to do so by August first. That's six months from today.

The mind reels.

Two months!

And happy to be home.

In which we are reminded who really runs the show (hint: not me)

Yes, that is an IV in her arm.

Tuesday morning I was walking home from Marika's 2-month well-baby check, at which she was pronounced an officially well baby, talking on my phone with K about positive developments on the Israel front. That was 10 am.

By midnight, I was standing in an isolation room at the children's hospital, being told by nurses in yellow gowns and masks that my eight-week-old baby had bacterial meningitis.

(They were, B"H, WRONG.)

I don't have time to do it justice. I'm sorry, I just don't. But, as I wrote it to my boss Friday morning:

In a nutshell, she had a very fast-moving eye infection. She was totally fine in the morning, at 10 am one eye was a little red, by 2 pm it was purple, oozing yellow gunk, and swollen shut, and by the time I got to the ER at around 6 (I went back to the doctor first, who told me she had periocular cellulitis and I should pack a bag fast and go to children's hospital) it was spreading to the other eye and she had a fever. They did blood work, her white counts were elevated, they did a spinal tap and those white counts were a little high too, so they admitted her and threw IV everything at her in case it was turning into meningitis.

In the ER I was told "just in case it's turning into meningitis"; by the time we got to her room I was told it WAS meningitis, but this was, apparently, a miscommunication (ha ha ha ha. Six years off my life right there. But, of course, better that they were WRONG.) Since then, nothing has grown out from her spinal fluid cultures, and she now has no fever and her eyes look perfect so they let us go.

And now we are home. Recovering. All of us.

Inhale, exhale

Grandma E emailed me this week and reminded me that Avtalyon is about to turn two. He is indeed. She thought he deserved his own post, and he does. I have another week for that, though, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, things here are... moving along. It's decision time for next year, and Option #1 of 1 is Go To Israel. The big question is how and where; whether he'll get into the program he wants, whether I'll be allowed to telecommute, whether we'll try to sell the condo or rent it out. Big decisions, big changes.

And one way or another, we are moving, which means that I'm going to have to pack up this apartment. With four children in it. And a husband. Who has... stuff. The mind kind of reels.

Marika's favorite song

Seriously. She loves it.

Every time I sing it she grins at me.

Naming names

I think that if I wait until I really have time to do this post justice, the baby will be three, so, in a nutshell:

My grandmother, as you know if you've been reading this for a while, died the year before last, the day before erev Rosh Hashana. We were very close and it's fair to say that she was the most stable and loving presence in my life for much of it. So, it was only natural that I would want to name a girl after her.

However: not so simple. For one thing, she wasn't technically my grandmother, being my grandfather's second wife (she married him in 1952, so was the only grandmother I'd ever known); and for another thing, being not Jewish, her given name was Maria Terez. Our last name is about as Jewish as it gets. Can you imagine? Maria Teresa Goldwasserberg? (I'm making that up, but it's close.) She might stand out a little in the Bais Yaakov.

So we (I) hemmed and hawed and pondered and considered and looked through baby name books again and again. I knew I couldn't really name the baby for my grandmother, in the sense of using her exact name, nor would there really be a point, since the idea there is it being a z'chus for the person's neshama. But I could certainly name in zecher of my grandmother, so that's what I tried to do. Eventually I came up with a name with a certain level of linguistic similarity, with a meaning that I thought she would have liked, and something that she would have been able to pronounce and not found weird.

My grandmother was born in Hungary 1924, the oldest of four girls, so it was pretty inevitable that she got named Maria Terez (as it was inevitable that the rest of the girls should be Erzsebet, Margit, and Katalin. You can count traditional Hungarian girls' names on the fingers of two hands.) The usual nickname for Maria would be Marika, but for some reason, my grandmother got tagged Mariska. She HATED this. Her elementary school report cards (which were perfect, by the way, and which she never threw out) said Mariska. People in town called her Auntie Mariska. She grumbled. "Why Mariska? It should be Marika. What good is Mariska? It's not a normal name." So when she moved to the nursing home, after 81 years of being Mariska, she just never said that name to anyone. She just said Maria, and they called her Marika, which was exactly what she had wanted all along. It only took her 81 years to get there.

So for purposes of this blog, the baby can be Marika; and if one day she decides she'd like it to be something different, she can tell me, and that will be fine with me.

Still no name

But a list, a totally random list of things I want to remember about right now:

1. Avtalyon is really into chickens. He says "chickum" and I taught him how to make a chicken sound, which he does incredibly well. "BOK bok bok bok bok." It's hilarious. Friends of ours sent us some money for Chanuka presents for the kids and I bought Barak and Iyyar little Lego spaceships; for Avtalyon I got a Duplo set with, yes, a chicken, complete with coop and little farmer menschie. He loves it and when he can't find it asks me for his "bok bok."

2. Avtalyon is in a phase of nighttime wakings. He doesn't wake up for a cuddle or an excursion though. No no. He wakes up for a book. He wakes up, howls for one parent, gives up and howls for the other, and when eventually one of us staggers in there stands up in his crib and politely requests a book. It has to be the right book though, one he hasn't looked at lately and one with the right pictures. If he doesn't want that one he rejects it with a firm, "No!" Why do we put up with this behavior, you ask? Well... it's the three-kids-in-one bedroom thing. If we ignore him, he cries, and it goes on for a long time and wakes up the other ones and... yeah. Easier to just give him the book.

3. One more Avtalyon thing. Because he still naps and Iyyar doesn't, sometimes at bedtime Iyyar conks out instantly and Avtalyon is still feeling social. So he tries to get Iyyar to wake up. It totally doesn't work, but it's really funny to listen to, because what he'll do is try to convince Iyyar that the book in his crib is just the shpitz and Iyyar should hear all about it. So what we hear is, "Eddie! Eddie wook! Wook eddie! Bok bok! Bok bok WHOA! Eddie! Eddie wook!"

4. Barak is noticeably happier and more relaxed than he's been in weeks if not months. I hadn't realized how much my being under the weather and exhausted and miserable had been stressing him out; the facial tic, the obvious tension, I attributed to school. But I think it was me, because the tic is almost gone and the meltdowns are greatly diminished and he just seems a lot happier. Last week he asked me to make "yummy sweet challah" for Shabbos and asked why I never made challah anymore, when my challah was so much yummier than the bakery challah. I heard this and... well, I was definitely going to try my best. So I orchestrated matters as well as I could on Friday and the baby and Avtalyon were, B"H, cooperative, and I did actually pull off a full batch of "yummy sweet challah" less than an hour before licht. The smile on his face was a mile wide and it was totally worth it.

5. Iyyar's been eating vegetables lately. Like, soup vegetables! This past week I made an improvised zucchini-dill soup (it was really really good if I do say so) with Hungarian noodles and he inhaled it. (Avtalyon dropped his on the floor. He's in a Phase.) And tonight, when dinner was leftover Shabbos chicken soup with added knaidlach, he ate his carrots and didn't even ask for more knaidlach. How about that?! Barak, of course, refuses to touch any cooked vegetable with the exception of carrot muffins and pumpkin kugel, but since he will cheerfully polish off a plateful of cut-up raw vegetables at every meal I don't worry too much.

6. And (saving best for last)--the baby has started to SMILE! I got some fleeting but definite smiles last week and then this morning I got a full-wattage, huge, goofy, lopsided grin, complete with one dimple. The kind that melt your heart into a puddle of motherly goo and make you instantly forgive the loss of sleep, income, time, and waist. She'll be five weeks tomorrow, so this is definitely a record. She also, as of yesterday, has decided that the bassinet is occasionally an acceptable place for a nap, instead of a cause for instant waking. Last night she was in there for a good two hours, and right now it's been an hour and a half and counting. I should be using this time to finish the dishes and write mitzva notes, but I know I'll forget all of this, so I wanted to write it down while I had the chance.

Almost a month

She'll be a month old tomorrow. How is that possible?!

Things here are good. Busy, but good. Yesterday and today I managed to not only cook real dinners but get everyone sitting at the table for them at the same time (remember how I used to complain how hard it was to feed everyone dinner, and that was without a newborn?!) The baby (yes yes yes she will have a name soon) is a lot like Barak was at this age--fortunately I'm not like I was at that age. You won't let me put you down for more than sixty seconds at a time? Okay, I can deal with that. With Barak, another I-will-die-if-you-don't-pick-me-up-now baby, most of the sleep deprivation came from my own inability to sleep anywhere but lying down in a bed. Now I can pretty much sleep anywhere, anytime, and I can sleep with a baby in bed with me--it's not like sleeping under lots of blankets by myself, but it's a heck of a lot better than getting out of bed fifty times a night trying to resettle a baby in a crib (and failing). I can even sleep pretty well in a rocking chair with a baby tucked into a Boppy. I usually try to get her to sleep in her bassinet/bouncy seat once or twice at the beginning of the night, and then I take her into bed with me and we both fall asleep. Pretty predictable really. She has all day to catch up on missed sleep, and I don't. She wins.

I'm also much better at carrying a baby in a sling than I used to be, and more comfortable with doing more things with said baby in said sling. There are still limits though. I can't (won't) cook with a baby in a sling--it just feels too dangerous to me and I'm not going there. No hot stuff, no sharp blades, so that really complicates, oh, dinner preparations. It's also hard to do things like change diapers on recalcitrant toddlers, wrangle children into snowpants, etc. But--BUT--one can knit with a baby in a sling, which discovery has improved my mental state enormously.

I still have Asnat here for three hours in the morning, which is a huge huge help--I usually manage to get a nap in while she's here. I also arranged for Iyyar to spend 20 minutes every day in afternoon playgroup, which is all the time I need for my husband to come home for lunch and me to run get him (or for my husband to go get him if I am sound asleep when he arrives, which has happened lately too)--and this means I don't have to wake up Avtalyon if he's still asleep at 12:45, which he usually is. AND my friend's son, who rides the bus with Barak, is walking Barak home from the bus stop--this means I don't have to wake up any nappers, wrangle three children into winter clothes, and go out to wait for the bus every afternoon. Another very big help.

Anyway, so, things are finding their new normal around here. The boys are generally doing OK--Barak actually seems more relaxed than he has been in a while (which still isn't very, but that's Barak), Iyyar really likes the baby, and Avtalyon, well, Avtalyon is working very hard to be sure that he is not neglected in all the bustle, and generally succeeding. I kind of wish he hadn't thrown all those black beans on the floor, but Iyyar picked them all up for me so no harm done. It's 9:30 PM though and I still haven't managed to clean up from dinner, pack lunches, or put the laundry away, so I'd better get going.

Name post soon. Really. Sometime within the next month for sure. Bli neder.

Three weeks

The baby (yes, she will have a blog name, but that should be its own post, so you'll just have to live in suspense a while longer) is three weeks old today, and marked the occasion by coming down with an impressively awful cold complete with horrible cough and icky goopy congestion. At around 4 this afternoon she woke up with a coughing fit that actually turned her purple, at which point I called the doctor, asked them to squeeze us in (which they did), and called my husband to come home (which he did). Verdict: bad cold, yes, but her breathing is fine, and while we were there the nurse weighed her and hallelujah! birthweight plus an ounce, even though she hadn't eaten in a while (hard to nurse when you're that stuffed up). Eight ounces in seven days, so all that nursing is doing something. Doctor says keep an eye to be sure her breathing isn't too fast and she is at least eating something; right now she is contentedly snoozing in her bouncy seat and I am putting my first free moments not holding a baby to good use blogging. And I knitted a little bit, too.

Last night she didn't settle until around 4, even in bed with me, and I woke up at 7:40, which is way too late for the mother of a kindergartner with an 8 am departure time; somehow Barak got ready and out the door, I stumbled around in a haze getting Iyyar and Avtalyon dressed and breakfasted, and once Avtalyon was napping, went back to sleep with the baby at 10:30. Not setting an alarm, because it was 10:30 and there was no way the baby wouldn't wake me up by 1, when it would be time to pick up Iyyar. Right? Wrong. I was woken up at 1:30 by my husband, who had come home for lunch to discover (apparently) nobody home and messages on his voice mail saying "Um, is anyone going to pick up your son?" I'd slept right through all the ringing, of my own phone and my cell, as well as my husband coming home at lunch, walking through the house looking for me, and seeing no one here, going to get Iyyar himself, wondering if perhaps I had taken the baby to the hospital. I had been in my room with the light off and somehow he hadn't noticed us sleeping there.

Think I might have been tired?

Anyway, the three-hour nap was awesome and I feel much more human; not only that, but a friend of mine sent us a (fabulous) dinner of takeout, the plumber, who is a friend of ours, fixed our bathtub and sinks today and LEFT WITHOUT CHARGING US (he just walked out the door--I thought he was getting a part but he never came back); and the dishwasher guy came and fixed my dishwasher (okay, he did charge us, but it's worth it--my dishwasher is working again!) Oh, and another friend took my toaster oven racks to tovel, so now I have a functional toaster oven again. Yay!

Two weeks and a day

I took the baby in for her first pediatrician visit today. I know, I know, I should have brought her in last week, but like I think I said earlier, couldn't deal, and I thought she was doing great. I was a little surprised therefore to discover that she was nowhere near her birth weight. She was born at 7 lb 15, discharged at 7 lb 5, and according to the scale at the doctor's office was 7 lb 8.5 today. Hmm. She had, it is true, just had a massive dirty diaper and hadn't eaten for a couple of hours at that point but... still. It seemed weird to me because she's nursing all the time and where are all those wet/dirty diapers coming from if she's not eating enough? So when the doctor was done I fed her and then asked the nurse to try again on another scale. That one said 7 lb 13, although she was at that point in a clean diaper and undershirt. Because I am neurotic, I came home and weighed a clean diaper and similar undershirt to find out that that added 2 oz. So I could call her 7 lb 11 oz, which is not as bad, but also indicates that she only got 2.5 oz during what seemed to me to be a pretty long feed. Which means that I need to be paying more attention to how much she's getting, because it seems to be less than I thought.

Other stats: 20.5 inches, 23rd percentile for height. 56th for weight.

Random cute kid conversation of the day:

Iyyar was getting ready for bed, wearing his Justice League t-shirt. I asked him to turn off the light and he objected. "Now I can't see very well!" I told him that Daredevil can't see at all but still manages.

"He can see in the dark?"

"No, he can't see at all. But he has radar sense."

Pause.

"He has a flashlight?"

"No, he has radar sense."

"Green Lantern has a flashlight."

"Right, Green Lantern does."

"Also the Flash. Also the Flash has a flashlight."

"I'm not sure about that one. We should ask Abba."

A lichtige Chanuka to you too.

Two weeks

Two weeks today. Baby B"H seems fine; pediatrician visit tomorrow, which I put off a few days because I was bleeding so much the taxi trip/carseat installation just didn't seem like a good idea. Kids generally adjusting well, although Avtalyon is driving me kind of nuts with the competitive attention-getting and the innocent grabbing at changing pad on top of dresser while newborn baby sister is ON IT. (I was right there with my hand on her, but still--bad idea.)

Mostly I am dealing OK. Just, um, hungry. The baby is not fussy but wants to be held ALL THE TIME, day and night, and is nursing almost nonstop right now; this really does preclude cooking. Generally speaking when someone has a baby in this community people send meals for the first two weeks, but that hasn't really happened this time, for a variety of reasons. So... yeah. We did get Shabbos twice, and weekday meals I think three times. But I think that's all over with now and today at around 5 pm I started feeling dizzy and realized that the only thing I'd eaten all day was... um... never mind. Not adequate, let's put it that way. A friend just offered to pick up a few things at Trader Joe's for me and I'm thinking I'll ask her for some boxed soups and granola bars. The kosher grocery does deliver so I could at least get cheese and I do have crackers. MHH went to the produce store yesterday and got a ton of bananas, although none of them are ripe yet.

And YES, I know it is kind of stupid and petty of me to be grumpy about not getting meals when I make a point of making them for other people whenever asked, especially since I specifically didn't want to ask anyone. Yes. Stupid. And petty. But I'm still hungry. I got the kids red peppers and hummous and made some frozen corn and gave them that with crackers and they seem OK with it--there was just an awful lot of screaming today, and I'm not quite up for it yet.

So, in a nutshell: I am tired. The baby is cute. The kids are as kids with a new baby sibling are wont to be. And I am tired. Oh, and my kitchen is... uh... never mind.

ETA: after I wrote this, a friend of ours turned up with dinner AND the offer to make a Target run for me, which was gratefully accepted. So we had dinner after all and now I even have diapers and granola bars and paper plates and so forth. Today Ada came in the afternoon so I had fifteen minutes to cook dinner. One day at a time...

Six days

I feel this bodes well. Don't you?

(oh--and does it remind you of anyone?)

If I were Julie, I would probably start this post as an IM conversation, or maybe a series of text messages, between me and my uterus. It would go something like this:

10/24
Uterus: u r in labor
Uberimma: no way. i have shingles.

10/31
Uterus: u r in labor
Uberimma: no way. kids are going to get chickenpox any day now.

11/9
Uterus: u r in labor
Uberimma: no way. not till 37 weeks. besides, no labor till pediatrician back from vacation.

11/10-11/29 (repeated daily)
Uterus: u r in labor
Uberimma: ok
Uterus: just kidding hahaha

11/30
Uterus: u r in labor
Uberimma: This is getting really annoying. Stop.
Uterus: No really. You're in labor.
Uberimma: Fat chance. You're like the uterus that cried wolf already.
Uterus: You don't believe me?
Uberimma: No.
Uterus: Okay, fine. But don't say I didn't warn you.

* * *

There's just only so long you can go to bed every night wondering if your water will break. There's only so long you can walk around having contractions before you start thinking, eh, it'll never happen. Even though logically you know that every passing day of this makes it more, not less, likely that you are in fact in labor... I dunno. That's not how my brain works, I guess.

So when I woke up at Monday morning with what felt like an upset stomach, I assumed it was, in fact, an upset stomach, because, you know, it'd been an upset stomach or just aimlessly meandering contractions for the last MONTH and I wasn't going to go paging my midwife or rushing off to the hospital for any of that. For some reason I'd overslept and my husband hadn't woken me up; it was 8:04 am, four minutes past the time I should have been out the door with Barak for the bus. This wasn't in itself a problem, though, since I'd been to check on Barak in the night and he'd had a fever. I went in to see how he was doing and he was still in bed, half awake; I checked his temp and he had 100.2 under his arm. OK, fine, you would've stayed home anyway. I gave him a kiss, told him to go back to sleep, and he just looked at me blearily and pulled the covers up a little higher.

I got Avtalyon out of his crib and dressed, got Iyyar his clothes and directed him to the bathroom while I got him Cheerios. And made a few bathroom trips myself. Ow, upset stomach. Got Iyyar dressed, got him more Cheerios. Ow. Husband must have overslept too; he's davening in the office. At around 8:45 I thought, you know, it's been a week since I saw the midwife, I should probably call her. And she'll probably want me to come in, so I might as well see if I can come in this morning, since I'm not planning on attempting any work and it's easier to go when Asnat is here. So I called midwife, at two minutes to 9, and got the answering service instead of the office. The person asked me if I wanted to page the midwife and without really thinking it through first I said yes.

My husband came out of my office at 9 and I asked him if he could take Iyyar to school, even though I knew that this would make him late to work; my stomach was really really upset at that point and I didn't want to go too far from a bathroom. He left with Iyyar, forgetting Iyyar's lunch, which I handed him through the door on his way out. Then I went to the bathroom again. Then I thought, huh. Maybe I should just... go into the office and get checked. I picked up the phone to call a cab, put it down, picked it up, put it down, and looked at it for a minute. Then I picked it up again and dialed. I asked for a cab to my midwife's office, which is across the street from the hospital.

Then I had a few more contractions and thought... huh. I wonder if... nah. Between contractions I thought it was probably nothing, and then I had one more that made me think that I might really be in labor. Then it stopped and I kind of dismissed the possibility again. The midwife still hadn't called me back, so I called again and had her paged again.

MHH came back and I told him I was going to the office to get checked. He asked me if I wanted him to come with me and I said, if you want, but I'm leaving when Asnat gets here. Asnat rang the doorbell at around 9:20; I opened it, she made a look of shock ("You're still here!") and I said, mid-contraction, yes but I am leaving NOW and then the phone rang and I saw that it was the cab company telling me that my cab had arrived. I got my bag and went in and kissed Barak and said, "I'm going to the hospital to have the baby and I'll see you in a few days." He just looked at me--I think he had sort of despaired of ever seeing the long-promised new baby too.

I put my coat on and was on my way out the door when my husband said something about needing to go get something; I didn't even slow down but called over my shoulder, "OK, but I'm not waiting for you." I saw the cab down the street and waved at him; he pulled up and I climbed in and I saw MHH running out the door after me. Good thing too, as it turned out.

In the car I texted Cecilia and told her I was going to the hospital; I just looked at my phone and that was 9:37 AM. I called a couple of people to see if they could come look after the kids that afternoon but didn't get through to anyone; then my midwife called back, and told me she'd never gotten the first page. How far apart were the contractions? 3-5 minutes, I said. Had my water broken? No. Any other signs of labor? I hesitated and said, "I'm in the cab." There are certain things you really just don't want to say in hearing of a cab driver when you are 9 months pregnant, you know? She said, OK, I'm leaving now and I'll meet you there. That was when I told the driver that actually I wanted to go to the hospital, women's hospital entrance. He said OK. I remember passing a certain intersection and having a contraction so intense I couldn't sit still, and thinking, yes, this is definitely it, but even then I had no feeling it was going to be anytime soon soon. It wasn't really all that bad.

(Don't worry. I did not have the baby in the cab.)

We got to the hospital, we got out of the cab, I remember having left my purple bag on the seat and my husband reaching back in to grab it. We walked in to L & D and I was for some reason walking a little bit ahead of him--he was talking about the statue of the extremely skinny woman cum baby in the lobby and I told him my midwife referred to it as the French au pair. We walked in to L & D and I remember the heavy double doors opening electronically; I went up to the registration desk, told the lady my name and the name of my midwife, and then had a contraction and a flash of very unpleasant memories and said to her, "Can we just skip this part? Can we just go straight to the baby?" She laughed or gave me a sympathetic look, I don't really remember, and said she wished it could be that easy. I asked for a room with a tub and she said she'd given me one; the nurse walked us both back there and started checking my vitals and the rest of it.

I know we got there at 9:58 and there were certainly a few minutes spent registering and getting into the room; I walked around, looked at the tub, put my bag down, and then told the nurse that this time I wanted drugs. I wanted an epidural. As soon as possible please. She said OK but I have to get you registered first, and I went to the bathroom and came out and looked at the tub again and asked if I could get in the tub and she told me it took a while to fill. She checked the baby's heartbeat and said something about if you want drugs you have to be on monitors and I didn't think I could sit still for that. So I went to the bathroom again. And then told my husband to move the bags on the floor away from where I was going to trip on them and thought dark thoughts toward my husband, who always catches the brunt of it when I am not feeling, ah, up to par. At this point I was really really in pain and thinking, "I cannot do this. I cannot possibly do this again," and my midwife came in and I told her I wanted an epidural, I'd done it naturally twice and I was NOT doing that again. She said, okay, but let me just check you first. Then I went to the bathroom again and she stood outside telling me she really needed to check me and that was when I called out through the door to my husband that he could leave now.

"Um. Okay. Is there anything specific you want me to be doing?"

"Just leave."

"Okay."

Then I got walloped with one of those contractions that made me remember just exactly how awful having a baby is, and my midwife told me she couldn't do anything about that one contraction so I'd have to just wait till it was over, and I said I couldn't and she had to make it stop. (I know, very rational, etc.) Then the next thing I knew I was on the bed and she was saying to me, okay, you're ten centimeters and ready to push. I think I screamed once with the next contraction and she told me, very sternly, "No screaming. Just push. With this next contraction you're going to push your baby out."

And I did.

It was 10:16.

So she handed me the baby, and she was fine and gorgeous, and after they got me a little cleaned up my husband came back and they told him it was a girl and after about sixty seconds of being surprised he looked at me and said, "You totally knew, didn't you," and I 'fessed up. I was bleeding too much so they gave me pitocin; my midwife said I had a first-degree tear but didn't force the issue with stitches; I cuddled the baby and I nursed her a little bit and she thought that was great.

At some point we went up to my room and stopped at the nursery first for the baby to get checked. She had a lot of little red spots on her face which were probably from how fast she was born but because of the antigen E issue the nurse in the nursery paged my doctor to see if he wanted to get her platelet count, which he did (it turned out to be fine). She was talking with one of the other nurses about it and as they were discussing it and saying she, her, her, she, I was honestly and genuinely confused--as in, whose baby are they talking about that is she and her and she?

And then I realized. Oh yes. She's mine.

I can hardly believe it myself

Not only am I no longer pregnant...

Not only is the baby not jaundiced...

Not only was it the quickest labor imaginable...

But IT'S A GIRL!!!