Ultrasound

Early in November, 2007 we had the ultrasound. I brought Corey with me, but he absolutely did not want to go in and see anything. Tom was supposed to meet us there. He hadn't missed a single doctor appointment, but I had a sense that this was about to change. It annoyed me that his job seemed to have a greater hold on him than the chance to see our baby looking like a human for the first time. I mean, it had been months since we'd last seen the little bean/peanut with a heartbeat!

Each of those (three) early ultrasounds generated a different due date. Add to that the original doctor's date and our current doctor's guesstimate and we could only be sure that the baby was coming sometime in April. We'd already thrown out our due date guess because we didn't understand that "40 weeks" really means 38 weeks. So one of the things we were really hoping to do was get the due date to end all the guessing.

Sure enough, when I arrived there was no Tom. After getting called back immediately, I took as much time as I could with getting changed. But really, how long could it take? The technician took me into a very cold room. She offered to turn the air off if I needed it, but said the machine made the room extremely warm. During pregnancy I will always choose cold over hot.

I explained that my husband was allegedly right around the corner.

***I tend to use the word allegedly with a sarcastic bent. Sometimes I count on people not realizing this so I can vent. I don't care at that point if they can just think I'm too wordy.

She said she'd "just take the measurements and then we'll bring him in for the fun stuff." The measurements took a long time. Maybe 45 minutes or so. The baby was clearly on Dad's side when it came to revealing its sex. Although I was mostly rapt with the parts of my baby ("there's the spine... that's right, Baby, you've got a backbone and you're going to use it!"), part of me was watching the clock, wondering where Tom was. About 20 minutes in I got a call saying that Tom had arrived. I was more than a little peeved by then, because I knew that he not only stayed a little too long at work, but he took side streets instead of the freeway. ("Dude, when you're leaving at 2:30 in the afternoon, the freeways are okay. No, really. Way better than that 25 mile per hour street with stoplights every 100 yards. Seriously. Try it sometime." Ugh! Do I sound like Kate Gosselin? I hope not, but jeez!)

Although I wasn't supposed to spy it, I saw on the monitor at the end that the estimated age was 18 weeks, 2 days. If that was accurate, we were looking at an April 4 due date. The technician wouldn't answer any questions about our due date exactly, but she did say that the early ultrasounds (before 12 weeks) are usually more accurate because babies don't all grow at the same rate, and that ultrasounds at this point can be off by as much as two weeks. She also wouldn't say if everything looked okay (which I knew she wouldn't but I had to ask anyway). She did say, "... but I can tell you that I was able to take a lot of accurate measurements for your doctor. He should get the results within 2-3 business days, and congratulations." I assumed (and hoped) that the "congratulations" part was code for, "Yes, of course everything is fine with that baby of yours. Have you met the parents?!? How could it be otherwise?"

Once all the measurements were done, Tom did get to come in for what amounted to about 10 minutes of viewing. Although we knew nothing about the baby's sex, I told the technician that I was going to lie. And I did. Or I tried. When he came in I said, "We found out what the baby is since you weren't here... oh, alright, we didn't." I'm not good at lying (not really a problem for me, as it happens), and I can't hold out for more than a few milliseconds when giving it a shot. I still feel kind of like a bitch for even trying, honestly.


So, we didn't find out the gender, we didn't know for sure that everything was A-OK (did I mention that I had a hard time trusting everything was going smoothly?) and we didn't even have a definite due date. In fact, now we had six potential due dates, ranging from April 4 to April 25.


Here's what we did find out. It was a toad. He or she was face down a lot of the time and looked to be on it's hands and knees, but the feet kept kicking around. We considered naming it Prince.

I'd post pictures, but we forgot to grab them from the technician before we left.

Baby Goat

When Tom and I first started hanging out, we did a lot of hiking in the local mountains.

***I always assumed hiking was done in the mountains until we went on a "hike" (walk, really) to the highest point in Wisconsin.

I've never been exceptionally steady on my feet, so leaping from this stone to that was never my gig. Tom, however, loves it. And he's good at it. In fact, I don't know if I've ever seen him fall. The occasional stumble, sure, but that's it. Tom said it's because he's part mountain goat. Ask him which animal he'd be if he could and it's a mountain goat.

Madelyn has definitely demonstrated her two-sided heritage. The first time we brought her to this home, she mastered the stairs. It's been two weeks and today she insisted that I hold her hands so she could walk up them. Of course the stairs are nearly as high as the length of her legs, so she has to swing her straight leg all the way around to the side and then up and over, but she did the whole flight.

We've unpacked 30 or 40 boxes, but we still have several sitting around here and there. One was in the living room, probably blocking her access to the wiring behind the TV stand. It's a regular banker box. Madelyn started figuring the thing out yesterday. Today she managed to climb up and have a seat. As Corey and I were debating whether I should let her do such things (you can guess where the protective big brother stands), it looked like Mad was going to fall right off because she was trying to sit down where there was no box. But she moved and we cheered. I was pointing out that we have to let her test things out or she'll never learn. Then, for reasons we'll never know be sure of (I'm guessing "testing gravity" was in there somewhere), she very slowly leaned all the way over to the side.

Mad's got a scrape on her temple. Mama, Daddy and Brother all had their hearts in their throats. And Brother spent the next half hour or so glaring and not talking to Mama.

Madelyn will be one in exactly one week. I can't even believe it. I looked on my MySpace blog to see what I'd done on this day last year. Tom and Corey set up the crib. I organized some of my belongings well enough that Tom made files for me, and we swapped out bookcases in our room, from an extra large that might fall on the baby (we had a cinderblock wall in the bedroom, so we couldn't anchor it) to a smaller one that held all of the books we'd gotten from a shower at work.
Here was my last line of that blog: I guess that’s enough for one very pregnant day. I can’t believe we’re into the single digits now. Eight days... and really, today’s pretty much over. I really can’t wait to meet this person!

We didn't know if the baby in my womb was Madelyn Kenzie or Oliver Canyon. It was a pretty exciting time. I worked halfway through that Wednesday. I was so afraid that not having enough scheduled things to do would result in the same "I'm-off-work-and-whew!-I'm-exhausted" feelings I had with Corey. I left work three weeks in advance of his due date. The next morning I felt like I had been concreted to my bed.

This time, I even scheduled an early morning manicure for my first day off. Bev massaged my hands in hopes of helping to stimulate labor. Then I took my car in to get the oil changed. While there I walked a few blocks away in not the best part of town to get a late breakfast. That was an experience! It's an area sometimes known for prostitution, but who'd have thunk that a nine-months pregnant woman wearing jeans and a collared T-shirt would garner any attention.

That evening Tom and I were laying in bed, chatting about our days before he headed off for tennis and I went to the grocery store. Sometime around 5:30 I had my first painful contraction. About 36 hours later, she was born and we knew her name.

Christmas Letter

This year, for the first time ever, I am writing a Christmas letter. Yes, I realize I am either a couple of weeks late or several months ahead. All the same. So many of these letters that people write focus on health concerns, scares and other bad things. They tend to end with something like, "we're looking forward to things being even better next year." I'm putting my own spin on the concept this year, and will instead focus on one aspect of life: The Family Photo Christmas Card:

Dear Family and Friends,

With the birth of our Madelyn, and perhaps more so, with the creation of the world's cutest "announcement photo"

(yes, she was almost three months old and, as my dad liked to point out, everybody already knew she was here), the idea of a family photo Christmas card was something I looked forward to creating. I even had an idea, carefully crafted in my (apparently pea-sized) brain, that would allow me to get everybody in the photo without fighting Corey to smile, damnit! or stress out about the fact that no one is looking in the same direction as the baby: A "stack" of our upturned hands... first Tom's, then mine, then Corey's... each hand at a different angle, so most of our fingers would show. On top would rest Madelyn's chubby little starfish of a hand. I even had the perfect sentiment to accompany such a photo.

We had a pretty awesome camera and a fairly puny budget, so DIY was definitely the way to go. After several missed opportunities, I decided to force the issue. This method has always worked well for me in the past, right?

Yeah, no. But time was running out for us to get the photo cards made and mailed. So Corey and I worked together to choose the room with the best lighting (of course it had to be the world's smallest kitchen) and then to figure out the camera settings. We put a red blanket on the floor for our background and took a few practice shots.Then we added Tom to the mix. You can see Mad's nearby, ready for her close-up.Madelyn was a little tired that evening, but she was doing alright.Once we were all set up and ready to go, the next step (and perhaps, the most crucial, yet least well thought out) was to deal with logistics. How do you get a kind of tired, sort of hungry eight month old little girl with a mind of her own to stretch out her hand and leave it there long enough for the shutter to click? We tried everything.That's not it.Mad tried to help, too. (Yes, Corey's hand is bleeding because in the fracas he re-opened a wound from earlier in the day.)At times, we got close to the elusive shot.

Eventually it became clear that the shoot was over.

This really was the last night that we could get it done, so I sadly put down the camera (okay, I was sort of giggling about that last shot) and walked away. Maybe next year I'll be able to make it work. I mean, really, how hard could it be? Mad'll be 20 months old by then. She'll cooperate, right?
Quit laughing, would ya?
Anyway, about a week later, I was looking through what we'd done and chuckling to myself about how it had gone. There was a small feeling of regret that we weren't able to make this happen. And then I saw it...

May the spirit of the season bring your family together.