Birth Plan

This December finds me wrapping presents, roasting a leg of lamb, and preparing for the birth of my first son, who was conceived not-so-immaculately in Bethlehem over Easter. I started thinking about Mary a lot while I was there, and my connection with her has grown over the past nine months to a level that's probably inappropriate for a protestant.

Friends are starting to ask me whether I'm nervous about the birth, and I am. I've never done anything like it before. For as much as I've read and learned and asked, I can't know what to expect. What I really want is for everything to go according to my plan. So much of life is learning to roll with the punches and adapt and make new plans... but I want to wake up with some mild contractions on a morning when my house is clean. I do not want to be the fifth person in 30 years who my midwife has to call back-up for due to a birth already in progress. I want to labor for about eight hours, and I want to deliver my baby at home and hear him cry in no more than three seconds. I would prefer that all of this happen on either December 28 (for the tax benefit), January 1 (for the 1/1/11 birthday), or January 9 (exactly one week past my due date, giving me a week to relax without work or school).

I wonder if Mary had a birth plan, or a set of ridiculously specific expectations, like I do. If she did, I can't imagine it included going out of town at nine months pregnant. It also probably didn't include barn animals. But she had the same promise I have, the same promise you have, which is that no matter what happens or how different things are from expected, God is with us. It's a promise that He fulfilled through a birth some two millenia ago.

He's Here!
The Nativity, from Luke 1 -2
By Sally Lloyd Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible

Everything was ready. The moment God had been waiting for was here at last! God was coming to help his people, just as he had promised in the beginning. But how would he come? What would he be like? What would he do?

Mountains would have bowed down. Seas would have roared. Trees would have clapped their hands. But the earth held its breath. As silent as snow falling, he came in. And when no one was looking, the darkness, he came.

There was a young girl who was engaged to a man named Joseph. (Joseph was the great-great-great-great grandson of King David.) One morning, this girl was minding her own business when, suddenly, a great warrior of light appeared -- right there, in her bedroom. He was Gabriel and he was an angel, a special messenger from heaven.

When she saw the tall shining man standing there, Mary was frightened. "You don't have to be scared," Gabriel said. "God is very happy with you!" Mary looked around to see if perhaps he was talking to someone else.

"Mary," Gabriel said, and he laughed such gladness that Mary's eyes filled with sudden tears.

"Mary, you're going to have a baby. A little boy. You will call him Jesus. He is God's own Son. He's the One! He's the Rescuer!" The God who flung planets into space and kept the whirling around and around, the God who could do anything at all -- was making himself small. And coming down... as a baby.

Wait. God was sending a baby to rescue the world?

"But it's too wonderful!" Mary said and felt her heart beating hard. "How can it be true?"

"Is there anything too wonderful for God?" Gabriel asked.

So Mary trusted God more than what her eyes could see. And she believed. "I am God's servant," she said. "Whatever God says, I will do." Sure enough, it was just as the angel had said. Nine months later, Mary was almost ready to have her baby.

Now, Mary and Joesph had to make a trip to Bethlehem, the town King David was from. But when they reached the little town, the found that every room was full. Every bed was taken. "Go away!" the innkeepers told them. "There isn't any place for you."

Where would they stay? Soon Mary's baby would come. They couldn't find anywhere except an old, tumbledown stable. So they stayed where the cows and donkeys and the horses stayed.

And there, in the stable, amongst the chickens and the donkeys and the cows, in the quiet of the night, God gave the world his wonderful gift. The baby that would change the world was born. His baby Son.

Mary and Joseph wrapped him up to keep him warm. They made a soft bed of straw and used the animals' feeding trough as his cradle. And they gazed in wonder at God's Great Gift, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in a manger.

Mary and Joseph named him Jesus, "Emmanuel" -- which means "God has come to live with us."

Because, of course, he had.

elephant wannabe

I have always known that I wanted to have a baby. What I didn't expect was how much I was going to love being pregnant. I don't know why -- my mom always had great pregnancies, and most of my friends seemed to enjoy pregnancy, too. I think I listened to the worst of everyone's experiences, watched a few too many sitcoms, and assumed that my pregnancy would be a compilation of all of it. I figured I would be crabby, emotional and irrational all the time... but according to Pete, I have been "more emotionally stable" than my non-pregnant self. (Okay, there were a couple meltdowns, but they were few and far between.) I thought I would look down from my positive pregnancy test and see stretch marks, but I'm almost eight months along and still in the clear. I thought my skin would explode into a pimplish frenzy, but my skin actually improved. I thought I would be exhausted all the time, but... well, yes. I've been exhausted all the time. That's par for the Joy course, though. And pregnancy is a terrific excuse for a nap.
The first time I talked with my midwife I was about twelve weeks along, and she said something that stuck with me. She said, "You're going to love pregnancy. The first one especially is just magical. But eventually the time will come when you'll have to let go of pregnancy and do the work of giving birth." Yesterday at my appointment I told her that I really hadn't believed her at the time. I said, "I'm still banking on the idea that something in these last few weeks will make me want to get this thing out of me, even if it means labor and then months of sleepless nights."

She said, "Well, even though you will probably get uncomfortable in the final days, you may never have that 'get this thing out of me' feeling. But here's the carrot I'll dangle in front of you: For as much as you love being pregnant, you are going to love this next part. You're going to love interacting with your baby and seeing him grow. You're going to love breastfeeding. You're going to love motherhood." (Yolanda has a way of making me feel better about stuff. I hope her calming effect works during birth, too.)

So here I am in the final weeks, and even if this is supposed to feel like the longest part, the holidays will probably whisk them away faster than I can ask, "Pete, will you rub my shoulders?" (Even if you have a very comfortable pregnancy, you should definitely take advantage of nine months of unlimited backrubs.) The pregnancy and labor books next to my bed are slowly being replaced with breastfeeding and baby care books, I'm stocking my pantry, freezing meals and washing baby clothes. Also, I'm trying to imagine that motherhood may be as enjoyable and exciting as these last few months have been.

* Photos are by Beth Laurren Photography, except for the last one. :)

STOP MAKING ME UGLY!

Today I spent roughly twenty minutes accusing Pete of making me ugly. This happens every two weeks when we take my baby bump picture. I look in the mirror, and I'm not ugly; I look at Pete's picture of me, and I am ugly. So it stands to reason that it is his fault.

Sometimes he makes me look like I forgot to apply makeup or do my hair:

Sometimes he forgets to move the camera strap:

Sometimes he makes me look pasty and crazy:



And sometimes he gets bored and forgets which bump he's supposed to be documenting:

But every now and then, he stops making me ugly and lets me be a cute pregnant lady:



(23 weeks, baby!)

Our Firstborn Shall be a Son

If there were any part of Pete that wanted to wait until the birth to find out the sex of our child, I beat it out of him with my bare powers of annoyance.

"What do you think it is, a boy or a girl?" I would ask at various times during the day. (Pete never claimed to have any intuition about the sex of our baby, which bothered me to no end. Once I pointed out that he should have intuition, since he was the one who determined the sex. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I wasn't really paying attention at the time.") He wouldn't ever answer my question, so I would follow it up by asking, "Do you think it's a boy?" to which he would nod in response.

"Really?"

He would shake his head.

"So you think it's a girl?"

He would nod.

"But you just indicated that you think it's a boy."

And so on. We repeated this exchange no less than three times a day for fifteen weeks, and then scheduled our ultrasound for the very first day that they allowed us to schedule it. I devised a brilliant scheme: the ultrasound tech would put the "results" in a sealed envelope for us to open with Pete's family at the reunion in Lake Geneva that same day.

The ultrasound went really well, but no sooner had we walked out of the office when I noticed a big, obnoxious, telling grin beaming from Pete's face.

"YOU KNOW!" I said, shaking the envelope in my hand. "HOW DO YOU KNOW?"

He shrugged.

"Did you see something on the screen?"

He shrugged.

"You don't know."

Shrug.

"HOW DO YOU KNOW?!"

In the end, the joke was on Pete, because the "female" that he saw on the screen referred to ME. He spent all afternoon imagining life with a daughter -- pink, dolls, pigtails, a wedding aisle -- and then we pulled "It's a Boy!" out of the envelope and he about fell over. It was an emotionally taxing day for Pete, followed by an emotionally taxing weekend for me, as the tech's office was closed and I couldn't call to ask why Pete had seen "female" on the screen. We sorted it all out by Tuesday.

So it's a boy! I knew it all along, anyways, and here's why: I have always been a boy magnet. Baby brothers flocked to me, one at a time, four in a row. Just look at the chubby-cheeked baby boy perfection I was surrounded with:



See what I'm saying? It only makes sense that a boy magnet would also be a boy-making machine. Our firstborn shall be a son, and judging by the boy-genes I have been bestowed, he's gunna be a cute one.

So bring on the blue stripes, miniature sailor outfits, and the quarter-sized sports equipment; bring on the trucks, the cars, the Thomas the Tank Engine and all of his friends; bring on the guns made out of everything including lunch items, the pitch-perfect machine gun noises that I still can't make, and the spit-infused sound effects to elaborate hot wheel crashes. Ask or tell me anything about your penis, little boy, and I'll respond without a blink... although I may spend a few minutes laughing into a pillow behind a closed door. If you look embarrassed about your underpants (and I know that look well), I'll look away until you get into the tub. My cabinets will always have a sufficient amount of Band Aids and peroxide, and my feelings won't be hurt when you lurch out my arms when daddy gets home. You know why? Because I am a pro at this. I got this one. You are one lucky little boy, and I already already feel like the luckiest mom in the world.

Quickening

It has only been in the last 194 years that women have been able to hear their baby's heartbeat, and only in the last 52 years have women been able to see their unborn child on a screen. (The stethoscope was invented in 1816 and ultrasound technology was approved for screening pregnant women in 1957.) But all women of all time -- Eve, Sarah, Hannah, Mary, Catherine the Great, Lucille Ball, my mom, your mom, and so on -- have been able to feel their babies move inside them. Perhaps for that reason alone, the little nudges and movements I've felt in these last few weeks have been the most amazing experience of my pregnancy thus far.

.

Three weeks ago I was sitting on my couch next to Pete when I felt an unfamiliar pang in my stomach. "I think the baby just moved!" I said, and then I held very still. "I felt it again!" I said, and Pete paused our movie.

.

"Sweet!" he said. "I felt it a few days ago when I hugged you, though, so it's not the first time."

.

"For the last time, you did not feel the baby move," I said. "It is impossible for you to feel it before I do."

.

"Why? I told you you were pregnant before you knew."

.

"I know, and you don't get to take this one away from me," I pouted. "I get to feel it first. Next thing I know you'll be in labor before I am."

.

"No thanks." He visibly quivered at the idea. "So what does it feel like?"

.

I sat very still again and waited until I felt it. "It feels... not like I thought it would. One of my books said it would feel like bursting bubbles or 'darting minnows,' and my midwife said it would feel like a faint nudge of a fingertip. This feels like... actually, it kind of hurts."

.

It was gas. You would think I would know what gas feels like, but I'm a lady, so I don't really get gas. Pete, if you're reading this, shut up.

.

A few days later, it was unmistakable -- a gentle little flop and then a tap on something deep inside me. I giggled and pressed on my stomach; I called Pete over to see if he could feel it, which he couldn't. (It looks like he won't be laboring for me, after all.) For the next two weeks I announced every time I felt the baby moving -- about three or four times a day -- and then I grabbed Pete's hand and pressed it on my tummy.

.

"Feel that?" I'd ask. He would shake his head. "How about that?" No. "You had to feel that one, come one." Uh uh. Once he said, "Well, I feel something... really faint... wait, nope, that's my heartbeat pulsating in my fingers." I made him pause computer games and flight simulators to feel my stomach. I woke him up from a nap once, which was a bad idea.

.

Last night we were drifting asleep when I felt the baby and knew -- just knew -- that it was strong enough for Pete to feel. He was nearly asleep and I didn't want to wake him up, but I had to. "Pete? Pete, wake up, I know you could feel this." He mumbled something and I took his hand, pressed it against my stomach, and waited. The baby jumped and Pete's eyes flew open. "I felt it! Wow, that was a big one!" He waited a little more and felt another kick. It was a milestone, a triumph, and even though he was probably too sleepy to remember it, I always will.

.

In her book Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering, Sarah Buckley references a study on maternal bonding with unborn babies. The study concluded that women who have ultrasounds report higher levels of bonding with their unborn child compared to women who do not have ultrasounds, but only before they feel movement. After quickening, technology makes no difference in how bonded a woman feels towards her baby. Even though I'm looking forward to my 21 week ultrasound tomorrow, and even though I have a recording of my baby's heartbeat set as my ring tone, I treasure these movements as the most pure connection that I have with the life inside of me.

"Are you going to find out?"

Until I got pregnant, I wasn't aware that all pregnant couples belong to one of two camps: The Waiters and the Finder-Outers. The lines are clearly drawn, and while both sides are prepared with a mini pitch, the Waiters will always win on account of passion.

"DON'T DOOOOOOO IT," they wail, as if they just found you on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge.

"But there are so few surprises in life," they implore sadly.

"The not knowing really strengthens you in those last few pushes," mothers reason. Then they add with a loud whisper, "And you get better stuff at the shower if your guests don't know what you're having."

But my all time favorite response came courtesy of our friend Mike. No one else ever put it quite this way, although the sentiment underscores the entire Waiters' case. "You'll ruin it," he said. "You'll just ruin it."

By the sly look on his face when he said it, he obviously knew that it would get to my head. Will I ruin it if I find out? I wondered. Would the knowledge of this baby's gender remove all of the mystery of life, leaving me with a dim, mundane existence? Would my shower guests buy me enough 0-3 month dresses for a flock of baby girls, but no thermometer? Was I going to run out of steam during labor, throw up my arms and say, "Well, I know it's a boy. No sense in pushing it out now," and then die in labor with my baby boy (as expected) stuck in the birth canal? My death would be (regrettably) no surprise to the Waiters, who had predicted this scenario, and they would talk about it the way you might discuss the death of a drunk race car driver. She found out, they would murmur to one another at my wake, their voices full of pity and condemnation.

Well, probably not.

My camp of Finder Outers isn't very passionate, and we're unified only by our impatience or our nerdy urge to "plan ahead" with appropriate colors. But, on behalf of all the peeking parents out there, I would like to offer my response.

First: Which surprise-filled reality are we comparing this this one to that deems life lacking in surprises? I for one am surprised on a daily basis. Sometimes Pete walks up behind me without my knowing and touches my shoulder and I spit my water all over the keyboard while falling out of my chair. Just today a dog ran into the street and I almost got in an accident. Occasionally I get a call from Family Video and am surprised to remember that I never returned that movie that we never watched, resulting in over $15 of fines. Some mornings I wake up with an enormous pimple that I didn't even feel coming.

Okay, so those are all bad surprises, but I'm sure there are plenty of good ones, too.

Second: Finding out doesn't take away the surprise, it just shifts the surprise to a different point in time. I can see why it would be fun to find out at the moment of birth, but personally I like the idea of spreading out the fun. We're going to have the ultrasound tech put the "results" in a sealed envelope, then we're driving to a family reunion and opening the envelope over dinner. This should provide at least twenty minutes of excitement, followed by months of anticipation and calls from my mother-in-law saying, "I saw an infant train conductor outfit today and couldn't resist!" At birth you have the excitement over the gender mixed in with the exhaustion and the rush of birth, followed by months of green and yellow onsies.

But ultimately, it's up to each person or each couple, and I say more power to the Waiters. I for one can hardly wait the 15 remaining days until my ultrasound. I think I'll set the envelope on the dashboard and stare at it during the entire drive to Wisconsin, just to tantalize myself with the surprise.

(I forgot to mention a third camp of couples: The Finder-Outers-Who-Make-Everyone-Else-Wait. Though they may have pure intentions, this group always comes off a little smug. Their mantra is, "We just want to keep something for ourselves." I never really know how to respond to that. Is an apology in order? "I'm so sorry that we the people have taken away so much from your pregnancy. I'm glad you are reserving some of it just for yourself." (?) Please, if you are going to find out but not tell anyone, don't tell people that you are finding out but not telling them.Find an appropriate way to dodge the question, and dodge it, lest I buy you lots of toys and stuffed animals that aren't on your registry just to make you angry.)

Just a spoonful of crazy helps the hormones go down

Yesterday I had my first official hormonal pregnancy breakdown. It went something like this:

Pete was in the living room as I was looking through pictures of fetal development. I found an amazing, high-tech, biology-book worthy photograph of a baby at our stage of development, and marveled at it. I look at these pictures every other week or so, and so much happens in that amount of time that it amazes me.

I set the photo as our desktop background (replacing a glamor shot of an airplane flying over water) just as Pete walked into the office. I said, "Pete, look at this amazing picture. Can you believe that's how developed our baby is right now?" He looked at it and said,

"Ugh. That looks like a dead baby. And please don't change my desktop background."

(Okay, now that I'm writing this, I'm starting to think that my following reaction was completely justified. Well, almost.)

Feeling a rare sort of rage creeping up from my toes to my chest, I silently stood up and walked to the dining room, where I began rearranging piles of magazines on the table. I do this when I'm upset -- I pretend to clean things. Pete has forbidden me from pretending to clean the kitchen when I'm angry because he often has to play interference, catching plates and glasses that I accidentally drop.

Pete followed me into the dining room and said, "Okay, you're upset. Tell me why."

I took one of the magazines off its new pile, walked silently to the living room, sat on the couch, and pretended to read.

"Okay, you are very upset. Tell me why."

Since I was pretending, I decided to pretend that I was an adult and, rather than act out on the anger I was feeling, ask questions to understand where Pete had been coming from and why he had such a morbid reaction to a beautiful picture. I opened my mouth, took a deep, calming breath, and burst into tears. "What is WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?!?!" was my first resolution-seeking inquiry.

Pete took a step back. "Okay, now you're unreasonably upset. Go ahead."

"I am NOT being UNREASONABLE," I informed him, wiping snot from my nose and attempting to focus my eyes. The rage had reached my head now.

"Joy, it isn't a picture of our baby. And why do you look so crazy? You've been so good throughout this whole pregnancy... even more emotionally stable than when you're not pregnant. Where is this coming from?"

I stopped blubbering and snotting and coughing and eye-darting as he finished his sentence. This is what shock feels like, I thought. I gripped my magazine. "I want to throw this magazine at you," I said. "I want to THROW IT AT YOU but it wouldn't HURT ENOUGH!!!! More emotionally stable than when I'm not pregnant?!"

He started laughing. Laughing. He probably wouldn't have done so if there were any sharp utensils lying around, but since all I had was my magazine, he laughed at me. "Yes, you've been very stable. I hear all these stories about crazy pregnant women, and I thought, 'Holy cow, Joy's going to be a trip.' But you've been great! And I'm just saying, let's not go down this road here. Let's just go back to Super Pregnant Joy."

By now I was sobbing and hyperventilating again. "So because I'm pregnant, my feelings don't matter right now," I wailed. "And I suppose when I'm you know, uh, SCREABING [that was supposed to be screaming, but snot was in the way] in LABOR, you'll just tell me to, I don't know, walk it off or something."

He hiccuped a little trying to suppress his laughs.

"And for another thing," I said, "It's not your desktop. It's OUR desktop."

"What are you talking about?" He looked bewildered. "What about the desktop?"

"YousaidthatIshouldn'treplacepicturesonYOURdesktop," I blubbered, the sobs rising and rising. "Butit'smydesktoptoo,weShareit!!!"

"Joy! Just tell me why you're so upset."

He waited until my eyes stopped darting around my head, until my sobs settled into a slight sniff, until some of the anger seeped out of my ears and the ends of my toes.

"I was excited over what I think is an amazing picture," I said. "I didn't care what you thought about the picture, but I wanted you to be amazed at how developed our baby was. I wanted you to say things like, 'Look at its fingers! Look at its nose!' And you should have figured out that it was important to me, because I had made it the background photo and I called you over to look at it. And finally, you should never say, 'dead baby.'"

Pete nodded. "Okay, I understand now. And you understand that I did not intend to hurt you or to say anything bad about our baby. I love our baby. Our baby is great. That wasn't our baby. Whatever I said about the picture probably came from a place of ignorance. I don't know how they take those pictures, okay? I know now that it was really a live baby, and that white ghostly stuff was... I don't know... the placenta? You're laughing now because I said that was the placenta, so see? I'm ignorant. And I'm not going to tell you to 'walk off' the labor pains. And it is our computer, not my computer, you're right."

"Just.... stop talking," I said. "And we'll be find." [That was supposed to be fine, but there was some leftover snot in the way.]