Gender drama

So we're having a baby boy, but we decided that we weren't going to tell
anyone but family what the gender is because we don't want a bunch of pink
or blue things. We'd rather people buy us neutral things.

An example of the kind of idiocy that we're trying to avoid:
I was showing my mother-in-law the crib that we'd picked out before we'd
learned the gender. The picture was of the model we'd chosen in a white
finish.
"Oh, a white finish?" she said, "you know if you have a boy, he's not
going to like that white."
I was baffled, "Why wouldn't a boy like a white finish?" The only
explanation I got was "it just looks girly". Ooookay.
"So what if I was really looking at this natural oak finish?" I asked.
"Well, you know a girl won't like wood finish."
!!!!! WHY WOULDN'T A GIRL LIKE WOOD FINISH?!?!?!?!

This whole conversation just made no sense to me, but people have some wacky
ideas about gender, gender roles, and the 'genderization' of infants. I've
come to the conclusion that although it confuses the heck out of me why
people have such strong opinions on the matter, that this is just the way
that it is. So the best way to avoid having to confront people's strange
gender ideas is to not tell them the gender. So there!
Of course, if you go around telling people that you're not finding out
the gender, then that opens you up to a whole different variety of
criticism, so my husband and I decided to essentially lie to our friends and
tell them that we tried to find out the gender, but the baby just wasn't in
a good position and we weren't able to tell.
Unfortunately, I neglected to specifically instruct my mother not to go
around telling non-family members what the gender of the baby was going to
be, so she told her obnoxious friend and of course that obnoxious friend
went and blabbed all over my facebook wall about not being able to wait to
meet my "little man". Grrr. I deleted the post and sent her a short
message (I was late getting back to my desk from lunch and was typing on my
phone) to please watch what she says on Facebook because we weren't publicly
announcing the gender of the baby. If she would have bothered to read any of
my recent statuses, she would have seen that we "didn't know" what the
gender was and that might have given her pause, but I found the comment
quickly and deleted I hope before anyone could see. She wasn't told not to
tell, so I really couldn't blame her or my mom. It was my oversight that
cause the issue in the first place.
I called my mom and left her a voicemail that I goofed up and forgot to
tell her not to tell everyone and their mother that we were having a boy.
She called me back and said she understood why we'd want to do it that way
and that was that...so I thought.
A bit later in the day, I got a call on my phone from my mom's friend.
I was working, so I let it go to voicemail figuring she'd just want to
apologize anyway. Boy was I ever wrong! She left me a long, hateful
voicemail about how I was being rude to her and that she was unfriending me
immediately. Apparently, the main source of injury was that my message to
her was so short and brusk. Sigh. I don't even think I'm going to call her
back to try to explain that I was in a hurry and typing on my phone which is
difficult and that it wasn't really her fault. She's emotionally unstable
and this is not the first round of drama she's brought into my life
unnecessarily, so I'm thinking I'm just going to have to let her go. I know
she'll probably hound my mother about how unfair I was to her, but if mom
doesn't want to deal with people who bring the drama, then it's her
responsibility to cut ties.
I'm in a good place in my life. My marriage is good, I have good
friends (that I really should make more time for), our finances are stable
and life is pretty stress-free. Of course a lot of the reason that life is
stress free is because I consciously made an effort to eliminate the people
and habits in my life that were the sources of my stress. So yeah. Each
person has to determine what level of drama they're willing to live with.
Some people like it. Some thrive off of it. Some go through a drama phase.
It's just not for me.
So hopefully nobody was checking their facebook feed today midday. And
if they did, maybe I'll just play it off by saying "well, everyone has their
guesses".

****

It's a...BOY!

Well, things have been very uneventful until today. My belly is getting
pretty big now, which is a big laugh for everyone. My neighbor who is due a
week before me still isn't really showing all that much. She's having a
boy, and we found out this morning that we're having a boy, too!!!

We got to see him moving around a lot and kicking. He was feet down and my
placenta is in the front, apparently. Everything looked great, though they
said the baby was a tad large (in the 65% for size, whatever that means.
Larger than 65% of all other babies at that gestational age??) In any
event, the ultrasound tech estimated the due date at August 25th, but the
midwife said we'll keep the official date at September 1st and assume he's a
bit large. Also, I've gained 6 pounds, right on target.

Next month we start our birthing classes and will also have a cloth
diapering class with a local diaper service vendor which should be really
informative. I'm looking forward to both.

Everyone is really excited to have another boy in the family. My mom said I
am "ruining the tribe of girls" since our side of the family is all women.
My husband's troupe is all men, though, so I suppose it all balances out. I
told my husband that the decision about circumcision is all up to him since
he's the family's resident penis expert. He's leaning towards not having
him circumcised and I'm all for it. My only two cons to not circumcising is
if he asks at some point why his parts don't look like daddy's parts and the
advantage of not contracting sexually transmitted diseases as easily. But
then if our son decides to be circumcised later in life, he always has that
option.

We celebrated our second anniversary this weekend by going out of town
overnight and eating at a fancy French restaurant in Cincinnati. Then we
hit up the museum to see a special exhibit on Pompeii, which was very cool,
but I get worn out a bit faster than normal when there is a lot of walking
to do. Also, the hard hotel mattress tried to murder me in my sleep! I
woke up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and my hips hurt so
badly I almost had to crawl. My legs were weak all day, so we headed home
in the early afternoon instead of staying out until evening. I've taken to
tucking an extra pillow between my knees at home and this seems to help me
wake up with less back pain. My snoring hasn't let up any (womp womp). I
still haven't started walking more, which I really, really should do. On
Monday, our actual anniversary, I came home from work to a lovely bouquet in
my favorite colors.

A lady at work gave me a bunch of maternity shirts in my size. I'm thrilled
to have them. I have one pair of dedicated maternity pants, about three
pairs of goucho pants that are stretchy enough to serve me well, and then I
have two pairs of stretchy slacks that are also wearable. I also have a lot
of skirts with elastic waistbands, but I've been preferring pants so far.

We haven't made any progress on the nursery...sigh. We'll have to get on
that when we have a free weekend. I did buy new blinds, though.

****

Update!

I am starving ALL the time!

In other news, my husband is concerned and annoyed that I've started to be a full-time snorer.  I would sometimes snore before getting pregnant, but now he says it's out of control and he's been sleeping on his on-call bed in the office.  Womp womp.  I e-mailed my midwife and she got right back to me (she's awesome) and told me to try the Breathe Right strips.  She uses them and said that they don't stop her snoring completely, but they make it much less noisy.  I picked up a pack and was surprised by the cost - $15 for a month's supply - but I suppose it's worth it if it saved my husband's sanity.

The awful acne that I've had is started to let up a bit.  My belly is just huge already!  I've stocked up on some maternity tops and I have a few good skirts, dresses and pants that will likely see me through.  I'm a size 20, so I already have a lot of pants and skirts that are stretchy and comfy.  But my shirts were all too short, so I went out to Motherhood Maternity and stocked up off of the clearance rack.  I got several shirts for $10 and $12, and spent only $20 on the most expensive one.

I can feel the baby fluttering around all the time now.  And tonight is the first night that I've had any sort of heartburn.  It's mild, but I'm really hoping it won't start to be a nightly occurrence.  I HATE heartburn.

I've been trying to ride my bike for exercise, but I'm so terrible about not getting enough physical activity.  We have a membership to The Y and we hardly ever go.  Maybe once in a month, if that.  So I'm going to try to be better at that.  I also need to do some of the exercises that my midwife gave me to help with my lower back pain.  Sweeping the floors and folding laundry put a hurting on me today!

Stocking up

My cubicle neighbor from work sold me a car seat, two bases and a stroller for about half of what I was going to pay to buy almost the exact same system new.  Sweet!  The set is black and gray, which matches the car interior fine, so hopefully people won't be looking at the car seat for gender cues.  We're bound to have some confused people, though, because I don't plan on dressing the baby in anything too gender specific.  Because really, the baby doesn't care if it's in a pink onesie or a blue onesie.

I ordered a bunch of Burt's Bees belly balm online and it finally came.  I like the oil and butter, but the balm is kind of weird.  It's too solid which makes it hard to apply.  But it smells divine!

Tonight, I was leaving straight from work to meet my husband at a meet and greet for the candidates for Congress in our upcoming primary.  I don't wear makeup usually and had put on a sweater this morning that I knew wasn't really big enough to cover my rapidly expanding belly.  I felt so frumpy and awful that I had to stop at Target and buy a shirt to wear just to boost my confidence a little.   I thought I'd scored a good deal when I found an XXL on the sale rack for under $10.  I was in a rush, so I didn't try it on.  It fit, but it won't fit for long.  I mean, really, how idiotic is it to not make maternity wear out of something stretchy?!

Nursery Wall Melt Down

So, I've thought and thought and though about what to do with the nursery.  Right now our second bedroom is a catch all room that is a jumble of tools and remnants of old home improvement projects.  We're working on cleaning it out and I wanted to go buy paint this weekend.  At first, since the room is already bright yellow (I didn't do that, it was that way when we moved in) I was just going to paint some little bees on the wall and go with a bee theme since it's gender neutral and I kind of like that small room having bright paint.  Well, my husband is a SCUBA diver, so he really wanted to do a coral reef theme.  He rarely gets his way when it comes to decorating the house and I thought it was awesome that he'd even put the effort forth to come up with an idea since his approach to starting a family had been avoidance of the subject for the first years of our marriage and he still carries some of that attitude with him (though now I think he avoids the subject because it stresses him out to think about fatherhood.)  So I said, great, coral reef, done.  I'm a graphic designer, so I started doing some visual reference searches and came up with an idea to have a nice blue on blue silhouette mural.  I didn't want to do anything full color because not only is that a lot of effort to hand paint, I just don't like having to much of a jumble of color.  I made a mock up of what I was thinking and e-mailed it over to him for his approval (yeah, that's how we roll).  We get up early and drive to the hardware store and we walk in and I'm going to pick out some blues and he's like "we'll need some red and black and green, or should we just use acrylics?"  I'm like, what?!  Didn't you look at the mock up I sent you?  He was confused because he thought since I said it was a mock up, that I would be filling in the silhouettes of the fish with full color illustration.  I'm like ARE YOU CRAZY?!  Do you have any idea how long that will take???

Let me just say here that I haven't had any real emotional outbursts during my pregnancy.  I get cranky when I'm hungry, but that's easily solved.  I haven't gone on crazy crying jags or just flipped my lid for no reason.  I have gotten unnecessarily livid at work in response to an e-mail from a coworker that was really no big deal, but I realized it was probably hormones and let myself cool down before replying.  So when I say I freaked out in the hardware store, I mean, I really freaked out.  I was like yelling at my husband about how much time and effort I'd put into this, and I'm the designer in the family so that makes me the authority on what looks good and he should just suck it up because his idea was stupid and would look horrible while my idea was informed by hours of research into current trends.  And, really, we're talking probably about 20 hours of searching out source material, compiling some artwork resources and drawing a mockup - the same approach I take with all of my work, so I didn't take wasting that amount of time lightly.  We ended up having to go out into the parking lot and continuing our argument in the car where I pretty much melted down into a crying puddle.  Eventually, we decided that we would ditch the coral reef idea since we were obviously on two completely different pages and go to the bookstore to look through children's books to get another idea.

We considered Pooh bear (my husband is a big fan of Tigger), Peter Rabbit, Dr. Seuss' "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" and a few other ideas.  I don't really like over-exposure to branding, so we were about to settle on hot air balloons when we spotted a display that had an Angry Birds game on it.  He was obsessed with that game for a few weeks last year and then his mother and I played it all night one night while the guys worked out in the woodshop at his parents' house.  Anyway, we were like, hmmmm....Angry Birds nursery?

And so that's what it will be.  We went back to the hardware store and got some paint for the background, searched the web for a few images to base the wall mural on and will start painting one of these days when it's warm enough to open the windows.  I'm really glad we were able to come to a compromise and I'm a little embarrassed about how I freaked out about something so silly IN PUBLIC (which we never do.  If we have disagreements, we always work them out in private).

Must have popcorn

I ordered a book and some flash cards on how to teach your infant to sign.
Some friends of mine taught their little girl how to sign and it was very
helpful for them to know what the baby wanted before she was able to tell
them what was wrong and why she was crying. She's getting ready to go to
school later this year, and she's just a dream when we babysit for them.
She gets bored with us because we didn't have any fun projects lined up for
her to do, but she's just so smart and well-spoken. So, hopefully, this kit
will help us out when our little one arrives.

In other news, I'm craving potato chips and particular brand of spicy
popcorn. I think I'm going to have to stop at the store on the way home and
pick up a back of that popcorn or I'll die!

My godmother thinks it will be a boy. She didn't break out her tarot cards
or anything, but she's got good intuition. (Yeah, my family are pretty much
a bunch of hippies.)

****

palpitations

Woah! I just had a few heart palpitations. Crazy. I googled it and
apparently it's just one of those things that happens (like passing out)
during pregnancy and is nothing to worry about. Still, though, what a weird
sensation.

****