Category Archives: The Girl

General Update

Last Saturday my husband made his stage debut as the bassist of the band known as Invisible, now in their seventh year, and the show was wonderful. I am terribly, terribly proud of him, and of all the guys. It was also really nice to get out and actually see people for the first time since early February.

Today I had my second let’s-keep-an-eye-on-your-body-for-signs-of-premature-labour ultrasound. It demonstrated that yay, my body is carrying on with the Stupendous Work it is doing in not showing signs of premature labour this time around: everything is perfectly normal. Go body! I have awesome BP, great results from my last blood test and the glucose challenge, and everything of that sort.

What is concerning my doctor is that the Owlet is very small. She’s about three weeks behind where they’d like her to be measurement-wise, and weighs about a kilo at 29 weeks, which means that out of 100 kids at this gestational age she’d only be 13th from the bottom. (If you’re wondering, the boy weighed 3lbs14oz at 31 weeks, which is also on the lower end for that point of gestational age, apparently, so I am not overly concerned about this.) My doctor is taking the facts that (a) it is a girl and (b) I am very petite into account, but even so, she’s not entirely sanguine. So my care has been transferred from the regular OB clinic to the high-risk clinic in the hospital, where they can evaluate me with machines and ultrasounds every two weeks to track the baby’s weight.

As a result of this weight issue, I have finally been officially put on what my doctor describes as Light Bed Rest. This is not the “eek things are scary” kind of bed rest, as nothing has changed from yesterday, or last week, or my last appointment two weeks ago. I am not in imminent danger of preterm labour. It’s just that if it should happen for some reason, a low birthweight baby has a worse chance of survival, and my doctor’s not taking any chances. She’d have put me on bed rest three months ago if I worked outside the home, but I don’t so she didn’t, and my work situation hasn’t altered. She has formally told me to avoid any activity that is stressful, or entails me travelling a lot in a day, or being on my feet for extended periods. I can continue to do quiet sedentary stuff like my freelance work; it’s just that instead of working at my desk in my home office I get to do it on a laptop from the couch, which is simply a step down from how we’ve been handling it all along because I already reduced physical activity three months ago at her recommendation. Now I have to avoid things like grocery shopping, and unfortunately it also means that presenting my keynote address at the Gaia conference this weekend is off the menu. You should have seen my doctor’s face when I ran that past her this morning. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” she said dryly, which was essentially very polite shorthand for, “Am I going to have to call your husband and tell him to lock you up on Saturday?”

If there was such a term as Further Reduced Activity, that’s what I’ll be doing; it’s the next step down from the Reduced Activity in which I have already been engaged. Because hey, yay me, I’ve been keeping my body from slipping into preterm labour signs, did I mention that? Huge victory there, and my doctor is very, very pleased about how I’ve been handling that. And the Light Bed Rest thing is going to be reevaluated every two weeks, although in all likelihood this is the way it’s going to be till the Owlet is born.

So there you have it. Everything is going very well, and staying even more quiet than I have been will help keep it that way. We just need to fatten the Owlet up a bit. HRH is writing me a prescription for More Ice Cream, which I think is an excellent idea.

An Aside

The boy put his ear to my belly yesterday and said, “She says she wants to come out now.”

NO SHE DOESN’T. This is not a one-upmanship thing, where my children compete to see who can be born the earliest. I forbid it. 28 weeks is NOT ON. She’s in there till at least 36 weeks or she’s grounded forever.

Mother’s Day Roundup And Other Mothery Stuff

This morning the boy picked up his bow and bowed his fingering exercise. He’d been playing it pizzicato till now, saying that no no no, the bow would be too hard. Today he decided to do it all on his own. I am learning so much about the way he learns by working through his practices with him. And we share experiences, too, like today when we were talking about pivots to cross strings, and he said, “I kept my right wrist really, really still Mama.” I agreed, and said, “You know how your teacher said grown-up cellists still have problems with not moving their bow hand wrists and letting their right elbows direct the movement instead? Mama still has lots and lots of trouble with that.” (Mama was also taught to use her wrist and keep it loose in order to economize energy, as was our current teacher, so we’re both working on remembering otherwise; you can see how teaching and playing styles change over the years.) “Really?” he said. “I won’t! When I grow up, I won’t move my wrist at all!”

I love that we share this together. I love that I can hear him humming bits of my recital pieces when I work on them, both during my lesson and when I practice at home, and even at random times when he’s building with Lego or playing with action figures. I love that he’ll play an exercise for me without announcing it and then ask me impishly if I can identify it, and he’s so chuffed when I do. He counts his practice stickers every morning before putting another one on, and it looks like we may hit 100 right around recital time (very exciting!).

He was so excited about Mother’s Day that I got my school artwork on Thursday when he brought it home, a construction paper daffodil and two heart-shaped cards. I was awoken on Saturday morning at 5:45 by a gentle pat and a whispered “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” because he couldn’t wait for that, either. On Sunday morning at 7:00 I got another drawing of a heart, and then a silver tray with a cup of tea and a small bouquet of tulips and daffodils from the garden. We’d invited HRH’s parents over for lunch, so I made that lovely cinnamon loaf and a quiche, and my mother-in-law contributed salad and crudités, and fruit to go with the cinnamon loaf for dessert. The food was all lovely, and we sat outside afterwards as the weather was spectacular. I managed to get sun, as the freckles testify. HRH and his dad (who is looking really, really fantastic and recovering well from his bout of very bad health) got to wander around upstairs and bounce ideas for finishing the attic off one another, and ended up on a recon mission to the Home Depot three blocks down that resulted in two perfect windows being brought home, much to everyone’s surprise.

Monday was a ped day. What? You say you thought the boy just had several? So did we. It was marked as conditional on the school calendar, which I didn’t check till this weekend, and I didn’t get an announcement or confirmation from the school beforehand so I went ahead and assumed it was happening. As I’d already put off my second round of blood tests and the glucose challenge test once from last week when I had the dizzy spells, instead of rescheduling it yet again the boy came with me to the hospital yesterday, and his mission was to take care of me. He was very interested in the cold orange drink I was given and asked what it tasted like. I said, “Like melted orange popsicles, with a bit of fizzy to it” and he made a face. We hung out in the snack bar for the hour it took for the glucose test, where he nibbled on the carrots and snow peas we’d brought, and we read a bunch of books. Then we went back to the lab and he held my hand very importantly while they took the blood so that I wouldn’t be afraid. The technicians thought he was adorable for patting my arm and telling me that it wouldn’t hurt and it would be over in just a moment. We came home and had a picnic lunch in the backyard.

I’m starting to feel a little weird. I’m at 27 weeks, and at the hospital they gave me a test to be done at home at 35 weeks. I had my first baby at 31 weeks, six years ago; I don’t know what happens normally after that, what tests are done, when appointments are scheduled. I missed two-thirds of my final trimester, so I have no idea what to expect from it. I’m in the weird position of having experienced labour and delivery, but not in the way I’d expected in the hospital I’d worked with up till that point; I never got to pack a bag or plan out what to do to keep my mind busy in labour, or anything like that. I’ve never even had a hospital tour. I’ve never had my brand new infant in my hospital room with me, or got to take it home with me when I left. It’s all new for me from hereon in till the baby arrives home, at which point I’m back in familiar territory. (I have plenty of experience in dealing with NICU, though, and pumping exclusively for a month to supply my baby with breastmilk, and in dealing with hospital staff and schedules of all kinds.) It’s just a really odd feeling to have this lacuna ahead of me between the two sections of pregnancy/new mum stuff that I know about. I sometimes feel like an imposter when first-time-pregnant women of my acquaintance ask me about the last trimester and new babies. My experience is so different from the norm.

Speaking of this baby, she is really working the kickboxing routine these days. I can’t find a comfortable position for my very adjustable desk chair and the yoga ball I got somehow manages to stress my lower back more rather than less, both of which make for a challenging work sessions. I may ask HRH to get the kneeling chair out of storage; that might work.

Easter Weekend and Baby Stuff

We had a lovely weekend visiting my parents. The drive was a challenge for me, as I usually need a day to recover from a long drive, but this time I had the extra physical challenges of pregnancy on top of my regular fibro issues to deal with. (It is truly astonishing how sore one’s core muscles get when one is pregnant and stuck in a car for seven hours, even with a lumbar pillow.) The weather was fabulous; warm, sunny, windy. My mother took the boy out for a movie, gelato, and some shopping on Saturday so HRH and I got to have some time out by ourselves, which was nice, too. Easter dinner was the usual tour de force everyone has come to expect from my mother’s kitchen (slow-cooked lamb!), complete with the best red wine I have ever tasted. She also taught the boy how to make chocolate ganache, which I think is an excellent skill for any almost-six-year-old to have.

One of the things HRH and I did on our day off was visit a children’s clothing store, which happened to be conveniently located next to the store HRH had to visit to buy new jeans. We realised that we had no idea what little girls’ clothing looked like, so we wanted to do a quick recon in order to steel ourselves. Amusingly, when we stepped into the store, we both turned left toward the boys’ section; we have to retrain ourselves. The girls’ clothes were mostly not bad with a lot of it being very acceptable and some of it downright sweet, although there was a small selection of the expected sequins and sparkles and ruffles and gaggingly cutesy sayings (note to people thinking of gifting us with any of these: please don’t, even if you think it would be funny). The cloying saturated pink seems to have been replaced by a paler version, thank goodness, and there was plenty of pale green and lavender and a nice chocolate brown on the racks, too.

The Easter Bunny stopped by Nana and Grandad’s house, and the boy found all seventeen of his hidden Easter eggs (or so we were told when he woke us up; apparently he found one and decided there must be more, and undertook his own egg hunt before anyone else got up). There was a basket of presents at the breakfast table, too, and the boy cheerfully opened the Owlet’s gifts as well as his own, being absolutely delighted by the tiny girl onesies, sleepers, and dresses. The Owlet now has a decent selection of clothing, what with the new stuff in the Easter basket, the sleepers Ceri’s mom brought up (thank you, Carmel!), and the box of family stuff from my cousin’s two little girls.

This seems as good a time as any to say that while we appreciate the slew of offers of baby clothing and general baby stuff, we did have a baby ourselves six years ago, and so we’re pretty set. We know there will be token gifts of new things, and every baby should have something new, but as much as we appreciate everyone’s generosity we really don’t need boxes of baby clothes. We’re set for equipment as well (and this is where I give a wholly deserved shout-out to Leah, who passed along equipment to replace some of ours that we initially borrowed, that we lent and wore out after seven kids, or came back broken). Of course, if there are one or two special pieces of clothing you want to offer us because you think they’re adorable and deserve to be worn by someone else again, that’s fine and we would be touched, but general bags and boxes of stuff really aren’t necessary.

In other clothing news, I finished one of the knitted origami baby shoes, and am an inch away from finishing the squares for the second one:

We have hit the third trimester and the Owlet is doing just fine. My last ultrasound, scheduled specifically to investigate for high-risk issues, discovered that I am actually less close to preterm labour than I was a month ago, so my doctor is very pleased indeed with my treatment. People keep telling me somewhat dismissively that I’m not very big at all, which I’m sure is a compliment in their view, but I’m just about the size I was when the boy was born so I’m actually a month ahead of where I was last time. I’m so petite that the bump may not seem big to them in comparison to other women who are larger than I am to start with (which is, let’s be honest, 99% of the female population), but taken within context of my body size and shape it’s big. The baby is right on schedule for her gestational age, too. I’ve grown out of two or three pairs of my go-to maternity pants… no, not grown out of, actually; it’s more that my shape has shifted and so the cut no longer sits comfortably, so they have to be cycled to the bottom of the box of maternity clothes, woe! The weather is finally warming up, so I dipped into the box of summer stuff to get a break from the same old clothes I’d been wearing for the last four months. I’m glad it’s just about warm enough to leave jackets open, too, because my polar fleece is about ten days away from no longer zipping up at all.

It’s hard to believe that at this point last time, I was five weeks away from a baby. At least this time the book gets handed in three months ahead of our due date, instead of a month. (And yes, I am knocking away on my wooden desk as I type that.) Funny story: We got new music last week at orchestra, among it Die Fledermaus overture. We sightread it and I frowned, asking our principal if we’d played this before, and she confirmed that we had. The sheet music looked like it had a note or two on it in my handwriting, in fact, but while it was familiar, I couldn’t remember ever having performed it. Upon consultation with the rest of the section after the rehearsal, it turns out that this piece was part of the mostly-Tchaikovsky programme we presented six years ago for Canada Day, a programme that was personally awful for me because of key signatures and rhythms, and, coincidentally, I ended up missing because I delivered a premature baby two and a half weeks before the concert. We found this very amusing, since it’s been programmed again when I’m pregnant. If anything happens, I will personally blame Johann Strauss Jr.

Idle Schedule Dreams

Maybe it’s because I’ve felt shackled to my desk for the past couple of months and a horrible winter, but I’ve been dreaming of what I’ll be able to do when this book is handed in on May 2.

– Actually go to the yarn store, where I have not been since early December, to pick up the copy of Spin-Off Spring 2011 that they’ve had aside for me for over a month. Pat yarn. Buy spinning fibre.

– Head over to Debra’s house with an empty box to sort through her little girl clothes and abscond with some. Also, have tea like real human beings.

– Actually shop for baby things. Not that we need a heck of a lot; we’ll be borrowing used stuff from others to replace our equipment that wore out/came back damaged/expired. It’s more the principle of the thing: I’d like to actually have one or two new things for this baby. I do need to start collecting samples of cloth diapers for newborns, though, to have on hand for when the baby comes home so we can test them out and see which brands/style suit her best. Some of this has been dependent on cash flow, as well, so I haven’t been able to jump on excellent used deals on Craigslist and the like for things like infant car seat stroller frames and sets of used cloth diapers when they’ve come up.

– Nap.

– Stare out a window for a while and not feel guilty.

– Possibly do a photo session with Tamu. Do recon on photo studios for an actual family portrait, something we’ve never had done, ever.

– Start spinning the warp yarn for the baby blanket (May), and then weave the baby blanket (see, I am already planning into June!).

– Order the fabric online for the baby’s blanket that the boy wants made for her. Start assembling the bits for the mobile he has designed. (Both of these feature the boy as designer/director and me as executor. Sigh.)

– Schedule a playdate or two.

– Finish knitting the garter squares for the baby booties and origami them together.

– Go to my doctor’s appointments and ultrasounds (the regular and the extra oh-dear-you’re-high-risk ones) without feeling stressed because there’s work piling up at home.

– Play the cello. (I have one. Not that you’d know it if you lived here.) Prep for the June recital.

– Start planning the boy’s sixth birthday parties, Family Edition and School Friend Edition.

– Read.

– Sort through what baby equipment we do have on hand that is usable and needs cleaning/repacking/set up. Not that we can set anything up in our bedroom till mid-July. No, there will be no nursery till around Thanksgiving when the attic office is done.

– Do the tax stuff. That was scheduled for last month; it didn’t happen, nor did it happen this month, because there was too much work. And since we’re first-time homeowners there’s a pile of unknowns that needs to be ascertained, like what we can write off, what receipts or proof of whatevers are required, and so forth.

– And… work. Sigh. Eventually the edits on the bird book will come back, and I’ll have to address those, and I know they will not be the “oh you have six things to handle and that’s it” that the hearthcraft book had; these will need more attention. But I am looking forward to the more regular paycheque that copyediting yields. Pay vs energy/time input, copyediting gives better value than writing, I have found. That’s sad but true.

A Friday Fibre Post

I’ve finished spinning the first two ounces of the Rambouillet. Oh, lawks; this is the sweetest thing. It’s like creamy Merino, only better, somehow. (Without going into a major digression about breeds and history, Rambouillet is essentially a offshoot of the Merino breed, created by breeding Merino with French or German sheep in the eighteenth century, and handles very much like it. I find it a bit silkier.) This is the “Wistful” colourway from Squoosh Fiber Arts. Her dyeing and preparation are spectacular, and her fibre is absolutely going on my list of things to stalk in Ravelry destash RSS feeds.

I thought it would be more like the first photo, pale olive greens and crabapple reds with some barklike grey-brown. As you can see for the second photo, it’s got those colours in it, but overall the browns and pinks became more predominant. I find how dyed fibre spins up fascinating. It rarely behaves the way I expect it to. I’m going to preserve the colour changes in this by chain-plying it to a heavy fingering weight. (I am lazy and have not measured the WPI of the single, but my eye and experience tell me that it should yield a heavy fingering weight after chain-plying.)

The wheel continues to work well and is a pleasure to use. I’m testing out the Scotch tension this time, since I’ve tried and like the double drive setting. And it wasn’t until I read the article on flyer wheels in the latest issue of KnittySpin that I realised durr, if I can set it up in Scotch (flyer-lead) tension by putting both loops of the drive band over the flyer pulley and the brake band over the bobbin, it’s also possible to set it up in Irish (bobbin-lead) tension by putting both drive loops over the bobbin and the brake band on the flyer. I’m sure this hasn’t occurred to a lot of people, since Irish tension is considered the most basic and limiting of the three settings. Having trained on a Louet, which is bobbin-lead tension, I know it’s not limiting. It just doesn’t occur to most people to use it if they’ve got the preferred Scotch or double-drive options.

Oh oh oh! Hey, gentle readers! You know that I am not a knitter, right? I knit very basic things like scarves, but somewhat badly. Well, I’m having a baby, and while there are spinning-then-weaving projects in the works for this event because that is my forte, I thought it would be kind of neat to actually knit something for her, all myself. I know plenty of fabulously talented knitters and I am aware that there are already two or three blankets on the go for the Owlet, as well as hats and variously snuggly things (plus a quilt!), but I wanted to knit at least one thing myself. It wouldn’t be heirloom quality, not by a long shot, but it could be cosy and pretty in whatever colour I chose, and it would mean something to me.

So I did. This is the Owlet’s Daffodil cardigan:

It’s a plain old garter stitch cardi done in a soft yellow Pima cotton yarn. I used a pattern for 3-6 mos and modified it to fit a 0-3 month old. (Yes, that’s me, converting a pattern I haven’t yet knitted before I can see how it works, with little to no understanding of how knitted objects are put together. I change recipes before testing them as per the written instructions, too.) It seems to have worked. I may add a couple of rows of crochet in pale green cotton to the bottom as trim. (No, I do not crochet at all. See how fun this is? My enthusiasm far outweighs my skill.) I forgot to put the buttonholes in when I knit the front because I was paying such close attention to making sure it matched the back, so I made button loops for the lovely buttons I bought for it instead. I love how rustic this is, with the bumpy garter stitch and the little wooden buttons.

My next project is tiny little boots in pale green Pima cotton, made from garter-stitch squares that you fold up like origami to magically make a shoe shape. There’s no point in taking a photo, because at the moment it’s only three four-inch-long rows of knitting on a needle. But hey, garter stitch squares! That is totally within my skill set!

And for fun, here is a snap of the test samples I did for the blanket I’ll be weaving for the baby. I spun test skeins of Corriedale, Merino, and Falkland, and have chosen Falkland for the warp to use with this lovely green Manos Clasica yarn I bought to use as the weft. Thing is, I didn’t know if I wanted it to be weft-faced, which makes it more green but creates a stiff fabric (left), or a more balanced weave, which drapes better and feels softer (right). I like the visual of the left, but prefer the feel of the right. I may try a dye test on the white Falkland warp and see if I can get it a pale willow green that matches one of the paler variegations in the Manos; then it will vanish more into the warp colours, and I will have my cake and eat it, too. The Falkland fibre I need won’t be in at my LYS Ariadne Knits for at least a month or so, so I’ve got time to mess about with dye tests on the sample Falkland skein I spun. I designed this to use a fingering weight warp so the green of the weft would be predominant no matter what, but I’m wondering if spinning a fluffier two-ply Aran weight to match the Manos wouldn’t be better. I have some Falkland left I could spin a sample of that with, too. (I theoretically could use the Manos as warp, too, but I don’t think I have enough for both warp and weft, and it’s a single instead of a plied yarn, which fares less well in respect to the beating of the heddle; a single gets worn away more easily than a multi-ply warp does.)

In Which She Thinks About Pregnancy Stuff

There are some thoughts I need to write out about this, because I’m trying to work out how I feel.

A couple of people have asked if we announced the pregnancy when we did because we couldn’t hide it any longer. This amuses me. People, I have been wearing maternity clothes since Christmas. That’s three months earlier than last time. I am built like a stick; my body shape starting changing pretty early this time round. Granted, my winter sweaters are loose and bulky, but I didn’t go out of my way to swath myself in disguises or anything, and I went out threeish times a week to mingle with the masses, so I wasn’t holing up at home to avoid being noticed. No, we announced it when we did because we finally had good news from the doctors about the health of the baby. (It occurs to me that people aren’t noticing as much as they might because of my initial body shape: I have a very short waist, so I’m basically ribcage/baby right now, and that’s not as noticeable as it might be if there were another four inches of space between the two.)

Long-time readers will remember that we didn’t publicly announce our first pregnancy at all via the Internet; we told people in person as we met them. This resulted in some people being told that we had a baby before they knew I was pregnant, thanks to the boy arriving two months early. But one of the reasons I didn’t share the news last time was because I didn’t want to be treated any differently. I was curious to see if our approach to sharing the news this time would support my previous suspicion. Sure enough, now that they know, there are people automatically assuming that I am differently-abled in some way because I’m pregnant. I am the same person the world has been dealing with for the past five months. Nothing has changed. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a bit slower getting in and out of chairs, cars, and bed, but that’s about it.

I find this fascinating, as well as exasperating. I can explain fibro till the cows come home, and although people say they think they get it, it’s a hazy, vague understanding. But tell someone I’m pregnant, and they jump to the assumption that I must be exhausted, my back must ache, I must feel sick all the time, and so forth. That’s how I feel the majority of the time thanks to fibro. Pregnancy was and is a breeze for me, possibly because I’m used to this sort of thing. (In fact, I feel better fibro-wise now that I’m pregnant. Go figure. This is not a serious option for long-term fibro treatment, though, people; we’re stopping here at two kids!)

I guess what it comes down to is familiarity. Everyone knows someone who is/has been pregnant, so they have some level of direct experience with it. Millions of women do this; we have a cultural perception of pregnancy and what it does to someone. Fibro? Not so much. There’s a reason why a lot of FM/CFS sufferers default to an explanation such as “It’s like I have the flu all the time”: it’s a common experience people can draw on to get some idea of what you must be going through. That cultural perception of pregnancy isn’t universally applicable, though, and that’s what drives me crazy. The experience is not one size fits all; everyone’s pregnancy is different, affects them differently, and impacts them differently. I appreciate the fact that people are upping their solicitousness and concern, but it kind of frustrates me that I’m being placed in a box marked “Pregnant” along with the general assumptions that rattle around inside it. We all pigeonhole people and situations, myself included — it’s human nature, and it helps us deal with things efficiently — but as often as I can, I try to evaluate every new situation and individual, and not default to assumptions. It just feels weird to have people dismiss fibro because they don’t have experience with it, and overemphasize pregnancy for me.

Okay, enough of that. Here’s something wacky.

Last fall I figured it was about time to get my eyes checked again. It has been about five years since my prescription changed, twoish since I started wearing my glasses full-time, so I was due. As usual, I procrastinated, so I got pregnant before I went in for a checkup. And then it was Christmas, and there was travelling and other family health issues, and it fell off my to-do list. My eyes started acting up in about January, and I remembered that I really ought to make that appointment with the optometrist.

And then I paused. What if it wasn’t my vision alone? What if it was the pregnancy? It isn’t unheard of for women to report major vision changes during pregnancy; there are people whose eyes have significantly improved or worsened permanently due to it.

I didn’t notice any sort of change in my first pregnancy. This one, though; whoa. I can now get away with not wearing my glasses at all most of the time. In fact, I have to take them off while driving a lot, because they make my distance viewing slightly blurrier. Reading from a book is mostly fine, depending on how tired I am, and ditto for the computer screen: I can go glasses-free earlier in the day, but as the day goes on and my eyes get tired, I have to put the glasses on again. The main problem I have discovered is that I have developed the habit of taking a pair of glasses off and putting them down if they’ve started straining my eyes, and then I can’t remember where I put them when I need them again hours later.

So in the end I think I’m glad I didn’t get that optometrist appointment before the pregnancy happened, because if I’d spent all that money on a new prescription that was just going to change anyway, possibly permanently, I would be pretty cranky. (No, HRH’s health insurance doesn’t cover eyes. Or dental, despite the atrocious amount of money he pays for it.) I’ll make an appointment for this coming fall instead.