Every time I have a non-pregnancy-related idea for an entry, I think to myself, "Write it down!" And then I don't, and I forget it, and no amount of brain-racking can produce it again without threatening to damage the pea up there beyond repair.
I'm still mostly feeling fine, although I appear to have pulled a muscle in my upper left thigh, despite not having done anything at all that possibly could've resulted in this -- except perhaps my nightly cow-tipping ritual, which is how I refer to the process of trying to turn over from one side onto the other. So when I heave myself out of chairs, it now involves an inordinate amount of extra leaning and some limping that leads to a gentle waddle. Which is annoying, because I am not that incapacitated by pregnancy YET, and I don't want to be doing the sad shuffle before it's absolutely physically unavoidable.
The beans are still floating around in there with varying degrees of feistyness. For the past three days I've had a kicking spree continuous enough that I can lift up my shirt and watch my skin ripple -- not just from the kick impact, but from the baby moving either its body or just its limb. Sounds awfully alien, I know, but it actually makes the whole thing so exciting. For so long, when you're pregnant, you just feel like a giant container with some foreign mystery in there. This is the part where you're getting daily reminders that, yes, it's real, and yes, your bean(s) have a personality, and yes, they're interactive, and yes, they're people. Whenever they go nuts like that, I always rub my belly affectionately afterward because I just can't help it. It's kind of amazing, it really is. I am my boys' first bedroom. There is something undeniably cool about it.
I mean, check it: Baby A is yawning. See his little mouth?
Doesn't get any cooler than that. The photo, incidentally, is from the 4D ultrasound session. Turns out I didn't get any good 4D/3D images because neither baby cooperated. Baby B just refused to face us at all, as if he had no interest in such attention whoring, so it was all about Baby A the entire time -- except Baby A kept throwing his arm over his face. So what we did get looked shadowy and weird and incomplete, and a bit like he is a melting claymation doll with a giant tumor on his forehead. Hopefully he will not come out looking like that, for HIS sake, although I will love him anyway. But much of the time was spent demonstrating how awesome their 2D ultrasound software upgrade is, and now in addition to being able to list for you the exact advantages of this new Siemens machine, I also got a bunch of short video clips just from that part. This still that I took from one of them is my favorite. I think that little bubble up there is actually you looking straight at his fingers, which are pointing at you, because he knows you're looking and he sees you and he will not deign to acknowledge you any further because he's got shit to do and naps to take.
We completed an Infant Care class the other night, which was interesting in some respects and not as helpful as it could've been in others. Granted, I'm not sure how I expected them to help me, in a practical sense, figure out how to cut my infant's nails, but I wish there had been a bit more of that. She did offer some tips on feedings and various safe ways to hold them that might seem weird to us at first, she explained a lot of the tests they do on the infants right after they're born, she talked a lot about their early developing reflexes that we should watch for, and she talked about the benefits of co-sleeping and swaddling as well as delineating a lot of what we know and don't know about SIDS. I defy any parent not to flip their lid about the SIDS risk of everything. We have re-thought using bumpers in the cribs about 20 times (pros: they are cute; cons: they are apparently silent killers; pro: we don't know anyone whose bumper has silent-killed anything; con: we would still be paranoid about it) and eventually decided against it because the risks didn't seem worth the reward. I mean, nobody wants to be saying, "Our beautiful children smothered themselves on their bumpers, but hey, at least the cribs looked really adorable."
And lest any of us think we'd get out of there without a bracing reminder of how gross human waste can be, we got a graphic video on diaper-changing, which the instructor picked because it did not shy away from showing the messy realities. This means we got a full-on look at what a baby's first bowel movement looks like -- something so icky it has its own name: meconium. And if this video is to be believed, it looks like someone upended three or four full cups of Jello Chocolate Pudding into the diaper.
"That will probably take about eight wipes to get rid of," the instructor said.
These are the future days of my life. Let's not tell Kevin that women who have C-sections -- which I'm very likely to have, since one baby is breech right now -- are advised to leave the diaper-changing to their partners and helpers for the first week or so because simply managing the feedings will be taxing. Which means he might well get BOTH meconium diapers and a whole host of early joys besides. Shhh. Help me keep that secret.