Third Trimester Travel

The trip went better than I expected, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend travelling at 34-35w.

My doctor’s standard recommendation is that travel is fine up to 36w, barring complications. I was almost hoping that he would tell me not to travel at my appointment two days before we left, except that I didn’t want to actually have complications.

Aside from worrying about my paper, I was afraid I just wouldn’t be able to enjoy the trip. I tire too easily now for the kind of energetic sightseeing I usually do. Anyway, I had already been to the two cities on our itinerary, and though I liked them both, this wasn’t the time I would have chosen to revisit them.

The part of me that worries too much and reads too many blogs feared that pre-eclamsia would strike suddenly while I was gone, or that the birth would simply happen prematurely without any convenient warning signs to keep me at home. The part of me that wasn’t worried about actually going into labor didn’t want to deal with having contractions and wondering if they were the start of labor or not, and doubting myself, and trying to communicate with my doctor at home and so on. (For the record, I am not so impressed with t-mobile’s World service plan, given that nobody who called me from the US got through. Missed calls were logged without the phone ringing, and without caller id. I was half convinced that one of our cats had died and our neighbor was calling to tell us, but all or most of the missed calls turned out to be my mother trying to say happy birthday.)

In all, I did enjoy the trip. At the conference, aside from my own session, I went to some other good panels. I did nap in lieu of going some sessions I would otherwise have attended. The plenary session that my husband accompanied me to was interdisciplinary in a way that allowed both of us to notice the weak parts (ah, marital snark bonding).

Megalopolis was fun too. I had had images of myself spending all my time napping in the hotel while Mr. Luo explored the sights and (historical) sites, but instead I napped while he used the hotel fitness center and then we went out together. His long workouts helped wear him out a bit and bring him closer to my energy level. We took a lot more taxis than we normally would and took a tour to get to one place out of town instead of doing the independent traveller thing and using public transportation. We even ate at one of the hotel restaurants a number of times, when we were too exhausted to go elsewhere. Fortunately, the food there was good.

Physically, I was not as uncomfortable as I had feared I might be, back when I was contemplating the conference. I am not too huge to get around. However, the occasional contractions or other abdominal and pelvic pains make walking a little harder than it would be otherwise. I have had to become accustomed to walking slower than my husband, which is not the normal state of affairs. Plus, I get more nervous when I’m not just walking around my neighborhood, where I know exactly where I am and how long it will take to get home.

I also discoved that even after two months of natural childbirth classes, my first reaction to a pain is still to clench something (usually my hands). Oops.

Also, even though Mr. L. helped with my luggage, he couldn’t carry all of our bags all of the time. Turns out my normal backpack / carryon was too heavy for me to carry without getting pains in the stomach muscles (though not the back at least), even on the trip home, when I put as much of the conference stuff as I could in my checked bag. Did I mention I hate asking for help?

Finally, I didn’t sleep well, which made the daytime fatigue worse. On a good night, I got up every three hours; more commonly, I woke up about every hour.

Telephonophobia

I can’t believe I missed this post by Bitch, Ph.D. back in February:

Why is it that making phone calls for appointments–haircuts, doctors, dentists, etc.–freaks me out and I’ll put it off forever?

Me too!

It’s not the only reason I don’t get things done, but the amount of effort it takes me to get on the phone is one of the reasons that:

• I haven’t gotten my hair trimmed since September
• I haven’t talked to any doulas yet
• I haven’t gotten the carpets steam-cleaned (which for our apartment falls into the category of nesting-means-I-should-have-done-it-years-ago)
• I haven’t signed us up for a class on newborn care
• I haven’t called to find out if the store we bought it from can fix the broken chair
• I haven’t talked to a lactation consultant so I can have her number on the fridge in case I need it, as per Moxie’s recommendations
• I never called the bank or credit union about an appointment to get prequalified for a loan

All those examples are just from the little sticky note on my desk labeled “calls.” I did make two of the calls on the list. I called and signed us up for a class on breastfeeding (also recommended by Moxie) and then called the first-choice pediatrian’s office to discover that the only time we could meet the doctor was the same night as the already-paid for class. (I thought I blogged about this, because I ended up in tears at my ineptitude, but I can’t find the post). That was a while ago.

A couple of these things could be done by email, but the sad part is that I am not much better at email than I am at making phone calls.

Also, I know not everything on the list is superimportant, but the minor things would be easier to do now than later.

Mr. Luo did take over the calling of pediatricians, so we will be meeting with a couple this week.

P.S. I should mention that it was a mention by Orange that sent me looking for Bitch, Ph.D.’s telephone post.

Quick Update

The last time I went away for nine days, I wrote up posts and dated them to publish while I was gone. This time, I not only didn’t do that, I didn’t write even though I had internet access part of the time I was away, as I got too obsessed with catching up to the hundreds of new posts in my Bloglines feeds. Please excuse the general laziness. (Not that I feel obliged to post while at a conference or on vacation, but I always get nervous when I don’t hear from third-trimester real life friends or bloggers.)

Since the last post, I:

delivered my paper in The Country Next Door

spent time with two grad school friends at the conference

revisted some tourist sites with my husband, who hadn’t been to either Conference City or Country Next Door’s Megalopolis

acquired a bunch of baby clothes from one of my friends

caught a cold

missed three prenatal yoga classes, and one more this morning, because it occurred to me that the other pregnant ladies might not want me around right now

got too big for my regular pants, finally (for those keeping track, at 34w, I could still get them on, but they were uncomfortable enough that I only took skirts and dresses on the trip)

turned 41

33w5d

I have a deadline this week, so posting will be light.

The nesting instinct may have kicked in. Whatever it was, it came with a burst of energy that led me to overdo the cleaning, cooking, rearranging of furniture, etc., which led to a sore back, which means I should try to limit my computer time to working rather than blogs. (Procrastination from the paper is responsible for last week’s return to regular posting.)

Otherwise, pregnancy continues. I feel like my belly is growing rapidly, though I still fit in my clothes. (I half expect to outgrow everything in the middle of my upcoming conference trip.) Sometimes I can sleep well, but mostly I don’t. Still, the only time I’ve felt really physically uncomfortable recently was on the hospital tour yesterday, but that was probably due to the morning’s overexertions.

I have a checkup tomorrow. I am feeling ambivalent about my upcoming conference, so I half hope that the doctor will tell me I can’t fly, but he’ll only say that if something is wrong, and of course I don’t want that. A month ago, I was ready to cancel the conference trip, but since I’d lose the same amount of money whether I canceled weeks ahead of time or at the last minute, I decided to wait and see.

At this point, I have so little confidence in my work’s contribution that I’m not feeling guilty about potentially depriving my fellow panelists and conference attendees of my insights. Besides, if I cancel, everyone on the panel will be happy because then they can talk for longer. (Then enough people will overcompensate and speak for way too long that the panel will run out of time despite having one less paper, but that’s not my fault.)

Friday Cat Blogging: RIP, Dynamo

On my way back from my walk this morning, I saw the neighbor’s Dynamo cat (not her real name), lying in the grass. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her nap outside (though I did find her happily resting on a box in our garage one morning last month), and when I got close to check I realized she was dead.

When Visualization Goes Bad

Thanks to attending a fair number of Buddhist teachings and ceremonies with my mother over the past ten years or so, my visualization skills have improved. (One evening, I realized that when the translator was instructing us to visualize the deity with one head and four arms, with rays of white light emanating from his head and entering your heart, that I actually could imagine it, to my surprise.)

Still, I’m not an expert. One of the suggestions in our childbirth class workbook is to visualize a nice waterfall falling over one’s body. I love water and waterfalls, but I cannot do this while in the approved side-lying position. It’s illogical, after all, for the water to flow from my head to my toes if I’m on my side. Can’t be a waterfall. Sorry. Maybe a river or stream would work.

At the end of our childbirth class this week, the teacher did some guided visualizations that included the one about a flower opening. First, I had to get past thinking, “oh, that was a joke on Friends” and “one of the characters in Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes tries that and it doesn’t work.” Then, I tried to settle into it. I like flowers, and even if I’m a little skeptical of the effect of visualization on my cervix, beautiful blooming flowers can be a relaxing image, right?

Teacher: Imagine you are in a rose garden. You are focused on a bud. You can see it opening.

Luolin: Okay, like the rose bush next to my apartment that has one flower and three buds. I think the buds died in the cold weather last week, because they haven’t opened. Oh no. My labor isn’t going to progress. I’m going to die in labor. … Does Mr. Luo know my password, so he can update the blog if I die?

I did manage to get back into the relaxation eventually, but it was a little unsettling.

Birth Stories

In the natural childbirth class I am taking, there is a lot of talk about how we aren’t familiar with birth in our modern world. It’s true that I haven’t witnessed any births, but thanks to bloggers who somehow find the time to write about their experiences giving birth even though they now have babies to take care of, I have read a lot of birth stories: everything from home births to emergency c-sections. The strange thing is that, although a lot of my friends have had kids in the past few years, I know less about the details of their birth experiences than I do of the ones linked below.

In case it is helpful to anyone else, I’ve made a list of links below to some of the birth stories from blogs I read. Some I read when they were posted, some I read in people’s archives, and a couple I came across via links from other blogs while I was doing this post.

I want to note that I haven’t linked to stories in which the babies did not survive. I honor those mothers and their labors and their children, but it didn’t feel right to me to just put their stories on a list of mine, subsection tragedy.

Julie: Charlie arrives, away from home

Jo: Sophia’s birth in four parts, plus discussion

Jenex: Boo’s birth story

Arwen: Camilla’s birth story

Jolisa: Rocket Baby

Cecily: Tori’s arrival

Emma Jane: short and long versions of Tabitha’s birth

Dooce: Leta’s birth

Mrs. Kennedy: Jackson

Moxie: El pequeño

Anna: Two parts for the Bee

Alice: Henry

Linda: E and L

Suz: Henry and Tyler

Lisa: Naim and Aaron

Special bonus, from One Good Thing: Instructions for mothers who gave birth in an Army hospital in 1956.

I am also very moved by adoption stories (most recently AmFam and Johnny), but at the moment I am, due to my own circumstances, most obsessed with reading about birth.

Matchmaking

A post at Unfogged (no, not the redacted one, a much less exciting one about relationships-Jody’s got a post about it too…) got me thinking about myself and Mr. Luo. On the topic of criteria for dating, one person had mentioned dating women who didn’t wear makeup. Somebody else had brought up not dating a vegetarian as a more substantive criteria, since there were practical difficulties with a veg/non-veg pairing.

When I met my husband, I was a vegetarian, and he wasn’t. I don’t normally wear cosmetics (neither does he).

We met at a monthly dance in Our Fair City that I started going to the January after I moved to this state. I don’t know exactly when I met him, because I didn’t really start to get to know anybody and learn names until I went to a weekend-long dance event the following autumn. I remember dancing with him then. A few months after that, when we were chatting at a dance, he asked if I’d like to go out with him sometime.

In a way, the whole meeting-at-a-dance thing seems cheesy to me. After all, it is just the sort of thing Dear Abby and Ann Landers used to recommend to the lovelorn: join a group, do an activity, meet someone who’s interested in the same things. I have to say that if I had started doing this kind of dancing back in Grad School Town specifically in order to get a date, I would have quit a long time before I got together with my husband. The dancing was fun, it was newcomer-friendly, it had good live music, and you didn’t have to bring a partner to dance with, because the custom was to switch partners for each dance. That’s why I sought out the local group when I moved to this area.

It turns out that we had a lot in common. We both have Ph.D.’s. Although it is not his native language, he grew up in a place where people speak the language that I teach. He even used to live in Grad School Town during part of the time I was there, and worked very close to where I lived.

Then there are the differences (It’s a good thing I’m not writing a paper for the Little Professor here.) He is an engineer. I am a liberal arts gal, who didn’t even realize that computer scientists counted as engineers when I met him.

Politically, he is more conservative than I am. This means that we both say we are Democrats, but he has been known to vote for a Republican, whereas I have voted for Green candidates. He thinks Bill Clinton was the saviour of the Democratic Party, and I do not.

I am much more suspicious of Big Business than he is; he is more distrustful of government (not so much its intentions as its inefficiencies).

He is entrepreneurial (he has founded three start-ups). I am risk-averse.

I was a vegetarian for the first two and a half years we were together, including a year when we were living together, then married. It was never a problem. We ate vegetarian dinners, and he cooked himself meat-heavy breakfasts to get the animal protein he needed. He was very good at adapting recipes from meat to vegetarian.

We’ve never discussed cosmetics (except possibly “I’m going to wear makeup at the wedding” “Uh, okay, whatever”).

I don’t know the best way to screen one’s potential dates. During the dry spell before I met Mr. Luo, I would sometimes imagine a list of screening criteria based on previous failed relationships. The criteria usually ended up eliminating all men (and I wasn’t romantically or sexually attracted to women):hmmm , no Americans and nobody from another country. No older men, but no younger guys either. No classmates, no workmates, and no cute waiters. Two strikes against computer geeks (although I don’t think my high school boyfriend actually ended up with a career inInfoTech). It’s just as well I never tried the personals or online dating, because I would have been paralyzed with indecision.

It all worked out just fine in the end, though.

Conflict Averse

It’s probably just typical child-of-divorced-parents aversion to conflict, but I get tense when people around me don’t get along.

That’s why, when one blogger I read and admire criticized a post by another blogger I read and admire, I felt a strong urge to jump in and smooth things over, even though I had no real standing to discuss the topic. Fortunately, the blogger in question spoke up for herself. That didn’t keep me from lying awake last night writing comments and posts on the topic in my head, thus disrupting my usual late-night worries about unrevised articles or unfinished papers. And waking up this morning thinking about it, unable to get back to sleep. Sigh.

I felt a similar urge when a friend was complaining about our boss. Even though I knew nothing about the issue besides what she had just told me, I wanted to say “well, maybe he actually meant x, not y when he said what you’re mad at him about.”

I don’t care as much if I don’t know both parties. When people in my Dance Group A complain about people in Dance Group B, in which I’m not involved at all, it may or may not be interesting, but it doesn’t give me a stomach ache to listen to it. (I was going to claim that Dance groups’ politics are worse than academic politics, but my husband claims not, based on what happened to one of his advisors on the tenure track.)

Easter Links

These are all secular links. You really don’t want to get religious information from me anyway.

The kids get suspicious. I have a friend who believed in the Easter Bunny for a lot longer than Santa Clause, because her much-older sister put so much effort into being the Easter Bunny for her.

Bitch Ph.D. provides a Peeps update. And, via the comments at Pandagon, Lord of the Peeps.

Figlet’s homemade Peepz (the process and product).

I’m not a fan of Peeps, though I don’t hate them. I can certainly understand the appeal of childhood sweet stuff that doesn’t actually even taste good. My mother never put Hostess Ding Dongs in my school lunches–not because they were taboo so much as that it never would have occurred to her to buy such a thing– so every once in a while I have to buy a box of them for myself. However, she did include a few Peeps in the Easter basket fixings that she sent, addressed to the as-yet unborn grandson (along with some very adorable Gund toodles rattles that are not only safe for babies, but also washable).