Bridget Sophia arrived on Tuesday, September 18, at 11:34 am. She weighed 7 lbs., 12.8 oz and measured 18.5 inches long. She has beautiful blue eyes (for now) and light brown hair. She's about 30 minutes old in this video.
I'll post photos on flickr when I get a chance . . .
After this post, I plan on posting only one more - a birth announcement, with perhaps a short account of the labor/delivery experience (for those of you who want the details), but really more of a post-script to this journey that started in the coffice some eighteen months ago.
As I come to the end of this blog, I realize how much it has come to mean to me--not only as a memoir and somewhat satisfying piece of multi-media literature, but as a means of communication that has kept me connected and re-connected me to family and friends near and far. Fannee Doolee is more than just my musings - it is a product of every person who has read or will read it, whether you've joined in the fray of commenting, sent me private e-mails, or remained one of the many "stalkers" who silently stop by and reflect on my ramblings only in your own private thoughts or prayers.
As I come to the end of this pregnancy, I realize that the journey has led me down a far different path than I had plotted for myself. I embraced this pregnancy as a "sign from God" that I am worthy and capable of mothering one more child. Foolishly, I set myself up for failure by believing I would either breeze through a healthy and manageable pregnancy while escalating my career and being everything a mother could be to my family, or somehow finding the strength to do so despite sickness and discomforts. I have done neither.
And yet, my reward at the end of this path is far greater than being deemed some sort of ordained Supermom. Not only do I realize that I will never be the perfect wife/mother/lawyer/person, but much more importantly, that I don't have to. Rather, my reward is a far more valuable realization: help is there for those who need it (to quote J.K. Rowling once more). Like a lost driver who finally, finally, breaks down and asks for directions, I see what a blessing it has been for me to follow the path before me, despite the bumps and challenges, because it led me to the inevitable place where I have no choice but to ask for help. You can't imagine how difficult that was for me to do--and what an epiphany it has been to learn to do it. In asking for help, the greatest blessing has been revealed to me in the overwhelming support from those closest to me as well as the most unexpected sources. I am entirely surrounded by people who love me, despite my flaws and my needs, who walk with me along similar paths of uncertainty, who lead me with the wisdom of their own experiences, and who wait for me at the end of the road.
With three weeks left until my due date, the end of a challenging (but, thankfully, healthy) pregnancy is in sight. I am ready to not be pregnant anymore, and hopefully ready to take on a newborn.
This is also the beginning of the end of Fanneedoolee, as I've decided to put a little closure (or at least a hard page break) on this chapter of my life and take a rest from blogging for a while. I've made this decision mostly from practicality - as you may have noticed, I've hardly blogged at all since taking on my new full-time ++ role as a SAHM - but also because this seems to be a good time to wrap things up.
When I started this blog, I wanted to create a snapshot of our family to preserve for Logan and Keelin to look back on someday, and I think I've done that now. With the new baby arriving, the end of our life as a family of four (and sometimes five) is likewise near. I realize now that I also started this blog as a way for me to feel more in touch with the part of my life from which I'd been so cut off. When I was working and away from the house 10-12 hours per day, posting pictures of the kids and capturing special moments about our family helped me feel more connected, and I think also played a big role in my realization that I need to be with my family more right now. Period.
Being here 24/7--and being more immersed in my family than I ever have before-- has tipped the scales away from reflecting in favor or experiencing. I've got to spend a while walking in these shoes a bit more before I'm able pay homage to the next chapter of my/our lives with any meaningful insight, or even clever prose.
So, I am planning to end Fanneedoolee with a final post shortly after the baby arrives, marking the ending and also the beginning of this point in the journey with a birth announcement. (I know we'll all be excited to find out which name makes the final cut - myself included!). I've got a few other loose ends to wrap up, and I will continue to upload pictures to my flickr photo stream, which may serve as my virtual baby book for #3! I will also leave the site up for a bit until I figure out how to save it to a disk or migrate it to a site where it can live on indefinitely without me having to pay a monthly fee.
So, thanks again to you, dear readers, and stand by for the conclusion--I expect I'll have at least a few cliff-hangers to leave you all anxiously awaiting for the next volume: Fanneedoolee and the Decade of Domestic Delirium, perhaps? Or maybe Fanneedoolee and the Haunted Housewife Hollows? Fanneedoolee and the Wickedly Winsome WalMart Shopping Spree??
Tissue Warning: This post may illicit possible tearing-up to an audible sob effect, particularly on mothers, or maybe its just me and my over-loaded pregnancy hormones . . . .
Dear Logan and Kiki,
Yesterday, you attended an "I'm Special, Too!" class for big brothers and big sisters-to-be at the hospital where we will be having your baby sister very, very soon. I am proud to say that you were both at the top of your class! Your little sister is so lucky to have such caring and special siblings awaiting her arrival.
Being a brother or sister can be very difficult, as we are learning all too well this summer. I just finished reading Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, which, along with Ross Greene's The Explosive Child and the course materials from The Art of Positive Parenting class offered through the central-Ohio based organization, Action for Children, have become my course books for my summer educational endeavor, "How to Positively Parent Your Explosive Child and Siblings Without Inflicting Lasting Damage." Unfortunately, I'm failing miserably and will likely have to repeat this course several times.
See, this is much harder than I could have known it would be. I won't make excuses for myself or my mistakes - I'm going to keep trying no matter what - but I want you both to know that if you ever find yourself someday where I am now--well, first of all, if you blame me for all your difficulties being a parent, I likely deserve it, and second, if you don't do it so perfectly all the time, I'll understand. And I hope like anything that I'm still able to come to wherever you and your family are living and hold your hand as you work through it, no matter how huge the mess (Thanks, Nana, for doing that for me!).
The hardest thing about being a parent for me is that, unlike anything else where my potential for failure is so great and the repercussions so massive, this is something I refuse to give up on. I love you both so much, that despite the fact that my biggest fear for you right now is the hurt I might cause you by messing up - not keeping you safe, or not teaching you the right things at the right time, or not being a remotely stable and secure comforter (which, granted, is darn near impossible to do in my present overly-pregnant condition) - I promise you that I will do everything and anything I can to be a better mom to both of you and your little sister, too.
I hope that someday - perhaps on many days - you will look back over this post with me, and we can laugh about the fact that you had no clue I was so completely clueless and incapable of being the perfect parent. (You could try saying, "Gosh, Ma, you must have faked it pretty well, because I thought you had it all under control!" or "Gee, I would have never known you had a moment's doubt about what you were doing, and it all made me the wonderful person I am today!" Those are just suggestions - feel free to add your own thoughts along those lines.) That's unrealistic, I know, but what may not be so unrealistic is that you might read this and think back on these times and the times yet to come and know that I really struggled with being a good parent, as maybe you will too. But I never struggled with loving you.
I love you,
Mommy
Well, I've officially survived my first week of stay at home motherhood (the kids have survived, too), and what better way to celebrate than by volunteering for Field Day at Logan's school.
Since this is the first year we've had a child in the public school system, this is the first time since, oh, 1983 that I've been to Field Day. I remember relay races, high jumps, the standing broad jump (an event in which I "medaled," believe it or not) and other fairly rigorous athletic contests.
Today's games were a bit different. The "field" consisted of seventeen different stations, including parachutes, corn hole, a variety of creative relay races, and even a cleverly-adapted Muggle version of Quidditch. Each class started at a station, then after 8 minutes, a bullhorn sounded, signaling the time to rotate. Half of the parent volunteers went with the class, and the other half stayed to run the station.
I volunteered to stay with our starting activity - line dancing - with the agreement that the rotators would switch out with the stayers half way through the course. For a straight, sweaty hour, I did the Macarena, the Chicken Dance, the YMCA and something called the Cha Cha Slide:
I wish I'd seen this video before this morning. Even so (and despite being 5 months pregnant), I DOMINATED the field. The other moms cheered me on as I led class after class through the motions. As Dooce migh say, I was the Valedictorian of line dancing.
Fortunately, I broke away from the Macarena in time to join Logan's class for the water relay activities. We will both sleep well tonight!
Alternate Title: Exhibit B to my "All About Me" page.
The first time I ever wore maternity clothes:
Now, you're probably thinking I look tremendously younger here than you might recall me being during my first pregnancy, and at the very least, I hope some of you are scratching your head and pondering whether you ever actually saw me wearing polyester stretch knits. The answer is no - at least not during my actual first pregnancy. The above photo, however, was taken about seven years before that time for my one and only paid modeling job.
I was just out of college and had signed on with a local talent agency. They barely called me in for auditions, let alone actual paying jobs. Then, one day I got a call that a client needed someone on short notice for a fashion layout for an advertising circular. "They know I'm a petite?" I reminded my agent. She assured me that was fine, and told me that the client "really liked my look."
Judging by the models they chose for the rest of the layout, I'm not so sure that was a good thing.
At least they didn't ask me to model the $1.99 Silk Panties.
Today is the official half-way mark of this pregnancy - let's hope the second half goes a little better than the first. I was not too surprised to find out that we're having a girl, and I felt overjoyed to see those first glimpses of her little face, hands, her beating heart. She clearly waved at us during the ultrasound, and at one point she had her mouth wide open as if calling out to us. The best part was listening to the kids' reactions though. After the doctor informed us that she saw a "hamburger" I said - that means it's a girl. An asked, "Really? How can you tell." Without missing a beat, my OB replied rather matter-of-factly, "because she doesn't have a penis."
"Hamburgers" and "hot dogs" are lay-person terms for what the visual depiction of a baby's genitalia looks like through an ultrasound. In her honor, I made hamburgers on the grill tonight. The kids could not have been more thrilled. Logan insisted on putting ketchup and mustard on his, and both kids devoured their burgers, thanking me the whole time for making such a delicious dinner. I said, "if I'd known you'd like it so much, I'd have made hamburgers for dinner every night this month!" Logan thought that sounded like a swell idea.
On Saturday, we took the kids to see the matinee performance of the high school's production of "Your a Good Man, Charlie Brown." An had a starring role in the behind-the-scenes work on this show - she was on the make-up crew and helped with some fairly elaborate set-up and clean up for the finale's special effects. The show itself is really nothing more than several charming one-liners and comic-strip length dialogs strung together with various musical numbers, all pulled off rather impressively by the student cast. About half of the cast members were teens from our church, and the attendees at the matinee performance seemed to include a majority of the toddler families from church as well.
For the finale, the cast sings a sentimental but up-beat number called "Happiness is . . ." The special effects included bubble sprays, and the numerous kids in the audience immediately took flight from their seats to dance and play in the bubbles in the theater aisles. The effect combined the audience with the stage show, and I was struck by how soon the day will come when our little ones will be the young adults on stage, taking their final curtain call before leaving the nest. At church the next morning, I was glad to hear from the other moms who attended that it wasn't just my pregnancy-inflated hormones that led me to tear up.
Watch and find out!
With a third pregnancy, I guess there's really no such thing as "popping" in the fourth month - it's pretty much a gradual spread. Those stretched-out ab muscles don't pose much resistance. Hence, I now look fairly pregnant:
17.5 weeks
(No, the blur is not some artsy Photoshop treatment; I've been getting a little braver with my camera settings and forgot to switch back to auto focus before giving my camera to An to snap a few photos).
I'm also feeling better and ready to start being excited about this baby. With Logan, I kept an in-depth pregnancy journal chronicling every single craving, dream, pound and stretch mark. With Keelin, I started to keep a calendar, but soon gave up when I realized the only things I would be recording were my endless stream of maladies. With this pregnancy, I have known from the get go that any record keeping I would do at all would have to take place here.
The first thing I recall about this pregnancy is my super-sonic smelling ability. It appeared in the first few weeks, even before I knew I was pregnant. Our choir sang in mixed formation one morning, and I found myself sitting next to a gruff but golden-voiced baritone who often performs maintenance and odd-jobs for the church. Patrick was on my other side, and I couldn't help but lean over in the middle of the service and whisper to him how wonderful the man on my other side smelled - a little Old Spice, perhaps, with a little Downey and maybe some Colgate. I could have climbed onto his lap and fallen asleep right there in the sanctuary.
Then I started having the crazy dreams and my hormones kicked in. In the weeks - OK months - that followed, it has been all I could do to keep from memorializing my morning sickness. I lie in bed at night and compose the lists - the times I've thrown up, the different places I've thrown up, the things I've thrown up, including numerous interesting food combinations, some more pleasant than others. If you get the picture, be immensely grateful I resisted that urge.
I began feeling those first little squishy-flippy sensations in my belly the last few days of March, and by the first week of April, I began experiencing daily that sensation that some tiny muscle or membrane deep within me was "flexing." Now, that sensation comes several times a day, and this morning sitting in church I felt more definite "pokes," or at least what I imagined were tiny little feet dancing on my bladder.
As for cravings, mostly I crave anything that will take this foul-mouthed nausea away, which has led to a rather unhealthy vice: Coke. I drink one or two every day. Full-strength, of course not diet and not even caffeine free (I never did give up coffee this time around). I am also constantly chewing and spitting out double mint gum. It's the only thing (besides the fizzy coke) that takes that sweaty-jockstrap taste out of my mouth, but the gum also makes me gag after a few minutes, so I spit it out and reach for a new piece a few minutes after that.
As for aversions, would you believe . . . chocolate??? Only since Easter have I managed to sneak down a few M & M's. I cannot remember any Easter when I have not gorged myself on Reese's peanutbutter cup eggs (truly, the perfect chocolate-peanut butter ratio, no matter what the Germans say), and this year I ate not a one.
My exercise routine has been non-existence, but I do think I can count the walk from my car to my office each day, especially the extra miles I gain looking for my car (pregnancy has made me prone to forgetting where I parked) and from my many trips to the bathroom. As luck would have it, my office is located the furthest possible distance from the women's rest room. There is no one in the entire 37 floor building that has to walk further to the bathroom than I do.
I mentioned previously that my face is a mess - more so than with either previous pregnancy, but my hair and nails are jammin' despite the fact that I frequently forget to take my pre-natals (hopefully all those extra nutrients in the Coke will make up for that). And I already have sooo many stretch marks, who knows if I'll even notice when I inevitably add to that collection.
Kiki and Logan remain excited about the baby. Kiki is convinced I'm having twins. Logan gently reminds her that she'll have to help him take care of this next baby. I think they both predict it's a girl. Less than two weeks till we find out!
I'm seriously considering selling the naming rights, however, so start thinking up some good monikers.
As I am now going on my fifth straight day of keeping my food down, I think I can safely say I'm done puking and ready to get back to blogging. Even the past week or so has been a big improvement, enough so that I've at least been able to get out and experience life, take pictures and otherwise capture in random thoughts and words rambling around in my head many "bloggable" moments. In an effort to clear my mental pallet, and because I realize I'm never going to have time to go back and develop these into the full-blown posts that they might have been, I'm going to attempt to tackle this all in one mish-mash multi-category post so we can all move on. Here goes.
Why Is It Always My Shoes?
Kiki, having fully recovered from hives and completed her course of steroids such that she has now returned to her normal spunky, adorable self, is making leaps and bounds in the world of potty training. Going #2 on the indoor plumbing is a regular occurrence for her, however, getting the timing down on #1 is still a bit of a mystery. She also on occasion enjoys trying on my shoes. During a recent underwear-clad moment, she wound up testing the watertightness of a brand-spankin' new pair of Etienne Aigner pumps. She'd done this one other time with a brand-spankin' new pair of Bandelino pumps. And, while I'm happy to report that you could confidently sip champagne out of either pair, you probably don't want to at this point.
Emotional Jail
Logan, ah Logan, I love you buddy, and you certainly have become quite a "man" since turning six - from making pee standing up "like a real man" to trying new foods and getting yourself dressed, you're really growing up. And yet, we still have the occasional emotional overload. SOMETHING happened at church recently that set you off - I didn't see it, but the mom of the 2-year old who was involved insisted that he apologize to you. I tried to get you to talk about it:
"Can you tell me what upset you?"
"NO!"
"Talking about it might make you feel better."
"NEVER!"
"Well, could I just say a little prayer that you'll feel better?"
"NO WAY. PUT AWAY THOSE PRAYER HANDS!"
"I'm not going to say anything out loud, I'm just going to think a prayer for you in my heart."
"NO! MOMMY - YOU ARE GOING TO JAIL!"
"Jail? Why am I going to jail?"
"FOR PRAYING!"
FANNEE MEETS GRACE
What do you get when you mix 2 lbs. butter that's not even close to room temperature, a bag and a half of Hershey's dark chocolate chips and remaining cookie ingredients, and the energetic offspring of Fanneedoolee and Grace? Chocolate chip crepes, and a lot of fun!
Click here for more baking fun photos in my flickr photostream.
H.B. MARIE!
Damn! Where ARE those pictures? You know the ones - with the lipstick and the tacky luggage? They must be lost in my mom's basement somewhere. I vow someday to find them and post them, hopefully before your next birthday. Until then, this blast from the past will have to suffice:
Nice midriff.
High School Revisited
Congratulations to An, who once again received a top rating when performing with her school choir at a regional festival. They advance to the state competition in May! And thanks to An for my best people watching experience to date - sitting in the high school cafeteria after the performance, watching all the students from the various schools in their mix of formal singing attire and flip-flops. From the fashions to the hairstyles to the social graces, high school is a social time capsule that remains unchanged.
The Many Faces of Logan
all aboard!
{More Photos To Come . . . }
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