Corpus Christi funtivities

Happy Corpus Christi!

...says Baby K who, according to the Internets, is now the size of a small watermelon. It's fortunate we had a small watermelon on hand to check.


In the world of planning-for-a-child-filled-future, we are busy little bees. (Almost as busy as the actual bees that are currently in an absolute frenzy in our garden, painstakingly vacuuming Every Single Flower.)

As of about now, I am "full term". I thought this would mean, when I went to my last doctor's appointment on Monday, that we'd do an ultrasound and I'd get the answers to all those burning questions, like, is there actually a watermelon inside me? And, if it keeps growing, won't I explode?

No such luck. There is to be yet another appointment, a week from now, to do all the measurements and assessments. (I still have no very clear idea of what is being assessed; we never really discuss these in depth, as several months of scrutiny have failed to turn up anything remotely interesting or suspicious in any of my bodily systems. Not for the first time in my life, I wonder if there's really any point in going to a doctor at all.)

Just in case, I did ask if there's a chance Baby K might appear before we manage to measure her next week. Oh, no! Not a chance! I'm assured. There's absolutely no sign whatsoever of anything happening in the near future.

The doctor did mention that she's moved quite low down, but doesn't seem to have entirely dropped yet. My personal opinion is that she's riding very low and very high at the same time - but I think this may have more to do with my size than with hers. She is also now very adept at both splits and handstands.

As they informed us in Baby School, which we graduated from a couple weeks ago, you may notice certain signs of approaching labour, such as going into a cleaning frenzy. So every morning, when I drag myself and my two very separate and unresponsive hip sockets into a reluctanct sitting position after long hours of intermittent abdominal-wall-punching, wandering about the house, snacking and blowing my nose, I look over my jumbled miscellaneous piles of Stuff all over the bedroom floor and test to see if I am inspired by any unquenchable desire to straighten them out. So far, the answer is consistently "no".

The same can be said for Baby K's room. As I imagine she won't be sleeping there for the first several months, we haven't made it that much of a priority to finish, beyond painting and setting up the two meagre articles of furniture - a dresser and a crib. And despite all the list-making and online information-seeking, it's taken us a while to get down to the actual buying-and-setting-up stage of the baby prep activities.

But this week, there has been progress. I put in a huge order to Allegro (our eBay, if you didn't know) for all those intensely fascinating items you have, I'm sure, always dreamed of owning but never had the opportunity to - freezer milk bags and wet wipes and dry wipes and gels and creams and sterile swabs and all sorts of hospital gear, and a little pacifier container with a hippo on it. Yesterday, we went on a spur-of-the-moment excursion to Ikea and came home, a little unexpectedly, with three new sets of shelves (all those wipes need to be put somewhere) and armfuls of bins of different shapes and sizes.

Add to that my recent, miraculous discovery of the true glory of Roban - our local chain of used clothing stores where, it turns out, you can buy baby-sized H&M jeans and baby cargo pants and onesies and sundresses and all sorts of things for 3PLN a piece - and I am even finally stocked up on the previously evasive supply of nightshirts that the hospital advises you to bring. (I cannot remember the last time I wore anything called a "nightshirt". It was a long hunt.)

Wearing one of my miraculous finds from Roban. Also, it was Emmeline's goodbye party last week.

Today was spent putting together furniture and puttering around the garden. I pulled up buckets of weeds from our sadly neglected carrot patch, while Piotrek whipped up three sets of shelves, a small desk and a diaper bin. Also, there was a minor tragedy when a sparrow flew head-first into our back door and, apparently, broke its neck. We laid it out in a paper-towel-shroud for some time in case it came to (this is not the first time a sparrow has collided with our back door), but this one was most definitely expired, so we held a small funeral and buried it in a patch near the compost heap. (I was for digging the grave under the trees near our deck, but Piotrek encouraged me to note how many of the late sparrow's friends like to flock about the compost heap, and how it would be much happier down there.) We have also unpacked the entire pantry in preparation for tomorrow's delivery of a full grown-up-sized fridge, including a freezer where, we imagine, we will soon be storing all those freezer bags of milk, along with all those carefully-prepared frozen meals in Tupperwares that you're supposed to stock up on before a baby arrives (say the Internets). Another of those things I plan to suddenly find myself desperate to do, once the promised hormones kick in. Whenever that is.

 

In addition to these exciting preparations, the contents of my hospital bag are now finally splayed in thematic piles all over Baby K's bedroom floor. Considering I've even taken the vital step of deciding which clothes to pack - for both of us - we're obviously ready to go. I mean, I will put the stuff into the bag and all. One of these days. When those aforementioned hormones kick into gear.

 

The truth is, I'm mostly just too tired to do much of anything these days. Since my muscles are more sore every day than if I'd been working out at the gym for twenty-four hours non-stop, my limited energy is generally devoted to an hour or two of extremely relaxing yoga, and my long lists of ambitious house-cleaning projects stops short after the first round of dish-washing. So while Baby K evolves into ever more of a watermelon, I devolve ever more into a Lump Extraordinaire, and resign myself to an early summer of reading mom blogs, reading spy novels, and watching youtube tutorials on cloth diapering, swaddling, baby slings and hypnobirthing.

 

And that's really all that's been going on, these past few weeks.

Can you tell which is which?

 

 

 

Mother's Day, observed

Last Monday was Mother’s Day in Poland, and I received my first tribute of the occasion.

As I was walking to the train station, a man came up alongside me on the sidewalk and started flagging me down with “Hello! Hello! Excuse me!” Now, as he was a man of the toothless, unwashed, sketchy-looking variety, and I have an often-proved talent for picking up undesirable stalkers, I’m afraid I employed my usual mode of action in such situations and kept walking as though I had not heard him, aided by a very loud passing truck. To which, in a demonstration of admirable persistence, he responded by suddenly leaping into a bush. As I continued on my way, he tore out the nearest wildflower and hurried once again after me, wagging the flower in my direction.

“I only wanted to give you this,” he said, “for Mother’s Day. I gave the very same to my own mother,” he solemnly promised me.

So I took the flower, and thanked him profusely, and he took this as an invitation to join me in my rather hurried walk (I didn’t want to miss the train.) “You know you’re supposed to eat them as soon as they’re born?” he said. I shook my head in a show of surprise. “Yes, you are, and if you don’t, then twenty years later you’ll regret it!” He laughed at his joke, then said, no, of course he was only joking, having children is a beautiful, beautiful thing. He himself has two sons, and they help him in every possible way. “And you will have a girl, I think,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, “how did do you know?”

 “I have two sons, and there has to be some balance in the world.” On which he reached the post office, and waved goodbye, and I continued on my way, realising about halfway to the station that I was still holding the flower out in front of me, like a banner.

 

My first Mother's Day present, after a long train ride

As to the actual Being a Mother bit, it’s gradually moving out of the theoretical zone into the realm of anxious practice. Piotrek and I have recently begun Baby School, among other things. We’ve been to one weekend session so far, where we were presented with dolls and baskets of clothes, and invited to practice dressing and undressing, lifting and lowering, taping and untaping the ends of diapers, and running brushes over imaginary heads of hair.

The school is in an old building in the city centre, with large, high-ceilinged rooms, parquet floors, and bits and pieces of décor in deep, solid, calming colours, such as dark pink bean bags, and dark blue exercise mats, and forest-green mugs, and a shiny purple tea pot on a little striped rug. All the couples sit in a circle on the bean bags, smiling at each other and at the young, relaxed, encouraging midwife who reassures us that we all know what we’re doing, and as we shall soon see, our children will be happy as little burbling clams.

We learned the art of bathing, and various techniques for cleaning parts of the face and body, and how to put on a disposable diaper, and which type of hair brush to buy, and how to use it, and when best to cut fingernails, and the easiest way to lift little legs and haunches to ease them in and out of onesies.

We did not, however, receive instruction on the mysteries of the reusable diaper. I have, of course, watched a YouTube tutorial on this subject, taking notes on the various models, recommended brands, and tried and tested uses of all the complex parts of the new-fangled reusable diapering systems currently available on the market. But the inserts, covers, pins, pads and other bits look far more formidable in real life than they did on the screen.

In the midst of sorting piles of baby clothes into “more white” and “more pink”, with the intention of trying out our sample packet of baby laundry powder from our Baby School welcome pack, and having recently received a miraculous package of fun and joy from Mom including beautifully hand-made diapers, I decided to put my diapering instincts to the test, and try out all the different materials. I practiced stuffing pockets, and covering pre-folds, and double-padding with ordinary flannel squares, and lining up elastic leg holes. I will just say – it’s trickier than it looks. But if we’re being generous with our definition of success, then I succeeded in getting the inner bits of diaper into the outer bits of diaper, and in pinning pre-folds and tetra squares without puncturing either myself or the stuffed-animal models that were eventually drawn into the experiment.

 

Victims of Diaper Practice

 
As we held fluffy pink plush breasts up to ourselves and practiced positioning our dolls against them in the various breast-feeding holding positions, our friendly instructor at Baby School reminded us again and again to ignore the markets, doctors, hospital midwives, family members and various random old ladies who will, under guise of kind encouragement, appeal to our natural feminine sense of guilt and try to convince us that we are doing something wrong.

The baby-product market will have you believe that you are inflicting slow, residual damage on your child’s bottom if you don’t prophylactically apply their creams and oils three times a day, while in fact most babies require nothing more than water to keep them clean. Your grannies and your paediatricians will blame your child’s sub-par weight gain on your “weak milk”, while in fact there is no such thing. Your friends and relations will thoughtfully attribute your baby’s crying to a wet diaper, while in fact, babies are very unlikely to notice that their bottoms are wet at all.  In fact, your baby’s crying, our instructor assures us, will almost never result from something you have done wrong.

Which, as I struggle to make the legs of my last pre-fold stay up over the feet of my blue stuffed elephant without cutting off his imaginary circulation, seems to me to be the best advice so far.