Week 29 - Hello, sciatica, my old friend

Had to let the buckles out on my Berks and I get gimpier as the days go by. I'm getting twinges of sciatica, which was so bad during my first pregnancy I had to quit working during my seventh month. And here we are on the eve of a new seventh month, and those painful flashes shooting out of my hip are bringing back those memories. My belly is heavy, and sadly, I am not avoiding stretch marks after all, their jagged red streaks appearing along my under-navel belly region to join their silvered cousins from another pregnancy long ago. But my total weight gain so far is only 22 pounds. Will I explode during my last three months, though, or will I continue to gain sanely?

The napmonster has returned, but isn't as debilitating as it was first trimester. Now it's 1-2 hour naps instead of 3-4 hour naps. And I seem to have made it through the worst of the heat wave, but not without some blowback to the rest of the population. I'm still taking everything personally, finding myself irritated when I don't have the money to do something when it used to be I'd just accept it and move on, or finding myself insulted when people make light of how far out in the country I live. A huge busload of people that includes some professional friends of mine are a scant 8 miles down the road at a winery I've been meaning to visit, but knowing I could go there and get the tasting/tour for less than $10 really made me question whether I should shell out $40 to go spend a couple of hours there with the busload when... I don't need the bus. As it was, the napmonster attacked me right around the time everyone would have gotten there, so... I'm lame. Again. But also annoyed that it takes a $40/head special event to get people to come out to my neck of the woods. It would be lovely if a couple of people would organize some carpools to come back out here during the prettiest season of the year, since it's been really difficult for me to get out of the valley even just to get to work since getting pregnant. Whine, whine, whine. I know. I should get used to the changing dynamics of my social life. It's going to be this way for a while.

We did get out for a spell last night to hang out with some friends of ours who are getting ready to move to Alaska. I think I'm more wired for those smaller, more intimate meetups these days anyway. The 46" waist is very heavy hanging off that back, you know.

The baby feels awesome, even if I wish he weren't digging into my ribs and my bladder at the same time. Every now and then, he'll rotate such that the head is right in the pocket where my gallbladder used to be. It hurts a lot, but is also funny to feel his head right there, as if I could cradle him right off. He never stays there for long, though. He seems to be settling toward more head-down stuff. I just hope he stays there.

Working and breastfeeding

As Dean noted in his last post (are you catching the vibe that he prefers to blog about sustainable lifestyle topics?), we have acquired a vacuum food sealer, a dehydrator, and a freezer in recent days. But I have a confession about that freezer. It's so I can freeze breast milk.

My first son weaned himself at 8 months, and that was largely because I was working quite a bit and had returned to school. I was devastated. Granted, we had started solid foods at this point, but I felt a tremendous amount of disappointment because I had wanted to nurse him for a full year. He just wasn't interested anymore, and I suspect it was because we'd started supplementing with formula: we didn't have a good system for storing breast milk, much less the means to afford a good pump. I remember being on the night shift at Hilltop House--I was a CNA back in those days--and having excruciating pain because Elder Son had refused the breast the evening before.

Now that I'm older and more well-established in my (non-health-care-related) career, I have a better shot at succeeding with this. My mother instilled in me a trust in my body to provide for my children; she breastfed us back when it wasn't encouraged at all. So even though I'm pretty sure I won't be able to cloth-diaper the kid the way I would if I were a stay-at-home-mom, I am reasonably sure that I will be able to do keep providing breast milk for son #2 for the full year and then some, if possible. I have a supportive work environment that includes a room for such things, and I'm working on the day care piece of it.

But the freezer eliminates the storage-space worry I'd been having. I like putting food by, and find that when I don't, I overbuy and watch things overspoil. So the freezer portion of my fridge is always packed. I started looking out for a supplemental freezer, preferably a small chest style, for under a hundred dollars. On Tuesday, I scored.

I dated a guy whose family was Mennonite for a year and a half some years back, and one of the best things I got out of that relationship was an appreciation for managing food storage. Buying a dozen ears of corn, for instance, when you're only eating two; cook the whole batch; slicing the kernels off the extra ears, and freezing them in quart-size freezer bags is a great way to never buy a bag of much-less-tasty commercial frozen corn, for instance.

Now I can pursue more of that, which will come in very handy as I make my own baby food as well. So you can see why sustainable living is an important topic in our family life, as people, and as parents. And as we shift out of pregnancy mode in a few months and into life with baby, we'll continue to share our little piece of how we're making the world better for our kids.

Speaking of which, I need to finish Elder Son's laundry....

Dad post: Better frugality through appliance acquisition

We've had a run on appliances. . . That's a big deal for a luddite such as myself. But these, I think really are worth the weight in coal they consume. For me it is both sad and frustrating to see such powerful devices designed for the scope and scale for use by the average homemaker to preserve, process, and prepare their own food gather dust in the corner of a cluttered pantry or kitchen while the Starbucks culture forgoes these options for the frozen meal-in-a-box, grocery store convenience of what more often than not basically amount to the modern suburban MRE; dog food for humans who are perfectly comfortable being "kept", all the while maintaining the illusion that they are free and independent. There is no genuine independence without food independence.

First Mrs. scored us a vacuum sealing FoodSaver doohickey at some ridiculous sale price, and at such an opportune time when my home-grown hops were (I hope) at their peak of readiness and potency. With this harvest I was able to glean 1 oz. of Cascade, and 3 oz. of Brewer hops, each weighed out and packaged in single use portions. But better still it allows us to vacuum seal cuts of meat and a myriad of other stuff that I've seen all too often end up in the trash.

For a while I've had a food dehydrator that I've used over the many years, mainly for making a favorite jerky recipe. But, lately, Pops has been using it almost to the point of exhaustion (the appliance, not him) from preserving a bumper crop of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and some more stuff from the garden. Tomato chips, where certainly strange, are actually very good to eat as they are, put on stuff like pizza, or reconstitute into sauces, etc. He replaced my old one with a revved-up stainless steel model with an adjustable heat setting making it perfect for curing herbs. Again, very timely for drying my hop flowers! As soon as I can find some London broil or bottom round steak at a good price I'll plan to make some beef jerky again; it's been a while.

And then yesterday Mrs. locates a smaller chest freezer on craigslist offered for $95. So we scored that on the way home from work this evening. This, I'm hoping, will help us better manage food storage giving us more room to actually set food aside - bulk grocery trips to better take advantage of sale opportunities for the sole purpose of freezing, intentional food-saving and, hopefully, reduce the amount of produce that goes into the worm bin (worms should eat free!) I foresee cold winter days when we actually spend entire afternoons preparing sauces, pastries, entrees, and a host of other foods, together as a family, to stock the freezer as time and space allow. Yes, the dried, vacuum-sealed hops go into the freezer, ready for the next brew day!

I'm glad I didn't have an epidural

I gave birth to my first son in 1992. A lot has changed in those years, but a lot hasn't, too. Now, 17 years is a long time to hold on to a birth story, and I didn't keep a journal of experiences in those days so much as I kept a journal of emotions, so I know that during my pregnancy I was incredibly depressed. I was 21, for most of it, and had married that February and gotten pregnant on the honeymoon--the same honeymoon that we had to cut short because we found out my then-husband was losing his job. I spent the entire pregnancy on WIC, food stamps, and Medicaid. Thank you, taxpayers of Virginia.

I remember more about the birth itself the closer I get to my due date, now. I had been flirting with toxemia; my blood pressure and weight gain were the biggest concerns but I was starting to show protein in the urine. But I was already showing signs of effacement and dilation, so the doctor made a decision to go ahead and induce me the following Tuesday with an amniotomy.

I remember coming in on what felt to be the coldest day of the year. It was blustery as my then-husband dropped me off at the door; he parked, we went up together. I don't recall checking in, but I do remember getting set up in the bed to be induced. The nurses started an IV. Ten minutes later, the doctor walked in, and asked why they had started an IV. They were visibly startled; I was just impressed. "I want to see how she does after we break her water. I have a feeling she won't need Pit."

I honestly can't recall how insistent I was at that time for a low-intervention birth, but I must have made myself clear at some point. The amniotomy itself didn't bother me; it struck me as a physical intervention rather than a chemical one. But what surprised me was what the doctor said upon examining me. "She's already 3 centimeters. She's having this baby today anyway." I had been in labor all morning and not felt a thing--something that is common to my mother and my grandmother. He performed the amniotomy; I didn't feel that either. By 10 a.m., labor was well established. "No need for Pit," the doctor said again.

I called my mom. "You'll have this baby by 1:30," she said. We all had a laugh, but it turned out she'd be right--I was ready to start pushing around the time that everyone else was finishing up lunch. Suddenly, the entire world turned round: my eyes, my mouth, my soul was all formed into a perfect "O" shape--and everything I could see *felt* round. (I'm prone to synesthesia, so in hindsight that makes better sense than it did at the time.) The head was out, and the nurses were pleading with me to pant, because one of my son's shoulders was hung up on my pelvic bone, a condition known clinically as shoulder dystocia. The doctor deftly worked him up, then down, then up, then down, rocking him past the barrier--and then my son came into the world, all 9 1/2 pounds of him.

One of the nurses who was helping me breastfeed made an offhand comment to me that has stayed with me ever since. "It's a good thing you didn't have an epidural," she said. "Oh?" I replied, asking her to explain. I was 6 weeks past my 22nd birthday at the time, and didn't have any more of an understanding of labor other than what I'd gotten from "What to Expect," my childbirth education class, and my mother's tales of carrying me and my brother. But I suppose I was influenced by my mother's explanation of the difference between her birth with me, done under twilight, and with my brother, done completely natural. I showed up in five hours; my brother in 3. (We're wondering, actually, whether I will have time to even get to the hospital at all, if I don't know I'm in labor until I get to 5 cm and I roll through dilation half as quickly as I did with Elder Son.)

The nurse explained that she'd seen cases where an epidural actually caused a labor to drag on and on. "Your baby was so big, that it was a good thing you and all your muscles were fully present to work with your baby and your body to get him out. I think, if you'd had an epidural, you'd have wound up having a section."

This made me curious, even then, about whether we should always trust in medication. Sometimes I think we're taught to be afraid of the pain, so afraid that the epidural looks like an attractive option. So many women in my childbirthing ed class this time around have the attitude of "pass me an epidural as quick as you can!" And while I'm a huge advocate for allowing women to make their own choices about pain management in labor, there are times when I wish this aspect was made more clear to women. Interventions have a funny way of cascading. I feel like I'm lucky that my doctor was Pitocin-averse, at least in my case--because I've heard so many stories about how Pitocin creates unnaturally strong contractions that leaves a woman begging for epidural relief. Then, sometimes the epidural creates a difficult environment for pushing; other times, the pitocin makes it such that the oxytocin rush that I think I felt in that O-moment of birth never happens. Either way, it can lead to that nebulous diagnosis that scares me so much: failure to progress.

As if women didn't have enough "fail" pressure in their lives, right?

So anyways, the point is: in 1992, I was told--after the fact--that having an epidural would have made my life more difficult. I'm glad I turned it down. And will do so again with this pregnancy, even though I'm 17 years older.

Week 28: The cankles cometh, and suddenly huge

I haven't gained very much weight this month--only 2 pounds, compared to last month's 12. I attribute this mostly to my appetite leveling off after a very hearty second trimester of making up for a highly nauseated first trimester. My midwife says that on the whole my weight gain is right on track.

But more interesting is that despite the lack of weight gain, I have a startling amount of girth gain. At the beginning of the month I was still being told, regularly, that I didn't really look all that pregnant. During the past two weeks my rib cage has expanded a rather astonishing 3 inches, leaving me dashing for the bra extenders and yielding the predictable third-trimester side effect of heartburn after the mildest meals. Tums is my friend. I've been insisting for weeks that the baby is big for date, and for the first time, this morning my midwife measured my fundal height and agreed that my uterus was about 2 cm taller than it should be right around now. That's fine with me; my first was 9 1/2 pounds at birth and I'm quite sure son #2 will make an equally impressive appearance.

It's been a rough week, on the whole. Dean totaled his car this weekend and we've been frantically chasing down bureaucratic nonsense involving his traffic citation, his insurance, and being a one-car family all of a sudden. We're thankful he's ok, of course.

The restless leg syndrome is a lot worse, and I think Bunky has it too. The constant kicking and movement is curious; I could swear Elder Son was never this active, but it has been about 17 years, so, who knows what it was like. I was saying to Dean the other day that I'm a lot more present in this pregnancy than I was in my first. Paying attention to new symptoms as they come along, and noting them in a journal like this? Never thought to do that with my first, and then I was excessively preoccupied with my own misery in an unhappy marriage, whereas now I'm fascinated with the process of gestating life. But today's new symptom is nothing weird. In fact, it's a favorite topic in my childbirth ed class--most of the women are ahead of me, and so have already been having fun with cankles: the phenomenon of ankle swelling such that they disappear into one's calves. The funny thing about this is that the women in my immediate family--my aunts--suffer with this all the time, and not because of swelling. My grandfather had no ankles, to speak of, and my aunts got his legs, and all despised him for it. In fact, my mother spoke enviously of my ankles as I grew into womanhood, and it made me wonder what the hell all the fuss was about. But right now? I'm totally missing my ankles.

Dean said they look uncomfortable. They're not, really--they just feel... puffy. They want a massage, really. That's all.

My favorite ticker caption EVER

YES! YES! YES!



(From Baby-Gaga.)

Ho hum, here's a post. . .

Immediately, all the potted plants on the back deck, our "garden" this year,  are dying of thirst as if they haven't been watered in days. I placed reservoirs under as many as I could fit and hope that the wilting isn't as permanent as it looks. It's the dog days of summer and my bees are displaying an inordinately high level of activity this morning around the entrance to their hive. I don't have enough experience yet to judge as to whether or not this is normal or what might be the cause of it, I just know I haven't seen them this active since the day I hived the colony. I fired up the smoker and went in briefly looking for something obvious but there was nothing but busy bees to be seen, and a single small hive beetle in the feeder portending trouble I do not yet have. I've decided to dump the vermiculture bin that I've kept in the basement for composting kitchen scraps by way of worms because I believe it might be the source of fruit flies that plague Mrs. in the kitchen. The bin is supposed to be full of worms but springtails and the curious scattering of what appears to be fruit fly pupae attached all along the underside of the lid are more the rule than the exception lately. I shall try again later with  a place in the basement where Mrs. can put kitchen scraps this winter but in the mean time I will construct something quick and simple for outdoor use.

While in the basement  this morning, I noticed a strange pattern of dried liquid that had recently streamed across the floor like the ancient "ocean beds" of the martian surface and had pooled under the furnace. Oil? No, there's mold growing on it. Water, of course, but it's not from streaming in through the gap under the door from the outside stairwell that sometimes happens after a heavy rain . I followed it back to . . . the water heater that BiL had only just installed a few months earlier (panic!!!) but luckily that wasn't the source, either. Last week I put a small wine rack over in that corner of the basement that we'd rescued from a dumpster some years earlier, and there I discovered that fully half of the dozen bottles of homebrewed cherry lambic I had stored on their side there the previous week had ruptured their corks and spewed all over the concrete floor.  Joy! I had expected to have and keep those for a while, to break out on the rare occasions when we actually have company. I'll set one of  the remaining bottles aside for Mr Lange, the comptroller of the hospice organization I work for who brews beer with his church, and take the rest to the honey extraction/BBQ I've been invited to attend tomorrow. Better enjoyed now, for certain, than saved for a possible calamity, later. Four and a half liters wasted. . . . It seems that everything I try to save for a rainy day only ends up getting washed away in the deluge, and I'm reminded that there is only this moment. Relax, it's later than we think.

Next, my job: I stopped by (local sports bar) after work yesterday evening for barley pops and oat sodas with Todd, the consultant who is assisting with our capital campaign and James, one of our IT managers. Being a rank-n-file, non-exempt employee with little business sense for the organization beyond what I do there in the Philanthropy dept. (and do well, I might add) the conversation with these two was a way for me to "check the vitals", in a sense, to get an overview of the organization that recently went through a location transition, and a couple years prior to that replaced their (our)  CEO with a woman from West Virginia who is decidedly from a more clinical background than what the organization is accustomed to. Since then she has adopted a business model put forth by a company called Multi-View, Inc (sketchy much?) that is in keeping with her clinical experience. Within this multiview model there's precious little in the budget for technology and nothing in the way of fundraising, or development as it's sometimes referred to. So, I'm getting a sense of an early, distant warning of my impending lay-off despite that the director of my department is actively trying to retain me with flexible schedules and promises of a decent increase in compensation. We've been counting on my job as a source of health insurance, at least, because my income there is fairly marginal (and outright crap for the market we live in).  I do okay for a guy lacking certain educational credentials, I earn just enough in wages and benefits to make my job very difficult to replace. But worse, it keeps me from moving to the valley, an hour and a half west of D.C. on a full time basis. Oh, something has to give eventually! In what we know as the future there exist perceptual corners around which logic and speculation cannot sense and I shall remain cautious with what I wish for!

But all those are possible future scenarios, and isn't this supposed to be a blagh about babies and diapers and daddyhood, and such. I have to admit that I really don't have the time/mental capacity right now for the "examined life" as it were. Far from wanting to be the main source of angst here at GA, I'll try to chime in here occasionally over the next few months, preferably when I actually have something relevant to share. Daddies like me, the reluctant type, come into these things from the outside-in especially being that all the real action currently is still happening in utero. I still have 87 days until Bunky's here, 87 days to  live what I call "my life": working my job establishing and maintaining adequate distance between shit and fan and sorting paperclips for hospice, tending to my bees and garden, hopefully putting some libations aside for when I don't have the luxury of time nor the peace of mind.  87 days of cleaning and mending, deep breathing and learning and re-learning to rise to meet the needs and expectations of the beautiful mommy-to-be-again at my side. 87 days to get my house in order, whatever that means. And after that I die again, or at least the world I enjoy goes into remission to make way for a new life. His, mine, and ours.

Week 27: More of the strange, childbirth ed

Still enjoying the antics of my geographic tongue, which for several weeks has caused my tongue papillae to do their own doodling. If I'd had my camera, sense of humor, and decent lighting in the same place when it started, I'd have started a time-lapse montage of the doodles on my tongue just as a silly retort to all those bump time-lapses I see, tongue-in-cheek because it's taken me this long to be able to tell the difference between my pregnant belly and the fat belly I had a year ago. (Hint: the fold above one's navel finally smoothes out. I still have a crease there, though!)

Other strange symptoms that have crossed my attention: The occasional worrisome elevation of my pulse to about 120 for up to an hour at a time; the very sudden (within a week!) expansion of my rib cage by a whopping three inches (no wonder I can't breathe!), and a change in the cell-phone sensation in my lower uterus. It now pulses from time to time; shorter duration but longer intervals of sensation. So help me, Dean is going to put his ear to my belly one of these days and instead of a heartbeat, he's going to hear the T-Mobile jingle and then a mischievous giggle. I'm sure of this.

Speaking of Dean, haven't yet persuaded him to dad-blog but hoping I can soon; I'd really like to get his perspective on our childbirth education class. We're the only second-timers there, in a room of 15 other couples all on their first. It's our first together, of course, and I need a refresher after 17 years, but more importantly, I want Dean to get a better understanding of how to work with me and guide me through the experience. He gets very squeamish during the class, and when I notice this I tend to take his hand and squeeze it, or lean on his shoulder to let him know I'm there and I understand. During dinner afterward, I realized what this was. "I'm banking my positive energy with you," I told him. "So that you can feed it back to me when I'm in need of it." In other words, I'm being strong for him now, as I have been since the beginning of this pregnancy; I resented it during the first trimester but now I am enjoying it because I do see it as feeding him with the energy I will need in three months, and knowing it can be safely stored with him.

About 8 months in our relationship, I was felled by a gallbladder attack that landed me in the emergency room at about 3 in the morning. Dean didn't leave my side the entire night, even when I vomited prolifically and was howling in pain. Similarly, when Dean dislocated his shoulder earlier this year, ER staff had a hard time prying me away from his side. Glad they did though, because it was later that week I found out I was pregnant and the further I was from the X-ray machine, the better. I've realized that with both of us, when we see the other suffering we do all we can to radiate healing energy and compassion toward the other. And I sense it radiating back to me when we're practicing breathing. I feel that love and I'm just amazed by it, and know oh so well that Bunky was created out of that love.

Well, that and a generous helping of absinthe. It was a crazy Valentine's Day night, after all.

So anyhow, here's hoping I talk him into writing a post soon. I'm wagering his perspective on childbirth education will be much less mushy and much more hilarious.

Please, no formula samples. I'm breastfeeding.

This link floated across my twitter stream just now. Aside from the unfortunate headline that mentions "breastfeeding discharge bags," which conjures up a very strange visceral image, it makes an interesting point. When I first went in to my doctor's office for my prenatal interview, I was offered a bag of goodies that included coupons for free formula. I took those out and handed them back. "Someone else may need these more than I will," I said.

Apparently Lansinoh has taken note of this and partnered with Cottonwood Kids to create a different goodie bag for new moms leaving the hospital with their babies--which is what they mean by "discharge bag." The Healthy Baby Bounty Bag, as it's called, is:

... an insulated bag you can use to store pumped breast milk. Inside it has samples of products, coupons, and resources - all that can help breastfeeding mamas succeed plus a few other goodies.

In my bag was Lansinoh milk storage bags and disposable nursing pads, Boogie Wipes samples, SaniHands for Kids hand wipe samples, an Aquaphor sample, even some Traditional Medicinals Organic Mother's Milk tea bags (my fav part!) and a card with a code to redeem a free gift from Cottonwood Kids.

According to the article, these bags will "soon" be available at more than 200 hospitals across the country.

Of course, there is not even one Virginia hospital on the list at Lansinoh's blog, but I am going to call and ask the question, because perhaps by making the hospital aware that it exists, I'll be more likely to receive one.

Here's the press release on the Healthy Baby Bounty Bag. Which leads me to my newest tag: Want!

So now for my next question: If my hospital doesn't participate, or if I'm birthing at home, will you still find a way to get me a bag? :D

(Side note: I'm terribly amused to see that they are using Gregory FCA Communications for their PR campaigns, because... honestly, those folks are my favorite PR company, as a former journalist who benefited from the attention they paid to what my beats were, and who at one point lived literally around the corner from their office.)

Week 26: Catching Up

Well, here we are at almost week 27 and I'm only now getting my week 26 post up. Couple of things of note that happened during this otherwise unremarkable week. First, I nearly got into a fight with a woman for a chair at a political rally; second, I had a bona fide baby scare that lasted exactly 20 seconds.

On Thursday, I went to see President Obama speak at a rally for the democratic gubernatorial candidate. By virtue of my journalistic-oriented employment, I'm not really able to talk openly about my political positions, whom I want to vote for, or anything like that and at times it really chafes me, because I'm an ardent gay-rights supporter and a bizarre mix of pro-life-but-anti-abortion-criminalization. I can say that here because I'm semi-anonymous. Whee! Anyhow. I was at this rally, and about the time that our current governor got up to speak, the room started spinning for me. I don't handle crowds well even when I'm not pregnant, so this wasn't completely unexpected, but what did throw me for a loop was the behavior of the woman whose seat I politely asked for, since she wasn't sitting in it.

There were very few seats in the venue, actually. Other people around me could see that I was in some distress, and some were actively trying to help me into the chair. "I'm so sorry," I said. "I'm six months pregnant, and I just need to sit down for a few minutes."

Her retort was scathing. "Well, I have cancer!" she said, indignantly. "Only for a minute!" She grabbed her purse and her shoes, since apparently I looked like I wanted to make off with them. She was wearing evening attire; I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. But the women behind me shot her withering looks, one in particular handing me an ice-filled glass to hold to my face. I felt flushed and hot, but according to my helpers, I was pale. As she continued to glare at me, I said, "I'm sorry to hear that. We're all in this together, right?"

She stomped off in a huff; I was amused later when Obama came to the podium and actually said, outright, "We're all in this together." Which is true. I'm a political moderate and really hate partisanism. Anyways, I enjoyed Obama's speech even if there was a lot of rhetoric in it that felt like it was catered to the "base." It was humbling for me to sit in the same room as a sitting president. The closest I came to him was about 15 feet, when he was out in the crowd after his remarks, but I just wasn't feeling aggressive enough in the crowd to try to meet him. And as I moved through that crowd, I found out why evening-gown lady was so intent on holding on to her chair even though she wasn't sitting on it: I saw her standing atop another chair, cheering and waving her flag as though to music.

The other thing that happened this week--and it happened last night, actually--was that I was sitting in my den catching up on Burn Notice episodes and working on a cross-stitch project for the nursery when it occured to me I hadn't felt the baby move in several hours. I freaked out, on the spot, trying to remember when he'd moved last, thinking I needed to start tracking these things. Then I took a deep breath, focused inward, put my hand on my belly, and asked aloud: "Everything ok in there?"

Bunky thwapped me so hard you would have thought he was reading a book and didn't appreciate my interrupting him.

This morning he's back to his usual squirmy self but I imagine he is starting to settle into sleep/wake patterns right on schedule. I just need to get used to when they are, and hope that a nice, uninterrupted jag of sleepytime becomes his norm and stays that way after he's born.