sassyfrass

doh! after that big twitter hacking scare in december, i forgot to change my password here so none of those tweets got archived here. rats.

in other news, STILL TIRED. four months (and counting) of getting up every 3-4 hours to feed a baby a bottle will really fuck you up.

opening up the ad for this year’s gama-go warehouse sale, suddenly we see that we’re featured from when we went two years ago with snapper, when she was just a wee couple of months old.

(stationary) dumbo is fun!, originally uploaded by sassyass.

for halloween and caitlin’s birthday, we all decided to go to disneyland. why? 1. everyone thought it might be fun for snapper’s first trip there and 2. caitlin gets in free for her birthday.

snapper was excited to go as i picked up my mom (who had been talking about taking her to disneyland FOREVER) and we met caitlin & the family there. and right as we got in we got to meet goofy in costume, and snapper was game, although we had to try and explain the difference between pluto and goofy. i mean really, why does goofy talk and walk around, and pluto doesn’t? was there some cartoon where goofy’s ancestors touched the monolith and pluto’s ancestors didn’t? hm, considering how that ended up in 2001, maybe that’s one of the cartoons that got censored in the vaults.

the only doubt i really had was whether snapper was going to be too young to enjoy any of the rides. we decided to go with the low-impact ones and start with something easy, like the big carousel just past cinderella’s castle. snapper was excited and picked out a horse, and was ready to ride, having fun… and then the ride started and the horse went UP UP UP and that was it. she screamed and tried to lunge back into my arms, and we spent the rest of the ride standing next to the horse.

pretty much every ride was some variant of that: sort of ok in the ride, and then when it starts, wanting to jump back into my arms. dumbo, teacups, winnie the pooh, all the same result.

alas, she ultimately did have fun wandering the park, and got to see all the characters, and hug winnie the pooh and tigger as well.

but maybe next time we’ll stick to the railroad and the monorail.

It’s strange to have gone through the whole process of having a baby but then not actually HAVING the baby. Obviously we fo have one, but him being up in the NICU instead of in the room with us is odd and lonely. Ironically, not having the baby maybe allows for easier recouperation, since there’s no on screaming in there every few hours. Yet you’d definitely prefer that to this. I played the game, where’s my prize?

The funny thing is that I walk around the hospital and see the people dealing with extremely long labors– running in with bottles of Gatorade to stay hydrated, walking around slowly trying to get the delivery process started. I think, “what the hell are they doing? Just sit down and pop that sucker out!”

You never really consider these issues when you’re married to quick-draw mccann.

well there you have it. a teeny tiny 3lb, 10.7oz. 15″.

how did we get here? Let’s back up a little, shall we?

we went in for our now-normal appointment at the doctor to get examined, and he results were pleasantly the same: cervical length still short but more or less unchanged, which is the same place she’s been for a couple of months now. yet it’s the same precarious position she’s been in, and eventually something’s going to happen, like building a house on the side of a cliff: it’s great while it lasts, but you know sooner or later a mudslide is going to come and wash the whole thing down the hill. The whole question is, WHEN? yet we had been in this state for so many weeks I became convinced it was going to end up a big joke and she was going to last into December, and be practically full-term.

Thursday hmc started having contractions for the first time. We rushed over to the doctor’s office and had her loooked at, and she was fortunately not dialating. They gave her something to try and stop the contractions, and decided to send us home given that not much else was happening. Eventually, the contractions stopped later that evening. Talking again with the doctor, one of them thought we might be due any day, while the other thought we might again hang at this new precipice for a few more weeks.

Friday there were small intermittent contractions, until it started up again around 6pm. hmc tried the medicine again, but after two doses there wasn’t much change. We called the doctor, and as I was describing what was happening to him he could hear hmc’s screams in the background and said, “get you arses to the hospital right now.”

So off we went, waking up snapper for an evening adventure. She was a little groggy at first but then excited to get to be up and out. In the car as hmc was yelling in pain, she asked, “what is mommy trying to do?” I told her that she was tying to rest, and that seemed like a perfectly acceptable answer to her, being able to relate that sometimes you cry and yell when you’re too tired and you can’t sleep.

I dropped hmc at the emergency entrance where they whisked her up to labor & delivery while I swung around and parked the car. We rushed in, only they WOULDN’T LET US IN. why? Due to new swine flu restrictions, no one under 18 is allowed in the hospital. So snapper had to stay out, which means i couldn’t get up there to help hmc. Thankfully, we had called hmc’s dad and he was already on the way to meet us, and got there not too long afterwards to take snapper so I could go up and help hmc.

By the time I got up there, her room was a flurry of activity, with lots of people swarming around. Originally we thought we were hoping to stop the contractions, but once again she was at 9cm when we got there, which definitely means it’s GO TIME.

Neither our OB nor the other one in the practice made it there in time. The baby shot out like a cannonball, with barely enough time for the on-call staff OB to finish putting on his gloves before he caught him.

Less than a half hour after we got to the hospital, at 9:27pm, he was born.

thinking about a couple of movies we saw this weekend:

viva maria! (1965): brigitte bardot & jeanne moreau as burlesque striptease inventors turned socialist revolutionaries to avenge george hamilton. cute, silly, and perhaps a little bit too long. you get the feeling that louis malle knew that he should edit this down, but every time he tried to, he fell more in love with bridgitte bardot and couldn’t bear to cut any scenes of her short.

indiana jones & the crystal skull whatever (2009): what does it say about this that viva maria! was infinitely MORE BELIEVABLE?

helvetica (2008): nice little doc about helvetica and typeface in general. it’s funny, being a hobbyist designer, i do recall subscribing to emigre font catalogues, and drooling over certain fonts. it was FONT PORN! how odd indeed.

i remember before all of this where i claimed that i would gladly give up my job and just stay at home and take care of snapper all day.

well.

no, it’s not that i’m backtracking on that, but after over a month of taking care of her without hmc’s bedridden help, man, am i tired. and my arms– no, wait, how does that joke go? it’s not really the snapper-care that’s the big drain, especially since the nanny is here three days of the week and the other two are covered by the french daycare. it’s all the other surrounding things that need to be taken care of that are exhausting: doing all the chores, buying the groceries, preparing all the meals, cleaning, etc. and of course making sure that hmc fed and watered and rolled over every now and then.

i get grumpy and tired from the ENDLESS EVERYTHING that needs to be done, but then i realize: this is what HOUSEWIVES DO ALL THE TIME. is this what drives housewives and (sorry, john) househusbands mad? is betty draper my new role model? or do i end up like kate winslet in revolutionary road? if you see me drunk in the neighbor’s car, shoot me first.

i almost empathize the most with larry gopnik in the cohen brothers’ new film “a serious man”. which was pretty wonderful and has delightful bits scattered around all the comedic tragedy. i think the problems i have with it are the same basic problems i have with the story of job in the first place: i just don’t know what we’re really supposed to learn, except maybe, “shut up and suck it up. shit happens.” which is fine for real life, but kind of crappy as a parable. and certainly doesn’t make you feel that much better when you’re in it.

but maybe it’s a more practical life lesson. because perhaps when this ordeal is all over, instead of getting a nice vacation you’re next plunged into a new cycle of intermittent sleeplessness punctuated by lots of crying and screaming. and maybe some of that will actually be coming from the baby.

today’s appt: 9mm. maybe even 1cm!

yes, i know that’s actually MORE than the last visit. we’re seeing the ob/gyn and perinatologist on alternating weeks. the perinatologist seems to give thicker measurements than the ob/gyn. they claim it’s maybe because of the more accurate ultrasound equipment the perinatologist has.

in any case, we’ll take it. one more week is one more week. slowly slogging to the next milestone, trying to get four more weeks to reach magic 32. except hopefully that doesn’t mean showtime.

last week’s measurement: 7mm. oh my lord. the OB i think actually said, “i don’t know how you stayed out of the hospital for the last month.”

and yet here we are today, at officially 28 weeks. not like the zombie horror movie. i don’t think. but in the good third trimester way.

next checkup is tomorrow. there’s always a huge wave of impending doom looming somewhere out there. oh wait, i mean HOPE! there’s always a huge wave of impending HOPE looming somewhere out there! that’s what i meant to say. dang internet mixing up words.

finally moved to wordpress. i gave up and thought this was going to be easier than trying to unfrack all the movable type quirks over all the years. and a lot of the reasons that stopped me from moving to wordpress in years past i for the most part don’t care about anymore, namely multiple blog support. a lot of that stuff ends up on twitter/facebook anyway, and i’m not really sold on the need for this anyway.

what i really don’t remember is whether the old rss feed is the same as the new one. which might mean i’m back to talking to the void, since i’m sure it’s long enough that no one’s actually checking manually anymore.

which means: FINALLY i get to reveal my deep-seated love of crocheted plant hangers.