Some thick ice

Anil had this great idea on Saturday that we go to the Museum of Fine Arts because I wanted to do some walking, and it's been a bit cold and frozen up here for the usual sidewalk strolls. He had the weekend off from work, and we were itching to do something that we might not get to do again for the foreseeable future. Granted, we won't get to lay around all night watching movies, but we'd done that all week and needed to get out of the house. But since we didn't get out of bed until 11 a.m. (another indulgence that isn't long for this lifestyle of ours), and realized that the museum closes at 4:45 p.m. on the weekends, we had to scratch that idea for the time being. Instead though, we went downtown to walk in the Public Gardens and Beacon Hill since it was above freezing outside (that's balmy for mid-winter Bostonians), the culmination of which was having a beer/Diet Coke in this little Beacon Hill bar called The Sevens. It's a routine we do with visitors and with friends in nicer weather, and it was a fun way for us to reconnect and reaffirm that we're still the same people we always are even when we're about to have a baby (and when I don't fit as gracefully onto a barstool... if I was ever graceful in that position, that is).

Here's my favorite part: the swan boat pond in the Gardens is completely frozen over, so much so that people are walking all over it, even up onto the little island from Make Way for Ducklings. I've never seen it like that; probably it happens every year but I don't usually stroll through the Common or Gardens in the tundra winter months. It's frozen enough to hold 8 1/2 months of pregnant Sara!

Best quote from this entire pregnancy:

Anil and I were watching TV the other night, trying to amuse ourselves as Saturday Night Live can't seem to do the job anymore, and for some reason--it must have been the music segment or a sketch with dancing--I did a lame little dance on the couch, and Anil goes, "You look like a Tella Tubby when you dance like that!" I laughed so hard I thought my water was going to break, because I'm sure it was true! I was sitting on the couch with my feet up, and all that was moving was my round belly, back and forth--you can picture it, right? Hilarious. If laughing helps labor along, I should have a short one, because we've been cracking each other up with reckless abandon.

"I'm a planet!"

That's one of my favorite quotes from Juno. And it's pretty much how I'm feeling this week. My belly is huge and just getting bigger, as is my appetite, which is frustrating as I try to not put on ten more pounds in my last month of pregnancy. Just this week I'm experiencing my first noticeable onset of "pregnant puffy face," which I really don't like. I know that it's normal, and I get that I'm lucky to have avoided it up until now, but I'm still not a fan. I got my hair cut on Wednesday and it was so not fun to look at my puffy face in the mirror the whole time! It was funny to tie the gown up over my belly though. And for the record, I've been told that I'm still not waddling.

I'm definitely puffing out though, all over and seemingly all of a sudden this week, though I'm sure it's been building for a while now. I haven't been able to wear my wedding rings in months, and now I can't wear any of my watches. My wrists don't look puffy to the eye, but apparently they are. My ankles are not cankles, let me be clear about that, but they're swollen by the end of the day and you can see ringed indentions when I take my socks off.

All of that is to just say that I'm at the point where I feel like I could have the baby and still not look like one of those marshmallow pregnant women... but I fear those days are growing short! I'm not due for another two weeks, but it'd be perfectly fine for her to come now. I just want to put that out there, Internet. My OB is on call this weekend, so in my appointment on Wednesday we tried to make that clear to my belly.

One reason we're ready is that the apartment is all set up, so here is a photo of me, the burgeoning planet, in our "baby den." Sorry if my belly is obscuring part of the view. Our apartment is loft-style, basically a big open space separated by stairs, so we cleared out half of it and set up the changing table then used bookshelves and cloth boxes from Target for a make-shift dresser.

Top 5 indignities of last month of pregnancy

5. Peeing a million times in the middle of the night. Or at least three to four. I'm not so big and heavy that I have to wake up Anil and have him physically push me out of bed, but I do have to strategically maneuver so as to not strain an ab (or what used to be ab) muscle here or there. I'm using my arms a lot, like doing a one-arm push up to get my upper body to go vertical. Then I can use whatever is still functional of my core from there to heft myself out of bed, or at least sort of roll over the side. I've stopped going to the gym because I consider my existence a workout at this point.

4. Either with the drop and change in shape or just from getting bigger (probably both), I'm getting belly drafts when I walk outside! And the other day in Target too. I don't wear my jeans with the bands that go over my belly anymore; I mostly stick to yoga pants or stretchy pants that sit on my hips and rest under my belly in front. When I walk, my shirt starts to ride up a little bit, and my jacket doesn't go as low as it used to, so I get this arctic blast of air on my belly when I'm outside.

3. I'm obnoxiously starving like I was in my first trimester (thankfully not simultaneously nauseous this time though). My stomach is still squished so will only hold a limited amount of food at one time, and when I eat that limited amount, I feel really full and inflated. Then I go from that level of discomfort to completely starving an hour or so later, usually at like 9 p.m., when I don't feel like eating real food any more. It's like this gnawing, unpleasant hunger too--not the kind where you actually want to eat; staying full just feels like a chore.

2. We went to Target last week to get all of the postpartum supplies that I might need, including a big pack of maxi pads. I've been told to stock up on them since it takes about six weeks for your uterus to fully contract and you tend to, well, leak (to put it nicely), in the mean time. So there I am with this hugely pregnant belly, giant green pack of Always pads in hand, and this teenage girl looks from my belly to the pads in total confusion.

1. I'm psyching myself out about every pain or tightening that I feel. I'm supposed to be feeling Braxton Hicks contractions by this point, but I can never tell. I'll feel like my belly is tight, but it also feels like it's just her stretching and/or sticking her butt up and out. [She does this thing at night where she rolls completely to my right side and just stays there, so my belly bulges out to the right in a really disconcerting way. I tried to take a picture, but whoa, talk about disconcerting--a close up of my belly is not what anyone needs to see right now.] I feel crampier than usual, but that's most likely because my internal organs are squished in unknowable places. With this in mind, I keep thinking of this hilarious story that I ready on Dooce.com last year. Heather Armstrong, of Salt Lake City, Utah, writes an irreverent, funny, and honest blog that she recently turned into a book about her first experience with pregnancy and new parenthood (the book is called It Sucked Then I Cried, in case that gives you some insight into what I mean by irreverent, funny, and honest), and this vignette (if you can use such a fancy word to describe such an un-fancy situation) was in the book too. When she's waiting to go into labor with her first daughter, she feels what she thinks are contractions, and her husband times them. Then she realizes that she just has to go to the bathroom. I think it's worth it to read the whole story in her words, but here is my favorite line, one that's been ringing in my ears as I lay in bed digesting Indian food or brownies, telling myself that I'm really not having contractions:

Sunday, 11:00 PM
Jon is still trying to reconcile the fact that he wasted three precious hours of his life timing poop labor.

Two things dropped on New Years

Even with a nasty cold, I stayed up to watch the ball drop on New Years, but there was a more exciting drop to come. I woke up New Years Day with a noticeably lower belly! The baby dropped with the Times Square ball. How fun is that? So she's head down, locked and loaded. All week I'd been commenting incredulously at how high she was; how it was like I had a shelf belly. And I was seriously concerned about where all of my internal organs were residing as I had literally one centimeter of space between my chest and belly. You could feel my uterus way up there--again, like a shelf. It was like I'd shoved a basketball under my shirt and pushed it up as far as possible. The old wives tale is that carrying high means you're having a boy, and I had random people asking if that was the case--my belly was that obviously up and out. The day before she dropped, it was the cashier at Target. I kept meaning to take a good picture, but kept putting it off (it didn't occur to me that it would change shape), so this is the best photo I have, taken on New Year's Eve. My mom was visiting and wanted a picture of the two of us in the snow, so this was a lucky spur of the moment belly shot that I didn't realize would be my last one with basketball belly.

When I changed clothes the next morning, I looked down and realized that my belly was like four centimeters lower and was shaped more like a ski slope or teardrop, no more basketball! I could feel the top of my uterus starting lower down, but the shape was the most striking difference. It seems to begin lower too--like an egg, lower down on my pelvis, instead of just popping out at my waistline, or what used to be my waistline. My jeans definitely don't fit anymore with that lower body shape change. I don't know if you can tell a difference in photos, but here I am on New Years Day post-drop.

Theoretically, I could go into labor 2-4 weeks after the drop. But from what I've learned, it's all just theoretical from here on out. There are always exceptions. I'm hoping though that this means she at least won't be late, since 4 weeks from New Years is my due date (it's January 30). Two weeks would be, well, pretty soon! But you never know. Of course, now I'm over-thinking every pain I get, but so far it seems hard to confuse a stomach ache from too much Indian food (last night) with the onset of contractions.

Top 5 Eats of Belly Watch '09

With the inescapability of Top 5, 10, whatever lists that comes with every New Year's Eve, especially ones at the end of a decade (and pregnancy feels like it lasts a decade), I thought I'd write some long overdue top lists for my pregnancy. I've kept them in my head all this time and as I near the end, it's funny to reflect on how much I've relied on things like repeat take-out restaurants or a certain pair of pants to make me happy. I'm going to start with places and things food-related that have kept me as well as my baby growing and well fed, so in no particular order of importance...

5. B.Good.

(photo credit: www.bgood.com locations page. I've meant to take a photo myself to put in the baby book... seriously it's been that much a part of this process!)

This is where I spent about 1/5 of my entire pregnancy--the Newbury Street location (other spaces being Anna's Taqueria--see #4, the Patagonia store, the Prudential Mall/Isis, and my couch). It's about three blocks away from where I've worked since finding out I was pregnant at the start of the summer, and it's faithfully supported me through the needs/wants of different trimesters. I was obsessed with it before (ask anyone I work with--it's a long-running joke), but pregnancy brought my dependancy on B.Good to a whole new level. When I was often simultaneously starving and nauseous during the first trimester, I inhaled turkey burgers. I read somewhere that high protein meals were best for keeping the newly pregnant full and the nausea at bay. B.Good has turkey burgers and ground beef and veggie burgers, all made in-house and served with whole wheat buns and an array of toppings. I always went for the "Cousin Oliver," with lettuce, tomatoes, and, of course, pickles (really my only instance of pickle-related craving). They call it "real" fast food. They also have baked regular and sweet potato fries, which leads me to my next trimester. My second trimester fell in the summer and early fall, so I was still up for plenty of salads time-of-year-wise and was still being conscientious of my calorie intake as I started to round up and out (trying to keep the rounding to my belly and not my butt). Baby's body was starting to develop more during that time too, so I felt good eating all those veggies. During that time, B.Good had a rotating special salad made from locally sourced ingredients like cheddar, tomatoes, and blueberries. I got their salads and sometimes fries (again, baked!) literally three times a week some times. It was embarrassing. After the baby arrives, I want to send B.Good a picture and thank them for helping her grow over all these months. Maybe they'll even name a mini burger after her!

4. Anna's Taqueria.

(photo credit: Yelp.com)

This is how cupcake's gotten most of her vegetables these nine months--from an endless supply of vegetable burritos! This is my favorite burrito place in the world. When Anil and I lived in Boston for the year after college, we always went to the Anna's in Davis Square, usually the morning/noon after a late night out on the town (how times have changed, huh?). Anna's burritos are incomparable to others because they take a tortilla and melt cheese onto it using a steamer, before they add anything else. It makes that last bite of tortilla and melted cheese in the bottom fold of the burrito amaaazing. For the veggie burrito, they use fresh vegetables like sweet potato, peppers, squash, and eggplant, and they dice it up as you order. I ask for black beans, salsa, guac, and hot sauce after that. If you don't think too hard about the tortilla and cheese, it's healthy! Anil and I go to the location near us at least once a week on average.

3 1/2. Kashi Go Lean blueberry frozen waffles.

(photo credit: http://www.kashi.com/products/golean_waffles_blueberry)

In finding a link for this unofficial sponsor of my pregnancy, I came across a message from Kashi that they're experiencing a shortage of these waffles and will be restocked "in the middle" of 2010. Whhaaaaa?!? The middle, first of all, is too vague. Like August?! I thought the shortage of frozen waffles was limited to Eggo; in fact I smirked when I heard about it because my addiction is so indiscriminately to Kashi. Should I panic and stock up? I go through a box of these at least every two weeks. Just this morning, I woke up starving and immediately subbed my go-to bowl of Cheerios for Kashi waffles because I needed a more substantial breakfast. They have 8 grams of protein and 3 grams of fiber for crying out loud... how can they not make enough for me when I'll be needing them most?! Let's hope this is a false alarm. Anyway, they've sustained me thus far, usually in the morning, but they make for a satisfying nighttime treat too when you want something sweet (because it's after dinner and "real food" seems silly... unlike toaster waffles... right?) and you find yourself starving because your stomach is too squished to fit enough food to hold you for more than 2-3 hours.

3. Foodler.com.

I heard about this site from a friend who had a baby last year, and it's a life saver. You set it on your location and can choose from a seemingly endless list of restaurants in the area. You see the full menu from each restaurant and can order whatever you want for delivery. Some go through Foodler directly from the restaurant, some go through DiningIn.com with an extra delivery charge, but they're all filtered through this site; it's SO easy. My favorite part is that you do everything online--your order, payment, and even tip. So all you have to do when the food comes is answer the door. I realize that my celebration of a total lack of human interaction might seem antisocial, but when you're tired, achy, and starving, it's pretty awesome to only have to communicate with your computer and have food arrive at your door. The only stressful part for me is when the delivery person rings our buzzer and Bailey erupts in barking. One time a pizza guy heard him and ran back to his car. Lately though they've been calling when they're here, which is so much easier. My favorite order has been from Sunset Tap & Grill (mmm avocado chicken melt with curly fries), a local favorite for quality bar food (apparently there is such a thing) and its huge selection of draft beers. It's usually crowded and loud though, and if you can't partake in the beers, it's not worth the trip. Problem solved with Foodler! I plan on maxing out this web site after the baby comes too. The downfall is that it's expensive (since it's from restaurants and includes tip and sometimes a delivery fee), but for the convenience in times of pregnancy or newborn, it's worth it. And it let's you avoid pizza and Chinese food every night, especially when you've decided that you're too pregnant to cook (but never too pregnant to eat!) and your husband is working late or overnight.

2. Comellas.

(photo credit: http://www.comellasrestaurants.com/locations.html)

This is a small Italian restaurant in our neighborhood that specializes in take-out but also has cozy seating if you want to dine in. Our protocol is to go there to order and have a glass of wine and San Pellegrino sparkling water while we wait (at least I can drink it in a wine glass). When Anil went there to pick up our food for the first time, he ended up chatting with one of the owners; it's a family-owned business with five locations in Boston and its suburbs. All of the pastas are handmade and the sauces are amazing. Our favorite is spinach ravioli with sun-dried tomato sauce.

1. Boloco.

(photo credit: http://boloco.com/stores/cleveland-circle/)

This place was a major sponsor of my pregnancy during the summer and fall. It's a local Boston burrito place that does creative adaptations of burritos versus the classic and simple ones that Anna's has perfected. You can opt for brown rice (we preggos need our fiber) and add veggies, and sub a bowl for a burrito. Their smoothies are the real prize though. The Cape Codder smoothie is my favorite smoothie ever: made with blueberries, cranberries, apple juice, raspberry sorbet and nonfat frozen yogurt. There's a location a block from where we live as well as a few blocks from where I work, so especially when I was feeling good and walking a lot in the summer and fall, I stopped into Boloco all the time. Just writing this makes me want a Cape Codder smoothie right now, even though there's snow on the ground outside.

I should also name my husband here as an official food-related sponsor of pregnancy, especially during this past month. Anil is the true cook in our marriage, and as his schedule has gotten less hectic during these past few weeks and we've been home together more, he's cooked up a storm, and cleaned up afterwards too--it's been incredible. So thanks to him too, for helping my belly and baby get rounder and rounder as our due date approaches.

Christmas retrospective

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I posted anything. I'm just soooo tiiiiiired. I had a total burst of energy for the past month, until about a week ago when my energy dissipated and just crashed. Anil and I did some major nesting around the house before that though. We're at the point now where if the baby decides that she's ready, we're ready enough. Since New Years though, I've felt exhausted, all of the time. That's only going to get worse though from here on out, so here's to trying to get back on the horse.

Here is our family portrait for Christmas 2009. We decorated our Charlie Brown tree, hung our three stockings (one for Anil, me, and Bailey... there'll be four next year) on the stairs, and draped snowflake lights below the windows. Those big boxes on the right were the baby's crib and changing table. I'm proud to report that only one of those boxes is still there, and it should be gone by this weekend (that's the crib--the final frontier).

Christmas was a wonderfully relaxing day for us, since it was still just us. Really all we've been doing since Christmas has been indulging in being able to stay up late watching movies, sleep in, make pancakes, and basically do whatever we want. Those days are definitely numbered. So Anil and I stayed in the house all day on Christmas--we ate pancakes and then made pizzas for dinner. We had grand plans to see "Sherlock Holmes," but we never made it out. (We did see it last Sunday though--highly recommended! I stayed awake and only had to pee twice, so it was worth the ticket price.) We watched the first season of "Mad Men" for a lot of the day. I'm saving the rest of the TV-on-DVD sets that I got on Thanksgiving sales for after the baby arrives and we're sequestered, rocking, and pacing day and night, but I thought, since "Mad Men" is supposed to be kind of slow and detail-oriented, that we should watch the first season when we could still devote some real attention to it and didn't have to pause it every fifteen minutes for one reason or another. But, of course, that meant that once we started it we were completely addicted and ran through the rest of the first season at an embarrassingly rapid pace.

For Christmas Eve, we went to our friends' house and made a festive feast of beef brisket roast, vegetables and gravy. I even made a spinach dip that my family in Richmond has always made for holidays, and I served it with the traditional bag of Fritos--it's the best. We're so lucky that one of my best friends from college and her boyfriend live right down the street from us, so we've shared lots of holidays and dinners up here. She's also an anesthesia resident, so I'm enlisting her this month to help me practice getting into position for an epidural. We watched some of the 24 hour loop of "A Christmas Story" that starts every Christmas Eve on TNT; I don't know how that movie never gets old. A friend from my work who joined us for dinner actually got a Red Rider BB Gun from his mom for Christmas last year (and for the record, so far, he still has both eyes).

Another tradition of Christmas is for me to make Anil and Bailey crazy by tying on Bailey's Santa hat and taking a picture. Bailey instantly gets this look in his eyes that is pure sulk, and Anil protests the whole time, but I love it.