Boy Oh Boyers

It's going to be difficult to put down the need to say something profound in my posts. Not that I'd succeed were I to make profundity my goal, so it may sound vain just to mention it -- but I can see how for myself, fear of saying nothing important could be crippling and prevent me from saying anything at all. Oh, well -- given my intended audience of family and close friends, I suppose even mundane news is worth writing. I'll try to avoid mind-numbing triviality, though in my current state of pregnancy I'll admit a bit of difficulty distinguishing between trivial things and earth-shattering ones.

I've truly been victimized by an affliction referred to as "nesting". I'm cleaning places in our home that normally I consider Tom's domain (a.k.a. lost causes). But, bring a new baby home through a dusty garage?! You have GOT to be crazy. My mind can't reconcile such a thought.

I am managing to stay quite productive at the office, though I've reduced my hours there significantly. I was so anticipating the end of Spring semester and the free time it would provide me, I have (of course) committed every waking moment to something important until the moment the baby is born. "Something important" often means responding to urgent work emails, reading research papers, or managing church worship team schedules. But don't worry -- other important things include sitting in my glider and reading The Mother of All Baby Name Books, or The Happiest Baby on the Block.

I've apparently been stricken by a new condition perhaps previously undiagnosed in pregnant women. I believe it should be called "e-nesting". I can only define it as the persistent need to get one's baby's blog up and running as soon as possible. This unceasing drive to conquer web technologies that were previously foreign to me is, of course, partly explained by my nature -- but this time it goes beyond that. This time it's fueled by the very forces of nature! I hypothesize that e-nesting may strike any parent-to-be, whether male or female, at any point during pregnancy. Perhaps we should unite and start a support group...er...support blog.

Most of my reflective moments nowadays are a little shallow. When I wander off into thought, the thoughts usually focus on functional things like making dinner, answering an email, or walking the dog. Then there are the bigger picture, future thoughts that are still shallow: whether I'll own a single bit of clothing that will fit after the baby arrives, whether he'll cry a lot, how tired I'll be. Occasionally, though, I think about something really worth thinking about.

Last night while I was writing some thank-you cards for the lovely baby gifts we've received, I was utterly overwhelmed by a sense of awareness that Tom, the baby, and I are completely surrounded by people who love us. Being pregnant has given me an interesting reason to contact friends I hadn't spoken to in years -- and catching up with them, most of whom have families of their own, is amazing. Family who live far and wide have repeatedly gone out of their way to let us know we're in their thoughts and prayers. New friends, who have become as close as family, care for us as though we've known each other our whole lives. Right now these precious connections make me feel loved and supported, not to mention incredibly grateful for the people with whom I get to share this life's journey. My sense of excitement is even greater for meeting our child when I think of how much he's loved even before he arrives.

For Mother’s Day, Tom got me a gift certificate to a day spa for a one hour prenatal massage. While the experience was a mixed bag (the only major downside being my room was too hot so I had to stop the massage at one point to get a fan pointed toward me and drink water before I passed out), overall it was awesome. The best part by far was the special cushion they have on the massage table so I could lay on my stomach. It had this big cutout for my belly, sort of like if I could go to the beach and dig a hole for the stomach. For that hour massage, I felt like a normal non-pregnant person. And that doesn’t happen too often nowadays.

I've had this domain since 2002. I chose it because I am a bassist who plays a fretless electric bass guitar. According to dictionary.com, the definition of a fret is "any of the ridges of wood, metal, or string, set across the fingerboard of a guitar, lute, or similar instrument, which help the fingers to stop the strings at the correct points." Therefore, as you might properly induce, a fretless guitar is one without such ridges on its fingerboard. I play a fretless bass guitar almost exclusively because I strongly prefer its smoother tone, gentler attack, and richer low range frequencies as compared with fretted basses.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot: fretless.com was already taken.

I've been told that I aptly chose a domain name that has meaning to even non-musical people because these people interpret "fretless" as "don't fret so much", like "don't worry so much". This is an interesting message to address at this point in my life, because being an adventurous person who generally doesn't worry about the everyday, I'm beginning to realize the view is very different when one imagines her own child being put in everyday situations. For instance, I love to inline skate. I always wear a helmet because it makes sense to do so, but once the helmet is on I never worry about what would happen if it failed. On the other hand, there seems so much more at stake with our baby. I mean, we'll put him in a good car seat which we carefully installed and had inspected at our local fire station. That's just good common sense. But will it be so easy to release all fear that something could still go wrong? A few glimpses at my purely biological reactions already tell me this release will be a tall order.

I'll be working to embrace such wisdom as Matthew 6:27, "Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?" And then there's Phillippians 4:6-7, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." I'm thankful to have parents who, at least in most any circumstance I can remember, also applied Matthew 6:27 in the following way: Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your child's life?

I love nature! Right now though, in the middle of a sleepless night, it's feeling a bit like a love/hate relationship.

It all started when nature "called". I've become a pro at handling those interruptions to sleep, since they happen so frequently now, and normally I'm snoozing again within seconds of hitting the pillow. Tonight, though. Well, tonight there was an owl who was feeling frisky. He or she may be the same owl who caused me to buy earplugs last year around this time just to stay asleep. This owl calls out loud, long, clear hoots every few seconds for several minutes. Then, if I listen closely, from a long way away I hear hoots in response. Sometimes that's the end of it, but sometimes there's an entire owl dialogue at 2am. These blaring calls have jolted me into absolute awakeness. So, for now I ponder nature.

Like alligators. I heard one yesterday while Angel (the dog) and I were walking past one of the ponds in our neighborhood. Now before you call me crazy, I'll say I don't actually believe I heard an alligator. Despite the possibility (which I haven't researched) that we're too far north for alligators, there's an even more compelling reason why this alligator sound must have been made by an impersonator. That reason is: the Homeowner's Association. See, our homeowner's association is vigilant. Apparently before we moved in, there was a bit of a problem with geese. These weren't migrating geese, they were some species of goose that picks a nice pond and stays there for life. You might imagine that having a flock of geese living permanently in the neighborhood pond has its charm, and I imagine so too. Especially for the families who leave bread on their back porches for the cuties to come eat. Apparently the big problem was: geese don't just eat, they also...well...you know. And they do so liberally and indiscriminantly. So these geese had to be removed. A goose removal service of some sort was apparently hired, and I have come to understand the geese were simply relocated to a lovely scenic pond just south of here where they can live out their days happily. But one goose evaded capture, and it has been the subject of fierce discussion in the neighborhood. People tracked this goose's activities like he was a criminal living next door lurking to harm their family! Well, the most recent homeowner's association meeting bore news that the goose has been successfully captured and should now be frolicking with the rest of his flock. So you see, there's no way there could be an alligator in our neighborhood pond. Someone would already have called the FBI.

My last post created quite a stir of email responses regarding North Carolina wildlife. My tongue-in-cheek dismissal of our potential neighborhood alligator may have been premature! Here's some evidence.

1. Steve Pifer found a link to a web page filled with animal sounds, and it turns out the sound I heard was just like "Alligators4" from this web page.
2. Rick Farris sent an article from the News and Observer that an alligator was found in the neighborhood pond of the Heddingham on the Neuse subdivision off U.S. 64 back in 1991.
3. According to researchers at the University of Georgia, there are documented reports of alligators living in central North Carolina.

Well anyway, this is really not even tangentially related to our baby, except that he's a boy and will probably be fascinated by reptiles and all manner of other creatures. And let's note that he won't be taking a dip in the neighborhood pond!

With our due date less than one month away, I'm finding myself wondering whether, when I do certain tasks, the next time I do them will be after the baby is born. They're usually mundane things that just aren't too frequent. For example, this morning I bathed the dog. It's really quite a team effort because it involves my sitting on the edge of the tub and getting soaked and soapy while Tom stands behind me and prevents her from leaping out and wreaking sudsy havoc through the house. Anyway, Angel only gets a bath about once a month because without a fenced yard, she just doesn't have much of a chance to get dirty. And thankfully Siberian huskies are not particularly smelly dogs. The point is, it's almost certain that the next time I bathe our dog, I will have bathed our baby already. Wow!

Wanting a snapshot of their bare pregnant bellies seems common among gals in my generation. I suppose it's just in fashion, or ladies my age don't mind showing skin as much as in generations past. After all, we aren't the generation responsible for the "itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini" song. If I recall correctly from listening to Grammies' collection of records, this song was about a poor gal who wore a bikini and then was so mortified to be seen in it that she either stayed in the water or kept herself wrapped in a blanket! Ladies these days (for better or worse) are less inhibited. It's interesting to note what changes a generation or two bring about in women's thinking.

While talking on the phone to Grammies yesterday, I told her about some upcoming Pictures of the Day including June 18th's bare belly picture. "Oooh", she said in disgust, "I never wanted to look at things like that when I was pregnant. I was too squeemish!" Being very good friends with my grandmother, there are still times she says things that absolutely puzzle me. Granted the fifty-something years between our ages must account for a great deal of language nuance that is the culprit for my occasional confusion (and hers in return, no doubt), but many of these puzzling quandaries aren't from misunderstanding each other. They're from completely different mindsets.

When my grandmother gave birth to her first child she was in the hospital for two weeks even though it was a routine delivery and both she and the baby were completely healthy. Her generation was not actively encouraged to breastfeed, and she made "formula" out of canned cow's milk mixed with syrup. When I was a nanny back as a young teenager, I remember you put babies to sleep on their stomachs because it was considered the safest thing. You didn't want them to get sick during the night and choke on their own spit-up, it was explained. Made sense to me. Since then, massive amounts of science have shown it is dramatically safer to put babies to sleep on their backs. Perhaps baby wisdom doesn't change as often as fashion, but they're surely not far removed from each other.

The good thing is, unlike fashion, baby wisdom can be backed up by science. Tom and I both enjoy taking in lots of perspectives and then weighing them to see which one makes the most sense. I'm sure that trend will continue as we become parents, especially as a myriad of literature is available for us to understand objectively what can be objectively understood about raising a child (and believe me, it's humbling to see how few things really can be considered that way). I'd imagine the majority of our choices will be in harmony with the wisdom of our parents and grandparents. And for the ones that aren't, like the bare belly picture, I know our families love us enough to accept the whole package anyway.

Okay, I'm going to whine. It's really, really hot here! Our high temperatures have reached upper 90's, over ten degrees hotter than average for this time of year. It's warm and steamy when we wake up, and hot and steamy when we go to bed. I feel like I'll be sunburned just walking between my building and the parking garage at work. Two skylights, a beautiful feature in our great room, have become the dreaded source of extra heat and blinding light in the afternoon hours. I'm here to tell you: I hate this weather.

It's an argument in the "nature versus nurture" debate, I think. I was born in south Georgia where it's even hotter than here on average (appreciably so). I grew up with a big yard and lots of opportunity to go outside, where I did spend a good deal of time. So you see, it's not as though I grew up in the Tundra...or even spent my entire childhood in a 72 degree air-conditioned house. How did I come to despise the heat so deeply? It could be a consequence of my coloring: extremely fair skin, light eyes. The bright sunlight that accompanies hot days is fraught with peril and physical discomfort for me. But it's not just the UV index that causes me grief. Get me near one of those steam rooms or saunas at gyms, and I'd fight you tooth and nail to avoid them. Icy cold water rushing out of the springs in northern Florida, though -- I could spend all day in there (and have)!

Alright, I feel better now to have vented. No pun intended.

We've chosen a name! We're so excited to tell everyone what it is, but we're not doing that just yet. For now, this theme-in-progress is a hint as to what name we've chosen. I'm looking forward to spilling the beans, but not before I've cleaned up the theme.

Wow, I'm a rhyming machine!

His name will be Rowan Thomas Boyer. Rowan is a kind of tree that grows especially well in Scotland and particularly near bodies of water. In Spring it flowers and then has red berries. We loved the name and came to settle on it partly due to Jeremiah 17:7-8, "But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream."

Though I wasn't aware of it until after we had chosen the name, Rowan Atkinson is an actor whose most famous role happens to be that of "Mr. Bean". Charming, eh? I'll admit to occasionally watching, and laughing at, Mr. Bean -- but for those of you who (like Tom) find such comedy obnoxious, do your best to disregard this little piece of trivia.

We chose Thomas as a middle name because, as you might guess, it's Tom's first name. Tom's middle name is Michael, which is his father's first name. So we thought it would be lovely to give our son his dad's first name as a middle name.

There you go, the name has been presented and explained. It's so awesome for us to be referring to him by name now, and to think more concretely about meeting him. I'm all too aware of how time will fly by -- of how, one day, I'll be reflecting back to this time while watching Rowan go off to school. Let's all savor every moment, shall we?

Though I've had a very healthy pregnancy with no complications, I've had occasion to become keenly aware of mundane medical facts that a non-gestational person would never even have to think about. Actually many of them are quite interesting and arise from totally ordinary situations.

For example, it's quite common to have a small fender bender with another car. Tom and I got rear-ended during...oh...my fifth month, I suppose. Tom was driving and I was in the passenger's seat. Though our rear bumper did sustain appreciable damage, the bump was so minor and at such a low speed that I didn't think twice about hustling to my next meeting on foot rather than being late for it, leaving Tom to deal with the offending driver and the police report. But after a couple of hours and some twinges of pain that were almost certainly from normal pregnancy tendon issues, I called the doctor just to be sure there was no need for me to come in after such a low speed accident. I was assured that, in fact, it is quite important that I come in right away for fetal monitoring and some bloodwork. Once I got to the doctor's office, I was then sent on to the hospital where Tom and I got way more than the standard free tour offered to couples who will have their babies at our hospital -- we got our very own "birthing suite" in which we sat for four hours with monitors strapped to my belly while waiting on bloodwork to determine whether the baby's blood had mixed with my blood. If I weren't some-blood-type-letter "negative", they would not have sent me to the hospital; so said my doctor when he stopped by our "suite" to check on me. I suppose somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain I knew the "positive" or "negative" part of someone's blood type meant something...and I suppose I must have figured whatever it meant would be nontrivial in some circumstances, but I had no idea what such circumstances would be. Obviously now I have one example. Of course we know the baby is completely fine, and this concludes the first hands-on medical lesson I got while pregnant.

I'm sure there have been many medical lessons between then and now, but another interesting one was just last week. I got a call from a friend of ours who has a young baby. She said she was giving me a courtesy call to find out whether I had held her baby recently, because if I had I should know he was diagnosed with Fifth Disease, and I might want to find out what the repercussions of that exposure would be for me. Well, I had held him and I indeed did want to find out about said repercussions! A quick search on google informed me that Fifth Disease is a minor viral infection which 40%-60% of adults have already had, and therefore are immune. The virus itself is parvovirus B19, related though not the same virus that causes parvo in dogs, and this disease cannot be spread from animals to humans or vice versa. Fifth Disease causes low fever and sometimes a rash. Though not dangerous for even young children or adults who get it, Fifth Disease can be dangerous for unborn babies because they can develop heart problems or anemia, which can even become fatal. Well naturally after reading this, it was another call to the doctor for me. They (of course) said I should come in for bloodwork. (As an aside, I am no longer a skeptic that being pregnant can improve one's anxiety over needles. See, there is often no warning that a pregnant woman's blood must be drawn, at possible penalty of her health or her baby's. After several such un-braced-for occurrences, the anxious mind probably has no other choice than to partly give up its adrenaline response to the idea of a needle stick -- sheerly out of self-preservation! But I digress.) I reported to the doctor for bloodwork, where the nurse explained that the test will tell whether I've had Fifth Disease before. Such a result is highly possible, she said, since many times people who are infected get better very quickly and never show any symptoms besides a very low fever. The test results came back in a couple of days, and they confirmed the presence of previous parvovirus antibodies in my blood, which leads to the conclusion that I have been exposed to the virus before and therefore my immune system is handily equipped to kill off the parvovirus invaders before they could even make their way to Rowan. Who knew?!

The most recent medical lesson I've had is about how to tell whether someone has a broken rib. Don't worry, it's not myself I was helping diagnose! But, not far from it. (I hope I tell the story accurately, Honey. But if not, that's the whole reason I set up this blog so you, my husband and Rowan's father, can post too! Will public taunting get you to write an entry? I won't hold my breath.) Anyway, here goes. Tom likes to ride his bike on the greenways near our house. Sometimes he goes off the paved path and explores, from what I understand, rugged wooded terrain. It's not really mountain, but more pseudo mountain biking. Off-road cycling? I don't know what you call it. One thing I am certain of, though: if you ever need a ticket to fly off your bike at risk of great physical harm, apparently Tom is your chaperone of choice. Last weekend a solo bike ride apparently saw him navigating challenging terrain at an unmanageable speed (can you imagine), and flying over the handlebars of his bike. After checking himself out to be sure he didn't need an ambulance (as if he could have gotten one anyway) he continued his ride. When he came in the house he was his normal sweaty, happy self and glowingly recounting the story of his mid-trail flight like it was the battle story of a proud warrior. After a few hours, he wasn't so glowing, and the last few days have seen sufficient groaning, moaning, whining, and other pitiful displays to drive us both to carefully read about the symptoms of broken versus bruised ribs. Well, his symptoms are clearly not in the "severe break" category, so he's taking reasonable measures of icing the area daily, taking Motrin or Tylenol occasionally if he's feeling particularly sore, and avoiding various activities that the preponderance of medical wisdom seems to say might prolong his recovery. So he'll certainly be fine, and my medical knowledge takes one more small step forward.

I'm thinking after a few years of motherhood (and heck, for that matter, continuing wife-hood), I'll be a veritable wealth of medical trivia.

Rowan has hiccups right now. I'm trying not to let myself write blog posts at work (it would be nice to achieve some degree of compartmentalization in my life, though that effort may be futile), but anyway, I was afraid I'd forget this.

He's probably had hiccups about ten times now. The first time was quite a while ago and he was still small, so it kind of felt like a tiny little boxer was punching with a tiny little fist from inside my lower belly. But now that he's bigger, I can feel his head very low and his feet very high in my stomach, simultaneously doing rhythmic little jolts that actually jar my whole body. If you're wondering how a baby who isn't breathing air yet can get hiccups - I wondered that too! But lest I end up making two medical posts in one day, I will not recount my current understanding of fetal hiccups. Go use your vast knowledge of the internet and look it up yoursef! :-)