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365 days + 365 days + 1 leap day = 731. On 7/31. Jillian has been around for 731 days! WEIRD!

That math is correct, right? My day is sort of upside-down today and I haven’t had coffee so the brain, she is not working so well.

A real birthday post later. If the universe allows.

I asked him to clean the house. So he’s cleaning… the outside.

Exactly two years ago today, I waddled to the OB/GYN for my 38-week appointment. It was July (obviously), and the temperature was quickly ramping up to the 100-degree mark at which it would stay for quite a few days in a row.

I was feeling pretty good, if humungous, as I peed in the cup. I couldn’t exactly see what was going on down there, but my aim is good. I got on the scale and didn’t even wince when the numbers got really close to 250. Didn’t bother me! I was cooking a baby in there!

Got into the examination room and laid back on the table. Laying down was the only way I could get any relief those days, since there was what I thought was a giant baby knee tucked up under my rib cage. The doctor came in and took my blood pressure (fine), checked what my weight was (also fine, but then again, who is going to tell a woman who is 16 months pregnant in sticky July that she’s gaining too much weight?), and then she busted out the measuring tape to see where we were at.

“What’s this?” she asked, feeling The Lump.

“I think that’s a knee.” I had been seeing other small lumps rolling around in the vicinity that could have been feet, so…

The doctor looked a bit concerned. “Hm. When was your last ultrasound?”

“20 weeks.”

“I think that’s the baby’s head.”

“No, no it can’t be. That’s it’s knee!”

“Let’s go find out.”

So my giant, half-naked ass toddled across the hall to the ultrasound room and we looked. Sure enough, that was A Giant Baby Head lodged under my ribcage. Better still, it appeared that the umbilical cord was wrapped between the baby’s legs. As an added extra bonus, the placenta was anterior (on top)! This baby was pretty much in the exact opposite position of what it should have been for a normal, vaginal birth.

“Um, so what are we looking at?”

The doctor pointed out all of these things, and explained that even though she personally specialized in breech births, the position of the umibilical cord and the placenta were fairly precarious. Oh, and the amniotic fluid was getting sort of low, which meant that there wasn’t much room for Speck (that’s what we called it, since we didn’t know what flavor we were getting) to move around and that labor could start at any time.

“I don’t want to scare you, but if you attempt to have this baby vaginally, there’s a good chance that one or both of you will not make it unless you have a c-section. So, rather than start labor and put your body through the wringer and still end up with surgery, I am recommending that you simply schedule your c-section now. It’s the healthiest thing for both of you. However, there are a few things you can try to see if the baby will flip. It’s late in the game, and there’s not much room to move around in there, but you can give it a shot.” Then she listed a couple of things I could try, from drinking a very cold, very caffeinated beverage to propping my feet up on the back of the couch whilst laying on the floor. Face down.

Shock. Disappointment. More shock. My body was built to do this, and now I find out I probably shouldn’t? Shock!

“I… need to discuss this with my husband.”

“Of course, but I’m going to have our surgical nurse schedule you anyway. She will call you and let you know the date and time. However, if you start laboring between now and then, you absolutely must call me because you will need to be extremely closely monitored.”

“Um. Okay.” Shock.

I got dressed and left the doctor’s office. In the car, I called Freddie and explained things to him. He was understandably confused and upset, and since his natural tendency is to want to fix things, he started rattling off a list of things I should do. “Call this person, call that person, try this do this bzzzzzz……”

“Um. Okay.” Shock.

My first call was to Freddie’s boss’s wife. She is a Bradley Method instructor, and might have some ideas. After listening to a short diatribe on the stupidity of the medical establishment in New Jersey, she suggested I go to see her chiropractor, who has been known to ‘turn’ babies. So I called and made an appointment for the following day.

My next call was to Freddie’s sister-in-law, who had been an OB nurse in her former life and who might have some suggestions as well. She never ever called me back, but that’s because that was right around the time they all discovered my old blog and The Situation was starting to brew. I wouldn’t find out about any of it until nine months later, but that’s old news. So I got my huge cold icy caffeniated beverage, headed home, and put my feet up.

I called the instructor for the natural childbirth class we were taking and explained that Freddie and I would no longer be attending class since we were apparently not going to have anything that resembled a natural birth at all. She understood completely and wished us luck.

About an hour after I got home, the phone rang. It was the surgical nurse, who said “Your c-section is scheduled for next Monday at 9AM. You’ll need to go in to the hospital the day before for pre-admission testing et cetera. Try to get as much rest and sleep as you can between now and then, okay?”

“Um. Okay.”

I spent the next week figuring things out. My last day of working would have been July 28th anyway, since I wasn’t due until the middle of August and I thought I would have a good two weeks to just relax and get things ready for the baby. That turned into TWO DAYS. My last day ended up being the 27th. We had the crib delivered on the 28th, at which time we also went to Babies R Us and bought a whole bunch of stuff off of our registry. Since we hadn’t had a baby shower (…don’t ask), we had exactly ZERO baby things in the house.

I don’t remember much about that week, now that I am thinking back on it. I remember July 24th VERY well, and I vaguely remember my last day of work, but the rest of it? Not so much. I chewed up about six tons of ice chips, played a whole lot of Playstation Golf, and that’s about it.

I was pretty sad and upset that I wasn’t going to be able to have the Natural Hippie Earth Mama No Drugs Rock Star Birth that I’d planned, but if I have learned anything at all in my life, it’s NOT TO MAKE PLANS. I had to roll with it, so I did. Rolling was about the only way I could get around, since the baby was positioned in such a way that she never dropped and I was carrying her high and dry the whole time.

So… yeah. July 24th, 2006 was kind of a rough day.

Happy.

If I didn’t have wicked tendonitis in both wrists, I would be doing cartwheels for real. As it is, I have James on the iPod and Jillian and I are dancing around the house.

My lovely blog-friend Summer just sent me an email telling me that James is finally releasing their new album (which I already have, thanks to Summer’s fabulousness and the magick of Teh Internets) in the states with a tour to follow. And they’re opening for Squeeze at Radio City! OMG!

Even better - they’re playing the Stone Pony the next night! For $20! The Stone Pony is roughly the size of my living room, and to see James there… I might die. I may have already died from sheer happiness at this news.

This past month has been so awful in so many ways. So to hear this, and have something to look forward to… well… it’s just the best thing ever. I am going to have an excellent day.

It’s not that I don’t love you, my four blog readers… it’s that, well, things are a bit of a tornado lately and there just hasn’t been time to sit down and write about how awesome I am.

So here’s some random junk.

1. WTF is up with my right foot? The sole of it is all hard and leathery and has cracked in places, which is uncomfortable at best and fucking painful the rest of the time. Getting a pedicure is out of the question at the present time, since I’m sure they want someone with oozing sores getting germs all around the place. I suppose I could maybe quit wandering around the backyard in bare feet and put some damn shoes on, but I probably won’t.

2. I managed to catch a cold. In July. At first I thought it was allergies, but after the initial early-spring pollen showers, I haven’t had any problems. Until this week, which brought on the sneezing and the sneezing and the sneezing. I think it’s going away now, but I still have that sunken-eyed feeling. Sexy.

3. My garden is quite a sight. The front garden was strewn with wildflower seeds in hopes that SOMETHING would grow there until I can actually sit and look at it and decide on a more permanent way of going on. It’s very pretty, with lots of blue and orange flowers that Jillian enjoys chewing on. Hope they’re not poisonous! I also have a few sunflowers that are still alive, which is a miracle to me since I have never been successful with those.

4. The back garden is… a tomato jungle. I planted sixteen pods with tomato seeds, thinking I was going to do it right and thin them before sticking them in the actual ground. I overestimated myself and ended up just putting the whole pod in. So now I have a veritable rainforest of tomato plants, which are being held up by a combination of cages and yarn. I need to stake them, like yesterday, but haven’t yet been able to carve out the time. I am hoping beyond hope that the hornworms don’t find us. Those things creep me out SO MUCH (more than soggy Cheerios, if you can imagine anything more horrifying than that) and if I see one, I’m busting out the Agent Orange.

5. The cantaloupe and the zucchini didn’t make it, sadly. It seems that buying plants from Home Depot is a bad idea - I have never done well with them, because they’re always diseased or something. The peppers I bought seem to be doing okay, and the eggplant… might live… but the others I bought DIED. DIED DIED DIED! Fuck off, Home Depot. Next year we’ll be more organized (ha ha!) and start zucchini and other fun things from seed.

6. I am trying to get Freddie to let me bust up the front lawn and put raised beds in there, but there is something encoded in his suburban DNA that makes him shrink with horror whenever I talk about NOT HAVING A LAWN. As it is, I refuse to water it no matter how brown and grody it gets because using fresh water on something that is ornamental and ultimately USELESS is so wasteful, it makes me want to barf. So… brown lawn. I did convince him to use a more or less ignored strip on the side of the house for next year’s veggie garden. We’re going to build the beds in the fall and hope that when spring comes, we’ll be able to grow stuff there.

7. My knitting projects are coming along nicely. I have finished the front of the Big Ugly Sweater and have started work on one sleeve. I might get it done by the time winter rolls around, but let’s not hold our breath. It’s my Aries nature - I love to start things, but the finishing… not so much.

8. Sewing is happening as well. Sort of. I am far too impatient to actually follow directions, so my projects tend to stall until I have some kind of brainwave that gets me through to the next section. Again - love to start things. I adore picking out fabric, but when it comes time to actually do something with it, I’m already bored and onto the next thing.

9. Tomorrow I’m heading up to Massachusetts to party with some of my Imaginary Internet Friends. I need some time away, badly. The last month or so of life here at The Butterfly Ranch has been extremely difficult, but I haven’t really been able to talk about it. It sucks, but that’s the way we roll here. I am thankful that I have my IIFs to vent to, or else this last month would have found me curled up under the dining room table, scratching at imaginary bugs.

10. Sunday Freddie and I are going to see the Mets! We weren’t counting on being able to get tickets at all this year, since it’s the last season at Shea Stadium, but thanks to his connections at work, we are using someone’s season tickets for this game. WHEEEE! Or, as Jillian would say “Yay Mets! Baseball!”

11. The Jillian is, as always, a constant source of amazement and delight. She is talking talking talking all the time, and putting words and sentences together left and right. Her latest obsession is airplanes, so every time we’re outside, we look up in the sky for airplanes. She is also a big fan of flowers, and after breakfast every day, she stands at the baby gate to the kitchen and says “Mama. Shoes. Outside, new flowers!” She also likes to learn new words and will happily repeat them all day long. Yesterday’s word was “greenies,” since she wiped some boogers on me and I said “Ew! Greenies!” So yesterday was all about “Mama, greenies in my nose!” And then she would cackle.

12. I fear the child has been cursed with my hair issues. I have cowlicks all over my head, which means the hair does not lie flat, ever. Jillian seems to have the same thing - her hair grows in about fifteen different directions and cannot be tamed. I am going to break down and get some barrettes to attempt to keep it out of her eyes, but I am not confident that this will help. Freddie is all for cutting her hair, but I refuse to allow him to do that! People just stopped telling me what a cute little boy I have, I’m not about to butch her up again!

13. I need to figure out what to do with this ridiculously large head of bok choy that I got yesterday. We joined a CSA, which, yay! But you get what you get, and a 2-pound (possibly heavier) head of bok choy was in the basket yesterday and… I’m at a loss. I know it’s related to celery and that I can use it in stir-fry and possibly also a soupy-thing (there’s a Naked Chef recipe that I have made before that was excellent), but other than that… I’m stumped. I tried last week’s [much smaller] bok choy in a tomato sauce over pasta, but I wasn’t thrilled with that combo.

14. I like the CSA. So far. We paid $350 for a 1/2 share, which looks like it’s going to be plenty. The farm is organic, and our farmer sends out a newsletter every week with little tidbits about what he’s doing and how he’s doing it organically. It’s very interesting. If I had the $$, I would love to buy a bigger plot of land out in the boonies somewhere and grow more food. I’m going to try, year by year, to take over more of the backyard.

15. And there you have it. Maybe, if you’re really lucky and you wish really hard, I’ll quit being lazy and post some pictures. Jillian’s 2nd birthday is coming up (I know - I can’t believe it either), so maybe I’ll post a bunch of her.