Constantchange

Progress of the lump

I can feel the baby move now. Not kicks or things like that, but the lump in my lower belly sometimes rolls over or pushes from one bit of area from another. The baby is quick, and alive, and at night The Husband sings to my tummy. I have tried to let him feel the baby move, but the lump is too small yet. No one can feel it move but me. I am thuroughly enjoying not finding out the gender, as I can tell how much this really, really bothers people who are into gender stereotyping. A baby really doesn't care about weather its a boy or girl for the first couple of years. Only people determined to hang pink bows or blue trains on things care.

My refusal to gender-type the lump isn't well recieved by most of society. So many people now know what they are having that nursury furniture and baby clothes tend to be far more pointed about gender than they used to be. A sea of blue and pink awaits you in all baby catalogs, with green, yellow, and purple more difficult to find.

I was relieved when I finally decided that decorating the baby's room in primary red, yellow, and orange wouldn't be too difficult if I told everyone my nursury theme was baby quilts. Quilts to me represent comfort, and baby quilts are sort of traditional, and people would think I was being clever and tasteful. The online catalogs filled with hearts and bears and trains had depressed and stressed me out. I remebered when my mom was pregnant, how she spent hours in wallpaper stores poring over catalogs of border paper for each child, and how she used to make all the sheets and comforters and wall hangings and bumper pads and all not just for her children, but for some of my cousins as well. I could never do that. I failed to inherit the decorating gene, and even if I had I don't have the time to sew. My over-exposure to wall paper stores, and the fact that my mom made me help her strip wall paper ensures that I hate wall paper. I chose red and yellow and orange because that room is already red, and therefore I won't have to repaint the whole damn thing.

I was happy to reveal the decorating epiphany to The Husband one night, thinking he would be impressed. "I found I theme for the baby's room!" I exclaimed as he climbed into bed.

"A what?"

"A theme. For the baby's room. I decided on quilts."

"Why does the baby's room have to have a theme?" He was puzzled; after all, the husband has never really been around babies. He's an only child of much older parents, and his cousins are all a generation older than he. His family is small, and so he didn't grow up with the steady progression of new babies in his life like I did. He has no idea of the tyranny of social pressure that is about to descend on us once the baby is here. Everyone has an opinion about the best way to treat babies. I thought on his question.

"Because if we don't theme the baby's room, old ladies will yell at us."

"What!?!"

I yelled downstairs to my sister. "Sara! Tell Winn that old ladies will yell at us if we don't theme the baby's room!"

Sara hollered back "It's true! My room had clowns! They were creepy! You have to find a theme!"

The husband looked appalled and confused. Clowns? Baby room themes? His desire to sing his favorite bits of "Pirates of Penzance" to my abdomen was out for the night. The husband is totally with me on the whole not gender typing the baby idea, because he knows this will decrease the liklihood of us getting frilly dresses or little baseball uniforms when what we really need are bottles and diapers and bibs and things. He loves me for my practicality, and the whole idea of themeing a baby's room doesn't sound practical to him.

I await the day our mothers descend on us from four hours away to tell us what to do with the baby with increasing dread and sick glee. They have radically different philosophies; my mother was a huge hippie when I was younger, insisting on everything natural (this relaxed considerably as she had more kids). The husband's mom wouldn't leave the hospital until she was sure the nanny was at their house, and she certainly didn't breastfeed. She raised her son according to some scientific method that was supposed to make him smarter. My mom was pretty much into the very passive form of parenting. The grandmothers are going to have a train wreck of conflicting advice, and will probably ignore that we don't agree with either of them. I suppose this is the way it is with many families. I'll be more interesting next week, I promise.