The grand arrival

After just over 24 hours of prelabor signs and warnings, I went into labor on the afternoon of Monday, September 29. At 11:03pm, Baby Boy Watson came to us. He weighed 8lbs 7oz and measured 20 inches long. He remains nameless and stateless. August has taken well to his Dai Dai (little brother), showering him with kisses, hats and diapers. More pictures and more about the birth to come.

Trial runs

(I had scheduled this post to publish on Monday morning, but it never did. It's old news now!)

Sunday morning I woke up thinking that maybe my water had broken and that labor would be starting soon. We spent the morning waiting for something (namely, contractions) to happen. By noontime, nothing seemed to be going on, so we went to the hospital/birthing center to make sure everything was okay. They monitored the baby (heartbeat fine) and did a brief exam on me (nothing doing), and sent us home. The midwife thinks that it's likely things will get going in the next few days, that my body's just starting to get warmed up. So still we wait.

It was good to have a trial run for all of us though, as we've chosen to give birth somewhere we'd never been prior to this afternoon. It's a swanky place, as far as hospitals/birthing centers are concerned, and the staff was great. And Augie woke up from his nap to find Mama and Baba gone, and Ah Mah here to take care of him. The two of them did well together, and they'll be fine when the real thing happens.

I made James take a few pictures of me (it's always so hard to get him to take pictures of me!), in what we hope are the last days/hours of my pregnancy. I really think I'm getting bigger by the day.

I think this is my widest view:

This is kinda how I'm feeling these days:

Responding to some "direction" from James:

And here's Augie's trial run on the potty:

I wish I had news to share with you, but everything here seems to be on stand-by. Augie's doing well at dagis, Ah Mah is doing well filling our freezer, refrigerator and bellies, and James and I are just waiting.

Not my most flattering angle:

This is our building's courtyard. We have a little area for Augie to run around, and he likes to play on all the bikes.

So happy!

Queequeg update

Today's ultrasound confirmed what we suspected: the baby's head has dropped. Way down there. The woman who performed the ultrasound even seemed surprised at how far down Queequeg is. The dip is my uterine measurement is now officially explained. They say that with second pregnancies, the baby doesn't usually drop until labor has begun. Guess I've got a couple-week head start on labor, huh?

And we also confirmed what I already suspected: this baby is big (at least by American standards), too (Augie was 8 lbs 1 oz when we arrived one week early). The estimate is that Queequeg currently weighs just over seven pounds - so if s/he keeps cooking for another 2.5 - 3 weeks, until my due date, s/he'll be coming close to nine pounds! So, please, let's get this thing out of there sooner. I'm hoping for about another week, and in all honesty I feel like I can't handle much longer than that. The baby sitting so low makes everything uncomfortable, especially walking and bending over. Thank goodness I rarely have to bend over with a toddler around. =)

Our goal for this weekend is to get to the point where we feel fully ready for the baby to arrive - apartment in order (James put up the bassinet yesterday!), all the newborn clothes and textiles washed and folded (halfway there), new dresser and lights purchased, maps and guide sheets for all our helpers printed, etc. Though of course we already have all that we really need for a new baby - loving parents, fully functioning breasts, enough clothes and diapers to keep everyone clean and dry for at least a few days.

Oh - and we got more good news today - Augie did much better at dagis than he has all week! Åsa, the "nanny" at dagis who seems to care of him the most, said that today he was "back on track", even though he cried after James dropped him off. He played, he flirted, he ate, and he napped! When I went to pick him up, he was up and playing with the other kids (rather than sitting catatonic in his stroller, as he was yesterday). I'm sure that after being home with us over the weekend Monday will be difficult again, but we're hoping next week is much better.

An Augie self-portrait:

Wee Quee

Yesterday, when I picked Augie up from the child care room at the gym, the woman who supervises the room told me that she'd had a great afternoon with Augie. There weren't many other kids there so she was able to spend a lot of one-on-one time with him. She said he came and sat on her lap for a bit - a big breakthrough for him with someone other than us. And then, as we were leaving, he grabbed a toy colander and put it on his head and said, "Hat!". Haley, the supervisor, said, "What a nice hat, August!", and he walked over to her and put it on her head, then laughed like crazy when it fell off. Little joker...

When I picked him up from his Montessori preschool this morning, Ruth, the woman who runs it, said that he had actually sat down with her to do a lesson! She was very impressed that he's gone from wandering around the area and touching and playing with everything, never focused, to sitting down quietly with her. And he sat at the table during snacktime for twenty minutes! I use exclamation points twice in this paragraph because this is so rare and exciting; Augie never stops moving, and I'd say that he's focus-challenged, so I love to hear these reports. I told her that his vocab has increased tremendously since beginning with her, and she said that she thought he was trying to say "blue" that morning - which he started working on yesterday when he was home with him (he was also working on orange. To be clear, "blue" means blue or green, and his word for orange means red, orange, or yellow). But it's cool that someone other than me can understand what he's saying.

On the home front, he decided to be really cute this evening. He was having red grapes for a snack, and he'd take two out of the bowl, one in each hand, and run to me and shout, "Two!". He wouldn't eat them until I acknowledged, "Yes, August, you have two grapes," and then he'd give me a big smile and stuff them both in his mouth. (Yes, we prefer he not eat two grapes at once. But I'm not the type of mother to dole them out one-by-one).  He does something similar in the morning: when I wake up, I have him help me turn on the two living room lights. As soon as they are both on, he stands between them and shouts, "Two!", arms outstretched to point at them both. And this evening he sat on the glider/rocking chair in the living room, rocking back and forth as far and fast as he could (which is pretty far) and shouting, "Rock! Rock! Rock!". When I acknowledged that he was rocking, he gave me a satisfied smile. It's his first verb.

Totally unrelated picture:

But this post is about wee Queequeg. I had a midwife appointment this morning and we did an ultrasound, because last time the baby wasn't positioned properly to see all the anatomy, so they wanted to check out the spine today. The baby gave us some good shots.

That's definitely the thumper of a football star!

First pictures of Queequeg

I had my first ultrasound today, and look what they found - there's a hand in my belly!

It turned out to be a waving hand attached to a baby!

Little Queequeg has all its fingers and all its toes and all its vertebrae and all its brains (and probably all its chromosomes), so things are looking good.

Things were tougher for Augie, today, tough. He slept very well last night (didn't need Mama at all overnight!), but then we had to take him for a vaccination early this morning. He only cried a bit when the needle went in - probably more because he was being restrained, which he HATES, than from the needle. He stopped crying within a couple seconds and was back to playing.

Unfortunately for us, about four days ago we realized that we had to go back to watching every moment of the day. We'd reached a point where he played just fine by himself and could run around the apartment entertaining himself and not getting into trouble; and then four days ago he just started climbing up everything. He climbs onto the toilet so he can flush it (he knows to put the seat down first); he climbs onto the couch so he can flip the switches behind it; he climbs onto the kitchen chairs so he can reach things on the table, then he climbs onto the table. We get no rest around here.

Today, as I was getting him ready for a walk outside, I put his jacket on him and then let him go so I could get his shoes and my socks; by the time I'd done that (less than 10 seconds), he had run into the kitchen, climbed onto a chair, and fallen onto the floor. He had a bloody nose and cried for a while, but nursing calmed him and cheered him up. Later in the day, as James was watching him, he started climbing onto another chair before it fell over and he fell onto his head before James could even stand up to go to him. He recovered quickly, but still... We hoped he might learn from all this, but before he went to bed he started climbing on chairs again. God help us.

Here's a picture from last week, him falling asleep on the bus:

We have something to tell you

I won't keep you in suspense: bun #2 is in the oven.

That's right, I'm pregnant. If all goes according to plan, sometime around the end of September Augie is going to become a big brother. I'm still in the first trimester of the pregnancy (about 9.5 weeks now), which is earlier than these things are usually announced; but I figure since the four of you who read this blog regularly already know the news, it's no big deal to announce it here.

And, this explains why my posting has been sporadic and uninspired lately: I'm tired. Really. F*&king. Tired. I've had some morning sickness - much more than with Augie - and tons of exhaustion. James has been fantastic about stepping up and taking over most of the housework (while I do all the work of growing a baby!), and letting me sleep in most mornings (especially since Augie has taken to getting up in the morning around 6:30 instead of 7:30, as he used to). As I remember from when Augie was an inside baby, this will all ease up in a few weeks when I'm into the second trimester and get that pregnancy glow again.

This also means that now that Augie is sleeping mostly through the night, I'm back to getting up every two hours to pee. It's just not fair.

Soon enough he'll have a little friend to point out all the trees, rocks and lichens to.

11 months - A look back one year

As Augie's first birthday approaches (did you read that? Augie's first birthday!), I'm getting all nostalgic and sentimental about him as a wee baby fresh from the womb - even about him when he was still an inside baby. What blessings have befallen us since this time last year! (Our best friends from Santa Barbara are in labor this very second with their first baby - go team Pelle & Davenport!).

Here we were almost exactly a year ago, with no idea of what was to come: