the busy heart

Here she is not two months old. Here she is one half hour old. My baby, Miss Henrietta Plum, is two months old. I can't begin to explain how every piece of that sentence blows my mind, but I'm here, finally, to try. And I have so much to say about all of this--about her, and motherhood generally, and how it's changed me specifically, and stories about how we landed ourselves in Lowell, and on and on--that I don't even really know where to start. And every day I think I want to blog, that I need to blog, that I simply must find a moment to record what's happened and what's happening and this big bursting evolving love, and then it's time to feed her or make dinner or my c-section incision randomly starts bleeding and I must away to the emergency room (true story. happened yesterday. all is well, oddly.), or I'm just so exhausted that I believe Sam when he says my only job at that moment is to sit very quietly and watch television until it's bedtim...

Our fourth wedding anniversary was at the end of July, right around when I hit 28 weeks. And behold! A dress still fit me!  We went out to dinner at a place we'd heard about called Craigie on Main, and it was a lovely meal. The weird part: One of their specials was pig's head. As in, the entire pig's head. We asked about it, mostly out of horror (we're both latent vegetarians, I think), and the waitress commenced telling us all about it--how they'd cut it in half for us, how everything was so tasty and we could eat all of it--the ears and the cheeks and the on an on. I think Sam held up his hand for her to stop. And we didn't order the pig's head. But we had a lovely time. Here we are, across the table from each other, clearly in love.

I posted some Instagram pictures of the nursery on Facebook (oh gosh, I'm getting so social media-y!), and though Instragram pictures are charming, it's hard to really see what's going on in the ones I took, so here are some more, with details. I'm not done with it, but I'm more done than I thought I'd get, so here it is. Here's a shot from (one of the) doorways. (There are three (!) doorways.) I made all of the rugs. Crocheted them from strips of fabric that I cut myself. Should I tell you more about how I did it? They took forever, but they are exactly what I had in mind, and I couldn't find anything like it in the real world. That's the dresser we found on the side of the road. I got the knobs on clearance at Anthropologie (the top two are golden snails, the bottom ones are turquoise-y and gold. It still needs a little love, but I love it. I love that it's full of her little cupcake suits. My dear friends came over and pu...

Before A year or so ago, I found this baby lamp at the thrift store. I think I paid a couple bucks for it, thinking I'd revamp it at some point since I wasn't crazy about the yellow gingham. A few weeks ago I thought I'd tackle the project, and found this stretchy turquoise lace fabric in my stash. I used modge podge and some hot glue to cover it (which was ... maybe not the best method, but it got the job done), and here's the after. After And because he hopped up right as I was taking pictures and looked so picturesque, here's Meatsock with the Moon. Cat + Moon

So, here I am, against all predictions, still pregnant. I'm 36 and a half weeks now, which just blows my mind. And she shows no sign of imminent arrival. I mean, I'm uncomfortable. Really, profoundly uncomfortable most of the time. It's a little absurd. And there have been some scares with low fluid and contractions and the like, but everything is pretty much fine now, aside from the fact that she's stubbornly breech. They're going to try to turn her next week, which will apparently be an incredibly painful procedure. But hey, if it turns her around, it's worth it, right? (Right?!!) Anyway, way back when we were worried she wouldn't even make it 28 weeks, some dear and lovely friends ( Russanne , Emily , Sarah) threw me a shower. Since I was on bed rest, they did it at my house, and the loyal Russanne came and cleaned up the place and decorated while I sat on the couch. This was only slightly awkward, since I so longed to help. But Russanne is an absol...

It didn't take me long, once I got put on bed rest, to realize I needed to learn to crochet. Or do something (anything!) with my hands, but crochet seemed the easiest. My friend Russanne  came over one afternoon to show me the ropes (or the yarns? okay, that was a really funny joke, to me.), and I proceeded to fail miserably, over and over. I'd try to make a square shape, and somehow end up with a triangle?! Or I'd try to  make a circle and end up with a weird little mushroom shape? It was discouraging, is what it was. But I kept trying, undoing what I'd done and asking google what the heck was going on, and starting over. And soon a big box of yarn I ordered arrived, and I proceeded to make this wee blanket for the baby girl. Okay, actually, first I failed again. I got a good way into a blanket and then realized it was so tight that it was more like a ... what? A scrubber pad or something. It was bad. So I pouted for a day, and then started over. And though, honestly...

This morning I was thinking about yoga. I was thinking about prenatal yoga, and how I had planned to do it while pregnant. I was thinking about this because my body hurt, and for an instant I thought, "Maybe I could do yoga," and then I remembered that I couldn't. Which led me to thinking, again, about the plans I had for this pregnancy, about how I thought it was going to go, and how few of those plans are actually playing out. Here's what I had in mind originally: I had a midwife at a birth center, and I really liked her, and I was excited about a semi-granola birth, a valiant attempt at doing it "naturally." I envisioned laboring in the bathtub and in the birth center's garden. I wanted to learn hypnobirthing and find a really good birth class. Before then I would do yoga, and I would take long walks, and I would eat a lot of green healthy things and plenty of good protein and I would be lean and lovely as a pregnant lady--you know, like a q-tip w...