Welcome to a SPOOOOOOOKY edition of The Final Countdown!! We're smack in the middle of week 33 and things.
are.
getting.
REAL.
My face is huge, my back is aching, everything about pregnancy is starting to hit in full force. I've finally started expanding sideways in addition to front-ways. It's...not as cute as it was.
But stare at me for 10 minutes anyway!
Goooood morning!
Coming to you live from between weeks 31 and 32, we're talking today about all the things people tell you not to do during pregnancy, how much those things are based in fact, and the insane myths that somehow are still perpetuated (like "Don't sleep on your back," or "Any amount of alcohol is going to give your baby FAS."). Also discussing all the things I'm ready to do again post-pregnancy (spoiler alert: club. SAMMICH).
Please ignore my knife skills in this video, as they are horrible and upon watching this back, I'm realizing I need to go to culinary school. Yikes.
Music used: Rockabye Baby!
Songs: Don't Stop Believin'
Here Comes the Sun
Can't Stop the Feelin'
I do not own this music - just purchased it on iTunes!
I feel like I am getting so spoiled during the month of October. Jordan is transitioning from one practice to another, and in between, he took three weeks off. We've been to Tulsa, to Santa Fe, have gotten to spend TONS of time together (beginning each morning with him waking up before me and bringing me coffee - #winning!), and last weekend, we got to see so many friends and family members in Birmingham.
Most of my family still lives in Alabama, so when it came time for a baby shower, Birmingham made the most sense as a host city. My sweet Aunt Dana, Mom's youngest sister, volunteered to host! She'd just re-done her beautiful kitchen in Homewood, and it was the perfect location to have a little party. The theme was "Mary's Little Lamb" - how cute is that?!
I wanted to keep the guest list small because I like the idea that the people in attendance will really be a part of this baby's life in a meaningful way. Despite the nasty hurricane weather, I was touched that friends and family gathered to celebrate the arrival of this baby. Moments like these make me want to fall on my knees in gratitude for the love, encouragement, and support I always receive from the people closest to me.
Every gift I received was SO generous, but a couple of highlights stood out from my two grandmothers: my dad's mom, who I call "Nonnie," gave me a pair of baby booties that my dad wore when he was an infant. So special!! My mom's mom, who I call "Gee Mommy" (I know, I made it up as a child, it works for us), gave me the Christening gown that all my cousins on my mom's side have been Christened in, beginning with me. I was the first grandchild on both sides, just like this baby will be, and so it was a really neat moment to think about the legacy of this beautiful gown.
Another really unique thing about this time in life is that one of my best friends on earth, Ginny Tyler, is pregnant and is only THREE WEEKS behind me. How insane is that?! Totally by accident, we're pregnant together. What makes this even more significant is that Ginny and I have photos of us together as little babies, and now OUR babies will be friends! It makes me cry. I can't.
Jordan saw that baby picture of us and asked if my hair had been burned in a fire. Um, NO THAT'S JUST HOW I LOOKED AS A BABY, thank you, Jord.
Extra great was that my grandfathers came to pick up my grandmothers, so I got to see and love on the important men in my life, too! I'm missing one sweet grandfather, Hank, but he was there in spirit!
Thank you so much to everyone who made this day memorable for us - I already count it as one of the sweetest parts of pregnancy to be able to spend time with such an incredible group of women.
Jordan and I (okay, just I) saw this great web series that Whitney Port (of The Hills fame) did during her pregnancy called "I Love My Baby But I Hate My Pregnancy." Each week, she did an update about kind of a "real girl's pregnancy," with all the yucky stuff no one likes to talk about but everyone experiences.
I haven't had as rough a time as Whitney Port, but I did love the idea of documenting a little bit of this process in an honest way because it's so special and once-in-a-lifetime. I love looking back on old photos and video, so more for Jord and me than for anything, I thought it would be fun to have some tape of these last 10 weeks.
Here's installment one, where he and I talk about The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of this process. If you've ever had kids, I'm sure you can relate to lots of this - because, let's be honest, pregnancy is all of those things.
Also, somehow we end up talking about comic books. And the time I tooted on Jordan's foot.
Hope you enjoy this early morning, no-makeup look! (The lighting gets better, I promise.)
Yellow, The Space Between, and Landslide are copyrighted by Rockabye Baby! and are not my property.
Yesterday, while the storms were rolling into Asheville and plummeting the temps to 50 degrees (heavenly!!), I sat on the porch and did a journaling exercise from a pregnancy book I intended to use from month one, but...forgot about. Oops.
Anyway, the exercise was to list all my favorite qualities about my partner, and to think about how those qualities will translate into him being a parent. It also asked what qualities he will balance about ME, so that I can go ahead and start thinking about the things Jordan will be better at than I will/vice versa as a parent.
So here's the excerpt from my journal yesterday.
When teaching someone a new skill, he’s very patient.
He is thorough (almost to a fault) and completes a task to the best of his ability.
He values excellence and craftsmanship over quantity.
He values family and moral uprightness over worldliness and wealth.
He is a dutiful son and sibling, and cares deeply for his family.
He is an incredibly loving and loyal son- and brother-in-law, and has become a part of the McAnnally family in a really special way.
He loves to learn and values information. He is always hungry for more knowledge.
He isn’t idle and loves to do things outside or in the woodshop - project-based.
He cultivates appreciation for new things (like cooking and baking).
He is SUPER intelligent and retains information at a high level.
He is kind and giving to people, animals who are vulnerable and can’t help themselves.
He is fun and silly and doesn’t take himself too seriously.
He is EXTREMELY witty and quick, and is always making people laugh.
He loves to play instruments and learn new songs.
He is proud and private about things that ought to be private.
He is very honorable and is a man of his word - if he promises something, he follows through.
He loves Jesus.
I'm jumping into into that third trimester (what?!) next week! So we're 2/3 of the day through this adventure, and it's impossible to overstate the difference having a supportive, loving partner who also has a great sense of humor (thank God) in the bucket seat has made.
Yesterday, our crib was delivered. We've been piling furniture, books, and baby clothes we've been gifted into the soon-to-be nursery for months now, but the delivery of the crib was the thing that, for both of us, made this all start to click into focus in a new way.
There's going to be an actual BABY in there.
So I stood at the door of the nursery, sneakily snapping out-of-focus photos of my precious husband, taking stock of this empty (for now) crib.
And I know this baby doesn't know it yet, but it won the freaking lottery. I did a good job choosing a husband, but this little one just lucked into having a dad who will be...all the things. I tried to list them out just now and just started crying, so insert your own. Any good adjective, just throw it on in there.
Kid, you've got a hell of a dad.
(Mary Catherine reserves the right to pen another one of these cheesy posts as the pregnancy progresses. This is just how things are right now, people. Don't come to our house if you don't wanna get covered in gooey feelings, 'cause they're contagious.)
...and won't give it back.
You know those Life Alert commercials?
Mmhmm. YOU know which ones I mean.
That is the current state of my brain. There are lots of things about pregnancy I thought people played up/were kind of myths (more on that in tomorrow's post), but one of them is "pregnancy brain."
Yeah right, I thought, arrogantly. These chicks are just being lazy and don't want to try anymore because they're cookin' a baby. Can't blame them, but let's not act like the forgetfulness can't be helped.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, pre-pregnancy Mary Catherine. How foolish you were. You simple idiot.
I'd like to offer a few pieces of anecdotal evidence that Pregnancy Brain is, in fact, a thing. For your consideration:
Jordan bought (well, I bought) some things from J Crew. In the stack, there were two pairs of shorts that he didn't care for. He asked me to exchange them for a different color pair of shorts and a pair of slacks. These items have been sitting on a stool in our bedroom for probably 8 weeks now, and I finally got around to doing it this week.
I took said items to the store to exchange, only to realize that I couldn't remember his pant size. Like, at all. It was gone. It was nowhere in the system from when I worked there, so my trip was fruitless and I had to go home, look in his other pants, get the size, and go back in. It's a 32/32 by the way, which really means I only had to remember the one number, twice.
That one sounds mild, does it? Could've happened to anyone, you're thinking? Stay with me.
I recently got a new car. If you know me personally, this is a Big Deal as I have been driving the same car since my sophomore year of college (meaning almost a decade). My car had started to really die out on me - the AC was faulty, the radio didn't work, and, in its death rattle, the starter began acting up.
One fateful Saturday morning after I'd taught Pure Barre, I got into the car only to find that it wouldn't turn over. Jordan had to come get me, and since we'd already made plans to go look at cars the next day, we decided to leave the car where it was and get it the next day.
When we arrived at the car, neither of us could find the keys. Where had we put them? we both wondered. We couldn't figure it out, so we went on to the dealership and made plans to deal with the lost keys later.
The next day, I made it my personal mission to find the keys. I turned the entire house upside down. Searched through our laundry, every nook and corner, and dug through Jordan's Jeep - nothing. COMPLETE mystery.
"Did you check your pockets?" my mother asked by phone. YES, MOM, I CHECKED MY POCKETS. Come on, girl. I felt like Parker Posey in Best In Show when the hotel manager suggests she look under the bed (anyone? anyone??) for her dog's lost toy. #busybee
So eventually, we bought another car and traded my current car in. Despite the fact that it was still in the Pure Barre parking lot. Locked.
The only thing either of us could think of was that I'd locked the keys in the car that morning. So we called AAA. I'm sure this poor guy thought that we were about to hot wire this car given that he unlocked it and we were still unable to locate the keys and/or start the car. He drove away, but he looked dubious.
Jordan had to go to work, so I stayed to clean out the car. Not knowing that the last time I drove the car would be the ACTUAL last time I drove the car, I'd made no effort to tidy it up. It's not important to the story, though it might be entertaining to include that inside the car, I found the following items that I did not know were there:
You get the point. If you found those items in a car, you'd be like, "So this is an alcoholic smoker who sometimes works out? Mmkay."
Anyway, as I was cleaning out the ruins of my life, it started to rain. I pulled on my rain jacket and put my wallet in my pocket so that I could walk to Domino's and get a pizza to stress-eat by myself and...
...touched something. Metal. And clinky.
The keys. They were in the pocket of the raincoat I'd been wearing that morning. Which means not only am I a moron, but MY MOTHER WAS RIGHT!
Last week, I needed to make a pound cake as a thank you gift for a weekend trip we'd recently been gifted. I thought, "This will be a snap. I've done this a billion times." I FaceTime'd my mom, started chatting, and got to work.
I laid all the ingredients out - eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, lemon extract, Crisco (YEP. CRISCO. Deal with it.), etc. Started creaming everything together. Talking away, blah blah blah, got it done in a jiff, put it in the oven, and sat back to wait for the house to fill with that fabulous baking smell. I cleaned up all my ingredients, wiped my counters, and congratulated myself.
But it didn't smell fabulous. It didn't smell like anything except scrambled eggs cooking.
I looked in on the cake and saw that it was sunken. This has happened to me before - I accidentally shut our back door too hard while baking once and it collapsed - so I thought, "Eh. Whatever. We'll see."
Anyway, thirty minutes later, I looked in to find that the center of the cake was still completely raw. Odd I thought. I'll let it bake a little longer, I guess.
Twenty minutes later, the blackened scorch of failure wafted through the house.
"What the HELL??" I said aloud to Tom Hanks.
Turns out I forgot to put flour in the cake. Despite getting the flour out and setting it with the other ingredients and putting it back into the pantry with the other ingredients, it did not occur to me that I had not actually put the flour in the batter. So, I basically made custard, and then burned the custard. Then threw it away. Then went to the store and bought a cake.
Friends, these are things that, despite my spazzy and oft-forgetful nature, would have NEVER HAPPENED had this baby not crawled into my brain stem, torn it in half, kidnapped my mind and held it hostage in my uterus. I can't even access normal thought anymore. I couldn't remember John Hughes' name the other day. JOHN FREAKING HUGHES, director of the 80's canon of classics such as The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. I can't remember anything about Jordan's work schedule. I asked a friend when she was due (she'd already had the baby). I asked a co-worker how her mother-in-law was doing who'd recently fallen ill (it was her father-in-law). I left the house without Tom Hanks to TAKE THE DOG TO THE PARK.
I've surrendered to it. Whatever. This is my life now.
"Oh, sweetie, it only gets worse," knowing moms say to me with a smile.
That's cute, lady. Thanks for the looming reminder that I'll never be able to effectively bake/speak/interact with other humans normally again.
Oooooo, this baby better be cute is all I'm sayin'.