As I sat down to watch, Craig took the New Babies, the dolls that Grammy brought, and stuffed them under his shirt. Devon started laughing the deep “HAA, HAA” that means he’s more than just amused—he’s highly entertained. He reached up under Daddy’s shirt and out popped pink sleeper New Baby as Daddy lay back and made groaning noises in parody of labor. When Devon had “delivered” the one, he tossed her on her head on the floor and went back in for twin sister. Devon then did a second body slam and a victory lap around the coffee table, arms raised in touchdown posture. Meanwhile, the discarded New Babies lay on the floor, glassy blue eyes undisturbed, fish lips splayed in perfect calm. They don’t cry unless you “feed” them with their bottles and then take the bottles out.
Strange, somehow, that I only have to have the babies once and Craig has to “have” them twenty or thirty times so Devon can watch and play obstetrician. It’s an interesting way to prepare Devon for the next week.
Personally, I think the best way to handle impending labor is to not think about it. I didn’t even pack my suitcase until the night before Devon’s induction. At the time I was hoping I’d go into labor naturally and be in enough pain to actually WANT to go to the hospital and have people help me. It was sort of hard to wake up at 5 on a perfectly normal morning, take a shower, check myself in feeling fine, and then set down to the task of having a baby for the next fifteen hours. Thankfully, my sense of unreality took over big time and even without narcotics it seemed like the whole experience couldn’t really be happening.
The worst part was I had spent time planning things to do for the boring hours of the induction when you’re hooked up to machines and waiting for the medication to ever-so-slowly ratchet up your contractions. I sat back and set my ipod to play the new Orson Scott Card audiobook I’d downloaded from Audible. The plot went like this:
Boy and companions catch new virus while trapping monkeys in Africa and start coughing and bleeding out of their eyes. They go to the hospital, where they get subpar Third World medical care and everybody but boy dies. Boy goes back to village, where everybody is bleeding out of their eyes and dying. Virus spreads to surrounding areas and boy watches while everybody starts…
No hard feelings to the creator of the Ender saga, but he probably shouldn’t market the Empire series to people in the hospital. I lasted for about a half hour before switching over to the book I brought. Forty pages into The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, the wife of the main character dies in—you guessed it—childbirth. Sigh.
I’m packing my hospital suitcase today, which is probably wise because I have two amniotic sacs instead of one. Each breaks separately, and if they both do at the same time it could be Victoria Falls. I also did a going-to-the-hospital pedicure, since hundreds of people are going to breeze in and out of the operating room while my feet stick up in the air.
Yes, they each have a different color polish; it wasn’t an oversight because I’m not seeing much of my feet these days. It’s our plan for telling our identical girls apart. When they lose their hospital bracelets, we plan on putting a drop of polish on each baby’s big toe, and I’m memorizing lefty’s color and righty’s color by trying them out on my feet. It’s a tamer version of what we’ve been telling people we’d do all along.
Friend: So, are you worried about telling them apart when they’re born?
Me: No, we’ll take a permanent marker and draw a mustache on one and a beard on the other.
I couldn’t paint my nails myself; I can touch my toes but only with my feet brought up sideways. Craig did it; a job he compared to putting glue on a model airplane. This he did with the same calmness and attention to detail that he devotes to any task.
Speaking of barefoot and pregnant, Craig sneaked a few pictures of me with Devon in the kiddie pool.
Let me tell you, it’s a real thrill to debut on the Internet three or four shy of two hundred pounds.
Devon needed some encouragement to play in the pool, and Craig was there to help me up.
I was slightly worried that we’d look down and notice there was way more water in the pool than we remembered and know what happened.
We’ve watched two movies this week, Secretariat and Three Idiots. One was set in India, one in Kentucky. Both were superb. They also each had a childbirth scene. I HATE childbirth scenes in movies, even if one of the movies just featured a horse giving birth. All that sweating and panting and grunting and mooing seriously disturbs me.
In the other movie, this poor girl started labor in the middle of a record flood that shut down city infrastructure and stranded her in a classroom. Forty Indian male engineering students, also stranded, improvised a suction positioner out of a shop vac and car batteries and delivered the baby all by their nerdy selves.
Not the mental image I wanted. Sigh.
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