My husband and I have wanted as natural a childbirth process as possible. However, in today’s medical world, “natural” seems to be impossible. After having my 5th ultrasound yesterday, apparently due to a MA medical requirement for women of my age, it was determined that I didn’t have enough amniotic fluid in me to wait for little baby Grujoski to decide on his own timetable. He needs to come now, whether he wants to or not.

Fortunately, he’s been in position to come for the past few weeks. Head down, moving a lot to reassure me that all is well, baby Grujoski seems ready to enter the world. So in about an hour (maybe two depending on traffic) I’ll get an IV drip of Pitocin to get my contractions started for real. So much for natural childbirth. I’m still going to try to go without an epidural…but I’m not a martyr, so we shall see.

Despite the forecast for rain, it is a beautiful day out there. Sunny and bright with cool air. A perfect spring day. Add to that the full moon, and there couldn’t be a better day to welcome a new baby into the world. Now if we can only get him to actually come today. I’ve heard the labor stories and know that we can’t really predict when he will arrive, but I’ve got a good feeling he will be born before midnight.

I thank God for the blessings that He has given me. First, for a loving husband who will be by my side despite his extreme dislike of hospitals (and for good reason, but that would be a different post). Next, for the wonderful blessing of health and happiness that I have had as I have carried this child, and all the love and support that has been given to me by friends (including co-workers) and family. Finally, I am grateful for the excitement I feel in anticipation for holding my baby in my arms instead of my belly.

No internet in the hospital, so my next post will be after we have returned home.

Today my husband and I toured the maternity ward of the hospital at which we plan to have the baby. The primary purpose of the visit was to teach my husband how to get to the hospital. I think it will take a few more trips before he can get there on his own, but today was a good start.

Maternity wards have come a long way since I was born (if I was even born in a hospital). Now there are three different types of rooms that they move you through–pre-labor, labor and delivery, and recovery, each with its own specialized furniture and equipment. TVs and CD players are standard in all the rooms, along with phones that will call pretty much anywhere in the state. (Out of state and international require calling cards.)

They now have full mattress cots for partners to sleep on during the mandatory two-day stay after labor required by MA state law. Not that I expect my husband to actually stay with me for the whole 48 hours. After his 4 month hospital stay in his early 20’s, he’s not so fond of hospitals. I was proud of him for making it a whole 45 minutes today.

My only complaint, no cell phones are allowed and they don’t have Wi-Fi. I don’t get it. They’ll make sure you have a TV to watch, but no YouTube? No IM? No email? For someone like me that is a mandatory 2-day severing of my information and communication umbilical cord. Labor doesn’t scare me, but I’m not sure I’ll survive 2-days without the internet.

This weekend was the first time I can say I actually felt like a beached whale. I had to get my husband to help me out of bed, in part due to laziness, in part due to finally feeling like I could use “I’m pregnant” as a viable excuse for needing help.

I work in a bullpen with a bunch of 20-something woman who all look like they could be in a fashion magazine. (I’ve never before actually known woman who wear pointed-toe, spiked heels with hip-hugger, boot-cut jeans). As one of the few women over 30 (okay, almost 40) and the only pregnant woman, it is really easy for me to feel VERY fat.

However, today at church, I had several women comment that I look great for being 7 months pregnant. They also commented on how small I am and told stories of how big they were at my stage of pregnancy. Last Monday during my first trip to Babies ‘r’ Us, I saw many woman whom I assumed were only days away from labor for our comparitive sizes.

The truth? It doesn’t matter what the actual circumference of my ever-growing belly is; what matters is how I feel about it and how those feelings affect how I interact with others. So today, I embrace my circumference and and all those around me. How can I possibly be sad about my waistline when I have a growing boy within?

My husband is so adorable! I have to say that up front. Though he isn’t innocent, he has the ability to appear as impishly innocent as a sweet-faced 6 year old boy. I also happen to be self-assured enough to assume the best intentions from comments rather than the worst. Thus, when my husband told me tonight, “You don’t look pregnant, you just look fat” I was able to take it for the complement that he intended. I was also able to laugh and explain to him why I might not be able to laugh at a similar comment later in this pregnancy. He recognized the flaw in his statement and tried to make it better by saying that I don’t look fat because my arms and legs and face aren’t fat, just my belly. This made me laugh harder.

Now, I realize that most women, especially those with extra estrogen, relaxin, and other pregnancy hormones rushing through their system, would probably burst into tears if their husband said that. Somehow, I’ve managed to keep my emotions completely separate from how I look. I think it comes from a long history of thinking I was uglier than the family dog (which was a beautiful malamute husky), and finally overcoming that inferiority complex through…well that’s another story.

Perhaps another reason I was able to laugh instead of burst into tears is because my masculine and feminine thought processes are pretty fairly balanced. I’ve known this for a long time due to my great ability to have guy friends and my difficulties in dating guys. It was confirmed again today when my husband sent me a BBC link to Sex I.D., a site where you can determine your brain’s sex. I fell pretty close to the middle, but slightly to the feminine side since I prefer masculine features in men.

Because of my brain’s balance between masculine and feminine traits, I’ve tended to have some very guy-like tendencies and still manage to have the feminine mystique. I can fix cars, manage a map, have great spatial relations, and speak my mind without beating around the bush. At the same time, I can sew wedding dresses, decorate a cake, arrange flowers, and do just about anything else needed to plan a wedding (not that I did anything to plan mine). While I was single, I used to say that I needed a guy that was more of a man than I was. Apparently, I did a good job finding him!

My husband claims that I hit him in the face three times as I slept last night. (Personally, I only remember one, which woke me up when it happened.) In my condition, most would blame the pregnancy hormones. I blame Citibank.

As I was trying to access my account last night, I was told that I needed to answer some security questions in order to make my online access more secure. I willingly obliged by clicking the button to answer now rather than later. This is what I got.

Note the tips on the left side, then look at the questions. What if my favorite television show is “24″? (I’ve never seen “24″, but this is a “what if” scenario since I don’t really watch TV.) Can’t use that answer. Which country would you like to visit? Since there are 192 countries in the UN and I’ve been to fewer than 15 of them, there are a lot of countries I’d like to visit, not just one.

Of all the questions in the list, the only one for which I have a consistent answer for more than a week is the first one…if only I could remember her name. Oh yes, I remember now. Kenna, or was it Kena? I’ve had over seventy roommates due to living in large houses with lots of people and over 17 years of rotating roommates. I pick one of the spellings and hit submit.

Wait, that red asterisk is REQUIRING me to answer 3 questions. Okay, maybe I’ll have better luck with the second. Good, it’s a different set of questions. Uh-oh. Similar problem. What was your boss’s first name at your first job? How do I know? I can barely remember the name of the company. If you could control your height, what height would you be? Your kidding me, right? What is with the “stroll down memory lane” line? Most of the questions have nothing to do with memory lane. They have to do with fickle favorites and fantasies for which only people without a life would have static answers.

Out of all the choices in the second question set, there is one answerable question…my favorite pet. Third question set, one answerable question–first pet. Easy, same answer as the question from set two.

Done. Submit. Error message: you cannot use the same answer twice.

In a fit of frustration, I write a somewhat unpleasant message to Citibank.

I can’t answer your bad questions 12/13/06 06:16:57 PM

You wrote:

Today when I logged in, I was asked to answer security questions in order to make my account more secure. Normally, I would be happy to do this, but the selection of questions were not questions that I could answer within the restrictions given. Please either expand the choice of questions or allow for a write in question for those of us who went to so many schools that we don’t remember the names of any of them, and had only one pet but can’t use the same answer twice, and have 3-letter nicknames for the people given…etc. Unless this is done, I won’t be able to answer the security questions consistently without writing them down, which defeats the purpose of security questions.

Re: I can’t answer your bad questions 12/13/06 06:36:34 PM

Customer Service Wrote:

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) required that all banks must take additional steps to protect online access. Citicards chose to utilize Challenge/Response or Security Questions. You will only be required to answer these questions when requesting certain functions on our website. In the event that you forget your answer you can make your request over the phone and have your security questions reset by calling 1-800-347-4934.

Thank you for using our website.

So, I can’t remember my phone number from when I was a kid, but I’m supposed to remember the number to call to get my questions reset?

Hmm. Come to think of it, maybe the unconscious punches were a side affect of pregnancy. My frustration was probably more a result of my inability to remember anything at the moment than a result of stupid security questions from Citibank.

Right before the Citibank incident, I was convinced that my husband had first showed me the Original Numa videos on YouTube. After debating it with him and then calling Feech (my teenager I’ve been harassing…I mean mentoring…for the past 4 years), I learned that Feech had shown them to me right before I got pregnant. My husband had never seen them before. (He has now.)

Perhaps pregnancy has robbed me of my memory. But I’m still blaming Citibank.

If you haven’t heard yet, I am pregnant with my first child. Several weeks ago, my husband asked me how big the baby was. I told him the embryo was about the size of a Brazil nut. We’ve both been calling it a Brazil nut ever since. I’ll admit it’s not the best reference term, but it is better than “monster,” which is what one of my brothers and his wife called their second child after she was born. Supposedly, they thought her grunting sounds were like those of a Sesame Street monster.

So I had an ultrasound yesterday to make sure that everything is okay with the Brazil nut. There were the typical comments about how cute the pixelated black and white image was and how fast the fetus moved, to which I responded, “good thing our yard is fenced.” A few jokes later and we were laughing pretty hard, which makes ultrasound imaging difficult. When I stopped laughing enough for the technician to proceed, it appeared the baby was laughing too. The still image below doesn’t do it justice, but you get the idea.

We were also able to determine that the baby is probably a boy, which is a good thing since I’ve been absentmindedly refering to him with masculine pronouns. Of course, after we determined his gender, he decided to show off his strength with a kick.

If you haven’t seen enough ultrasounds to know, the picture above is of his left foot.

Hmmm……If I’m this bad with ultrasound pictures, there is no hope for this child once he’s born. Then again, if his hyperactivity during the ultrasound is any indication, I might be so worn out from chasing him around that I won’t have time to post funny pictures.