 |
| 37 Weeks preggo, with toys |
Paris has finally been visited by those sunny, crisp fall days that just make you want to walk by the Seine and stop in at a cafe to share a hot chocolate or a bottle of wine. It is just beautiful out, and today Matt and I are hopefully going on another date of sorts, if I can come up with some good ideas - I have two drawbacks currently: I can't walk much farther than 10 blocks at a stretch, and I don't have a coat that covers my bump - BUT hey, if I plan things right neither of these should really be a problem. I just have to build in plenty of places for us to stop ...
Right now, Matt is at an Irish pub watching the Rugby World Cup final - New Zealand and France battle it out! Neither of us had ever watched rugby before, which is - apparently - a big sport in the rest of the world ;). New Zealand beat Australia last week; these are usually the two best teams, and nobody can understand how France made it into the final -not even the French! Parisians are not really the most team-spirited in any case, but their response still seems to be "I don't know how Les Bleus are in the final, they are not a very good team" - and now they're playing the New Zealand All Blacks, the best team in the world.
Matt is watching the game with an Australian guy we met at one of our parenting workshops, whose wife actually HAD HER BABY this week! She'd sent an email to a group of us fall pregnant ladies on Wednesday to say they were on the way to the hospital, and I told Matt he probably wouldn't be going to watch rugby with Carl this weekend - BUT NO, this guy was committed to the rugby final, even with a two day old baby at home - well, it IS the World Cup. And when I think about it, he probably had a pretty stressful/amazing week, and deserves a couple of hours of rugby- watching and beer.
This was the week of early arrivals amongst the women from my parenting classes - of the 6 women slated to deliver in November, 4 of them either went in to labor or were making plans to be induced this week! I kept getting emails all week "Sorry, on our way to the hospital, can't make coffee/lunch/ etc". Almost all of them delivered 2-3 weeks early! I feel a little like the last pregnant lady left standing - Gigantor seems very content to just hang out, turning my belly into a full on Winnebago for her comfort - She's probably got a baby equivalent of a one bedroom apartment in there by now, and I feel like it's gonna be hard to coax her out. We'll see.
But just in case, we did a lot of baby prep this week - built the crib and maybe even more importantly, got a new washing machine. Seriously, washing machines are like porn for parents I think. This is a Miele which my friend Eugenie was nice enough to give me when she moved - the MIele is like the Rolls Royce of washing machines, I guess. Matt and I just stood around watching the cycle in awe and saying things like "Its so...quiet." Our old one was given to us by the old tenants and was maybe 20 years old, and used to buck like a bronco when it was on spin cycle, sometimes even moving so far out of position that it would block the door to the bathroom. So yes, we feel ready for the onslaught of dirty baby clothes that is coming our way.
My father was in Paris this week, and he brought with him a lot of early-childhood toys, stuffed animals, and books that he and my step-mother had picket out, so now we feel really set and are just trying to arrange our tiny little apartment so we have room for all the baby's things as well as our own. I'm actually feeling more optimistic about it than I even have - Some of this is because we also hired a CLEANING WOMAN, a first for us and it is making a HUGE difference in our life - it's funny, we never had one in New York - I kind of wanted one but could never convince Matt the expense would be worth it. But now, with the baby coming, he was immediately on board - we both all of a sudden realized that we'd need to keep the place much cleaner with a small child, and that we might be too exhausted to do this ourselves -
So I guess that all qualifies as nesting .... I'll tell you one quick story from our Childbirth and Early Parenting class from last weekend, and then sign off - Now, if you're a parent reading this letter, you've probably taken some version of this class - usually its like once a week for six weeks, and you learn about what to expect when you go to the hospital and then in the first few weeks of your newborn's life. Most of the clinics here in France offer this same thing, but we did ours in English through the English language parenting group, and so it was done in a marathon weekend of two days, 9:30-4:30 each day. At the end of each day we were so exhausted and full of new info that we both had to lie down when we got home.
One of the best things about the class, though, was the opportunity to meet other American/British/Australian etc couples living in Paris who were due about the same time we were - and of course, it kind of goes without saying that everyone is having their first child, so everyone is in a similar state of nervousness. On the first day, our teacher had us watch a birth video - a little traumatic for us but we all sort of swallowed and realized it was probably a good idea for us to watch it. Matt and I both had horrible memories of being shown birth videos in Sex Ed classes in junior high school, and at least one of the guys, an Englishman from Manchester, looked like he might faint or throw up or both.
However, it was one of the kindest, gentlest birth videos ever - a home birth clearly from the 80s with a woman who had already had a baby, and so the whole experience of her pushing the baby out took literally 3 minutes and looked like a piece of cake. Our teacher told all the men to watch to see what the husband was doing to support his wife - and he did do quite a bit in the moments of the birth, but for the labor he basically walked around with a cup of coffee asking the midwives "So, how much longer do you think this is gonna take?". This kind of made the nervous guys in our class laugh - one said "Ah, I see a cup of coffee will be the key to my successfully supporting my wife through this". Then later, we were carpooling home with a French/Australian couple, and the French husband seemed totally awed by the woman in the video. "That woman," he said, "She was like a professional at having babies." Both his wife and I tried to tell him it was her second baby and probably wouldn't be quite as easy with the first, but still it was probably the best video the teacher could have shown to get us all a little less nervous about the whole thing.
Well, I really wracked my brains for some non-baby related news this week but came up pretty empty! That tells you a lot about where at least MY head is at right now - though I am trying to get out a little and do a few Paris things in these last few weeks. Also, I finally put the BLOG together for this letter - yes, that's right, there will be a Paris Letter blog shortly that you can subscribe to, with pictures and links and all that stuff - I need about one more week to polish it up, but I'm hoping next week I can link you all in to that instead of this email. Hey, it only took about a year for me to get it together ;)
In the meantime, I hope everyone has a great week, and I'm taking suggestions for TV shows that we could buy and watch during the first weeks of our baby's life - this seems to be what all the parents I know do - they are so exhausted that they just watch episodic TV when they have an hour of downtime. We know several couples who've used the opportunity to watch the entire 5 seasons of THE WIRE, which unfortunately Matt and I have already seen .... but if you've got any other suggestions of series that you've loved, lemme know!
No comments:
Post a Comment