Sunday, December 30, 2012

baby's room: inspiration

Although lately I've been trying to do a lot of baby reading on important topics, such as approaches to sleeping, nursing, and brain development, designing the nursery has been a favorite pastime during down times at home since about halfway through my pregnancy. With 4.5 weeks to the due date, we still have a lot to do to make the baby's room ready. But we've gotten a lot of the major items together and have loads of ideas for the rest...choosing between them will be the difficult part (as will trying to keep the budget under control).

Early on, Jesse and I both started making design boards. We started with gray and yellow as our base colors, partly because the room will continue to serve as a guest room and we already had a gray futon with gray and yellow bedding. Our boards looked a little different – Jesse’s had a lot more burnt orange and turquoise and a little more of a 1970s vibe. I kind of like keeping the color scheme a little simpler. 

This is an extremely chaotic, early iteration of my design board, that has since been streamlined (click on it to make it bigger):


We wanted to have a mostly modern, graphic style with lots of colors and patterns that wasn’t too “baby,” but we also like to have mid-century, rustic, and whimsical elements as well. It might be a lot, but I’d love to incorporate maps and travel, woodland animals, Wisconsin and California, and typography, even if just in some small ways. I’d love to have some DIY elements too, to make it feel more personal.

With that as our direction, we’ve been browsing blogs and favorite shopping sites and coming up with lots of options for furniture, rugs, curtains, bedding, art, and accessories. We’re also trying to bargain-hunt. It’s taken a while, but we finally have the crib, the dresser/changing table, the glider, and the crib bedding (which we haven’t 100% decided to keep). A rug is on the way. I’ve slowly been picking up and ordering little accessories. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, it will all come together!

reality check

I know it's been months since I have written a blog post, which is unfortunate since there is so much to say. I think the pregnancy has made me want to write less than normal. I wish it had the opposite effect.

But a few weeks ago, I ended up in the hospital with pretty frequent contractions. At 31 weeks, it was still too early to deliver and so I was grateful that it was determined that I was not in labor. Even so, the experience reminded me that this baby is coming - maybe soon - and I can't keep putting off the many things I want to do before the baby comes (like write about my experience of being pregnant) or I may just not have the chance to do them.
This pregnancy has been proceeding so smoothly and normally, that I was really surprised to have something like this come up. On the day it happened, I could tell that I was a little off. Jesse was in Chicago on business, and in a brief conversation with him, I joked that I would let him know if I went into labor. When I took the dog out for a walk after I got home from work, I could feel some tightness, so I hurried home, ate dinner, and settled in on the couch to start tracking my contractions. For nearly two hours, they were mostly seven and eight minutes apart. At that stage of pregnancy, they say to call the doctor if you have more than four in an hour. I had more than four in 40 minutes. It took the midwife an hour to call me back, but when she did, she said I needed to come in to the hospital. As worried as I was that something was wrong, I was nearly as worried that I was completely wrong about what a contraction is. I wasn't, and it's good I called.

It took me a few minutes to get ready and prepare the apartment for Yuki to be in it for a while by himself, since I had no idea how long it could be. I even left out an extra big bowl of water and filled his food dish way more than normal. I know he's not a cat, but I thought it would put my mind at ease a little if I couldn't get home to feed him. I got "lost" on the way, since one of the freeway ramps was closed at night and the detour didn't make sense. Thank goodness for smartphones! It's funny now, but at the time, I was pretty nervous that I was actually in labor and needed to get there so they could slow or stop it.

Everyone at the hospital was really great and took the situation very seriously. They monitored the baby and my contractions throughout the night and did lots of exams and tests, and gave me an IV. Although the contractions continued for much of the time I was there (even getting to 3-4 minutes apart), it never turned into labor and so they sent me home around 4:30am. The contractions (Braxton Hicks) have continued since, but now that I am at 35 weeks, I don't need to go in to the hospital when I have a lot, until I can tell that it's actual labor.

Interestingly, I ended up back in the hospital a week later for a completely different reason. I'm grateful to be a part of a medical group that takes these concerns so seriously, but I really, really hope to avoid further visits to the hospital until I am ready to have the baby!

In some ways, I learned a lot from these situations. We need to have an alternate route to the hospital planned. I need to know where to park (late at night, this was also a problem). I need to bring an iPhone charger. We need to have a backup plan for what to do with Yuki if we have to go in to the hospital in a hurry. And I also have a better sense of what to expect in the hospital. I learned that I really don't like feeling immobile due to all of the wires and monitoring equipment, so that will definitely have an impact on how I plan for the birth.

The best part about this is that Jesse got me a cozy scarf in Chicago for my courage. :)