Almost 39 weeks

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Well, it looks like the daily pep talks with Pookie Bear worked: she has stayed cozy and warm inside my uterus through December, and now we are on the eve of our 39th week of pregnancy together.

I’ve felt and thought this the entire pregnancy, but I am so happy and grateful to have had such an enjoyable and relatively smooth pregnancy to date. I still can’t believe she is coming, and soon we will meet our little Pookie Bear baby. I’ve also enjoyed every single one of her movements, whether they have been kicks, pounds, squirms, wiggles, turns, and even her tiny little hiccups. Even when they have been painful, like when she’s kicked me in my ribs or given me sciatica or piriformis pain, I still love each feeling and just feel so blessed to have gotten this far with her. Sometimes, I just can’t believe how lucky I am, and I rub my belly and remind myself that this is all real, that my little baby is almost here.

In the beginning when I could feel her movements, she would get excited and move a lot after exercise, meals, cold drinks, at bedtime, and in the middle of the night. I still fondly remember waking up feeling startled, just to her little somersaults in my uterus. As time progressed and she got bigger, she’d get excited on plane rides, especially during ascending and descending. She loves being in festive, rambunctious events like Auria’s backyard food and beer event, and she moves a lot during those events, as though saying she wants to be included in the fun. She also kicked a lot during calls and presentations when I did a lot of talking. And she absolutely loves comedy and live theater; she never stopped squirming and turning during those live events.

I hope this is all indicative of the person she will become: someone who is lively and boisterous, loves good conversation, live theater, comedy, music, and events, travel, and delicious food. I’m so excited to meet my little Pookie Bear, and she has a throng of people who already love her and are eagerly waiting to meet her, too.

Cooking frenzy

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I pride myself on productivity and efficiency. It’s a little disgusting to think about it, but I do. I have a hard time not doing things, and I know I get it from my mom. Chris calls me out on this all the time, as does my best friend, and this obsession certainly has not let up with Pookie Bear’s pending arrival. In fact, I think her pending arrival has only made the obsession worse with my to-do/checklist.

I was able to get my hair cut and highlighted yesterday, so that ticked off another big thing I wanted to get done before baby’s arrival. So what next? MORE FOOD! This afternoon, I made chicken satay and its accompanying peanut sauce with Sambal Lady’s new spice blends, stir-fried Chinese pea shoots, two mason jars’ worth of XO sauce using Eat Cho Food’s simplified recipe (the entire apartment smells like seafood now in the form of dried scallops and shrimp!), scallion oil noodles mixed with seaweed, and Instant Pot masoor dal. That’s six things in the span of one afternoon. And I still want to make tomato onion masala and potato leek soup (with the remaining leeks from Thanksgiving). The freezer is running out of space for me to add prepared food into, so now I’m going to need to figure out where to put all this tomato onion masala for quick Indian meals once I make it. The nesting instinct has gone on overdrive.

Life-sized teddy bear

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A number of packages arrived today, both expected and not expected. I tend to do most of my shopping for staples like skincare/cosmetics/clothes around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and if I am buying Christmas/birthday gifts for friends or family, I usually use this time to take advantage of all the discounts and deals. What I was not expecting to be delivered today was a huge Amazon box that was gift wrapped and not from our baby registry.

When we opened the box, which was addressed to me, there was a large vacuum-sealed bag. It came with a gift note, which said it was from “the Dream Team.” The label said it was a 55-inch teddy bear… for Pookie. I couldn’t believe it; my team at work had sent me a life-sized teddy bear. I read the reviews, and this guy will need to be unzipped and re-fluffed to be in his full, optimal glory!

“DO NOT take it out of its packaging!” Chris exclaimed, bewildered that someone had sent us such a massively sized stuffed animal. “We have so much clutter! There is stuff everywhere now!”

I’d always wanted a life-sized stuffed animal, just for shits and giggles. In my dreams, it was a Totoro or Snoopy the size of me, but hey, this teddy bear will do. I cannot wait to see how Pookie looks next to this teddy bear in terms of size. It will be too cute.

Visiting friends and mom’s comparisons

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When you live in a city as exciting and cosmopolitan as New York, you inevitably will have guests and visitors come from all over the place not just to see you, but to see and experience the city. One of my friends came to visit today with her now husband, and since they were coming over to grace me with their presence, I decided that since I was still feeling good, I’d make one of her favorite childhood cookies, the snickerdoodle, and send her off with some. Unfortunately, the Serious Eats recipe did not come out as I’d hoped (immediately out of the oven and a few hours later they were good, but passed that, they didn’t retain their soft, chewiness the way snickerdoodles are supposed to.

The two of them had been engaged since 2014, around the time Chris and I got engaged, and so my mom used to always say annoying things about how at some point, they would get married, never tell me, and not invite me to the wedding. “You can’t just assume that just because you invited someone to your wedding that they will invite you to theirs,” she started. “Maybe they don’t have the money to invite you, or maybe they just don’t see you as close enough to invite to their wedding.”

I thought about these constant jabs when my friend revealed that the two of them had gotten married about two weeks ago, in her parents’ backyard with just immediate family in attendance. Great, I thought, now my mom will be smug because she was right. Though it wasn’t like some grand affair that I was just left out of as my mother would want to imagine.

Not only did they get married in the last month, but they’ve also bought a home in the Bay Area. Talk about a double whammy in just one month.

I told my mom this later in the evening, which excited her to no end. She wants all my friends (at least, the ones she knows) to get married, have kids, and “settle down.” “Did you know that she’s your prettiest friend? I used to think (insert another friend’s name) was the prettiest. But no, SHE is the prettiest of them all!”

Yes, because I rank all my friends by how good looking they are. My mother really cannot help herself from comparing, as comparing people is one of her absolute favorite things to do, which annoys me to no end. Why can’t someone just be pretty or smart and that’s it? Why do they always need to be compared to someone else….?!

38-week ultrasound

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I was at the maternal fetal medicine/ultrasound unit at Lenox Hill yesterday for a weekly deep scan. Since week 35, when I come here, I feel a little on edge because I never know what they will find (or nitpick at). The maternal fetal medicine doctor who has been evaluating the baby’s growth and heart rate is also one of the directors of obstetrics at Lenox Hill, so the practice tends to take his recommendations very seriously. He’s also apparently extremely conservative and cautious as evidenced by not only my recent hospitalization, but the original insistence I stay at least TWO nights, and so I was bracing myself for more fetal monitoring today.

Well, the sonographer told me that the ultrasound all looked good; baby looks healthy and the blood/oxygen flow through the umbilical cord looks perfect. When she walked me to the waiting area to discuss with the doctor, I was surprised to see a new maternal fetal medicine specialist come over to greet me who I’d never met before. They said that they didn’t need to do fetal monitoring today since the last several weeks, everything looked good.

“The baby looks perfect,” she said, “No concerns at all!”

I asked her about the previous specialist’s suggestion of potential induction given the baby’s size, and she looked at me quizzically and reviewed some previous notes on my chart.

“Well, you’re Asian, and Asian babies tend to be smaller on average than Caucasian babies,” she said. “I’m assuming your husband is also of Asian descent, as well? Based on what I can see, I see no concerns as the baby looks very healthy. I see zero reason for inducing.”

Wow, some common sense for once. It was such a relief to hear this and to hear another specialist’s perspective. I hate all the interventions that are unnecessary, and I just want Pookie Bear and me to get out of this alive, healthy, and without endless, non-medically necessary procedures.

Baby’s head low in pelvis

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I was at my OB’s office yesterday for my 38-week appointment, where we did a high level ultrasound and she informed me that the baby’s head is very low in my pelvis.

“That means that she’s ready!” my doctor exclaimed, smiling wide and getting excited. “I estimate that based on her position, she could really come anytime in the next week. You have our emergency number on your phone, right?”

Anytime in the next week? WHAT? I was both filled with excitement and terror all at once. Pookie Bear is ready to come out and discover the world? I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised given that I’m already at 38 weeks, and babies being born about a week or so early is pretty normal and healthy since it’s not like they have a calendar that says, “it’s 40 weeks — time to GET OUT!”

So what did I do, the crazy overdrive person who can’t keep still and is obsessed with productivity? On the way home, I stopped by Whole Foods and purchased a 3-lb container of rolled oats to start making lactation cookie dough balls to get ready for the freezer. I already picked up ground flaxseed and brewer’s yeast the week before, so I had all the core ingredients to make up the “lactation” part of this cookie dough.

I told Chris about what the doctor said, and today, I knew he was on edge regardless of whether he’s willing to admit it. He insisted we organize a lot of the baby items in the second bedroom and start taking things out of the boxes that we were gifted from the baby registry. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal, and I also knew it wouldn’t take that much time, but he snapped at me when I said it wasn’t a big deal and that he could take care of a lot of it.

“What if you go into labor tonight or tomorrow?” he snapped. “Then I have to do all this myself! I don’t know what’s in all these boxes!”

Well… the box that says “changing pad” — that has a changing pad in it? None of this is that complicated. He didn’t appreciate my comments and insisted we do this at this second. So we did it all this evening, and it took probably less than 30 minutes. There’s really not THAT much baby stuff, and I don’t think he realizes that because pre-baby, this bedroom was empty, hollow, and had a big echo. There’s not much of an echo anymore, though.

But this is what Chris is like when he gets anxious, and he feels like he’s not in control. I married a loving control freak who wants to be in control of literally everything, and he hates surprises. The second he feels like he’s out of control, he reacts by being a bit short fused and snappy. So I expected this from him at some point.

I don’t think there’s a newborn out there that allows his/her parents to be in control. And that’s what he and I will need to get used to — not feeling like we’re in control at all and just going with the flow of what the baby wants and needs.

First snows of the season

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It is technically not winter yet, as it’s officially winter on December 21st here in the northern hemisphere, but it certainly feels like it’s winter given the drop in temperatures. I always know that winter has arrived when my head feels naked without a hat on and my hands either need gloves or to be pushed into my pockets. But another reminder of winter is the tiny little snow flurries that tend to happen in late November and early December. When I am in the comfort of a warm office or home, and I look out the window and see tiny snowflakes fluttering around outside, I know it’s really winter. And that feeling that accompanies those snowflakes is usually a mixed one: a little bit of excitement because I think snow is really beautiful, and quite a bit of dread because I absolutely hate cold weather, and I especially cannot stand navigating the snow, ice, and dangerous black ice on the streets and sidewalks of New York. I will also add that snow is especially beautiful when you are nice and warm inside a cozy, heated apartment, with a nice hot drink in hand. And there, you can admire it from the inside out, and the world feels like your own snow globe.

I started noticing the tiny flurries this past weekend. And this afternoon, I noticed them, as well, a bit more furious than this weekend with more intention, almost as if to say, “yep, autumn is gone, and winter is here. deal with the snow!” It’s a different feeling this year, though, with Pookie Bear in my womb, nice and cozy, squirming around in her limited space in the uterus, just waiting to come out into the world. My baby will be a winter baby in the northern hemisphere and a summer baby in the southern hemisphere. No amount of snow or snow flurries could take away the nice warm feeling I get thinking about her pending arrival.

Registry etiquette

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In general, whenever I have been invited to a wedding or baby shower, if the couple has a registry, I will always buy a gift from the registry or give cash. This makes the lives of all of us much easier: we know that the couple will like and appreciate the gift because, well, they themselves chose it. And there’s no guesswork needed, nor is there pressure in terms of how creative you can get with the gift. I recently finished reading Adam Grant’s book Give and Take, and in it, he succinctly says that if you are a giver (in other words, a good human :D), you will buy a gift off a registry or give cash. What you will not do is try to go off registry and buy something else… because in that case, you are thinking about yourself and your own orientation and what you think would be best for them. And in sum, a gift is supposed to be about the recipient, NOT the giver.

So it was weird when I received a long-winded email from my uncle when he wanted to explain that he didn’t get us something off our baby registry and decided to go with something else. While I am always appreciative of gifts and do not expect gifts (I mean, I’m not forcing anyone to get us a gift), this was just odd. He said that given the ongoing pandemic, he wanted to get us something fitting, which ended up being… an automated soap dispenser with soap refill. “This way, both parents and baby will keep safe,” he explained.

A soap dispenser isn’t baby or mama related directly, and his rationale for going with this just seemed so strange and out there. In addition, we already have an automated soap dispenser, so why does he think this is such a superior gift compared to any of the items I had added to our registry? The most absurd part is that he purposely didn’t even check off the “this is a gift” box on Amazon and just had it sent without a tracking or order number (he admitted this when I told him the item came already open/seemingly used), and without the ability to return or exchange it. My uncle has sent me many gifts from Amazon previously over the years, and he had always checked this box off before. So in my head, I wondered if he did this purposely and/or even facetiously.

Regardless, we were able to return it and get Amazon credit for it, but in the back of my mind, I wonder what real rationale he had when he did this and if he was trying to send some weird message to us in doing so.

Antenatal hand expression of colostrum – first time failure

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I finally ordered the little syringes that Chris’s cousin’s wife told me about to attempt to capture hand expressed colostrum before Pookie Bear arrives. So today, I sterilized the little syringes and attempted to express colostrum. I took a warm shower and thus heated my breasts, massaged them, and then tried to do the “C” shape around them to express colostrum… and well, nothing happened. It was a failure. Later in the evening, I tried again, this time warming my breasts up with a hot hand towel and massaging them, and still nothing. I was dismayed, but there’s no way I’m going to stop trying. I really want this to work. While I’ve read that even if you cannot do this successfully before the baby comes that this has zero bearing on whether you will be successful at breastfeeding, I still am determined to do this. I just need to focus on getting the technique right and continuing to try, as I’ve read that many other women struggled for the first several days of attempting a few times a day, and then miraculously as though out of nowhere, a few drops actually came out. And a few drops are all you really need each expressing session. The breast stimulation, if nothing else, is still supposed to help with future milk production, and so I’m hoping all this effort will be worth it.

Prenatal massage indulgence #2

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I’m in week 38 of pregnancy, and I’m indulging in what will likely be my last prenatal massage before the baby comes. All my friends and Chris have thought I’ve been cheap about indulging in experiences like this, but hey, at least I booked a second massage given my piriformis muscle has been giving me issues in the last couple of weeks. It has not been as debilitating as the sciatica, but it’s definitely slowed me down and made simple things like squatting down to pick up items or even sitting down and getting out of a chair momentarily painful.

Yesterday, I went to get another prenatal massage with the same masseuse I saw in October, and I told her about my piriformis muscle pains in my butt. While she did spend more time on it for me, she said that unfortunately, the only “solution” for this was the baby coming out. As my hips continue to widen in preparation for labor and birth, this would cause more stress on my lower back and butt muscles and nerves, which is inevitably what is causing the pains in my butt. She said she was pretty sure the pain was manifesting itself in my piriformis, but it’s likely that the piriformis wasn’t just it when it came to the nerve compression; it was just my right butt cheek entirely.

It’s okay, though. All these little nuisances are worth it as long as my little Pookie Bear comes out healthy and happy.