Pregnancy by week

Last night was the last night of our “Home and Birth Center Child Education Series” with the mother of all doulas in this area, Penny Simkin.  I remember when I was a kid I was convinced that all parents needed to take a class in order to become parents and I asked my parents what classes they had taken and they (shockingly!) told me that parents didn’t  need to take a class.  I did end up finding this purple book about parenting on the bookshelf though, and I greedily (and a little guiltily) looked through it for any clues on their parenting strategies.  I don’t remember much about it, other than that it was a purple book.  And the animal book was red and the plant book was green.  It was a great book series and I’m sure many of its images and words are ingrained in my brain.  I saw it as a source of all true knowledge.  That is, until the World Book Encyclopedia came around a few years later and my obsession moved over to those.

Anyway, the birth class we took, along with Penny’s two awesome books “Parenting, Childbirth, and the Newborn” and “The Birth Partner” sort of live up to my expectation that parents should study to become the best possible parents that they can be.  The classes were highly informative while also being very enjoyable, and we ended up making some friends as well.  I gotta say that there’s a huge benefit to being around people who are having babies around the same time as us.  There’s so much to relate about, ideas to toss around… and as much as I like to say that I can learn anything worth learning from a book, I don’t think anything could’ve replaced the experience of this birth class in preparing us to become somewhat competent for the first few days, weeks, and months of little Axelrod’s life.

While I’ll probably see some of the people in the class between now and then, we’re also going to be having a reunion in a couple months where we all get to meet each others’ babies.  It’s going to be surreal and awesome.  This is all such a crazy and life-changing experience.  It’s all sort of tripping me out today.

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I think this blog has been properly named, even though at the time it was intended to be sort of humorously self-deprecatory.  I mean, we started interviewing doctors and buying all the books right away, and a home birth was far from our thoughts, but here we are.

And today we started looking into the whole world of what they call “elimination communication,” which we’ve run into a few times before but as I joked in our birthing class last week, we thought it might be too extreme for us.  But then we looked into it a bit more, read a bit from about it from another great new parent who’s trying it out, and it’s starting to seem a little more reasonable on this slippery slope into complete hippydom.  It is, in the extreme, an attempt to be diaper-free, and instead pay such close attention to your baby that you know when he/she needs to go and you hold him/her over a toilet.  In its less-extreme forms, you can still use a diaper, but still try to get the communication going about when he/she needs to go. Of course, in the pre-diaper world, it was the only way to be.

Once you get on this train of trying to get back to the core of what parenting is… from natural births to breast-feeding to attachment parenting to elimination communication… it just never seems to end.  There’s a luxury implied in some of these methods… who has time to pay this much attention to an infant, clearly only the rich and bored.  But these things don’t have to be polarizing philosophies.  They’re all presented (if not by the media and by strongly opinionated bloggers) as a spectrum of possibilities.  Adapt what you can, discard what proves to be impossible.  The same goes for everything else in life.  It’s not about choosing your loyalties and author/doctor heroes, but rather finding the resonant bits of methods that have been used and tested and finding out what kind of parent I want to be.

But yeah, from zero to baby.  Esther’s due date is coming right up in 29 days, and our list of things that we need to do before then is getting perilously small.  Then it’s the fast track for toddlerhood, adolescence, teen years, and adulthood for our little Axelrod.  While we run around trying to catch falling chickens and put out forest fires.  That’s my expectation, at least, I could be wrong.

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As a writer (by schooling, only), I’ve always been obsessed with names.  Writing a short story or a novel is really just a glorified reason to come up with names, and characters to go with names, and stories to go with characters.  Right?  I can spend weeks, or months, trying to think up a name for a minor character.  So, of course, when it came to coming up with a name for our baby, I was super excited for the task.

We went through thousands of names, suggesting even the most ridiculous names we could think of, just to get used to the waters.  Lampshade Spatula was one of the more unique name options.  After a while of suggesting names it became necessary to come up with a series of Rules that any chosen name must adhere to (no ex-boy- or ex-girlfriends, nothing that rhymes with Aiden, nothing in the top 100 names for the previous year, nothing that is too weird).  Then, we started to feel like you do when you’re tasting your 56 wine at a tasting… confused about what’s actually good anymore, also maybe a little drunk.  And we (or at least I) got a little burned out on names and then start wondering if maybe we were going about it all wrong.  I’m pretty certain every collaborative creative process goes through these same stages.

In the end, it comes down to a gut feeling, and probably timing.  The names suggested at the right point in the name-choosing process probably have a much better chance of being chosen than the early ones that sounded good but seemed untested.  Coming up with a super-meaningful name that satisfies all 18 Rules becomes less important than just feeling good about the name.  In the end, it’s the baby that’s meaningful, not his or her name (yes, we had to remind ourselves of this).

This all happened really early in the pregnancy for us.  Starting pretty much as soon as we found out Esther was pregnant, and going through ups and downs all through weeks 8-20 or so.  After what seemed like forever, we had some names chosen.  In reality, our little baby was still only have baked.  Before the 20-week ultrasound, we had a couple top names for both genders.  When we found out that our baby was a boy, it was settled.  The first name, at least.  And we started referring to him by this name.  It felt right.

The middle name followed soon thereafter, after a crazy middle name brainstorming session one Saturday-like morning (it could’ve been any day of the week but it feels like a Saturday in my memory).

We wanted to make sure we liked the name a lot, so we kept it a secret for a while.  That also helped avoid the awkwardness of having to hear about how the name doesn’t work for other peoples’ aesthetics… it’s intentional in a way, because if the name met everyone’s aesthetics (like, say, Oliver, does) then that’s a sign that the name is about to become quite popular, and who wants that?  Not us.

To help make it OFFICIAL, we thought of a little art project.  This is the end result:

It’s the name encased in a semi-secret code.  Since it’s probably not that easy to crack, we’re telling people in person as we can.  And, I expect, by this time next week, after the baby shower etc, it’ll be public knowledge.

We haven’t decided if he’s going to need a pseudonym for this blog as well, one that matches his parents’ pseudonyms.  Hmm… probably.

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