From what I’ve seen in the mommy blogging world, these kinds of posts typically start out with stats. This reminds me of something I read once about infancy being the only time when it’s considered polite to ask how much a person weighs or remark on how much hair he has. I’m not sure if anyone ever thought to ask the babies if they think it’s polite, but for the sake of perceived good manners, I’ll go with it.

At seven months old, the Burt Squirt weighs upwards of 20 pounds and is 27ish inches long. Forgive my imprecision, but he doesn’t have a checkup this month and our scale needs new batteries. I assume he’s heavier and longer than he was at six months, as he’s filling out his 6-9 month PJs nicely. Of course, it’s highly possible I shrank them in the dryer…I prefer growth spurt, especially considering how many times I nursed the kid yesterday.

Yes, at seven months old, the Burt Squirt is still nursing pretty much exclusively and shows no signs of giving up any of his six or seven daily feedings. Which isn’t great for the amount of sleep I’m getting, but I’m just glad he hasn’t cut any teeth yet–though Niagara Falls flowing forth from his mouth and constant chewing everything lead me to believe they’re on their way. We’ve spent the past month introducing baby food, but, “Liam, Mashed Sweet Potatoes; Mashed Sweet Potatoes, Liam,” is about the extent of our progress. There were two days in there where he voluntarily opened his mouth and ate apples, but then it was time to move on to other things and there hasn’t been a repeat performance, despite my singing Bananaphone and Peaches in the attempt to make him laugh and open his mouth. He grins–with his lips pressed firmly together. The Burt Squirt is nobody’s fool.

He’s actually sparing with his laughter in general, which obviously means he has a has a highly cultivated and discerning sense of humor, cracking up only at such comic gems as “poopies” said in a silly voice.

Just because the Burt Squirt doesn’t laugh a lot doesn’t mean he’s not a happy baby. Happy is his default setting, and he smiles and jabbers “dada” and “baba” all day to express it. Especially if he’s outside, or on the go. This is not a child who likes to sit around the house all day–a surprising trait in the offspring of two troglodytes. Lucky for him, he’ll be celebrating his seven month birthday with lunch at Babe‘s and coffee at Mozart Bakery.

Less surprising is his clear desire for independence. If the Burt Squirt’s not happy, it’s generally because he’s not where he wants to be and can’t get there on his own. He’d like nothing better than for me to hold his hands and help him walk around the house all day long. He gets less frustrated now that he’s finally learned to roll from back to front–a motor skill his pediatrician assured us is often delayed in kids with more weight to lug around. Though I think the delay was due less to physical inability as lack of interest in doing so, because one day he just suddenly did it, multiple times in a row, with great ease, and it was obvious he’d been holding out on us. There was a look on his face of, “Oh, I can get across a room if I do that. Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

He’ll be asking himself the same question when he figures out how to crawl, which is sure to happen any day now. He’s quite adept at lunging from a sitting position onto his hands and knees. What he needs is a good set of guns like I have–from carrying the 20 pound Burt Squirt around.

As we’ve come full-circle back to weight, it seems this Burt Squirt update has come to a close. It’s cliché, but I can hardly believe that more than half of his first year is already over and gone. How could seven months have slipped past since I first nuzzled his cheek in the operating room? And how could he be so big when a year ago today he was just a little 17 week-old bump in my tummy?

That time flies like it does makes me glad for those few hours each day when I don’t get any housework done because I”m stuck in my nursing chair snuggling with my little squirt who refuses to nap anywhere but in my lap.

Because that’s the only time I get to be a mommy blogger.

For those of you who don’t follow me on Facebook:  I am too heavy to sit in my husband’s lap.

This would be grounds for utter devastation, were it not for the fact that I am 38 1/2 weeks pregnant with a baby that will probably make headlines and retaining enough water to fill Lake Superior.   It’s easy to be amused about outweighing your husband (yes, I really do) when you know that in a few days, you’ll be well on your way back to the status quo.  (Oh yeah; in my failure to update this blog regularly, I might have neglected to mention that we’re going to induce labor next Monday, a week ahead of my due date.  Because of the Lake Superior and 19-pound baby issues.)

My poor husband must be given credit where credit is due; he tried to let me sit on his lap.

He was browsing the interwebs for new computer desks (for his upcoming new work-from-home job, which I also really need to post about!) and I wanted to look with him but didn’t want to walk the whole six feet over to my desk to drag my chair over, so I asked if I could sit in his lap, as I often do when we want to look at stuff together.  The dear man didn’t even cast a wary eye over my gargantuan belly before un-crossing his legs to accommodate me in his lap.

So, certainly he can’t be blamed for letting out a quiet, “Uffda!” when I sat on him. Or even for adding, “You are kind of heavy,” because he was amused, not critical; my vanity wasn’t the least bit wounded, though I feared his lap was. I asked if I should get up and get my chair.

“No,” he sort of gritted out, shaking his head with determination — like a weight-lifter asked by his spotter if he needs a hand with his bench press. “You’re fine.”

I was fine for about three minutes longer.

Really, it’s a testament to what a sweet man he is that he can tell his wife she’s squashing him (and that he’s looking forward to the return of the status quo, too) without making her cry. (Of course, considering I have only had one melt-down during my entire pregnancy, I’m starting to think that instead of becoming hormonally unhinged, I have developed the emotional control of a Vulcan.  Eat your heart out, Mr. Spock.  I only hope this continues through those harrowing weeks of learning to live with a newborn.)

I’ve always liked my husband a lot.  Duh.  That’s why I married him.  But pregnancy has made me like him even more.

Probably I shouldn’t have said that.  Undoubtedly, he’ll remind me of these words at some crucial juncture Monday when I’m at the brink of screaming at him never to touch me again.

So, before Walmart, I ran in Kroger for the express purpose of buying Ragu 7 Herb Tomato pasta sauce. Two jars of it.

I came out with six jars.

Plus six more in other varieties.

And nine boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch…

…five boxes of Lucky Charms…

…four boxes of Barilla pasta…

…three 8-roll packs of Bounty paper towels…

…and two packages of Oscar Mayer hot dogs.

It’s like The Very Hungry Caterpillar Goes Grocery Shopping.

I couldn’t help myself! They were all items I buy regularly, and they were on sale cheaper than Walmart ever has them, and in stock, and–

Well, you know you may have gone a little beyond taking advantage of a good sale when the cashier remarks, “Not planning on going out for a while?”

I gave a sheepish laugh and indicated my baby belly. I should have told her I was preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse and asked if she was ready (because nothing says preparedness for zombie attack like weenies, cereal, pasta sauce, and paper towels). But I never think of these things in the moment. Even when I’m not pregnant.

Sunday night, Mr. Burt and I went to dinner at Sweet Tomatoes (which is, by the way, a fantastic salad bar/buffet that caters to a younger, more health-conscious crowd than Golden Corral or Sirloin Stockade) because I was too tired to cook after a long previous day of shopping and decorating, a largely sleepless night, and a baby shower that afternoon.  As we were carrying our trays of salad to a table, one of the guys busing tables interrupted an animated conversation he was having with a table of ladies to shout to me, “Hey!  How many months are you?  Eight?”

“Just about,” I replied.

He threw his hands up in the air like he’d just scored a touchdown.  “I knew it!”

“You’re having a boy,” chimed in one of the women, pointing at my belly.  “I can tell from how you’re carrying.”

“Oh yeah,” agreed the busboy.  “You’re totally having a boy.”

“It is a little boy,” I said.

Another victory dance.  I wondered how excited this guy would get if his own wife told him he was having a boy.  “Is he going to be a junior?” he asked Mr. Burt.

“Nah,” Mr. Burt answered.  “He’s my little dude, but we’re not naming him after me.”

The busboy’s jaw dropped.  “You have to name him after you!  Carry on the family name — all the kings did.  You know, like Henry VIII.”

Apparently the busboy missed the part where Henry VIII kept divorcing and beheading his wives because they weren’t having boys… (Though, to be fair, Henry VIII’s illegitimate son was a junior.)

“You should name him Kingston!” suggested the woman subscribing to the old wives’ tale that carrying low means a boy.

“As in, the capital of Jamaica?” I whispered to Mr. Burt as we left the busboy and the customer to continue their discussion about what to name baby boys.  Who knows?  Maybe a romance blossomed that night, and nine months from now the busboy will be the proud papa of Busboy, Jr.

Thankfully, the nurse who took my blood pressure yesterday at my OB appointment thinks Liam Alexander is a great name.  We concur.

You’d think that such a life-altering experience as pregnancy would be a subject a writer would eat up, wouldn’t you?  Yet this writer has made it six months into her first pregnancy without really blogging about it.

Several things can account for this, I think.  During the first part of my pregnancy (17 weeks, to be precise), I was too sick and tired to blog.  These days I’m feeling better physically, but I most often don’t feel I have the mental capacity or creativity to write; I’m preoccupied (gee, I can’t imagine with what), and I believe that my body is so busy making a tiny person that there’s not much left for making stories of words.

It doesn’t account for the slowdown in my novel work, but I think the biggest detriment to my blogging is Facebook.  When you can share any interesting news or amusing tidbits in one line, or upload a photo album to share with all your friends, why go to all the trouble of writing blog posts?  (Which is an entire blog topic in itself…)  But the writer in me resists this laziness – the less I write, the less I’ll be able to write.  And the sentimental part of me knows I’ll regret not having written anything but Facebook status updates about my pregnancy.

Though maybe there’s something to not chronicling pregnancy:  if I don’t write about my experiences, I won’t remember them as clearly, and will be more likely to consider a second pregnancy… Because I’m convinced there must be some sort of amnesia that sets in after birth, or women would never volunteer to do this more than once!  (I don’t know what to make of all these women who claim to love being pregnant…)

We found out I was pregnant on the July 4, 2009.  (So Liam won’t be born on the 4th of July, but maybe in a metaphorical sense, the idea of him was.  And maybe statements like that are why I should keep on not writing…)  It was our second month of trying, and I was a few days late, but I’d been late the previous month and gotten my hopes up – and been disappointed by negative pregnancy tests – so I didn’t particularly want to test again and see another “Not Pregnant.”  Jeff insisted, though, because we were going out with friends for the 4th of July and there would be wine.  Also, I’d been feeling nauseous after meals for the past few days, and he put more stock in that than I did.  (All my life I’ve suffered from a nervous tummy, and I wouldn’t put it past myself to imagine morning sickness.)  So I took a pregnancy test.

It was about 6:30 in the morning, and we were at my parents’ house.  I went to the bathroom, then brought the pregnancy test back in the bedroom, set it on the night stand, and lay back down, determined to be comfortable in bed and not think about the results for the next two minutes.  When enough time had passed, I didn’t want to look, so Jeff got up and red the test.

“You’re pregnant!” he announced.

My first thought was that he was kidding, and I said so.  Then it occurred to me that would be a really mean joke, and Jeff would never make a joke like that.  At which point I bolted upright in bed and looked at the test for myself.  Yes, I was pregnant.

We lay in bed together, savoring the moment of our discovery.  I think we giggled a lot, and kept saying, “We made a baby!”  It wasn’t too long before we couldn’t take it any longer, and had to get up and tell my family, and call Jeff’s family to tell them the exciting news.

The sickness, which would last until my 17th week of pregnancy (I was five weeks pregnant when we tested), began the very next day.  I’d cooked mostaccioli for dinner and made it through the meal without incident.  It was later that evening, when I opened the fridge and got a whiff of the cold leftovers, that I lost it, and it seemed like I barely stopped for the next twelve weeks.  I tried every remedy I heard of, and even had prescription nausea meds, but nothing seemed to work for me.  I tried to keep in mind what women who’d been there, done that kept saying:  that the sickness was a good sign, meant my pregnancy was progressing normally, and my baby was healthy.

But the following Sunday, a week to the day since we’d announced my pregnancy, I began to bleed.  Since I hadn’t yet seen my OB-GYN (my first appointment was scheduled for two days later), I had to go to the ER.  The less I can remember about that night, the better – though I was, remarkably, calm, because I did know that about a quarter of all first pregnancies end in miscarriage – but I don’t think I’ll ever forget what a long night that was, lying there for hours, being pumped full of fluids, waiting, and finally hearing the words “threatened miscarriage.”  I was sent home with the order of two days’ complete bed rest, but I didn’t sleep much that night for the smell of hospital clinging to me.

Thankfully, after that scare, I had no more of the same.  Four weeks later, we heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time.  Jeff was at the appointment with me, and neither of us expected how amazing it would be to hear that “whoosh whoosh whoosh” sound.  Dr. Franken didn’t even have to hunt for the right location to pick up the heartbeat. She touched the microphone to my tummy and immediately we heard our baby.  “There he is,” I said, and Dr. Franken remarked on my use of the male pronoun.  I hoped we’d have a boy first, because Jeff’s parents already have two granddaughters and I thought it would be doubly fun to have the first grandson in the family.

A few weeks after that, we had our first ultrasound, and learned we were, indeed, having a little boy.  I was right!  (Though Jeff refuses to believe I had any kind of intuition about the sex of our baby, since there was a 50/50 chance of being right.)

We named him Liam Alexander, just because we like the name, but I think the meaning is apt:  “strong-willed warrior.”  (Though we could be asking for it with that one…)  As with his heartbeat, we were amazed to put a face to the little creature responsible for making me throw up every morning.  He was still very much developing, but his face was so complete.  I think Alyssa put it best:  “He has a NOSE. On his FACE. Which you can SEE. BABY.”

Many couples, I think, rush out and start buying baby clothes when they find the gender.  We were not above shopping for Liam – but his wardrobe, so far, isn’t entirely practical.  We’ve acquired a few things from a friend who sent me some baby clothes her son never wore, but mainly Liam has Halloween onesies and…

…a dragon costume.

We actually were a little hesitant to start shopping for lots of stuff for Liam.  Halloween is gender-neutral (well, maybe not the dragon costume…) but as the ultrasound technician was only 85% sure he was a Liam, we waited till our 19 week ultrasound confirmed his maleness.

People criticized me for posting the picture of his teenie weenie peenie on Facebook, so I’ll refrain from embarrassing my son by instead posting the picture in which he is sucking his thumb.  That is my favorite picture of Liam to date, the one that makes me melt into a puddle of mush.  There’s something so comforting in knowing that my baby boy is nestled snugly inside me, contentedly sucking his thumb.  And it’s just such a baby thing to do.

In the weeks since the ultrasound, Liam has gotten up to even more baby things.  We’re feeling him all the time now.  I first felt a little succession of taps when we were at a Ben Folds concert at the end of September, but now he’s progressed to kicking and punching and flipping and rolling and head-butting.  He is one active little guy – and Jeff’s mom says that’s just how Jeff was in utero, so we’re expecting a little bundle of energy when he’s born.  I love feeling Liam move – every time it happens, I can’t help but stop whatever it is I’m doing and put a hand to my belly.  Or not put a hand to my belly, because I like to watch him move, too – even though there’s something slightly freaky and sci-fi-ish about that.  But as much as I love feeling and watching Liam, I think what I love best is how Jeff reacts to his movements.  The first time he felt a kick was the most joyful I’ve ever seen him.  (And considering my husband is pretty much always happy, that’s saying a lot.)  Of course, that joy was contagious.

As much as, on the whole, I’ve not enjoyed being pregnant – the sickness and tiredness really were horrible, and even now I’m frustrated by my inability to concentrate and my loss of motivation and by the changes in my body that make showering and dressing a big chore – I have loved what pregnancy has done for our marriage.  I was afraid I’d be hormonal and unpleasant to be around, but I think it’s actually mellowed me a lot, made me more patient, more eager to please and be pleasant and kind.  I find myself wanting to spend more time with Jeff – not that we didn’t spend time together before, but I find myself taking more of an interest in his interests and just wanting to be with him.  Probably on some subconscious level I’m aware that soon we won’t have each other’s undivided attention and I’m making the most of every moment we have while it’s still just the two of us.  I’m also more aware of what a wonderful husband he is.  Throughout my days of sickness and bed rest, he was so patient with me, taking care of me and helping out more around the house.  He never gets annoyed (or never shows his annoyance) when I’m tired or sore or complaining.  He’s never afraid of what might happen or what’s to come, and that eases all my anxieties about giving birth and becoming a mom.  We’ve taken a lot in stride the past six months, and we’ll continue to do so in the months to come.  So I’m very grateful to pregnancy for preparing me (us) for the future, and strengthening our relationship through this shared experience.

Moving on from that gush of sentimentality, now that Liam is 100% confirmed male, we’ve begun to prepare our home for him in earnest.  We actually found a high chair on a curb, which we picked up and cleaned up and have restored to like new.  Craig’s List provided a stroller/carrier/carseat and a crib and changing table – and the bedding for Liam’s jungle-themed nursery.

I will have everyone know that Jeff is the one of us responsible for carrying our the jungle theme to the extreme.  We went to IKEA one afternoon, and my normally frugal husband insisted we get Liam a stuffed hippo, elephant, crocodile, and shark (you know – a land shark), along with a sunshine light fixture and that nifty leaf canopy.  Ever the interior decorator, I of course did not argue.  We’re going to paint the walls a lovely shade of green and do leaf murals.  After we’ve dealt with a little leak problem that’s cropped up…

And…that’s my pregnancy to date.  Except for a picture of the pregnant lady herself:

There I am, at 23 weeks.  I am amazed at my hugeness, and slightly alarmed to know that I’ve got four months to go and will get huger still… I shall endeavor to blog about that experience.  Though if there’s anything I’ve learned from this post, it’s that words are really inadequate to describe what it’s like to bring a child into the world.

Yesterday afternoon Mr. Burt and I went to Lowe’s, and while we were hemming and hawing over which winterizer to get for our lawn, an elderly man whom I’d just watched have a very confused conversation in broken English with one of the employees about garden plants versus sunroom plants, approached me and asked, “You have shot?”

Not sure I’d heard him right, or, if I had, what exactly he was asking me, I said, “Pardon me?”

“Shot,” he repeated, and gestured with his not-a-garden-plant to my shoulder.  “In shoulder.  Shot for you and baby.”

“Oh!” I said, realizing he must mean a flu vaccine.  “Yes, I just had one last week.”

“Good,” he said with a nod and a grin, and then walked away.

But a moment later, he came back.  “I not get shot so you and baby have one.”

Now, it’s very sweet (not to mention very random and very funny) that this guy wanted to do right by all the pregnant ladies out there this flu season (I wonder if he’s stopping all the pregnant women he sees to share this with them?) I’m pretty sure the FDA or whoever recommended that the first vaccinations go to pregnant women and the elderly!  I hope this man, whoever he is, makes it through flu season okay!  And that his not-a-garden-plant lives.