To cut or not to cut

One of the many things you have to think about if you are possibly having a boy child is whether or not to circumcise the kid. If you're Jewish and even semi-observant, this is usually a no-brainer. In fact, it was a no-brainer for most people until a few years ago, when people started to question whether it's medically necessary. And of course, in many parts of the world, it's never been done routinely.

Of course my husband and I disagree on this. I don't really want to do it, and he really does. I am trying to understand his reasons, and I know in some ways I can't simply because I'm not a dude. Basically, he is afraid it will "cramp his style" with the ladies (I have tried to assure him it won't), and he's afraid the kid won't look like every other kid and will get made fun of in the locker room. Considering that the kid will be growing up in Brooklyn, where lots of new-age hippie-style parents are refusing to circumcise, I actually think he will look different from everyone else if he IS circumcised.

Anyway, I really am trying very hard to take all these concerns on board and take them seriously. It's as much my husband's decision as it is mine. But I can't help it. I hate the idea of someone cutting up my tiny little baby's penis! I hate it I hate it I hate it. And yeah, I understand that it's a pain in the ass to wash an uncircumcised penis several times a day. But I would seriously rather wash that weird little dick-sweater six times a day than have some doctor cut it off. I just can't bear to think about that.

There is the disease factor to consider. Some studies have shown that having a circumcised penis can significantly reduce a man's risk of getting HIV or other sexually-transmitted diseases. Of course I hope our son (if it is a son) will be smart enough to use a condom, but you can't really plan on that.

Anyway, yeah. We need to work this one out. Which will be fun. 

Baby names

So my husband and I are in complete agreement on what we'll name the baby if it's a boy and nowhere near agreement on what we'll name it if it's a girl. (Which means we're having a girl, of course.)

Out of curiosity, and looking for some inspiration, I made the mistake of looking up a baby names website. I kind of knew the names would largely be horrible, but I wasn't really prepared for how horrible. The people behind this website apparently think it's acceptable to name your child any of the following: Amari. Celyn. Genoveva. Evaki. Evensong. (Evensong!!!!) Fuschia. Bracken. (The fuck?!?!) Ginerva (which sounds to me like a vitamin supplement for old people). Hop. Kiley. Lochellen (a female monster in Scotland?) Randilyn (please, don't). Sequence (this is not a name!!!) Yank (umm...just put the stripper pole in the nursery already because a girl named Yank is destined for a career in pornography). Yoad (a girl named Yoad is destined for a lifetime of loneliness. Also--I wonder if they meant Yoda and mispelled it. Because while either name seems ludicrous for a girl, I feel that I've already demonstrated how little taste these supposed baby namers have). Bridge. (Motherfucking BRIDGE. Again, not a name!)

No thanks, babynames.com.

I find that Facebook is also an unintentional treasure trove of terrible names. That's how I found out that some chick who knows some chick I went to high school with 20 years ago named her daughter Londyn. Londyn--with a y. 

Back to the drawing board, obviously. 

Orgasmic Birth...and other complete tripe

So I'm a little over halfway through my Hypnobirthing class.

I feel like about 60% of it is really helpful and 40% of it is just hippie dippie propaganda, as I had predicted. Helpful: the breathing exercises and the relaxation tapes. Yes, the tapes are dorky, but they work! I fall asleep almost every time I listen to the main one. I do feel that, with practice, I am teaching myself how to relax, which is really helpful.

But the propaganda part is pretty annoying. Like, one of our assignments was to watch a film called "Orgasmic Birth." Yes, you read that right.

I did not get past the opening credits. After seeing exactly one minute of the film, my husband said, "This movie should be called 'Ugly Hippie Chicks Ejecting Babies While Coming.'" Which is pretty much exactly what happened during the opening credits. It was like the world's worst porn movie.

Also--birth as an orgasmic experience? I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. We came up with some possible sequel ideas: Orgasmic Tax Return Preparation, Orgasmic Root Canals, Orgasmic Going to your Job on Monday.

Next I'm supposed to watch "The Business of Being Born," a.k.a. the Ricki Lake water birthing documentary. I'm told that its alternate title should have been "If You Have Your Baby in a Hospital You Will Die." We'll see if I can get through more of that movie than the other one. 

Sandy

Well, that was a fucking weird week.

I was hardly affected at all. Though I live very close to an evacuation zone (you can see Wall Street from my house! Meaning I live very close to the East River in Brooklyn), it wasn't close enough. Thank God. We never lost power; we only lost Internet for a few hours on Monday.

But it was still weird. My office is in downtown Manhattan, so it was closed for the whole week, and I had no access to e-mail. Our website still worked, so I updated from home, in the comfort of my jammies, like so many media people that week. (Someone wrote on Twitter on Tuesday morning, "90% of the news you'll read today was written by someone in pajamas who was drinking before noon.") I did not even bother trying to leave my neighborhood, since so many people who had to go into  Manhattan for work (including my husband) said it was a shit show.

I lived in NYC through the massive floods of '99 (which crippled the subway for an entire day and which, up until last week, had stood out as a crazy day in my mind) and of course Sept. 11. Never have I seen the place just grind to a halt--and for almost a week! Holy shit people, that was unprecedented. And so very, very weird.

It was strange to see half of Manhattan with no lights. It was weird to see huge lines at the gas station across the street (and listen to people yelling at each other as tempers flared, even more than normal for New York). And it was awful to watch the scenes of devastation all over the city, and guilt-inducing to do so from the comfort of my warm, dry, electrified living room.

I couldn't really help out with cleanup, being all pregnant and wanting to avoid toxic chemicals. So I sent a few shekels to various charities and made a couple huge vats of baked ziti to send to a shelter. I feel like I didn't do enough, but at the same time I didn't really know what else to do. I kept thinking of that Onion article from Sept. 11 that said something like, "Ohio Woman, Not Knowing What Else To Do, Bakes American Flag Cake." Other than that, I mostly tried to do my part by staying out of the way as much as possible--not adding to the scrum of commuters trying to go places. I didn't have to be anywhere, so I didn't try. I rescheduled various appointments, didn't attempt to go grocery shopping until several days later and just generally kept a low profile.

Oh, and I pigged out like a little piggy. I baked five dozen chocolate chip cookies and ate 90% of them. Yeah, I have back fat now. My doctor is gonna yell at me tomorrow when I break the scale.

I can't take more of this election coverage, so I'm going to bed. Night y'all. 

Baby prep and other stuff

So I'm starting to feel slightly more prepared than I did in my last post. We bought a really good stroller from a listserv of local moms in our neighborhood; between that and the bassinet, baby bathtub and high chair that various girlfriends have given me, I no longer fear I will have to put my baby in a shoe box.

I'm also in the process of setting up a registry, after getting numerous inquiries about when I was going to do this. I've gotten lots of good advice from girlfriends on what to pick; a couple have said you should just register for everything the Consumer Reports bay products guide tells you that you will need.

So I'm doing that. Except I do feel a little weird about putting a digital rectal thermometer on a gift registry. I know we'll need it, but is it just me or does that seem a little weird?

Anyway, one major area we are not prepared for is who will look after said baby when I go back to work. I'm taking 12 weeks, and even if I decide that I love being a mom so much that I don't want to go back, that is not even remotely an option. We need both of our incomes. We're both journalists, so it's not like either one of us has a large enough income to support a family of three.

I had been resolutely in favor of daycare--I don't want to leave our kid with a nanny, for a host of reasons--but it turns out that there are no daycares in the neighborhood we're moving to that will take infants. My objection to hiring a nanny had to do with cost, but also because I don't like the idea of leaving my child with just one person, especially an undocumented worker who is not licensed or anything like that. Then, of course, there was the news this week about this happening. That horrifically tragic and terrifying incident has prompted lots of hand-wringing on parent listservs, some of which is just disgusting. The fact that ANYONE could blame the parents in this scenario makes my blood boil. And it's so regressive to suggest thatit's somehow the mother's fault because she wasn't home. If you honestly think that and you're reading this right now, fuck right off this page and never come back.

I really don't know how anyone could have prevented this. They vetted her, they knew her really well, they went to visit her family in the D.R., for fuck's sake. Also, everyone needs to outsource childcare sometimes. Even the most slavishly devoted stay-at-home moms have to go to the doctor every once in awhile.

So yeah, it's scary, is the moral of the story. That is really the only lesson anyone can learn from this.

Hippie-birthing

So this baby business is starting to feel real. For one thing, it’s moving around all the time—which, by the way, is awesome. This is the best part of being pregnant, by far. (There isn’t much else to recommend it, frankly.) I call it Sir Moves A Lot, even though I don’t know the gender for sure—I just really feel like it’s a boy.

Anyway, in preparation for all this realness, I signed up for a Hypnobirthing class. Please believe that I am in no way of the mindset that I do not want any kind of drug-induced pain relief during labor; I just want to manage on my own as long as possible, because sometimes if you get an epidural too early it can lead to unnecessary medical intervention and even a c-section, which I want to avoid like the plague.

So the Hypnobirthing technique is supposed to help you deal with the pain, among other things. (The goal is to do it unmedicated, but again, I’m not even going to pretend like I want that.) That said, the very phrase “Hypnobirthing” makes me feel so hippie-dippy; I just picture Edina in AbFab when she’s going through one of her faux-flower child phases. “Hypnobirthing, dahling, hyp-no-bir-thing!”

Anyway, I just took my first class last week, and my homework was to start listening to the CD that comes with the course materials. It’s really just this chick with a soft voice and a lilting British accent saying things like, “you are feeling very caaaaaaaaaalm, and relaaaaaaaxed, all throughout your body,” over the sounds of new age-y music. As a professional cynic, I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, and yeah, I really can’t relax, ever. I don’t think I unclenched my butt the whole time I was listening to the CD because all I could think about was my work deadline and how much I had to do the next day. Supposedly this stuff starts burrowing into your subconscious with repeated listens, enabling you to make yourself relax on command. We’ll see.

As much as this goes against pretty much everything I believe, however, I want to stick with it. In the first class, we watched videos of women giving birth under self hypnosis. Those bitches were CALM. They didn’t even make a sound when their babies were coming out. So I’m gonna give it a whirl.

Today I totally had a breakdown. There have been a lot of changes at my job lately, and my workload has just officially gotten insane, to the point where I really don't think I can handle it all, and on top of that we just signed a contract on an apartment, and so we're starting the insane mortgage and coop board application process. Plus, there is a ton of baby shit we have to do that I haven't even thought about--figuring out what we need, registering for stuff, sorting out the daycare situation, taking childbirth prep classes, etc.--and I really haven't had time to deal with any of it because of my job.

So today, when I logged in (on Sunday) to do about an hour of work, then realized it was actually going to be more like three hours of work, I just lost it. I totally broke down sobbing like Nancy Kerrigan (to paraphrase Eric Cartman).

My husband forced me to step away from the laptop and take a ten-minute break, then rubbed my back while I blubbered about how stressed out I am. I do love that man. (But I'm never going to call him "DH." Apparently this is an acronym women use on message boards, as I discovered during my brief and ill-fated foray into pregnancy message boards. I guess it stands for "dear husband." Barf.)

This week is going to be insanely busy, and includes the dreaded glucose tolerance test. So there's something to look forward to.

 Anyway. Yeah. Shit is stressful, and my hormones are not helping. But I made a big comfort food dinner tonight to make myself feel better. Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy. It was goddamned delicious, if I do say so myself. And here's hoping tomorrow will be better.