Liam is born

33 Wks

The big eye-catcher of the nursery – I decided – should be a mural. And not just a Winnie-the-Pooh-mural (though the bear is adorable), but something drawn by hand and New York-themed. And since I’m a sketching disaster myself (always have been – apparently the artistic gene skips a generation), I asked my friend Janine to make one for me.

Making the sketch itself took her days of doodling – painting it on my wall took about a day, with Janine en Martje painting, and me looking after Noah.

And this is the end result!

32 wks

Manifesto by the Alliance of Mothers Supporting Truthful Pregnancy Stories

Concerning women about to get pregnant

Hi there! You are planning to embark on an adventure that is probably one of the greatest ones you’ll ever experience. Congratulations! The next nine months will prepare you for that adventure. In 2010, the Alliance of Mothers Supporting Truthful Pregnancy Stories was founded, which mission is to truthfully inform women on what to expect while the Miracle of Life unfolds.

If you’re not one of those women who appreciate bluntness, stop reading this manifesto!

First the most important news, which also happens to be very good: having a baby is an amazing experience. There’s nothing like it. You’ll find that you’re able to love someone you never even met; you can talk to sheer movement, and you will worry about someone else’s well-being more than you ever worried about your own. You will be a key witness to a person coming into existence, into your existence, in every sense of the word.

While this probably is one of the best things to ever happen to you, a lot of side effects will keep you pretty busy. Contrary to custom until now, we feel you have a right to know about them. Attached is a – non-comprehensive - list of things to expect:

· You will feel sick for a period ranging from about a week to a maximum of 42 weeks. You may be forced to eat dry cereal, sit on the floor of a supermarket, and eat when your body tells you not to.

· You will feel sleepier than you ever felt before. Enjoy sleeping for the first 13 weeks; after that, you might not sleep an entire night for a long, long time.

· Your boobs will double in size. Some of you will like it; some of you won’t. It’s a double-edged sword anyway.

· Many people will tell you to watch out for stress. Their constant reminders of this are huge stress factors. What ís stress, anyway?

· You will start crying at the oddest moments for the oddest reasons. Within nano seconds after your breakdown, however, you will be able to be elated, furious or totally numb.

· Expect a bloody nose every now and then.

· You will not be able to eat the things you used to love, and crave stuff you used to hate. You will be forced to go into the supermarket to let your instincts lead you to the right foods for you at that precise moments. You will buy stuff you won’t be able to eat anymore the day after. You will get food obsessions. You will force friends to prepare you dinner.

· You will forget the simplest things. You will not be able to conduct a decent discussions, because you won’t remember your perspective.

· You will gain weight. You will not be able to fit into your own clothes and you will be forced to get a new wardrobe of maternity clothes. You will learn that the maternity industry caters only for a select group of women, thereby accomplishing what you spent your whole life to avoid: blending in with a very specific, very girly, flowery, pink-colored group.

· You will be faced with something they absurdly call ‘minor ailments’, such as restless legs, stomach acid, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and Braxton-Hicks contractions.

· In the middle of your pregnancy, people will smile at you when they see you walking on the street. Enjoy these moments. By the end of your pregnancy, they will be shocked instead.

· Your world will become smaller and smaller; the things you used to find important will start to matter less and less. This might seem frightening to you right now, but it’s actually quite a nice sensation.

· You will feel overwhelmed, not up for it at times, exhausted, panicked, and daunted.

· After all of it is over, a very smart and helpful hormone will make you forget about all of the above and make you not tell anyone else.

31 wks

31 Wks

And then, finally, D-day! I find a house full of friends who come to paint the nursery. The only thing I have to do, is get the paint and prepare lunch. J

29 - 30 wks

29 wks Holidays!

One week off and I am prepared. First, I visit family and friends up north. The train ride is very relaxing; the humming sound of the engine works as some kind of lullaby, because I have trouble staying awake. In Eindhoven I hop on a bus to Steensel, where my brother lives. I’ve been on the bus many times before and spot my exit far ahead, but I’m still dumbfounded when the bus whizzes by my stop and I realize that I forgot to push the I-want-out-button. There is only one busstop in the whole village, so I rush to tell the bus driver that I should’ve gotten off the bus. He looks at me like I’m either very stupid or very drunk, gives me a sermon for all passengers to hear, then drops me off at the edge of the village.

In The Hague I visit Sytske, who takes me to a Liberation Day concert. Some kind of loud band and we are standing right in front. The baby hears the drums and starts kicking like a maniac. I don’t know if this is approval kicking or disapproval, so I can’t make any predictions as to whether my boy will be a punk rocker or not. Personally, I found the music a bit nauseating somehow, so we headed home.

After my mini-tour of Holland it’s Home Improvement Day. I rent a polishing machine for four hours. The nursery has a wooden floor that needs a makeover. And when my brother-in-law can’t make it last minute, my mother steps in to help. My mother is a 72-year-old tough woman! The only problem is that we are both barely strong enough to carry the machine up the two flights of stairs to the room. By the time we finally reach the right floor, one out of the four hours has already passed. The ensuing two are hectic; mum in the middle of a cloud of dust, because the dustbag keeps falling off the machine, me bringing coffee upon coffee to keep her going. A couple of times the machine manages to pry itself loose from my mother’s hands and goes on a polishing spree in all the wrong places. Then we have to go through the ordeal of carrying the monster back down the stairs The result of one day of struggling: a very creatively polished floor!

My last holiday highlight is a trip to Antwerp with Maarten. We shop, we eat, we sightsee, I pee. I pee A LOT! And the thing about public toilets in Belgium, I found out, is that they charge insane amounts of money. Some toilets cost me € 0,50 to pee! By the time we head back to Maastricht I’ve sponsored Antwerp for about 5 euros in urinal expenses.

30 wks

The nursery floor quickly develops into a small disaster. The wood-dye I bought turns out to be too light, the second can too red. Either way, it looks like someone burnt the floor or something. My mom puts on a new layer every day while I’m at work and every night I get home to see a bit of improvement, but not a lot. The floor stresses me out immensely. I want to do something myself to better the situation, but apart from dragging more and more cans of dye to the house, I’m stuck.

The lady from the maternity care agency announced her upcoming visit a few weeks ago. But now, the day before she actually arrives, I’m getting nervous. Does this woman want to see my entire house? Because the nursery is far from finished. The floor is a wreck, there are boxes everywhere and I need to clean the bathroom. I have laundry lying around and didn’t pay my bills yet – they’re in a big pile on the table. I’m starting to fear some kind of reprimand by the agency. If they are supposed to take over my household for a week, I better make some changes quickly! – something like that.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The lady comes in, sits down and shows me the fabric she just bought at the market. Delfts Blauw – totally the fashion these days. Cosy small talk from the get-go. I like her immediately. She doesn’t want to see the whole house either. She just wants to tell me the general procedure of the agency, the stuff I need to get ready and she wants to know if I plan to breastfeed or not. When she leaves, I tell myself to stop worrying and to start enjoying the unexpectedness of whatever is to come. I plan to succeed in this effort by week 35…

27-28 wks

27-28 wks

27 wks S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G. for B.A.B.Y.

Sale at Prenatal! This is d-day! My sister and I head over to Heerlen and raid Ikea first, loading all kinds of baby stuff onto the cart. Is this something I normally overlook, or is it just today that a statistically weird number of pregnant women are shopping at Ikea? And is it just me, or are we all suspicious, sizing each other up?

Never having been one to happily participate in any kind of group dynamic anyway (except when I get to be the outsider who watches or leads), I am completely puzzled by the unwritten social rules of pregnant women or any parties orbiting around them. And this gets clearer to me every day. Also, I am aware that it’s me, not them, that’s making life on their planet annoying. I should return the endearing smiles, redirect childbearing questions with tell-me-your-story-questions, tear up whenever I hear my babies’ heartbeat, and keep a graph of his kicking movements throughout the day. If I only did that, we would get along perfectly fine.

Prenatal is one of Holland’s biggest stores for everything Baby. Today, they offer a 20% discount on all items, which means this is the day to stock up! Apparently, Prenatal is reluctant to get people to the store on this day, because they didn’t post the date on their website, nor their flyers, so my sister and me had to pull a bit of a 007 to find out when to be there. But upon entering the store, we had to conclude we had simply used the wrong media canals, because almost every pregnant woman in the region was present picking out strollers and Maxi Cosi’s.

But ladies and gentlemen – I am proud to say – WE GOT HIM! The stroller of my liking. Orange and sand colored. With a sand colored foot bag, because ‘when you pick orange, this might not match with every outfit he’s going to have on’. Right on. We got the stroller, and the footbag, and the maxi cosi (the cheapest one they had, which I had to pay for with a very disapproving look of the sales lady and a few moms-to-be in my near vicinity when I stammered something about how this one’s black color would fit neatly with the car’s interior…the car I’m about to sell by the way), and the few maternity wear items that didn’t look either huge or ridiculous on me.

Week 27 and I’m still short of the baby closet, but everything else is IN MY HOUSE!

Week 28 How to assemble a stroller

And then all the stuff is sitting in my house, waiting to be put together. Most things will have to wait, because the nursery has to be painted first, and that won’t happen till week 30. But a pregnant woman, they tell me, gets anxious when things aren’t moving along and this is true for me as well (though I think I already possessed this trait before I chose to put my body through Hormone Hell). So a plan was made for me and Ralf to combine purpose and pleasure in one great stroller-assembly-date. I did my utmost to put Ralf in a very easygoing mood by preparing a dinner that wasn’t burnt, overcooked, ex- nor imploded in the oven, or any other of my usual cooking features. And I miraculously succeeded in getting a dozen of chicken legs out of the oven sizzling with taste and aroma! Lucky strike, probably, but great dinner nonetheless.

With dessert, we watched the DVD that came with the manual that came with the stroller. For those who quickly glanced over the previous sentence; let me help you get the essential info out of this great piece of work. A DVD came with the stroller. And when something like this is added to an already huge manual, I get the feeling the DVD contains valid information. There is no other excuse I can give to explain why I subjected a good friend to five minutes of watching a badly-dressed woman in an otherwise empty room assemble and dismantle a baby stroller over and over again. Why would anyone want to see something like that? Let alone do something like that? 5 minutes felt like an eternity. Ralf and I stared at the screen long after the dvd was finished. The upside: labor itself seems to be a better prospect than ever putting that disc into any playing device ever again.

First sentence in the manual: do not assemble or disassemble this stroller whenever a baby is sitting in it.

Another great tip: if you add weight onto the stroller in any place other than the crib itself, the stroller will risk becoming unstable.

And this was only the first page. Ralf and I struggled through page after page of instructions, some of which suggested a very low regard for all Bugaboo-buying customers. We were not discouraged, though, determined to make happen what the dvd-lady had managed numerous times. The end result was a beautiful stroller with amazing flexibility that I get. And a deepening of a friendship that now holds a few extra secrets on stroller-assembly.

25-26 wks

25 wks – stress, panic and crying

The to-do-list is stressing me out. I’m afraid I end up having this baby without the proper preparations. Work is stressing me out as well, because no matter how much I do, nothing seems to get done. Whenever I get stressed these days, I cry. But of course not for the right reasons. I cry because I can’t get my omelet to bake the way I want it, because I look fat in that outfit, because the cat won’t come back inside.

That last example is probably the worst one. Let my cats out on the patio, because I want them to be normal wild outside cats by the time the baby arrives. Scout & Louis (my cats, as you’ve probably guessed) are very enthusiastic about this idea. They spent last weekend outside all day and slept all evening, totally exhausted. On Thursday I get home at about 7pm and decide to give them another outing-opportunity before nightfall. My mistake: I fed them first. So Scout & Louis storm out without any vital reason to come back that night. When the sun goes down – no cats. When I call for them, Scout, the nerdy, scaredy cat comes back, but Louis, the crazy-warrior-type does not. I grant him another half hour, then call him again. It’s pitch black out by now. This time Louis calls back to me, and he sounds panicky. When my eyes are adjusted to the dark, I can kind of spot him two yards over, trying to climb a tree that would get him on the wall that would get him home. But he keeps falling out of the tree, because he can’t clearly see where to jump anymore. Finally, he gives up and sits still in the yard, without even answering my calls anymore.

I panic and call a friend. This friend is one of the good guys of this planet. A very good one. He jumps on his bike straightaway to rescue my cat. Or me. He even brings me a brownie! By the time he gets here, though, Louis has quietly managed to get into the tree and hurry home. He’s drinking some water when my friend hands me the brownie.

26 wks - Baby names

Most common Dutch names for a baby boy: Jayden, Milan, Luc, Sem, Thijs, Lucas, Daan, Jesse, Tygo and Thomas.

Most common American names for a baby boy: Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua, Daniel, Alexander, Anthony, William, Christopher, Matthew.

Most common Ghanaian names for a baby boy: Abeeku, Kobena, Kwodwo, Nkrumah, Yaw, Adusa, Akwasi.

Weirdest names for a baby boy: Locadio, Milagro, Juton, Detroit, Beckham, Hardock, Tao.

Which factors to take into account when finding a good name for a baby? This is what I came up with:

· Cannot rhyme with/resemble some very bad nicknames. This might cause some very embarrassing playground moments while growing up. So no Rik, Pepijn or – and sadly – Eli.

· Has to be cute and informal while growing up, but serious enough when thirty something and trying to build a career. No Billy, but no Johannes either.

· Cannot alliterate with last name. Eliminates all names starting with ‘P’.

· I want it to be English, because of my love for the English language, but not SO English that grade school teachers in my town won’t know how to pronounce it properly, so my kid will have to correct his teachers all the time, which is annoying by itself, causing him to eventually give up and be called some kind of pseudo-English-name with a Maastricht accent. So definitely no Jayden or Ethan!

· I like two-syllable-names for boys. I loved the name ‘Noah’ for a long time. Now I love my sister’s son Noah even more.

· I want some kind of link to the past, to people that came before him, whose name he could carry and thus whose stories he will take with him. Doesn’t have to be family in particular. My father’s name is out, ‘cause Noah’s already got it.

· Second and third names are kind of cool, I think, but I’m not crazy about women’s names for boys.

24 wks

Work has been more than crazy lately. We’re opening two new locations at once, and one of them has serious opening issues! Two days before our deadline, we’re all forced to spend the entire day and evening working on the vinyl floor and assembling furniture. I try to help out as much as I can, but after working on two small cabinets my back hurts so much I have to stop. I’m put on babysitting duty for my sister’s kid who’s stranded at the work site like myself. But after a while it’s getting hard to even pick him up. I feel exhausted and no use. Working shifts like these are simply not doable anymore, I finally realise. Another lesson learned.

Like my good old friend overseas pointed out: I’m expanding in all directions at once. My diameter is increasing weekly, it seems. Reminds me of Violet Beauregard, the girl in ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory’ who ate too many blueberry-pie-gum at Willy Wonka’s. Another friend suggested I start keeping weekly measurements to see how fast I’m growing. He’s a guy, of course. As is the friend who told me to look up pregnant Heidi Klum pictures online to see how lean she stayed almost up until the end. Women approach the big-belly-complex much more tactfully: they all tell me how I’m pregnant in a beautiful way, they tell me you wouldn’t guess I’m pregnant when they see me from the back, they feign amazement when I tell them I’m almost six months. I tell you this: it ain’t hard to love the girls these days!

In the meantime, I still have way too much on my to-do-list-before-baby. Still have to buy the buggy, all the baby furniture, most things on the baby-necessities-list. Still have to paint the room, assemble all the stuff, go to the breastfeeding-information-night. Still have to visit the day care centers where I hope my baby will one day be accepted. Still have to finish the kitchen and the terrace so I won’t be in any mess once I’m in another one altogether. Oh, and announcement cards. But first I really have to stay on this couch with my book for a little while longer.

21 - 23 wks

21 wks

Enter the second half of this pregnancy. I get to go to the hospital for the ultimate ultrasound. It feels like kind of a big occasion, so I bring my mom and my sister. Mom has never seen ultrasound images before; she stares at the screen and I’m not sure she actually knows which part of the baby is being shown. But she’s obviously fascinated anyway. We get a complete overview of the baby; the brains first, then the head and the heart, the spinal cord, kidneys, and finally the legs and…

Even though I’ve somehow known I’m having a boy for weeks now, and even though I can clearly see a third – somewhat smaller – ‘leg’ down there, I’m still not confident enough to declare this baby a boy myself. What if it turns out to be a girl after all and I’ve already established the opposite? Would that be my kid’s first prenatal trauma? It seems best to wait for the expert to say it out loud.

‘Well, you’ve probably already noticed…’ the ultrasound lady says. My mom, sister and me say nothing. ‘It’s a boy!’ I smile. It’s a boy. My sister leans over and whispers: ‘you’re having a son!’. My hormones take over and the tears in my eyes make the baby’s legs and genitals all blurry. By the time I ‘m back to normal, the screen is showing Junior’s head in 3D, a little skinny babyhead, eyes closed, but hand touching chin, like he is thinking hard about something. Rodin himself couldn’t have sculptured it any better. There’s a beautiful little baby boy in there.

22 wks

The fact that I’m having a boy means that I am not having a girl. Obvious, of course, but this is something that I somehow needed to process for about a day. Last week I was having a baby, but now I am having a boy. So within a week I lost the possibility of having a girl. That means no dresses, probably no doll houses, no earring decision for the first 10 years at least. Kind of sad. Okay. Bye bye imaginary girl.

Having a boy means picking out the coolest clothes, means broken arms or wrists when playing outside, might mean cars and footballs, knights and soldiers. Slight chance of earring decision in high school. Having a boy means I no longer have to look for names, because I’ve already got one. And it means I can start buying orange kid stuff, which seemed better for a boy than for a girl. I’m having a boy!

The pregnancy books say I will be feeling the baby more and more as the weeks progress. And they are right. He kicks in the mornings and the evenings mostly, or at least those are the times when I’m the most conscious of it. It’s kind of a funny feeling, and it often makes me smile. It makes up for my belly that has exploded over the weekend, thus eliminating some of the few final options of normal-Thessa-shirts I could still wear. It also makes up for being exhausted at the end of a working day. It doesn’t make up yet for the drastic surge in frequency of toilet visits, both day AND night.

23 wks

Annoyed by men staring at your breasts a little too openly? Try the entire population staring at your belly all the time. My entrance is no longer marked by me or my attitude as I walk in, but by my pregnant state of being. It took some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. I can now be proud or amused slightly more than being irritated or embarassed. The smile that appears on most people’s faces after establishing the presence of the belly makes up for a lot.

I can’t sleep normally any more. I keep waking up, either because I have to pee, or because I feel sick or because I can’t find a right posture to lie in. I try out different kinds of pillows in different places and finally settle on some kind of pillow-fortress in which I barricade myself. This means I am able to move as little as possible, which is nice. It also meant waking up in horror in the middle of the night, because I couldn’t find the way out of bed to go to the toilet. But the end result: sleep in nice little 2.5-hr-intervals, which is better than no sleep at all. I watch tv on my iPhone in between.

The club of women-who-have-been-there are including me in their midst more and more. I keep getting showered with the most compelling birth stories. The difference between now and 10 weeks ago is that now, I find myself interested. I want to know how all of them did it, experienced it. I want to be put at ease, and with every story I find a way there. You gave birth for more than 24 hours? Well, you’re still smiling AND my baby will probably be as much in a hurry as I was. You sometimes pee a little when jumping or dancing? Well, you have three babies and I’ll only have one or two. Your wife had to stay in bed for 12 weeks? Well, I’m Superwoman, so no worries. They wouldn’t give you the epidural? Well, I know one or two people in the hospital, and I’ve already programmed their data in my Phone.

In the end, everyone tells me, it all comes down to one thing and one thing alone: the moment where you finally get to meet the one that has been living inside you for so long, will make up for every contraction, every C-section, and any pair of stitches. Also, this road is a one-way kind of deal: there’s no turning back. I wouldn’t want to anyway; I’m way too curious already.

20 wks

The advantages of being pregnant are twofold at the moment.

First advantage: I get to eat everything I want to eat whenever I want to eat it. Let me repeat that, in case you just glanced over that little piece of text: I get to eat EVERYTHING I want to eat, WHENEVER I want to eat it. I cannot remember ever having that privilige. Up to the age of 18, parents are the main obstacle between a stomach and its appetite. From 18 till 25, my financial limitations made me compromise. From then on, it was just common sense telling me that: yes, that cheesecake looked awfully good, but not good enough to risk embarassing these-favourite-jeans-suddenly-no-longer-fit-experiences.

Enter pregnancy!

Without hesitation I raid the supermarket throwing into my basket all kinds of no-go’s from yesteryear: potato chips, chocolate, ice cream. Not even a shred of guilt as I force my colleagues to prepare scrambled eggs, grilled cheese sandwiches, mini pizza’s. I even decided to introduce myself at my third visit to the local cafetaria, which can be assured of its survival for the next four months. Foodwise, I’m in heaven right now. Luckily, Junior not only craves egg-whites, cheese and junkfood, but also lots of salads, cucumber, and juices.

Heidi Klum has raised the bar for all of us, you know.

Second advantage: people are very nice to pregnant women. This is a fact of life that sunk in rather late in my case. Probably because I was too busy being annoyed, over-emotional and sick for the first 14 weeks. Then it took me about six weeks to get used to it and feel free to take advantage. But I am proud to tell you guys: I am totally there!

Our Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende – who should be busy packing in my opinion, but that should be in an entire different blog – often questions our Dutch moral values. Well, my advice to him is to be a pregant woman’s apprentice for about a week. If he were mine, he would have witnessed the many times people around me carry heavy things for me, the little gifts I get every week, the patience that I’m granted, the leftovers always going to my plate. It could be society’s way of preparing me for motherhood, where you’re automatically supposed to shift from 1st to 2nd place in your existence. If it is, it’s definitely working. I hope to spoil my kid as much as I’m being spoiled these days.

Speaking of which: I’m in the middle of a training session at work, when I feel this weird turning sensation in my belly. So there it is. Butterflies. Let the games begin.