To spare you several weeks of posts about what books I’m reading, what food I’m eating, and how grouchy I’m becoming in my 8th month of pregnancy (because that’s just how dull things would become),  I am officially on an internet vacation until August. 

I’ve threatened this before, and July feels like the right month to do it. I’ve got some editing work to do over at Our Stories, and I need to do some non-blog-related writing of my own. I suspect somehow you’ll manage without me.

But do check back in a few weeks for the exciting conclusion to Pitter’s Birth Story (Part IV!) and a whole new round of moanings and groanings about Patter’s last weeks on the inside. See ya on the flip side!

There are many book-memes out there…this one I snagged from a woman in my book club because it’s related to the National Endowment for the Arts and so it just feels official, ya’know? Although I must say that I’m kind of disgusted to see Mitch Albom on the same list as Shakespeare. Really? Will he be in the canon with college courses devoted to his genius in the future? Just put a knife through my English-major heart and be done with it.

The NEA approximates that most American adults have only read 6 out of the 100 titles  on this list. I’ve read 69, which clearly makes me QUEEN OF THE WORLD!

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare-Complete? No. Lots of the plays, though.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens—twice people. TWICE!
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden-
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown-I have vowed to never bother with this!
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom-Another I refuse to read
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery-en francais, too
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Part I is here and Part II is here.]

It is early in the morning of June 19, 2006.  

Upon deciding it is time to walk to the hospital, my dear husband decides to packs his bag. Yes. Nothing like the last minute. He rushes around asking, “What should I take? How many pairs of underwear do I need?” and as is usual in our relationship, I am the calm consultant to these queries and assist in the packing. Good grief. I’ve had a bag packed for a week, replete with a little photo album of lovely Hawaiian-focal points and my ipod jammed with “soothing” playlists for labor. (Did I ever use these items? NOPE.)

Finally, with bags and pillows in hand, like bandits in the night, we begin what is normally a seven-minute walk over to Brigham Women’s Hospital. But, it takes about fifteen minutes to get there because I need to pause a few times for contractions. It’s eerie walking through our neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning. Even drunk we were never out this late. Three am is truly the witching hour. When we arrive at the hospital, we learn that I am only allowed to have two visitors with me (Sweet Cheeks and my Aunt/Doula). My mother must wait downstairs. I wasn’t told I should have made a special request for three people to attend me and ooooh I’m ticked off. But the registration staff tells us that the midwives can probably overrule this but we’ll need to speak with them upstairs. A frustrating problem we remedy before anything important occurs, but I feel bad about it.

Upstairs, the midwife on duty checks me in a small examination room, and tells me I’m not dilated more than a centimeter. Whaaat? I was only a centimeter dilated at my last OB appointment nearly a week ago! All this pain and sleeplessness for nothing? No one reminds me that although I may not be dilating, my body may be busy effacing, which is just as important. In retrospect, this information would have helped my attitude.

In the room, I lay on my back with the fetal monitor on for half an hour and it is maddening because I can feel how being still is causing my contractions to slow considerably. Now, although they are as much as 10 minutes apart, the whole process begins to slow down, but the intensity and duration of the pain doesn’t abate—so much so that I find it increasingly hard to talk while they’re going on.

After we’ve been at the hospital for an hour, the midwife suggests I walk around the hospital or outside for an hour or so to see if being upright will trigger the labor’s progress again. If it doesn’t work, we’re to go home. I am determined to do whatever it takes to stay at the hospital, so we heed her advice. Downstairs, we find my mother adorably curled up like a cat, asleep in the waiting area, and we leave a note explaining we’ll be waddling around the building.

Outside, the muggy dawn greets us and the Longwood Medical Center has awoken from its strange stillness. As we make our way through people departing for their morning commute and the am-hospital shift arriving, I have my first breakdown/crying jag. I am so tired and depressed that my body hasn’t “progressed” in any “meaningful” way. As we walk up and down gentle neighborhood hills, my Aunt calms me and is really helpful in keeping my spirits up. She’s convinced that although it seems to the midwife like I’m having a slow beginning, in our family, things pick up pretty quickly. After a little over an hour, the contractions become closer together and we return to the maternity ward, as I try to choke down a bite of bagel for nourishment. It tastes like a poison brick and I struggle to chew more than two mouthfuls. Nausea and exhaustion are hitting me hard.

It’s now about six am. When a new midwife, Denise, examines me she finds that I am dilated to two centimeters, but my contractions slow down yet again once I am on my back strapped with the fetal monitor. She really upsets me when she delivers this priceless news:

“You’re not going to have the baby today!! But you should be excited because when you come back tomorrow morning your body will be more ready for the induction that’s already scheduled! You may not even need the cervial ripener tonight!”

She nearly claps her hands in glee and suggests we go home, especially since there isn’t a labor room available for me anyway. 

When we come back tomorrow??? I want to PUNCH her in the face. Really hard. But I’m too tired and Sweet Cheeks is a wuss and won’t do it for me.

However, Denise picks up on our reluctance and doesn’t force us out of the hospital, and says that we can hang around if we want. Sweet Cheeks sits next to me while I take catnaps in between contractions that come every 7 to 10 minutes. This chunk of time feels like an eternity. And after an hour or two of this we admit defeat decide to go home. I finally realize I’ll be more comfortable in my own bed, but I am totally dejected that we’ve spent so much time in the hospital and are leaving. I’m worried about the hot apartment (we’re living in the attic of a 100-year old house with craptacular air conditioning) and I don’t look forward to going through the checking in again process when we finally do return.

This sucks. I am the classic case of the new mother who turns up at the hospital too soon. Did we dream up all of those close-together-long contractions from so many hours ago? What happened?

It’s now noonish and we do not brave the heat to walk home. Crazy we are, but not yet certifiable. Sweet Cheeks scuttles back to the apartment and brings the car for us.

At home I try to sleep again in bed. My Aunt and mother make me a fruit shake to try to get me to eat a little bit—I haven’t eaten anything since the Thai food the night before and they’re worried I’m getting weak. I’m not hungry in the least but I understand drinking half the shake is a good idea. I manage to keep it down.I sleep quite a bit but have continually more intense contractions.

From this point on, my memories of labor have some very strong points, but the rest of it is some what fuzzy. My sense of time passing is much like the one or two times I have ’shroomed. There is little way for me to grasp whether 10 minutes or 10 hours have gone by. I can read the clock, but how I feel in my body relates so little to the numbers I see that reality becomes a random concept rather than a concrete place.

I have an intense physical memory of laying on my side in our queen bed sweating, with my body pillow between my legs, facing away from Sweet Cheeks. The large blue and white hibiscus-print on our sheets is both soothing like I’m floating in water, but it’s also bothersome.  I need Sweet Cheeks next to me in bed so that when I wake up from the mini-dreams I’m having with a contraction, he can hold my hands and look in my eyes while I do my deep breathing.

Laying down makes the contractions hurt more—which continues to solidify what I learned at child-birthing class: sitting still and sitting down hurts more and slows the process down. Although I’m weary and frightened, I still believe that if I were to have an epidural, everything would slow down and I can’t stand the idea of doing that to myself on purpose.

When I can’t take it anymore, my Aunt calls the OB office to speak to someone there about my progress. I have an appointment at 2 pm set up from the previous week in order to check my pre-induction status. My Aunt gives Biddy (the head midwife with whom I only met once but loved and trusted whole-heartedly) my story, and Biddy suggests we either come in or go back to the hospital—our choice. Biddy is convinced that I’m ready to be admitted even without seeing me. I decide that I’d like her to check me so that I don’t get to the hospital only to be turned away again. It’s a tough call, however, since I don’t want to get into the car for more than one trip. The contractions are stronger, longer, and closer together and I don’t want to travel unnecessarily. I need to focus intently at this point and can’t talk during the contractions.

Focus and breathing is nearly all I can do…

[...and sticking with this loooong birth story is probably more than you can stand. But I promise that Pitter will arrive at the end of Part IV!]

Sooo. In the last 48 hours I have done the following:

1. Hustled over to CVS to purchase new shampoo and conditioner to find a promising set from the Organix line. For some silly reason, the ‘poo/condish set for each “type” (Vanilla Silk, Coconut Milk, Teatree Mint, etc.) appears in bottles that are identical in color and shape but for the words “Shampoo” and “Conditioner” written in the same typeface.

Who am I, roundly pregnant, to tempt the shower gods by purchasing bottles that look nearly identical? I know my weaknesses. I cannot be trusted in the shower to figure out to correctly read which bottle to use first and then to pick up the other bottle in the correct order. I need better differentiation. 

Solution? Buy a shampoo from the Vanilla Silk line, which has a white bottle, and a conditioner from the Coconut Milk line, which is gold. Easy peasy to tell apart. Am brilliant. 

What happens the next morning? After using my Vanilla Silk shampoo, I promptly pour the contents of the Coconut Milk bottle into my hands and discover I HAVE PURCHASED TWO SHAMPOOS. Different colored bottles, yes. Same words. Arrrgh. 

And when I return to CVS to purchase conditioner, am I bright enough to bring one of the shampoos with me in the hopes of an exchange? No. So now I have enough shampoo to last me until Pitter turns three next summer. 

2. Drove this morning over to a Cookie Cutters establishment for a much needed haircut. For Pitter. Not for me. (Am growing it out again, I think…)

As there was a twenty-minute wait, we moseyed over to a book store to buy Thank You cards for Pitter’s birthday. At the register, I discover that my wallet is sitting at home in the bag holding diapers I purchased during my third trip to CVS this weekend (because God forbid I remember when I am at CVS the second time buying conditioner that Pitter has one diaper to his name). 

So. We leave the cards at the bookstore and return to Cookie Cutter to inform them we will return in half an hour. I drive home, grab my wallet. We rinse and repeat, except this time I am driving legally and am able to pay for basic services. 

3. This afternoon blew up the wood-chipper that has been ingesting entire trees and shaking the walls of Pitter’s room for over an hour during prime napping hours.

Am now being held for terrorism and writing from a holding cell in the bowels of the Indianapolis police department. Hopefully Sweet Cheeks will spring me soon. 

Okay. Number 3 has nothing to do with money. And is also nothing more than a twisted fantasy.

But are you getting a sense of what month 7 of pregnancy looks like?

It ain’t pretty. 

1. I have neither gestational diabetes nor anemia. The latter surprises me slightly since I have a general rule about not eating red meat (anything I couldn’t kill myself I try to stay away from…and…there’s just too much blood with the mammals and everything plus you’ve got the enormous resources spent to raise one cow etc. etc.). I have had a hamburger and about six meatballs during this pregnancy because I just wanted them. But I doubt that’s enough alone to stave off anemia. Vitamins + leafy greens= magic?

2. How can the following patient bathroom set-up for urine-samples be anything close to sterile?: 

a. No instructions for order of operations (my last OB’s office was incredibly thorough on this and I appreciated it). They also handed you a pre-labeled cup to take into the bathroom with you. All the focus was on cleanliness and near-neurotic hand and nether-region cleaning.

b. Between the toilet and the sink and beneath the onlypaper-towel dispenser in the room sits a table with the following items: stacks of plastic sample cups, one magic marker for name-writing on the cup, moist towelette packets, the only hand soap in the room.

c. A lidded, overstuffed trashcan without a handle/foot thingy.  

So here’s what inevitably happens: To kick it all off, I wash my hands, which inevitably drip a bit on the basket of sample cups and marker as I grab a hand towel from the dispenser above the basket. I take a cup from the stack in the basket and use a moist towelette for what you’d expect. I do my business, which is sometimes messy, sometimes not. Sometimes I need to grab another paper towel with wet hands to clean off the cup. I put the cup on the table. The cup is inevitably a little wet somewhere. I wash my hands. I pick up the marker and write my name on it and put it in the little metal box in the wall. Then I throw away any paper towels/packaging by lifting the lid of the trashcan and then I have to touch the door handle to leave the room.

Um, everyone’s dripping god knows what into the basket of goods, eveyone’s putting their cup on the same piece of table, and who knows during what part of the process people are picking up the same magic marker.

Fascinating, I know. BUT IT BUGS THE SHIT OUT OF ME EVERY TIME I HAVE TO ENTER THAT ROOM.

3. You’d think an OBGYN with the first name “Sheldon” would be over sixty. He’s not. Closer to 40. Huh. And there you have it.