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OK, all pregnancy entry up and coming! Beware!

I am now 19 weeks along. This pregnancy is going by so fast – it is amazing, in retrospect, how much time I had to navel gaze when I was pregnant with Matthew. Now, things are blazing by at an amazing speed, which is just as well! We are all quite excited about Baby Girl Cajo’s arrival…

That’s right! The baby is a girl! Here is a picture of her foot, where she has been heartily practicing the best ways to kick her mama’s butt (she’s doing a great job of it in utero, I will have you know):

Everything looks great and she’s on track gestationally, so that’s always a plus.

Diabetes – while pregnant, is a pain in the tuchas. My insulin needs are increasing as per expected as the placenta grows, I feel like a human pin cushion (Josh affectionately calls me a heroin addict), and it’s always a game – “Good morning! Let’s see how much two slices of whole wheat bread, peanut butter and sugar free jam will spike you now!” Otherwise, we’re okay in this area now. I gave Matthew an old insulin pen to play with after I was done with it and he saw me injecting one morning and uncapped his pen, lifted his shirt, and pressed his against his belly. Too cute. Let’s hope he never has to do that for real.

Other symptoms. Still exhausted. Still nauseated (this is actually lessening as of this past week, fingers crossed). Anxious for this phase to ebb!

My word, how big are you? I have a belly. I have had a belly since about 12 weeks but now it’s not as squishy anymore. And amusingly enough, I am actually down about 4 pounds from the time I got pregnant.

Way to help me lose my shit: tell me that the integrated screening came back “screen positive” for Trisomy 21 (Downs Syndrome). These last two days have been slightly excruciating. I had an amniocentesis today to get some more information about the baby’s chromosomal structure, but wow, talk about stress – that combined with pregnancy hormones had me bursting into tears every twenty minutes. Lame. Anyway, one fun thing did come out of this entire deal – Baby Girl Cajo (no, we are not sharing her name until she makes a final appearance) today at the ultrasound right before the amnio yawned and the tech caught it on film.

So, right now we wait – we elected to get the FISH results (a faster way to get initial data – within 2-3 days) and the final complete results will come in 10-12 days. I am feeling better, statistically, about everything happening, but I think we will still be anxious until we find out definitively one way or the other.

Matthew has been cracking us up lately. His latest favorite thing to say is “baby” while he looks for pictures of babies on the computer or in one of his books. When we ask him, “Do you want to kiss the baby?” he’ll lift my shirt and kiss my belly.

Lest you think he is ready and understands that his little world is going to tip upside down in four months (!!!!!), he is still hugging and cuddling his Gloworm and then hurling it on the floor and walking away. Troublemaker.

Cute, though:

He’s now over 3 feet tall, weighs over 37 lbs, and is wearing size 3T and 4T. Huge. And because of the amnio, I’ve been instructed for the next couple of days not to lift anything heavier than 10 lbs. Ha!

Due date is 12/29/08. I think we are either totally ecstatic or a tiny bit insane. Probably both.

…that my baby could start morphing into an honest-to-goodness little person?

Deep down, though, he is still my little schmoo and I will look back wistfully at these days when I am his favorite person and he loves to randomly kiss, hug, and cuddle me. I can’t cuddle him when he’s 30, can I?

This has been a good weekend – despite feeling like a truck ran me over from here to the ends of the earth. Josh’s sister is in town, so we strongarmed her into babysitting our fussy toddler on Friday night while we ran away (oh yes, literally – I ran down the stairs and urged Josh to hurry behind me so M wouldn’t fuss as badly, although as we shut the door I heard a little wail coming from upstairs) to a delightful Cameroonian restaurant in south Berkeley. Delicious, and perhaps because of the food, or perhaps because we were starved rats, we ate really fast, and then headed over to Barnes & Noble in Emeryville to kill some time before the movie started – we saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Good movie, although to be honest I think I have seen entirely too much of Jason Segal’s penis.

Yesterday was a deliciously napful day. After Josh put Matthew down for a nap, we settled in to watch an episode of News Radio on DVD. Halfway through, I started conking out, and by the time I woke up a couple of hours later, Josh had done the grocery shopping and put them away.

Today, I woke up a little earlier than I would have liked (and it’s my morning to sleep in, which seems like the greater injustice!). We met Jera for brunch at the Thai Buddhist temple and ate oh so much food, and then hit the farmer’s market. It’s been a lazy Sunday afternoon – the best kind – and really, I couldn’t ask for anything more. Maybe a pony. Ponies are good.

I am having a blast these days – I am finally sitting down and scanning in pictures from years past – from when my mom was a kid – and also from high school and college. I am fascinated now by pictures of my uncle when he was a young boy, and also of my grandmother as a young woman and a new mother.

The most amusing thus far is this picture. Notice the little girl (ahem) behind the screen door screaming her head off because she was not going to be in the picture?

Now notice her son, almost 30 years later:

I recently found out that my uncles were not fraternal, but identical. It’s fairly evident when you see them in their younger years, but as adults, they were as different as different could be. Their voices were different – their body types different, and certainly their personalities (obviously not affected by genetics) were different.

What I would give to have known them at a younger age – before the stresses of adulthood and marriage and work and making ends meet created permanent furrows in their brows.

Best thing about going to a baseball game with a toddler: teaching him how to boo the Phillies – he balls his fists up tight, puts them near his mouth and hoots like an owl.

This parenting thing is so much fun. Ask me this again on a Saturday morning when he’s stripped himself naked and smeared poop on his chest.

Ah, it’s still fun, just messy.

L-R: My mother, Jenny; Matthew; me; my grandmother, Caroline

In casual conversation, when I refer to my family, I will refer to my mother and grandmother as my parents – and it’s true – I have my mom and my grandma, and they are indeed my parents. Growing up, that was my norm. My mother left my father when I was a newborn and we went to live with my grandmother. Many houses and apartments and states later, I finally left for good after grad school and I was in my own apartment, starting out my adult life.

My grandmother was a strong woman. She sent her kids (my mom and her two twin brothers) off to Libya and then the United States so they could have the best education they could, while she tended to her husband who was dying of leukemia. She was a nurse by trade. She gave birth to my mother at home essentially by herself (she told me that my grandfather, an obstetrician/gynecologist, was in the other room getting his bag and gear together to help my grandmother give birth when he returned to find her holding my mother in her arms).

She flew around the world after my grandfather died and settled down in Connecticut. She worked hard as a nurse’s aide (where she learned how to smoke, incidentally – the nurses there taught my grandma how to smoke by offering her pot first) to put my uncles through private school and eventually college.

She took care of me and although she was my grandmother, she was another mother to me in every sense of the word. When I was being mistreated in a daycare center, she marched in and pulled me out – I’d been put inside a closet because I refused to eat from the same communal bowl of rice soup they tried to feed us all out of. From that point on, Grandma stayed at home to take care of me – working from home, sewing and knitting beautiful garments to sell in upscale boutiques in Manhattan.

Everything I learned about being Chinese I learned from her. She did not bind her feet as a child, so I learned to talk back and refuse to be treated in a subsevient manner. She did not allow herself to be subjected to a loveless, arranged marriage, so I learned to fall in love and let my heart guide me. She treated the least of our society with the most of her heart, so I learned to seek out justice and be grateful for what I have and give back what I can. She spoke loudly and with conviction, so I learned how to be a loudmouth and badass, too. Occasionally – only very occasionally – she cried. Whenever she did, I cried too. As my uncle died a year ago, she sat quietly in her wheelchair and from time to time reached out to touch his toes. I remember what it was like to touch Matthew’s toes for the first time, to fully embrace his newness and the beginning of life. I can only fathom what heartache she felt when she sat there and touched his toes for the last time at the end of his life.

We shared so much together over the course of my lifetime. She taught me how to knit when I was six or seven years old. My cousin and I used to go with Grandma on walks, and before she broke her leg, she was fast – to the point where Jennifer and I didn’t want to go on walks with her because we were not walking – we were running to keep up! At 11 o’clock every weekday morning, she watched The Price is Right. Over the years, she watched Bob Barker’s hair change slowly from black to white – and imagine my surprise when in her final days she and my mom agreed that Drew Carey was not a bad replacement for Bob Barker!

Grandma was most famous for her cooking – everything she learned about cooking came from a lifetime of adapting and testing and figuring out what tastes worked best using cribbed, lesser, American ingredients. A few years ago when visiting my grandmother, I followed Grandma with a notebook and pen, writing down every exact step and amount she used to make her famous sticky rice stuffing. As I madly scribbled, she would say, “Ai ya! Get out of my way! I don’t know what amount, I just know how to make!” Every year after that for Chinese New Year and now for Thanksgiving, I try to recreate my grandmother’s stuffing. I always fail, but I try.

Josh and I once went out to lunch with Grandma and my mom at a small strip-mall dim sum restaurant in West Hartford – it was a pathetic experience, culinary-speaking. I think we had to ask the staff for chopsticks. The food was bad, and the greatest outrage, which Josh likes to kid – is that they used the wrong kind of wrapper for mu shu pork! My mom, grandma and I were all quite miffed – and Grandma said so, loudly and in Chinese. My mom tried to shush her. “Ma, they can understand you!”

“Good! They have deceived us!” I don’t think I have laughed so loudly at someone else’s misfortune, to trick my grandmother with food.

One of the greatest compliments she ever gave me was when we were back home when my uncle died. Josh and I were wrangling a busy and nosy baby who wanted to get into anything and everything. From time to time, I would nurse him as needed. She asked me questions about what it was like to nurse Matthew, and we talked and shared moments together – from mother to mother. She told me that I was a good mother, that I was very caring and that I was doing well by him. And then later on, on the day my uncle died as we sat next to him, Josh was busy with Matthew in the waiting room and had laid him down to nap on the sofa and he himself laid down on the carpet to close his eyes. There they were – father and son – united in sleep. Mom pushed Grandma toward the waiting room and they both peered in and saw the two of them in the darkened room and Grandma smiled and told my mom what a good father he was to Matthew.

I miss her so much. She died two weeks ago and life has gone on. The sun rises and the sun sets. I am slightly aghast that nothing has changed and everything has changed all at once.

My grandmother was always very proud of me and what I’ve accomplished. What I would give to tell her how proud I was of her and her strength and fortitude and what she has accomplished. I would thank her for being, as I’ve often referred to her, the meanest old man I knew, for having high standards to achieve, for being a wonderful role model of what a strong Chinese woman is, for being a pioneer in a country that never once appreciated her beauty or strength.

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who is a mother, who has a mother or grandmother, who is about to become a mother, or who loves a mother.

We are a bag of tired bones here today at Casa Cajo. The last two nights have been sucky – Matthew was secretly replaced by a demon of some sort and woke up repeatedly and unendingly. As a result, we are all zombies, of course, except for the little boy. He has a way about him.

We took him into the doctor this morning because we are at the start of week 3 of this sick that just will not quit (actually, for ALL of us) and we wanted to rule out things like ear infections or something nastier brewing in his little germ factory’s caves. He is fine. I love our pediatrician to bits and pieces – she greeted us warmly today and said how nice it was to see the whole family (although I think she was being nice – two of us looked like we were about to keel over!) and she does a great job of reassuring us me that everything is fine and he is headed in the right direction. I asked, because I always do, about Matthew’s speech and she said she is not worried one little bit, and when I told her that one of my July mom’s babies already knew her A-B-C’s, she reassured me. I like her – she makes me feel competent and not paranoid. Hard task, that.

For my own reference, a list of things Matthew says now:
- mama (although the stinker will actually, if you ask him to say mama, say baba instead. Pfeh!)
- baba
- dog
- duck
- outside
- rabbit
- grandma
- great-grandma
- thank you (never with us, the stinker)
- banana
- orange
- What’s that?
- All done!
- Hi there!
- milk

Things Matthew understands:
- feet
- shoes (boy loves shoes. Watch out Zappos)
- socks
- diaper change
- he nods yes and no appropriately (although if he isn’t sure, he’ll nod both at once!)
- hungry (heads for fridge)
- milk or water (heads for fridge or points for a sippy cup in the dish drainer)
- book
- hug
- kiss
- blow a kiss
- Peekaboo
- cover up and cuddle in bed

And lastly, a funny after today’s doctor’s visit: we took Matthew to daycare and there were a few other of the full-time kids there. Matthew ran into their arms and gave them kisses and hugs and it was very sweet. Then my goofball son decided to play on the floor and put his head down and stuck his butt up in the air, à la downward facing dog. This was funny, because hey, isn’t a baby’s butt in the air a funny thing? What’s even more funny is that Matthew has found his leadership skills in yoga: within a few minutes all of the kids were head-down on the carpet with their butts in the air. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time.

Work has totally kicked my booty these last few weeks – all for good reasons, I think – but stressful nonetheless. I was at work today, and Josh came out with Matthew to visit before we all went home together – Matthew was a shy little charmer – it is amazing how our gregarious son is so shy around new people. Watching him learn and the little light bulbs in his head go off is really cool – it is like he is our own little science and psychology experiment. He saw someone put money into a soda machine, press a button, and then a soda came out. As it happens, Matthew is kind of in love with sodas (I don’t know why; I let him taste a little of my diet Coke and his face screws up into a grimace, but I think he likes the bubbles) so he immediately scrambled out of my arms, went over to the machine and inspected it. He pressed a button and put his hand into the slot and waited for a soda to pop out and looked all up in the slot trying to figure out why no soda came out.

Stuff like this – watching him figure things out, play with the dogs, squeal with laughter – this is what makes parenthood cool.

(I will forget happily about the snot that runs from his nose like a faucet. Seriously, this boy is keeping Kleenex in business.)

Ava loves Matthew, too: