overdue

When you're overdue, you start looking for every sign that you might be *just about* to go into labor.

Here's some things that haven't meant I was about to go into labor:

• getting the best night of sleep of my pregnancy
• getting the worst night of sleep of my pregnancy
• getting nauseous, faint and dizzy for hours
• contractions
• having days where I felt great and perfectly fine
• sudden very puffy feet
• sudden unswollen feet
• having fewer bladder management skills
• a sudden acne breakout
• having a perfectly clean house
• having a perfectly messy house

We were pretty convinced this baby was coming early. We also had a lot of big events going on a couple weeks ago, and somehow convinced her to stay put until we got through those.
Now we've been trying to convince her to come out (so I can avoid another c-section), and it doesn't seem to be going as well.

We've been pretty patient.
And waiting and watching.
And waiting and watching.
And waiting.

Our doctor's been pretty patient. And very amiable to our hopes and requests.
But something's gotta give soon. They can't let me do this forever. If I don't go into labor on my own, I'll either be getting a c-section tomorrow or on the weekend.

... but on the other hand, I just lost my wallet. That's gotta mean something big will happen any minute now, right?!

(can you check into the hospital without any forms of ID?)

So, no baby yet.

But I thought I'd share a project from a month or so ago.
I got to take some engagement pictures for one of my dearest friends. Here's a peek at what this chilly, lovely, afternoon was like.

and a little more casual...

And what's a photo shoot without a little plaid?

One, Two

"One, two, one, two," Greta counts.
Three is too hard to remember and too hard to say.
So "one, two" echoes throughout our rooms.
"One, two, one, two" my heart strums along.
One. Two. One. TWO.

We are so close. On the precipice of two.
Most days I can't comprehend the two, and I get stuck on the precipice.
I can feel it. Something big is coming. Change is hovering in the air.

Sometimes it sucks the breath right out of me--waking me up in the middle of the night.
Sometimes it makes me panic over what still needs to be done.
Sometimes it stops and stills me, as I realize our days and routines won't be the same.

I'm breathing in my time with just Greta extra slow and heavy. Walking hand in hand. Eating our morning cereal. Hearing her holler "HELLO!" Singing rounds and rounds and rounds of "patty cake." Lying next to her in bed and watching her eyes grow heavy and flutter to sleep. Having her cook next to me in the kitchen, and then hand me something to eat pronouncing, "It's dinner time!"

These are such sweet days for the two of us. She wants me to join in everything, and she wants to be a part of everything I do. And she's started calling me "Mama" again, instead of just "Mom," which just kills me.

"Mama. Bath. Get in!"

"Mama. Come. Rest. Bed." (Or, let's be honest, "Mama, get up!")

and the most common phrase around this house is, "Mama, coming too?"
She repeats and repeats it. "Mama, coming too?" She lifts my hand to pull me up and bring me with her. She can't stand being upstairs when I'm down, or downstairs when I'm up.

We are happy friends and companions that spend almost every hour together.

Thinking of change tugs at my heartstrings a bit. I hate that it's bittersweet.
I know I won't lose Greta to the new baby. But this sweet undivided time is precious. And the adjustment period really might be rough on her and make her angry. And our days will be different, and this time will come to an end.




...But amid the sentimental worries, there's this other sneaky excitement that has worked it's way in. I can feel it catching and taking hold over my heart. There's a new girl coming! We know her a little bit now, and we know how we feel about her now, but she is coming soon! And we get to meet her! And she will be ours!

We are sure she will add. She will add and add and add to our family. She will add joy and surprise and a whole new person and a whole new round of delights. I'm sure she will also add some layers of trickiness as we figure out how to have twice as many kids as we have now. She will also add exhaustion and worries. But we've already learned once that adding to our family is the best kind of adding.

There are no more than a few weeks left. Or maybe days. I'm already past the point I was when I delivered Greta.

One, two, one, two.
Two will be nice. Two will be right.
One, two.
One, two.

views from the backyard

A week or so ago, there was a sudden snowstorm.  But Greta and I enjoyed it just fine.

Today, things were looking a little different, but we didn't seem to have a problem with it either.

Welcome, spring!

Names: Part 3

People really don't let you forget about things like changing your baby's name. OR your baby not having a name on a birth certificate until they're a month old.

We get it.
It was weird. We're rather embarrassed about it.

So after we had Greta, we decided we had to talk about baby names all the time--whether I was pregnant or not. We could not let that happen again. We've casually discussed it on and off for a few years, and luckily, I think we've now settled on a couple boy names. No guarantees we'll use them, but we have a couple options (first and middle) that we both feel really comfortable with and that might be great contenders sometime.

However, pretty much as soon as I got pregnant again, I was quite sure that this new baby was going to be a girl. Very early in the pregnancy I was scouring for girl names. I told Jason we had to focus in on girl names since we had some boy options--and I knew that 9 months might not even be long enough for us to find and settle on something.

Jason's also been pretty set on determining a name as quickly as possible. He's pointed out: "Look. We've learned that the 'wait until we see the baby' thing doesn't actually work for us. It didn't help at all. So we have to just decide on a name. And then we're just going to go with it."
He would like to name the baby the day she is born, I think. That's approximately my goal, but I'd be fine with getting her named in the first couple days.

Well. We are T-minus 50 days until my due date. (And if this baby comes when Greta does, we're only 28 days away!) Baby Girl Brown #2 doesn't exactly have a name yet.

This is how it's gone.

• We've gone through Top 100 Baby Name lists and pulled out our favorites.
• We've gone through social security records for different decades and written our favorite names from those lists.
• We've gone through family trees searching for favorite names. (A new personal favorite is the mother / daughter combo a couple hundred years back that are named "Silence." I'm sure Silence Brown has a nice ring to it?)
• We've joked through atlases, billboards and everything else coming up with names that make each other laugh.
• I go to baby-naming websites and try fishing around for various names.
• We've made lists of things we CAN'T name our baby now that we have a baby Greta. For example, Gretchen. Some names are too close or don't fit well or whatever. We also have names that we can't name our child since our last name is Brown. For example, we get nervous about color names--like Scarlet.

So we have lists on our phones and google spreadsheets with options.

Jason and I have probably agreed less on names this time around.
We have some old lists with Jason's favorite names, and another with a few of my favorite names. He has like 6 names, and I won't go for most of them. And I only have two names, and I'm not sure that I really want either of them.

That seems to be the biggest problem. Of all these lists, we have names that we think are nice. "Sure, that's a fine name," we can say. Or we can find names and groups of names with a style we like. If we're looking at a list, we can easily narrow down which ones we like the best. But we don't love them enough to really consider naming our child that.

Some other problems.
• I'm still too fickle. Occasionally, I'll have names that I love and I'll try and convince Jason to like them. A few weeks or a few months later, Jason will say, "Yeah! That name has really grown on me." And then I look at him and say, "No. I don't like it anymore."

• Or I worry. "What if this is our last baby girl ever? What if this is our last chance to name a baby girl and we mess up because we're young and foolish?" (But who knows if this is our last baby girl or even how many children we will have or want to have. We don't have that plan nailed down and won't for quite awhile, and turns out you can't plan genders even if you try. But, you know, something else to worry about.)

• I'm also self-conscious about trendy names. I don't want to be too trendy or too 2015. I also don't want to look back and be embarrassed about what I named my child. But I have also learned that there might not be any avoiding this. As I have gone through social security lists of top names, it's become clear to me: there are TOTALLY themes to names in EVERY decade. It's really hard to avoid. And just like the names "Jason" and "Jennie" are great names that we've been fine growing up with, they might be recognizable as the kind of names from the late 80s. Similarly, our kids names will probably be pin-pointable to a certain period.
(Unless we choose the name Mary. I'm pretty sure that's the most timeless girl's name from several millenia.)

• I just get nervous about messing this up and making my child live with the results.

Some other interesting notes:
• Nicknames. My husband is a good, good man, but he has zero older brothers and has never actually been made fun of in his life. I had four older brothers who spared very little in teasing their youngest sister. I am much more tuned in to the inane names, cruel derivations, and potty-humor associations that can be generated from normal, nice names. When I bring these things up, Jason sometimes looks at me and says, "What?! That doesn't make any sense. Why would someone call her that?" And then I assure him (and my brothers back up) that kids call each other a lot of dumb things that don't make sense.

• We also play a game: "If we had to name the baby tomorrow, what would we name her?"

Right now?
We have one strong contender, but no middle name to go with it. And I'm worried I might back out and decide I don't like it sometime soon, since I've already kind of done that once. And then we'll have zero options. But we're trying to refer to the baby with a name and audition it (before she's even here! so that's improvement!) and trying to work through this.

Are we going to tell you what names we're thinking of?
No. Probably not.
Would it be a good idea for me to talk about some of these options out loud?
Quite possibly. But I still get nervous and probably won't do it yet.

Something I'm serious about:
If you have a method of either generating or narrowing down baby names that works well for you, let me know! or baby name books or websites or activities or whatever it might be. I'm game. I'd also be open to any names you'd like to suggest. We're all about possibilities and brainstorming.

Here's to Baby Girl Brown #2 -- and helping her get a name before her older sister did!

Names: Part 2

So what the crap happened last time we had/named a baby?
Right. Last time.

We were really struggling coming up with a name. It was a few weeks before the baby's due date, and we still weren't sure.

And then, BOOM, in a whirlwind of a few days, I was being tested constantly, got diagnosed with preeclampsia, was told I needed to not be pregnant any more, was induced, and suddenly we were having a baby. One of the first things Jason and I said as they hooked me up to the IVs was "Sorry, baby girl. We don't have a name for you yet."

Things got increasingly more complicated. Inductions turned into C-sections and then my baby was needing surgery and being ambulanced to another hospital where I wouldn't see her for several days... And you know, my first priority at that point wasn't declaring a name. We had to take care of everyone's health first. And then I wanted to be able to see her, which people seemed a little understanding about.

So, when we filled out all the hospital paperwork we left the name portion blank. Her birth certificate had no name on it. As I was released from the hospital, the nurse wheeling me out teased, "Haven't you had 9 months to figure this out?!"

It was a little entertaining to arrive at the Primary's Medical Center NICU. All of her tags read "Baby Girl" or "BG Brown," while the rest of the NICU babies had sweet name tags lovingly decorated by their nurses.

Family members were texting and emailing asking what her name was. After all, I had now seen her and held her and stuff. We didn't have one yet.

I distinctly remember Mother's Day. My husband and I sat with my 5 day old baby in the NICU, enjoying the warm sun coming in her corner window and mostly really grateful to be spending time all together. We tried out names for a few hours. We were a little surprised at the process. We had always thought that once we saw her it would be obvious. It wasn't. In fact, as we stared down at this little baby's face and tried to determine what to call her, it was much harder.

When the doctor passed through, he had to comment. "If she's not named by the end of the shift, I'm just naming her. Okay? Maybe Emily. That'd be a good name for her." Eventually we decided on a name we had talked about. Naomi. We had liked it, and decided we'd try it. We'd call her Naomi. We also really liked the name Greta, and talked about that as a middle name?

We wrote out a little nametag and put it on her bassinet as we left, and the nurses winked at us.

As we talked with family that night, we talked about the name.
Here's the thing.
It wasn't sitting well with me.
In fact, I couldn't even get the words out to say the name to my own family. Jason had to say it. And I was too uncomfortable to talk about it. I knew that I thought "Naomi Greta" had zero percent flow to it, but I also just wasn't sure in general.

I knew it was probably my own lack of commitment and indecisiveness holding me back, so I tried to be bold. We announced the first name "Naomi" on facebook. Pretty committal, right? Telling hundreds of people?

Turns out not even that did the trick.
As time went on, I liked it less and less. I anguished more and more. And I didn't like all the associations and pronunciations of the name that I hadn't fully considered.
For a little bit, our families called her Naomi. I didn't really call her much of anything. And then I opened up to everyone about how I didn't like it and was thinking that we might need to try something else.

Let me tell you, that stirs the pot!
I thought a 5 day old baby without a name was bad, but it really gets interesting at week 2 or 3.
I had a sweet grandma comment, "Changing it? But I've already told everyone the name is Naomi!"
"Me too, Grandma. Me too."

I didn't need a name for her. I spent all day with her and could call her "baby girl," or "sweetheart," or all sorts of things just fine. But other people were pretty sure they needed something to call her.

It really wore on me and I anguished about it. It wore on Jason, too. I still have to-do lists from those first few weeks with "NAME" written on the top of it. And by this point, everyone else was more vocally chiming in with what names they liked. I guess that's how it goes when you have a child, there in the flesh, without a name.

Finally, on her due date, we started to settle. I was really feeling much more decided on the first name of Greta. And then in the car that night, Jason suggested the middle name "Ruby."
I gasped. It was a great fit. I called my mom in excitement. We might have a name! We weren't totally settled, but we might have a name!

We tried it out for a few more days. Greta Ruby. It was feeling good. It was feeling right. It WAS feeling different than Naomi ever did. It felt like something I liked--and that I didn't care if anyone else liked it, because I did.

Finally, on her one month birthday, we took her down to county health office and got it officially on a birth certificate. Our baby girl. Greta Ruby Brown.

We reannounced.
People made fun of us for the first, oh, year. Except for when they still make fun of us.


(FOR THE RECORD: if you ever find yourself in this situation, you should know that you do NOT need to have a name when you leave the hospital. Also, it was not hard at all to get a birth certificate/social security card amended. It took half an hour, maybe, and cost $18. The process was not actually a big deal and don't let people scare you or make you feel guilty about it. If you need more time to name your child, take the time you need.)

Names: Part 1

"So do you have a name?"

...here's the thing. We aren't the people who decided when they got engaged what they would name their children. In fact, we have a really hard time deciding baby names.

To catch you up on our backstory, here's something I blogged two years ago when I was pregnant with Greta.

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There's the standard three questions.
1. When's your due date?
2. Girl or boy?
3. Have any names?

Luckily, the first two are really easy to answer. Straightforward, and people readily accept one-word answers. But when I answer "no," to #3, people are always confused.

"No? Do you and Jason just not agree on names?"
"Well, I think we mostly agree. We talk about it all the time. We just don't ... have... any."

"Do you have a pool that you're thinking of? Some good options?"
"Not really, yet, no, sorry." (honest truth.)

"Did you have boy names but then found out it was a girl?"
"Well kind of, but, no, not really. We just aren't very decisive. And just don't have anything we like yet."

But none of those answers are very satisfying to people.

Sometimes I try and explain in different ways:
"Part of it's tricky when you have a last name like Brown. We don't want to name her Katie/Sarah, and have her compete with the other 5,000 Katie Browns that will be in the Utah school districts alone. But we don't want it to be too off the wall."
OR
"Part of me is just really indecisive. And I'd like to see this child before they're given a name. So I'm not planning on naming the child until the hospital. But I know I need to have some options before then, or else this child will never have a name. I'm working on being decisive."
OR
"We also get really distracted really easily coming up with names. We start reading billboards, and the name becomes "Ikea" or "Awesome" (pronounced ah-weh-so-meh). We've also gone through all the combinations of Light Brown, Chocolate Brown, Mahogany Brown, etc. Or other fun historical names, like Dostoyevsky Brown, or Gorbachev Brown, or... other nouns, like  Geography Brown, or Grandma Brown. Yeah, we just get distracted really easily."

Or when Jason tries to explain:
"The other challenge is convincing Jennie that the name needs to be something appropriate for a white little girl born in Utah. You see, Jennie has this thing for hispanic names, or Middle-Eastern boy names. So, we have to focus a bit."
That one baffles people a lot. (My neighbor last night: "Like WHAT?!") I don't know how to explain it either, other than I would just love a Middle-Eastern little boy that I would like to name Amir, thank you very much. And my hispanic children will be Alma (as in "soul") and maybe Nico. And maybe these will be adopted children, or maybe they will never exist. I'm still dealing with the fact that I will likely never have any dark-skinned, dark-eyed children. But Jason reminds me there might be some cultural confusion if I name a white, pasty little girl something like "Nuria," or "Amir." In fact, he does facebook and google searches for first names, and then points out to me that all of the hits coming up have last names like "Gonzalez" or "Rahnavard" or "Assaf" and that this name is not really appropriate for a scandinavian mutt with the last name of "Brown." Jason introduced me to Russian names, which mostly just give me a kick, but are similarly not appropriate. We're working through this.

So, no, we don't have names.
We don't really have options of names. We have a few contenders that might be higher than others, but I don't know if they're possibilities yet at all.
Just thought you might need the update.

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Things haven't changed too much since then.

But we're now implicated by our history of having a child who didn't officially have a name on a birth certificate until she was a month old. And we have another baby girl coming in the near future who also needs a name!

To be continued...