Within a week...

...I'll have a baby!

I went to the dr. yesterday. They're monitoring me pretty closely because of various risk factors (age and other stuff) and saw some things they didn't love, and were considering taking me right up to the hospital (the office is in a wing of the hospital building). Whoah! After some further tests they decided everything was ok, but my dr. said the baby is ready and she doesn't want to press my luck, so if the baby doesn't come out on his own sooner he'll be coming out by next Thursday at the latest. Which honestly, is fine by me.

I know, natural childbirth is best and all that... Well, I truly don't mean to denigrate anyone's choices here, and I completely get why many women (probably a very high percentage of my friends, actually) are super-pro-all-natural childbirth. In fact, two friends of mine are midwives; they are wonderful and I think what they do is a really beautiful thing. And I'm certainly not one to blindly trust anyone with a medical degree. But in my current case (and maybe this is partly because for half my life I've been studying the Middle Ages, where so many women and babies didn't fare so well in birth!), I'm really perfectly fine being in a hospital, under the care and following the advice of a physician whom I really trust. It could be different if I were 25 with no risk factors, but I'm not. And I feel just fine about the way this is all unfolding. Ok, now that I've gotten that off my chest...!

So, I'm going in Tuesday for more monitoring. Depending on what they see, they may take me in Tuesday, but they'll probably leave it until Wednesday night or Thursday morning. When Bob heard Wednesday night, he shot me a look, and I knew he was thinking "Band practice!" Which I said out loud and we both laughed. The dr. asked what time it was over and I said around 10, and she said that if we need to go with Wednesday night we can come in after that. The thing is, we're halfway through recording "Been a Long Time", and we'd have to shelve it for a long time (as it were) if I can't get my vocals down now (and I can't do my vocals until Mike first lays down the drums and then Bob lays down the rhythm guitar, which I'm pretty sure they can't do until practice on Wednesday night).

Of course, I must say that I kind of love the idea of going into the hospital to have the baby directly after band practice! This has been our little rock and roll baby from the start, and somehow that would just be fitting. Let me explain.

First of all, he was conceived right around our first anniversary, which also happened to be the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, which we sort of made the theme of our anniversary. We visited both the town and the concert venues, and even had our own little impromptu concert on the lawn, right where the original stage was. We played all of the songs we had just recently written (on the lake in New Hampshire--more on that in later posts) and had spent a portion of the weekend revising/refining.

Two or three weeks after that, I took the pregnancy test, right before we were about to play our biggest gig yet (a national/international bike race that takes place in our town). I remember I wanted to take it then, right before the gig, because sometimes we like to party a little bit before we go on stage, and I was thinking that I'd better just check this out before I tossed back a shot or two of blueberry vodka! Anyway, the test was positive, and that was one exciting/intense gig, let me tell you :-)

And throughout the pregnancy our music has really flourished, especially our songwriting. It's just been an incredibly fertile time for us creatively (not just procreatively--ha).

And, this kid comes alive with music! Well, in particular, with music that really rocks, and especially with the guitar. It started during one of our gigs--can't remember which one--but he'd start going nuts when I'd pick up the guitar and play Johnny Cash's Fulsom Prison Blues (if you don't know it, it's a really kicking song, especially at the tempo at which we play it). It was a little disconcerting the first time it happened, but then it became something I kinda looked forward to and that actually cracked me up. It happened every single time I played that song (and often during some of our other songs that really move... but never during any of the slower ones). More recently, he's started going nuts every time his daddy plays one of his rockin' solos. A couple of practices ago, for example, we were listening to some of what we'd recorded, which was pretty loud and with a booming bass drum beat, but he was perfectly still in there. But when Bob strapped on and plugged in his guitar and started noodling, the baby jumped into action! Dancing all around in there. The guitar wasn't any louder than what we'd been hearing; in fact, it was not nearly as loud, so it's not that. It just must be something about the sound that he really responds to. It's happened many times (at home, as well, when Bob picks up the guitar).

Yesterday during one of the tests in the dr.'s office (a non-stress test, where they test the baby's heart rate), the baby wasn't moving enough. I had brought a cookie with me, because the same thing happened last time. Well, the cookie wasn't doing anything, so after about 10 minutes I got out my Blackberry and found the one video we have on YouTube and started playing it while holding it right up to my belly. It definitely got him going a little bit at first, but where he really went nuts was during his daddy's guitar solo! And then he slowed down when the solo was over, and then at the very end of the song, the way we do it, each instrument has a little one- or two-bar solo, and when it came time for Bob's, again he went nuts. You could see it on the monitor. It was hilarious. And of course, Bob loved it!

OMG, too funny... I just went to YouTube to get the link to put here, and played the video, and he did it again--woke up and started kicking during the guitar solo. Then went back to resting.

Speaking of getting back to resting, I'm going to try to do that now. Soon there will be not much resting to be had in my life!