Year: 2010

I never had a bridal shower and I had somewhat of an unconventional wedding. So it came as no surprise when I started thinking early on into my pregnancy about what my baby shower wouldn’t be.

For starters, it wouldn’t be a painful occasion in which women sat around in a circle doing arts and crafts while I opened presents. Nor would we play any silly games. No disrespect to the scores of women who have conventional baby showers, but it’s just not for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand and respect the reasons for having a shower when you are expecting your first child. The expecting parents need things. A lot of things. But the key word here is, parent-sss.

When I first set out thinking about a shower I knew it would be a “Jack & Jill.” Jason was one half of the reason why I was pregnant in the first place. What absolved him of requesting these things from family and friends, too?

Because I knew the shower would fall some time in the summer, it was a no-brainer to plan an outdoor BBQ in my parents expansive backyard on Long Island. The yard I grew up in. The yard I got married in. And since the majority of our friends have children and dogs, we decided that they would be invited, too.

We designed our very own baby shower invites in Photoshop and proceeded to plan an outdoor BBQ for June 5th, with a rain date of the following Saturday, June 12th.

Our DIY shower invites!

My brother and his wife flew in for the party and camped out in our apartment in Brooklyn Heights the week leading up to the shower while Jason and I took a stay-cation at my parents house in Northport. It was a bit odd, being displaced like that during the week, but it allowed us to plan and prepare for a BBQ in which we were expecting 50 adults, 13 children and seven dogs.

I ran four miles with my dad the morning of the shower while dark clouds moved along steadily, and ominously, above us. When we got home, we had a family meeting with Jason on speakerphone (he had to go back in to the city for work), and my husband’s wife sitting mum, but as supportive as ever.

My dad wanted to call the shower off and after Jason saw the weather reports, he too, was in favor of postponing it until the following week. However my mom, who has a tendency to go into stress mode when planning big occasions at our home, was in favor of goin for it, while my best friend Lauren chimed in via text message: “It will work out, it always does.”

I couldn’t help but take the weather personally. After all, it had rained on our wedding day, too. But on our wedding day there was a gigantic tent pitched in the backyard, not to mention the luck of something up above that stopped the rain and brought out the sun one hour before the ceremony started. Would we have such luck again?

In the end, the women prevailed. The shower would go on. And while I was happy to just be getting it over with, I prayed to God it wouldn’t pour.

It didn’t.

In fact, each hour came and went with intense heat and a light breeze, but no rain. Not even a clap of thunder could be heard in the distance.

The shower was a huge success and a ton of fun, complete with children running around squealing with delight, dogs chasing one another (even Ella got in on the fun), and a table full of wonderful gifts that we did NOT open in front of everyone.

Leave it to our baby shower for their to be some gambling, too! Lauren made us a baby pool in which you can guess the sex of the baby and the date that it will be born. Only one person’s name can occupy a box and it’s $5 per box to play. No one chose my due date, August 8th, under boy or girl, and the majority of the guesses have me going early with a boy. The lucky winner takes home the pool which is up to $160.

As I walked around the yard making sure that the coolers were always full,  the dog bowls had cold water and that my vegetarian friends had their fill of soy dogs and veggie burgers, I took great joy in seeing my childhood friends’ children running around. It turned out that so too, did my friends. That night Sharon said to me, “I was sitting in your kitchen and Ashley was going ‘mommy, mommy,’ and I thought, how cool? I grew up in this kitchen and now here’s my kid sitting where I once sat.”

The next day, Tish wrote me and said, “I cannot tell you what Saturday meant to me, to be around your parents and my children in a backyard I grew up in. It brought back so many memories.”

To think I will join them in those same feelings in less than two months from now — to be creating new memories where there are already so many old. Let’s just say that the mere thought of it leaves me feeling pretty damn good.

One could make a joke or two about the placement of that knife!

This Friday, June 11th I will be attending The Pregnant New Yorker’s Pregnancy Health Expo in Manhattan. Click here for more details…

The expo will be at Kinespirit at 40 East 23rd Street b/w Park and Madison from 6 – 9 pm. It’s $20 per person pre-registered and $25 at the door, however I still have a few leftover complimentary passes. If you would like one, leave a comment and I will get in touch with you asap.

Here I am at 30 weeks pregnant…

We went for a couple of good runs over the weekend. One with your daddy and the other with my dad and my brother. Running with you is not necessarily easy, but quite enjoyable nonetheless. It makes me feel amazing and I can’t help but think in some way, I am passing that same feeling on to you 🙂

I saw our midwife yesterday who said you are in the right position and that I am the right weight (phew), and she even showed me where your little hands were and then we shook hands! You have been quite active but there is no discerning your patterns of activity. Sometimes you knock around early in the morning, other times after I have an orange, and often when I sit down around 5:00 to watch the evening news.

Beverly said she would let me go to 41 weeks and six days if for some reason you are running a bit late for your big debut – which means you will be born any day between now and August 21st. That’s quite the relief since most doctors only let you go days to maximum one week past your due date. I am pretty confident though, that you will come on your own terms.

The baby shower BBQ bash is this weekend. We’re headed out to Long Island a bit early in preparation for it. We’re expecting 50 adults, 13 children and about six or seven dogs. Will post pics next week…

We had a prenatal consultation with the Dr. who may become our baby’s pediatrician, Dr. Jana Dehovitz of Brooklyn Heights Pediatrics. I say “may,” because her practice is supposed to start participating with our insurance provider, but doesn’t at the moment. If they still don’t by late June, then we’ll be on the hunt for a new ped.

When I first set out in search of a pediatrician I Googled “vegetarian-friendly” Dr.’s in my neighborhood. They need not be veg themselves, but they at least need to be supportive and/or understanding of the lifestyle in which we’re choosing to raise the baby. Dr. Dehovitz came recommended to me by a parent on the Bococa parents listserve who called her “very alternative medicine/veggie friendly.”

It turns out Dr. Dehovitz was the original Brooklyn office of Tribeca Pediatrics before going solo, and carries their same philosophy. A plus. My friend Brooke uses Dr. Tholany from Tribeca Pediatrics and I have heard wonderful things about her, too.

Our first impression of Dr. Dehovitz was perhaps that she was a bit cold. She asked to see our list of questions, and while we had some, they were not on paper. What it came down to was, “would she support and guide us as we raised our child as a vegetarian, and what was her protocol for immunizations?”

We heard all the things we needed to hear and then some. I knew when she said that she doesn’t over-prescribe drugs and antibiotics, that she had my husband at hello… even if it were a bit cold.

Dr. Dehovitz’s practice is on Pierrepont Street just one block from the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The office is bright and welcoming, with shelves of books for children and parents alike. The waiting area is also outfitted with tons of toys for toddlers, while the examination rooms have windows that resemble that of a ship’s. If you don’t have children and it’s been decades since you were one yourself, you forget how traumatic of an experience visiting the Dr. can be. Seeing Dr. Dehovitz’s office makes me think that hopefully, the experience is a tad easier on the tykes.

Oh yea, and just as I was feeling all warm and fuzzy, I grabbed her business card on the way out. I said to J, isn’t it totally freaky that they have some little kid dressed in a devil suit representing their practice? “Definitely, but I kind of like it.”

What can I say, twisted senses of humor I guess!

What started out as a laid back quest to find the best reusable diapers that would fit our lifestyle, ended in a frenetic feeding frenzy to purchase them today.

I credit Jason with having discovered gDiapers in one of my pregnancy magazines a couple of months ago, and after falling in love, I set out to educate myself on what we would need for our little one to get started. Alas, the “new baby bundle.” Outfitted with 12 tiny gPants (for newborns), six little gPants in gender neutral colors, and one case of gRefills, this bundle is only available via gDiapers’ website and retails for $149.99. Sure other retailers carry gDiapers, but they don’t carry the precious new baby bundle, whose main attraction is the tough-to-get tiny gPant for newborns.

Delighted to purchase a bundle for us to get started, I was met with a message in red that said, “Sorry, but we are currently sold out of the new baby bundle. Click here to be notified when they are back.” Even though there was a lot of time left in my pregnancy for me to purchase them, my heart sank and I regrettably filled out the form to be notified. This was a couple of months ago.

Today at 2:30pm, I received an email from Kelli McKee at gDiapers alerting me that at 1:00pm (PST) the new baby bundle would be back in stock and ready for purchase, but that there was still a very limited stock. Yikes! I had an hour and a half until I could pull the trigger. “Should I go food shopping before, or after?” Dinner would have to wait. I did not want to miss the 4:00 door opener. And apparently, I was not the only one.

I checked in with gDiaper’s Facebook page, of which there are nearly 14,000 fans, and noticed a post from gDiapers at noon that said, “Before Dec of 2009 we only sold three sizes: sm, med, and lg. No tiny g’s just yet. So for 4 years folks (including parents on the gTeam) started their babies in small. And guess what? Diapers.com has an amazing deal on size small everyday g’s and sweet bundle (and individual pants, too!). Check it out.”

“Oh no, they are already trying to create diversion,” I thought. This is going to be war. And sure enough, at 4:00 my time and 1:00 PST, their website crashed. Thinking it would be temporary I refreshed the page frantically to no avail. Thanks to Facebook, though, I was able to stay apprised of what was going on. Almost immediately, fans (myself included) began to post to their wall that they were having problems. Then came the first update by gDiapers an hour later: “We’re experiencing technical difficulties because so many people are logging in to our shop at the same time. Please bear with us. We’re working through this as quickly as possible.” That update received almost 60 comments – some humorous, some annoyed, some sympathetic – within minutes. Sounds crazy, I know, but let’s not forget that the majority of customers are desperate pregnant women with wild and raging hormones!

So after several status updates and pleas by gDiapers staff to layoff the refresh button, I went food shopping. I mean a pregnant woman’s gotta eat, right?! Upon coming home I checked their Facebook page and saw that several users were rejoicing in the fact that they were finally able to buy their bundle. And so, at 5:51pm, nearly two hours after the gDiapers new baby bundle feeding frenzy began, I was able to buy ours!

It does sort of bring to question why there is such little supply for such high demand for the tiny gPants. As one Facebook fan by the name of Tammy suggested to me, “perhaps gdiapers is afraid of going too big too fast. making mass quantities of terrible products might not be worth it to them. in keeping it small, perhaps they’re able to do better quality control.” Point taken, but when there is overwhelming demand and clearly not enough supply, isn’t that when you want to uh, I don’t know, get big-ger? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want them to sell out to Procter & Gamble, but create the supply to meet the demand already!

At last glance, gDiapers staff posted a YouTube video to let us know that they were indeed hard at work to resolve the website crash. Aren’t they happy that this didn’t happen on a Friday!

So here I am at 25 weeks pregnant, and I can say that I finally and officially “feel” pregnant. Running has become more difficult, trips to the bathroom occur every half hour and people stare at my belly as I walk down the street. According to my midwife, my weight gain and size is “on point,” but perhaps most noticeable this week was that at 25 weeks on the dot on Sunday morning, I woke up with my arm draped across my stomach and could actually feel you moving from the outside. So of course I called for your daddy who came darting into the room, placed his hand on my belly, waited patiently and there you were… saying hello to him for the very first time. It makes the whole experience even that much more exciting now that he can be in on the fun!