Recently, Jenny took a gestational-diabetes screen. The screening entailed chugging a bottle of “glucola,” waiting an hour, then having her blood drawn. Happily, the unnaturally orange, unimaginably sweet glucola was not nearly as horrid as she’d expected. Having been advised that it tastes better chilled, she’d put it in the fridge the night before, and it tasted more or less like a half dozen melted orange popsicles. The results were fine: The doctor isn’t concerned that Jenny might have gestational diabetes, which is great. What we didn’t know was that when her blood was checked for diabetes, it was also checked for iron — and found wanting. Like the majority of pregnant women, Jenny has developed mild iron-deficiency anemia as a result of her increased blood volume, Eggplant’s needs for iron, and other pregnancy-related factors.

Jenny got this news from a random nurse who was not her obstetrician’s nurse, under slightly unusual conditions (too boring to explain), very late on a Friday. Perhaps that explains the miscommunication that followed. The nurse explained that the anemia could easily be treated with iron supplements and went on to explain that Jenny should get the kind of iron called ferrous gluconate, taking 320mg per day. Jenny confirmed to be sure, “320mg per day?” “Yes, that’s right,” said the nurse.

Imagine Jenny’s surprise when she stopped by the drugstore after work and discovered that the only ferrous gluconate in the store came in 27mg tablets. She did the math in her head. She’d have to take around twelve pills a day to get the right dosage. What a pain! Jenny went home and popped twelve iron pills. She mentioned her concern about the dosage to John, and they agreed she’d call the doc on Monday and see if maybe there was a prescription version of the pill that comes in the correct dosage.

On Saturday, she popped twelve more iron pills. She was starting to worry that the dosage was incorrect. No one has to take twelve pills of anything — plus, the label on the ferrous gluconate says to take one a day. But she had double-checked the dosage with the nurse and had it confirmed, so it must be right! Maybe she was just really, really anemic. Still, she decided that for the next day she’d try to spread out the dosage a bit.

On Sunday, Jenny took six iron pills in the early afternoon and six at night. It was tricky to figure out when to take them, since the nurse had advised her not to take the iron within two hours of eating dairy, taking her prenatal vitamin, or taking antacids. Since Jenny eats a lot of dairy these days and has been chewing Tums wafers like they’re candy (due to the daily heartburn that’s afflicted her for the past few months), this required some tricky scheduling. She was beginning to dread having to work this out every day for the next three months of pregnancy.

On Monday morning, Jenny phoned the doctor’s office and was promised a return call by the end of the day. Late in the afternoon, the doctor’s nurse called, and Jenny explained the situation. There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then the nurse said, “320mg is for ferrous sulfate. For ferrous gluconate, you should be taking 27mg a day.”

Aarrgh! Jenny tried to remain calm while the nurse asked how many she’d taken so far, and asked some rather personal questions about her, ahem, stool. Eventually, the nurse was convinced that Jenny was going to be fine and told her not to worry. “But have I done any harm to the baby?” The nurse reckoned not but offered to ask the doc just to be absolutely sure. (Thank you, nurse!) She called back a little while later with the doctor’s assessment that no harm had been done to Eggplant. PHEW! She also assured Jenny she didn’t need to make herself crazy trying to dodge the dairy and antacids and gave her some saner guidelines for taking her daily iron.

Jenny’s still not sure whether the first nurse messed up or whether Jenny merely misheard her. It really could have been either. But she’s resolved only to take medical advice from her doc or the doc’s nurse from now on, just in case.

After megadosing on iron for a weekend, she’s back on track with a single pill a day. Any temporary superpowers she acquired as a result of the metallic mishap have surely subsided. However, it might be her imagination, but she thinks she feels a little more energetic and less breathless than before. She’s optimistic that maybe all this time she thought it was the pregnancy making her so fatigued and out of breath when it was mostly the anemia. Here’s hoping!

Recently we’ve enjoyed a spate of social occasions with loved ones:

• Dinner with Beverly and Rick at BOKA. We enjoyed the color-changing walls, fantastic food, and a lively conversation about baby names. (Jenny also enjoyed BOKA’s fine selection of nonalcoholic cocktails — most restaurants can’t seem to come up with anything more imaginative than juice with soda water.) Beverly, a well-respected editor, is something of a name expert, and she and Rick enlightened and entertained us for several hours, assisted by a fat stack of naming books, which they’ve now loaned us. It was a wonderful evening, boasting that elusive, perfect trio of good food, good company, and good conversation.
• Nikchick, Chris, and Kate were the first people we had over for dinner at our new pad. We had a great time catching up with them (hadn’t seen Nikchick since the summer!) and celebrating Nik’s birthday, and we gave them the keys to what she’s been calling the Pay It Forward car (aka the Geo Prizm). Yay! We hope it will not be so long before the next time we have the pleasure of their company.
• Jenny’s dear friend Kathryn was in town for the holidays, and we got to see her and her partner, Dave, and our friend Jim a couple of times: The weekend before Thanksgiving, we all cooked and played games at Jim’s mammoth bachelor pad. Then, the Friday after Thanksgiving, the gang came by our place for more cooking together, eating, and games. Kathryn fortified us with leftovers from their family Thanksgiving up in Mount Vernon, plus a treasured holiday gift from her parents, who are expert mushroom hunters: a box full of morels! But the best gift of all was seeing Kathryn and Dave. We see them so seldom that seeing them twice in a week was a special treat.
• We spent Thanksgiving with some of John’s family and others: John’s cousin Tracy and her fiance, Chris, live in town, as do John’s cousin David and his wife, Diana. Diana’s brother, Mike, and his wife, Renae, hosted the holiday at their place, and assorted friends joined us as well. This was the third Seattle gathering of the extended-younger-Tynes-generation clan, officially making it a tradition. We are enjoying the potluck aspect of this newly minted Thanksgiving ritual. Whoever hosts takes care of the turkey and the quintessential side dishes, while the rest of us bring assorted appetizers, sides, wine, and desserts. The food was marvelous, as Mike is a devoted home chef. Boy, did he look tired after the meal was over though! One of these years it may be our turn to host Thanksgiving, and we’ll know just how he feels. We enjoy the company of these folks tremendously and always wish we had occasion to visit with them more often throughout the year.

We have much more socializing in the near future with various friends and family. We’re glad they’re all sensible enough to “book us” now, while Jenny’s still midpregnancy and not too wiped out. We have a feeling that January and February will be a lot less social for us. Not only is Jenny likely to be running out of steam, but we’re signed up for several childbirth and newborn classes at the hospital and will undoubtedly be doing a lot of last-minute shopping for baby supplies. Jenny’s also hoping to cook and freeze copious quantities of meals so we don’t have to cook for a while post-baby. Plus, John’s company’s game launches in January, which may keep him a bit preoccupied. So for the remainder of December, we’re looking forward to banking a lot of loved-ones time to sustain us.

Plus, bonus cats.

In just the last few weeks, Jenny’s abdomen has acquired a new and rather significant shape.

That’s right — she’s full of baby! We have made several shopping trips to stock up on maternity clothes, although some of John’s old shirts are now suddenly suitable for around-the-house use.

The extra mass and accompanying strain often leave Jenny tired. Fortunately, the world is full of comfortable pieces of furniture where she and the baby-to-be can take it easy. After a glorious Thanksgiving dinner with family, for example, Jenny settled into this comfy armchair.

Of course, after that same dinner John felt like he must be pregnant too . . .

We’ve added a baby-registry page to our website. You’ll find it in the right-hand column under “Pages.” 

As we breach the beginning of the third trimester of Jenny’s pregnancy, our little tyke-to-be is eggplant-sized. Imagine! All her physiological structures are in place, and her main job for the next three months is just to grow, grow, grow.

We can see it happening: Jenny’s belly has really bloomed out this past month. Can it really keep getting bigger??

At this stage, people are beginning to ask whether we’ve picked out a name for our little Eggplant. Truth is, early on we generated a list of nearly a hundred names that one or the other of us liked. We did a round of voting and narrowed down the serious contenders to around 33, but another 41 were pretty close behind. (Imagine two writers trying to choose just one name . . .)

Part of the problem is we have such similar aesthetic tastes. We like similar design, décor, and clothing and have huge areas of overlap in our tastes in art, music, and theatre.

And we like a lot of the same names because they suit our aesthetic. After checking out the Social Security Administration’s data on what names have been most popular in the past few years, we posit there are two kinds of parents: those who make up or borrow new, fashionable names for their kids and those who dig up old chestnuts. In the first camp are parents of Madisons, Aidens, Masons, and Kaylas. In the latter are the parents of Sophias, Elijahs, Hannahs, and Calebs.

For better or for worse, we’re squarely in the old-chestnut camp. A lot of the names we like are musty old monikers, with a distinct dowdiness to them. They’re a bit twee. As we discovered, many of these names are in vogue right now – which stunned us, since we’ve both always been a bit out of step with what was trendy, even anachronistic. Neither of us has ever been what you’d call a lightning rod for the zeitgeist.

But names we like, like Isabella, Olivia, Abigail, and Lily, are all wildly popular these days. Our friend Darla says there are three Olivias in her baby daughter’s child-care class, and three Isabelle/Isabellas. So much for being out of step.

We’ve decided to rule out anything that trendy. Both of us grew up with very common names and recognize the value in having a name that stands out just a little. Jenny remembers one year at her high school when among the fifteen varsity, JV, and frosh cheerleaders, there were five Jennifers/Jennys.

On the other hand, we also know that kids often don’t like standing out too much. So names like Dandelion and Petra are no longer on our list. (However, we’re still smitten with a name we made up, Aubergine, which sounds like it should be the name of a turn-of-the-century, pinafore-bedecked schoolgirl with ringlets but is actually another name for eggplant. Would our little Eggplant ever forgive us for naming her after a fruit, and a nightshade at that?)

Other names we like we’ve ruled out because although they are not fashionable now they were popular very recently. The bloom has somewhat faded off the rose, as it were. Erin and Sabrina are some examples of this. Again, this comes as something as a surprise, probably because there just aren’t a lot of children in our Lives.

In the interest of narrowing down our list, we’ve weeded out names whose nicknames sound too much like the nicknames for more popular names. (We love the old-fashioned name Adeline, for example, but with all the young Addisons and Madisons out there these days, we’d be one of sixty parents shouting “[M]Addie! Time to go home!” at the playground. (These sound like picky details, we know, but we’ve got to shorten that list somehow!)

We also axed one of Jenny’s favorite names, Violet, when we learned that’s what Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck named their little girl two years ago. We thought of the name ourselves, but it would always look like we’d copied a pair of celebrities. Definitely not our style.

That still leaves a lot of names though.

When we describe our naming deliberations to friends, they often want to problem solve for us, offering time-saving solutions (”Oh, just wait till she’s born and see what she looks like.”) or platitudes (”Geez, who cares if a name is popular or if Jen and Ben like it too? You should name her whatever name you like best.”) Such loved ones, though well meaning, miss the point. The name game isn’t only about winning; it’s about playing. We have enjoyed the journey as much as the destination. It’s fun to think about names! We are not burdened by the process; we’re delighted.

We only wish we had more opportunities to use more of the wonderful names we’ve found. Since we don’t plan to have more children, and we’ve already got a full complement of pets, we are pretty sure this means some fiction writing is in order. This thought does not displease us.

From the A Word A Day email newsletter, October 25, 2007:

This week’s theme: There is a word for it.nosism (NO-siz-em) nounThe use of ‘we’ in referring to oneself.

[From Latin nos (we).]

As it’s often used by editors, it’s also known as the “editorial we”. It’s also called “the royal we” owing to its frequent use by royalty. Mark Twain once said, “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we’.”

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

“We must avoid both egoism and nosism in order to realize the glory of humanity.” —J. Odera Oruka; Philosophy, Humanity and Ecology; Diane Publishing; 1996.

How delightful there’s a word for it.

Most of the time at Gracey’s Mansion, we refer to ourselves as “we,” which is not nosism but simply a straightforward use of the first-person-plural point of view. Every once in a while, however, we accidentally slip into nosism, as, for example, when we say “We are six months pregnant.”

Ahem.

We have found a family car we love! It’s big enough, new enough, in our budget, and astoundingly well reviewed. This model has all manner of airbags and performed very well in crash tests. It’s roomy enough for John, who is too tall for many cars, and it’s got the universal LATCH system for child car seats.

Plus, it’s so much classier than any car either of us has ever owned — and so much newer than any car either of us has owned in close to a decade — that we find ourselves saying things like “It’s too nice! It’s so comfortable! We don’t deserve a car this good!”

Of course, considering that our previous car, the Geo Prizm, has manual locks, manual windows, and no trunk latch in the cab, it does not take much to impress us.

The Prizm, incidentally, has a legacy that we are upholding. It was given to us for free by our friends Rob and Lisa, who had likewise received it for free from a friend of theirs. We are keeping this chain letter of a car going by giving it in turn to friends of ours.

The goodwill Prizm is getting old and eventually will cease to be a welcome gift. We hope that the last recipient in the chain will give it to a charity able to use some of the parts.

But meanwhile . . .

Hello, new car! We love you!

It’s odd, living with cats. Sometimes we remember that they aren’t simply Trouble, Eliot, and Monkey but are in fact small furry animals who, somewhat bizarrely, live in our home. If they were spiders or cockroaches we’d shoo them out, but instead they’re on our side, playing for the same team.

You learn to look for them. Every time you enter a room, you take stock of where the cats are — or aren’t. When we moved into this apartment, we bought several fuzzy cat beds and scattered them around the place, and sure enough the cats now sleep in them all the time. But they like other places, too, inexplicable ones. Trouble likes to sleep on the floor beneath the desk. Eliot tends to sprawl out anywhere on the carpet. And while Monkey favors a particular bed, she has shoved it up against a piece of furniture so it sits at an angle and then snuggles up into it, not quite level with the floor.

They talk to us, and sometimes it’s clear what they want. In the morning there’s almost always one or more cats sitting outside our bedroom door. Their voices are very distinctive — to us, at least — so we have a pretty good idea which cat is outside, mewling at us to come out and start the day, already.

They go through phases. At our last apartment, the deployment of canned cat food was a major event in the household. We had to divvy it into three bowls so they wouldn’t all crowd around one, and we’d put Eliot’s off by himself so the girls wouldn’t bully him away from the chow. Now in our new place, the food is the same, but only Eliot gets excited about it. The girls come wandering in later and eat it or don’t. Eliot, however, sends a clear signal that he is expecting yummy wet food when the evening’s final minutes are stretching out towards bedtime.

We like our Life with Cats. We eagerly await the changes that come when this becomes Life with Baby and Cats. Wish us luck!

One of the “joys” of pregnancy, Jenny has discovered, is the swelling – and we don’t just mean her belly. One day several weeks ago, Jenny came home from work and her feet felt funny, stiff. She peeled off her socks – which seemed tighter than usual – and discovered that her feet and ankles had swollen up like great water balloons. It was the most horrendous sight she had seen in some time.

Since then, her feet have been swelling regularly, almost daily. By the time she gets home from work, her feet are puffed up like pincushions. And her hands have gotten in on the fun too. To mix things up, though, her hands swell at night. She wakes up in the middle of the night and finds her hands puffy like down mittens, so swollen that she can’t remove her wedding ring easily, even though her finger hurts.

Once in a while she wakes up in the morning with a puffy face too, but it usually goes away after an hour or so. Thank heavens.

This problem is known as edema and is very, very common in pregnant women, though Jenny wasn’t expecting it till much later in her pregnancy. The edema is partly the result of all that extra blood she’s carrying around now. (She started with 3.5 quarts like a normal human, but by the time the baby’s born there will be 5.5 quarts pumping in her veins!) It pools in the extremities when they don’t get moved around or when they have the misfortune of being the lowest place on her body. And with the growing uterus pinching off blood vessels, circulation is slowed down too. Joy!

Edema is not life-threatening nor even especially painful. It’s just kind of ugly. You can allegedly manage it by moving around more often, elevating the swollen parts, drinking lots of water (which helps “flush” the system), and not overdoing it on salt. Jenny hasn’t found most of these suggestions to be more than occasionally effective, but, frankly, swollen feet and hands are among the least of her pregnancy concerns.

With one exception. She’s been worried about not being able to take off her wedding ring. Horror stories abound on the internet of women whose wedding rings had to be cut off either late in pregnancy or during delivery. These women exhort the newly pregnant on mommy-to-be message boards from coast to coast: “Don’t let this happen to you. Take off your ring while you still can!”

But how to know when it’s time to take off the ring for good? How long should she push her luck? Jenny decided that if her ring would not come off once a day for five days in a row, she would take it off for the duration of the pregnancy, a threshold that was reached in late October. But she was distressed by the idea of running around town without a wedding ring. Some women wear their ring on a chain around their necks, but Jenny was worried she’d lose it. She’s had a lot of necklaces break and didn’t want to take the chance.

Fortunately the internet, full of scary stories, is also full of solutions, and we found this one: Get a temporary wedding ring, cheap, in a bigger size. Brilliant! Jenny’s ring is a plain platinum band, so she was able to look for a simple band in silver, which the internet (oh, happy happy internet!) provided by way of Gem Avenue at Amazon.com.

Her temp ring arrived a few days later and other than its diameter and weight (and lack of personalized engraving inside) is indistinguishable from her real ring. And at under $20, including shipping charges, it won’t be a big deal to replace should it be lost or cut off. Jenny’s real wedding ring, the one John gave her on our wedding day, is now tucked in its little ring box, where it will rest safely until it fits her finger once more.

The other night at the table just before dinner, John asked Jenny to marry him again and slipped the new ring on her finger with some words of love. It feels like we’re on our honeymoon all over again.