36: contractions, cute fireman, and coming to terms with pushing a baby through a vagina.

want to know what's a little mind blowing? 

being 36 weeks pregnant. 

it's like, um is this really my life? is it possible to be larger than i am right now? will i ever be able to walk up a flight of stairs without running out of breath again?  there really is a baby, like a human baby, in there, huh? has this seriously been going on for THIRTY SIX WEEKS OF MY LIFE? 

weird stuff, i'm telling ya. 

so far week 36 has been pretty fantastic. 

yesterday, as usual, i was at my parents' house around dinnertime. my dad whipped up this delicious chicken stir fry with carrots and green beans and ginger, YUMMO, and not only was i able to eat all of it, two helpings, i stayed in the kitchen while he cooked it, instead of running waddling for cover in the basement to get away from the nausea making smells. still taking the zofran and pepcid before breakfast and dinner, but every week i am less and less nauseous. you kind of forget what life is like without that constant companion. let me tell you, NAUSEA-FREE LIFE IS GRAND. 

went two whole weeks without getting hydration. (!) 

had several beautiful baby showers, pictures to come someday, and had a good time organizing remy's room. can't wait to get his nursery all set up and beautiful. 

geez remy, spoiled much? 

my friend lilian had her baby, a gorgeous baby boy with tons of dark hair.

i thought travis was going to steal him when we visited lilian and derrick at the hospital. man, that guy looks cute holding a baby.

speaking of travis, check out the sexy business of him in turnout gear. (he's on the left.) firemen are some strange creatures. before i knew travis, i figured fire fighters were all about fire prevention. (which, officially, they are, of course.) but the real truth is that for a fire fighter, nothing could be more like shooting heroin than running into a burning building, smashing down windows and walls, and hosing out flames that are hot enough to melt your gloves, which is what happened to travis in this fire.

i have lost track of how many times i've heard this.
"yeah we got paged out on a fire, but the freakin' home owner had already put it out by the time we got there!" like, these guys are genuinely upset that the fire didn't spread and damage anything.
i love fire fighters.

travis was pretty proud of the amount of soot and ash accumulated from the fire.


so all around, so far it's been a great week. but the best part for me, was a pretty neat discovery.

i am no longer afraid of giving birth.
this is huge for me.

let me explain how this happened.

for one thing, i have been educating myself. for me, this has always been the best cure for fear, education. you may remember how much i love being a student? so i had a good talk with myself and decided i was going to approach labor as if i were studying for a test, probably the most important test i've ever taken. so how did i prepare myself for any other test? get that info into my brain!

i read meghan's book, mind over labor, which started helping me to think about birth in a different way, that i could be in control of the experience, that i have options. i'm still struggling with the notion that my body is perfectly designed to grow and deliver a baby, because the growing part was such a battle. obviously, my body didn't like being pregnant. but the idea that my uterus, cervix, and vagina will work in harmony to expel a baby (seriously!?) is less and less freaky and more and more believable.

after that book, i read liana's copy of hynobirthing, the mongan method. this book had a very interesting history of birth and why we think about birth the way we do. and then the part i thought sounded crazy until i read the book: how to train yourself to go into self hypnosis and deep relaxation to control pain and allow your body to work correctly during labor. go {here} for a more in depth explanation. pretty fascinating stuff.

the book came with several CDs to help you practice breathing and relaxation exercises. i was skeptical, but they work. so well that sometimes i fall asleep while i practice them, such a deep sleep i don't realize i'm asleep until i wake up three hours later. i don't know how the relaxation will go when i'm in extreme pain, but i'm excited to try it out.

travis and i also watched the documentary, the business of being born. be prepared to see loads of boobs if you watch this. travis was a little traumatized, i think. i was delighted to discover that watching women give birth didn't send me into fits of tears, though. the difference was that these women were in different positions than the ones i had previously seen. i have a lot of negative feelings about spreading my legs, feet in the stirrups, and having doctors poking around down there, completely out of my control. watching women giving birth sitting up or in a tub, not with their parts totally exposed, wasn't scary at all.

and then i have also been looking into epidurals, how they work, what the risks are, etc. getting my birth plan all set. it's really hard to know what you will want in a situation you have never been in, with a pain level you have only heard explained to you. i don't want to commit to going unmedicated, because maybe in those moments, i'll want the medication. i do want to arm myself with preparation and knowledge so that if i feel able to go without the meds, i'll be ready.

most importantly, i no longer want an elective c-section. (!)

okay, that was long. now for the experience this week that led to the cool discovery of not being afraid of giving birth.

a few days ago travis and i were at ikea, buying a changing table and i started having contractions. i've been having the painless, practice braxton hicks contractions for the past few weeks. these contractions were not those. obviously, the pain level was far from what labor will be like, but these ones hurt. enough that i had to stop walking, bend over, and hold onto whatever was in closest grabbing reach. we started timing them. three to four minutes apart, lasting a minute and a half. i ended up finding a chair, because i couldn't keep up with travis. he found the changing table, bought it, and we left. the contractions lasted two hours, and then slowed down.

then later that night, my mom and i were out shopping at walmart and they started coming again, this time with even more intensity. three to four minutes apart, lasting a minute and a half. painful enough that walking was hard work. this lasted another hour, and then they slowed down again, but during the night, they were painful enough i woke up a few times. by morning, they were mostly gone.

the thing that was so surprising, was how exciting it was! i didn't feel any fear, just pure excitement that maybe this was it! maybe remington was making his appearance and we were going to meet him! i welcomed the pain, (again, i know this pain is nothing compared to what will come.) because the pain meant these contractions might be the real thing. i loved seeing the looks on travis and my mom's faces, looks of such excitement. i am so ready to give birth! seriously, who the H am i? never thought i would say that.

well that's pretty much it.
now to get back to the ridiculous amount of obsessive cleaning and organizing going on. all i want to do is clean everything in sight. think i'll go tackle the hall closet next.

worrying about things is way scarier than dealing with them.
so ready to face and conquer this lifetime worry of mine, giving birth.

xo

90 percent work and 10 percent play.

you know when you get together with family or friends and you hear yourself talking and talking about one thing and in your head you're like, shut up, these people don't care.

but you're just obsessed and can't seem to focus on anything else. that is what has happened to my life with my new job. travis, bless him, listens to me ramble on and on and on and ON about the kids i work with. i'm just in love. even when they yell at me, swear at me, and lie to my face, like one girl who spilled milk on the carpet and then quickly tossed a magazine on top of it and then played dumb when i told her to clean up her mess, i still love them.

it's unbelievable how exhausted i am after working an 8 hour shift. the first week of work, i found myself acting very snippy and short tempered. i went to a family party and found that the usual patience i have with certain family members who make me crazy was dried up. no patience left in the reserves. i couldn't figure it out and then i realized, oh, i put up with bullshit all day long. i don't have any more room for bullshit putting up with after work. yikes.

what kind of bullshit you ask? it comes in the form of a girl yelling "it's none of your damn business" when you ask her how things are going with her mom after she gets off a pretty intense phone call. it's dealing with a girl who has borderline personality disorder and trying to decide which lies to call her out on and which ones just aren't worth it. it's hearing a boy who has a juggalo background tell racist jokes and trying to explain to him why that's not appropriate when he has a lifetime of indoctrination saying otherwise.

oh and then there's the heartbreaking stuff. like the boy who is filled with grief and shame over stealing an older woman's prescriptions, and then her family assuming the older woman can't remember where she put them and then putting her in a nursing home. the girls in groups therapy agreeing that they will probably never be with a sober guy because the sober ones are too boring. it's the girl who tells you stories about her mom's boyfriends coming into her room late at night. the hopelessness in a girl's eyes when she tells you she is out of options. that her choices are to run from treatment, or go back to her 25 year old boyfriend, or go live with her mom and her pedophile boyfriend, or go to foster care. what on earth am i supposed to say to her to make her okay? last night, one girl was talking about these cute hot pink shorts she used to have. and how she doesn't have them anymore because she was pushed out of a window at a party when she was drunk and high and the paramedics had to cut her out of those shorts. one girl talked about how her mom had stolen her paychecks to pay rent. there are a thousand stories just like these.

and then you start to realize how impossibly hard it is to change the world.

but there are the good moments too. the moments that keep me driving back to work. like when a girl tells you she has decided to stay sober. and not to run anymore. or the moments when you are out back playing catch with the boys and they just seem like regular kids, not kids who assault police officers or steal prescriptions or shoot up. or like yesterday, when i finally got the girls to do a workout with me and seeing their pride in accomplishing something hard, like holding a plank position for two minutes or doing a certain amount of lunges. or having a guitar lesson with a boy who is so shy but so incredibly talented. and then watching him teach his peer what he learned. oh these kids are so full of potential!

working with adolescent boys is tricky. they are all so sweet to me, and i'm not stupid; i know why. it's tricky to put those boundaries in place, like what do you say to the 16 year old boy who keeps calling you "darlin" and what do you say when at dinner, one kid announces that every boy the unit has a crush on you. "sorry, i'm happily married." i replied. but i am always wary of advances or flirting. my parents worry about those adolescent boys assaulting me. but i want to have faith in them, even in spite of what my past has taught me about what boys are capable of. i just love them. i don't know if i completely understand unconditional love, but i think that's what i feel for these kids.

see, i told you all. these kids have taken over my life.
but there really are other things going on. sort of.
 the week before last with all the fires, travis worked 130 hours.
 yeah, i didn't know there were that many hours in a week.
so we kind of just work. a lot. but this week we made it a point to squeeze in some summer fun.

 travis and his crew hard at work. 

 mountain biking with my dad

 my mom and i doing our usual thing

 

 day at the pool together

 kayaking and swimming in east canyon 

 getting slurpees on 7-11, naturally.

we are all about work around here lately, but i'm thankful we were able to spend a little time together this week. 

please don't have children if you don't plan to even try to teach them right from wrong.

thanks, xo

a very long rambling post about words, firemen, and being someone's wife.

everyone is born with a natural ability of some kind. some call them talents, some call them superpowers. everyone has at least one. travis is an athlete. he's fast, he can jump high, he is coordinated and agile without trying. my mom can make a friend anywhere. my brother reed is a quick learner. i was born with two abilities that come naturally, almost as easy as breathing or some other function my body performs without me thinking too much about it. (pooping probably, since as you know from previous posts, i poop like clockwork.)

my superpowers are singing and language. i've been singing since before i could talk. it's always just been easy. my mom taught me to sing in a round with her when i was just learning to make words. i have always been able to pick out harmonies and find pitch. when i took voice lessons, everything clicked, breath techniques, projecting, etc. music brings me a great deal of joy and i'm always grateful i was born with this talent.

my other superpower has always been in words. my mom tells the story of when i was a baby learning to talk and how my understanding of english grammar was very advanced. my parents were enjoying my parroting of what they would say, so they decided to challenge me with a long word.
"say, Yugoslavia!" they prompted.
"I go slavia!" i replied.

i was that kid who knew how to read before starting school. i was writing my name in cursive before kindergarten. that geeky kid with giant glasses and her nose in a book was always me. i was reading on a college level by third grade. not only have i always been a great reader, but i'm a fast reader, something that has really come in handy for college. my mom read to me from the time i was born and always made reading a huge priority, and i'm thankful to her for nurturing this ability.

i'm not saying all this to brag. i'm terrible at a lot of things, like anyone else. math. racquetball. reading charts and graphs. understanding the NFL. keeping score in games. driving. oh, reading a map, kills me. like i stay home sometimes rather than go out and find the address of events. i'm ashamed to admit this, but i don't completely understand how to use street names and numbers to find places. having a gps on my smart phone has changed my life.

ok, but i'm rambling here. the point to all this thinking was that i have been considering the word 'wife' the past few weeks. what i really want to write about is what it's like being a fireman's wife and what i have learned from this. but i just hate the word 'wife'. ever since i was a little kid playing house, i have hated this word. i used to say, "and this is my husband" in pretend play rather than introduce myself as someone's wife. the reason i got to rambling about talents is because i was thinking about how even as a kid i used to think about words a lot. i'm sure many of you were the same way, but for those of you who aren't, that's why i can remember hating that word even as a 7 year old.

now that i technically am someone's wife, i have been in plenty of situations where i had to introduce myself as such. "hi, i'm travis's wife." at fire department get-togethers. but it still bothers me and i'm not sure why. even as a kid, i wasn't so sure about the idea of "belonging" to someone else. i didn't know if i really ever would get married and as you know i kept my last name. because i am and always have been collette charles. just because it's a western custom for the woman to take the man's last name, doesn't mean it's the only right, moral choice to make. in many places in africa, each member of the family is given their own last name. when travis asked me why i didn't want to change my name, i asked him, do you want to take my last name? of course he didn't. i asked why. he replied that he was a bodtcher, not a charles. i told him the same principle applied to me. it's a hassle and people are always confused about why my name is different from his, but it's important to me. i have always been a little funny about my name. once in 5th grade, i changed the spelling of my name to "kollette" and insisted that everyone else respect it, including my teacher.

again with the rambling.

so awhile ago i was pondering different blogs i could write that would gather large audiences and possibly make me some money. i considered a mormon feminist mommy blog, since that combines a lot of things that seem contrary to each other on the surface. obviously this would be later if i ever get the courage to be a mommy. another blog i thought about was a fire wife blog. people are always interested in firemen. firemen are universally loved, like puppies or you know, some other thing that only does good for other people. people are interested in what it's like to be married to a fireman, too, because their hours are strange and their job is more of a lifestyle. but writing a blog about what it's like being the wife of a fireman turned me off completely. because being a wife to a fireman is only a very tiny piece of who i am. being married to travis is obviously a giant part of my life. but to write an entire blog about being his wife wouldn't be honest at all.

but i thought, i could write a post or two about it. plus, he's at work now and i'm a tidtch bored and lonely. might as well make a list of why i feel that way, right? and i know that once we have kids, being a fire wife will be completely different and much more difficult, but these are things i have learned in the year and a half that i have been a fire wife.

* being married to a fireman gives you something interesting to talk about to other people.
* you instantly have a connection to the entire fire community. doesn't matter what department they work for or if you even know them at all, you're family.
* travis works 48 hours on and then has 4 days off. this means i will spend 1/3 of my life sleeping alone. unless i take another fireman husband, as my brother zane has suggested.
* i don't think of weeks as having 7 days. i am always counting down from four, from the day travis comes home until the day travis goes back to work. the two days he is gone are almost not even counted as weekdays for me, as strange as that sounds.
* i know that for the next thirty years, travis will work his share of valentine's days, thanksgivings, christmases, and 4th of julys. being a person who values holiday traditions, this bothers me immensely.
* 9/11 has taken on a new meaning for me. it could just be that i'm getting older and starting to appreciate the gravity of the terrorist attack, but watching the footage this year of those firemen at ground zero brought me to tears in a much more personal way than ever before.
* although i lived on my own for four years before marrying travis, i am adjusting to living alone in a completely different way than when i had roommates. i know that for two to three days a week, i will be killing my own spiders, taking out the trash, and checking the house for intruders alone. sometimes, this is awful.
* men in uniform are attractive. my man in his uniform is a turn on.
* being married to a fireman means that at any given moment during his shift, he can get a call. it doesn't matter if you're there visiting him. it doesn't matter if you're telling him an amazing story over the phone. the tones go off, and he has to put you second. that was really hard to get used to.
* being married to a fireman means that you worry about him. you pray that when he goes on a freeway call, no one slams into his ambulance. you pray that no one gets violent or that might get to sleep the entire night through so he won't be exhausted on his four off. you pray that people will stop drinking and driving so that he won't be in danger when he's on the roads late at night. you worry about him all the time.
* you think about having children and you worry that you won't be able to handle being a single parent 1/3 of the time.
* sometimes you feel jealous that he gets to be the hero all the time while you're home alone.
* you go to family events, or to hang out with friends, and feel like a widow. people ask where your husband is and you are always saying, oh he's at work.
* sometimes i make the effort to go out and have a good time when he's working. then i feel sad that i have had adventures without him and slightly bitter that he missed the good times.
* i feel extreme pride in him.
* i love getting to know the men he works with and feeling their acceptance.

so there you have it. the life of the fire wife. or as i would rather say, my fireman husband's effect on my life.

travis standing in the rubble after a big structure fire last winter.
photo courtesy of kslnews.com

pinning travis's badge after he was officially sworn in as a murry firefighter/paramedic.

doing what a fire wife does best...
remember that time i had an identity crisis
and dyed my hair blonde...

visiting travis on his birthday while we were still dating. pretty enamored with the uniform.