Our big weekend

1. Friday night. We celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary. But first K stopped off at one of our pregnancy's support group 'graduates' to pick up her old maternity clothes and meet the baby. She's a single mom and feeling very overwhelmed right now with her 5 week old. She had an anxiety attack when she left her baby for 15 minutes. I'm grateful to have a partner. The maternity clothes are awesome and really expand my wardrobe which is starting to shrink as I slowly outgrow the maternity clothes I have. Can I really get bigger than this?

Our anniversary celebration was fabulous. We went to Mrs. K's Tollhouse in Silver Spring, the restaurant we were married in. The food was fabulous - I had a pear salad, pumpkin-apple ravioli, and strawberry cheesecake. I splurged on my strict diet because I felt I deserved it at least for one night. Cheesecake is definitely not low fat! But it was so good. I love the annual tradition of dressing up, eating really decadent food, and spending a beautiful evening with my wife. I'm sure I'll treasure this even more next year.

2. Saturday morning. Infant Safety & CPR class. It was a very useful class. Everything was hands on and we practiced everything again and again, so now I feel like if I'm in a panic situation, everything will just come to me naturally. Makes me feel more secure about staying home alone with the baby.

After the class we stopped by to pick up a free changing table posted on our Silver Spring moms listserv. We weren't going to get a changing table but this one was free, so... Now I am so thankful! It adds so much storage to our nursery. We've been piling all diapers and supplies into the shelf on the bottom. It doesn't match the furniture in our room, but it's free so who care. I love that we haven't bought any furniture for our nursery (the glider was a gift from my parents) but we are completely set and ready to go. People have been so generous with their hand-me-downs.

3. Saturday night. Our baby shower with our local friends. It was a Star Wars themed shower based on the Star Wars memorabilia K has put into our nursery. It was a great turnout - a party style shower, no games, just hanging out with our friends. Totally what we want. It was so much fun! Our friends are fabulous. There was a big group gift of a black play pen and bum genius cloth diapers, both things we really wanted but thought were too expensive to expect as a gift. They surprised us! The black play pen is awesome because it will match our living room. Our home is small and if we fill it with a bunch of random pastel colored baby items, it will look even smaller.

Another cool gift was an original Star Wars comic book, the first issue ever printed, from 1977. It was K's friend J's original copy bought in 1977. We framed this and hung it in the nursery and it looks great.

All of the kids at the party (I think there were 8) got together and decorate onesies and a canvas tote bag with sayings like "I love my mommies, I'm J's favorite, K's favorite child, Will work for cookies". I don't know where or when this was done - it was presented to us as a surprise. There are some pretty cool ones that we can't wait to use.

C gave me some nursing clothes - two shirts and a swim suit. It took me a while to understand how to use them, but once I did, I was impressed. They look just like normal clothes and then you lift something up and there's your boob. I also got a very nice nursing cover from K's friend T. It's black and white floral, very hip and modern looking. All of our friends here in the liberal north are big breastfeeding advocates and like to say "I should be able to feed my child whenever I want." They never cover their breasts. I'm from conservative FL. Showing my nipples to the world makes me uncomfortable. I plan to be discreet.

A couple A & E gave us their hand-me-down Graco Snugride Infant Carseat and Snap N Go stroller. This is a really great hand-me-down. They only have one kid and she only used these pieces for less than 9 months. This saves us about $130.

K and I also exchanged gifts. I gave K an designer diaper bag by LeSportSac. Purses are very important to her, and she just couldn't handle the thought of carrying a cutesy diaper bag. We were given a pastel sesame street bag from my grandma and it really disturbed K. So the diaper bag makes here very happy. She gave me a delivery gown called 'Pretty Pushers'. It's a purple dress that I can wear instead of a hospital gown with a matching headband. My ass won't show in the back and I can be comfortable while pushing this one out. It's very cute and I love it.

We were so excited about all of this that we went home and sorted through it and put it all away that night. Usually something like this would take us days. We loved all of our gifts, which is wonderful. We're finally starting to feel really prepared for this baby, though there are still a few things needed on our 'essentials' list. Luckily there is one more baby shower on the horizon - K's work is throwing one in April.

4. Sunday morning. We spoke to the K-8 kids in our church about 'different types of families'. We read 'And Tango Makes Three' then discussed what it means to be a Welcoming Congregation and talked about different kinds of families people knew about. Then K and I talked about our family. K explained that a very nice man that we don't know gave us a special gift of sperm so that we could have a family together, and we are very thankful for that man and his gift. The kids asked questions like what will the baby call you (Amma and Mommy), what will the baby be named (we said we weren't sure if it was a boy so they gave us some suggestions. It was cute.

Then we broke off into groups and we talked to the grades 5-8 youth. First we talked about the power of language and specifically the "That's so gay" phrase. Then we talked about what marriage really means. They said 'love, commitment'. We said yes, but it has a bigger meaning legally regarding how the government views your family. We talked about hospital visitation, insurance, death, social security, inheritance tax. We talked about how our church goes each year to talk to our legislators in MD about same-sex marriage and why this issue is so important to our church. It seemed okay, but kids that age are so quiet. All were quiet except for the one 'punk' kid who said things like "If my friends and I see someone being a racist, we commit a hate crime on them." I don't even know what he means be that. He said lots of other things that made us uncomfortable and the other kids were mostly quiet. We read a poem from the COLAGE website about growing up with two moms and then asked what the kids thoughts of the poem. One kid commented that the poem was well-written and had good parallel structure, and then when the others said they didn't know what that meant, he raised his hand and asked if he could expand on parallel structure. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. But all in all I would say it went well.

5. Sunday afternoon. Spring cleaning. We're busy so we doing this in bits and pieces, starting yesterday. We organized our entry way closets, making room for strollers, and scrubbed the walls and floors. It's the smallest room in the house but it looks great, and it's a start. We were supposed to have our pregnancy support group but it was cancelled and I'm thankful. We had a big enough weekend already.

Tonight is our Baby Care Basics class, then it's a thankfully quiet week from there.