• Little Pau

The Stats

Paulo Ulises Arreaza was born on Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 10:22 a.m. He weighed 7 lbs 15 oz and measured 21.5 inches. We call him Pau.

The Details

I started having contractions sometime after midnight, but I'd been contracting on and off for days so I didn't make a big deal of it. I went to bed and tried to sleep through intermittent pain until around 4:30 a.m., when I realized the pain was consistent and coming every five minutes or so - it was time.

I woke up Tony, who woke up my mom and called his sister so that she could come stay with Luki. He also sent a few text messages to some key folks and, of course, updated his Facebook status.

We got to the hospital by 6 a.m. and the contractions were about three minutes apart. My nurse midwife checked my cervix and saw I was seven centimeters dilated. "Looks like you're going to have a baby this morning," she said. "You think he'll be here by noon?" I asked. "I think he'll be here by 10," she answered.

I labored quietly, with my eyes closed most of the time. I stayed in bed, despite being offered a Jacuzzi tub and a birthing ball and not being connected to an IV so that I could walk around if I wanted to. I just wanted to plow through the pain, I didn't want to think about ways to ease it. It was there, it was intense, and I just had to get through it.

At around 10 a.m., the midwife told me I was fully dilated. My water had not broken yet, but one big push took care of that. Three more big pushes, and he was here.

As my due date looms closer, our days are filled with anxiety. We are scrambling to get things done - install a car seat, finish decorating the room our boys will be sharing, pack the hospital bag. I find myself revisiting the old baby books and websites while making mental goals and challenges for life with this new child: a drug-free birth; breastfeeding for a year; attempting to cloth diaper; wearing the baby as much as possible. I have done this before, I know things don't always go as planned; still, I manage to get caught up in the different parenting philosophies and the debate over that magazine cover. With all this swirling around my head, I often forget the most essential thing - that I am growing a human, that I'm about to make a person come alive.

I dream about my father - who died on Nov. 28, 2009 - almost every night. It's a side effect of pregnancy, these incredibly vivid dreams. He is never fully present in them, though. I always dream that he's traveling somewhere, or that he's dying, or that he has been gone for a long time and I suddenly find a goodbye note from him in his planner. It's ridiculous; my father never had a planner. He didn't write people notes.

I miss him desperately in the dreams, and I wake up to miss him more.

• Ailen's father, Uli, with Lucas

Despite my not-so-hypothetical love for Gael and Tony's workplace lobbying for Felipe, you all have chosen Gabriel.

By the time I was 24 weeks pregnant with Luki, we had renovated an entire room in our home and turned it into his nursery. We'd registered for every baby gadget imaginable. We read books and played music to my belly every night. Now, with t-minus three weeks to birth, this baby's (hand-me-down) crib is filled with (hand-me-down) laundry that needs to get done; we have yet to install a (hand-me-down) rear-facing car seat; and the only reason we had a shower is because my friends love me too damn much and ambushed me with a surprise one even though I said I had no interest in acquiring a single additional item of baby paraphernalia. Luckily, we mostly got gift cards which we can use to buy diapers and wipes, the only things I couldn't figure out how to reuse.

I think the most pressing issue here is that this baby still doesn't have a name. So, I'm opening the floor to you, dear CL readers. What should we name this baby?

• My name is...

I have thought long and hard about writing this post because I want to start by saying something I fear might not sit well with most of Creative Loafing's readers: I am a Christian. My family attends church every week; I teach Sunday school; my husband plays in the worship band. We believe in and are followers of Jesus and we aim to be more like him each day.

I hesitated to write this post because I felt like, once I told you I am Christian, you would assume other things about me - that I'm a Republican; that I hold a staunch, unyielding position against abortion; or that I voted in favor of Amendment One. And you would be wrong.

I hesitated because, sometimes, when I tell people I am Christian, I have to supplement it by saying, "but not the crazy-right-wing-nut-job kind," and that gets tiring.

But I need to write this post. As a Christian. As a follower of a Jesus who was a radical; a revolutionary who stood for the poor and the outcast. A Jesus who did not say a single thing about being gay or straight, but sure did say a whole lot of things about love.

I realized I had to write this post when I was talking to my son as we headed out to vote on Saturday. I was trying to explain to him - a not quite 3-year-old - what it means to be married. "Being married means loving someone so much you want to spend your whole life with that person. You want them to take care of you when you are sick; you want to go on vacation with them; you want to play with them every day; you want to cook yummy food for them and read bedtime stories together."

In that very basic, dumbed-down explanation, I realized just how very little marriage has to do with sex. And isn't that the whole big hang-up the Christian right has? Those two or three Bible verses that talk about a "man lying with another man"? (Bible verses which many theologians argue are poorly translated and taken out of context.)

So let's stop focusing on what happens in the bedroom and look at what marriage is really about: spending your whole life with someone; providing for and taking care of that person; loving him or her the ways Jesus asked us to: "like we love ourselves."

"We are going to vote today because some people want to control who you get to marry," I said to Luki as I buckled him into his car seat. "They don't want to allow some people to spend their whole lives with their best friends."

"That's not very nice," he answered with a frown.

No. Not very nice, indeed.

Please, get out and vote against Amendment One today.

This is my favorite thing on the Internet right now:

I know, I know... you've probably already seen it on your mama's/cousin's/high school frenemy's blog/twitter/facebook wall. Did you cry? I did. Was your favorite part when he got inside the box and started pushing out the tickets? Yea, me too.

I saw it at work and kind of frightened a co-worker who walked in my office as I was bawling my eyes out. "It's ok, it's ok, these are happy tears," I said. She still decided to leave and come back later; nine o'clock in the morning is waaay too early to deal with a hormonal pregnant lady. But it wasn't the hormones - a bunch of my non-inseminated friends cried too and - he'll probably kill me for telling you this - even Tony confessed to tearing up a little.There's just something about how creative and imaginative Caine is that's captured the hearts - and pockets (the video has raised over 160k for his scholarship fund) - of millions.

As a parent, it immediately got me thinking about what I can do to foster that kind imagination and creativity in my own kids. Should I try to get Luki into the Montessori magnet school? Sign him up for summer camp? Limit his time in front of the TV even more? Cut sugar out of his diet? Buy him less toys? More books? Invest in some cardboard boxes? Then, I realized... you know what Caine's dad did to "encourage" him? Absolutely nothing. He basically let his kid fend for himself all summer.

Parenting today has become so much about doing and researching and advocating. We buy all the books and Google every little thing, we plan and prepare, trying to create from scratch the one thing kids come without - an owner's manual. I know all of our efforts come from a good place: we all want what's best for our kids, but maybe what's best for our kids is to just let them be.

I recently heard a story on NPR about innovation and creativity in the workplace. It basically said that the most successful workplaces, the ones with the best track records for innovation, are those that allow their employees unstructured time to just... do whatever they want. People who are relaxed and happy are more likely to come up with great ideas.

So I'm making that the goal this summer, for my kids and for myself. To be relaxed and happy, to do less, to just be. Who knows? Maybe our best ideas are lurking behind our inhibitions.

Look, I'm not even going to try to pretend otherwise: when the ultrasound tech told us we were having another boy, I felt a little bit ... disappointed. It's awful, I know. There are thousands of women out there who would kill just for the chance to get pregnant, and here I am, during my second perfectly healthy pregnancy, bemoaning that the kid in my uterus most likely has a penis. (I say most likely because ultrasounds are not 100 percent accurate. Actually, according to one of the pregnancy message boards that came up when I Googled it - a reliable source if I ever saw one! - ultrasounds have about a 6-percent margin of error. So yes, I am still holding on to a sliver of hope that I may be having a daughter.)

Don't get me wrong, I love this baby, no matter the sex, and I know that once I meet him or her, I will have the same certainty I had when Luki was born. That head-smack moment of, "Duh! Of course this is my baby, this had to be my baby, I couldn't have given birth to any other baby but this one." But still ... have you seen how cute those little girl outfits are at Target?

• That could be a finger, or a shadow... right?

When I was pregnant with Luki, we didn't find out the sex until he came out and told us. Lots of friends and relatives thought we were crazy for waiting to find out and, in response to them, I would get on a high horse about not wanting to genderize my child from the womb. You see, gender was not going to be an important factor in how I raised my child because boys and girls are equal, and pink and blue are social constructs.

And then I had a boy. And he is such a boy. With the constant roughhousing and the obsession with trains and trucks and - thanks to our adventures in potty training - a quickly developing fixation with his penis.

Can I be critical and opinionated for just a quick second? Okay, thanks.

I think that immigrant parents who don't speak their native tongue to their kids are doing them a huge disservice. And whenever I encounter one speaking in often broken and accented English with their offspring I have to take deep breaths to overcome the overwhelming desire I get to slap some sense into them. Don't they realize that speaking a foreign language to their kids now pretty much guarantees them a successful career in the future? Don't they know that those kids are going to learn English anyway from TV and school? Ugh!

Well, I've already introduced myself, so I feel like we are close enough to discuss something that is near and dear to my heart. I dare say, near and dear to the hearts of all mothers. Something that, until I became a mom, was hardly ever given a second thought and was never the topic of public discourse. Something that used to be private and disgusting and is now the cause of promises, bribes, and celebrations. Yes my friends, this is my third post, and I am ready to talk about poop.

This morning on the way to daycare, I asked Luki if we could hold off on our conversation about the weather and the seasons for a few minutes. There was a story on NPR I wanted to listen to. It was an update on the Trayvon Martin saga, a news piece I’ve been following closely with shock and disbelief.

Yes, my first reaction to blatant acts of discrimination continues to be disbelief. Rationally, I know it’s real, I know it happens every single day, but whenever I encounter an actual, tangible example of it… I just… I can’t accept it as commonplace. Really? This poor kid got shot and killed just because he’s black? And the white killer didn’t even get arrested? Really? For real? Am I being punked?

All signs point to yes, for real. That actually happened. In the United States. In 2012.

Perhaps the reason I’m so unsuspecting about discrimination is because my parents never really talked to me about race when I was growing up. My mom loves to tell a story about how, when I was about six or seven, I came home complaining about a little girl who had bothered me at school. A relative heard me mention it and asked, “what color is the girl?” and I responded… “she’s beige with some pink spots.” Back then, white and black were just colors inside my box of crayons.

So far, I’ve taken the same approach with Luki. We haven’t talked about race at all. He’s been exposed to people of all different races in our own family, at his daycare, at church… but he’s never asked me anything about their skin color and I haven’t brought it up. In an ideal world, I shouldn’t have to… right? It shouldn’t matter.

But our world is not ideal.

• The Arreazas: Luki, Tony and Ailen

OK, so this is where this story picks up: I’m a twentysomething Charlottean who is 20-something weeks pregnant with my second child. Married to Tony, a pretty sweet guy (except when he’s pestering me about leaving my shoes strewn across the living room floor again!), and mother of two-and-a-half-year-old Lucas (Luki, for short).

• The Arreazas: Luki, Tony and Ailen

Here are ten other things you should know about me, in no particular order:

* Neither of my pregnancies was exactly planned and my initial reaction to both of them was complete and utter shock. Don’t get me wrong, I love my kid, and I love this fetus in my uterus, but… upon seeing those two pink lines, my first thought was, HOLY CRAP! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!?!?, with a side of OMG, MY LIFE IS OVEERRR!!

* I was born in Cuba and Tony in Venezuela. We are hoping that at least one of our children will go into baseball or autocratic politics and lead us into early retirement. Also, we only speak Spanish at home. This is one of the few steadfast parenting decisions we’ve made: we want to raise bilingual children.

* It is my deep-rooted belief that mayonnaise is the foulest substance on the planet.

* My dad died, unexpectedly, two years ago. It sucked; it still does. I’m not over it; I’ll never be.

* This is not my first foray into blogging. I blogged here for about a year and a half and then quit for no real reason. It started off with me documenting the very end of my first pregnancy and the first few months of Luki’s life and then got all sad and depressing when my dad died. Things never really got cheery over there again.

* The reason I started blogging in the first place is that, back when I was pregnant with Luki, my mother replaced her perfectly working washer-and-dryer with a new model that had a “Baby Wear” function on it so she could sanitize her unborn grandchild’s clothes properly. I just felt like the world really needed to hear that story.

* Speaking of sanitizing, I, more often than not, wipe my son’s nose with my shirt sleeve.

* My socks usually don’t match, I don’t iron my family’s clothing, and I rarely finish what I start.

* Motherhood is the only thing I’ve never considered quitting.

* I still occasionally make it out to the Neighborhood Theatre, get buzzed (when not pregnant), and sing along, albeit somewhat off-key, to Rock en Español.