Post #18: The Last Days of Stacy's Pregnancy

Shortly after arriving from my long journey from Boston to Australia, I had my first look around the Brisbane neighborhood that would be our home for the next few weeks,

beginning with a brief walk with Stacy and Jason to a nearby corner pub for lunch. The August “winter” weather was bright and warm enough to eat outdoors. That was the first of our many meals at the Regatta Hotel that included several pleasant indoor eating sections as well. August is part of Australian winter, but it is quite mild and spring-like in Brisbane in the northern state of Queensland, as Australia is in the southern hemisphere where more northerly locales are warmer than those more southerly. Next to the pub was an expansive liquor store that I frequented often to replenish my wine supply over the next few weeks. After lunch we walked, slowly due to Stacy's girth (usually Stacy walks way faster than me), several more blocks, paralleling the river to the main commercial center of Toowong where all our basic shopping needs could be found: mall, grocery markets, drug stores, specialty shops and variety of ethnic restaurants.

Jason went grocery shopping to purchase ingredients for a dinner menu. He also returned with wine and his favorite Australian beer that is not available in Fiji. The name of the beer is Coopers. Hmm … a little insight into why Jason likes that name for their baby boy.

By the time, we returned to the apartment I was quite ready for a jet-lagged nap. I eventually awoke to great smells emanating from the kitchen area where Jason was preparing the first of many restaurant-quality, gourmet meals that he would professionally create while I was with them in Brisbane. My first night's delightful dinner was a beautifully seasoned fish course adorned with mushrooms, capers and other colorful vegetable accompaniments over a bed of saucy Israeli couscous. Stacy is a vegetarian who eats fish so many of our meals were deliciously seafood based.

Jason's fish dish attractively adorned with veggies and couscous

The culinary delights continued with the next morning’s breakfast as Jason served us artistically arranged eggs and smoked salmon over toast and more couscous garnished with delicate greens. Yum!

Jason's home cooked breakfast with the expectant couple

Jason had just arrived in Brisbane the night before my arrival, so Stacy and Jason had much to attend to. Furthermore, they had been separated for the past six weeks. I noticed, to my relief, that Jason had already assembled the jogging stroller that I had arranged for Amazon to send directly to Brisbane. I was ever so glad that I never attempted the assembly job when the large mailing box containing the stroller was delivered to my house. In one of my portaged duffel bags I had brought the coordinating car seat, which also doubled as the baby seat in the BOB stroller. Jason tested the car seat’s positioning in the stroller, but peculiarly he could not figure out how to release it. I looked for any directions I may have brought along from the original packing materials but found nothing particularly instructive. I too examined the installation but also did not see how to extricate the car seat. Emotionally volatile Stacy was getting fairly distraught that the car seat would not be released from the stroller for its critically important first use in the car to bring newborn Cooper home from the hospital.

“We aren’t allowed to take the baby from the hospital if we don’t have a car seat for him in the car,” wailed Stacy, chastising Jason for his erroneous car seat placement. Getting desperate, Jason began resorting to some heavy-handed tools for extrication.

“I doubt that prying the car seat out with tools is the best the way to do this,” I tried to say diplomatically to the man I hardly knew who was about to be the father of my grandson. I worried that the car seat would be in lots worse shape if Jason broke something on it while trying to remove it forcefully from the stroller. That led to my attempting online research for relevant instructions, but again with no success.

Eventually, Stacy lumbered over to the stubborn conveyance and surprised both Jason and me by locating a heretofore unnoticed release mechanism which instantly popped the car seat out of the stroller’s fittings, to the enormous relief of all three of us. That had been quite the scene for an hour or so.

Another activity that took up time during the last couple pre-birth induction days was swaddling practice. After viewing an online instruction video, Stacy and Jason used the cuddly, lifelike bunny rabbit puppet that I had brought to Brisbane for my grandson-to-be as an infant stand-in for attempting the recommended folding techniques for snug swaddling. It was a bit like newborn origami which engendered lots of humor. I tried to reserve any adverse observations as swaddling had never been part of my infant care repertoire from days gone by.

For the most part, I felt very comfortable living up close and personal with Stacy and Jason, as they were eagerly anticipating their child’s birth. I had not really known what to expect, having had very little prior time with the two of them as a couple. And fortunately as I tend to be garrulous, both Stacy and Jason seemed rather open to my reminiscing about my own pre-natal and birthing experiences as their current scenario popped them into my current consciousness.

Another fabulous meal prepared by Jason. Who needs a restaurant?

For the remaining couple of days before the induction date Stacy was feeling very large and immobile. So she was basically couch-bound except for short easy walks for an occasional shopping excursion or meal in the Toowong commercial district or to an appointment at the conveniently close Wesley Hospital where she would give birth. And also sometimes desk-bound too, attending to absentee obligations, despite Jason’s chiding Stacy about her inability to ignore work as she was already supposed to be on childbirth leave.

Of note, Stacy had informed me that the United States was about the only developed country that had no federally-mandated employer policy for pregnancy leave. She had been fairly surprised and annoyed to learn that her normally socially-conscious employer, Wildlife Conservation Society, a US non-profit, indeed offered no specified pregnancy leave. So Stacy was technically on paid personal and sick leave time, for which fortunately she had accumulated plenty of time over her prior eight years of healthy employment with WCS. Stacy had notified WCS that she would be out for two months. In actuality Stacy had enough reserved time to be absent up to six months but there would be no one doing her job as the Melanesia Regional Director. So the longer she would be out of work, there would be more issues to address upon her return. Two months would have to suffice, and she had already lined up two Fijian women for baby care upon her return to work. In contrast, I had learned from our cousin Claudia that her daughter-in-law Margaret was permitted 16 weeks paid leave by her employer, the United Nations, as well as a liberal amount of additional time to take unpaid leave with her position being held for her return.

Meanwhile, as I was recuperating from jet lag and the long journey down under, I was happy to take myself out for long exercise walks along the lovely river path that took me all the way to Brisbane’s cheerful South Bank Parklands.

Along Brisbane's lovely river walkway

When I was slow to depart for my pre-announced Sunday walk, Stacy practically kicked me out of the apartment so she and Jason could have some alone time before that night’s scheduled induction. Anyway, the lovely Brisbane “winter” weather was perfect for riverside ambling, comfortably sharing the pathway with many other walkers, strollers, joggers and bicycles. And I took a fairly long walk to ensure they had ample privacy for their last interlude pre-baby.

Packed up with the recommended minimal belongings to bring to baby delivery, Stacy and Jason left that Sunday evening, August 14, 2016, about 7:30 pm to walk the short distance to Wesley Hospital for admission. Teary-eyed, I hugged and kissed them both and wished them all the best. Stacy’s labor was to be induced that night with anticipation of baby delivery some time the next day. Stacy had been told that labor could take a while, so I said as they left, “If I haven’t heard anything from you, I’ll come over in the morning to see how everything is progressing.”

With their momentous departure, I was left comfortably alone in the apartment with lots of delicious leftovers of Jason’s prior preparations, and full access to the common television area without concern for waking anyone, since my sleeping hours were still fairly unpredictable due to my half-way round-the-world jet lag.

Wow! They are about to have a baby, and I am about to become a Nana, so exciting !!!

(Thank-you blog readers for bearing with me since I began posting on my FinallyNana blog site in January, 2019, as I have brought you on this vicarious pre-Nana pregnancy journey, with occasional forays into Nana's early grand-mothering experiences. I promise you that I finally become a Nana in the next blog post!)