I’m 15 weeks along in my pregnancy now. I’m feeling good: no more nausea and not too tired. I do get shortness of breath sometimes, but it’s dealable. I’m still stuck with the current house, but I think I’m close to talking my husband into moving his big office to the smallest bedroom in the house, so that I can move my daughter into that room, and the future baby will go into my daughter’s current room. We’ll still be seriously short on closet space, but oh well. It could be a lot worse.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how exactly I’m going to manage a newborn with a 23-month old running around. Specifically, nursing. I know with “the Diva,” she nursed for like 45 minutes in the beginning, and then I had to start all over in 30-45 minutes. I was a constant feeding machine. How am I going to run around and chase my daughter and make sure she’s not getting into trouble while trying to nurse the newborn? I’m also trying to figure out the “gear” now. I think I’m going to use my daughter’s current crib for the baby (after a few months in a bassinet), and then I’ll have to move my daughter into a twin bed with rails. I didn’t want to do it at 23 months, but it just makes the most sense. And then potty training will probably have to start around then also. I really hate having all these changes for my daughter at once: new baby, new room, new bed, potty training. I worry that she’s going to feel like she was kicked out into the cold. She has sooo much attention from me now, and she’s definitely a “mama’s girl.”

As for music, my daughter LOVES it. She dances and claps whenever she hears music. Today I was playing a dvd of Jimmy Gnecco’s video “Mystery,” on the computer and she noticed and started swaying back and forth. Speaking of Jimmy/Ours, his new record label, Bright Antenna, has been streaming chat sessions with Jimmy, and they’re awesome! In fact, right now I’m watching a live concert of him playing at the Brooklyn Bowl show. I’m really loving the things this small label has been doing for him. It’s really a shame that the large labels he was with in the past didn’t give him the advertising or backing that he’s worth. At least he’s doing everything on his own terms now. And I mean everything- vocals, guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, producing, etc. I’m loving his solo album, “The Heart.” A big portion of the album was dedicated and/or influenced by the passing of his mom from lung cancer last year. I think the reason the album hits me so hard is because my dad was going through lung cancer the same time as his mom was, and they both died in November 2009. In a live recording from a past show, he talks about the meaning of the song “Bring You Home,” and how part of it is about putting his mom in the hospital even though she didn’t want to go. And how he wish he could bring her home, regardless of what the right thing to do is. I understand that struggle 100%. Before my dad was home on hospice, he was in a rehabilitation center for 2 or 3 months where nurses cared for him and tried to get him up and walking because he was so weak from cancer. He hated it there and once said to my mom, “I’m gonna die here aren’t I? They’re never gonna let me go home.” That was so hard to here. So whenever I hear Jimmy’s song, it hits a note. A deep, harmonic minor note.

I’m an only child. I was never a spoiled only child in the sense of material things, because my parents didn’t have a lot of money. But I received a lot of love and attention and never had the issues that I hear some siblings had growing up…like fighting over who gets the front seat in the car or who gets to sit with dad on a 2-seated roller coaster. I don’t know if those are real issues to most people with siblings, but they seemed to have bothered my husband growing up since he always lost those fights to his older sister. My mom was the disciplinarian in the family while my dad was the one who made everything better, even just by letting me cry in his arms after mom yelled at me. Whenever I wanted to go to a friend’s house for the day or rent a movie, his standard comment was “Go ask your mother.” And if mom wasn’t home it was always, “Sure, that’s fine.” I had a close relationship with my father and was definitely “daddy’s little girl.”

In early 2001, when I was 24, I found out that my dad had prostate cancer, at age 60. He had his prostate removed and received a lot of radiation and chemotherapy. Being the tough blue collar guy he was, he acted like it never bothered him too much. After that it seemed to be in control. A few years later they said that a few cancer cells might still be somewhere because his count was up in his blood. My parents did a horrible job at keeping me informed on his condition and the details–I don’t know if they purposely kept it from me or if they just didn’t want to talk about it, so I never knew  the specifics on everything. Well a few years after that his legs started to swell up like crazy and he would get winded very easily. One day he actually had a seizure because his blood pressure went up too high. It turns out that the chemo destroyed his kidneys, so he had to start dialysis- 3 days a week for 5 hours a day. In retrospect, I think that out of all his different illnesses/conditions, the dialysis is what ruined his quality of life the most. He basically became tied down to a dialysis center, so he couldn’t travel easily, and my parents loved to travel. He always wanted to go on a Panama Canal Cruise, and unfortunately only a few cruise lines offer dialysis on-board, and those that do cost you double the price of a ticket, so they couldn’t afford it. It always killed me inside that he never got to go on his cruise. After a few years of being on dialysis and a ton of other symptoms, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and heart disease and needed several heart stents put in.

I realized when my dad was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001, that my time was probably limited with him, so I made an effort to appreciate every moment I had, and I always hoped that he would be able to see some of my “firsts” in life. I was so thankful that he was able to see me get married and walk me down the aisle in 2006. My next wish was that he’d still be around to see me have a baby. When I got pregnant the first time and miscarried right away (this is in my earlier blog posts), I thought I had lost my chance and it made the miscarriage even harder to deal with. Almost 2 years later I finally got pregnant again and I was thankful he had at least known that I would have a baby. You have to understand that in the past 8 years, he had been in and out of the hospital non-stop, and there were quite a few times that we thought he was on death’s door in the ICU of the hospital wing, so I didn’t know if he would “make it” to see the birth of my daughter. He did make it, and he visited us in the hospital to see his only grandchild. He was a wonderful grandpa to my daughter and always talked to her, played with her, and mostly loved to just stare at her and say how beautiful she was.

In September my dad started the Hospice program, and I took my daughter to see him as much as possible. She really was his source of joy, and whenever he saw her, his face would light up and he we get a huge smile. My husband and I are Halloween fanatics and we do our house up like crazy for it, so in early October, even though he was really weak and never left the house, he wanted to come see the house, so my mom packed up the oxygen tank and he came. He couldn’t stay long, but at least he saw it. I think he just wanted to see our house one last time. On October 9th, his 68th birthday, we visited him and I bought him an ice cream cake. Surprisingly his appetite was back and he ate his piece of birthday cake. It’s the little things like that that make me smile. On November 4th I turned 32, and on November 8th my daughter turned 9 months old. We visited my dad on November 8th and even though he was in and out of consciousness from being so tired and on really strong pain medicine, he managed to laugh and smile when my daughter did the same. As we were leaving he said “thanks for everything.” The next day he passed away, exactly one month after his birthday. Later on my mom told me that before we visited him on the 8th, he kept asking what day I was coming to visit him. I guess to hold out for it.

I am so grateful that he was able to meet his granddaughter. The one thing I’m really heartbroken about though, is that she will never “know” her grandpa. He was the nicest, most generous man, with an awesome sense of humor and I know she would have had a blast with him. When people think of my dad, they think of him as always laughing and making jokes, and that’s how I choose to remember him and what I hope to convey to my daughter about him. People say my daughter doesn’t really look like me or my husband yet, but I think she has my dad’s smile, and that’s truly a gift. I love you dad. 10/9/1941 - 11/9/2009