Happy Turkey Day

I’m so sorry, I’m such a Naughty Blogger! It’s been a trazillion years since I last posted, I know. Here are my excuses;

1. I was in Seattle, and the time difference made blogging next to impossible
2. I was washing my hair. Because there was vomit in it.
3. I’ve been enjoying spending quality time with Loud now that he’s home again
4. Quiet makes me sew every spare second like I’m in some sort of holiday sweatshop
5. Blog-posting, or cookie-making: True, a blog is forever, but a piece of homemade baklava is delicious for like, a whole hour

I was tallying up the number of places Baby will have been in-utero, and it’s really quite ridiculous. I am going to Cincinnati tomorrow (for Thanksgiving, more on that later), back to Boston a few weeks after that, Toronto for Christmas, Chicago again in early January, and who knows what else before May? The good news is, my Boston trip got moved back a week because of a major meeting, so my next ultrasound appointment is now a week earlier. The bad news is, it won’t be Dr. Reassuring, which kinda sucks but kinda fits into my original plan of trying to meet everyone in the practice, so I guess that’s a good thing. So Friday, December 7th I should know whether Alistair really is an Alistair, or is an Anastasia. I'm still getting the occasional nausea attack, which I was hoping would be gone by now, but last night I was able to retain a Big Mac, which I thought was a good sign (yes, I know, I chose the most healthy meat option I could think of). My energy level is still about the same, and no other physical changes that are noticeable as yet.

So Cincinnati tomorrow. I’ll be staying with my #3 favorite cousin, who is a mother of two and hopefully kept some of her maternity clothes since she is also tall and not a size 0. The bonus is, she’s a nurse as well, so she’s a GREAT person to talk to about stuff like Baby. She’s a very tell-it-like-it-is person, which I appreciate when I’m faced with choices about epidurals and episiotomies and other even more disgusting topics. I hope my #1 favorite cousin doesn’t feel slighted that I’m not staying with him, which I’ve done for the past 10 years, but #3’s house is, uh, more centrally located. And has heat. And doesn’t have dogs and dust and a floor that makes my socks black on the bottom. I’m excited to tell the cousins, but I’m freaking out a bit about telling my Catholic Grandmother. I’m hoping that by now she’s had enough scandal in the family that she won’t actually keel over dead at my news and will just be disappointed or sad or some other awful reaction. She’s my closest grandma, so I really hope I don’t get disowned or anything like that, because I like her a lot and would love for Alistair to know her.

After I get back from the ‘Nati it will be time for The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. No, not a visit to the Admiral’s Club at O’Hare, CHRISTMAS!!!! I love Christmas. I love trying to come up with perfect presents, and wrapping them in blue and silver, and getting a ridiculously oversized tree and overloading it with lights, and baking 14 dozen different kinds of cookies, and more lights, and Christmas music on the radio and in the stores, and The Year Without a Santa Claus. I love it all. Loud is a Scrooge, so it makes me happy that he hates it all, because he gets outvoted (Quiet, sensibly, loves Christmas as well). And I found out that Loud’s Baby Boyfriend enjoys the holidays too, so at least that’s something.

I hope everyone has a nice Thanksgiving and a tryptophan hangover, and gets to spend time with friends or loved ones or a favorite video game or whatever floats your Mayflower. Happy Slapsgiving!

Homeless, Helpless, and Hapless

Still wonder why I'm single?

I just realized I sincerely hope that neighbors cannot see into my house. I am actually working from my home office today (and not my bed or chaise, I know, it’s truly remarkable), which is on the first floor of the house and street-facing. It’s excellent for playing Who’s That? Who’s There?, a favorite game that was invented when a group of my friends were all laid off from the same company. True, we were blind drunk when we came up with it, but that shouldn’t hurt the game’s validity.

Anyhow, it’s like 24 degrees in the house today and I still refuse to turn the heat on. The only thing worse than dry heat is the first time you turn the heat on for the season, and all the dust in the ducts burns off. I hate that smell. So here I sit, looking like the Unibomber but more homeless and unkempt and scary, in a black tracksuit with the hood up. Oh, and I have a blanket wrapped around me. And I fell asleep with my hair wet last night, so you can imagine what that is like. All I want is a big mug of hot chocolate that is in reality a mug of marshmallows with some cocoa powder, heated up, but I am trying to be good and am instead drinking lame ass warm milk. I feel guilty that I had a relatively healthy dinner last night of salad, cranberry sauce, and potatoes (look, I said ‘relatively’), and then projectile barfed it all over my walk-in shower. It would have upset me more if it hadn’t been so darn pretty (all that orange carrot peel and red cranberries, it was very festive, although I still didn’t enjoy picking it out of my shower drain). So now I'm giving baby some nice warm unsweetened milk without a chocolate cupcake (shut up, you cupcakes out in the kitchen!). The only downside is that I expect to be completely and utterly asleep within 20 minutes.

I was hoping I’d be one of those people who gets pregnant and their migraines magically go away for nine months, especially since mine are usually triggered by Aunt Flo. No Flo, no go, I figured. I was so wrong. I have had at least four in the past three months. Last night I was so sore afterwards that when I woke up in the middle of the night coughing I was afraid I was going to barf up baby. That’s just uncool.

So I had my first real doctor’s appointment, and made the tragic mistake of falling deeply in love with the very first doctor I met with. I’m going to one of those group practices where there are like 147 doctors that could potentially be on call when I go into labor, so my theory was that I was going to try to meet with a different doc each time I went for an appointment. That theory is shot to hell. I don’t want to see anybody but Dr. Reassuring. He was quietly funny, kindly, experienced (he’s the practice director), open-minded, didn’t hassle me about my weight, listened, and gave me his email address for any time I had questions. I wonder if his wife would let him live with me after I have the baby. So basically, I don’t have a chance of him being the one to deliver me since I adore him so much. My next appointment is December 12, and I will apparently get to learn the baby’s gender at that time. So crazy! Don’t those silly people know I already know it’s a boy? (sorry, baby, if you’re a girl, I hope I’m not giving you some sort of complex already).

My water aerobics class is tonight and I don’t want to go. I’m cold, and tired, and achy, and unshaven. The effort required to get ready is more taxing than the stupid class. And I just realized I didn’t ask Dr. Reassuring for a note that says it’s ok for me to even go, so I have a terrific excuse to avoid the other 26+ week non-vomitting energetic happy mommies.

Introducing - The Fetus

Don’t be upset that I’ve been keeping secrets, I had to. I had to see for myself that little person before I could let myself believe and hope and share with all of you. It’s been a VERY long three months, trust me. I’m up to an average of 1-2/day with the barfing, I’ve become a total vegetarian (totally against my will), I’m tired all the time, and just generally no fun at all. So be happy you only have another 6 months now of listening to me fret and complain!

I’ve been keeping up the writing, although not posting (I’m sneaky), so if you want, go back to September and get caught up on all the drama and excitement that was those first early weeks. If you don’t care, well, I promise that going forward I will try my best to keep you up-to-date on all the minutia. In the next couple months I’ll be working with my favorite web designer cousin to get the official website up, so I’ll share that info when it’s available.

For those of you wondering about the timing – yes, I conceived exactly two weeks after the miscarriage. So I will forever advise that people don’t wait, because apparently your body really is primed and ready to go. I only did one single lonely little attempt, Friday August 24th, but as we all know, that’s all it takes!

Girl - 3, Boy - 1

I’m on a conference call for work right now, and I don’t know how I’m expected to be able to focus, or even stop shaking. The drive home from UNC is a blur. There is a baby, inside me, growing and kicking and flailing his/her arms, and basically becoming a person. 167 beats per minute is how fast that little tiny heart is thumping, and I saw it. I saw the umbilical cord, and passed the Nuchal Translucency (less than 2.5mm is good, and my kid is 0.7, so I feel pretty happy about that). Length from crown to rump is a respectable 10.1 cm, which is long for 12 weeks but I had already expected a long big-headed baby.

I don’t know about people who say they can’t really make out the baby on the ultrasound viewer – maybe ultrasounds have just improved a whole lot since the sitcoms I remember, but I could see arms and legs and at times an oddly skeletal-looking face. The spine looked good, and there was a LOT of movement (although he/she seemed to be happiest snuggled right at the bottom where it was hardest to get measurements).

I also learned that because my blood type is A positive I don’t have to worry about the RH factor (duh, I wish now I had taken some sort of biology class). So basically I am reassured (for now), and will hear all the other results, including the blood draw, some time next week. The genetic counselor, Tricia, was very nice and had terrific hair, so I trust her implicitly. I don’t think at this point that I would do CVS or amnio, unless something comes back from the testing that was suspect. I know that people hit three months and see the baby and hear the heartbeat and then still miscarry, but I am done worrying for now. I can’t imagine that this crazily active being would want to jump ship, especially when it continues to get such an excellent diet of veggies and desserts.

The other kind of cool thing I saw (although the tech was very careful to say that she couldn’t officially say anything), was a somewhat pronounced genital area. Which would indicate boy. So that brings us to Girl – 3, Boy – 1. I can’t wait for that test. Yes, I am definitely going to find out the gender if I can. I hate mint green and butter yellow, even more than shell pink and baby blue. Plus I am just damn impatient.

So May 16 is the official magic date we’re aiming for. Either a Taurus or a Gemini (since as a firstborn it’ll probably be a bit late). I am just grateful it will be before the brutal Southern summer.

Studying for the Test

Tomorrow, finally is The Big Day. Not as momentous as some future milestones, but still a biggie to me. Tomorrow is the day I get the First Trimester Test, where they’ll poke around my insides with that violating internal ultrasound device again, but this time hopefully find a healthy happy baby.

Going to the Halloween party last weekend was rough (the long drive, the insane cat allergies, the exhaustion and nausea, the lack of drinking), but it was kind of cool because I told that small group of people about the Potential Person, and I started getting all kinds of crazy advice. I would probably only follow about 2% of what I heard, since a lot of it was total crap or crazy hippie nonsense or just didn’t apply to my situation whatsoever, but I still enjoyed getting to ‘talk parent’ with other parents. Yet another occasion where it made everything that much more real to me, and allowed me to think yet again, ‘Yes, hmm, maybe I may actually have a small person sometime early summer next year’.

I think of all the horror stories I’ve heard about people who go for the ultrasound and find an empty sac, or dead baby, or a huge cancerous tumor (well, not really the last thing, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would be worse than going through three months of this to find out the baby had died). Really, I know now why people don’t jump back on that horse faster after a post-12 week loss; they need that time to forget how horrible the first trimester is. I know I sure as hell couldn’t turn around and knock myself up again as fast as I did last time.

I was hoping that since I was about to hit 12 weeks tomorrow the craptastic effects would begin to subside, but I’ve actually tossed my cookies more in the last week than in the whole previous month. I had a cup of weak tea and some sliced melon for breakfast this morning, and promptly hurled – I can’t get much more bland than that! I ordered a salad last night for dinner and uttered the most horrifying sentence ever – “Hold the bacon”. Chicken is now off the list as well, so I’m eating a lot of veggies. The last few days for lunch I’ve lived on my mother’s recipe for 4-bean salad, but without the onion or green peppers or anything else that might offend. So basically I’m eating some beans in a sugar/vinegar marinade. Oddly, I lately adore chick peas, but since they are so darn good for me I’m not too worried. I’m drinking a yogurt and fruit smoothie to get my dairy on, so other than the lack of brain-growing fish oil I figure I'm doing ok.

Happy Month-Before-Christmas!

I was catching up on some blogs and feeling irritated by the people that are slack in writing (that’s you, Dang), and excited by the people who have been writing a lot more lately (excellent work, Marit and Zacend!), when I realized I myself hadn’t posted in like 4 months. After a quick and slightly excitable slap on the wrist, I set myself down to write and realized – it’s NOVEMBER. It’s no secret that I love and adore Christmas, and start planning for it in July, and talk about it constantly and play Christmas music and have already done 80% of my shopping (it’s called the Internet – get some). But I still, after 13 years of living in the States, have a hard time coping with how it sneaks up on me. I think it has something to do with how late Thanksgiving is here. I’m used to a nice early-October Canadian Thanksgiving, then Halloween, then a full two months to prepare. Here, I now have to wait another three weeks for Thanksgiving, and then BOOM, it will be Christmas like the next day. It doesn't help that it's sunny and 65 degrees outside, and that I have gorgeous pink roses in full bloom around my mailbox.

I had my first Christmas-worry dream last night. This year, my college friend T. who teaches in New Zealand will be in Toronto with her two kids and my college roommate Lola will be around with her two kids, so we’re all going to meet up – I can’t wait. In the dream, though, I suddenly realized it was December 25th and I had to leave for NC the next day and I had not seen them PLUS we had forgotten to celebrate Christmas. Did I mention I’m a natural born worrier? So I had to instantly email them both first thing this morning to lock in plans.

And as disappointed as I am to still be living with Loud and all that goes along with that, I am still excited that I get to have another Christmas in this house. This house wears the holidays very well. I have been toying with the idea of having some sort of holiday party/open house/New Year’s get-together, but haven’t decided yet. Part of it depends on my work/travel schedule, which impacts my energy/availability, part of it depends on whether Loud will be around since I don’t want him or his offensively young boyfriend or irritating friends to be here, and part of it depends on what’s going on with the baby attempt – I don’t want to commit to something and then be all barfy or tired and not enjoy it. Regardless – only 54 days til Christmas! I think I'll do my first batch of cookies this weekend...