Grad Ovaries

No Seriously, I Moved!

2012-01-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

I moved, to here: www.aisforalgorithm.com

Blogger stats tell me that lots of people are still following me here at Grad Ovaries, and lots of people are still checking back looking for new posts (not just through searches, but people who seem to be deliberately looking), and far far fewer people are over at the new place.

So, one more reminder:

I moved.

To here: www.aisforalgorithm.com

It's much cooler over there. You'll like it. Trust me.

New Address!

2011-11-17T12:14:00.001-08:00

Okay, I did it. I moved the blog. (And renamed it. And redesigned it. It looks cool now.) Please please please go check it out.

www.aisforalgorithm.com

See you over there!

Blog Redo

2011-11-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

So... I'm thinking about making some changes to the blog. Not in content, but in name. And maybe location. I picked the name for the blog without giving it very much thought, and I kind of expected it to be just be about fertility treatments and very little else. S and I had been trying to get pregnant for like two years, and I was extremely frustrated and emotional and confused, so I started this blog to chronicle our continuing journey to parenthood... and I got pregnant with LL three months later. And now here we are, more than four years later (!), and I never write about fertility stuff, and I'm no longer in grad school. The name kinda sucks. (In fact, I actively dislike it.)

Also, despite having done this blog for more than four years (!), I know nothing about "blog technologies." I started with blogger because it was free and I had used it to set up a shared blog for my study group when we were studying for our qualifying exams, but I spent exactly no time at all considering any other sights or looking up features or anything. But many of my dear readers know a lot more about this than I do. So, help please?!? Any advice? Even from those of you who read regularly but rarely comment? Thanks!

Here are the decisions that I'm trying to make:

- Should I move the blog off of blogger? It seems like all the cool kids are on wordpress these days. Are there awesome features I'm missing out on by staying with blogger? Are there other compelling reasons for moving? Is wordpress super easy to figure out? Yes, I have a PhD in Computer Science, but I'm actually a total luddite. Go figure.

- If I move to wordpress, should I move all the content, too? I see that there are easy tools for doing so. Is there any downside?

- If I stay on blogger, should I just change the name of the blog, or should I change the URL, too? I'm not all that worried about keeping my page rank or anything like that (that seems to be the main reason that people have angst about moving blogs) but I would like to keep my meager readership. Yes, I hate the name, and the name is right there in the URL, but maybe if I just changed the name, it would be enough to make me feel better. But I think that I probably want to change it completely, URL included. I don't know.

- The big question: what should the new name be? I'm at a total loss for this one. I plan to continue the blog the way it has been for the past few years -- mostly about the kids, and work-life balance, and being a working mother in a science field, surrounded by a bunch of awkward oblivious tech guys. (But, especially after I start the new job, I will probably write very little about work. I want to keep up my slim facade of anonymity.)

- Would it be weird to introduce new nicknames for my family members? S and LL are fairly uninspired names. (I kinda like Kermit.)

So... any advice? Any pitfalls to keep in mind? I want to get it all sorted out before I start the new job, which is in just a few weeks.

Food Chain

2011-11-10T15:47:00.000-08:00

A friend of ours recently had his first baby, and we asked him how it was going. I absolutely loved his reaction. He said:

Babies are totally amazing. They're completely helpless and immobile, and they make more noise than should be possible from something that small. Could it be more obvious that we are at the top of the food chain? Our babies are born yelling at the top of their lungs, "Hey, look at me! Totally helpless little morsel of food right here!!!"

Yep, we're lucky that we created tools to defend ourselves, because holy cow our children do everything in their power to try to bring about their own destruction. Ages one through five can basically be described as "I have the physical ability to kill myself in a bazillion different ways, and none of the intelligence to stop myself from doing it by accident." I am constantly amazed by how completely oblivious LL is to the dangers around him. Jump in front of speeding cars? Stuff handfuls of food into his mouth until he chokes? Grab at hot candles? Eat random leaves and flowers found outside? Climb really high onto things when he has no reasonable plan for getting down? Run as fast as he can, with his eyes closed? Yes, these are definitely the actions of someone concerned with his own survival.

Last week, Kermit crawled off the edge of a cliff without a moment's hesitation. Okay, not a cliff. A stair. Just one stair. But seriously, no hesitation, and he banged his forehead pretty bad when the ground ended up not being where he wanted it to be. (Also, S and I were both standing right there when it happened, so we're not exactly winning any parenting awards right now.)

Kermit's latest favorite game: he tosses his head waaaay back, to give me a chance to tickle his chin and neck. What kind of an animal has offspring who think that the most intelligent thing they can do is to purposely expose their jugular?

Children make a lot more sense when you think of them as The Top of the Food Chain. But I'm not entirely sure that they're better off for it.

Etiquette Question

2011-11-01T14:44:00.001-07:00

We have this friend, D, who has been friends with S since they were in high school. D is an odd mix of hyper-sensitive about protocol and yet clueless about a wide array of social norms. His wedding, for example, was the most intricately formal affair that I have ever been to, carefully choreographed (by him, not his wife) to keep Emily Post perfectly happy. He is still humbly apologizing for something that he did to me, by accident, more than eight years ago, something that I laughed about at the time and was never upset about, and for which I keep kindly telling him that he really doesn't need to be concerned anymore. He has spent holidays with S's extended family, and interrogates us carefully about the preferences of various members of the family, so that he can be careful not to offend.

And yet this same guy regularly invites himself over to our house for dinner, whenever his wife is out of town, by explaining to us that he would like me to cook dinner for him because he cannot fend for himself. And he is constantly explaining to us how brilliant his son his, especially compared to most normal children (like LL). He even makes his son put on little "shows" for us, to display how much he knows. It is ... weird.

We recently went to a birthday party for D's son, who turned four. We bought him a small gift (Lego cars!), LL happily handed it to him, and he immediately ripped it open. And then declared loudly that he didn't like it, before tossing it aside and running off. D was absolutely mortified. He kept apologizing for his son's behavior, throughout the evening. Bizarrely, he never actually corrected his son, or encouraged his son to behave differently; he just kept apologizing to us.

But, whatever. The kid is four. I wouldn't be shocked to see any four-year-old behave like that on occasion, I've seen much worse from this one, and I've seen similar behavior from D, so I wasn't exactly surprised, and I didn't particularly care.

Fast-forward to today. We received, right on time, a nice thank-you note from D's son, hand-written by D. Here is the card, verbatim:

"Thank you very much for the Legos. While I rudely said, "I don't like it," my attitude changed dramatically when it was exchanged for nerf guns."

So... I laughed out loud. Because it is so typical of D -- he did the appropriate thing and sent a note, but the note itself expresses what a horrible gift it was, until it was exchanged for something much better. And on the one hand, I guess I'm glad that they were able to get the kid something that he wanted (that is, after all, why I carefully included a gift receipt in the birthday card). On the other hand... is it normal to tell a gift-giver that you exchanged their gift? I would think not. And certainly not in a way that makes it obvious that you hated the original gift. (Surely there are more tactful ways of mentioning it, if you feel the need.)

But now I'm actually torn about what you should say in a thank-you note when you didn't actually want the gift. I mean, that note is obviously not it, but what is the right thing to do?

Stupid Quote of the Year

2011-10-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

I was at a baby shower recently and I ended up sitting next to the aunt of the mother-to-be. She works in public relations, and she seemed convinced that her role as a public relations person made her an expert in every single policy issue and social issue to ever be publicly discussed. Rarely have I been near someone who spouted such a continuous string of stupid comments. Stupid and insulting and false and annoying. But she was the aunt of the pregnant woman, and everyone other than me seemed to be totally enthralled with her, so I was reluctant to make too much of a scene by telling her she was full of it. And holy cow, this woman just went on and on and on.

Spout off about the horrors of bottle feeding, then roll your eyes and nod your head towards the woman sitting right next to you who was actually bottle-feeding her child during the entire conversation? Yeah, that's nice. Explain that obesity is entirely a result of the fact that fat people are also ignorant? Interesting. Complain that all (yes all) working mothers like to pawn their kids off on other people so that they can spend more time drinking lattes at the gym? I didn't know that people drank lattes at gyms, but that one is especially great to say in front of a pregnant woman who plans on going back to work after her baby is born.

But my very favorite opinion of hers is one that I remember verbatim. Mostly because dead children so rarely comes up in conversation at baby showers:

"The worst thing in the world is losing a child. Losing a child is really awful. But there is something that is just as bad as a child dying: a child who disowns his parents. This happens all the time to the parents who put too much pressure on their kids. Harvard and Yale are full of kids who hate their parents. Those parents suffer just as much as parents of children who died."

There you have it. If your kid goes to Harvard, it's exactly the same as if your child died. You heard it here first.

Yellow

2011-10-28T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have not been posting enough lately. Mostly because I have a bunch of looooong posts that I want to write, but not enough time to write them. But the longer I wait, the longer the (potential) post becomes, because it has to cover everything. Vicious cycle. So, in an effort to actually record everything that I want to record, I am going to try to convince myself to do more frequent, shorter posts. Starting with this little anecdote about LL, which I want to remember forever and ever so that I can make fun of him about it someday, and also because it is cute.

When LL was learning colors, he had an awful time pronouncing the word "yellow." I don't know why -- he could do all of the sounds and combinations in other words, but this one word was really hard for him. At first, I thought that he just didn't know the color yellow, but no, it was all about the word. The fun part was watching him COPE with not being able to say it.

At first, he would try to say it, and stumble and stumble over the sounds until finally giving up. Very frustrating for him.

Then he would just cry whenever I pointed to something yellow. This phase was very depressing, but thankfully didn't last long.

Next, he learned an important life skill that will someday serve him well in college: if you don't know the answer to a question, just answer the question that you wish had been asked!

Me: What color is the car?
LL: Blue!
Me: What color is the truck?
LL: Red!
Me: What color is the bus?
LL: School bus!
Me: Um, yes, it is a school bus. What color is it?
LL: School bus fast!
Me: Okay. What color is it?
LL: Say "vrooooom!" Has 4 wheels! Look -- door open here!
Me: What color is the bike?
LL: Purple!

That phase cracked me up, and lasted a long time. Eventually, he realized that he couldn't avoid the color yellow forever, so he made up a new word for it. Out of thin air. He just picked a sound that he could pronounce, and that was his word for yellow. He called it "arr." At first, we thought that he was abbreviating "amarillo," but he informed us that we were wrong.

The "arr" phase lasted quite some time. Long enough that I stopped noticing it, automatically translating "arr" to "yellow" in my head.

And then one day, he said yellow. And then immediately giggled and buried his head on my shoulder. (Adorable!) After that, I would actually hear him looking at books by himself and repeating the word yellow over and over again.

The part that kind of shocks me is that he was actually aware that he wasn't pronouncing it right, enough to be embarrassed about it. Which was weird for a two-year-old. Especially since there are a ton of words that he mispronounces, but this word was the only one that bothered him. (For example, he mispronounces the word milk. It sounds more like "meat." He's been saying it that way for almost a year now. Every so often, S calls it "meat" when talking to LL, and LL gets really mad at him and says, "No, Daddy! No call it that!" He thinks that S is mocking him by pronouncing it in the LL way. But it doesn't stop LL from saying it, and he doesn't seem embarrassed to say the word.)

LL has been saying "yellow" for a few months now, but he still pauses every so slightly before saying it, like he has to concentrate more than with other words. On the one hand, it's very cute. On the other hand, I cringe a little when I see him acting like he's scared to make a mistake. We are generally very careful not to correct things like pronunciation and grammar for him at this age, preferring to just speak properly in front of him and let him naturally absorb language. Not sure why he suddenly decided that it would be bad to make a mistake. In the mean time, every time I hear him say the word "yellow," I feel like a little bit of his babyhood is gone forever.

Tough Month for Computer People

2011-10-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

I assume you all know about the passing of Steve Jobs. Since his death earlier this month, his face has appeared on every magazine in the country, it seems. In the tech world, he has long had a very nuanced and mixed reputation -- smart, impulsive, controlling, brilliant, obnoxious, insufferable. The news reports this month seem to be focusing exclusively on the positive, heralding him as the Thomas Edison of our time. Like him or hate him, he had an undeniably huge impact on the technological world. It was a sad loss for my field.

Within days of Jobs' passing, the tech world lost another icon, a man named Dennis Ritchie. If you don't work in technology, you likely don't know Ritchie. He wasn't flashy like Jobs was. He didn't lead a company or have much of a reputation outside of technology circles, but he had an enormous impact on the technology that allowed someone like Jobs to create the products that we all take for granted today. Ritchie was instrumental in creating the C programming language, which provides the basis for much of the software in use today, including much of the work done at Apple. Ritchie also helped to create the Unix operating system, the concepts for which provide the underpinnings of both Linux and MacOSX. If you study computer systems, you start with the work of Dennis Ritchie.

Me, I'm not a computer systems person. My field is artificial intelligence. And I just got news that the father of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, passed away this morning. (As of me writing this, it doesn't even seem to have hit major news organizations yet, but it will.) You're even less likely to know John McCarthy's name than Dennis Ritchie, yet he is a giant in the field. McCarthy literally created the field of artificial intelligence, even coining the name at a conference he helped to organize to bring together people who had started to think about the field, some 50 years ago. And he created the Lisp programming language, a language that many people in computer science still view as the purest, most beautiful programming language ever created. I learned C before learning Lisp, but Lisp was the first language that really spoke to me and made me realize the potential of computer science. Have you been hearing about how Jobs was a genius for adding Siri to the iPhone? Siri is only possible because of McCarthy. I have probably read more work by McCarthy than any other computer scientist. I heard him speak numerous times. I had lunch with him a few times. I consulted with him about my dissertation. He was huge in the field, and huge for me personally.

A very sad day, capping a very sad month. RIP John.

Career Love

2011-10-20T23:21:00.000-07:00

My job hunt is officially over. Yay! Those two final round interviews that I had back in August both worked out, and I received job offers from both of them on the same day (a month later...). I negotiated a bit with both places (it really really helps to have more than one offer, so the timing actually worked out well) and ended up with two very good options. Then, of course, I had a hard time deciding between them. (Horrible problem, I know.)

Normally, an advisor is instrumental in helping a brand new PhD get a first job after graduation. I have sent emails to AdvisorA throughout my job hunt and she has never so much as replied to any of them, much less helped me to network or suggested other places to apply. But, because I am an idiot who never learns, I wrote to AdvisorA and asked her for an opinion on the two offers: Company1 or Company2? And she eventually wrote back with gee, I don't know, you should probably work for Company3. To which I had to reply with, thank you so much for your input, but, as you know, I was already rejected by Company3, so that is not really an option. (Why don't you also give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice in it.) And she replied that I should really consider Company4, where she happens to be visiting at the moment, so she went ahead and gave them my CV. To which I had to reply with, thank you for (finally) taking an interest in my job hunt after ignoring me for six months, but waiting until I have two good offers in hand that I need to respond to ASAP really isn't helpful, and besides, Company4 is located 800 miles from where I live and you know that I am not going to relocate so what the hell is wrong with you?!?

So, instead I turned to an old mentor of mine from a job that I had straight out of undergrad. He was several levels above me in the management chain but we got along really well and became close. (Bizarrely, we mostly bonded over college basketball and matzo ball soup recipes.) He has since retired, but we have kept in touch over the years. He has introduced me to a lot of the people that I know in my industry, and he had recommended a few places to apply for jobs, had personally contacted people at a few companies for me, and was generally helpful at keeping my spirits up during this job search. He's a little short on personal boundaries, but I find that endearing. (As an example: when I was working for him, he shamelessly and repeatedly tried to get me to date his son. It didn't bother him at all that I had been dating S for several years already, since he thought that his son was better for me than S. Also, it didn't bother him at all that pressuring a 23-year-old college hire to date your son is wildly inappropriate behavior for a corporate Vice President.) He has been around forever, so I knew that he would have opinions on both Company1 and Company2, and would help me to evaluate the career prospects at both. He totally helped me to clarify how to evaluate the offers, which was exactly what I needed.

So, I finally made a decision, and I'm feeling good about it. The offer brings me into the company at a slightly senior level instead of at the usual new-PhD-entry-level, so it is nice to feel like my work experience pre-grad-school is being taken into account. My future manager jumped through a lot of hoops to make me a good offer, mostly because he is excited about a few of the previous projects that I've done, and he is giving me a ton of freedom to set my own research agenda. And the job has a bunch of life-in-general points in its favor -- great work environment, lots of good coworkers, relatively low stress, no required travel, flexible work hours, short commute.

One of the guys who interviewed me for this job is in charge of the entire research division (a good 3-4 levels above me, and working on the opposite coast from me). I'll call him R. Given the size of this place, there's no way R interviews every new PhD. Also, this is one of those guys who has worked in my field forever and is very very well known. He wrote a textbook for one of my classes in grad school. At the interview, the first thing he said to me is that he is close personal friends with three of the four people who wrote letters of recommendation for me. Somebody noticed the connections I had to people he knew, and showed him my resume, and he knew that he had to talk to me. AdvisorA used to work for him at a different company. AdvisorB went to grad school with him back in the 70s. (He had this to say about AdvisorB, who is the more supportive of my two advisors: "I've known AdvisorB since before you were born. I love him like a brother. He wrote a very positive letter on your behalf, which surprised me, because in 30 years, I've never known him to write a positive letter about anybody!" I am apparently awesome at picking advisors.) And BossLady from my last job co-edited a journal with him for many years. He spent most of the interview complaining about what an embarrassment it is for their company that I had to apply for a job through their website -- why in the world didn't AdvisorA personally hand him my resume, since it is so obvious they should hire me? (Incidentally, I had the same question. When I asked her to make a connection for me, she ignored me.) It's nice to feel loved.

I told this story to my other mentor, and he immediately said, "Oh, it is awesome that you have already met R! As soon as you start the job, you need to send an email to R, tell him that you're excited to be at the research lab, and suggest that you have coffee together next time he's in town. Make him into your next mentor!" Which sounds like a great idea, and I was working up the nerve to do it, when R emailed me himself and suggested we meet for coffee when he's next in town. All good signs, no?

And, as if all of this positive job stuff wasn't enough, I've fielded no less than four phone calls from people at the company whose offer I rejected, including two from the CEO, trying to change my mind. The first one was flattering, the second one as well, but by the end it just felt a little awkward. (I gave them the job equivalent of the "It's not you it's me" speech, and they kept responding with the job equivalent of "Oh come on baby, I can change, just tell me what you need!") Ultimately, the CEO told me that if I change my mind any time in the next year, I should give him a call and he'd extend another offer. Which is awesome, but where was all this love when I started interviewing for jobs months ago?

I start working in December, to give me time to set up childcare for Kermit and finish up all the home stuff still on my plate. I'm excited to start, but also feeling very hormonal about the whole thing, because Kermit is 9 months old and in that super cute phase where I just want to play with him all the time. Haven't even started the job, and already feeling torn.

9 Months In, 9 Months Out

2011-10-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

Yep, Kermit turns 9 months old tomorrow. I'm not feeling very eloquent these days, but I can manage bullet points:

- S and I usually bet on an over-under line for baby weights at well-baby checkups. S picked the line today at 21 pounds, and I took the under, because I thought that Kermit would be closer to 20 pounds. Also, at this age, LL weighed in at a svelt 19 pounds and change. But our tiny little Kermit, who still barely eats, tipped the scales at 21 pounds 13 ounces, putting him at the 83rd percentile. The only time either of my kids has ever been above 80th percentile, it has been for head size.

- Kermit also has a big head.

- After getting two teeth at four months of age, Kermit drooled and chewed for five months but made no further progress. On Monday, I discovered four new teeth. At his doctor's appointment today, Dr. K discovered two more. So Kermit sprouted six new teeth this week, and now has his full set of eight front teeth. That would explain the lack of sleep this week....

- Kermit is crawling. Big time. Nothing is safe.

- Kermit pulls himself up on everything, including things that are seriously not stable. (Ever seen a 22 pound baby pull himself up on an empty laundry basket?) And he's starting to cruise. Dr. K predicts that he will be an early walker. I predict that we are in trouble, because our house is not babyproof anymore.

- Last week, Kermit got his first pair of shoes. They're adorable.

- Any suggestions for how to keep an extremely mobile and extremely oral nine-month-old from killing himself by choking on the toys that your three-year-old leaves scattered all over the house? LL is pretty good about cleaning up his toys, but he is still barely three, so legos and other small parts still end up abandoned on the floor sometimes, and I'm constantly grabbing them moments before Kermit jams them down his throat.

- In the food department, Kermit is lukewarm about being spoon fed, but loves loves loves finger food. Peaches, avocado, applesauce, mango, shredded chicken, and cheerios are the current favorites. Last night, he enjoyed his first artichoke. (Side note: feeding artichoke to a baby is a pain in the butt.) He has also discovered that straw cups are the greatest invention of all time. No matter what he is doing, he gets very serious and concentrates when offered a straw cup of water.

- Kermit responds to his name. It's very sweet. We can't tell how much more he understands, but he definitely knows when we're talking to him.

- He's starting to figure out clapping. Especially after knocking down a tower of blocks, which is the current favorite game.

- Over the last month, we have gradually been weaning Kermit off of swaddling. At first, we were occasionally leaving one arm free. This week, we switched him from swaddling to a sleepsack. He now insists on sleeping clutching his security blanket, which is very cute. But it is taking him forever to fall asleep, because he keeps stroking my face and giggling instead of going to sleep.

- I would say that he isn't sleeping as well since we stopped swaddling, but he wasn't sleeping well before, either. He's still waking up once or twice a night to eat. He no longer goes back to sleep easily, and is often up for an hour or more in the middle of the night. The combination of teething, learning to crawl, separation anxiety, swaddling cessation, and yet another mild head cold have made the sleep problems inevitable, so I'm just hoping that everything happening all at once means that we can move on from it all, too.

- Good lord, I need more sleep. Soon.

- S's parents are visiting this weekend, and they are so excited to see Kermit crawling and playing and being all interactive. Yay!

- In addition to all of Kermit's recent advances, this has been a monumentally bizarre week for me, but I should leave the rest of it for a separate post. Discussions of SWAT team manhunts for crazed gunmen in my neighborhood probably do not belong in the same post as my baby boy's 9 month birthday.

- I love teasers, don't you?

Bubbles!

2011-09-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

Seriously, you have to throw a bubble party. Coolest Party Ever. Seriously. Here's what we did:

1. Buy this book, which has tons of information on making the biggest bubbles in the world. It comes with a patented "Bubble Thing" which is absolutely necessary.

2. Buy the ingredients for making the bubble juice recipe in the book. Most of the ingredients are easy to come by (distilled water, Joy dish washing liquid, corn starch, baking powder). But make sure that you also splurge and buy glycerin. I bought a 16 ounce bottle from Amazon.

3. Clean two big five-gallon buckets. Multiply the bubble recipe to make six gallons of the bubble juice, putting three gallons worth in each of the buckets.

4. The Bubble Thing is awesome, but you probably don't want more than one of them, and it's a little hard for young kids to use, so make/buy other bubble wands. We had some normal plastic wands. We also bent a dozen wire coat hangers into circles. Paper towel tubes work surprisingly well, too, but they do disintegrate after a while, so make sure to have lots of them. Colanders are a ton of fun, too.

5. For the party, put the two buckets at opposite ends of the yard. Put all the wands in a third bucket in the middle. Lay out a pile of towels, for people to wipe their hands. We also put out some lawn chairs, but most people wanted to be in the middle of the action.

6. That's it! I had food and drinks in the house, but we started blowing bubbles on the front lawn as people arrived, so the food was completely untouched for at least an hour because everybody wanted to be near the bubbles.

It was awesome. Awesome! The big Bubble Thing was used mainly by the adults, and made bubbles up to twelve feet long or so. But even the three-year-olds were able to produce some bubbles with it, though smaller, and the bubbles stayed attached to the wand. Two-year-olds were able to handle the coat hangers very well, which made bubbles more than one foot in diameter and 2-3 feet long.

I read that bubbles this big could be produced with this particular wand and bubble solution, but I didn't really believe it until I saw it in my own yard. Thus, I feel compelled to show a few photos (with people cropped out of them, to keep my thin veil of fake anonymity).

Awesome, right? You could fit multiple children in each of those bubbles. Those bubbles were big enough that neighbors more than a block away were standing in their own yards exclaiming over them. And the kids had a blast experimenting with different ways of making bubbles and chasing them down in the yard.

You know you want to go and do this yourself. Best party ever!

LL @ 3

2011-09-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

LL turned three! This year marks the first time that he was at all aware of his birthday, and he sure made the most of it. He was so excited!!! Balloons! Presents! Cupcakes! Visitors! Parties! And we haven't even had his big birthday party yet. (We had a small celebration with just us the night of his birthday; he had a picnic in the park the afternoon of his birthday with one of his neighborhood friends; he had a party at daycare the next day; but his big celebration with lots of guests at our house isn't until this Saturday.)

On a related note: LL has eaten more sugar in the last 4 days than the entire rest of his life up to this point. If that is an exaggeration, it's not by much.

We always try to buy toys that are fairly low-tech (no batteries, encourage free play, etc.). I came up with a pretty good list of gift ideas, then gave them all away to other people who asked what he might want. For our gift for LL, I decided to get him some dress-up clothes. He loves running around the house in his Halloween costumes from the last two years, so I thought that it would be a good choice. Then I went looking for dress-up clothes. You know what's left after you rule out dress-up clothes in the princess genre? Almost nothing. You can buy individual outfits, but they're usually expensive (eg, a full pirate costume for $40). But it's really really hard to find a trunk of assorted dress-up stuff for boys, like you would find for girls.

Actually, even if I had a girl, I would be frustrated by this. The girl dress-up stuff is entirely princess stuff, slutty outfits, and high-heeled shoes. Kinda makes me glad that I have boys.

I finally put together a decent trunk of dress-up options. They're mostly hats, which are the best parts of dress-up outfits anyway. We have hats for: firemen, policeman, farmer, train engineer, safari person (?), wizard, race car driver, construction worker, pirate, and cowboy. There are also a few (rather silly) accessories: pirate scope, binoculars, compass, magic wand, glasses. And I got him a super hero cape.

LL is totally afraid of the super hero cape. I don't know why. He has yet to try it on, and he keeps hiding it. S and I have been wearing it around the house, because we think it is really cool, and we told LL that it gives you the ability to fly, but he wants no part of it. As far as I know, he doesn't know what a super hero is (he's never seen any movies or books with super heroes in them) so if he just didn't know what it was, I'd understand. But what in the world is making him actively hostile towards it?!?

Somewhat related: I asked LL what he wanted to be for Halloween, because I want to get costumes squared away now, before things get even busier around here (Jewish High Holy Days, S's parents visiting, me starting a new job someday). S and I thought for sure he would want to be a pirate, and I had already bought a companion parrot costume for Kermit, which I thought would be adorable, but then LL informed us that no, he would really prefer to be an owl.

Owl costumes are hard to come by. And most of them are ugly.

One more aside: I've been having way too much fun with joke possibilities that go along with having the kids dressed up as an owl and a parrot. I told S that he should dress up as a rock, so that they can be Two Birds and One Stone. There are also good possibilities if I can convince S to wear a George W. Bush mask. (You know, a bird in the hand....)

LL's birthday gift from Kermit was an abacus, because there's a picture of an abacus in one of LL's I-Spy books, and he loves to point to it and tell us that when he's older, he wants to have one of those. I couldn't really figure out what age is old enough for a kid's first abacus (it doesn't quite elicit the same debate as the appropriate age for a first cellphone) but I decided that surely three years is old enough. So now he has an abacus.

S is so thrilled that LL wanted an abacus that he now seems convinced that LL is going to, I don't know, reinvent calculus or something. I'm pretty sure that he just likes all the colorful beads.

For LL's party this weekend, at which we are expecting 12 (!) kids, our theme is bubbles. I bought ingredients to make several gallons of home-brewed bubble solution, we're filling some relatively untippable buckets with the stuff, and letting the kids go wild. I have a bunch of plastic wands in various sizes, but we also bent some clothes hangers into roundish shapes, and created a few more homemade bubble blower things with string and straws and the like. I'm very excited about it. I also predict that the adults have at least as much fun with the bubbles as the kids do.

Stream of Consciousness

2011-08-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

No unifying theme. None. At least, I don't think so. If you find one, let me know.

Kermit slept through the night. Twice. And then immediately got sick. Now he's back to waking 2-5 times each night, and I'm even more exhausted than before. It was like glimpsing an oasis in the desert, and now it is gone.

I have two (two!) final round interviews this week. I believe that I have a decent chance at getting offers for both of them. Interviewing for jobs may be my least favorite thing to do in the whole wide world.

I am desperate to get a job, desperate to get back to some semblance of normal life, and yet every time I think about actually getting full-time childcare for Kermit and starting a job, I cry. A lot. LL is so happy being at Natasha's during the day that I don't even blink about sending him there, but Kermit is so tiny and snuggly and fun, and I've never been away from him for more than a few hours, and it's making me weepy. I still want to go back to work, but apparently my hormones are intent on making me miserable about it.

I predict that Kermit will be crawling within the next 30 days. I set him on the ground surrounded by toys, and he immediately throws one of them out of reach, then goes up on all fours to try to retrieve it. Every time. He's 7.5 months old right now. LL didn't reach this stage until 10 months, and didn't crawl until 11.5, so I'm kind of in shock about the possibility of early mobility.

Can you say "possibility of early mobility" 10 times really fast?

S went to a bachelor party on Saturday, and he got shot. Sort of. Not really, but there was a gun and a bullet and an injury, so why nitpick, right? I don't know much of anything about guns, and I'm a little unclear about what happened, but it went something like this: (1) S tells me that the bachelor party is going to involve guns and alcohol. I am supremely uncomfortable around guns, and I get mocked when I ask, horrified, "In what order?!?!?" (2) S assures me that they are going to a shooting range before doing anything else, and that everyone will be very very safe, and that I have nothing to worry about, and to stop prefacing sentences with, "And if I'm a widow next week, ...." (3) S becomes the envy of all his friends when they hear me saying, "Guns? Really? Are you sure you don't just want to go to a strip club?" (4) S comes home extremely hung over, sporting what looks like an ugly black eye. Between (3) and (4), something happened where S shot a pistol and the hot shell casing (?) flew into the air, ricocheted off a wall (?), and lodged itself between the safety goggles and S's eyelid (?), leaving an ugly black burn mark. I'm particularly unclear on how something like that happens if you're wearing safety goggles. Also, I have not at all changed my opinion on guns, at least as they relate to bachelor parties.

S and I went to a wedding on Sunday. (Ironically, a wedding having nothing at all to do with the bachelor party on Saturday. That wedding isn't for another two weeks.) We had Rosie come and watch the kiddos, and it was our first night out since before Kermit was born. The minister referenced Steve Jobs twice during the ceremony. He told us that the bride's mother had recently passed away but was watching the ceremony from heaven, despite the fact that the bride's mother had just walked down the aisle moments before and was sitting right in front of him. He started reciting a quote about love, then realized halfway through that it was actually about death, not love, so he apologized but then felt compelled to talk about death for a while. And, bizarrely, he kept making references to rock climbing.

Ever since he got his Big Boy Bed, LL has been insisting that either me or S sit in his rocking chair until he falls asleep at night. If we try to leave, there is much crying and carrying on. We warned Rosie that he would want her to do this, but when she sat in the chair, he told her, "No, that's okay, I'll go to sleep all by myself." And he did. WTF?

I made the mistake of telling LL that his birthday was coming up. He's a little unclear on what a birthday is. He is also completely unclear on units of time. I have had this conversation with him two or three times a day for the past several months:
LL: Is it my birthday today?
Me: No, not for a few more weeks.
LL: After naptime it will be my birthday?
Me: Um, no....
LL: Oh, I will play, go to the park, eat lunch, then it's my birthday?
Me: No, you have to eat like 30 more lunches before it's your birthday.
LL: I'm not hungry. Is it my birthday now?

LL is talking nonstop these days. It's amazing how his speech is getting more sophisticated day to day. Some of it is pronunciation, some of it is speech patterns, some of it is vocabulary. Really cool to watch it unfold. People told me that I would want him to please just be quiet for a little while! by the time he reached this age, but it hasn't happened yet.

We leave next week for yet another wedding (our fifth one this year) but this one is several hundred miles away, and we're driving. I am ... apprehensive. LL is pseudo-potty-trained. Kermit hates the car and rarely falls asleep in his car seat. This particular drive has large gaps between exits and random bouts of stop-and-go traffic. Almost every single time we've done this drive, S falls asleep and I have to drive the whole way. I've been stocking up on car activities for LL, but I have a sinking feeling that we're just going to end up singing songs for 9 hours straight, punctuated with random crying. Wish us luck.

300 Days Later

2011-08-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

Here's the 300 day update to my 500 day goals. (Um, more than halfway there already? Really? Yikes! I guess the good news is that I made progress on a lot of these in the last 100 days. The bad news is that I still don't have a job.)

1. Have two happy kids. (Done!)

2. Finish my PhD. (Done!)

3. Own a new (bigger) house. (Gotta get a job first.)

4. Work in a job that I enjoy. (Not yet. But I have gone on several interviews, so that's a start. The sucky part is that unemployment is still up, so employers are being super picky and taking their sweet time with interviewing. Uggghhhh. One example: I applied for one particular job, for which I am a perfect fit, in late April. They contacted me in mid-June and had me come in for a first-round interview. For the next month, they repeatedly called me with more questions and asked me to send them detailed information by email. In mid-July, they finally asked for references and set up a second-round interview for early August. That interview went well, and now they want me to come in for a third (and I hope final) full-day of interviews for the end of August. I should have an answer by mid-September, a full five months after applying for the job.)

5. Bring both kids to visit my parents at least once. (Done!)

6. Bring both kids to visit my in-laws at least once. (Done!)

7. Pay off all debt except the mortgage. (Working on it. One of my remaining undergrad loans is still in deferment from grad school, so I'm not working on it too hard, though.)

8. Lose all pregnancy and fertility treatment weight from both pregnancies. (That would be 22 pounds below pre-pregnancy weight with Kermit. Right now, this means that I still need to lose 15 pounds. I've been making some effort on this one lately, and I've lost 6 pounds in the last 100 days. At this rate, I won't quite make it, so I need to step this up a bit more. In theory, 15 pounds in 6 months should be easily doable if I just focus a bit more.)

9. ~~Breast feed Kermit for one year.~~ (Only made it 5 months, two less than with LL. Depressing.)

10. Cook dinner at home 5 days each week. (I'm totally rocking this one! I'm not positive that I'll be able to keep it up if/when I go back to work, but I've been hitting this goal regularly for several weeks now.)

11. Read 10 fiction books. (I read a book! I read a book! It was one that I'd already read several years ago, and I only picked it up because S left it sitting on an end table by accident, but still, it's better than nothing.)

12. Learn javascript. (I decided to change this one. I'm learning Objective-C instead. Why? Because if I know Objective-C, I can write iPhone apps. Fun, right? I've been spending a little time during each of Kermit's naps working my way through a tutorial, and I've written a few (extremely silly and easy) iPhone apps, just to play around. I have a few ideas for apps that I totally want that don't seem to exist, so as soon as I build up a little more confidence with the language, I'm going to start working on those. I might even earn a few bucks. S seems to think that my app ideas are really cool and if I work on them maybe they'll sell really well and then I won't have to find a job. Which makes me laugh and laugh and laugh.) (Seriously, that is never going to happen.)

13. Learn perl. (I can really only focus on learning one language at a time.)

14. Have permanent assigned "homes" for most objects in the house. (I've actually made some progress on this one, too! Mostly through selling some stuff on craigslist and donating some stuff to Goodwill. But this one really isn't going to be done until we've moved into a bigger house.)

15. Update work wardrobe. (I'll start working on this once I've lost a little more weight, and am any closer to actually having the "work" part of "work wardrobe.")

16. Shower every day. (Sadly, no progress on this one. Ugh.)

17. Wear makeup every work day. (Definitely not happening right now. Though I have managed to put on makeup for interviews, so I've met that extremely low bar.)

Having a job should help me to make progress on more of these, so hopefully the next 100 days will see a bit more accomplished. Though, I think I've said that at every single one of my updates....

Family Dinner, Part II

2011-08-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for the absence. Not much sleep being had around here lately. Also, interviewing for jobs sucks. Now, back to Experiments in Cooking for a Family.)

I asked around for book recommendations to figure out how to properly feed small children. I know way too many families that have to make separate meals for each kid, and I wanted to avoid that if at all possible. When my brother and his family visit my parents, for example, my sister-in-law has to email a shopping list to my mom. The list includes the exact brand and variety of bread that each kid will eat, which means buying 3 separate loaves of bread. Same for deli meat, peanut butter, and yogurt. My mom makes chicken nuggets and pancakes and pasta for dinner every night, and still very little gets eaten, and my mom spends the entire visit trying to figure out how to orchestrate elaborate meals to make everybody happy. She annotates her recipe cards to indicate which of them might possibly be eaten by which of the kids. It's ridiculous.

So, keeping in mind that all toddlers are picky to some degree, but also that eating habits develop over time and tend to stick around for life, I wanted to get LL and Kermit on healthy footing. I wanted a book that would be realistic for a working mom to implement, backed up by actual studies and research, aimed at developing healthy habits for the whole family, and all while avoiding the guilt-ridden tactics that a lot of parenting books seem to employ. The suggested reading was the classic Child of Mine by Ellyn Satter.

I enjoyed it a lot. It made sense to me. It provided straightforward recommendations for how to approach mealtime with young children. The key take-away points for me:

- You can't force a child to eat something they don't want to eat. Trying to bribe or coerce or punish them tends to make things worse. The same goes for trying to limit how much of something a child eats. Instead, parents should decide what food to make available and when, and the child decides how much of it to eat.

- Kids are curious. They want to emulate their parents, and they want to try new things. If you put food out for them and they see you eating it regularly, they may not eat it right away, and they may not like it the first time they try it, but eventually they will choose on their own to try lots of foods and eventually they will enjoy eating a wide assortment of foods.

- Kids like having control, and they are more accepting of things when they can control it. For food, this means that, as much as possible, put all food out on the table in serving bowls and let kids take as much or as little as they want. The only exception should be desserts, which should be portioned into single servings for each person at the table.

- Make a variety of food for dinner, put it all on the table, then sit down and eat as a family. Don't honor requests for other foods, don't get anything else, but let your child eat as much as they want of whatever is on the table. Make sure that there is something that you know your child will eat. (Satter suggests always putting bread on the table for every meal.) Then stop worrying about your child. If he decides to only eat bread for this meal, he'll eat something else at the next meal. If he doesn't eat any vegetables, he won't get scurvy, and he'll probably try it next time. As long as you are calm and uninvested in the exact quantities your child eats of each food, he'll explore them on his own. Sometimes he'll try lots of stuff, other times he won't. That's okay.

We've been taking this approach for several weeks now. I make dinner, I put everything on the table, and LL decides what he wants and what he doesn't. For the first several days, we had a conversation like this at the beginning of every dinner:

LL: Cottage cheese please Mommy!
Me: We're not having cottage cheese tonight. Tonight we're having chicken and potatoes and bread and carrots and blueberries and apples and milk.
LL: I don't want chicken. I want cheese please Mommy!
Me: I understand, but tonight we're having chicken and potatoes and bread and carrots and blueberries and apples and milk.
LL: Peanut butter sandwich?
Me: No, sorry, no peanut butter tonight. Tonight we're having chicken and potatoes and bread and carrots and blueberries and apples and milk.
LL: Oh.
(LL eats bread and blueberries and milk.)
LL: Cottage cheese now Mommy?
Me: No, sorry. But if you'd like, you may have some chicken and potatoes and carrots and apples, and there is more bread and blueberries, too.
LL: Oh. Um, may I try the chicken?
Me: Sure, take as much as you'd like! Would you like me to help you cut it, or can you do it by yourself?

He has mostly stopped asking for specific things for dinner. (We still have meals occasionally when he really really really wants something in particular that's not on the "menu," but he moves on fairly quickly.) Left on his own to eat or not eat whatever is put on the table, he almost always has some starch, some protein, and some fruits or vegetables at every meal. There have also been a few nights when he just had milk and bread, and we're okay with that. He tends to ignore new vegetables the first few times I serve them. Then he starts asking questions about them. At the next meal, he'll put a little bit on his plate but won't eat it. The next time, he'll take one bite and declare that he doesn't like it. One or two more meals, and suddenly he's eating it. It's a slow process, but very low stress, and it is making our meals much more pleasant.

Next post: I have a strategy for dinners, but what should I cook? I buy a bunch of cookbooks, try out some elaborate meal-planning, and figure out how to keep groceries in our house.

Family Dinner, Part 1

2011-07-14T13:38:00.001-07:00

I have a lot to say on this topic, but not a lot of time to write, so I'm breaking it down into more than one post. This one is about what we had been doing, dinnerwise, until very recently, and how we schedule our evenings.

When LL started solid foods, he ate his dinner of pureed whatnot at 5:00 or so, then went to bed at 6:30. I usually fed him dinner, S arrived home just in time for bedtime, and only after LL was asleep in bed did I start making dinner for me and S. We normally ate our dinner around 8:00 or 9:00. We kept saying that when LL was older (for some vaguely defined notion of "older") we would start eating dinner as a family. Tons of research points to the importance of eating a family dinner for providing all sorts of positive stuff for kids (healthier eating habits; healthier attitudes toward food; more varied diet; better child-parent communication; fewer discipline problems in school; etc.). S and I both ate dinner with our parents every single night as kids, and we both always assumed that we would do the same with our kids.

And yet ... LL reached two years old, and we still weren't doing it. He was still eating his dinner around 5:00 or 5:30, and S and I took turns being home to feed it to him, with the other parent tending to work a bit later, arriving home just in time for bedtime at 6:30 or 7:00. And the foods that LL ate were getting to be a smaller and smaller collection of the foods available to him. He ate a ton of yogurt and cottage cheese and other dairy items, but no other protein. He ate a ton of fruit, but hardly any vegetables. He ate some starches, but nothing too interesting. Whenever we did eat around him (like lunches on the weekends) he was much more adventurous, asking to try whatever we were eating. We knew that something had to change, that we had to find a way to rearrange our schedules to start doing a family dinner, but couldn't quite figure out how to make it work.

We got our chance to try it out when my mom came to stay with us just before Kermit was born. She came in mid-December and she immediately took over cooking dinner for us. I wasn't working anymore, and S's work was very slow, as it always is around the December holidays, so it was easier for us all to eat an earlier dinner. We started eating dinner at 6:00, pushing LL's bedtime back to 7:30 and adding a bigger snack for him at around 4:00.

And you know what happened? LL started eating a ton of new foods. He discovered that he loved lamb. From there, he tried beef. He consented to eat plain chicken on occasion. He tried some soups. He was more adventurous with sauces on pasta. He was still mostly eating the same stuff as before (this kid can put away a lot of cottage cheese in one sitting) but it was progress. It also helped when we moved him out of his high chair and into a booster seat at the table, so that he was really sitting with us to eat. When my mom left in mid-February, I still tried to get a family dinner on the table by 6:00. At first, I was mostly heating up frozen meals that my mom and I had stashed away, but I gradually found the energy to start cooking again. And when S went back to work, he made it a goal to be home by 6:00 every single night, even if it meant that he needed to do a little more work from home after the kids were in bed.

As Kermit got bigger, he stopped sleeping through dinner, so S and I would take turns holding him while we ate. By 5 months or so, he was big enough to sit in the high chair, so he started joining us at the table during dinner (but not eating anything). I start cooking dinner each night around 5:15 or so, depending on what I'm making. It's ready by 6:00 or 6:15, depending on how "helpful" the kids are while I'm cooking. We all sit at the table together, then S and I take turns playing with the kids or cleaning up the kitchen a bit. Kermit goes to bed at 7:00, LL starts his bedtime routine at 7:30, with me and S taking turns with each of the kids. (LL wants me to put him to bed every single night, which isn't fair to anybody other than LL, so we had to start alternating. But on the nights when I have Kermit, LL always listens for me to leave Kermit's room, then calls for me / sends S to get me, and I have to spend time with him as well, so S is always done with bedtime long before I am.) S and I then finish cleaning up the kitchen and straightening up the rest of the house, and we're done with all household work by 9:00 or so, which is when we used to be just sitting down to eat dinner. It's awesome! Not only are we eating together as a family, but as a bonus, S and I get an hour or two to relax together every evening.

I started to stress out, though, about whether I'd be able to keep this up once I returned to work. Also, I was making dinner every night, but they weren't all exactly the healthiest dinners. LL was mostly eating his own food, not very much of the stuff I was cooking, but I still stressed about setting a good example for him by cooking and eating healthy, well-balanced meals. And I wanted to figure out how to get him to eat a bigger variety of stuff. And with Kermit starting solids soon, I saw an opportunity to get him off on the right foot from the very start. Time to consult the experts!

Next post: I read a ton of books about cooking fast healthy meals and feeding young children, and totally change my approach to both cooking and serving meals.

The Great Potty Train

2011-07-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

Today is Day 26 of officially potty training LL. It is going well, I think, though slowly (by design). Our approach:

Stage 1: This stage was all about awareness, not really training, and it started sometime around 2 years old, maybe earlier, I don't really remember. We bought a simple plastic potty (the Bjorn one that everybody has) and put it in the bathroom, without comment. If he asked, we told him that he could sit on it if he wanted to. He often sat on it while S or I went to the bathroom, usually keeping his clothes on, but sometimes asking us to pull his pants down, rarely asking us to remove his diaper as well. When he was in the bathroom with us, we narrated what we were doing ("First I pull my pants and underwear down, then I sit on the toilet. Now I'm peeing!" etc.) We bought him a potty book (this one, which is nice and simple and funny). We let him flush the toilet for us. And when he was in the bath, we pointed out to him when he started peeing. Eventually, he started trying to pee in the bath, until he was able to do it whenever he wanted. Then he started occasionally asking us if he could sit on the potty to pee, and when he did, he almost always managed to go a little, and when he did, we all clapped and exclaimed over it. We even called Grandma a few times. It was all very cool and laid back.

Stage 2: This (short) stage was about immediate preparation, for about a month. When S or I took LL into the bathroom with us, we started asking him if he would like to go potty, too. If he said no, we dropped the topic for the rest of the day. (Side note: while watching me pee one day, LL suddenly realized that I have different plumbing than he and Daddy have. He pointed dramatically to my crotch and said, "Uh oh, Mommy! Where did that part go?!?" And thus LL was introduced to the difference between boys and girls, along with names for anatomy that we hadn't gotten around to yet. Fun times.) We talked about how we pee in potties or diapers, but not in underwear or pants. He was able to be naked in the house for periods of time, during which he would tell us about how he was not going to pee on the floor. (He was very fond of not peeing on the floor.) We talked about poop a lot. I took LL with me to Target and let him pick out Big Boy Underwear, and we talked about how he would wear it when he was ready. There was much general excitement.

Stage 3: Home potty training! This is the stage we're in right now. We started on a Saturday. When LL woke up, I asked him if he wanted to wear underwear instead of a diaper. Then I set the alarm on my cell phone to go off every 15 minutes with a gentle chime, and he would go sit on the potty. Some of the time he peed, and some of the time he sat for 10 seconds before telling me that he didn't have to go, maybe he'd go next time. A few notes about how this stage is going:

- The morning went great -- no accidents, lots of success -- but at the end of the day, he had three accidents all in a row. No big deal, it was his first day, but I got the sense that he didn't quite have the energy and attention span to do whole days yet. So, we started doing half days of potty training for the next week, either mornings or afternoons, depending on what else was going on that day, working our way back up to full days.

- On the second day, I started seeing LL dancing around a bit between those 15 minute intervals. When I asked him if he needed to go pee, he told me no, he would wait until Mommy's phone rang. We tried for two days to convince him that he could go whenever he needed to, he didn't have to wait for the alarm, but he didn't believe us. Thus, we had to discontinue the use of the alarm. We loosely kept track of the time, and asked him to go sit on the potty every 20-30 minutes. By Day 5, he was occasionally initiating it himself, and by the end of the week, we had stopped asking him to go, letting him go when he felt that he needed to.

- He still runs to the bathroom whenever my cell phone rings. That Pavlovian thing happens fast!

- He will not poop in the potty. (I hear this is common with boys.) When he needs to poop, he asks us for a pull up, then lets us know when he's done so that we can change him back into underwear. Each time he does this, we ask if he would like to try pooping in the potty instead, but so far, the answer is always no.

- After one week, he decided that he wanted to pee standing up. I think that he learned this at daycare, because S had been sitting down to pee when LL was around. So, we have a little stool in front of the toilet now, and LL pees standing up every time. He has very good aim, so it has been less messy than I feared, and S taught LL to wipe up the edge of the toilet bowl with toilet paper, so not too bad.

- LL has become an underwear fashionista. He likes to change his underwear several times a day, to try all the different designs. Telling him that we only change underwear during the day if they get dirty seemed like setting up some really bad incentives, so we've been going along with it.

So, here's where we are:

- If he's at home and awake, he wears underwear and goes to the bathroom on his own.
- When he needs to poop, he wears a pull up.
- When we go out, including when he's at daycare, he wears a pull up. (He can't wear underwear to daycare until he masters the pooping part, and I'm hesitant to bring him out even to the grocery store in underwear until that happens as well.)
- When he's sleeping, he wears a pull up. I don't see this changing any time soon. The kid pees a whole heck of a lot in his sleep.
- He has an occasional accident, but they're getting less frequent.
- We did not do sticker charts or M&Ms or prizes or anything like that, but we do have a potty song and dance that is performed every time LL (or his bear) successfully go potty. It ends with a high five. LL is very fond of the potty dance.

The next stage is going to have to be pooping in the potty, but we're waiting until LL lets us know that he's ready. I'm in no particular rush, and his progress so far is fine with me. Amusingly, we hadn't talked about potty training in front of LL, just sort of did the steps that we wanted to do. Then one day, he heard us use the phrase "potty train," which apparently conjured up for LL all sorts of images of choo choo trains filled with potties, and he has been much more enthusiastic about it ever since. He really does love his trains.

Half Year

2011-07-07T22:02:00.000-07:00

Um, Kermit is 6 months old today. Yikes! The last general update I wrote for Kermit was at 3 months, so here is a many-month summary of All Things Kermit.

Kermit was an early smiler, and an early laugher. Thus, he's very good at it by now. This kid will smile and laugh at anything. He likes imitating faces, so he will smile back at anyone who smiles at him. He's very popular with the old ladies at the grocery store. (A woman in her 90s threatened to kidnap him the other day; it was simultaneously flattering and extremely creepy.) He's ticklish everywhere. He's bizarrely startled by Peek-A-Boo, but loves it when we just look away from him, then look back at him and say, "Aaaaa..... boo!" (leaving out the "Peek" part). He loves it so much that now he laughs when you just say "A-boo!" to him, which LL does all day long. LL got very excited when we read the Disney version of Aladdin and discovered that the monkey in the story is named Abu. Thus, Kermit now has a stuffed monkey named Aboo, and he is awesome.

Kermit can roll whichever way he wants, but usually prefers just to rock from side to side, and rotate in a circle centered at his butt. Kermit is obsessed with toes. At first they were just cool to look at, but now he knows how to chew on them, and that makes them so much cooler. He is finally coordinated enough to get other things reliably into his mouth to chew on as well. He sprouted his first two teeth at just 4 months old, so it's good that he can help to alleviate his own teething now. He still prefers to chew on Mommy's fingers, though, and those teeth are sharp! Kermit loves sitting, and can balance for several minutes at a time, when he's in the mood. He still just collapses when he gets tired, so we need to keep pillows around him for now. He also loves standing while holding onto our hands. And we pulled out our jumperoo, and he's so crazy for jumping that we need to ration his time in that thing, or he'd want to be there all day long.

Kermit is still waking twice each night to eat (once around 11pm, and once around 4am). We're usually still up for the 11pm feeding, so this isn't too horrible, but it would be nice if he started sleeping more solidly at night. The reflux medication has improved his overall eating a bit, but he's still eating the majority of his food at night, and barely sipping milk during the day, so I'm reluctant to do too much to mess with his feedings right now. He outgrew his bassinet two months ago, so he now sleeps in his crib, which we set up at the foot of our bed. (Oh, how I long to move to a bigger house....) He loves "talking" to the penguins and polar bears in his crib when he wakes up. (And yes, is that not the coolest crib set you've ever seen?) I can't complain too much about his sleep, because he easily goes down for three naps each day, two of them an hour long each and one generally 2-3 hours, and he goes to bed easily at night. (I will now spit three times and throw salt over my shoulder.)

Kermit loves music, and we end up singing to him all day long. He is especially a fan of Laurie Berkner. Luckily, LL has learned how to sing many of her songs, so he takes over singing to Kermit when we get sick of doing it. Kermit still hates riding in the car, so we play Laurie Berkner on repeat to try to keep him calm whenever he needs to be in the car for a while.

At his well baby check-up today, he weighed in at 18 pounds, which is totally average for his age but gigantic compared to LL at six months. It's even more surprising since he is still eating below the normal minimum number of ounces of milk for a baby his age. Poor thing must have inherited my amazing ability to gain weight even when not eating. (As opposed to LL, who is taking after S -- they can both eat their body weight in whatever unhealthy food strikes their fancy, and still stay thin.)

Every afternoon, while I cook and while we eat dinner, Kermit hangs out in his high chair. He loves being up at our level, where he can see everything that's going on, but he thinks that it's rather unfair that we don't share our food with him. (He will probably get his first taste of "solid" food this weekend.) Kermit has also shown himself to be wildly adaptable. Unlike LL, who was a fussy mess if one of his naps was ever 15 minutes late, Kermit handles schedule changes with a smile. And he has already spent a few days with Rosie while I was out on job interviews, and he apparently couldn't care less which Big Person cares for him during the day. Which I guess is a good thing? I'm still not sure.

Happy Half Year, Kermit!

Bullets

2011-07-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Oy, I haven't written in a while. Part of it is that I'm busy (cf, two small children). Part is that I'm exhausted (cf, two small children, again). Part is that I was sick for a ridiculously long time. Part is perfectionism (I have so much that I want to write about, but I want to write it well, so I procrastinate on each post until I can do it properly). But now I'm hopelessly behind in what I want to record here! So, a quick bullet list, most of which will be expanded into a series of much cooler posts in the near future.

- I've started interviewing for jobs. Blech. I hate interviewing for jobs. I'm already growing tired of jumping through the hoops.

- Kermit turns 6 months old next week. It's so cliched to say it, but geesh, where did the time go?!? He has two teeth already, he's chewing on everything he can get his little paws on, he loves standing up, he wants desperately to learn how to sit up straight on his own, and he is ready ready ready to start eating real food, thankyouverymuch. Also, he loves to nap. Also, he is seriously the smiliest baby in the world, which is fairly impressive for a teething refluxy kid. Especially one that's constantly being stepped on by his older brother.

- LL has suddenly exploded developmentally. He's sleeping in a big boy bed, he's trying new foods with toddler abandon, he has suddenly found his voice and is carrying on full conversations, and he's progressing nicely with potty training. And he's nearly as tall as me. Well, not quite, but he's suddenly a heck of a lot closer than he has any right to be, since he's not yet three years old. Bedtime is getting ever-so-slightly better, but still kind of sucks. When things calm down a bit on all the other transitions he's facing right now, we will really need to do something about bedtime.

- Why yes, I did slip in there that we started potty training LL. It's been about two weeks. We're taking a very very very laid back approach, which is going fairly well so far. I've cobbled together a lovely low-stress technique that so far has resulted in a lot of successes, a few accidents, several conversations about the differences between boys and girls, and a weird pavlovian thing where LL needs to pee every time my phone rings.

- One of my resolutions is to cook more dinners at home. Also, I'm trying to lose some of that lingering fertility/pregnancy weight. Also, I'm tired of LL eating yogurt, cottage cheese, crackers, and fruit (and very little else) for every meal. Also, nobody ever taught me meal planning, or even much cooking, and I kind of feel like I've been blindly winging it for 15 years. Which might have been fine when I was cooking just for me, but now that I'm responsible for feeding two human beings, both of whom will hopefully grow up having healthier views on food than me, their overweight mother, I decided that I really needed to educate myself and make some changes. I've been reading lots of books. I've also been slowly integrating new ideas into our household, in the hopes that I can get some new behaviors ingrained while LL and Kermit are little, and before I go back to work and have much less time for planning. Summaries and book reviews will be coming soon.

- S and I went out to see a movie this week!!! For the first time in like a year!!! It was awesome! We saw Super 8. Highly recommended. I really liked it, and not just because it was two hours during which nobody pulled on my shirt and whined, "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" Also, I got to go to the bathroom before and after the movie all by myself.

- I got my hair cut last week, and my stylist asked what product I've been putting in my hair. I told her that my baby is teething right now, so he chews on his hands, then grabs handfuls of my hair, and I sort of just let his saliva accumulate there all day. I started going to this particular high-end salon when S and I were first married. I'm not sure that I'm quite their target clientele anymore.

Yep, those are the highlights. More later.

Back!

2011-06-08T11:06:00.001-07:00

We just got back from visiting my family. The trip was exhausting but wonderful. We stayed at my parents' house, and my brother and his entire crew drove in and stayed there as well, and it was so much fun to have all the cousins together. (I must say, though, that 11 people was a bit much to be staying in my parents 3-bedroom house, especially when it includes 5 kids ages 4 months through 11 years.) The last time LL saw any of these cousins, he was only 9 months old. This time, he was old enough to actually play with them, and he had such a good time. We also got to go to several of my favorite hangouts from when I was a kid, see a few of my oldest friends who are still in the area, and eat some food that I can't get where we currently live. (Oh frozen custard, how I have missed you! Why oh why is frozen custard only available in like three cities in the US? It is the most fabulous food on earth.)

LL has been talking for weeks about wanting to see the oldest cousin, B, who is 11, so we thought that he would spend the whole time trailing after him. Instead, he happily played with LiLi, who is also two. The middle cousin, age 7, spent the entire time playing with Kermit, which freed up the 11-year-old to play with S the entire time. (Have I mentioned how much all kids, especially the 8-12 set, love S? He's amazing.) With both my children happily occupied, I got to spend some quality time with my brother, which is very rare these days. I tried to soak up those chunks of time when no one was sitting on my lap or whining for a snack. Yay, vacation!

Now we're back to reality. Kermit's eating got worse while we were gone, and we've switched him to a new reflux medication in the hope that he'll start eating a normal amount. He ate well yesterday for the first time in a month, so we're hopeful. (No more breast feeding, though. The most he has nursed in the past week is for 30 seconds, and my milk supply is practically gone, so I think that our breast feeding time is really over. I made it 5 months this time, not even close to the year that I had hoped for.) We're so desperate to get calories into Kermit whenever he'll take them that we've been willing to offer him food whenever he asks. And he seems to prefer the majority of his milk between 10pm and 7am, which sucks. We can barely get an ounce into him at each meal during the day, then he gulps down 6 ounces at each feeding in the middle of the night. Once he seems truly better, we're going to have to do some behavior modification on that one.

LL was healthy the whole time we were gone, then immediately came down with another cold when we got back. Not too bad, but he's coughing a lot, which keeps waking him up at night, which of course requires me to get up at night and calm him down. Between LL's cold and Kermit's weird eating patterns, I haven't slept much since we got back.

Next up: I need to get a job. Kermit turned 5 months old yesterday (an update on him, and an update on LL, since it's been a few months since I devoted a post to him, will be coming as soon as I have the time to write them). I had planned to stay home with Kermit for 6 months, so... I should really try to find a job soon. I've enjoyed being home with him, but it is obvious to me that I would not be happy long-term as a SAHM. So, resume revisions this week, and sending out a few feelers to see where I am. Ugh, I hate looking for jobs.

Flu

2011-05-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

Taking care of an infant is a thankless, messy, exhausting job under the best of conditions. I like to think that I normally handle it with a certain amount of finesse. I can deal with the sleep disturbances, the pacing back and forth, the bizarre way that all newborns can tell the difference between when you're standing and when you're sitting, the unpredictability of it all. I do it, and I smile. But you know when I'm ever-so-slightly less able to deal with the physical and emotional demands of taking care of an infant?

When I'm suffering from the worst stomach flu of my life.

I spent most of yesterday and today silently praying that I was sympathetic enough towards LL when he was sick with this flu last week, because holy cow this really sucks! I don't blame him at all for spending three days lying on the couch intermittently crying. I wish that I could do the same. Many people have written about how one of the worst things about motherhood is that you don't get any days off, not even sick days. Still, I think that most people can at least call on some family to step in with assistance when it gets really bad. The fact that we have no family in the area always hits me hardest at times like this, because just having somebody home with me who could help to hold Kermit on occasion, even if I still had to do the majority of the work of caring for him, would make a huge difference. It would help me to avoid those times yesterday (and yes, plural, multiple times yesterday, though slightly better today) when I sat in a rocking chair holding Kermit while both of us cried, as I gulped back my instinct to yell as loudly as I could about the misery of it all.

On the breast feeding front, Kermit is indeed breast feeding a bit. I'd say one-third of his feedings are entirely at the breast, one-third of his feedings he rejects the breast completely and eats just from a bottle, and the remaining third he nurses for some brief period of time before appearing frustrated, and then I top him off with a bottle. This sounds all nice and promising, except that it means that I never know how he's going to want any particular feeding. I attempt to nurse, then I need to go make a bottle, feed him the bottle, then put him down and hook myself up to the breast pump. The nurse-bottle-pump thing means that every single feeding takes an hour or longer, and I have to be at home for every single one of them. Thus, I can never leave the house. Which is not a long-term solution, obviously.

Even with pumping after every single feeding, I have run through my entire freezer of milk and have needed to start supplementing with formula. Even with three solid weeks of ridiculous over-the-top pumping, my milk supply has not budged at all, but Kermit's appetite (thanks to some reflux medication) has gone up. The stomach flu has thrown everything into even more chaos. Eating or drinking absolutely anything makes me ill, so I'd be dehydrated even if I weren't also trying to sustain another human being. Thus, my supply has taken another hit, and I haven't had the energy to pump for the past two days to try to keep it steady.

Perhaps I'll start up again after I'm recovered, but I suspect that my supply has dipped for good. And I'm trying to make peace with that. If I can figure out when Kermit is nursing and when he's not, I can just plan to nurse at those feedings and save myself the heartache of offering the breast at other times. My current plan, I think, will also include cutting out all that pumping. I know that this plan will cause my supply to continue to drop even further, so it probably means that Kermit will stop nursing entirely within the month, but I just don't have the energy to fight it anymore.

Assuming I'm over my flu, and assuming that S and Kermit don't get sick in the meantime, we're flying to visit my parents on Tuesday. I can bring a breast pump with me, but there's no way that I'll be able to pump eight times a day while on vacation. At this point, I kind of feel like I've been tilting at windmills for long enough. So, I'm nursing Kermit as best as I can right now, to try to force as many antibodies into him as he'll take, and once I'm over the flu, we're probably going to step it down a notch and let Kermit decide how much he wants to nurse.

But first, I have to get over this ridiculously awful flu.

Timeline

2011-05-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

My month of May so far:

Sunday, 5/1 -- Like an idiot, I write a post about how Kermit's breast feeding is going better. I mention that I live in fear of him having a nursing strike like LL did, so I'm enjoying each day that he nurses well. Then I tempt fate even further by buying two new nursing bras.

Monday, 5/2 -- Kermit starts crying in the middle of every feeding. I am determined not to lose him over to bottle-feeding, so I refuse to give him any bottles. He's fussing a lot at feedings, but he also seems content by the end, so I trust that everything will right itself eventually.

Thursday, 5/5 -- Kermit stops nursing completely. He latches on, sucks once, then cries hysterically. By midday, it's obvious that he's hungry but he's not going to nurse, and I tearfully give him a bottle, then immediately call the lactation consultant.

Friday, 5/6 -- I meet with a lactation consultant. She thinks that I have a low supply, which is frustrating Kermit, hence the refusing to nurse. She tells me to rent a hospital-grade pump, then exclusively pump for the next two days and bottle-feed Kermit. Her prediction is that Kermit will eat 32 ounces a day (normal for this age is 30-36) and I will only pump 18-20. So basically, the nursing strike is entirely my fault. I'm heartbroken.

Saturday, 5/7 -- I spend much of the day hunched over a breast pump, crying. I'm in disbelief that my second child followed my first and rejected breast feeding at a far-too-young age. Today, Kermit turns just four months old. I feel like a total failure.

Sunday, 5/8 -- Having spent two days pumping 9 times a day and bottle feeding Kermit, it seems like all I'm doing is dealing with milk. The lactation consultant was only partially right: I did indeed only pump 18-19 ounces each day, which is horribly low. BUT, Kermit only ate 18 ounces each day, despite my offering him a seemingly limitless supply. The LC revises her diagnosis: rather than my low supply being the cause of the problem, it appears to be a symptom. Kermit decreased his demand for some reason, and my supply did what it was supposed to and adjusted to meet the lower demand. So now we have to figure out why Kermit doesn't want to eat.

Monday, 5/9 -- Kermit's well baby checkup with Dr. K. His growth is slow, and he has indeed dropped growth curves since two months, but he's still within normal bounds. We think he may have late-onset silent acid reflux. Or at least, we hope he does, because it's solvable. We start him on medication for reflux and cross our fingers. I also start downing fenugreek like it's going out of style. The hope is that the medication increases Kermit's appetite at the same time that the pumping + herbs increases my supply, so that by the end of the week, we can get Kermit back on the breast and eating a healthy amount. Which is good, because pumping 9 times a day while caring for two children is not long-term sustainable. In fact, it really sucks. At dinnertime, however, I discover a bigger impediment to finding the time to pump: LL has a sudden high fever, and will need to stay home from preschool until he's better.

Tuesday, 5/10 -- I'm home all day with a fussy Kermit and a feverish LL, trying to fit all those pumping sessions into a day already filled with caring for two mildly sick kids.

Wednesday, 5/11 -- The good news: LL seems better. The bad news: Kermit's appetite hasn't budged, and neither has my supply. At 3am, even my good news disappears: LL wakes up crying, then immediately vomits all over me. Guess he's not better after all.

Thursday, 5/12 -- All hell breaks loose. Both kids spend the entire morning crying. Kermit is burping and spitting up nonstop and wants to be held all the time. LL has horrible diarrhea and stomach cramps and wants to be held all the time. No matter which one I hold, the other one sobs. If one falls asleep, they soon wake up from their brother crying in pain. No way that I can adequately care for either one of them like this, much less keep up with the pumping. I call S and ask him to take a sick day and come home to help. When he gets home, LL is crying uncontrollably and in so much pain that he can't even hold his security blanket. He violently vomits all over his room, and I decide to take him to whatever pediatrician is free to see him. He's diagnosed with stomach flu. The pediatrician urges me to nurse Kermit as often as possible, to keep him from getting sick and to keep him hydrated. I mention the nursing strike, and the pediatrician predicts that Kermit will be sick within days, and will then need to be hospitalized for dehydration shortly thereafter. I return home with LL in total despair.

So, that's where we are right now. Three weeks ago, Kermit was sleeping well and eating well and growing well, or so I thought. Now he's a fussy mess and still refusing to breast feed for more than a minute or two at a time, getting all of his meager daily caloric intake from bottles while I desperately pump to try to produce even the small amount that he's eating. LL is violently sick with the flu and doesn't know what to do with himself other than clutch his stomach and cry. Having been vomited on yesterday more times than I can count, I can't imagine how I will possibly escape getting the flu myself, and I don't know how I will possibly keep it away from Kermit. After a week of effort, my milk supply has not increased at all, and getting sick will likely drop it even further. The lactation consultant predicts that Kermit will never breast feed again.

I'd like to say that I'm handling the nursing strike better than I did with LL. When he had his nursing strike, I sank into a month-long depression that I was only able to come out of once I gave up pumping and let my hormones even themselves out. I do feel a bit more even-keeled this time, but only barely, and it's probably just because LL's stomach flu is leaving me with very little time to dwell on how heartbroken I am about Kermit. For now, I need to figure out how long I'm willing to keep up with the pumping, holding onto the hope that Kermit may come back to me. In the mean time, I have two sick kids who need my attention, and I need to keep my head in the game.

200 Days Later

2011-05-10T08:31:00.000-07:00

Here's the 200 day update to my 500 day goals. (Actually, I'm one day late, so this is my 201 day update. Things are spinning a bit out of control around here the past few days. The update on what the heck's going on is coming as soon as I have a little more time to breathe.) I have made progress on a few more of these in the last 100 days, but a lot of them are still untouched, so I find it a little scary that I'm practically halfway through. I knew that the first half would be slow, since Kermit was due just a little while into my 500 days, but it still feels unproductive to have so many of these still open. A lot of them are related to me finding a job, which is hopefully something that I will start to work on in the next 100 days.

1. Have two happy kids. (Done!)

2. Finish my PhD. (Holy cow, this one is done!!!)

3. Own a new (bigger) house. (Gotta get a job first.)

4. Work in a job that I enjoy. (Not yet. I plan to start looking for a job in another month or so.)

5. Bring both kids to visit my parents at least once. (We have a trip planned for later this month!)

6. Bring both kids to visit my in-laws at least once. (Done!)

7. Pay off all debt except the mortgage. (My last undergrad loan is out of deferral and in repayment. So I am making progress on this one.)

8. Lose all pregnancy and fertility treatment weight from both pregnancies. (That would be 22 pounds below pre-pregnancy weight with Kermit. Right now, this means that I still need to lose... 21 pounds. Before you clap too much for me that my pregnancy weight is gone, you should note that at my 100 day update, I only had 19 pounds to lose. So I've actually gained 2 pounds in the last 100 days. Good lord I get hungry when I'm breast feeding!)

9. Breast feed Kermit for one year. (Four months gone, eight months to go. Though this one is actually looking like I might not make it.)

10. Cook dinner at home 5 days each week. (I'm doing okay with this one, but only because I count reheating food I've stashed in the freezer as "cooking dinner." Not sure how I'm going to handle it when my supply of frozen food is depleted.)

11. Read 10 fiction books. (Ha! Total books read so far is still 0.)

12. Learn javascript. (Ha! Not yet.)

13. Learn perl. (Ha! Not yet.)

14. Have permanent assigned "homes" for most objects in the house. (Ha! Check back, um, after we've moved.)

15. Update work wardrobe. (I'll start working on this once I'm closer to the end of my maternity leave, and hopefully have lost a little more weight. Also, I only need a work wardrobe if I have a job, so this one is incredibly unnecessary right now.)

16. Shower every day. (Sadly, no progress on this one. Ugh.)

17. Wear makeup every work day. (Definitely not happening right now; I'm lucky if I manage to put on a shirt that doesn't have spit-up on the shoulder.)

Having a job should help me to make progress on more of these, so hopefully the next 100 days will see a bit more accomplished.

Milk Update

2011-05-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

I'm amazed by the differences with breast feeding this time around. With LL, I had horrible problems getting him to latch for the first 3 weeks or so -- a combination of my nipples being completely inverted and LL being rather lazy. During LL's early days, I saw no less than FOUR lactation consultants, all of whom said, "I'm sure that your nipples aren't truly inverted; it's very rare." And then they examined me and said, "Wow, yours really are! Um... not sure what to do next...." None of the first three LCs were any help at all, and then I struggled alone at home for a while, during which time LL barely gained any weight. S finally convinced me to go see another LC, and she was wonderful and helped us to pull through. By the time LL was one month old, we'd worked through the problems and breast feeding was great.

Kermit has been a completely different story. With LL, getting him to latch was unbelievably frustrating, and it required three hands, which meant that S had to actively participate in every single feeding for the first several weeks. But, I never had any pain. None. With Kermit, he latched on immediately, every single time. And I was so thrilled that I didn't have to fight so hard for a latch, and I could do it without S's help, that I didn't really pay attention to whether he had a good latch. By Day 5, it became clear that he was mangling me a bit when he ate, and by the end of the first week, I was in a lot of pain. This time around, though, I knew what to do -- we immediately called the LC who was actually helpful the last time, and once again, she was sympathetic, and she made it clear that she was considering both my interests and Kermit's interests, rather than ignoring me and just focusing on the baby.

Everyone told me that breast feeding my second child would be a lot easier than it was the first time around. And indeed, it has been a lot easier. Still, it hasn't been easy, and I hadn't really thought about that distinction before. There has still been a lot of frustration, and a lot of physical pain, which is something that I didn't see coming, since it hadn't happened at all with LL.

It turns out that Kermit did a lot of damage to my right breast in particular during those first two weeks or so. The LC told me that I needed to rest it for 2-3 days, pumping that side while feeding Kermit just on the left. She assured me that my milk supply was sufficient that he'd get plenty of food from just that one side, but by the second day of that plan, it was clear that she was wrong -- Kermit was ending each meal by screaming his little head off because he was still hungry, and once I clued into that, I started topping him off with a bottle of the milk that I'd pumped from the other side. In the mean time, he had so continuously and vigorously nursed exclusively on the left for those three days that he managed to damage that breast as well. So by the end of the third day, my right side had healed a bit (but not completely) and my left side was now sore as well. I went back to nursing on both sides, hoping to let my left side rest a bit, and the very next day Kermit got inexplicably frustrated at the beginning of one meal and bit down, hard, on my newly healed right breast, re-damaging it to the point of being even worse than it had been before the three days off.

We went back to the LC at that point, who offered a few more suggestions, and things have improved since then. My left breast got better quickly, but I continued to have a fair amount of pain on the right side during each feeding, and the damage to that breast was still visible, for a full two months.

With LL, all of the breast feeding frustration felt like it involved teaching him to do the right thing, which was very very stressful, but I always felt like we'd pull through it. This time around, all the frustration was within me -- will I be able to suffer through the intense pain I was feeling at each and every feeding, 9-10 times a day, for however long it would take for the pain to go away. It was a completely different kind of frustration. The worst part was how ridiculously sensitive my right breast was. When Kermit was seven weeks old, I still couldn't sleep on my stomach, because I couldn't put that kind of pressure on my right breast. Same thing with sleeping on my right side, which is normally how I like to sleep. Sleeping on my left side was okay, but only if I cradled my breast carefully with a pillow and avoided resting my arm on it.

It was like that for a full two months, and then all of a sudden, it just got better. No more pain. Yay!

Of course, it got better just in time for Kermit to enter his I'm-too-distracted-to-eat-well phase, where he eats for ten seconds and then needs to turn his head to make sure that he's not missing something interesting at the other end of the room. (He even does this in the dark -- what does he expect to see when he turns his head?) He latches and unlatches himself a gazillion times each feeding, and I have no way of knowing when he's truly done eating. And it's sad, because the part of breast feeding that I love the most are those long, peaceful nursing sessions where the baby snuggles against my body and drinks deeply and gives little content sighs. I feel like I was in the pain the entire time that Kermit was doing that, and now he won't settle down like that anymore, except occasionally at night, so I feel like I just sort of missed that phase. I only had a very brief period of time when LL was like that, too -- just a month or two, and then he entered this distracted phase as well, and then he went on strike and stopped nursing entirely.

Indeed, LL's nursing strike is hanging over me every time I nurse Kermit. I was so heartbroken when LL went on strike because it was so sudden. This time, each time Kermit nurses, I wonder if he's going to do the same thing. What if this is the very last time he nurses?!? He had a mini one-day strike a few weeks ago, and I completely panicked that he would never nurse again. So, I'm trying very hard to relish every breast feeding session we have that goes well. I'm also being a bit paranoid about anything that might have caused LL's strike. With LL, we dutifully gave him one bottle a day, as recommended for babies that need to learn to eat from a bottle. With Kermit, he's only had two bottles in the past six weeks, as I try to make sure that he believes that all milk must come from Mommy, at least for now. We'll see how it goes. In the mean time, I'm just relieved that nursing is pain-free for now, and that Kermit is growing and thriving.

Dr. Mommy

2011-04-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

At the end of December, I gave a quick update on the state of my PhD. At the time, two of my three committee members had agreed to sign my dissertation, while the third (AdvisorA) was refusing to acknowledge that I'd even sent it to her. I gave her one more month to get back to me (also, I had a newborn and wasn't really in the mood to deal with her) and then, in early February, I started bugging her by email. And bugging her and bugging her. She kept telling me that yes, she had edits, but no, they weren't ready yet, and no, she wouldn't be signing until after she was done requesting changes. And then she kept putting off sending me anything. After much back and forth, she finally finally finally sent me a bunch of requested edits at the end of February. And yes, that means that I was editing my dissertation while caring for a six-week-old infant. Fun times! The first week of March, she finally sent me her signature on the final signature form. Which gave me one week to run around campus with Kermit getting the other two committee members to sign the form, doing final changes, doing the format check with the Registrar's office, and turning the whole thing in before the Winter deadline.

One random observation: when you do all this final PhD work while toting a baby who is not quite two months old, just about everybody you interact with comments on it, saying something like, "Really, you're doing all this dissertation work with a newborn?!?" Don't feel too proud of yourself, though. Yes, approximately two-thirds of those people will mean, "Wow, it's really impressive that you're finishing up heavy duty graduate work while also caring for a newborn!" But the other third of the people will actually mean, "Wow, it's really sad that you're neglecting a newborn just to do some graduate work before some arbitrary deadline." Those last third of the people will look sorrowfully at the baby and ask if maybe you shouldn't be going home and doing this PhD hobby of yours at a different time. (One of the women in the Registrar's office explicitly told me that perhaps I should come back in another few weeks, and I pointed out to her that I was there to meet her office's deadline, and she just shrugged.)

But, here's the good news: Everybody on the committee signed my dissertation. All forms and documents were turned into the university. The university accepted everything, and last week, officially conferred the degree. I am now Dr. Nicky. Mommy, PhD.

The job hunt is officially on hold, because I want to stay home with Kermit for a while longer. On good days, I tell people that I am now Dr. Stay-At-Home-Mom. On bad days, I just tell people that I'm unemployed. But either way, grad school is now mercifully over. For now, I'll be sticking with Dr. Mommy.

Family Resemblance

2011-04-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

Background information: I'm Eastern European Jewish. Pale skin, green eyes, dark brown curly hair. S is Japanese. Fairly light skin, dark olive-shaped eyes, black curly hair. Yes, he's 100% Japanese and he has curly hair. It's rare but it happens. Relatives on both sides of his family have wavy hair, but if there were a contest for curliest natural hair on a Japanese person, he would win.

One of the fun things to do when a baby is born is to play the "Who does he look like?" game. This game gets a little more complicated, however, when the parents are of different racial backgrounds. S and I have always said that LL just looks like himself. Yes, we can see tiny pieces of each of us in him (for example, he most definitely has my chin, poor kid!) but he doesn't truly look like either one of us. When he was a baby, however, S's family insisted that LL looked like me. When I finally asked some of them what specifically made him look like me, they universally answered that he looked white. (And apparently all white babies look like me....)

It's not uncommon for children of mixed race backgrounds to look more like one race than the other, and we've even seen full siblings who look like they are from completely different racial backgrounds, simply because they inherited specific features from mom vs. dad. So we were curious about who Kermit would look like.

Now that we've visited S's family, the verdict (from them) is in. In the words of one of S's aunts, "At least this one looks Asian!" They insisted that Kermit looks Japanese, with the undertones of "thank goodness!"

Okay, that's all very interesting. But here's the kicker: Kermit looks exactly like LL did as an infant! Seriously, you take photos of each of them at the same age, and I can barely tell them apart. We made a stack of photos of Kermit and intermixed them with a bunch of photos of LL at the same age, and nobody can reliably tell us which are Kermit and which are LL. In fact, when people struggle to find differences between them, the only reliable indicator that we've found is that Kermit's skin is actually more pale than LL's was at this age.

S and I have chalked it up to a case of people seeing what they want to see. We've also done a lot of joking about how S doesn't need to worry about the paternity of the kids -- if there was a mixup with the sperm at the fertility clinic, they must have made the exact same mistake the second time, too, because LL and Kermit obviously have the same parents.

I'll also note that most people truly don't think that LL is Asian at all. I think the mass of curly hair throws them off. And when I was out with Kermit today, someone asked if my husband was Mexican, and insisted that the baby looks Hispanic. So perhaps my kids just look vaguely exotic, in an indistinguishable way? Welcome to the modern post-racial world!

Looking at photos of LL from his first year, his face changed a lot over those twelve months, so we know that it's likely that Kermit will change in different ways and end up looking completely different from his brother. But for now, whenever anyone asks me and S who we think Kermit looks like, we just say that he looks like LL.

Quarter Year

2011-04-06T15:41:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I've been blog-absent for a while. No particular reason, other than the normal newborn nuttiness. It turns out that when you're recovering from a c-section, and then everyone in the house is sick, and then your newborn is hospitalized for RSV, and then everyone is still sick, and then you visit your in-laws for two weeks, and then you come home and try to get everyone back on a regular schedule.... and then you finally have time to take a breath, your first coherent thought ends up being something like this: "Hey, what happened to my teeny tiny newborn baby, and who left this gigantic three-month-old in my house?"

Yes, that's right, tomorrow Kermit will be three months old. For the first three months of LL's life, I kept detailed notes about what we were doing and how he was developing and what he liked to do. And I swore that I would do the same for Kermit, because I really didn't want to fall into that all-too-common trap with second children where there's no record of their life even though there are volumes written about the older child. And yet... here we are. I have been taking notes, but I still feel like I've been letting him down a bit. So, here's the three-month update, and I'll just have to try to do better in the future.

Kermit is an awesomely easy baby. If his needs are being met, he's happy as a clam. The only caveat is that the needs have to be met instantly, because he goes from happy as a clam to flames-shooting-from-his-eyes angry in ten seconds flat. When he wakes up, he's cheerful but hungry. I need to feed him within seconds of waking, because if I try to do something stupid like take the time to get a clean burp cloth out of the closet first, he'll claw my eyes out in frustration. When he's done eating, he whimpers a bit, followed by one burp. Every time. One burp. And then he's ready to play.

Exactly 75 minutes after he wakes up, he's ready for a nap. At 76 minutes, he starts screaming like a banshee, so I need to watch the clock for this one. He's amazingly consistent. If I swaddle him and give him a pacifier at 74 minutes, we can avoid the screaming entirely and he'll let me quietly rock him to sleep, but G-d help me if I wait until minute 76.

For his first month, he ate more than a baby that size has any right to eat, but he stopped eating when he was hospitalized, and he has normalized out his feedings now. At his two-month appointment, he weighed more than LL did when he was two months old, despite the fact that Kermit was born weighing over 1.5 pounds less. It's kind of annoying, actually, because the first two months of breast feeding were excruciatingly painful for me (a post unto itself) yet he wanted to eat all the time. (And not for lack of supply; we did that weigh-feed-weigh thing with a lactation consultant in those early weeks, and she was shocked by how much milk he was gulping down.) Now that breast feeding isn't painful anymore, he's barely interested. He's far too distracted by the world around him to bother eating very often or for very long.

Kermit loves to be bundled. He spent most of his first 6 weeks swaddled, and still likes it for naps and bedtime. He likes being in the sling, but it's not the magic cure-all that it was for LL. If Kermit is tired, he'll quickly fall asleep in the sling, but it doesn't calm him in quite the same way. Just before two months, I started carrying him in a mei tai, and I think that he prefers that now, at least when he's awake. Now that the weather is nice, we like to go outside as a family, with LL riding his tricycle, S chasing him on his plasma car, and me walking up and down the sidewalk with Kermit in the mei tai, begging them not to get run over by cars. Fun family times! Kermit attended his first birthday party this past weekend (one of LL's friends turned 4) and he spent the entire party hanging out in the mei tai, where he could snuggle or hide or sleep or watch, depending on his mood. Love it.

Kermit's first smile was at ~5 weeks, while he was hospitalized. His first laugh was when he was just under two months old, on my birthday, though he would only laugh at S. The last two weeks, he has become obsessed with Itsy Bitsy Spider, which often gets a chuckle out of him. And he flirts with everyone. He also loves sticking his tongue out.

When he was nine weeks old, we flew to visit my in-laws, for S's sister's wedding. Kermit was a fantastic traveler, nursing and sleeping on the plane and never making a peep. He loved being passed around among all the aunties, and almost every grandmother-type had an opportunity to hold him and rock him into a happy cuddly sleep. During the visit, Kermit went to his first zoo, his first childrens museum, and his first playground. He found all three of them to be fantastic places to nap in his stroller. (He thought the same about the wedding, actually.)

Also on that trip, Kermit discovered toys. We have a bunch of those baby toys that are meant to be hung from car seats, the ones with lots of colors and rings and textures, and they crinkle and rattle and are meant to be chewed on. I never really saw the point of them when LL was little. He would watch them when they swung from his seat, but he never touched them, so I didn't understand why they bothered with the textures and noise makers, unless that was for the amusement of the adults who were trying to entertain the baby with the toy. But Kermit... wow, Kermit can't get enough of those toys! He swats at them, he pulls them, he rubs them against his cheek, he chews on them, he talks to them, he smushes them in his pudgy little hands and shakes them. When LL was little, I occasionally hung one from his car seat just to brighten it up a bit, but Kermit actually plays with the toys. Amazing!

When LL was around this age, he grew attached to a small burp cloth, and I had to rush and make him a new security blanket (the much-loved Froggie Blanket) to replace it, since that particular burp cloth wasn't safe to leave in his crib. This past month, Kermit started doing the same thing, so I made him his own Froggie Blanket equivalent, and he is already quite in love with it. (We have named it Beary Blanket, but we'll have to see if the name sticks.)

Kermit also loves to talk. He started loudly cooing during his third month, and apparently liked the reactions of those around him, because he now must join all conversations. And we've all heard him cry out "Mama!"

More specific posts about sleep, our daily routine with two kids, and family resemblances, are coming soon, along with an update on LL, who is now two and a half (!).

Dear Mother-in-Law

2011-03-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Mother-in-Law--

Hi, remember me? You've known me for more than twelve years. I've been married to your only son for almost eight years. I'm the mother of your only two grandchildren in the whole wide world.

I wanted to remind you about a few things we've done together. Like when you visited S and me and watched him convert to Judaism. Do you also remember when I got married to S, in the big synagogue, with the rabbi speaking all the Hebrew? Or how about all those times you've celebrated Passover at our house? Or perhaps you've forgotten about all those other holidays you've celebrated at our house, in which I have made yummy roasted brisket in place of your traditional holiday ham? I'll also remind you about the repeated conversations we've had about why I don't eat spam. You also participated in bris celebrations for both of your grandsons. Any of this ringing a bell?

Because I'm curious about why, when we're staying at your house, you made ham soup for dinner, complete with big pieces of ham and chunks of pork sausage. I don't expect you to keep a kosher house while we visit, but I have explained numerous times that I really can't eat pig products.

I thought at first that, despite our long and obvious history, in which I have had to remind you many times about this single important dietary restriction, you had simply forgotten. But as we were all sitting down for dinner, you very pointedly said to me, "If you don't want to eat the dinner I made, you can just heat up some leftovers for yourself instead. I think there's some stuff in the fridge." Which kind of makes me think that you did remember, but you just didn't care. Which seems like an odd way to treat a house guest, no? Especially one that you expect to visit you often, with your adorable grandchildren in tow. Or am I just being overly sensitive?

Anyway, just curious.

Nicky

C-Section: The Ugly Side

2011-02-25T22:52:00.000-08:00

This post is long long long, but I left a lot of details out of Kermit's birth story, and I need to get them written down somewhere I can read them later. (But, I didn't want them integrated with his birth if they didn't have to be, because ick! let's focus on the cute baby for that one!) Details like, in what ways did it matter that I didn't give birth vaginally? How was the c-section? Did they put everything back where it goes, or is my bladder in a subtly different place than it was before?

The answers are: Lots of ways. It sucked. Things definitely feel a bit scrambled in there.

More details? Yes, I do have more details! If you insist.

First, I'll just mention that the nurses at my hospital are clearly not used to dealing with women who do not want a c-section, despite a non-trivial number of women attempting VBACs at this hospital on a regular basis. I can't possibly be the only woman they've ever dealt with who wanted a vaginal birth but didn't get one. And yet every nurse greeted me with something along the lines of, "You're here for your scheduled c-section! You must be very excited to be having surgery today instead of going through all the hassle of a vaginal birth!" When the first person said this, I didn't respond, because my eyes filled with tears and I didn't trust myself to speak. With the second person, I informed her that I actually would prefer the hassle, thankyouverymuch, but it didn't end up being feasible for me. I'm not sure how I expected her to respond to this... probably something like, "Oh, I'm sorry it didn't work out. We'll do our best to make this experience as positive for you as we can." That would have been reassuring. Instead, she tried to convince me that this way would be so much easier and more convenient for me. Which was exactly why I was upset, so it was exactly the wrong thing to say. Anyway, that nurse must have made a note in my file ("Crazy woman wanted VBAC instead of the nice convenient surgery") because every other nurse who came into my room, even ones who were just dropping off linens, gave me a speech that started with, "So I understand that you're a little reluctant about your c-section today" and then proceeded to tell me why surgery was oh so very convenient. In a voice that very much implied that only a naive little girl would be reluctant to give birth surgically.

Blech.

I'm definitely not a granola hippie type person, and I've always shrugged off people who believe that giving birth in a hospital automatically means that you'll be steamrolled by the uncaring medical establishment, blah blah blah. That whole outlook on hospital births was nothing like my experience giving birth to LL -- I had a doctor who listened to me, provided me with well-researched information, and ultimately let me call the shots about my own care; I had supportive nurses who asked how I wanted to be treated with regards to labor assistance, and then followed through on my wishes; the default behavior at the hospital is that all babies room in with their mothers; fathers are considered on equal footing with mothers, and are thus not considered "guests," which means that they can always spend the night if they want to; it is assumed that all mothers will breast feed, and formula is never offered unless it is explicitly requested by the parents. Basically, everything that the anti-hospital-birth people complain about... none of it matched with my experience with LL. But hearing nurse after nurse try to convince me of the virtues of a c-section, when I very obviously did not want it... um, yeah, I get it now.

Anyway, once everything was set for the c-section, I managed to get myself into a good mental place where I just wanted to meet little Kermit, regardless of how it happened. The c-section was, ultimately, medically necessary, so let's just go ahead and do it. And as I mentioned in Kermit's birth story, my hospital actually does a lot of things to make it easier on c-section moms, so that they don't miss out on as much of the post-birth stuff. A lot of these polices were actually new since LL was born, so I was pleasantly surprised. For example, when LL was born, he was immediately whisked off to the nursery. The nurse held him up next to me for 10 seconds so that I could get a quick glimpse and S could snap a quick picture of me with him, and then I didn't see him for nearly an hour, during which he was weighed and examined and bathed and dressed and everything else they do during those first precious minutes. I hate the one photo I have of me with LL immediately after his birth. The nurse was holding him at an angle to get us both in the photo, but that meant that I couldn't actually see him at all. In the photo, I'm trying to smile for the photo, but it looks like a horrible grimace because I'm really attempting to crane my neck to see his face, which is exceedingly difficult to do while you're unable to move and someone two feet away is still holding your uterus outside of your body. This time around, I got to see him as he was being born. He was cleaned up ever so slightly, the bare necessity of stuff was done (apgar scores and very little else) and then he was brought immediately to my side, where I got to touch him and hold him and stroke his face for as long as I wanted. They didn't do anything else to him until after my surgery was over, so that I could take part. Fantastic improvement over LL's birth.

Before having this c-section, Dr. M had assured me that a lot of things would be better than LL's birth. Since this was a scheduled c-section, instead of an "OMG, after 23 hours of labor the baby is stuck like a big round peg in a much smaller pelvic opening and he's turning purple we have to get him out now" c-section, the surgery itself would be much easier. None of that "push the baby back out of the birth canal so we can reach him" stuff that made my recovery the first time oh-so-fun. None of the body trauma from the long labor and several hours of pushing. Easier surgery. Easier recovery. He promised.

To summarize: that was not my experience.

This c-section was definitely completely different than what I remember with LL, but not in a good way. The birth itself was very similar, but once the baby was out, things diverge tremendously. I remember feeling very little during the 30 minutes it took to close me up last time; I mostly remember being rather bored and wanting to get out of there so that I could see my baby. This time around, I was consumed with the terrible tugging and pulling going on at my lower half. It felt awful. It's hard to describe the sensation of your body being tugged and pulled in a million different directions, internally, while you're unable to move. I can't use the word "painful" because the spinal does block pain down there, but it was intensely uncomfortable and unsettling. I also started feeling dizzy, and out of the corner of my eye, I watched my own stats on the monitor to see my blood pressure dropping down down down.

The anesthesiologist offered to give me something to make me sleep through the rest of the surgery, but I declined, because I wanted to be completely alert as soon as they were done, so that I could nurse. A few minutes later, I started to experience horrible chest pain that got worse and worse. I panicked a bit because, um, what happened to not feeling any pain? The anesthesiologist added some other type of pain killer, which dulled it a bit (he promised it was referred pain, and not a heart attack, which is what it felt like) but it also made me even more dizzy, and my blood pressure continued to drop. The tugging and rummaging seemed to go on and on, as I repeatedly asked how many more layers they had to go. It really sucked. Which surprised me, because I expected the recovery to suck, but not the actual procedure. Over and over in my head was the thought that thank goodness Kermit was here and healthy, but this whole surgery thing was clearly a mistake. I just desperately wanted to be out of there.

When I finally got to recovery, all I wanted to do was to sit up and nurse Kermit. When they took my stats, though, they discovered that my blood pressure was still very very low, and my temperature was also low and continuing to drop. They would let me sit up a little, I would get very dizzy, and they would immediately lie me back down. Thus, my first nursing experience with Kermit involved me lying flat on my back with hot towels wrapped around my head in an effort to bring up my core body temperature. (It didn't work; when I left the recovery room two hours later, my body temp was still hovering near 95, which is a bit insane, and my blood pressure was barely double digits. In retrospect, I'm not sure how I was even conscious.)

I was in that condition for the rest of the day. My L&D nurse asked me what one thing she could do for me that would make my life better, and I said, "I want to get up and walk around!" Nope, not gonna happen. "How about at least letting me sit up?" And she looked at my stats, and smiled apologetically, and asked if there was anything she could do for me that wouldn't make me faint. (Side note: I'm lying in a bed with rails. Why does it matter if I faint? It's not like I'm going to fall into anything or bump my head, and I'm sure I'd come around again eventually. I'm kidding, but only barely.)

Anyway, the surgery sucked. I'm not a squeamish person; I can watch my own blood being drawn, and I have no fear of surgery or anesthesia or any of the rest of it. Yet the last 30 minutes or so of Kermit's c-section ended up being one of the more terrifying things I've ever been through, as the chest pain consumed me and my abdomen was pummeled from within and I thought I was going to pass out and my blood pressure dropped lower and lower. And the rest of that day, as I struggled to sit up despite continuing low blood pressure and low temperatures, also sucked.

The next morning, my stats were still low, but no longer in the scary range, and I was allowed to sit up and eat a little and get out of bed. After LL's birth, this was when things were just starting to suck, because the recovery from labor + surgery was long and hard. But I'd been promised that recovery this time around would be much easier, so part of me actually started feeling like maybe the worst was behind me. Except that my recovery was worse than last time, too, for unknown reasons. It does seem to have been faster -- I wasn't able to move around normally until 8 weeks last time, which meant two full months of no driving and no lifting things and trouble standing up or getting out of bed. This time around, I felt like I reached 85% recovery by the one-month mark, and I kind of ignored that last 15% and just returned to my life, so that was definitely an improvement. But that first month was much worse than last time. It's almost as if my two months of pain from last time was just intensified and shoved into a shorter period of time. Is that better and easier? Um.... not sure. I was definitely in a lot more pain for that entire month. But maybe it's just an indication that, last time, I got off easy.

I had my six weeks post-partum appointment last week, and I know that I'm definitely better now than I was at six weeks post-partum with LL, so I guess that's something. And the remaining effects from the surgery (loss of nerve sensitivity for several inches around the incision; intense pain on my lower left side when I do anything more strenuous than walk from the living room to the bathroom; extremely weak ab muscles that give out when I carry Kermit for more than five minutes) are apparently completely normal, and can be expected to continue for another 4-6 weeks.

So, overall, while I'm thrilled that Kermit is here and healthy (recent hospitalization for respiratory distress aside), and that I will eventually be completely healthy as well, I can't say that things went as I expected. And while I'm grateful that c-sections are an option -- having a c-section certainly saved both my life and LL's life two years ago -- I'm left wondering why the hell anyone would choose a surgical birth voluntarily. S and I haven't decided yet whether we will someday want to try to have a third child, but I hate beyond measure that my birth experience with Kermit is inevitably going to color that decision for us.

LL's First Joke

2011-02-19T14:18:00.000-08:00

Today LL invented his very first joke! We're very proud of him. Are you ready?

"What color is Baba's car?"

"Blue!"

Insert hysterical toddler laughter here!

You see, it's funny because everybody knows that Baba's car is actually white.

The best part of the joke is watching the totally evil look on LL's face when he says what he knows to be the wrong answer, then tries for all of one second to suppress his laughter.

He followed it up with these gems:

"Mommy's car is blue!" (My car is actually gray.)

"Daddy's car is blue!" (S's car is green.)

"LL's car is blue!" (If LL had a car, I'm pretty sure that it would be red.)

He practically fell off his chair laughing at that last one. Then he very soberly informed us of the correct colors of each of the cars, because jokes are always funnier if you explain the punchline.

Let the years of bad knock-knock jokes begin....

Kermit's Birth Story

2011-02-16T12:33:00.000-08:00

I've obviously been distracted for a while now, what with the extra work of keeping my kids out of the hospital and stuff, but I didn't want to wait much longer to get Kermit's birth story written down. So here it is, in way too much detail, the story of Kermit's entry into the world.

We had a relatively normal morning, getting LL ready for the day. I had become ridiculously emotional the night before, and that continued into the morning. Every time I tried to talk to LL, I started crying. I'm honestly not even sure why. But I kept sitting down with him on my lap to try to explain to him what was going to be happening over the next few days, and every single time, I had to do it through tears. We'd spent the last two weeks having these conversations once or twice a day, where I would explain to him that very soon, Mommy and Daddy were going to go away for a few days, and he would get to stay home and play with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma would dress him and change his diapers and read to him and rock him and put him down for bed and feed him (even special treats like yogurt shakes and french fries!) and it would be tons of fun. And after a few days, Mommy and Daddy would come back home again, because even though Mommy and Daddy leave sometimes, Mommy and Daddy always come back home. Each time I explained this to him, he would nod his head and say that he understood, and I just hoped that after hearing it a dozen times, it would actually sink in. So, I gave him my speech one final time, through a few tears, and he nodded his head and patted my leg and asked if the baby was coming home. All good. After breakfast, my mom drove LL to Natasha's at more or less the normal time, and he waved and blew me kisses from the car as they drove away. S and I took a few minutes to finish packing up our stuff, and at 10:00, we left for the hospital.

After an emotionally tumultuous evening, I felt more and more calm the closer we got to the c-section. I still wasn't thrilled with how things were going, but I was slowly moving past the disappointment and focusing on the joy of finally meeting our little Kermit. We checked in at the hospital, got settled in an L&D room, and began all of the random things that you have to do to prepare for surgery. (Undress, sign forms, answer tons of questions in triplicate, start an IV.) The IV took several attempts by several people, and ultimately the anesthesiologist had to do it himself, and it took him two tries. One person remarked that it appeared that I did not have a circulatory system, though I assured her that I was fairly certain that I did. It reminded me of my ultrasound 3 weeks earlier, when the technician couldn't find my cervix. I had to reassure her, too, that I was fairly certain it was there, since the baby had not fallen out yet.

Eventually, S and I were left alone, as the IV pumped me full of fluids and we waited for the appointed time. I surprised myself by how calm I was by the time we moved to the operating room. Time to get the show on the road!

Getting the spinal was relatively easy, and I was shocked by how quickly it began to numb my legs. I literally felt the cold spread downwards as I slowly lost sensation. I wasn't quite prepared, though, for how much I was still able to feel. I seemed to recall my epidural at LL's birth blocking just about everything during the c-section -- even when I was warned to expect some pressure at the moment when they took him out, I only really noticed it because it moved my whole body a bit. This time, I spent the entire surgery completely aware that people were rummaging around inside of me. It wasn't painful exactly, but supremely uncomfortable and unsettling.

After 10 minutes or so, Dr. M announced that he was ready to get Kermit out. At my repeated insistent request, they lowered the curtain for me so that I could see him emerge, which was incredible. (I had asked Dr. M about this possibility several weeks ago, and he told me that it would be fine, but to remind him on the day of the c-section. I mentioned it to the anesthesiologist when he was talking to me about the spinal that morning, and he balked and said, "No way!" I sputtered a bit and tried to get him to discuss it with me, but finally just dropped it until Dr. M came into the operating room, at which point I brought it up yet again. Dr. M immediately said, "Sure, that's fine!" and told the anesthesiologist to be sure to lower the curtain at the appropriate time. Score one for speaking up for yourself!)

I didn't get to see LL until after he was washed and swaddled, so it was wonderful for me to be able to see Kermit while he was still attached to his umbilical cord, all naked and alien gray and covered in schmutz, hands clenched in angry fists and squawking in surprise. And at that moment, his method of birth didn't matter. Or rather, it mattered, but it wasn't the earth-shattering disappointment that it seemed the day before. I'm still sad that it happened this way, and I feel like I still need to mourn never getting the opportunity to progress naturally and give birth vaginally, but seeing my brand new son in his very first second of life did indeed heal the worst of the resentment.

Kermit was cleaned up ever so slightly, the bare necessity of stuff was done (apgar scores and very little else) and then he was brought immediately to my side. The nurse supported his body while lying his head on my chest, allowing me to watch him and kiss him and stroke his face with my hand and count his fingers for as long as I wanted. And S and Kermit and I got to spend quite a while staring at each other and murmuring over our perfect little baby. When Kermit was put back in his bassinet, it was only to go with S to my recovery room, where S got to bond with him undisturbed while they waited for my surgery to end. Only after I joined them in the recovery room did the nurses do the rest of the post-birth stuff like weighing and bathing, so that I could observe everything.

Meanwhile, Dr. M and his team were putting me back together. I'm going to skip over that part for now, because it sucked. I'll leave the sucky things for a different post.

When I got to recovery, I asked for Kermit to be unwrapped so that I could hold him on my chest skin to skin while he was still all new and alert, something that I never got to do with LL until an hour or so later. The nurse wanted to bathe him, but cheerfully agreed when I said that I would prefer to nurse him first. And so I got to cuddle my naked little Kermit on my chest and watch him root and twist his way to my breast, where he latched on almost immediately.

After that, we did the usual things you do post-birth. Snuggled Kermit. Called the relatives. Chose a little knit hat for him to wear in the hospital. Remarked about who he looks like (more S than me, but just barely) and what color his eyes are (steely gray) and the incredible quantity of hair (dark and curly, as expected).

The extra fun ending to the birth story: once we were all moved from recovery into the room on the maternity ward where we would be staying for the next several days, our newly assigned nurse smiled at the three of us and said, "All settled?" At which point, right on cue, we had an earthquake. Yes, an actual earthquake. I was on a wheeled hospital bed, so I thought that somebody had just kicked the bed really hard for no good reason, and I was a bit confused about why somebody would do something so mean to a woman who just had surgery, but then S looked around and asked if anyone else felt something, and we all realized what was going on. At the tender age of almost-exactly-three-hours old, Kermit experienced his first earthquake. A magnitude 4.1, for those of you keeping score at home. That number will either make you say, "Wow, that sounds big!" or "Wow, I'm surprised you felt it at all!" depending on whether you've ever lived around earthquakes and how well you understand logarithms.

Welcome to the world, Kermit! Life is full of surprises.

Home Again Home Again

2011-02-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

Quick update: we're home, thank goodness. Kermit isn't completely out of the woods, but he was stable enough and on the road to recovery so that they discharged us from the hospital Saturday night. We had a follow-up with Dr. K on Sunday morning, where we briefly thought that she was going to re-admit him, but all is well. He's still a bit weak, but he's eating better and breathing a little easier. And the fever is gone. And his oxygen saturation is staying a bit more stable, though it's still lower than we would like. We're checking back in with Dr. K tomorrow, just to make sure that Kermit is headed in the right direction.

In a twist that would only be achieved by a newborn, Kermit began social smiling while in the hospital. I mean seriously, who smiles, much less for the first time, while in the hospital?

The decision we need to make now is what to do about our upcoming trip for S's sister's wedding. We had been planning to fly, but I'm starting to have concerns about trapping Kermit in a plane with 300 strangers and recirculated air for several hours. We could drive instead, but it's a 14 hour trip, and that's a long time to spend in a car with a toddler and a newborn. Dr. K says that Kermit will probably be well enough by then that we don't need to worry about flying. But nothing puts a mother's nerves on edge quite like several days in the hospital with a one-month-old.

Focus

2011-02-11T00:19:00.000-08:00

Nothing quite like the feeling of finding out that you've been focusing on exactly the wrong things.

Last weekend, both my kids got sick. LL was a feverish toddler mess, but he had weathered colds before, and I figured this one wouldn't be any different. Kermit's symptoms were newer and more mild, yet he was the one I was concerned about. I knew the drill with toddler colds -- you bring them to the pediatrician, and then you listen to the lecture about how viruses just need to run their course, take them home, keep them hydrated, nothing else to be done. It almost always feels like a wasted trip. Kermit, however, was barely one month old. Surely a cold in a one-month-old deserves a bit more professional attention!

So Monday morning, I called and made an appointment for Kermit to see Dr. K. And as an afterthought, I checked with the advice nurse to see if maybe possibly it might be a good idea to bring in LL as well? I expected the "don't be a hyper-protective mother" speech, but instead the nurse rather pointedly mentioned that lying on a couch for four days without playing or eating isn't exactly normal behavior for a two-year-old, so yes, bring him along to the appointment.

When Dr. K entered the exam room, my speech to her went something like this: "Kermit has the sniffles, and he doesn't have a fever or anything, but he's coughing, and he's only four weeks old, and I'm really concerned about him. Also, LL has been a feverish mess for four days and counting, but I'm sure he'll be fine soon." And then she examined both of them, and said, "Sorry, he has pneumonia." And I said, "Oh my goodness, Kermit has pneumonia?!?!" And she gave me the oddest look in the world, and I'm paraphrasing here, but she said something along the lines of, "No, you dolt, I'm talking about LL! You know, the one who's really acting sick! Kermit just has a cold, and it'll run its course, keep him hydrated, call if it gets worse. But LL, goodness gracious, he's really sick!"

Anyway, I felt like an idiot, because the whole time that LL had been sick, I'd been focused on making sure that he didn't pass it to Kermit. And not only did I fail at that (as if there were any doubt that Kermit would catch LL's cold) but I had somehow totally glossed over how very sick LL was. I was completely focused on the wrong kid.

So, I spent the next several days obsessing over every detail of LL's recovery. Was his fever dropping? Was he drinking enough? Was he eating more? Exactly how much more active was he than he was the day before? On Wednesday morning, Dr. K called to check on the kids. And I gushed over how much better LL was compared to when she saw him on Monday. As for Kermit... well, he wasn't getting better, but he wasn't getting worse. You know how colds are, they need to run their course.

By Thursday morning, however, as I gleefully dressed LL to head to Natasha's because he was remarkably and gloriously better, I looked down at Kermit and realized that he hadn't really eaten much the night before. And he'd spit up massive amounts of milk at his last several feedings, even though he's generally not a spitty baby. And he had been fussing at every feeding since Wednesday afternoon. And he seemed to be sleeping more than usual. I'd told Dr. K on Wednesday morning that he wasn't getting any worse, but by Thursday morning, I had a sinking feeling that he actually was getting worse now, and maybe we should bring him back to be seen.

I made a follow-up appointment for Kermit for Thursday afternoon. When I made the appointment, I kind of thought (again) that I was doing the over-protective mother thing, but by the afternoon I was glad that we were going. Still, I felt a bit silly leaving the kid with pneumonia to fend for himself at daycare while I brought the kid with the run-of-the-mill cold back to the pediatrician.

Then again, Dr. K never once said this about LL, but she said it about Kermit on Thursday afternoon: "Sorry, but this baby can't go home with you today. He needs to get to the hospital. We're calling an ambulance to take him there. Right now."

For several days, I had obsessed about Kermit's cold and missed that LL had pneumonia. And I then over-compensated and fixated so much on getting LL over his pneumonia that I completely missed that Kermit had suddenly, very suddenly, gotten a heck of a lot worse. For the second time in one week, I was focused on the wrong kid.

I'm currently admitted to Children's Hospital with Kermit, while LL is at home with his grandmother. I totally didn't see it coming, but my toddler with pneumonia is at home without his mommy because, remarkably, he is not the sickest child I have. We think that Kermit has some sort of respiratory infection, probably RSV, but we don't know for sure quite yet. His oxygen levels keep dropping, so he's getting help breathing, which thankfully is giving him enough of a boost that he has also started eating more. We've been told that he will be here for at least two days, probably more. S keeps telling me that I should feel proud of myself for realizing that Kermit was getting worse and insisting that he be seen; apparently when I made the follow-up appointment, S thought I was being silly and that Kermit was just fine. And yet, I cannot shake the feeling that I'm failing miserably at the mommy-to-two-children thing, because I can apparently only pay attention to one of them at a time, and it always seems to be the wrong one.

The Good and the Bad

2011-02-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

First, the good news:

The Packers won the Super Bowl! The Packers won the Super Bowl! The Packers won the Super Bowl! The smallest town with a professional sports team in the US has defeated the mighty Big City! The Lombardi Trophy is back in Title Town! Cheeseheads rule the earth!!!

Now, the bad news:

Our house has been hit with the plague. I mentioned that LL was feeling a bit sluggish and under the weather on Friday? He continued to spend 100% of his time with his feverish little body draped over me all day Saturday. And all day Sunday. After breaking out the animated movies Friday and Saturday, we switched to football on Sunday. This was absolutely a one-time-only, just-because-LL-was-sick sort of thing (definitely not something that I would have done under normal conditions, even with my Packers in the Super Bowl) but we watched eight hours of pre-game shows on Sunday. Eight hours! Do you know what people have to resort to in order to fill eight hours of pre-game? Let's interview every player on both teams, even people you've never heard of. Let's interview people who used to play for both teams but don't anymore. Let's interview people who have ever played in a Super Bowl. Let's discuss exactly how much of a jerk Ben Roethlisberger is, and whether anyone cares. Did you know that it's really cold in Dallas? Let's talk about that for a while. Here's the history of the cheesehead. Here's the history of the terrible towel. Did you know that the Packers coach grew up in Pittsburgh? Let's find out which team his former neighbors are cheering for! Did you know that Michael Douglas is cheering for Pittsburgh? Did you know that Catherine Zeta Jones is a huge Green Bay fan, because she really likes cheese? Did you know that John Madden, George W. Bush, and Cameron Diaz sat together at the Super Bowl? Does anyone who is not literally being held down against their will by a toddler actually care about all of this??? And then, when all eight hours of pre-game were over, we still had a full Super Bowl to watch. With commercials. All told, we watched 12 hours of football on Sunday. I am now officially footballed out.

Normally for LL, watching NFL games is a full-body sport. He runs when the players run. He falls down when they're tackled. He does all the referee hand motions. He yells, "Touchdown!" and "First down!" and "Go Pack!" But for this Super Bowl, he sat quietly on the couch with his head buried in a pillow. When the Packers scored a touchdown, we got a faint smile, but he didn't even have the energy to lift his arms for the signal. I convinced him to eat an Oreo cookie, and it was the only food he'd eaten since Friday. Really pathetic.

Also, by Sunday morning, both Kermit and I also had coughs, congestion, and slight fevers, so nobody was having very much fun. S was still healthy, so he was hiding out as far away from the rest of us as he could manage.

When nobody was any better Monday morning, we went to the pediatrician with both kids. Kermit has a run-of-the-mill cold. Except that he's barely one month old, and no cold is run-of-the-mill at that age. We're keeping a close eye on him.

LL's cold has progressed to pneumonia. And an ear infection. He's on antibiotics. We're trying to convince him that he needs both food and oxygen to survive, but he's not getting very much of either one right now.

I was told to provide LL with whatever he needs most (to sit in my lap, 24 hours a day) and to provide Kermit with whatever he needs most (to nurse every hour, 24 hours a day) and to be sure to get plenty of sleep so that I recover, too. Anybody notice how completely incompatible those things are?

And the kicker: the pediatrician suspected that this might not actually be a run-of-the-mill cold at all. She thought that it might be whooping cough. (Yes, LL and I are both vaccinated against it, but this particular vaccine is notoriously unreliable, so it was a very real possibility.) We were in panic mode until this morning, when we got the lab results that came up negative (thankfully). But if nobody's better by next week, our pediatrician wants to re-run the test, because it apparently has a high false negative rate.

But hey, at least the Packers won, right?

Trial by Feverish Fire

2011-02-05T21:38:00.000-08:00

My mom has been staying with us and helping out since before Kermit was born. She's planning to stay until Kermit is 6 weeks old, since that is when I'll be able to lift LL again. She's been doing a lot of cooking and shopping for us, as well as helping a lot with LL. But she also promised to attend my nephew's birthday party this weekend, so she left on Thursday to go there, with plans to return to our house Sunday night. Thus, S and I would be on our own with both kids for four days, our first time ever.

The idea was for this to be a very light practice run of life with two kids. My mom prepared several meals before she left, another friend was planning to bring us dinner on Friday, and we had a small Super Bowl party planned for Sunday (Go Pack Go!) which would provide some extra hands and entertainment for LL. Still, we were a little nervous about being on our own, since we've gotten used to having my mom around to help.

Mom left Thursday morning, and the rest of Thursday went just fine. We got dinner on the table on time, and got both kids to bed with relative ease. S and I were actually feeling pretty good about ourselves! Until 1am or so, when LL woke up crying. S went to check on him to discover that he was burning up with fever. Great.......

All of Friday and Saturday have been spent trying to soothe a sick sick sick toddler while also trying desperately to keep him and his germs away from not-yet-one-month-old Kermit. For me, this has meant sitting on the couch holding LL and watching movies, then handing him off to S while I scrub myself raw to try to decontaminate myself before feeding Kermit, hoping that my breast milk has enough antibodies in it to help him to fight off the cold, then handing Kermit back to S so that I can go back to snuggling LL until Kermit's next feeding.

Before this illness, LL had seen exactly one movie in his entire life (I was heavily pregnant and exhausted and home alone with him, and it was the only way he would let me lie on the couch for 90 minutes). In the last two days, he has seen eight movies. Er, three movies, repeated several times. (Four viewings of Finding Nemo ("fish movie"), three Kiki's Delivery Service ("train movie"), and one Beauty and the Beast.) He insists on being in physical contact with me the entire time, alternating being in my lap, over my shoulder, and lying with his head on my legs. When I need to get up to feed Kermit, LL lies pathetically on the couch asking me when I'll be coming back to him. I swear I saw heat plumes rising from his feverish little body. (103.5 midday today, and that was after being dosed with Tylenol.) The only food I've gotten him to eat has been a yogurt shake that he sipped throughout the day, along with as much juice and water as I could force into him, because he's getting awfully dehydrated.

Luckily, Kermit seems happy being held all day by S. (If he were old enough to have a parent preference, I don't know what I'd do, because LL has been refusing all comfort from S and insisting on being held by me.) Unsurprisingly, I am now developing a cough and sore throat, which we're hoping will skip both Kermit and S. I'm a little fuzzy on the science, but my being sick means that there will be additional antibodies in my breast milk, which should provide additional protection for Kermit, right?

One particularly sad side effect of all of this is that we've had to cancel our Super Bowl party. The last time my Packers were in the Super Bowl, I watched the game in my dorm room and made all my friends chip in a few bucks for the meager snacks that I bought for the occasion (most of the food had been stolen from the dorm dining hall). In other words, I've been waiting a long, long time to host a real Super Bowl party featuring my Green Bay Packers. Instead, the four of us will be watching it quietly at home. If I can keep the coughing, sneezing, and feverish delirium to a minimum, it will hopefully still be a good time for all. In the mean time, we're all counting down the minutes until my mom gets back to make us a giant pot of matzo ball soup.

Go Pack!

100 Days Later

2011-01-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

100 days ago, I posted a list of goals for what I wanted to accomplish in the next 500 days. Here is my update, 20% of the way through. Keep in mind, I have a three-week-old, so I haven't exactly been focused on these during the first fifth of my 500 days. In other words, I've basically squandered the first 100 of my 500 days, but hopefully my update at Day 200 will be better!

1. Have two happy kids. (Done!)

2. Finish my PhD. (Still finishing some formatting, and still waiting for AdvisorA to freaking sign off on it. Also, even once all of that is done, the degree won't technically be awarded until March.)

3. Own a new (bigger) house. (Gotta get a job first.)

4. Work in a job that I enjoy. (Not yet. I didn't expect to be working in a job yet, but I thought that I would at least have one lined up by now. Sigh.)

5. Bring both kids to visit my parents at least once. (We're hoping to make one trip sometime in late spring, but haven't planned the details yet.)

6. Bring both kids to visit my in-laws at least once. (First trip is in March!)

7. Pay off all debt except the mortgage. (That last undergrad loan is still there....)

8. Lose all pregnancy and fertility treatment weight from both pregnancies. (That would be 22 pounds below pre-pregnancy weight with Kermit. Right now, 3 weeks post-partum, this means that I still need to lose 19 pounds. Yep, that's right, Kermit pregnancy weight is already gone. Woo hoo!)

9. Breast feed Kermit for one year. (Three weeks gone, 49 weeks to go.)

10. Cook dinner at home 5 days each week. (I have made zero progress on this so far. I haven't cooked anything more complicated than rice since Kermit was born.)

11. Read 10 fiction books. (Ha! Check back in another 100 days.)

12. Learn javascript. (Ha! Check back in another 100 days.)

13. Learn perl. (Ha! Check back in another 100 days.)

14. Have permanent assigned "homes" for most objects in the house. (Ha! Check back, um, after we've moved.)

15. Update work wardrobe. (I'll start working on this once I'm closer to the end of my maternity leave, and hopefully have lost a little more weight. Also, I only need a work wardrobe if I have a job, so this one is incredibly unnecessary right now.)

16. Shower every day. (Um... this one has actually gotten worse in the last 100 days.)

17. Wear makeup every work day. (Definitely not happening right now; check back when I'm a bit further away from having given birth.)

Slow start, but I expected that, since many of these were going to be difficult to work on until after Kermit was born. The next 100 days will hopefully be more productive.

Two Weeks?!?!

2011-01-25T23:07:00.000-08:00

Wow, time really flies when you're on-the-clock 24 hours a day with both a newborn and a toddler!

I've been meaning to give some sort of update, and as usual, I put it off until I can write up the "full" update that I really want to write, which never happens, and thus nothing gets written. So, these here are some random thoughts that I wanted to get down, and I expect that there will be more random stream-of-consciousness-type posts over the next month as well. You do what you gotta do, you know? I still need to write up Kermit's birth story, too. Later. I promise.

Kermit:
He's an eating machine! This kiddo latched onto my breast on his very first try and never looked back. He's so loud gulping milk that it's kind of embarrassing. Babies are supposed to regain enough weight to be back up to birth weight by their two-week appointment; at Kermit's appointment, we discovered that he was a full pound above his birth weight, prompting our pediatrician to point at my breasts and ask if I'd opened a Dairy Queen in there. (S was so amused by the question that he has taken to calling me his Dairy Queen. My Wisconsin roots make it that much funnier for him.) When he's not eating, or asking to eat, or complaining that he's hungry again, Kermit is a very calm baby so far. And very snuggly. I'm very much enjoying all the newborn snuggles.

Also, not to jinx it or anything, but Kermit just might be a good luck charm for my Green Bay Packers, since they haven't lost a single game since Kermit was born. We have photos of Kermit and LL both wearing their Packers jerseys and appropriately sized cheeseheads, watching the NFC championship game, and there is much excitement around here for the Super Bowl. We normally host a Super Bowl party for our friends every year, and I've dreamed about being able to host one in which my Packers are playing, but I'm not sure if I can pull it off with a one-month-old....

Lots of family visited during Kermit's first week, through his bris at 8 days old. The bris went wonderfully, other than Kermit waking up during the naming part of the ceremony and deciding that he was hungry again, and then bawling loudly for the rest of the ceremony, until I could whisk him away to be fed. Yes, that's right, he stayed calm through the circumcision part, then freaked out during the part where he was just hanging out in Grandpa's arms listening to the rabbi. We had a much smaller turnout at the bris then we had at LL's, which was disappointing (for example, not a single friend or coworker of mine, from my job or from school, attended the bris) but I kind of saw it coming. Second kid and all, eh?

After the bris, things quieted down, and everyone except my mom left. She's been staying with us since, which has been awesome, because I don't think we'd be eating without her. Or rather, we'd be eating pizza for dinner every night. Late.

LL:
LL has been a little champ! He's very attentive and loving, showering Kermit with kisses, telling us when Kermit needs to eat (every single time he cries, apparently), bringing him blankets to keep him warm while he sleeps, rocking the bouncy chair when he fusses. If only the kisses weren't full on the mouth, and the blankets smothering Kermit's face. It's a little Of Mice and Men, if you know what I mean.

I'm not allowed to pick LL up until my 6 week appointment, which seems to be the hardest part for LL to deal with. I've explained to him that Mommy has an owie (he investigated it himself to see how bad it was; he found the incision quite fascinating) and that I can't pick him up or carry him until the owie gets better. Every day, he asks if the owie is better yet, and looks a little sad when I tell him no. And today, he forgot and jumped off a chair into my arms; I caught him, but it hurt like hell, and he could tell that I was in pain. When I put him down, he walked away, then returned a moment later to ask if my owie hurt, at which point he told me that he was sorry and he kissed my stomach to make it better. So I guess he understands the limitations fairly well.

He has also caught on shockingly fast to the new rhythms of our household. Every time Kermit cries, LL runs to me and says, "Oh Mama! Baby needs to eat! Open shirt! Open shirt!" And then he attempts to help me pull out a breast. We haven't really gone out with both kids yet, but I'm really looking forward to him doing that in public.

The toughest times for LL tend to be when he's hurt and when it's bedtime (he wants to snuggle on my lap, but I can't lift him into his crib, so he cries when I need to hand him over to Daddy). All compounded by the fact that he got his worst injury ever this past weekend, when he tried pulling his pajamas off a wooden hook wall-hanging thing and the whole thing fell off the wall and hit him in the face. I was right there when it happened, and he immediately buried his face deep into my shoulder and wailed in agony, while I held my breath and wondered exactly how much blood there was going to be once he pulled his face away from me. He ended up with a huge gash across the bridge of his nose, tons of swelling, and two black eyes. He is currently very proud of his injuries, though, and stops to admire himself in every mirror he passes, and recounts the story to everyone, since everybody has been asking him what in the world happened to his face. (I like to point at two-week-old Kermit, shrug, and just say, "All brothers fight, right?") LL is definitely more clingy than usual, and he's been acting uncharacteristically defiant towards the end of the day, but overall, things have been more smoother than I expected. (I say, confidently, after only two weeks....)

He's Here!

2011-01-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

Our son, Kermit*, was born Friday, January 7, at 1:00pm, via completely predictable c-section. He weighed a modest 7 lbs 7 oz, he's 21" long, and he's the best eater in the world. Seriously, this kid cannot stop eating.

Everyone is doing well so far, though I still have my cough left over from the cold a few weeks ago, and fits of coughing immediately after abdominal surgery sucks more than I can possibly describe. We should be home sometime early next week, and I'll write up a full birth story then. For now, I'll just mention that Kermit's birth was so earth-shattering that it culminated in an earthquake. Literally. A small one, but the building moved, and S and two nurses and I all looked at each other in disbelief and asked, "Wow, was it just me, or did anyone else feel that?!?" at the same time. I've lived in earthquake territory for nearly a dozen years, and I've felt maybe 6 earthquakes total during that time. Yet one of them was the night S proposed to me, and another one was the week we found out that we were pregnant with LL. And now this one to herald in Kermit's birth. Nothing inflates your view of your own significance quite like the universe moving a planet to announce your major life changes.

* As with LL, I have decided not to actually include Kermit's name on the blog, but I'll leave enough clues that you can easily figure it out if you want to. For blog purposes, the name Kermit has grown on me quite a bit, so we'll stick with that for now. In real life, his name starts with a J, and means "dove" in Hebrew. The name comes from a prophet in the Torah known most notably for being eaten by a very large fish.

Trying to Keep Perspective

2011-01-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

(Warning: this post is angsty and self-indulgent and more than a little whiny. I'm not sleeping much these days, and I was up all night last night with LL, and I'm not having any contractions anymore, and my emotions are all over the place. Can't wait until the real roller coaster sets in post-partum.)

Shocking news: I'm still pregnant.

To be clear, when I say that I'm trying every labor induction technique that I can manage, I'm including all of the following:

- spicy foods
- raspberry leaf tea
- copious sex with S
- stopping of prenatal vitamins
- foot and ankle massage
- acupressure on the spot between thumb and index finger
- nipple manipulation
- bouncing up and down on an exercise ball
- long walks
- driving repeatedly over railroad tracks
- eating basil
- talking calmly to Kermit about how cool it is on the outside
- S leaning over my abdomen and yelling, "Oh for goodness sake, contract already!"
- reverse psychology, where S and I talk loudly about how we're not really ready yet

You'd think that one of those would work, right?

I had my final prenatal appointment yesterday, where Dr. M remarked on how high Kermit is, how he can still see the entire head on ultrasound because he has not dropped at all. I verified with him that all of the home induction attempts were fair game, and he supportively said, "Yeah, sure, whatever you want. I'll see you for the c-section on Friday." Seriously. I thought that I sucked at getting pregnant, but apparently I am equally bad at going into labor.

Even worse, the closer I get to the scheduled c-section, the less okay I feel about it. I am completely at peace with LL's c-section, but this time, it feels really wrong. Too... planned. I feel like I did everything possible to avoid a c-section with LL, and there was ultimately no other way for him to be born. This time, it just feels... too convenient maybe? I asked Dr. M a lot of questions at my appointment yesterday, and in an attempt to make me feel better about it, he finally said, "You'll be amazed at how different this c-section will be than your first one. Your first one followed a long, difficult, exhausting trial of labor, and there was a fair amount of urgency by the time the surgery happened. This time will be very calm, very mellow, very casual." But that just makes me feel worse about it. I kind of feel like the birth of a baby should be accompanied by some drama and fanfare and hard work. There should be exhaustion at the end of it, to show that something significant happened. But just lying down on a table for a while and then being handed a baby, very casual? After months of fertility treatment and months of gestation and a car accident and a wrong diagnosis and careful diet restrictions and ultrasound scares and breech maneuvers and excitement... it just seems anticlimactic.

It isn't helping that there seems to be a general lack of enthusiasm surrounding the birth of this child, at least among our family. S's sister explained her plans to us over the phone yesterday, and despite several detailed conversations with her over the last several weeks, she apparently never actually understood anything about the scheduling of the bris. She asked us exactly when the bris will be happening, and we had to explain (again) that we won't know until the baby is born, since the date will depend on the birthday, and the time will depend on the mohel's schedule. If Kermit is born by c-section on Friday, then the bris will be the following Friday, probably in the morning. At which point she told us that she has tickets to a show next Thursday night, plus she doesn't want to spend any vacation time to visit us, so couldn't we just do the bris over the weekend? Um, no. Religious mandate is going to take precedence over her social calendar for us. Sorry. But she's welcome to visit us and Kermit after the bris instead of trying to attend. But she doesn't want to do that, either, so she probably just won't bother visiting.

Then we talked to S's parents, who informed us that they planned to arrive in time for the bris, but no earlier, which is what we expected. But then they're only staying for maybe 4 days, if that, because they're rather busy this time of year. Really? S's parents are both retired. They hang out with friends and do various hobbies, but they have no scheduled time commitments at all. None. And we have no idea what they mean by "this time of year." The holidays are over; what is there for them to be busy with in the middle of January? We tried to get them to explain what had changed, since we expected them for 10 days, like they did with LL, but they just said, "Eh, we'll see you guys again later in the year." It's very odd, and S and I are both kind of hurt. They were so excited when LL was born, and they adore him, but they have yet to express any emotion at all about Kermit. (Related: S's parents sent out a holiday newsletter. It contained photos and updates about LL, but S and I were not mentioned at all, not even once. They actually wrote, "We will soon be grandparents again, as LL is expecting a baby brother early in 2011." I find it supremely weird that they worded it that way -- why would you talk about the upcoming birth of a child by mentioning the baby's relation to you, and to a sibling, but not even acknowledge that the baby will have parents?)

My family is slightly better, but I have several relatives who have repeated to me their annoyance that they can't plan their attendance at the bris more in advance. Which is ironic, since I have a scheduled c-section, so Kermit's arrival and bris are actually much more predictable than most. But again, that just makes me feel awful, because part of the fun is supposed to be the uncertainty, the excitement of turning to your husband and saying, "Honey, it's time!" I hate being robbed of that. Again.

But honestly, most of this is probably hormones and jitters. I told S about all of these feelings, and he asked if I wanted to call Dr. M and postpone the c-section until next week sometime, to give myself even more time to go into labor naturally. But when I really think about it, I don't want to do that, either. Every indication in the world is that this baby is big and getting bigger. Each day that we wait, the likelihood of my being able to birth him shrinks. What's the point of waiting to go into labor if I'm practically guaranteed a c-section anyway? The whole reason that I chose this Friday for the scheduled c-section was that it seemed to be a tipping point where my odds of a successful VBAC dropped below the potential benefit. And I chose it several weeks ago, when I was much more rational than I am right now, before the discomfort and nesting and hormone roller coasters and sleep deprivation set in. I know, intellectually, that second guessing myself right now is both expected and pointless. I even predicted that it would happen exactly like this -- that I wouldn't go into labor, but that I would start doubting the decision the closer I got to the c-section. And here I am.

So. If I wanted to, I could postpone the c-section. But I don't think that I'm going into labor next week anymore than I'm likely to go into labor tomorrow, so I'll just be in this exact same position, just one week later. Really stupid. I do believe that the c-section on Friday is the "right" call. Ultimately, what I'm upset about is the fact that it's necessary. I hate that I'm not going into labor on my own. And there's really nothing that I can do to make myself feel better about that. Even reminding myself, over and over again, that what really matters in all of this is a happy, healthy outcome. That one way or another, approximately 36 hours from now, I'm going to be holding Kermit in my arms. Which is really the whole point.

Waiting Waiting Waiting

2011-01-03T21:43:00.000-08:00

Um, yeah, still here. Still pregnant. Still sitting around mindlessly making up things to go on a to-do list, and then doing them, because I'm bored. And tired. And I'm fairly certain that I've been in early labor for like 3 days now.

Saturday night, around 9pm or so, I started getting fairly regular contractions, stronger than I've ever gotten without the help of pitocin. And they got stronger and more intense, but never closer than 10 minutes apart. And it went on like that until 5:00 in the morning, when they abruptly disappeared. For that entire time, I was certain that I was in labor, that this was it. I even sent S to bed early to get some sleep, so that he would be well rested whenever we needed to leave for the hospital. But Sunday and today were both fairly uneventful.

I'm having contractions again tonight, ones that are definitely a huge step up from the Braxton-Hicks contractions I've been having for many weeks, but not quite as strong or regular as Saturday night. So it's looking to be another fairly sleepless night for me. I'd love to believe that this is all leading to me being in actual breathe-through-the-contractions, check-into-the-hospital labor, but... yeah, I don't believe it is.

At most three more days of waiting.

New Year

2011-01-01T22:20:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2011. Did you know that I'm having a baby this year? More specifically, I'm having a baby sometime this week.

For your totally boring reading pleasure, here is the state of things in our household right now:

- At 39 weeks pregnant, I am definitely ready to have this baby. I wanted the baby to be born in January, for the big-picture-completely-unimportant reason of giving him a teeny bit of distance between the holidays and his birthday. Mission accomplished! But now I need him to come out. The sooner the better.

- I am definitely a big fan of home labor induction techniques. I tried them all with LL, over the course of like three weeks, and none of them worked. (I skipped the castor oil thing, because ew! it just sounds unpleasant, not to mention ineffective, but the rest were fair game.) I'm doing them again now, but given my past experience, I kind of feel like a patsy. Fool me once, you know?

- My cold is still hanging around a bit, which sucks. I'm down to an infrequent cough and mild congestion.

- My mom arrived to help me with LL, and after a nice little incubation period, she caught my cold, so she is currently out for the count. I feel awful for her, because she really wants to be helpful, but she clearly feels really miserable and has zero energy. I'm currently taking care of her more than she's taking care of me (though she did make a pot of matzo ball soup the other day while S and I took LL with us to run some errands and let her rest). We're hoping that she gets better soon, for so many many reasons.

- LL is going through a growth spurt. He's barely sleeping, but he's eating his body weight in food at every meal. We met a huge group of friends for lunch on Thursday. We arrived first, LL was the first one served, and two hours later (yes, two hours) everybody else got tired of chasing their kids around the restaurant, so they left, and LL was still sitting at the table eating. It's ridiculous. He hadn't moved from that high chair for the entire two hours, and was more or less continuously eating that whole time. We finally had to cut him off because we just couldn't sit in the restaurant anymore, and it was way past naptime.

- We're more or less ready for Kermit to arrive. We've purchased all the necessities, things that need assembling or setting up are generally assembled, we have decided on a name (in English, Japanese, and Hebrew). The house is still a little cluttered, but no longer embarrassing. Bags are as packed as they're going to get. The only thing really left to do is install the car seat. Oh, and go into labor. I should make sure that's on the to-do list....

- Wow I'm uncomfortable. Definitely hard to move around these days. And I haven't fallen asleep before 3am in over a week. I'd forgotten what a total insomniac I become during the end of pregnancy. Also, I'm constantly starving.

- Every night around 8:00pm or so, I start having contractions. They're not very strong, but they are consistent, at every 15 minutes, like clockwork. They continue like that for several hours. Except for an occasional strong one, they're not very intense, and they never come any closer together. And then they stop until the next night. What's up with that? (I have been getting an occasional one during the day, too, but they're always in isolation.) S reminded me that the exact same thing happened when I was pregnant with LL, and it went on like that for nearly two weeks, and it never amounted to anything. So really, this is all just annoying.

- For many months now, I have been predicting a birth date of January 2. Not really liking my odds at this point.

The Race is On!

2010-12-31T02:17:00.000-08:00

For several months now, my friends have been placing bets about which would happen first: Kermit being born, or my PhD dissertation being finished. Time is obviously ticking down to Kermit's arrival (one week from now at the very latest!) so the question is: what is the state of the dissertation?

I am pleased to announce that I finished a full draft of the dissertation, except for some formatting tweaks and other minor changes of that sort, sometime in November. I eagerly sent it off to my three committee members for review. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. Total radio silence. Not even a short email acknowledging that anyone had received it.

So then I sent off a friendly reminder: "Did you see the 200 page document that I sent to you a few weeks back? Any idea when you might get around to reading it?" And then I waited. And waited. And waited. More silence. (Seriously, folks... nothing? Really?!?) I consulted with AdvisorB, who said that yes, he had seen both emails, and no, he hadn't looked at the dissertation yet, and yes, I should feel free to harass the other committee members to my heart's content. He even suggested that I threaten them a bit, though finding something good to threaten them with is tough, since I have exactly zero leverage in this situation.

AdvisorB's exact suggestion was that I send an email informing the other members that I would be in their offices on January 10 with the final form to sign, and if they had any reason that they couldn't sign it then, they needed to let me know now. I had to point out to him what a completely empty threat that was, because with a scheduled c-section on January 7, there was no way I was going to be in anybody's office on January 10. He then encouraged me to "play the baby card" and mention that fact to the other committee members, but I refuse to do that. (One committee member doesn't even know that I'm pregnant, and I seriously could not live with myself if I felt like I had only gotten my dissertation approved by my committee because they felt hijacked by my pregnancy.)

Meanwhile, AdvisorB promised that he himself was ready to sign it whenever, since he had already seen enough in previous versions and talks that he knew that he wouldn't have any problems with it. And I could feel free to mention to my other committee members that he had already approved it. One down, two to go!

So, I went with a milder, less-specific version of AdvisorB's suggestion. I emailed each of my other two committee members and told them that if they had significant changes in mind, they needed to let me know soon. Otherwise, I would be contacting them in mid-January and expecting signatures. If that would be a problem, they needed to speak up soon. It's kind of silly, because if they want to, they can completely ignore me and have zero consequences for doing so. But I sent the email anyway; I'd been waiting for more than a month at this point, and at the very least, I wanted to provoke some sort of response.

Committee member #3 wrote back very quickly, saying that he loved my dissertation, thought that it was an excellent piece of work, and was prepared to sign off on it whenever I wanted. Woo hoo! Two down, one to go!

Anyone who has been reading this blog should be realizing at this point who the one remaining committee member is. Yes, that's right, everybody's favorite: AdvisorA. I still haven't heard squat from her. And she's the only one who I can't harass in person, because she's 3000 miles away, and I'm not exactly hopping on an airplane anytime soon to go knock on her door. So, I'm still waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And getting even more pissed at AdvisorA, if that's even possible, for her complete neglect of the past two years.

Looks like Kermit is going to win the race....

Flip!

2010-12-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

I had my 38 week appointment today, with the main goal of discovering whether Kermit had flipped to be head down during the past week. When we discovered last week that he was transverse breech, Dr. M had given me a home exercise to try, which he said was "occasionally" successful in turning babies into the proper position. The birth instructor that I had with LL had also given me some exercises. And in the comments on my last post, eulogos pointed me to this site with yet more exercises to try to get a late-term transverse baby to cooperate.

The exercises from these three sources were all different, but they amount to the same thing: get your butt higher than your head, then hang out like that for a while. Gravity will pull your uterus towards your throat, stretching the ligaments in order to widen the bottom of the uterus to make room for baby's head, and at the same time, gravity will also pull the baby up away from your pelvic bone, hopefully dislodging him enough so that when you stand upright again, he'll settle into a head down position.

Sounds great, right? A few minor problems. First, when your uterus is bulging with some 10 pounds or more of baby + placenta + amniotic fluid, it is supremely uncomfortable to hang out upside down. Those 10 pounds are more or less free-floating in your abdomen, so flipping over so that gravity pulls them towards your lungs and other organs makes you feel really ill. It's hard to breathe, too. And the blood rushing to your head doesn't help, especially if you're like me and you've been battling dizzy spells and light-headedness all pregnancy anyway. Also, once you're nine months pregnant, you're not exactly at your most nimble. Once you're done being upside down, it is nontrivial to get back up again.

But, I really wanted the baby to turn! So, I spent the last several days hanging out upside down like a bat. And apparently my efforts were successful, because as of today, Kermit is head-down. Woo hoo! I don't think that I actually felt the moment when he settled that way, but by last night, I was fairly certain that he had turned, so it was nice to confirm it this morning. Everything else at the appointment was also good -- blood pressure is low, urine is clear, I lost 2 pounds (!), heart rate is good, fluid levels still appear to be normal. And we got a really clear view of Kermit on the ultrasound, including a close-up of his hands, which appeared to be holding onto my uterus for dear life. He didn't look like he wanted to vacate anytime soon.

So... vertex baby: check! Next step: spontaneous labor. If all else fails, Kermit's eviction is in 10 short days. Everyone may now begin thinking happy labor thoughts for me!

The Odds Are Definitely Against Us

2010-12-22T21:41:00.001-08:00

We had a bit of a scare on Tuesday. The ultrasound on Monday was uneventful, but apparently that was only because the tech isn't allowed to tell us anything. We had a regular 37-week appointment on Tuesday morning, and that was when Dr. M went over the actual results, which weren't that great. The ultrasound had been ordered just to assess Kermit's approximate size (weight and head circumference) so that we would know how likely we would be to succeed at a VBAC. But since they were looking around anyway, they took a bunch of other measurements, too.

The alarming one was something that I would never have even thought to be concerned about: amniotic fluid levels. According to Monday's ultrasound, there was shockingly little fluid. A horrifyingly dangerous low amount. Really bad. Dr. M explained the situation very calmly, then said that he wanted to verify the measurement himself before we did anything else. So, he did his own ultrasound, and ... my levels were completely normal. Above average, actually. He checked and re-checked just to be sure. And the change was so dramatic, with less than 24 hours between ultrasounds, that Dr. M says it is impossible for the condition to have corrected itself, it had to have been an erroneous reading to begin with. Still, to be on the safe side, he ordered me to dramatically cut back on my activity level for the rest of the pregnancy. Not bed rest, but he wants me sitting with my feet up, conserving energy and drinking as much water as I can stand, the majority of the time.

Dr. M also had me come back for an NST Tuesday afternoon, to verify that Kermit was still doing well. And he passed with flying colors, which would be nearly impossible if the measurements from Monday were at all accurate. So we all got to take a big sigh of relief. (Though we're still going to keep an eye on it, just to be sure.) (It also gave me the confidence to ignore the "rest with your feet up" thing, and I spent today frantically cleaning the house, because damn there's a lot of stuff that I want to finish before Kermit arrives, and apparently I am running out of time.)

Once Dr. M became convinced that the technician in Monday's ultrasound had to have made a mistake, he looked around and verified everything else as well. Which brings us to bad news number two. I've spent the last eight months convinced that, to succeed with a VBAC, I "only" needed to worry about going into labor spontaneously, progressing normally, and keeping Kermit from getting too big. Those were the ducks that needed to be in order. Know what I didn't consider? He's breech. And not a simple foot-first breech, where we'd still be able to try a vaginal delivery. Nope, my kiddo is transverse breech -- he's completely sideways. Impossible to deliver a baby that way.

There is a procedure that some doctors do, where they push on your stomach to sort of massage the baby into the desired head-down position, but it's a bit risky (and also has a fairly low success rate). Dr. M said that he would be hesitant to try it in someone who has had a previous c-section, and he absolutely would not do it in someone who has had a low amniotic fluid scare. Put those things together, and it becomes way too risky for him to try to turn the baby manually.

LL was breech for much of my pregnancy with him, and we started to worry about it around 32 weeks. But he had turned head down by 34 weeks, so we were fine. You really want the baby to be in position by 35 or 36 weeks, because after that, they start getting cramped enough that they don't have room to flip around anymore, and by 37 weeks, they're usually "stuck" in whatever orientation they're in. And here I am, past 37 weeks, with a transverse baby. It's still possible that he'll find a way to turn on his own, but the odds are dropping each day, so we are likely looking at a repeat c-section regardless of whether everything else goes my way or not.

Dr. M told me that if I do go into labor, every single conversation I have with a medical person other than him needs to start with the first words out of my mouth being, "This is a VBAC attempt, and as of Tuesday, the baby was transverse breech." He kept repeating that I was not allowed to say anything else until I was sure that they understood both of those things, because that particular combination would change everything else that happened from the moment I call the hospital to say that I might be in labor. No messing around. Which is kind of scary.

So... right now I'm 37w3d pregnant. My amniotic fluid levels might be periodically suspiciously low. My baby is stuck in a transverse breech position. He is measuring a bit big for his gestational age. That VBAC is fading more into fantasyland every day.

Bullets

2010-12-20T15:46:00.000-08:00

- I am officially full term. Labor is theoretically imminent at any time now, but I'll believe it when I see it.

- Given LL's giant head when he was born, we had an ultrasound today to attempt to estimate Kermit's head size (and the rest of him, while we're at it) so that we have a little bit of information on what we're in for if we get the opportunity to try a VBAC. We'll get the final results at a regular prenatal appointment tomorrow, but early signs seem to show that he's big, but not Guinness Book of World Records big. So I guess that's something.

- It's a little hard to believe that he's so big, considering everyone I meet seems to agree that I'm not really showing. I'm 37 weeks along, which is 8.5 months. I'm measuring between 38 and 39 weeks, which is almost 9 months. Kermit is definitely measuring close to 39 weeks. And yet consensus from friends is that I look 5-6 months pregnant, tops. At a holiday party this weekend, when I told people that I had 3 weeks to go, everyone (and I do mean everyone) assumed I misspoke and corrected me with, "You mean 3 months, not 3 weeks." Nope, I really do mean 3 weeks.

- Here at 37 weeks, I have gained 16 pounds. Apparently, it's all baby.

- We should really pack our hospital bag. I keep having fits of contractions, and after each one, S panics a little and says, "We need to pack our bag!!!" Then we get distracted with other things.

- On the plus side, our house is finally coming together. The guest room is almost clean enough for someone to sleep in it, and the rest of the house is almost ready to be presented to guests. Almost. We made a lot of progress this weekend. My mom arrives on Friday.

- I'm sick. I managed to not get sick at all while pregnant with LL, and other than a small cold during my first trimester, I thought that I would escape this time, too. Guess not. So far it is very mild (wicked sore throat, slight cough, mild congestion, occasional headache). S and LL had this same thing a few weeks ago, so I do have some idea of how it is likely to progress. The good part: it doesn't really get any worse. The bad part: it lasts forever. They're both still coughing, after several weeks. Can I tell you how much I dread going through labor with a sore throat and cough?

- LL's new favorite snack: hot herbal tea. S had been making himself a lot of tea, to soothe his own sore throat, and LL was very curious. So, we made him weak tea, diluted it with cold water to cool it off, sweetened it with a bit of honey, and served it in a very grown up ceramic mug. He's totally enchanted by it. Every morning he asks for "hot tea! hot tea!" and then questions us extensively once we give it to him, to make sure that it's actually "warm, not hot!"

- We set up Kermit's bassinet in our room yesterday. LL is very intrigued.

- Any suggestions on how to keep a curious and persistent toddler from climbing into a bassinet?

Transitions

2010-12-15T12:03:00.000-08:00

Before LL was born, I remember hearing from lots of women that they felt guilty while pregnant with child #2 because they felt like they were ruining the life of child #1. I thought that was incredibly silly. Lots of children are able to survive the indignity of having a younger sibling. And as a younger sibling myself, I rolled my eyes at the thought that an older child was somehow entitled to even more time alone with his parents than he had already received, when the younger child was never going to get any years alone with Mom and Dad at all.

But now I'm biting my tongue, because yeah, I understand the feeling. LL's life will change dramatically when we bring Kermit home. Right now, our lives revolve around his schedule. Everything we do is tailored around making sure that he gets his nap on time, he eats at his accustomed times, and we're home for his bedtime. He thrives when we keep him on schedule, and melts down when the schedule gets too far off. (A little variation he can handle, for a few days, but after that he gets really cranky.) But schedules are impossible with newborns. I don't remember much from those early days, but I definitely remember the randomness of it all. And the afternoons of playing non-stop with LL, or making him the center of our morning routine as we all get ready for the day? Not going to be possible anymore.

So yes, I feel a bit guilty about how much LL is going to have to adapt, even while I also feel like he'll benefit a lot, in the long run, from having a sibling. I picture him crying for me and my being unable to respond because I'm dealing with a Kermit crisis and it breaks my heart. LL is so totally mommy-focused these days (from asking me to do everything for him, to being completely consumed with my welfare -- he helps me up from the couch, and brings me my slippers as soon as I get home from work -- it's very cute) that I really don't know how he is going to handle needing to share my attention.

But I also feel bad for Kermit. LL will have had a good two years alone with Mommy and Daddy. He got the instant responses when he needed something and full attention during play times. He had two parents putting him to bed almost every night, sharing bedtime stories and rocking him to sleep. Kermit is never going to get that much dedicated attention. Right from the very start, he's going to have to share us with LL, and wait his turn, and be patient sometimes. Which yes, is probably a healthier way to grow up, in the long run. But I'm a firm believer in spoiling babies a bit when they're very young and don't understand what's happening around them and are helpless to help themselves. And Kermit is just never going to get that kind of unconditional spoiling, even when he's very very little.

I'm sure all mothers expecting their second child have some of these feelings, but they're made worse right now by the fact that LL is just so darn mommy-focused. If I am at home, he wants me to do everything for him, and completely rejects S. Everything S tries to do for him is met with a plea of "Mama do it!" It's getting kind of ridiculous. I mean, the three of us are eating dinner, and LL wants more milk; S stands up to get it for him, and LL snatches the cup out of S's hands, saying, "No! Mama do it!" Then he sweetly hands the cup to me, saying "More milk, Mama?" And if I try to assure him that Daddy is an excellent milk-pourer, he cries. Not a manipulative cry... just a very sad, plaintive one. Breaks my heart.

Blame it on the pregnancy hormones, but I'm suddenly feeling very very guilty for the rough transition coming up for LL.

One Month

2010-12-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

It kind of snuck up on me a bit, but I'm suddenly feeling very pregnant. It's not like this feeling is unexpected -- I am 36 weeks along, one week away from officially full-term, less than a month away from meeting my little Kermit -- but still, it came up on me quite suddenly. I've been having plenty of aches and pains and awkwardness that goes along with the typical third trimester. But starting on Friday, everything kicked up a notch.

My Braxton-Hicks contractions are frequent and fairly intense. The pain in my hips has been joined by killer sciatica, making it difficult to stand, bend, or walk more than a few steps. I'm completely unable to move in bed. The moving in bed actually doesn't matter much, because I get intense pain in my legs whenever I'm horizontal for more than an hour, so I'm not really sleeping much in bed anyway. Kermit is suddenly taking up my entire abdomen; it definitely feels like he went through a huge growth spurt in the last week. And he is suddenly much stronger; when he stretches, I can see my belly move in response, in crazy ways. I'm constantly feeling off-balance. After 8 months of avoiding it, I suddenly have the typical pregnant woman crappy posture, where my back bows much more than it should, to compensate for the growing stomach. I waddle. And every single time I stand up, I get shooting pains through my cervix, which I can only hope is an indication that I'm starting to dilate?

In general, I feel awful. And yet, not ready to have this baby. I'll put up with it for a while longer, thank you very much, because my to-do list is still far too long to go into labor.

But, just in case Kermit decides to come a tad early, we're trying to get all of the essentials done as soon as possible. I've ordered all of the baby items that I didn't want to live without, and the last of them should arrive this week. We spent today frantically cleaning the house, because it seriously freaks me out to imagine tons of out-of-town family in our house in its current condition. And first thing tomorrow morning, we're packing our hospital bag, because I kind of feel like I'm playing a giant game of chicken by not getting that done. Also, the superstitious part of me hopes that the more prepared we are, the less likely Kermit is to arrive early, and I kind of want him to stay put until January.

LL, meanwhile, has started talking more about babies. He points to all the new stuff and explains that it is "baby's stuff." He gently rubs my tummy and whispers "baby...." (Lest we give him too much credit, he usually follows this up by pointing to his own tummy and saying the same thing, so his level of understanding is still very much up in the air.) And he has been insisting that we refer to him as a Big Boy, as he prepares to take on the role of Wise Older Brother.

One quick story. I was sitting in the glider in LL's room, rocking him in my lap. We were both fairly happy and comfy and sleepy. And suddenly Kermit, who has been getting remarkably strong and insistent in his movement lately, gave a swift kick to my stomach, which hit LL square in the back. LL turned around in my lap, perplexed, and stared at my stomach for a minute. Then he got a weird little look on his face, pointed to my belly, and whispered, "Mama! Jump! Jump!" So apparently the Kermit nickname was a good one.

Labor Anxiety

2010-12-06T14:13:00.000-08:00

People have started asking me whether I'm nervous about labor and delivery, and I'll admit that I've been giving it a lot of thought lately. I'm actually not all that nervous about the actual labor and delivery part. I feel like I remember a fair amount about my labor with LL, and I don't feel like I'm being selective about what I remember. I remember some goods things (the anticipation; the growing excitement as things progressed; a sense of adrenalin-induced empowerment that I didn't really expect to feel once I started pushing; the incredible sound of his first cry) and of course, lots of things that were perhaps necessary but not what I would classify as "good" (frustration at the slow progression of early labor; annoyance that I couldn't walk around much; fear and disappointment when we found out that a c-section was necessary; and of course holy crap I remember a whole lot of pain). Overall, though, it wasn't a process that I dread going through a second time, though I am hoping for some fairly significant differences this time around.

During my pregnancy with LL, I spent much of my third trimester consumed with thoughts of labor. I'm not sure the right word to use. Not fear. Not dread. Anxiety? Let's just say that I was really really worried about it, because everyone seems to rank it as the most painful thing in the world and you don't know how long it's going to last and I had no idea what the pain was going to be like so my mind started inventing all sorts of crazy scenarios. This time? I'm honestly not all that worried about the actual labor and delivery. I'm bizarrely looking forward to it, actually, since I'm so excited to possibly do it without pitocin this time. And maybe even successfully deliver a baby without a c-section! This time around, rather than something to bring about anxiety, it just feels like a challenge. I can handle a challenge.

Having said that, there is something that I am feeling completely anxious and panicky about: how LL will handle my time in the hospital. I'm getting very freaked out about this. I have never spent a night away from LL, much less 3 or 4. LL has been put to bed by other people (grandparents, babysitters) but I have always been there when he wakes up in the morning. Things that are currently keeping me up at night:

1. Making sure that LL is taken care without too much panic if/when I go into labor. The possibility of going into labor during the holidays is making this particularly stressful. My mom has agreed to fly into town when I'm just short of 38 weeks, so that she can stay at our house and care for LL if I do go into labor, which is fantastic, but now I'm obsessing about what happens if I go into labor before she arrives. It's ridiculous because LL had to be induced at almost 42 weeks, and I'm suddenly worried about going into natural labor at 37 weeks, but still... I can't get it out of my head. We have a few friends lined up to possibly come to our house and stay with LL for a few days, but it would be very stressful for LL and that makes it very stressful for me.

2. If I do end up with a c-section, I'll need to be in the hospital for four days. That seems like a very long time to be away from LL. More and more, the main reason that I'm hoping for a VBAC is just so that I can get home sooner.

3. Another problem with a repeat c-section: when LL was born, I wasn't able to pick LL up out of his bassinet for at least a week, possibly two. I wasn't able to change his diaper for the first week, either. Every time I wanted to hold him, to feed him, to comfort him, someone had to pick him up and gently hand him to me. That was annoying but manageable, because S stayed with me in the hospital and did all of the baby-lifting for those first several days. This time around, we think that it would be easier on LL if S spent nights at home, so that he's around for LL's morning routine. But I don't know how I manage to care for Kermit overnight, including all those night feedings and diaper changes, if S isn't with me. As far as I can tell, my only option will be to let the nurses bring Kermit to the nursery after S leaves, but that kills breast feeding. So I'm kind of at a loss. If I have a c-section, it seems like S will have to stay at the hospital, and I worry about how LL will handle us both not being there in the morning.

4. I can't decide whether LL should visit me in the hospital or not. Does that make things easier or harder? On the one hand, I'm sure that he'll want to see me (and I'll want to see him!). On the other hand, what happens when he realizes that he needs to leave with Grandma and I'm not coming with him? Will that just make it harder?

5. Last week, I had an evening filled with lots of suddenly strong contractions. They eventually died down, and I was fairly certain the whole time that they were Braxton-Hicks and not the real thing. Nevertheless, they were shockingly strong and frequent, and I had to carefully breathe through them. I wasn't yelling or anything, but I was grimacing from the pain. And WOW, it freaked LL out. He kept coming over to pat my leg and talk to me and give me kisses, but mostly he just stared at me with a frightened look on his face. I kept reassuring him that Mommy was fine, everything was okay, but he was really very concerned. So now I'm worried about how he'll handle it when I'm in real labor but haven't left for the hospital yet. I guess from this perspective, it would be best if I went into labor in the middle of the night while he was sleeping, so that he wouldn't have to see me in pain, but I hate that then I won't be able to say goodbye to him before we leave.

So, yes, I'm worried about labor, but not for any of the reasons that I was worried the first time. And when I write them down, even these things seem very minor. Women manage to have babies without completely scarring and traumatizing their toddlers all the time. Things just work out. But I'm agonizing about it nonetheless.

Constraint Satisfaction

2010-11-29T14:52:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago, I wrote another in a series of agonizing posts
about trying to find a name for Kermit. At the time, we had it narrowed down to five possibilities, and I was desperate to narrow it down more than that, and soon. After much more deliberation with S, we decided to just pick the front runner and treat it like a done deal. Assume that's the name, start using it around the house, kick the tires a bit and see how it feels.

There's a certain relief that comes with feeling like a decision has been made, even if we can still change our minds many many times between now and Kermit's arrival. The name that we picked has grown on me more and more, and at this point, I'm fairly happy with it. S wants to kick it around a bit more before he declares it "the name," but says that if Kermit were born today, he'd be happy with it. For now, that's good enough for me. We probably have several more weeks to decide for sure anyway.

Two months ago, when we took LL for his two-year checkup, we informed our wonderful pediatrician, Dr. K, that she would soon be acquiring a new patient. She was very happy for us, and asked if she could help in any way. I was mostly joking, but I asked her if she'd heard any cool baby names recently that she thought we'd like. I figured, who better to have the pulse of local baby naming trends than a pediatrician with a growing practice? Her whole face lit up and she said, "Ooooh, I love helping with names! Any name requirements that I should know about?" We briefly outlined our constraints for her, and she said that she'd give it some thought and get back to us.

Fast forward to this morning, when I left a phone message for Dr. K about some minor tummy trouble that LL's been experiencing for the past week, just to make sure that we're "treating" it correctly at home. When she called me back, she said, "I'll talk to you about LL in a minute, but I've been meaning to call you about names! I've thought a lot about it, and I have the perfect name for you guys!" And then she said the exact name that S and I had already decided on.

After a short stunned silence, I just said, "You're kidding!" which she took to mean that I hated the name and was disappointed in her. She explained to me that she thought it was just so perfect, given our constraints, and it worked with LL's name, and she liked how it sounded with our last name. And she said that she normally puts together a list of 5-10 names for people, but with us, she hit on just this one name and thought that it worked so well that she just had to tell me.

And then I had to tell her that she was creeping me out, because that was the name that we had all but decided on. What are the odds that she'd pick the exact same one? (For the record, this is not a common name, or a trendy name; it's not like she picked the #1 most popular name, or #1 fastest growing name, or anything like that. It seems to me to be very random that we came up with the exact same name.) And she laughed, and then said very seriously that she is quite good at naming babies.

I've mentioned the name to a very small number of other people in the last few weeks, but I hardly expect people to really give an expectant mother an honest opinion on this sort of thing -- unless the person visibly cringes when you tell them, it's hard to judge whether they liked it or are just being polite. But getting the impartial out-of-the-blue recommendation from Dr. K feels like real third-party confirmation that this name works. Silly but true. And despite my contrarian reputation, that makes me like it even more.

I suppose it is possible that our constraints are very, um, constraining. But I do not believe that they are soooooo constraining that, given a list of every possible name in the world, they narrow the set down to a unique single possibility. But apparently they do. Who knew? And now we are officially barred from ever having another son, because there isn't a single name left that he could use. We've apparently already chosen the only name that works.

Parking Fiasco, Continued

2010-11-23T17:42:00.000-08:00

I last reported (on Friday) that I had called the DMV to check on the status of my parking placard, so that I could park near my campus office for the remainder of my pregnancy, and they informed me that it would be another month at least before they would process the form. Horrible backlog, nothing they could do about it, not even in the system yet, blah blah blah. But they helpfully suggested that I could fill out a new form, get my doctor to sign it again, and take it to the DMV in person. But I would need an appointment at the DMV, and the next available appointment was (you guessed it) in a month. Fantastic.

Out of desperation, I made some more phone calls and discovered that I can bring the form to a DMV office without an appointment, if I'm willing to waste a day sitting around and waiting. Less than ideal, but at least I would get the placard this week, right?

I had a prenatal appointment on Monday (yesterday), so I got another copy of the DMV form and took it with me to get it signed by my doctor. But, um... did I mention that my doctor, Dr. M, is out on medical leave until mid-December? And I can't stand the doctor who is filling in for him? Dr. M was the one who originally convinced me to apply for the placard, but I spent much of my appointment on Monday trying to convince this new doctor to sign the form in his absence. He made me feel horrible for even asking. And then he filled it out wrong and I had to go back and ask him to fix it. Blech.

I then spent this morning sitting around the DMV waiting to get the form processed. Not like I had anything better to do.... But at long last, my number was called, fees were paid, and I walked out of there with the parking placard that I needed. Yay!!!! Happy ending, right?

The punch line of this whole story, though, is that the placard that I originally applied for by mail arrived at my house this afternoon, despite the assurances on Friday that it was nowhere close to being issued. The paperwork actually shows that by the time I talked to the DMV on Friday, the darn thing had already been issued and put in the mail, so I have no idea why they couldn't have just told me that over the phone. And the arguing with the sub doctor and the sitting around the DMV all morning were completely unnecessary.

On the plus side, now I have two placards. Yippee. Two hard-earned placards. Too bad it's illegal to sell one of them or something.

Time Off

2010-11-22T21:02:00.000-08:00

I expected that interviewing for jobs while heavily pregnant would be an odd experience. Pregnancy is one of those protected classifications that isn't allowed to be factored into hiring decisions. I've been on the other side of interviews for several companies, and all of these companies had policies that prohibited us from discussing any of those protected classifications. You can't ask somebody about their family, or whether they're married or have kids, just like you can't ask them about their religion or comment on their gender. And if the job candidate volunteered some bit of information that we weren't supposed to discuss, we were instructed to ignore it and immediately change the subject.

Pregnancy is an odd case, though, because it does have a large (albeit short-term) impact on job performance, and it's such a giant obvious elephant in the room. The interviewer is looking at someone who quite clearly will need some extended time off from work in the near future, but isn't allowed to mention it. And the pregnant woman can't bring it up herself, because an ethical interviewer would stop her before she could say anything meaningful about it. Several people advised me that I should bring it up during my interview, so that I could reassure my potential future manager that I do plan to work after the baby is born, but I remember from my training that my potential future manager would then be put in the awkward situation of needing to stop me from talking about it. So I decided best not to bring it up, so that I wouldn't force him into a situation that he didn't want to be in.

Thus, while interviewing for jobs over the last several weeks, I expected to have lots of pseudo-conversations where people fished for information and I tried to reassure them without either of us saying anything explicit. Which is fine with me, even if it feels odd. You do what you have to do.

What I did not expect was that nobody would notice that I'm pregnant.

S thinks they noticed but didn't say anything. But in the last month, I've been interviewed by more than two dozen different people, and I can count on one hand the number of them that glanced knowingly at my stomach or gave some other indication that they figured it out. I simply don't believe that the rest of them are good enough actors to hide that they had noticed. On the other hand, I had variations on this conversation with more than half of the interviewers:

Interviewer: So, you're planning to graduate in January?
Me: Yes, that's right.
Interviewer: But you don't want to start working until June?
Me, looking pointedly down at my pregnant stomach: Um, yes, June.
Interviewer: Time off sounds like a great reward for finishing grad school! Are you planning to just relax? Travel? When I finished my PhD, I went to Paris.
Me, rubbing my stomach a bit: Um, no, no travel. I have, uh, family obligations to take care of.
Interviewer: Time with family can be fun, too! It's nice to be able to chill out like that for a while. Are you sure I can't get you some coffee?

Um. Really? You can't figure out on your own that I'm not flying to Europe in the near future? You can't fathom what I will be doing with my time off? I know that my field is known for a high level of socially clueless behavior, but still -- 7+ months pregnant!?! Open your eyes, people!

One interviewer (just one!) asked me more specifically what I was doing with my time off, and I mentioned that I was pregnant. And I only told her because I've known her for 10 years and I work with her husband and I was tired of playing games. And she acted startled and looked at my stomach and said, "Oh! Wow!" and was clearly surprised. (She then later asked me if I was finding it difficult to work out child care arrangements, which was her roundabout way of asking me if I was sure that I wanted to work after the baby was born. And I assured her that we had daycare all lined up, which was my roundabout way of saying yes, I'll definitely be going back to work.)

It was all very very odd. I'm still waiting to hear back about whether I get any job offers out of the experience, but I'm certainly glad that the interviewing is over for now! 33 weeks and counting....

Take a Hike

2010-11-19T16:03:00.000-08:00

The downside of living off-campus while a grad student at a mostly residential university is the lack of convenient parking. I have a parking permit that gives me permission to park on campus, but it doesn't guarantee that I will be able to find a parking space. Pair that with an overall lack of parking near my building, and it means that I generally have to walk approximately one mile from my car to my office. I've been doing this for a long time now, and I usually don't mind it. The weather is usually good, and I don't have much time for real exercise, so a nice walk twice a day isn't such a bad thing. But throw in lugging a heavy laptop and a stack of papers while dealing with hip and back pain from a third trimester pregnancy, and things get a bit awkward. I've been having trouble making it all the way to my office. And I know that things are just going to get worse over the next 7 weeks.

I mentioned this to Dr. M several weeks back, and he encouraged me to apply for a temporary disability parking placard. Simple DMV form, Dr. M signs it, and just like that, I can park in one of the dozen handicap parking spots that are always completely empty right outside my office. Problem solved!

So I sent in the form to the DMV, and waited for my placard. My hips got worse, my back got worse, and still I waited. The DMV promised that they generally process these things within two weeks, but it has already been much longer than that. When I woke up this morning unable to walk from my bed to the bathroom without painfully hobbling, much less walk a mile to my office, I decided enough was enough. So I called the DMV to check on why it was taking so long.

Skipping right past the part where I was on hold for a full 30 minutes, I finally got someone at the DMV on the phone, and I explained the problem. It turns out that they're "a bit backlogged at the moment," so that instead of taking two weeks to process the placards, it's currently taking them 8-10 weeks. So far, my application hasn't even been entered into the system. Keep in mind that these are temporary placards, which means that they're only good for a few months -- how are they useful to anyone if it takes 2-3 months just to process the request?!? By the time it arrives, I'll have given birth, so this is no longer of any use to me at all.

The woman did point out that I could get a new form, get my doctor to sign it again (they don't accept photocopies -- it needs to be an original signature, and the original is lost in DMVland at the moment, so I need to get a new one), and then take it in person to the DMV, where they will issue the placard same-day. However, I absolutely need to have an appointment; they will not process these requests if you just walk in and wait. And the next appointment at a DMV office within a 50-mile radius of my house is December 20, more than a month away. Again, not helpful.

At this point, I'm actually calculating how much it will cost me to park illegally for the rest of my pregnancy and just pay the parking tickets. Think I can write off parking tickets as a medical expense?

Falling Behind

2010-11-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

I am starting to truly feel beaten down by everyday life. I'm at a point where people ask me, "Hey, how's it going?" and I answer, "There's a lot going on, and I'm a bit tired, but things are good!" And then I start listing the things that are going on, and people start looking concerned. And asking me if I would like to sit down. And calling S to express concern. And gossiping to each other about how it's fairly remarkable that I'm still walking around. Um, yeah. Things are getting just a bit overwhelming.

I'm desperately trying to finish the full draft of my dissertation, which is getting harder as baby brain takes over and pregnancy carpel tunnel interferes more and more with typing. I'm desperately trying to figure out the job situation (I had one more grueling interview earlier this week, and it's likely going to be my last one before Kermit arrives, so I hope it was a good one!). We still haven't really purchased anything at all for Kermit, though I did sort and wash infant clothes last weekend, so we've moved from "completely unprepared" to "almost completely unprepared." Which I guess is progress? Our bedroom is going to be doubling as a nursery for the first few months, but we have done no work at all to make room for the things that need to be in there, much less purchasing or moving those things into place. My mom is going to be staying with us for several weeks, starting around Christmas, but it is currently impossible to even walk into our guest room, much less unfold the hide-a-bed or expect anyone to comfortably live there. It's completely uninhabitable. (As an example: the guest room doesn't even have a door. And the door to our guest bathroom doesn't latch properly. Nice, huh? We don't have overnight guests very often.)

I have an ever-growing list of things to do before Kermit arrives and none of them are getting done. My top priority right now has to be finishing the dissertation, because it has to be done before Kermit arrives, and preferably several weeks earlier. Number two is getting through the last of the job interviews and making a decision about a job for next year. But I'm reaching that point in pregnancy where I don't want to be doing any of those things anymore. I just want to be nesting and preparing for Kermit. But I haven't been allowing myself to do any of the baby prep things because I need to focus on the dissertation. And wow, nesting is one of those powerful hormonal deep-rooted instinct things, so suppressing it is making me fairly miserable.

To top it all off, LL is sensing that I have less energy these days and that I am trying to get S to do a bit more of LL's care. And LL is pushing back. Big time. For weeks now, LL has been insisting that I do everything for him. Every other sentence out of his mouth these days is, "No, Daddy! Mama do it!" S is not allowed to pour him milk. Or get him food. Or wipe his face. Or change his clothes. Or change his diaper. Or read him books. Or open his curtains. Or put on his jacket. Or pick out socks. (It's ridiculous -- S hands him a pair of socks; LL says, "No Daddy! Mama do it!" LL takes the socks back to his room and returns them to his drawer; LL runs to me, takes my hand, drags me to his room, opens his drawer, and points out the exact same socks that he just put back there, which I then hand back to him. What exactly has he accomplished other than tiring me out and making S feel unloved?) So even when S is home and theoretically helping to share childcare responsibilities with me, I am still doing all the work.

I'm exhausted. I'm restless. I'm having horrible dizzy spells several times a day. I'm unable to concentrate on the things that need my focus right now. I'm unable to take a break from the things that are tiring me out. And I'm 32+ weeks pregnant, rapidly running out of days to get things done. Anyone have any thoughts on how to slow down time?

Parlor Tricks

2010-11-09T15:49:00.000-08:00

I know that I'm not the only one who enjoys teaching my young child totally useless and random things just because it's funny to watch him do it. LL has two new tricks, both of which were his idea. (As in, he started doing them, and yes, I then encouraged them. Because damn they're funny.)

1. He can dance and sing backup for Gladys Knight's Midnight Train to Georgia. Yep, he just joins right in with the Pips. The fact that they're most often singing train noises ("woo woo!") definitely helps. We thought this was just a passing fad, like (thankfully) his bizarre obsession with Ke$ha, and his addiction to the Beyonce / Lady Gaga song Telephone, but this one seems to be sticking around.

2. He knows a shocking number of football referee hand motions. He's been watching a lot of football with me each Sunday, but his interest reached a whole new level when he noticed a referee making the roll-your-hands motion for "false start." He thought it was awesome, and immediately showed me how he could imitate it. Since then, he has added the hand motions for holding, face mask, touchdown, fair catch, and first down. We're trying to teach him pass interference and intentional grounding next. S and I have been having fun calling these out to him in random order just to watch him do them all. Though I'm starting to think that he only likes football referees because they dress like zebras.

Either way, I figure this is all very useful knowledge, because already he has two excellent career options. Football referee, or Pip.

Names, Yet Again

2010-11-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

We have a short list of 5 possible names for Kermit. I'm not completely thrilled with any of them, because they each have a problem relative to our list of naming requirements:

One isn't Jewish. (We might end up dropping this requirement out of desperation.)

One sounds too "cutesy" when said aloud with LL's name. (S thinks that I'm making too big a deal out of this one, but I picture myself introducing the two kids together, and I feel slightly embarrassed, because they feel so similar. Also, I'm afraid that the similarity will make people constantly mix them up.)

One is too popular. (I'm kind of shocked by how this name has shot up the charts.)

One sounds a little too sing-songy when paired with our last name. (I'm not positive though. It's kinda borderline to me. Maybe it's fine. If I had to pick a name today, by myself, this is one is probably the one that I'd pick, but I still need some convincing.)

One fits all of our requirements, but so far fails my test of still liking it after saying it aloud 8 million times in a row in an attempt to get said child to clean up his toys and get ready for bed. (Some people talk about the test of shouting a name out your door at the top of your lungs, to call a kid to dinner, but that's not my preferred test. I can yell any name two or three times. I much prefer the test of wandering around the house for an hour saying, "LL, time to clean up. LL, stop playing with the blocks. Come on, LL, it's time to go. Uh oh! Where's LL? There's LL! Come on, LL, let's go get into pajamas!" This is all about how the name feels in your mouth. LL's name works for me. The last name on our list, which fits all of our requirements on paper, fails this test miserably for me. But maybe I just need to give it more time.)

So... I don't know. We've been using all five names interchangeably for a little while now, to see if any one of them starts to stand out, but so far nothing. S says that he likes all five names equally, by which he seems to mean that he feels equally neutral about all of them. If he were picking one of them by himself right now, I think that he'd go with the only non-Hebrew name on the list, but that one is also a character in a television show that we watch, which bothers him a lot. It's entirely possible that we're both waiting for the other one to grow attached to one of the names and then convince the other that it really is the best name ever, but neither of us feels strongly enough to step up and do it. We're both such wimps.

We kept LL's name a secret from everyone except my brother, but this time around I'm thinking about sharing the options a little more widely just so that I can get some opinions. I don't want to post the list on-line, and I'm enough of a contrarian that I'm just as likely to be convinced by the opposite of what people recommend to me, but if anyone wants to provide input by email, let me know....

75%

2010-10-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

Um, I'm about to hit 30 weeks pregnant. 75% done. I'm not exactly sure where the time has gone. The first trimester was consumed by recovering from my car accident. Early second trimester was all about preparing for my dissertation defense. The rest of my second trimester was all about looking for a job. And now suddenly here I am in my third trimester, and I'm totally focused on finishing my dissertation (and still looking for a job). But you know what I haven't done at all? Prepare for the arrival of a baby. Oops.

Total purchases for Kermit thus far: 3 onesies and a teddy bear wearing an outfit from my university. That's it. We've started working a bit on a name, which has so far resulted in a short list of 6 names, all of which feel rather "blah" to both me and S. No real standouts in the entire list. We have a sketch of a plan for what to do with LL if/when I go into labor, but we haven't actually discussed it with the people who we would like to have help us out. We procrastinated so much on signing up for a refresher birthing class that all of the classes are now full, so no class for us. (I did manage to get us into a refresher breast feeding class, since I don't really remember those early breast feeding days very well except to remember being very very frustrated a lot of the time.) I have a to-do list of things to do before Kermit is born; there are currently 32 items on the list. I have no concrete plan for knocking the rest of them off, even though I have just two months to figure it out.

Speaking of panic... we just found out that my OB, Dr. M, is having emergency surgery next week and will be out of the office recovering for 6 weeks after that. Which means that I won't see him again until I am full term at 37 weeks. This is one of those totally unavoidable things, but I hate the fact that I have OB appointments at 31w, 33w, 35w, and 36w that will all be with other doctors that I don't like nearly as much. And those are fairly important appointments, where we measure progress and manage the end of the pregnancy and estimate weight and position and do ultrasounds to judge likelihood for VBAC and stuff.

And speaking of VBAC... the plan was to try for a vaginal birth if I went into labor on my own, but to schedule a c-section somewhere around 39 weeks in case it didn't happen. Dr. M originally schedule the c-section for 38w5d, but that felt too early to me, and I asked him to reschedule it to 39w1d. He thought that was fine. Then I started feeling like maybe that was still too early. At my appointment this week, I asked his opinion on rescheduling it to 39w5d, just to give my body a little extra time to go into labor. And, once again proving what an awesome doctor he is, he said that he would schedule it for whatever felt most comfortable for me, there was no valid medical reason to pick one over the other, so it was completely my choice. So, the new eviction day looks like it's going to be January 7. (NOTE: when January 1 rolls around and I'm horribly uncomfortable and begging for the pregnancy to be over, remind me that I'm the one who chose to push back the eviction date.)

This is all just a roundabout way of saying: we really need to get going on baby preparations. Tick tick tick tick tick....

What Not To Do While Pregnant, Part Two

2010-10-22T22:37:00.000-07:00

Part One, from my last pregnancy, is here.

I thought that I had reached new heights of stupid things to do while pregnant with the 16 hours of round trip air travel over 48 hours last weekend, but today I managed to up the bar. Yes, I'm that stupid.

Not that you were planning on doing any of these things anyway. But if you have a choice, don't do them:

1. Interview for a job that you actually care about while 6 1/2 months pregnant.

2. Ask to use the bathroom 8 times during a 7 hour interview day. Yes, you'll probably be excused for asking, since you're 6 1/2 months pregnant. But never underestimate the ability of every single guy who interviews you to fail to notice that you're pregnant. They'll just think that you're fat and you really like to pee.

3. If you have to give a research talk as part of your interview, make sure to have continuous Braxton-Hicks contractions throughout the talk. They really help to keep you focused.

4. Throw in some nice solid kicks to your cervix during your talk, too. If you can't give a polished academic talk while fielding kicks and contractions, well, you probably don't deserve the job.

5. When your very last interview of your very long day asks if you can stay past the scheduled end of your interview so that he can ask "just a few more questions," definitely say yes. You've already been "on" fielding questions for 7 hours... what's one more hour?

I feel completely brain dead. And I have no idea if I'm going to get a job offer. My mind feels so mushy right now that I'm not sure that I'd want to work for anyone who would offer me a job in this condition. I'm fairly certain that I came across as a complete idiot, but I also don't feel mentally capable of judging my own performance, so who knows. Maybe contractions and in-utero kicks make me look smarter. I'll update when I hear back from the recruiter.

500 Days

2010-10-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

In 500 days, I'm going to be reaching a semi-milestone birthday (not a huge one, but it is divisible by five). For some reason, I've been thinking about it a lot lately, even though it is more than a year away. Several months ago, I made a short list of things that I wanted to accomplish by the end of 2010 (it's posted in the column to the right) and that list has been a good motivator for me. Well... not so much motivation, as a reminder of what I wanted to do this year.

In that same spirit, I have made a list of what I want to accomplish by the time I hit that birthday in 500 days. (There is a fair amount of overlap between this list and the other list. Partially because of the overlap in time periods, but also partially because I'm starting to doubt my ability to get a few of these done by the end of the year. See #3 about moving into a new house....) Things that I want to finish, things that I want to achieve, things that I want to begin, things that I want to form habits for. We'll see how it goes. Some of these are already in progress, others should be accomplished relatively soon, and some others might just be pipe dreams. But, here we go:

1. Have two happy kids. (I'm working on this one!)

2. Finish my PhD. (This one had better be done well before my 500 day deadline!)

3. Own a new (bigger) house. (I'd love for this one to be accomplished sooner rather than later, but it kind of depends on the job situation.)

4. Work in a job that I enjoy. (Looking for a job in a bad economy while pregnant sucks.)

5. Bring both kids to visit my parents at least once. (Preferably twice.)

6. Bring both kids to visit my in-laws at least once. (Preferably twice.)

7. Pay off all debt except the mortgage. (Just one annoying undergrad student loan hanging around at this point. It will come out of deferment as soon as I graduate, and I'd like to knock it off as soon as I'm earning a real salary.)

8. Lose all pregnancy and fertility treatment weight from both pregnancies.(That would be a goal of 22 pounds below pre-pregnancy weight with Kermit, which includes 12 lbs fertility gain with LL, and 10 lbs fertility gain with Kermit. Plus whatever pregnancy weight tries to hang around after Kermit is born.)

9. Breast feed Kermit for one year. (I had this goal with LL, too, but I didn't make it. LL went on strike at 6 months and never came back. I'm hoping that LL was just a quirky baby and Kermit will go longer.)

10. Cook dinner at home 5 days each week. (I'm using a loose definition of "cook" here. I consider heating up leftovers or a frozen lasagna to be "cooking." I'm just trying to get us out of the habit of ordering take-out Chinese and pizza delivery. Also, when I say "cook," I'm including cooking done by S; I'm not a total martyr.)

11. Read 10 fiction books. (I used to read for pleasure a lot. My pleasure-reading took a hit when I started grad school, and all but died completely when LL was born. One book every other month or so isn't really asking a lot.)

12. Learn javascript. (Just seems like it would be really useful for prototyping, and easy to pick up, but I've never even looked at it.)

13. Learn perl. (I don't actually know a single scripting language. Right now, non-CS people are asking, "So?", and CS people are wondering why anyone ever let me graduate with a degree in CS. Whenever I need to script something, I do it in Lisp. Which used to have a fair amount of street cred, as these things go, but now it just feels a little embarrassing, and increasingly unpractical.)

14. Have permanent assigned "homes" for most objects in the house. (This is part of a larger "declutter" goal. Right now, we don't have enough storage space to make this a reality, but once we're in a new house, I'm getting serious about this one. If we don't have storage space, stuff is getting thrown out, because living in clutter makes me constantly tense.)

15. Update work wardrobe. (Including maybe shoes again, if my feet keep changing size. I'd like to not wear blue jeans every day. It's one thing during grad school, but I've been having the nagging feeling that I'm really not dressing my age these days.)

16. Shower every day. (I know that a lot of people are probably saying "Ew!!! You don't do that already?" And the answer is: Sadly, no, not since LL was born. I simply cannot figure out a way to make it work. My mornings are too hectic, and I hate showering at night. But this will change. I'm going to make it a priority.)

17. Wear makeup every work day. (Does this one sound familiar? Because I did a whole makeup thing many months ago. And I found a regimen that I like. And then I got pregnant and got wrapped up in my dissertation and I totally stopped doing it.)

I know, a list of 17 items is kind of random, but these are the things that came to mind. If more things come up over the next 500 days, I reserve the right to add more. My current plan is to check back on these things every hundred days, which would be:
1/29/11 (400 days left)
5/9/11 (300 days left)
8/17/11 (200 days left)
11/25/11 (100 days left)

Any medium-length goals you're working on? Anything I should add?

Beep Beep!

2010-10-19T14:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how else to put this: LL loves transportation. In particular, he loves pointing out to us whenever he sees various forms of transportation. And when he points them out, we absolutely must verbally acknowledge them (by name) or else he just gets louder and more insistent. Airplanes (which must be called "jumbo jets"), trains, buses (anything bigger than a car), cars (which are identified mainly by an enthusiastic "vroom!" noise), bikes, and car horns ("beep beep!").

A typical drive home from daycare goes something like this:
LL: "Bus! Bus! Mama, look -- bus!"
Me: "Yep, that's a bus."
LL: "More buses! Mama, look -- more buses!"
Me: "Yep, there's another bus."
LL: "Oh, wow! Mama! Jumbo jet!"
Me: "Yes, I hear it, too. There's a jumbo jet outside."

I usually find it rather charming, since he hasn't been talking for very long and his little voice just tickles me.

This past weekend, however, we went out of town for a wedding. I'm not going to go into the details of two eight-hour flights less than 48 hours apart, while 28 weeks pregnant, with an energetic toddler in tow. The less said about that, the better. But, I will ask you to imagine the above described transportation-loving toddler, who has lived his entire two-year existence in the quiet suburbs, transplanted for two days to Manhattan.

Have you ever taken a cab through midtown Manhattan while needing to verbally acknowledge every single bus, taxi, and car horn? I don't know how his little body managed to keep up with everything that he needed to talk about. ("Bus! Bus! More buses! Beep beep! Beep beep! Oooh, vroom! Vroom! Vroom! More buses! Beep beep! Wow! More buses! Beep beep!") I hope that our various cab drivers were amused.

Whenever we were inside a building, out of sight of the multitude of buses and cars outside, LL could not stop talking about the fact that he had been on an actual jumbo jet. Two jumbo jets! And a choo choo train! (The "choo choo train" was in fact a monorail that took us between two airport terminals during a layover. But considering that LL was also positive that the luggage carrier on the tarmac was also a choo choo train, there was no use in us explaining such fine distinctions to him.)

S thinks that LL would be much happier living in a city, where he could see as many buses and trucks and cars as his little heart desires. I, however, am awfully glad that we rarely see more than a half dozen buses on our way home from daycare. I just don't think that I could take saying "Beep beep!" that many times every single day.

Kermit Update

2010-10-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

I am now 26 weeks along. That magical potential-viability-outside-the-womb stage. About to enter the third trimester. Less than 100 days left to go. Things are really moving along!

On the GD front, I can finally say that I don't have gestational diabetes. My entire medical team finally agrees. I've said this from the very beginning. My OB agreed with me early on, but wasn't allowed to remove the diagnosis without buy-in from the endocrinologist. The endocrinologist said that she didn't think that I had it, either, but wanted to monitor me anyway, just to be sure. So I've been meeting with the nurse every month or so, to go over my food records and monitoring numbers, and at this month's appointment she finally threw up her hands and said, "Yeah, I don't believe that you have gestational diabetes." I'm at that point where, if you have gestational diabetes, it's going to be running rampant by 26 weeks. But my numbers right now are actually lower than they were back at 10 weeks, which completely supports my claim all along that pain and stress from the stupid car accident was artificially (and temporarily) elevating my blood sugar.

This past month, I've ignored the GD diet guidelines on a regular basis. I gave in to a craving for donuts at breakfast one morning. I've had fruit smoothies. I've had big bowls of pasta. I've been drinking more milk and eating more fruit, including at breakfast and bedtime, which are supposed no-no's. Yet my blood sugar numbers remain at the low end for normal non-pregnant people. On Friday, I even repeated an A1C test, which measures average blood sugar over the last three months, and it came back not just normal, but even a little lower than last time. So, the nurse told me to just eat whatever I want. Test myself occasionally, but don't worry about it. She said to try to do a full week's worth of monitoring before my next appointment with her (more than a month from now) but between now and then, don't bother much. She called me an anomaly. I'm not sure that it counts as an anomaly if I can scientifically explain what's going on, but whatever. It's good news.

All other pregnancy-related health signs are looking good as well. I'm ever-so-slightly anemic, almost exactly the same as this point in my pregnancy with LL. Last time, I was told to eat more hamburgers and spinach, because it was too borderline to warrant any more heavy-duty intervention. Which is fine with me, I like spinach. And Kermit is regularly kicking up a storm, much more targeted than LL ever was. In particular, Kermit keeps kicking my cervix, which I don't remember LL ever doing. What's up with that? Trying to dig himself out?

We also settled on a skeleton of a labor plan. Dr. M is supportive of trying a VBAC, but only under certain conditions. For one, I need to go into labor on my own (no induction) and I need to progress entirely on my own (no pitocin augmentation) because the use of augmentation drugs dramatically increases the risk of uterine rupture during VBACs. This might be a hurdle for me, because I never went into labor with LL, and even when I was 8cms dilated and my water had already broken, my contractions would disappear when they turned down the pitocin. I'm a little hopeful, because I'm already having Braxton-Hicks contractions, which never really happened with LL, so maybe my uterus is actually prepping for something this time!

The other condition that we'll need to meet is that I need to go into labor before 39 weeks or so. LL's c-section was necessary because of a rare condition called CPD, in which the baby's head is too big to fit through the mother's pelvic bone. A number of factors probably contributed to the CPD (LL's gestational age at delivery, which was 41w3d; LL's enormous head; my apparently narrow-ish pelvic bone; a lack of elasticity in LL's skull). This time around, we can't be sure how many of these factors will be present. My pelvic bone is likely to have spread a little more, since this is a second pregnancy, which will hopefully help. On the other hand, Kermit's head is so far measuring even bigger than LL's. Kermit's head might be more elastic, which would help a lot, but we won't know until I start pushing. (Most babies' heads deform to fit through the birth canal; this is why they often have cone heads for a day or two after birth. Even after hours of pushing out LL, his head remained nice and round and didn't deform at all.) The only thing that we have any control over is gestational age, which is why Dr. M won't let me try a VBAC too late into the pregnancy. Basically, he and I both want to avoid a situation where I have another full trial of labor, several hours of pushing, and then end up with another c-section. That outcome might not be entirely avoidable, but we can minimize the odds, and one way to do that is to set an eviction date, a scheduled c-section.

Right now, we've scheduled a c-section for January 3, when I'll be 39w1d. Which is a hair less than 3 months from now. I might try to push it back a few more days, to 39w4d, just to give myself a few more days to go into labor. (Dr. M originally scheduled it for 38w5d, but I wasn't comfortable with it being that early, so he agreed to wait a few more days.) But basically, that's the plan.

I've been giving a lot of thought to the VBAC question since before I was even pregnant with Kermit, and I'm happy with this plan. When LL's birth ended in a c-section, I was disappointed, but not as crushed as some other women seem to be. I felt like I had missed out on the experience of giving birth, but goodness knows that 23 hours of active labor certainly gave me a sense of what that experience would be. And I resented the longer recovery period and incision pain, which was compounded by the long trial of labor and pushing before eventually having the surgery, but it's not like a vaginal birth would have avoided pain and recovery. At the same time, I definitely know in my heart that the c-section was unavoidable. I don't have any "what-ifs" in mind where I think that the c-section could have been reasonably avoided. I wasn't "pushed" into it by over-eager doctors, I wasn't rushed in any way. Every decision we made, I would make again. So even though I didn't want the c-section, I know that LL would never have been born without it, and there's a certain peace that comes with that.

I've poured over the data on the risk of VBAC complications in various settings, and I feel like trying the VBAC in a supportive hospital setting with trained doctors and nurses who assist with them all the time will bring the risks down to a level that is comparable with other types of birth. If I don't go into labor before the eviction date, I will be a little disappointed. But I also feel like, by the time I'm that far along, the odds of a successful VBAC will have dropped enough that it probably wouldn't happen, anyway, and I'd have the same double recovery as last time. So this plan seems right to me.

In the mean time, we're trying to step up the preparation for actually having Kermit in our lives come January (or, let's be honest, possibly late December). The odds of us moving into a larger house between now and then are shrinking rapidly, so we're strategizing about where to put things in our current house. Bassinet in our bedroom. New rocking chair, also in our bedroom. Changing table in a location TBD. Nursing stool next to an existing chair in our living room, so that I can nurse somewhere without waking up S. Kermit's clothes stored in our closet. No crib or dresser purchased for Kermit until 5 months old or we're in a new house, whichever comes first. Boxing up all non-essentials in our office so that the room is de-cluttered enough that my mom can sleep on the hide-a-bed in there for a while after Kermit is born.

There are a few things that we'll need to buy, but not much. New rocking chair, new changing table. Bouncy seat. New boppy. New stroller. (Probably a sit-n-stand, like this one, since I don't think we'd need a full double stroller for very long, but might want one for the first 6 months or so. If anyone has experience with these, please let me know, because I've barely done any research on these yet.) Not much else.

Oh, and we do still need a name other than Kermit....

Security

2010-09-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

When LL was just two months old or so, he semi-adopted his first security object. It was a little white burp cloth with blue stars and blue embroidered embellishments along the edges. One of my mother-in-law's friends made him a set of three similar cloths, but he only liked the one with the blue stars. He smiled when he saw it, he gripped it tightly when we gave it to him, he liked rubbing his cheek against it, and he seemed to sleep better if it was nearby.

The starry burp cloth was replaced by Froggie Blanket, a small dead-simple square quilt that I made for him out of some flannel with lily pads and frogs on it. LL briefly wanted to bring Froggie Blanket with him everywhere he went (and I added "make back-up Froggie Blanket out of leftover fabric" to my to-do list) but it quickly evolved into a sleepytime-only thing. He holds onto it at naptime and bedtime, and likes to hold it while being rocked, but in the morning he gives it a hug and leaves it in the crib. Occasionally, if he's sick or feeling particularly needy, he will want to hold onto it a bit more, which we let him do. It usually doesn't leave the house (he naps at daycare just fine without it) but it does join us on outings every so often. And he always always knows where it is, in a sixth sense sort of way. (Every once in a while at bedtime, we won't see it, but we just need to ask LL, "Where's Froggie Blanket?" and he will always know where to find it. Even that time it was stuffed inside the salad spinner in the back of a cabinet.)

I'm not a very artsy-crafty person. I do some occasional knitting or crocheting, but that's about it. And I've been known to go years between projects. But I love that LL is attached to the Froggie Blanket that I made.

But, little boys grow up, tastes change, new security objects are identified. We have a new must-have security object in our house. It's not exactly replacing Froggie Blanket, which is still required in the glider and crib at all times. This is more of an additional new friend. It's only been a week, so it may end up being short-lived, but LL's behavior with this thing has been sudden, dramatic, and different than anything he has ever done before. The object of his affection: a small stuffed zebra named NoNo.

I mentioned a little while ago that zebras are one of LL's favorite animals, and though he knows the word "zebra," he insists on calling them "no-nos" for, um, literary reasons. When we went to the zoo with Grandma and Grandpa, he spent a long time exclaiming over the zebras. As we were leaving, I helped my dad to pick out a little stuffed zebra at the zoo gift shop, for him to give to LL for his birthday.

LL thought the stuffed zebra was cool, but it pretty much stayed with all of his other toys. The fact that he played with it at all was a minor miracle, actually. We own a lot of stuffed animals in various sizes and species, and LL almost always ignores them. There's one monkey that he briefly liked playing with, because the monkey wears overalls and the overalls have a real zipper that goes up and down! not to mention monkey-sized shoes and socks, but other than that, LL just wasn't a stuffed animal or doll kind of kid. When I was trying to get him off of the starry burp cloth, I offered him a bear named Bingo at the same time as Froggie Blanket, and he was completely uninterested. (I'm wondering, in fact, why I even encouraged my dad to buy the stuffed zebra in the first place.)

So, the zebra sat in the toy box for a week or two. And then suddenly last week, when I was trying to get LL to climb into his high chair for dinner, he suddenly exclaimed, "NoNo!" I thought at first that he was just being defiant, but no, he was talking about the zebra. He dug it out of the toy box, climbed into his high chair with it, placed it carefully next to him at the table, and proceeded to feed it dinner. (Luckily, I was able to convince him very quickly that zebras don't eat yogurt, because that wasn't going anywhere good. It turns out that zebras survive mostly on goldfish crackers.) And ever since then, NoNo has gone everywhere with LL.

NoNo eats all meals with LL. He is clutched along with Froggie Blanket at bedtime. He rides toy trains. He reads books. (It is very important that NoNo be able to see the pictures.) He goes to the grocery store. Observations about the world are carefully explained to NoNo in long, complex sentences that only LL and NoNo completely understand. (I pick up individual words, but that's about it. I know that NoNo has been told about grandparents and shoes and jumbo jets, but I'm not sure what details were revealed.) So far, the only time that NoNo is left at home is when LL goes to daycare. Possibly it's because one of his friends there has a bear that she carries everywhere, and some of the other kids like to take it from her to make her cry, so LL might sense that NoNo won't be completely safe there. When he leaves for daycare, he gently kisses and hugs NoNo, then leaves him carefully by the door to wait for LL to come home again.

I am just blown away by this behavior. I know that kids like role playing, and they get attached to stuff, and they humanize animals. But I'm a little amazed by how suddenly LL adopted this particular friend. It's very cool to watch. It's also adding a bit of confusion to our household, because when LL yells, "No No!" we need to interpret whether he's talking about his zebra or saying "no" to something. But oh, so much fun to watch!

Pa Choo-Choo

2010-09-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

My parents and my in-laws visited us for 10 days around LL's birthday. I already recounted how the weekend didn't go quite as planned, but I didn't want to skip the fact that most of the visit went wonderfully, fantastically, joyfully well (debilitating fevers and emergency ambulance rides notwithstanding).

My parents and my grandfather and my uncle arrived first. It had been three months since they saw LL, and he was a bit shy and reserved during that visit. He had been a little cautious, a little quiet, a little hesitant to let anybody hold him. This time around, it was like we had suddenly presented him with four of the best playmates he had ever met. LL previously knew how to say "Mama", "Daddy", and the name of exactly one of his friends. He didn't have names for anybody else, including Rosie and Natasha, whom he sees for many hours every single week. Yet he had given obvious names to all four of the visiting relatives within an hour of their arrival. (Grandma was "Baba", Grandpa and Great-Grandpa were both initially "Pa", though he offered better distinguishing names later, and he called my uncle by his first name.) He insisted that all four of them accompany him everywhere. (It made for a very crowded bedroom during diaper changes, because everybody had to be within eyesight or LL complained and called out for whoever was missing.) When we went for a walk, LL anxiously kept everybody close, and if anyone fell behind, LL would run back to the straggler, take his hand, and drag him forward to join the group. We have a "no shoes" rule in our house, and each time people arrived, LL helped them to take off their shoes, then helpfully brought the correct shoes to each person when they were ready to leave.

The most awesome part of all of this was LL's interaction with my grandfather. My grandfather is 88 years old. He adores children, but he's just not able to play with them as actively as he used to. (He is, I think, fairly active for an 88-year-old -- he lives independently, works a part-time job, and flies cross-country to visit me and LL a few times a year -- but he's also, you know, 88 years old.) He has four (soon to be five!) great-grandchildren, but since he's usually with my parents when he visits them, he kind of gets treated as a backup to my parents, who are the grandparents, the main attraction. He has complained to me in the past that he doesn't think that my nieces and nephews like playing with him, and it makes him sad to feel left out of the fun.

Anyway, in addition to a traditional birthday gift for LL, my grandfather also brought two smaller gifts that he gave to LL as soon as he arrived. The first was a little foam baseball that he got for free at a baseball game. The second was a train book, because he knows that LL loves trains. ("Train book" is a little misleading -- my grandfather brought a 150-page catalog of high-end hobbyist collectible model trains that he picked up at a collector's convention.) (Note that my grandfather does not collect trains, he just happened to notice the convention going on so he stopped to pick up a free catalog for LL.) When LL saw the train book, he went wild for it. He took my grandfather's hand, dragged him to the couch, made him sit down, climbed up onto the couch next to him, and demanded that my grandfather "read" the book to him. Together, they read through all 150 pages of that catalog. On each page, LL would point to each train and yell, "Choo-choo! More choo-choos! More choo-choos!" and then my grandfather would try to say something descriptive about what they were looking at. ("That's a coal car, circa 1940. That one is a passenger car. Oooh, that train car is red! Look, there's a caboose!") For 150 pages.

When they finished the catalog, LL got the little foam baseball and played catch with my grandfather for a good hour. He let other people play a bit, but if any of the rest of us held onto the ball for too long, LL would run over and retrieve it from us, saying "No, Pa Choo-Choo's ball!" ("Pa Choo-Choo" should not be confused with my father, who became known as "Pa Itsy-Bitsy", because apparently he does an awesome Itsy Bitsy Spider.) My grandfather was in total heaven.

I should also note that the morning after everyone had arrived, LL woke up at 4:00am, and when I went to see what he needed, he told me that he wanted to sit in his rocking chair with Pa Choo-Choo. I told him that Pa Choo-Choo was sleeping, because it was nighttime, but he would be back in the morning. With that explanation, LL consented to sit in his chair with me, but only until Pa Choo-Choo arrived. And indeed, LL sat in my lap from 4:00am on, dozing off occasionally, but waking up regularly to ask if Pa Choo-Choo was there yet. And when Pa Choo-Choo finally arrived, LL ran to him, took off his shoes, dragged him to the couch, sat him down, handed him both the train catalog and the baseball, sat down next to him, and they read the entire 150-page catalog again.

Over the course of their visit, LL developed similar special games with each of the visiting relatives. Everybody felt bathed in LL's attention, nobody felt left out. We were a little nervous that he would ignore S's parents once they arrived several days later, but he immediately latched onto them with the same ferocity.

We went to the zoo, we went to a toddler amusement park, we went to the park, we played in the yard. S and I even went to work on several days while LL stayed with whichever grandparents were around at the time, so he got lots of time with grandparents and without Mom and Dad as well.

We're back into our normal daily routine now, and LL is still asking about when his grandparents will be back. Poor kid doesn't quite understand that the next time he sees them will be in January, when they all plan to visit after Kermit is born. We'll do plenty of computer video chats between now and then, but I'm a little nervous to see how he handles not being the center of their world. But for now, I'm just so thrilled that I have photos and videos of LL adoringly playing with older relatives, especially with Pa Choo-Choo.

Change of Plans

2010-09-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

Here is how this past weekend was supposed to be:

Saturday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, which includes fasting for 25 hours (though I'm exempt from fasting because of the pregnancy. Kids don't fast, either). My parents had arrived earlier in the week from out of town, and we were going to spend a quiet morning at home, followed by services at our synagogue. S's parents were due to arrive that afternoon, then we were all going out to dinner to break the fast. (S's parents aren't Jewish, so no fasting for them either.) After a nice dinner out, everyone would return to their respective homes (us) and hotels (everyone else) before returning to our house for LL's party on Sunday morning. Yes, Sunday was LL's second birthday! We were expecting nearly 30 people at a birthday party for him on Sunday morning. Lots of friends, lots of family, lots of cute antics from LL. After the party, we would all nap and then quietly open presents with just the grandparents (and eat leftover cake -- I baked a big one!). I was looking forward to the whole weekend.

Here is a brief list of what went wrong:

1. Saturday afternoon, shortly after S's parents arrived, LL started acting strange. Even though he had already napped and it wasn't yet bedtime, he was very sleepy and lethargic. We took his temperature and discovered that he had a fever of 104.4.

2. I frantically tried to bring down his fever while simultaneously canceling his birthday party.

3. I suddenly realized that it was after sundown, my family hadn't eaten anything since the previous night, we had no food in the house, and we could no longer go out for dinner. I quickly ordered the fastest take-out food I could think of, then sent someone to go pick it up for me.

4. As everyone else sat down to eat dinner and I comforted a feverish LL, S's mom suddenly turned pale and said that she didn't feel well. Five seconds later, she completely lost consciousness and collapsed. And we weren't able to wake her.

5. I dialed 911, then carried LL outside with me to wait for the paramedics, so that he wouldn't have to watch his grandmother lying on the couch mumbling incoherently. For the record, standing in the cool night air watching the flashing lights on four emergency vehicles parked outside your house does a fairly good job of both cooling down a feverish toddler and distracting him from his own mystery illness.

6. The paramedics managed to rouse S's mom, but when she tried to stand up, she nearly collapsed again, so into the ambulance and off to the hospital she went. S's dad went with her, in a complete panic. S and I promised to follow them there, a few minutes behind.

7. The combination of worrying about LL, worrying about his mother, and not eating for 26 hours and counting was too much for S. I made him sit down while I packed up some things to bring to the hospital (S's mom's purse and wallet; a container of food for S; some snacks and water for me and S's dad; my address book so that we could call S's sister). I also gave quick instructions to my parents on how to care for LL while he's sick (where we keep the medicine; how much he can have and when; how best to comfort him at bedtime; emergency pediatric numbers in case he gets worse; to call my cell phone if his condition changes at all). There's nothing quite like handing a scared, feverish, sobbing toddler over to someone else before rushing out the door to an even bigger emergency. (I called the house five minutes later to see how he was doing. He apparently cried for 10 seconds after the door closed, then asked my dad to play trains with him. When I called, he was jumping up and down on the couch, despite the 104 degree fever.)

8. By 11:00pm, the ER doctors were convinced that S's mom was fine (thank goodness!). We may never know what caused her to lose consciousness, though she's under orders not to drive a car until she has been cleared by a cardiologist back home. Discharge orders and paperwork kept her at the hospital until 1:00am.

9. After getting home, sending my parents back to their hotel, and crawling into bed, I got a rejuvenating three hours of sleep before LL woke up and wanted to be held by his mommy until morning. His temperature remained at 103. When he was finally comfortable enough to fall back asleep in our bed at 7:30am, I was too wired to go back to sleep myself.

10. All the grandparents, including S's mom, returned to our house late morning on Sunday, where we all tried our best to be festive for LL's birthday. I blew up a few balloons, LL opened presents, we all ate cake. Then everyone went home early to try to get some sleep.

Last night, LL slept normally, and he woke up this morning with his temperature back to normal. His mystery illness lasted exactly 36 hours, just long enough to spoil his birthday. And S's mom has been joking that she only passed out because she didn't like seeing LL get all the attention. The weekend is over, everyone is fine, all is well. And I'm still jittery as hell. Everything is fine, but I can't seem to get my heart to stop racing. Pregnant women really aren't meant to endure this much drama.

LL Anecdotes

2010-09-12T21:31:00.000-07:00

In honor of LL's second birthday next week (!), here is a collection of recent LL short stories. I wanted to get them written down before I forget them in the haze of Terrible Twos and New Baby.

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A few weeks ago, when I picked LL up from Natasha's, she told me that she should really be paying me, rather than the other way around. LL spent the day cleaning her house. When I got there, he was sweeping the patio, complete with very competent use of a dustpan. The next day, Natasha made me wait to get LL so that he could finish fixing her vacuum. Natasha has a roomba (small robotic self-propelled vacuum). One of the little girls at daycare (Jenny) is scared of the roomba. All day, this process had been repeating: (1) roomba starts independently cruising around the room; (2) Jenny starts crying; (3) Natasha hits buttons on the roomba in increasingly confusing patterns to make it more difficult to turn on; (4) Natasha hides the roomba; (5) LL finds the roomba; (6) LL keeps trying different combinations of buttons until the roomba starts working again; (7) return to step (1). As I was talking to Natasha, we heard a quiet "whirrrr" followed by hysterical crying from Jenny, followed by a big grin from Natasha: "I guess he fixed it again!"

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We stopped using tablecloths when LL learned to crawl. (You know that physics trick where you pull really hard on a tablecloth and all the stuff on the table magically stays in place on the table? LL loves the idea, but sucks at the execution.) The other day, we were having friends over for brunch, and brought out a tablecloth. LL saw S shaking it out to put on the table, and became convinced that it was a bed sheet. We explained the difference, and had LL help us to spread the cloth on our formal dining room table. S and I then went to the kitchen. Soon, I heard a weird creaking sound coming from the dining room, followed by a giggling LL happily yelling, "Jump! Jump! Jump!" I returned to the dining room to find LL standing on top of the table, jumping up and down. He was somehow convinced that putting a "sheet" on the table had transformed it into a bed, which is of course meant for jumping. (Yep, we let him jump on the bed. We're bad parents.)

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One of LL's favorite words is "hot." I'm fairly certain that in LL-ese, "hot" actually means "not the temperature that I was expecting," since all objects are said to be "hot" if they are not room temperature. Including things like ice water. One of his favorite things in the world is blowing on things to bring them to the correct temperature. In my perpetually-overheated pregnant state, LL has taken to lifting up my shirt, touching my stomach, declaring it "hot!", and then blowing on it until it seems cooler to him. My own little portable cooling system.

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Our neighbors did some heavy duty yard work recently, which meant that there was a real live bulldozer right outside the window! LL spent much of the morning standing on the bookshelf under his bedroom window so that he could see it better. When we finally let him outside, he dragged a lawn chair off the porch and set it up in the lawn so that he could watch all the action. I tried to ignore the fact that he was convinced that the bulldozer was a train, and therefore kept yelling "Choo choo!" whenever it moved.

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For snack time at daycare, Natasha puts out plates of snack at two toddler-sized tables, then lets the kids sit down and eat whenever they're hungry. Last week, LL sat down at one table while all the other kids sat at the other one. He proceeded to eat his entire plate of food, then slide the snack plate at the chair to his right on over and eat that snack, then go ahead and eat the one to his left. Then he carefully stacked all three (empty) plates into a neat little pile, carried them over to Natasha, and asked for more. He regularly eats three or four servings of everything that she makes, more than any other kid there. I think she's convinced that we never feed him. Yet he's still in the 30th percentile for weight. I wish that I had his metabolism.

+

LL's vocabulary isn't huge, but it suddenly started making huge leaps just in the last week, with a ton of new words and an explosion of phrases/sentences. One of his favorite pastimes is pointing out stuff he knows words for while we are driving. These loud pronouncements are generally followed by requests for me to acknowledge that I, too, saw whatever it is he's pointing out. And requests to see more of them. ("Bus! Bus! Mama, bus! Look! More bus?") Things that we see from cars that must be acknowledged: buses, bikes, balloons, trains, and dogs. Note that "trains" are things bigger than cars that are not buses, and "dogs" are non-human, non-bird animals.

+

LL remains the most expressive toddler I have ever seen. What does a typical toddler do when he spills milk? Laugh and make a bigger mess? Cry? Call for you to clean it up? Try to clean it up himself? Mine shakes his head and says, "Ay yay yay! Look at that!" His constant use of the phrase "Ay yay yay!" (along with the occasional "Oy!") makes him sound like an old Yiddish man. It doesn't help that he refuses to say the word "eat," and instead asks to "nosh" when he is hungry.

+

LL has a Farm ABC book, with pictures of farm items for each letter of the alphabet (R is for rooster; S is for silo; T is for tractor; ...). But, like every alphabet book ever made, the authors could only come up with a zebra for the letter Z. Next to the picture of the zebra is a caption that says, "Hey! Zebras don't live on farms!" Every time we read this book, LL points to the zebra, giggles, and says, "No no no no no!" He is now convinced that zebras are called "no-nos," and they're one of his favorite animals.

+

You know how some parents allow their older kids to choose the name of new siblings? We're at such a loss for names that we decided to give it a shot. I'm fairly certain that LL has chosen the name "Jumbo Jet" for his younger brother. Which do you prefer: Kermit? or Jumbo Jet?

Enjoying Pregnancy

2010-09-03T16:24:00.000-07:00

I have a confession: I enjoy being pregnant. You probably wouldn't guess it by the amount of whining that I do here, but I really do enjoy the overall state of pregnancy. (Yes, the details leave much to be desired, but I'm talking Big Picture.)

True, the fatigue sucks. As do all the little aches and pains. The Top Ten List of annoying symptoms, for me, include fatigue, itchiness, swollen wrists and ankles, insomnia, muscle cramps, digestive issues, heat sensitivity, constant paranoia about food, physical awkwardness, and the inability to wear the same bra or shoes for more than 2 months in a row. During the first trimester, I tend to get a small set of those that stick around for weeks at at time. During the second trimester, I generally experience all of them, 4-5 at a time, rotating on a daily basis. (As soon as the digestive issues disappear, the muscle cramps come back, that sort of thing.) During the third trimester, they're pretty much all there all the time, if I remember correctly. And yep, that sucks.

But in exchange for the miserableness, there's so much to enjoy. I love the anticipation of it all. The sense of a new beginning. The realization that you're doing something that you're only going to do for a few short times in your entire life, if you're lucky. Feeling the kicks and knowing that you're enjoying something that nobody else at that moment knows exactly about -- the private kicks of your future child. The daydreaming about the future. It's all really rather lovely. And I know that there are people who freak out about the weight gain and spend nine months convinced that they look like a fat cow, but I'm actually the exact opposite; I'm normally fairly self-conscious about my body, but during pregnancy, I almost feel like I have an excellent "excuse" to not have an hourglass figure, and all that self-consciousness disappears. (After LL was born, it almost immediately reappeared, but still.)

I remember being physically miserable during my pregnancy with LL. Those last two months or so, from weeks 34-42, seemed never-ending. I reached the point of "Holy cow I really just cannot go on like this!!!" a good week or more before I actually gave birth. I remember being that miserable. But I also remember missing it all when LL was just a few months old. At the time, I convinced myself that my mind was playing tricks on me, that I wasn't really remembering what it was like, that if I was ever lucky enough to get pregnant again I would immediately be consumed by thoughts of, "Oh, that's right, this sucks! What the hell was I thinking, doing this again!?!" But now that I'm here again... nope, it's good. Really.

The things that sucked before (see the Top Ten List) still suck. But they don't suck with the ferocity that they sucked last time. This time around, I seem more in control of the fact that the miserableness is short-lived. That the aches and pains come and go. That the whole experience really is rather fleeting, even if it doesn't always seem that way in the moment. I feel like I spent my pregnancy with LL trying to "get through it." There were things that I enjoyed, and I spent much of that pregnancy in total awe of what was happening, but I still treated it as a trial that I needed to suffer through (including labor, the big final exam) in order to reach the payoff of a real little baby. This time, I'm much better at viewing the pregnancy itself as a life stage to be enjoyed like any other.

I wrote several weeks ago about how I was sad that this pregnancy felt so abstract. I'm starting to realize that my sadness came mostly from a place of feeling like I hadn't enjoyed those first few months the way I should have. And now they're gone. This last month or so, though, things have been very different. I'm definitely "in the moment" now with this pregnancy. Taking note of the changes, marveling at Kermit's development, keeping perspective on the bad stuff. And having twinges of sadness that I may never do this again.

Names and Such

2010-08-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

Not to state the obvious or anything, but picking a name is hard! I really hate it. When we were picking a name for LL, we settled on his name fairly quickly, despite some ridiculous naming constraints (mostly self-imposed). (Those constraints are detailed here.) Not that we didn't have lots of doubts along the way. We certainly did. But we always came back to LL. Two years later, I still love LL's name. Love it. Never regretted it. But now I can't find anything else that I like. And it should be easier this time, too, because we're not working with any first-letter constraints for the first name. Here are the goals this time around, focusing just on the English-first-name issues, leaving aside the Japanese-middle-name issues and the Hebrew-first-name issues:

1. It has to sound at least vaguely Jewish. Kermit's middle name and last name will be Japanese, so it's important to us that his Jewish heritage be apparent in his first name. I'll admit that we're easing up on this restriction a bit the more we struggle with names, but we draw the line at anything too WASPy or New Testament. Which is a shame, because I really like some of the preppy WASPy names.

2. Nothing too off-the-wall. I don't want people struggling to pronounce it.

3. Nothing too high up on the popularity charts. In my perfect world scenario, everyone has heard the name, and thinks it's cute, but nobody personally knows anyone with the name. (Probably a pipe dream, I know, but I think that we managed to hit this one with LL's name.)

4. Some sort of nickname possibility. I always regretted not having a nickname, and I want the kid to have options.

5. It has to sound good with our highly unusual last name. This one is actually fairly problematic. Lots of names become really odd tongue twisters when paired with our last name.

6. Nobody in our family can have the name (this is a Jewish tradition/superstition). We'd prefer if it's not the name of any of our close friends or their kids, either. And, um, no ex-boyfriends. There's a name I like that fits all the other criteria, but I dated a guy with that name for like 3 seconds in college, and when I bring it up as a possibility, S says, "You mean like your ex-boyfriend?" So I guess that's a rule or something.

I keep reminding myself to be open-minded. When we picked LL's name, we weren't completely thrilled with it at first. We kept going back and expanding our list to include more names, but then we'd always (somewhat reluctantly) come back to LL. It took us a month or two of kicking the tires and using it in conversation before we were really comfortable with it. As soon as he was born, we knew it was right, but it took a while for it to seem that familiar. I'm hoping for a similar experience this time around, and I keep reminding myself that all names will sound slightly awkward to me at first, but I need to give them time. But the only way that's going to happen is if we manage to narrow to a short list early enough to give us time to grow comfortable with any of the names. So far, nothing.

On a slightly related note, we need to find a new mohel. We struggled long and hard with that decision last time, too, and ended up with a guy that we really liked. But apparently he retired sometime in the last two years. (Or moved away. Or died. I don't actually know which. But, um, he's not available anymore.) So now we need to find somebody new. Also, I'm not normally a gender-stereotype person, but female mohels seem "wrong" somehow. (I'm saying this as a woman in a male-dominated field, with a female rabbi and a male OB/GYN. These things normally don't bother me at all. But I just can't hire a female mohel. Not sure why. Is it just me?) And it turns out that most of the mohels (yes, more than 50%) working in my (fairly small) Jewish community are women. My synagogue has so far been very little help. Blech, decisions.

Banana

2010-08-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

Today I am 20w1d pregnant with Kermit. (Now that we know it's a boy, we've given the Frog an official pre-birth name. Not enough kids named Kermit these days, don't ya think?) (No, we're not really going to name him Kermit.) (Though we haven't yet found any names that we like, so you never know.) (And Kermi is a cute nickname.) (S and I have a bet going to see how many of our friends we can convince that we're really naming the baby Kermit.) (We apparently have very gullible friends.) (But I digress.)

I am now officially more than halfway done. And I've resorted to the produce comparisons that I loved during my last pregnancy, to let everyone know that Kermit is already the size of a banana. Yikes. Way too much stuff that I still want to do before Kermit is born. Little things, like finish my dissertation and get a job and "fix" LL's bedtime routine and buy a new house. Complicating things a bit is the fact that pregnancy brain has officially set in, and I am a mess. I remember being a bit scatterbrained while pregnant with LL, but Kermit has brought me to a whole new level. Quick story from this weekend:

We were invited to a birthday party at a friend's house on Saturday. I asked her if there was anything that we should bring, and she said YES, bring a booster seat for LL to sit in during dinner. It was the only thing that she asked us to bring, and she actually reminded me about it several times. Fine. Saturday afternoon, I packed up LL's diaper bag for the evening, got everyone ready to go, locked up the house, got in the car... and halfway there, I realized that I forgot the booster seat. We turned around and drove all the way back home. S stayed in the car with LL while I ran in for the booster seat, locked up again, and we were on our way (again). We got to the friend's house, and I reached down to pick up LL's diaper bag, only to realize that when I walked out the house, I grabbed my work bag instead of LL's diaper bag. So, instead of diapers and pajamas and food for LL, I had research papers and computer cords. Great. S told me to just go to the party with LL, he would drive home (again) and swap bags. Fifteen minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was S. When I locked up the house the second time, I used S's house keys... and never gave them back. He was locked out of the house. He had to turn around, come back to our friend's house (again), get the keys from me, drive home (again) to switch bags, then drive back to our friend's house (again). All because I'm a blathering idiot.

In other news, I am constantly hungry these days. After not gaining any pregnancy weight at all for so long, even though Kermit was growing normally, my body finally realized that it was sort of cannibalizing itself to make it all happen, so consuming extra external calories would be a good thing. Here at the halfway point, I am now up 2 pounds. Which is perfect, since it allows me to gain the recommended one-pound-a-week for the rest of the pregnancy without making my overall gain too out-of-whack. My weight gain goal with LL was 25 pounds, but I kind of assumed that I'd go way over that. (All of my friends, every single one of them, gained more than 45 pounds with their pregnancies, and I figured I was doomed to follow in their footsteps.) Instead, I gained 28 pounds, which I considered an unqualified success. Thus, my goal this time around was a repeat of last time, which looks doable.

On the gestational diabetes front: I'm still meeting with the nurse once a month or so, despite everyone's belief that I don't actually have gestational diabetes. (As I suspected, my blood sugar goes up only in response to stress, regardless of what I eat. If I'm relaxed and I eat a big 'ole slice of cake, my blood sugar stays nice and low. If I have a "bad dissertation day" and eat half a bagel, my blood sugar goes up. It's weird, but wonderfully predictable.) I'm following a few GD guidelines for food, but I bend the rules a whole lot. I'm not drinking any beverages with carbs in them, so no soda or juice or sweetened tea in the past 2+ months. And I've definitely decreased portion sizes for rice and pasta and bread. But I'm not doing anything even approximating counting carbs. I just make choices, usually, for foods with more protein and vegetables and fewer standalone starches. But then I just follow my hunger in determining when and how much to eat. And I'm still eating desserts fairly regularly. Every once in a while, when nutrition information is available, I look up how many carbs are in my meal (yeah, I tend to look it up after the fact). Leading to a lot of conversations with S where I say things like, "You know how I'm supposed to eat 45g of carbs at dinner? I just ate 95g instead. Think it will matter?" And then I test my blood sugar and nope, it didn't matter, I'm still normal. I've been warned that insulin resistance can change dramatically after 20 weeks, so I'm still testing myself multiple times a day so that I'll know if I need to start being more diligent, but for now, I'm rather enjoying getting a pat on the back from a professional every month who looks at my food charts and validates my level of nutrition. So, yay.

One other piece of random information. At last week's ultrasound, we discovered that Kermit's placenta is at the front (so, towards my stomach instead of my spine). Front placental placement is a bit rare, but apparently has zero medical significance. It does, however, provide me with a bunch of practical information that I had been wondering about. It explains why I felt Kermit kicking so much later than I felt LL, since the placenta cushions those early movements. It explains why Dr. M kept having a harder time than normal finding Kermit's heartbeat, since the placenta muffles sound a bit. And it explains why I kept complaining that the ultrasound pictures we were getting of Kermit looked so much "fuzzier" than LL's had, since we were seeing the images through an extra layer of tissue. Mystery solved!

Job Hunt

2010-08-19T18:14:00.000-07:00

I hate applying for jobs. Hate it. Each time I've been on the market for a new job, I only really applied to one or two, and then took one of those when they were offered. (So, I'm also not very experienced at the big job hunt thing.) The last time I was seriously on the job market was in 2003, when I became so fed up with my current job that I vowed to quit by the end of the month, even if it meant being completely unemployed. I sent a single email to a friend at another company asking if they were hiring, and then I threw up my hands and gave my two weeks notice the following Monday morning, unemployment be damned. By the time those two weeks were up, my friend had arranged an interview, I'd met with my future manager, I'd gotten an offer, and I accepted it. Easiest job hunt ever.

This time around is probably going to be a bit more challenging. I've decided not to do the academia tenure thing, and I'm not interested in a post-doc, so I'm just applying for research positions. And they have to not care that I'm pregnant. And they have to be local, because S and I don't want to relocate. And they have to not care that I'm pregnant. And the economy sucks. And did I mention that I'm 20 weeks pregnant?

When talking to people about my pending job hunt, I've been mentioning two competing factors: (1) I didn't want to start interviewing until I was sure about when I would graduate; and (2) I wanted to interview before the pregnancy was showing. Well, now that the defense is behind me, I have a likely answer to (1) -- I'll be graduating in January, within days of my due date. Which is both convenient and a bit awkward. Mostly because it has now made point (2) rather impossible. Even though I have still not gained an ounce of weight, I suddenly popped yesterday and am definitely showing. I noticed it yesterday morning, and several people commented on it during the course of that one day. It literally happened all at once. And while I might be able to hide it a bit with some careful wardrobe choices, none of them are at all flattering.

So, we'll see. I've informally applied for 6 jobs. Two of them won't require interviews, because I've already worked for people there and they're just checking to see whether there's an opening that makes sense (though both have privately mentioned that the immediate maternity leave makes it a hard sell, and they'll definitely be able to make me an offer if I talk to them next summer, after the baby is born, but probably not if I insist on doing something while pregnant. Which is illegal I think? But I'm not interested in fighting about it right now, especially with friends). Two others are at places where I have numerous personal contacts, so I'm hoping to at least get interviews, and then deal with the maternity leave thing later. The last two are more of a stretch, but two of my former managers know people at those places, and they're putting in some phone calls for me, so we'll see.

But the waiting and the doubting and the stress of interviews and the feeling of being judged and the endless waiting? Hate it.

Sex

2010-08-16T15:01:00.000-07:00

When LL was just a few months old, we had a big playdate with several friends in the area who all have children around the same age (give or take 18 months or so), most of whom are girls. On the way home, S said, "Let's have a girl next." And I laughed, for many many reasons. LL was still so little, it seemed ridiculous to even be talking about the "next" one. Also, it's hard to ignore that we would be lucky to get pregnant again with any child, much less being picky about the sex. And even if we wanted to be picky, it's not like we had any control over it. But, S had made his point: he loves LL, but he also wanted the experience of raising a little girl.

In the months since then, S has mentioned several times that he thinks it would be fun to have a little girl. And while I agreed with him a bit, mostly just for the variety of it, it has never been as important to me as it obviously was to him.

When I got pregnant with the Frog, S admitted that he really wanted it to be a girl. And I started getting worried about dealing with his disappointment if it wasn't. I've spent the last two months playing up the advantages of having another boy. Brothers close in age are more likely to play together! Both me and S grew up in older-brother-younger-sister families and we didn't get along with our siblings at all; wouldn't brothers be fun?! If we had a girly-girl, neither one of us would have any idea how to relate to her! Boys are so much easier during the teen years! And we can reuse all of LL's infant clothes! If we were royalty, you'd be thrilled with having boys!

Meanwhile, I started to chat with friends who have multiple boys. (Statistically, half of our friends with 2+ kids should have boy-girl combos, but in reality, less than a third of them do. Almost every single one of our friends has either girl-girl or boy-boy children, leaning heavily towards boy-boy.) Most of them admitted that they had a mild preference for a girl the second time around, but their husbands were much more invested in the outcome. One of my friends put it this way: "When we found out our second was a boy, my husband was visibly disappointed. He came around by the time our son was born, but it took a month or two."

Today was our big fetal ultrasound. While we waited for the exam, I reminded S that the most important thing was that the baby be healthy. And he acted a little defensive and told me that of course that's most important, and he wasn't going to be upset no matter what the sex turned out to be. And besides, we'd always said that we might maybe possibly consider trying to have a third child, so it's not like this is our definitive last chance for a girl.

So, the results of our ultrasound: the Frog is healthy. Strong heartbeat, measuring one day ahead of the estimated due date. Scarily for me, this baby is measuring smaller than LL did in all measurements (length, weight, abdominal circumference, femur length) with the glaring exception of head circumference, which is noticeably bigger. (I ended up with a c-section with LL after 23 hours of labor because of a rare condition called CPD, in which his gigantic head was demonstrably too big to fit through my pelvic bone. We still have several months of growth ahead of us, and a lot can change, but an even larger head doesn't exactly support my odds of a successful VBAC.) I'm doing the ostrich head-in-the-sand thing about the head size, so ignoring that little tidbit, we can see that everything looks great.

And then S, who had been standing at the foot of the bed, stumbled a bit and had to sit down. Because he had seen the same thing that the ultrasound tech had seen: an unmistakable little penis. We're having a boy!

S was quiet for the rest of the exam. (Actually, first he held up three fingers and whispered, "Ready for number three?" with a small wry smile, but after that he stayed quiet.) He says that he just needs a few days to get used to the idea, which is fair. And I pulled out every gender stereotype I could think of in an attempt to get him excited. You know you would much rather go to football games than dance recitals -- we might have just dodged a bullet! But I should probably just give him time to get used to the fact that we're not going to have the boy-girl family that he grew up with, that I grew up with, that his cousins all grew up with, and that he had always pictured for us.

In the mean time, I have to go plan another bris!

Differences

2010-08-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

One of the benefits of keeping up with this blog throughout my pregnancy with LL is that I have a resource to refer to, week by week, to see what to expect this time around. When I'm feeling particularly crappy, it helps to read my posts from last time and see how they gradually got more upbeat about side effects, reminding me that things do get better. But, there's a downside to having that journal from last time: it emphasizes for me just how different this pregnancy has been.

I'm a little over 18 weeks pregnant right now. Middle of the second trimester, almost halfway there. By this point with LL, I was done with the morning sickness entirely, which had been replaced with frequent migraines and back pain. I had told all of my friends and coworkers about the pregnancy, and was happily planning my maternity leave. I had started looking at stuff that I wanted to buy for the baby (didn't buy anything yet, but I was looking) and we had already received several baby gifts in the mail. I was almost done crocheting a blanket for the baby. I was wearing maternity pants every day, since my regular pants had grown too tight and uncomfortable. I had gained 5 pounds. S and I were tossing around a few names (though nothing serious until we found out the gender). We had started clearing out the room that would become the nursery. And I was feeling regular light kicks from tiny LL.

I know that every pregnancy is different, blah blah blah, but I still expected a fair amount of overlap. But, it's not happening. Comparing that list to this time around, the only commonalities are the frequent migraines and back pain. That's it. Everything else is different. I'm still getting morning sickness, worse than it was for most of the first trimester. I've barely started to tell my coworkers (it's leaking out slowly this time around) which means that many of our friends don't know yet, either. I have no idea what I'm going to do about maternity leave, because I don't know if I'm going to have a job. We have done zero shopping for the baby, and have received no gifts. I haven't so much as bought yarn for a blanket, much less started working on one. I'm still wearing normal clothes, which fit just fine. I'm 2 pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight. S and I haven't mentioned a single baby name. We don't know where the baby is going to be sleeping, because we don't know if we're going to be buying a new house before the baby arrives, so nothing has been done for a nursery. And I've just barely started to feel some kicks, and I'm not completely convinced that they're not just my imagination.

Some of these things are entirely under my control -- if I wanted to tell people, I could. And nothing in particular is stopping me from discussing names or looking at new strollers or crocheting a blanket (other than, um, writing my dissertation, which has a self-imposed deadline of "before I go into labor," but it's not like I'm not procrastinating on that with everything possible under the sun). Still... I'm not feeling any particular drive to get going on the baby stuff yet, either. My defense is, of course, partly to blame -- I'm been very very distracted by getting through that ordeal. And now that it's over, the dissertation writing and job hunting are sharing front stage. But not gaining weight and not showing and not feeling many kicks... those things have kind of combined to make this pregnancy feel very abstract for me, even this far along. I'm not particularly worried about those things (lots of people don't feel kicks until closer to 20 weeks, and the baby is growing normally so I've been told not to worry about the lack of weight gain) but still... it seems to be making me feel more "distant" from this pregnancy than I was with LL. And that makes me a bit sad.

We're hoping to find out the baby's sex at next week's detailed ultrasound, which should help me to put an imagined face to this oh-so-abstract baby. I'm hoping that the sex information helps to make things more real for me. In the mean time, I forced myself to buy something for the baby, something that I can look at to hopefully start some of the baby daydreaming that consumed me during my pregnancy with LL. I bought this onesie for the baby this week. Appropriate, no?

Perspective

2010-08-09T12:16:00.001-07:00

Alternate title for this post: "... In Which Nicky Learns (Again) that the World Does Not Revolve Around Her."

I agonized and agonized about when to tell AdvisorA about my pregnancy. I kind of didn't want to mention it to her until I had a job, lest she decide to tank my letters of recommendation. But I also didn't want her to find out from someone other than me, which would make things even worse. And once everyone at my university knew... well, it was just a matter of time. So I decided to just bite the bullet and tell her already.

I sent her an email, letting her know that I was pregnant. I re-worded the email several hundred times before finally sending it off last Monday. And I immediately regretted it, but there was nothing to do but wait.

And wait. And wait. And wait. Because she never wrote back.

I spent all week convinced that I had made a horrible mistake. And hating AdvisorA for whatever rationale she was possibly using to not respond. Maybe she was so angry that I was further ruining my career that she couldn't bring herself to respond? Maybe she was trying to decide whether to tell me outright about her plans to give me bad recommendations, or just do it quietly? Maybe she was so happy that my defense was over that she didn't feel the need to read anything from me ever again? Maybe she was busy plotting exactly how to ruin my life?

Because, you know, it's all about me. No other possible reason that she wouldn't have written back.

Yesterday, I found out that AdvisorA's mother died. She actually passed away two days after my defense. And she's been busy, you know, mourning and planning a funeral and stuff. Not really responding to email.

When I found out, I sent her an email with my condolences. (I'll send a card, too, but I wanted something to reach her as soon as possible.) And she wrote back, almost immediately. She thanked me for my note. And she told me that her mother's last "good" day was the day of my defense, and her mother was very happy for me and for AdvisorA that the defense went so well. And she told me that she had seen my email, and congratulations on my pregnancy. And it brought her a measure of happiness to know that life was going on. And she wishes that some of her mother's spirit will live on in my unborn child. And a friend of hers had a baby who was born around the time that her father died (many many years ago) and she's always doted on that child, as a way of remembering her father. And because of the timing, with my defense and my pregnancy announcement and her mother's death, she will always feel a special bond with my child as well.

Um. Yeah. You all know how up and down my relationship with AdvisorA has been, but this one really threw me for a loop. My next post will probably return to self-indulgences about dissertation writing and toddler temper tantrums and pregnancy complaints, but for now... yikes. I'm appropriately sad and chastised and grateful for everything that I have.

Completely Unimportant Dilemma

2010-08-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

Please be sure to read the title, so that you know that I am completely aware that this is a ridiculous thing to be wasting brain cycles thinking about. Nevertheless, brain cycles are being wasted, and I don't know what to do. Also, there's a certain comical absurdity to the situation, so I wanted to share. Advice appreciated.

Let's say you're a PhD student about to finish up grad school. You have an advisor (let's call her AdvisorA) who has been less than supportive for the past two years, even though you had an excellent relationship early on. She cut off your funding after you had a baby, insisting that having a child proved that you weren't serious about your career, and she didn't want to waste more time and money on you. She takes weeks to respond to emails (unless it's about something that impacts her, in which case she always responds within the hour), and you went months without speaking to her on the phone. She lives in a different state, and each time she has visited your university in the past 18 months, she hasn't even mentioned it to you until she's at the airport to fly home again. She took 6 weeks to review the single dissertation chapter that you sent to her so far, and even then, she had very few comments, and they were more aesthetic than substantive. She put you through hell leading up to your defense, and even the morning of the defense itself, you weren't sure whether she was actually going to show up, even though "showing up" just meant sitting in front of a video conferencing camera at her own university.

You're feeling good that your defense is over, but you still need to interact with AdvisorA for a few more months. She still needs to sign your final dissertation, and you need her to write letters of recommendation for you for jobs. But you're looking forward to being done with her after that, and you assume that she wants to be rid of you, too.

It's now the day after your defense. You innocently check your email and discover... wait for it... that AdvisorA wants to be your "friend" on Facebook. How do you respond?

I've asked around, and even people who get along really well with their advisors aren't generally "Facebook friends" with them. And all the professors that I've casually talked to have expressed shock that a professor would ask a current student; in fact, they all talked about agonizing about whether to accept friend invitations from their students (generally undergrads), but have never heard of it happening in the other direction. So, I'm kind of at a loss. And it's not like I'm posting drunken photos that I don't want her to see. I tend to post occasional photos of LL, and innocuous status updates at the rate of 3-4 per month (things like "I passed my defense!"). I'm not concerned about "hiding" things from her. It's more that I'm pissed off at her, but I don't want to get her more pissed off at me while I still need stuff from her.

So far, I've just pretended not to have seen the request. But at some point, I should respond. Any thoughts?

This Week, In No Particular Order, I ...

2010-07-31T21:19:00.000-07:00

... officially moved from passive nausea to all-out bent-over-the-toilet morning sickness. Isn't this stuff supposed to go away in the second trimester?

... spent several of the last 24 hours before my defense helping AdvisorB with a talk that he's not giving until October. Every time I asked him if maybe we could talk about it after my defense, so that I could go back to my office to practice my own much-more-urgent talk, he told me to quit worrying.

... continued my battle against the summer cold that LL gave me the week before. So far, the cold is still winning. Being sick while pregnant really sucks, since there are no decent drugs that will take away the symptoms.

... felt The Frog kick for the first time. Yippee!

... told AdvisorB about my pregnancy. (Haven't gotten up the nerve to tell AdvisorA yet.)

... spiked my blood sugar for a day, all day, even though I was barely eating, based purely on stress. Then, since the stress wasn't going away for a few days and there was nothing I could do about it anyway, and seeing the actual numbers was just adding to my stress, I stopped testing for 24 hours.

... lost two pounds. Which brings my total pregnancy weight "gain" to negative three pounds.

... saw Inception. Excellent movie. Very trippy.

... successfully defended my PhD dissertation.

Defense

2010-07-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

I'm told that this is how most students spend the two weeks or so before their PhD dissertation defense: They have lots of long discussions with their advisor about what to present, and what to expect, and what they should do to prepare. They go through multiple versions of their slide presentation, in consultation with their advisor. They give a practice talk or two, then redo their slides again based on the feedback. They talk some more with their advisor. Then they lock themselves in their office and practice practice practice giving the talk, until they know it backwards and forwards. Then they talk to their advisor some more, and tweak their slides some more, and practice some more. Two weeks of total focus and preparation.

My dissertation defense is this week (!). Here is how I have spent the last two weeks or so:
I emailed an early version of my slides to AdvisorA for feedback, along with a long list of questions. AdvisorA has been completely out of touch with me since then, except for two short emails telling me that she hasn't had time to look at my slides. She did, however, inform me that she bought airline tickets to fly into town for my defense, but she bought refundable tickets, because she's still not sure if she's going to be able to make it. As of today, she is 90% or so sure that she will actually not be present in person.

At her request, since she knew that she probably would bail out, she insisted that I schedule my defense in a room equipped with video conferencing. I spent several days trying to find a room on my campus that can do video conferencing, since my department doesn't have one, and most of the departments that do have one won't let people from other departments use them. AdvisorA then told me that I also had to help find her a video conferencing room on her campus, since she didn't have time to schedule it herself. I spent another several days emailing people on that campus to try to book a room for AdvisorA, most of which wanted me to give them my credit card number (yes, my personal credit card number) so that they could charge me several hundred dollars in "use fees" since I'm not affiliated with the campus. My argument that this was for AdvisorA, who is a full professor at the campus, were ignored because I didn't have her department account information, and she never replied to my request for her to send it to me.

The day that all the scheduling finally got squared away, LL woke up in the middle of the night with a fever of 103. Other than the fever and a slight cough, LL was in excellent spirits and simply could not understand why I wouldn't let him go to Natasha's to play with his friends. Predictably, I got sick two days later. (The combination of sick toddler coughing in my face, lack of sleep from holding the sick toddler all night, stress over the defense, and lowered immunity because of the pregnancy, turned out to be waaaaay too many points against me in my hope of avoiding a cold just now.) I spent three days with my own 100 degree fever, completely unable to think straight. I did manage to do one practice talk just before succumbing entirely to the cold, and S took care of LL for much of the weekend so that I could finally get around to revising my slides a bit.

The way things stand right now, I have barely practiced at all, I have had zero feedback from my advisor, and I have an awful cough and sore throat that makes it difficult to get through a full reading of Good Night Moon, much less a three hour dissertation defense.

It's gonna be a fun week. See ya on the flip side.

Random Thoughts

2010-07-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

What is the deal with little boys and trains? Is there seriously something inherent to little boy brains that makes them fascinated by trains? LL yells "Choo! Choo!" every time we go by train tracks, as if he's trying to summon the train. He lines up crackers on his tray and says "Choo! Choo!" as he pushes them along. He makes his own trains out of blocks. He's obsessed. (Also, he has made it very very easy to figure out what to buy him for his birthday.)

LL ate half a grilled cheese sandwich at a restaurant this weekend. He normally refuses to eat restaurant food (other than fruit), so this was a major accomplishment.

How is it that a little boy who hates tomatoes, hates tomato sauce, and generally refuses to eat anything red, lest it be related to tomatoes, has suddenly developed a love of V8? I'm torn between encouraging it (yay, a vegetable!) and discouraging it (ack, that's a lot of sodium!).

Did I mention that we finally took LL for his first haircut? His curls were getting way out of control, impossible to comb, and we could have put him in pigtails if we were so inclined. (It never looked long, because the curls were pretty tight, but when you stretched out the curls, you could see that it was actually quite long.) I'm too much of a chicken to cut it myself, so we took him to a kid's haircut place where he got to sit on a motorcycle and play while they cut his hair. They cut and cut and cut, and then I asked them to cut some more, and there was a huge pile of hair on the floor when they were done, and yet... he looks exactly the same. The curls are a little better defined, because they cut off much of the older baby frizz. And it's definitely easier to comb. But he still looks like a cocker spaniel from behind.

We told Natasha today that LL is going to be a big brother, and her immediate reaction was, "Of course, I've known that you were pregnant since that day a few months ago when you looked different." (Yeah, I was only 4 weeks pregnant then.) Then she told me that she had a dream last week that I was having a girl. I've decided not to doubt her.

LL has a girlfriend, a little girl at daycare named Eve. They are one month apart in age, and they do everything together. Natasha claims that they even poop at the same time each day. They will only nap if they are in cribs next to each other, and they feed each other food at snack time. Eve has the exact same curly hair as LL, in a slightly lighter brown, and they hold hands and run around together. It is beyond cute.

There is a third kid at the daycare who is around the same age as LL and Eve. Her name is Sophie. On the days when LL isn't in daycare, Eve and Sophie play together. But if LL is there, Eve only wants to play with LL. When Sophie tries to join them, Eve pushes her away so that she can have LL all to herself. (LL apparently doesn't even acknowledge that Sophie is ever around.) Natasha says that Sophie doesn't like LL, presumably because she thinks that LL is "stealing" Eve from her, but all attempts to get the three of them to all play together have failed, with Eve glaring at Sophie, Sophie glaring at LL, and LL playing quietly while remaining completely oblivious to the drama around him. It is bizarre to me that my little boy is apparently part of the popular clique at daycare.

Twelve Hours

2010-07-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

I interrupt my incessant whining about the car accident and insurance and lawyers and gestational diabetes for an important announcement:

I hate graduate school.

Most people seem to have a love-hate relationship with graduate school. It is a long, exhausting process with many many ups and downs. Other than a few specific low points, I never minded graduate school all that much. I had lots of intellectual freedom; I had flexibility with how I used my time; I enjoyed bouncing ideas around with smart people; I found a great mentor in AdvisorB who appreciated my approach to science and who actually seeks out my opinion on research topics, even ones that are far outside my own dissertation area. Yes, working for below minimum wage for six years kind of sucks, but I kept my eye on the prize and never doubted that I would be able to graduate one day. There were definitely some aspects of graduate school (yes, I'm looking at you, ridiculous soul-sucking qualification exam!) that appeared to be more hazing ritual than actual educational necessity, but for the most part, I could see the value in most of what I was expected to do. And I believed that if I kept doing well at the things that mattered (research, papers, service to my lab, networking) everything would end up okay.

Then, almost exactly one year ago, I got to experience one of the truly ugly sides of academia. (Story starts here, and continues here.) Short version: AdvisorA cut off my funding when I returned from maternity leave because she didn't agree with my choice to have a child. My department helped me to find alternative funding (it helps that the department chair and financial manager are both working moms who were fairly outraged at AdvisorA's behavior) and life went on. Freed of her financial obligations to me, AdvisorA turned to passive benign neglect, not standing actively in my way but not responding to emails or questions, and making herself generally unavailable to me. That went on until a little over a month ago, when I pointed out to her that helping me to graduate would also get me permanently out of her hair. She was suddenly super supportive and helpful. Which kind of makes me hate her even more, but it does get me closer to graduating.

So, it's time to put together my dissertation defense committee, and pick a date for the actual defense. AdvisorB made it abundantly clear that he thinks it is absolutely vital that AdvisorA participate in person, which means finding a time when she can fly out here for a day. I gave her a three month window and asked her for dates when she could be here. She helpfully supplied me with one week. That's it. Five days when she's willing to be here, and no other times all summer. Armed with that single week, I went in search of two final orals committee members who were interested in my dissertation topic and available during that week. And it turns out that week sucks for most people. I had brainstormed lots of committee member options with AdvisorB, but I didn't find anyone who was available during that week until I got down to my sixth and seventh choices. But hey, they're warm bodies, we expect them to be supportive, so let's just go with it and schedule the defense! Between those two guys and the existing members of my reading committee, there was exactly one day when they're all free.

So, I innocently sent out an email to everyone saying, Here's the day! Do you guys want morning or afternoon? And everyone wanted the afternoon. Some of them had hard constraints limiting them to the afternoon. And that's when AdvisorA decided to join the conversation and insist on it happening in the morning. Why? Because if the defense is in the morning, she can fly back home that afternoon. But if the defense is in the afternoon, she'll have to spend the night and fly home in the morning. And she doesn't want to wait those extra twelve hours to get home.

In the last 24 hours, my committee members have exchanged nearly three dozen email messages trying to negotiate a time for my defense. (I'm staying out of it, because it does me absolutely no good at all to pick sides on this.) AdvisorB even found a flight that AdvisorA could take that evening so that she *would* be able to get home that night, but she's just ignoring his suggestion. It's ridiculous.

AdvisorB has been a professor for well over 30 years, and he says that he has never had this much trouble scheduling a defense, or seen an advisor being this much of a roadblock. He's planning informal meetings with each of my other committee members to bring them up to speed on the situation with AdvisorA, just in case she becomes a problem during the defense itself. But honestly, the entire committee has been witness to the email exchanges of the last 24 hours, so it should be fairly obvious to all of them that AdvisorA is a pain in the ass.

In the mean time, if they can't agree on a time, my defense will need to be pushed into the fall, which means staying in grad school for another semester. Which sucks. Not just because I have to be here for even longer, but also because it erases any hope of starting a job before my upcoming maternity leave. All because AdvisorA doesn't want to take a later flight.

I hate graduate school.

Relieved. Just Relieved.

2010-06-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

Things are still looking good. I had my NT exam today, and the preliminary results look very promising. (Based on the measurements, bloodwork, etc., it looks like the risk of chromosomal problems is one in a bajillion. Give or take.) After being so active at my last appointment, today the Frog was dancing around a lot less. My NT exam with LL took forever, because he absolutely refused to stay still and be measured, but the Frog was quite cooperative. Everything went very quickly.

I also met with the endocrinologist this week, to discuss my GD diagnosis. She agrees that I probably don't have true gestational diabetes, but rather a mild sort of gestational insulin resistance, which only really appears when I'm stressed out. But given that "stressed out" is my normal state these days, it's best to keep an eye on it. She gave me the go-ahead to be more forgiving with my diet, which is nice. And I can ease up on the monitoring. (She suggested monitoring every other day, or skipping the monitoring after one meal each day. Enough to take some of the pressure off, and avoid having to quit my job, but not so much that I'm likely to miss any upward trends that might occur later in the pregnancy.) And she promised that if my blood sugar levels continued to look as excellent as they do right now, she would personally talk to Dr. M to make sure that I could still try for a VBAC, which is normally forbidden for women with GD. So honestly, good news all around.

Even my dissertation seems to finally be coming together. After several weeks of drama trying to find a final defense committee member, and trying to get everyone to pick a date, it looks like I've finally scheduled my dissertation defense. I'm still waiting for final confirmation from my committee, but odds are good that I'll be defending next month. Which is good, because I don't want to tell anybody at school about my pregnancy until after I defend. (Thank you once again to AdvisorA for making me totally paranoid about sexist retaliation.)

So yes, things are looking good. You'd think that my mood would turn around a bit. But so far... not so much.

I'm a little weirded out by how different this pregnancy feels for me than my pregnancy with LL. I expected there to be changes (every pregnancy is different; I'm in a different place; I've been through it before; etc.). But even given all of that, it still feels... different. I feel like I'm more detached somehow. The first several months of my pregnancy with LL, I was constantly worried that something would go wrong. Every time I was without morning sickness, I was sure that the pregnancy was over. Every time I had gone more than a week without an ultrasound, I began to doubt that things were still okay. Things evened out a bit once I started feeling kicks on a regular basis, because I stopped worrying quite so much, but I still felt a lot of emotional highs and lows.

This time around, I'm still worrying, but it doesn't feel like the same type of worry. I'm still worried, but not in an "I hope everything's still okay!" sense. More in a "I wonder if things have gone wrong yet?" sense. I keep feeling this weird sense of inevitable doom. And no, I have absolutely no reason to be feeling this way. Every single appointment has showed normal growth and normal development. Normal everything. With LL, every time I heard a heartbeat or saw LL on ultrasound during an appointment, I was filled with awe and relief and excitement and love. This time, there's a little bit of relief, but mostly it's just... surprise. Really? Things are still okay? Are you sure? How strange!

During my pregnancy with LL, especially during the first trimester, I was consumed with thinking about the baby. Was he okay? What would he look like? I can't wait to tell our parents! I can't wait to tell our friends! Gosh, I feel really sick. How big is the baby this week? Does he have eyelashes yet? What should we name him? This time around, I just feel angry at all the external stuff. Did the car accident affect the baby? Can I recover from the car accident while pregnant? Better warn the physical therapist that I'm pregnant! Gotta hire a lawyer to explain to the stupid auto insurance that I couldn't get an x-ray, because I'm pregnant! Do I really have GD? How can I possibly manage GD diet and blood sugar monitoring and extra medical visits and physical therapy and dissertation and still run my household? Gotta interview for a job before I start showing! Gotta defend my thesis before I start showing!

I was so excited to tell our family and friends when I was pregnant with LL. This time, we've started telling everybody, but I just feel relieved to have it out in the open. Not all that happy, just relieved. And it doesn't help that I'm not showing at all, I haven't gained a single pound, and I'm not really feeling all that much as far as pregnancy symptoms. (Occasional indigestion and leg cramps. That's it.) And while those things would probably make other women really happy, for me it's just adding to the feeling that this pregnancy isn't really happening. It's weird.

It makes me sad that I'm not getting as excited as I was before, that I don't feel as emotionally attached as I did last time. S is convinced that I just have too much on my mind, and things just keep piling on top of it all. Car accident. Gestational diabetes. Advisor drama. Committee drama. Dissertation defense scheduling. But if that's true, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the pregnancy, because most of those things aren't going away anytime soon.

Maybe once I start feeling regular kicks things will feel a bit better.

Random

2010-06-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

LL has learned how to hide. He'll be playing somewhere, and all of a sudden, he'll just be gone. Poof! No LL. Total silence. (As any parent knows, total silence is a dream come true, except when it isn't.) It used to be that I could just walk around the house calling his name, and his noisy giggling and inability to stand still for more than five seconds would give him away, but lately he has gotten a lot smarter. This morning, he stood still and silent in our bedroom closet for several minutes before opening the door and jumping out with a loud, "Ta da!" And then laughing hysterically. I really have to keep an eye on this kid.

On the pregnancy front, I have finally succumbed to total fatigue. I think that I spent the first two months of this pregnancy running on pure adrenalin, and it finally caught up with me. I slept all day yesterday. Seriously. All day. I got LL up and dressed, put him in his high chair, then told S to feed him breakfast while I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up to say goodbye when S and LL headed off to daycare, I managed to get myself dressed, then went to run a quick errand before work. But after the errand I was so exhausted that I turned around and went back home and fell asleep again. I woke up to eat lunch, worked for maybe one hour, then slept again and almost missed waking up in time to pick LL up from daycare. I somehow convinced LL to sit quietly in my lap and read books until S got home, so that I could conserve energy. (LL seems to be obsessed with a different book each week. This week's book is Where the Wild Things Are. I'm reading it dozens of time a day. Want me to recite it from memory for you? Because I can, quite literally, do it in my sleep.) And by 8:00 I was exhausted again. I remember being disappointed during my pregnancy with LL to discover that the "second trimester energy boost" was pure myth, so I'm no longer naive enough to expect it to kick in anytime soon. But still, there's a limit to how much a person can sleep, right?

I'm definitely approaching my second trimester, because the big second trimester symptoms from last time (dizziness and headache) have returned with a vengeance. I'm on Day 9 of this headache, and I get dizzy spells several times a day. Thanks to the GD, my blood sugar is being micro-managed to perfection, so I can say with a fair amount of certainty that the headache and dizziness are entirely a low blood pressure thing. Better too low than too high.

All this sudden fatigue and headache has meant a dramatic slowing down in dissertation progress, which has me a bit worried, but not worried enough that I would skip a nap. Also, in conspiracy with AdvisorB, I accidentally took down a major tech company for several hours last week, so it's not like I'm being completely unproductive. And as AdvisorB pointed out, the company wouldn't have gone down if the employees were smarter, so I shouldn't even feel guilty. (And no, I can't say anything more, but no, I didn't do anything malicious or illegal. And it was really kind of fun. But you should probably sell any stock you own in this company, because they really were kind of dumb.)

Sunny Days Are Here Again

2010-06-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

Finally, some good news!

I had my 11 week prenatal appointment, and everything is looking good. Heartbeat, measurements, etc. All wonderful. Whew! The baby looked more active than I remember LL being at this stage. Isn't it a bit early for in-utero gymnastics? Also, the baby kind of looked like a frog, but it was probably the weird angle. Expect "Frog" to be the baby's blog nickname for a while. NT exam is in less than two weeks, when we'll get an even more detailed look, but I'm finally breathing easy for now.

Dr. M's assistant asked how the GD stuff was going, and I let everything out. The uncertainty over the diagnosis, the miserableness of the nurse appointment, the inability to get questions answered. If possible, she was even more angry about it than me, and insisted that I repeat everything for Dr. M. And then of course Dr. M reminded me why I love him so much. He's going to speak to the head of the department about an "anonymous patient," and file a complaint himself. And he agreed that the diagnosis was a little iffy, but said that he wasn't actually able to do anything about it, because once GD is diagnosed, all care related to the GD becomes the responsibility of the endocrinology department. Then he expressed outrage that they weren't actually doing their job, as far as answering my questions and treating me with respect. I repeated all of my unanswered questions to him, and he gave me a referral to have a consult with an actual endocrinologist, instead of one of the nurses, so that I can get some answers. And I really really appreciate that he admitted that he didn't know the answers to my questions instead of just blowing me off like the nurse did.

The number one question is going to be whether it makes sense for me to retake the three hour glucose test. I mentioned the GD diagnosis to my physical therapist, who had some interesting things to say on the matter. She asked if my back was bothering me on the day that I took the test. My back was fine initially, but I had to sit in uncomfortable waiting room chairs for three hours without moving, and at that point I couldn't sit for more than an hour without feeling pain. By the end of the test, my back was killing me. Here's some biochemistry that I never knew: when you're in pain, your body releases extra cortisol, which blocks insulin and artificially elevates blood sugar levels. Which goes pretty far in explaining my weird test results, in which my fasting sugar levels were normal, my one hour results were normal, my two hour results were normal, and my three hour results (the one for which my back was killing me) showed that my sugar levels had stopped dropping, causing me to fail this last test. Interesting.... Dr. M agreed that I should probably retake the test and see if the results are different, but unfortunately, he's not allowed to make that call -- I need the endocrinologist to do it. We'll see what she says.

And in a final bit of good news, I have "graduated" from twice weekly physical therapy to just once a week. My back is definitely getting better, and I often go days without feeling any pain. My back definitely gets fatigued faster than it used to, and there are still some things that I can't do very well (like crouching over a tub to give LL a bath) but it's getting there.

Ah, the feeling that things are finally falling into place!

More GD Frustration

2010-06-17T10:43:00.000-07:00

I had my follow-up appointment with the nutritionist today, to see how I'm doing with the GD. What an unbelievably frustrating experience!

The whole appointment started off bad. I have a written log on which I'm supposed to write down everything I eat, and what my four-times-a-day glucose levels are. I dutifully filled in the entire log. The first thing the nurse did was take the log from me, then ask for my glucose monitor. The monitor has a memory function, which stores a month's worth of values. She then proceeded to go through all the numbers in the monitor to verify that I didn't lie on my written log. She did this for the entire week's worth of values. Then she eyed me suspiciously and asked if I was sure that all of my numbers were from my blood and not from somebody else in my household. Nothing quite like the feeling of knowing, without a doubt, that the person sitting across from you is convinced that you're a liar.

Then we had this conversation:

Nurse: Wow, your numbers look great!
Me: Thank you. Given my weird initial test results, and my low monitoring numbers, do you think it's possible that I don't have GD, maybe ease up on some of the restrictions a bit?
Nurse: No, you definitely have GD. Otherwise you wouldn't have failed the test.
Me: But, by the ADA criteria, I didn't fail the test. And my monitoring numbers kind of back that up.
Nurse: Now you're just arguing semantics.

Note to the world: I don't think that she knows what the word "semantics" means.

Next, we talked about exercise. At the GD class, we were told that if our blood glucose levels after eating were too high, they can usually be lowered by exercising a bit during the hour immediately after eating but before testing.

Nurse: Are you exercising after meals?
Me: I do exercise every day, but it is very hard with my schedule to exercise within an hour of starting a meal, because I'm commuting after breakfast, and I'm in meetings after lunch.
Nurse: Oh, okay. Then we should probably put you on insulin.
Me: Pardon me? I thought that my numbers all look great?
Nurse: Yes, they do. But if you're not willing to exercise, we'll need to put you on insulin. Your choice.
Me: You would put me on insulin even if my levels are completely under control without it? What would you possibly accomplish by doing that?
Nurse: We just want to help you to protect your baby.

As an aside: does implying that a pregnant woman doesn't care about her baby really motivate her to change behavior? Because it honestly just pisses me off. So does threatening me with completely unnecessary medical interventions.

The exercise discussion also included this bit:

Nurse: There's lots of ways to exercise. Don't you play with your toddler?
Me: Yes I do, but not after meals.
Nurse: Why not?
Me: An hour after breakfast, I'm at work. Same with lunch. And an hour after dinner, my toddler is in bed. I play with my toddler a whole lot during the day, but it tends to be before breakfast and before dinner, and there isn't much I can do about that.
Nurse: (with a disapproving look) Okay....

And finally, there's this gem:

Nurse: Is there anything that you had trouble with this week?
Me: I found it difficult to test after breakfast, because I'm commuting to work one hour after breakfast.
Nurse: Maybe you shouldn't go to work for a while.
Me: Um, I don't see how that is possibly an option.
Nurse: We just want to help you to protect your baby.
Me: My baby seems pretty well protected without me dropping out of school and quitting my job.
Nurse: Well, I guess that's your choice.

Yeah, not the best medical experience I've had in my life. At a minimum, I was looking for a little support and advice about how to fit all this monitoring into my life. I was not looking for threats, or implications that I'm a bad mother, or being treated like a liar. And yet, after all the disapproving comments during the appointment, she concluded by telling me that I seem to have things so well under control that I can go several weeks between appointments.

And yes, I made sure to make my next appointment with a different nurse.

GD

2010-06-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

I have to admit: as much as I was dreading sitting through the gestational diabetes education class, it was actually rather interesting. Very well done. I was afraid that it was going to be two and a half hours of "Don't eat cake. No, seriously, don't eat cake." Instead, they actually taught us the biological mechanism that causes gestational diabetes, how it differs from normal Type 2 diabetes, and walked us through some very practical GD diet advice. Not bad.

I mentioned in my last post that I didn't fully understand why I had even been diagnosed with GD, since I only failed one of the four tests, in a rather odd way, and even the American Diabetes Association says that you need to fail two of the tests to be diagnosed. When the nurse teaching the class put up info about the test, confirming that it takes two fails to be diagnosed, I had to ask, so I went to chat with her during the break. Here are the somewhat frustrating things I learned in that conversation:

First, she told me that the OBs in my clinic are "more conservative than most" and made their own policy to diagnose GD with only one failed test. So at any other clinic, I'd be considered healthy. Second, she admitted to me that she had noticed my test results in particular, because they were so borderline. After looking at my full history and test results, she is fairly convinced that I don't have GD. (She even said, "The one factor that I've seen produce results like yours is stress. Have you been under any stress lately?" And I burst out laughing.) But then she gave me the "better safe than sorry" speech, and said that as long as I was already there, it would be best to continue to monitor me for the rest of the pregnancy. Which, yeah, I assumed would be the conclusion, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

I've only been following this GD diet for two days so far, so I'm not ready to draw any far-reaching conclusions, but I've found my initial reaction to be somewhat surprising. I thought that I would really really hate following the diet. A lot. I've barely eaten any desserts since getting pregnant, but I have been surviving on fruit. And during my pregnancy with LL, I had horrible food aversions to chicken and beef, so I pretty much survived on carbs. Also, I've been craving milk lately. But, with the GD restrictions, a big glass of milk fills just about my entire carb quota for a meal, and I'm not allowed to have fruit with breakfast or before bedtime. Really annoying. Still, other than the milk and fruit, I've found the limits to be not too bad so far.

The part that's annoying the hell out of me is that I have to time everything. Three meals and three snacks each day. At least two hours between each of those, but not more than four hours. And I have to test my blood sugar exactly one hour after each meal.

The problem with this schedule? Almost every single hour, I have to be sitting down somewhere, either to eat or to test. An hour after I start eating breakfast, I'm usually in the car commuting to work. But I can't test my blood sugar while I'm driving. So, I either need to sit around at home for an hour so that I can test before I get in the car (which makes me very late to work) or I have to eat really early in the morning, which makes me throw up. My afternoon snack almost always needs to happen while I'm driving home from work, but I can't find any "allowable" snacks that are easy to eat in the car. If I wait to have the snack until I get home, it pushes dinner into LL's bedtime. And even if I manage to be able to eat dinner when I want, testing an hour later is even more problematic, because that's when I'm putting LL to bed. I can't hold a toddler in my lap, read him a story, and test blood sugar all at the same time. And the testing that needs to happen while I'm at work is hard, because I need to sneak into abandoned conference rooms to get some privacy, often walking out of meetings to do so.

If I were convinced that all this work was for the good of the baby, then I'd happily do it. But you know what? I don't have GD! I was given guidelines for where they want my blood sugar to fall at various times, and they also mentioned what "normal, non-GD" results would look like. Admittedly, I only have two days worth of date on myself, but still: my results so far all look completely normal. Even though I've been pretty sloppy about counting carbs.

I have a follow-up appointment with the nutritionist next week, and I plan to grill her on whether I can ease up on the dietary restrictions a bit. Maybe monitor a little less often. We'll see.

Spiraling Further Downwards

2010-06-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

I have family risk factors for gestational diabetes. (As in, most of my dad's side of the family seems to have type 2 diabetes.) I've never had any problems myself -- my brother was diagnosed with Type 2 when he was younger than I am now, so I make sure to get myself screened, and all of my readings have always come back normal. Because of the risk factors, though, Dr. M likes to test me earlier in my pregnancy, instead of waiting for the second trimester like is normally done for other pregnant women.

The one hour glucose screen is annoying, but manageable. It is even more annoying during the first trimester, when you're already nauseous most of the time. Still, it's better than the three hour tolerance test, which seems like the ultimate way to piss off a pregnant woman.

I took the one hour screening test when I was 8 weeks pregnant with LL, and I passed with flying colors. (Yay!) I took it again when I was 20-something weeks pregnant with LL, and I passed again. (Yay!) But this weekend, once again eight weeks pregnant, I failed it. (Booooooo!) But just barely. I failed it by the itty-bittiest amount possible. Still, a fail is a fail, so I was given the honor of taking the horrid three hour tolerance test this week. Why is this test a form of mild torture for pregnant women, particularly pregnant women with injured backs? Admittedly, a few of these were just my bad luck, but still:

1. You have to fast for at least 12 hours before the test.
2. While the 12-hour fast is already making your nauseous, you have to drink a big bottle of sugar syrup, really fast.
3. You now have to sit in a waiting room for three hours while they draw your blood once an hour. Still can't eat anything.
4. You're not allowed to move around much, because it throws off the readings. So you're restricted to remain sitting in the awkward waiting room chairs for the entire three hours, even if your back is killing you. The nurse will yell at you if you try to stand instead of sit.
5. There's probably free wifi at the clinic where you're getting your blood drawn, but don't think that you'll actually be able to work for those three hours. The wifi is nearly guaranteed to be out of order for all but 15 minutes of your three hour wait. You didn't have anything important to work on anyway, right?
6. Every single cigarette smoker and perfume wearer will decide to sit down next to you while you wait. What's that? You're in your first trimester and you're really sensitive to smells? And as previously mentioned, you're not allowed to get up and walk to somewhere less smelly? Awwww.
7. After the test, you'll realize that you're about to be late for an important meeting, so you don't have time to grab something to eat. All in all, you'll end up fasting for 17 hours. At least you had that yummy nauseating sugar syrup for breakfast at the clinic, right?
8. You made it to your meeting, and you finally got some food. You desperately want to go home and lie down. Unfortunately, you now have a pounding headache and feel lightheaded every time you stand up. Can't drive home like that!

And the final insult? The cherry on the top of a freaking fantastic week? You fail the test. But again, just barely. The glucose tolerance test has a total of four blood draws. I had always read that failing two of them means that you have GD, but failing just one of them means that you're fine, but they'll want to test you again several weeks later. Well... I only failed one of them. And again, just by the itty-bittiest amount. My other three blood draws were comfortably in the normal range, not even borderline. But this morning Dr. M called to tell me that they recently changed the guidelines, and now failing even one of them is considered enough to diagnose with GD.

So... I have to take a GD nutrition class next week, and then I have to start monitoring my glucose levels. I don't actually believe that I have GD, but I'm no medical expert, so I guess it's better to be safe than sorry. We'll see how it looks after a week or two of monitoring.

Did I mention that I was on my way to meet with my lawyer (yep, as of this week, I have a lawyer) when Dr. M called, because the other guy's auto insurance are being jerks about paying for my medical bills, even though they've already admitted liability for the accident? Did I mention that my in-laws and my entire extended family are all arriving from out of town in less than a week? Did I mention that I'm walking through my university's graduation ceremony in ten days, on the blind faith that I'll be finishing my PhD this summer? Did I mention that AdvisorA has been sitting on a draft chapter of my thesis for more than five weeks without communicating with me at all? Did I mention that I need a full draft of the entire thesis in one month in order to have any prayer of anyone on my committee reading it, and thanks to AdvisorA's neglect, I have to put it all together with zero feedback on how I'm planning to structure it?

Did I mention that glucose levels can be artificially elevated by stress?

Focus

2010-05-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

Things I'm trying really really hard to ignore right now: constant morning sickness; aversions to most food that S suggests for dinner each night; a horribly aching back; the pending arrival of both sets of parents in less than two weeks; and the dawning realization that I need to hire a lawyer to handle the medical claim against the other guy's auto insurance.

Things that I'm vainly attempting to focus on while ignoring those other things: my thesis. Which needs to be turned in to the university in approximately ten weeks.

So far, I have written 148 pages of my thesis. These 148 pages are very much a draft, and thus are in varying degrees of "doneness". Some of those pages are in excellent shape awaiting comments from my committee. Other sections are still in early draft form, and will probably be rewritten once or twice before going out for review.

I separate my thesis into ten major chunks, and seven of them are at the 90%-or-more done stage, with maybe one minor section in each that I'm still tweaking. (Chapter 2 needs a better conclusion; Chapter 5 needs a little more polishing in its transitions; that sort of thing.) I estimate that the thesis draft itself is approximately 75% done, with most of the remaining 25% needing to happen in the last three chunks, which are at much lower levels of doneness. (For example, my concluding chapter doesn't exist yet. At all. 0% done. I hate conclusions.) Also, the 75% number might be wildly optimistic if my committee hates what I have. Though my committee will only be able to hate what I have if they ever freakin' read the darn thing!

To date, I have sent exactly one chapter out for review. My committee unanimously agreed that they want to see my introduction, then they want to go through several rounds of revision with me on the introduction, and then they want to see the rest of the thesis all at once. So, I dutifully finished a draft of my introduction and sent it out for review. AdvisorB had many thoughtful comments and changes. I updated the chapter slowly while waiting for comments from other committee members. When it became apparent that nobody else was reading it, I sent out a new version and asked my committee members to review the new version. AdvisorB is meeting with me on Monday for another set of reviews. Everybody else: deafening silence. In particular, AdvisorA, my primary research advisor, has given me zero feedback. None. I keep sending her reminders, asking her if she's had a chance to look, and she's completely ignoring me. Last week, I got an email from her, out of the blue, asking me what I'm working on, and if there's anything that she should be aware of. I quickly responded with YES! I'm writing my thesis, and I need your feedback! Please read the chapter I sent you! Nothing.

Also, writing a 200 page document in 20-minute intervals does not work very well, but 20 minutes is about the limit of how long I can sit in front of my computer before my back gives out and I have to walk around and stretch a bit. Back injuries suck. I've been trying to think of a worse time for this car accident to have happened, and I can't think of anything. Pregnant, writing my thesis, planning my dissertation defense, looking for a job, and planning a move. Yeah, excellent timing.

Anyway, ten weeks. Yikes.

All Systems Go

2010-05-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Big sigh of relief. I finally had my first prenatal appointment, after holding my breath for the last week plus, and everything looks fine. Nice strong heartbeat, baby measuring more or less where it should. Based on my IUI, I had placed my due date at January 7; based on the ultrasound measurements, the due date is January 9. I'm actually amused by the two day difference, because the same thing happened at my first ultrasound with LL -- I insisted that the due date should be September 9, based on my IUI, but the measurements placed it at September 11. At the time, we went with my date, but then he was born 10 days late, on the 19th, so... maybe that early measurement was closer after all. This time around, we'll go with the measurements. January 9. Which means that I'm only 6w5d today (holy crap that's early!).

Mostly, I don't care what the date is, as long as the baby is growing well and the heartbeat is strong. Thank goodness. I know that I won't be truly relaxed about the pregnancy until after the first trimester, and even then I'm likely to be a bit jittery throughout, but at least this first hurdle has been passed.

I also had the first of what I'm sure will be many discussions with Dr. M about VBAC vs. scheduled cesarean. Dr. M's preference is to schedule a c-section at 39 weeks, but support me doing a VBAC if I go into labor naturally before that, if I want to. If I'm fully committed to try a VBAC, he'll support that, too. I have no idea what I want at this point, but it's good to know that I have options. Mostly, I asked him for reassurances that the recovery from a scheduled c-section is likely to be easier than it was last time. With LL, I had 23 hours of labor, including more than two hours of pushing, before diagnosing CPD and needing the c-section. My recovery took a long time (I wasn't feeling physically better for a full eight weeks) but I don't know how much of my recovery was slowed down by the long labor. I remember how uncomfortable and sore I was last time, unable to drive or lift things or bend down or even walk comfortably, and I can't imagine also taking care of LL in that condition.

As for me... I saw the orthopedist this week, who confirmed that I injured a vertebrae in my lower back. He has no way of knowing whether it's fractured or just bruised, since he couldn't do an x-ray, but given my overall condition, he said that he wouldn't recommend surgery even if it is fractured, and that this type of injury usually heals fairly well on its own, given time. I also have a lot of soft tissue damage all through my lumbar, which isn't helping. The idea of a fractured vertebrae has me a bit freaked out, but I guess it just is what it is.

At the orthopedist's suggestion, I started physical therapy today, to hopefully relieve some of the pain and strengthen my back before it gets stressed even further by the pregnancy. And the physical therapist was very good, and even thinks that my soft tissue damage was less severe than it otherwise could have been, because the relaxin (pregnancy hormone affecting muscle tissue) floating through my body actually makes it easier, in most cases, to recover. She walked me through a lot of good stretches, massaged my back, and talked about things that should help my back at the various stages of the pregnancy. Apparently, when it comes to back pain and muscle injuries and pregnancy, you want/need to do different things at 7 weeks vs. 14 weeks vs. 21 weeks, because relaxin peaks at 14 weeks, and the weight of the pregnancy starts becoming a factor around 21 weeks. Good to know. So, twice a week physical therapy for as long as I feel like I need it. The time commitment is a little daunting, but if it means that I have an easier time caring for LL and playing with LL and working on my thesis and contributing to the household and growing a child... hard to argue with the results.

All I really remember from my first pregnancy is that I had back pain for just a few days at a time, every 1-2 months, until it settled in for good around week 37. I was worried that it would be worse this time around, because of the car accident. But the physical therapist said that I'll actually likely feel less back pain this time around, because I can start purposely strengthening my back now, ahead of the real problem points.

She actually told me that a car accident at 6 weeks can be an awesome thing, because it gets insurance to start covering physical therapy at exactly the time in the pregnancy when you want a professional helping to whip your back into shape. How's that for a glass-half-full approach to life?

Anxiety

2010-05-13T12:59:00.001-07:00

I need to whine. A lot. Bear with me.

Car accidents suck. Car accidents while pregnant suck even more. Car accidents while none of your friends or family know that you're pregnant are even worse.

My back is still killing me from the accident, and all I can take is Tylenol. All of my friends and family keep eagerly asking me what I'm taking for the pain, and when I tell them that I'm just taking Tylenol, they think that I'm nuts, since they don't know that the pregnancy is limiting my pain relief options. Several have told me that I should angrily call my doctor and insist that she prescribe something stronger for me. My options for dealing with my friends: either lie to them and tell them that my back isn't that bad, so I don't need anything stronger; or lie to them and tell them that I am taking something stronger, even though I'm not. Either way, it's pretty obvious when you're with me for more than a few minutes that I'm awfully uncomfortable, so I don't know that either lie will be at all believable.

Several of my friends have had experience with neck and back injuries from car accidents, and they're asking me all sorts of questions about what my x-ray showed. Um, I haven't had an x-ray. There's really no way to x-ray the lower back without shooting radiation through my defenseless 6-week-old apple seed. (S wants me to get the x-ray, in the hope that the radiation will produce a child with superpowers. I think he's kidding. But he might not be.) But when my friends hear that I haven't had an x-ray or an MRI, they're outraged. They're positive that my doctor is negligent, or stupid, or both. But I can't explain to them that my doctor is not being negligent, she's being respectful of my desire to protect my child, because they don't know that I'm pregnant.

I'm tempted to lie and tell them that I did get an MRI, and it showed nothing, just to get people off my case. But you know what totally stupid reason is stopping me? I desperately want sympathy. And if I tell people that I have good strong pain killers and nothing seriously wrong, then nobody will give me any sympathy at all, even though it's obvious to me that something is wrong, and I'm in a lot of pain.

I'm seeing a specialist on Monday, who will hopefully be able to diagnose something, or at least rule out my primary care doctor's worry that I fractured my back. I don't know how much he'll be able to do, though, without an x-ray or an MRI. I'm kind of scared that he's just going to say that without an x-ray, there's nothing he can suggest for me, and send me on my way.

Also, I'm terrified for my ultrasound next week. I know that my little apple seed is well cushioned, and should be completely immune to any effects from the accident, but still... I hate not knowing for sure. And I can't just ask for an early ultrasound, because an ultrasound right now wouldn't actually show anything yet, it's still too early. If it were a few weeks from now, my doctor could have done an ultrasound immediately after the accident, and I'd know that everything was fine. But having to wait? Sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks.

I'm also terrified that I won't be able to make it through nine months of pregnancy with a back injury. I had lower back pain on and off during my pregnancy with LL, and that was just from a normal pregnancy. Going through that with an injured back and pre-existing pain? With no options for relief? I don't know how to cope with that.

And I really hate that S is the only person I can talk to. Don't get me wrong -- S is great -- but I hate not being able to talk to other family and friends. I was tempted to just tell my mom everything, but then I get upset that this isn't exactly how I wanted to tell her about the pregnancy. ("No, Mom, I haven't had an MRI, because it's not safe for the baby. Oh, did I not mention that I'm pregnant?") Also, S is very very into the first trimester secrecy thing. He's already upset that so many people know. (He complained to me that the police officers at the accident scene knew about the pregnancy before our family. Um, not a lot I can do about that.) So telling people about the pregnancy isn't really a good option.

So, I'm lying down a lot and taking Tylenol and trying to work, and I'm putting on a brave face for everyone around me and pretending that it's nothing, I'm fine, nothing to worry about. But I'm actually in a lot of pain, and I'm full of anxiety. I'll hopefully have some answers by the end of next week, after I meet with the specialist and see the apple seed on ultrasound, but in the mean time... this just really sucks.

Things that Sucked Today

2010-05-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

1. Getting into an accident on the freeway this morning because the stupid car behind me didn't notice that everybody in front of them, including me, had already come to a stop.

2. Thinking that I could drive to work once the police finished writing up their report, only to discover that I had a flat tire, which necessitated me pulling over into a random parking lot off an unnamed frontage road.

3. Both the tow truck driver and the rental car guy getting lost on their way to meet me.

4. My cell phone company having an area-wide outage just then, resulting in my cell phone, and the cell phones of a few strangers that I managed to flag down, being completely unable to either make or receive calls. Thus, the tow truck driver and the rental car guy were both trying to call me to figure out where I was, but I didn't receive any of their calls, and I was unable to call them to figure out what was going on once I realized that I'd been waiting an awfully long time. Thanks for nothing, AT&T.

5. The tow truck guy arriving before the rental guy, requiring me to empty my car of all of my belongings, including LL's car seat, into the middle of the parking lot, then sit with them in the rain while I waited for the rental car. The tow truck guy was kind enough to contact the rental car place for me using his phone, to give them better directions, but was not kind enough to let me wait in his truck out of the rain. Because, you know, he has a schedule to keep.

6. The rental car company arriving with barely enough time to get me a car and get me back on the road to make it to the doctors appointment that I'd quickly scheduled immediately after the crash. How silly of me to think that 3+ hours would be plenty of time to make it to the appointment less than a mile away from the site of the accident.

7. My doctor informing me that, if I was already feeling whiplash pain in my neck so soon after the accident, I'm probably going to be feeling a whole heck of a lot of pain for the next several weeks, but because I'm first-trimester pregnant, I can only take Tylenol.

8. My doctor becoming extremely concerned about some tenderness in my lower back. She thinks it's possible that I fractured my back, but the only way to be sure would be to take an x-ray, which is a no-no during early pregnancy.

9. The orthopedic consult ordered by my doctor being booked for the next several months. They're going to try to fit me in sometime in the next week or two, but in the mean time, I've been told to report immediately to the emergency room if I feel any numbness in my legs.

10. Discovering that my local drug store is sold out of Tylenol.

On the plus side, I'm not having any spotting or cramping, so it's possible that my little apple seed is still safe and sound for now.