It Begins Again (Almost)

Know what I picked up yesterday? A prescription for Clomid. I'm not planning on starting a medicated cycle until mid-January at the earliest, but Dr. M called it in to the pharmacy now so that I can start it whenever I like. I just pop a pill, call his office to schedule the necessary monitoring appointments, and we're off.

I'm both excited and totally freaked out about it.

S saw the prescription and just shuddered. He's excited about having another child (and he's even more excited about trying to get me pregnant, silly man!) but he's quite possibly even more nervous than I am about the whole doped-up-on-hormones thing. I was quite the emotional freak show the first time I took fertility meds, and neither one of us is looking forward to doing it while we also have a gazillion other things on our plate. (But then, we had a gazillion things on our plate the first time, too, not the least of which was that S was recovering from surgery and going through a ton of physical therapy, which isn't true this time around, so at least that's something.)

Complicating things a bit: LL is suddenly very possessive of me. It's as if he can sense that we're trying to create some competition for him, and he wants to make clear that he, and only he, is the center of my life. If S and I hug in front of LL, he inevitably comes over to us and inserts himself between us, pushing S away from me and hugging me himself. S tried giving me a back rub this weekend, and LL kept pushing S's hands away from me, then patting my back with his own hands. It's really very cute, but the more it happens, the more I worry about how he'll react to a baby sibling.

S and I babysat on Sunday for our friends' daughter, partially as a favor to them, but with the additional motivation of watching what LL would do as we cared for another child. The baby is eight months old and immobile, so it helped that LL could just move away from her if he wanted some space. At first, S and I sat on the floor beside the baby, and LL crawled around us. He played with toys, he handed toys to the baby, he asked us to read books, he handed books to the baby... all was well. He behaved perfectly, and didn't even mind sharing his toys. (It helps that the baby brought one of her own toys, and LL thought it was the most awesome toy he had ever seen, and she let him play with it.) When I picked up the baby to go change her diaper, though, LL got a little suspicious and crawled after us. (It probably didn't help that I was using his changing table, in his room.) He watched us very closely the whole time. But, he was ultimately okay with it, and returned to his play.

Then I put the baby in LL's high chair to feed her dinner. And LL freaked out. We're not sure if it was the fact that she was in his chair, or the fact that she was getting food and he wasn't, or the fact that his mommy was the one feeding her. Whatever it was, LL decided that he had been patient long enough, but now things had gone too far. He grabbed onto my legs, he shrieked and whined, he tried to physically pull me away from the baby. I kept talking to him, and leaning down to give him kisses and hugs between feeding spoonfuls of banana and oatmeal to the baby, but he just got more and more upset. Eventually, S picked him up and took him to his room. Once he was behind closed doors with S, with me and the baby out of sight, he calmed down. And after the baby's dinner, when I carried her into his room to let them know that we were done, he seemed fine. Except that he later refused to eat his own dinner at first, rejecting every food we offered to him, while staring suspiciously at the baby sitting on the ground playing with his toys.

Part of me knows that this wasn't exactly a fair test. If we are lucky enough to get pregnant again, we'll have time to prepare LL for the new addition, rather than having a baby just appear at our house one day. LL will also be at least 9 months older by then, and better able to understand things that we tell him. The baby would have its own "stuff," at least during the first several newborn months, so LL wouldn't have to share his toys so much right away. LL would have time to get to know a new baby from the start, when the baby is a lump and there are other people to play with, so he might not view a new baby as "competition" until after s/he has been around for a while.

Still... it seems that we should really start interacting with more children, so that LL can get used to seeing us around other children.

Also, it was hard, but I thought that S and I handled it very well ourselves. We watched both kids, got them both fed, did several loads of laundry, and cooked dinner without too much hassle. There was one moment when S was clearing a clog in the washing machine and I was holding the baby while trying to wash potatoes and LL was in his high chair screaming because he was done with his raspberries and wanted his next course right now... and S called from the laundry room, "You know what? Let's only have one kid!" But you know, overall, it went well.