When you gotta glow

Four down, two to go; and also s'mores

2012-01-01T18:00:00.010-05:00

Months of trying to conceive on our own before going back to the RE, that is.

Technically, the results for attempt #4 aren't in yet, but I'm looking ahead. Last month my period was a couple days later than I predicted, and I felt pregnant. I even peed on a stick like a dippy fertile. But, nope.

Christmas was fun, but DJ got sick (103 fever!) which prompted us to cut our visit to my folks' short. I was really sad about it, but it was the right move. He's better now, but if it persisted or turned into a respiratory problem I'd want to be in our own home and near his own pediatrician.

I've always enjoyed Christmas, and having DJ made it immensely better. The most emotional moment TOTALLY snuck up on me. I was wrapping presents one evening on the living room floor, half-watching some nature documentary. I wrapped up the set of blocks we got for DJ, chose a gift tag, wrote "To DJ from Mom & Dad", and immediately bubbled over with tears. I went snarfling into the kitchen where J was. I couldn't even talk; I just showed him the tag. Yeah, I did not see that coming.

In other DJ news... He's crawling all over the place now, pulling himself to standing on all sorts of rolling, rocking, unstable things, and he stood unassisted for about 3 seconds. He might have stood longer if I hadn't been yelling "LOOK LOOK LOOK" at J. His skills are growing hugely everyday. It's exciting, but it also seems to have caused a major sleep set-back. The last few nights he's woken up at 3 am wanting to play, and he has a harder time getting himself over that first brief awakening 30 minutes into a nap or bedtime.

Also, I think he's made his first joke. He sneezed during dinner and J and I both said, "bless you!" He giggled and then fake-sneezed a few times, giggling every time we humored him with a response. For about three days we could stop him from fussing during diaper changes by pretending to sneeze; it was great! Today, only sneezing puppets and stuffed animals did the trick.

Here he is rocking the Christmas sweater:

And to follow up on my last post, here are pictures of the homemade graham crackers, homemade marshmallows, and plated s'more kits.

Graham crackers are made a lot like pie crust -- mix dry ingredients, cut in butter, add wet ingredients and cold water a little at a time, and then roll it out between sheets of parchment. Then you score in lines and poke holes:

Baked! I thought the crispy outer parts were a little better than the breadier cracker parts, so I made a batch where I used a star-shaped cookie-cutter and placed them individually instead of scoring crackers. They were OK; too crispy. They had less flavor. And it was absurdly labor intensive. The cracker format was a lot better.

Here's the homemade marshmallow in the foil covered pan, dusted liberally with a blend of confectioners sugar and cornstarch. It sits like that for a day to firm up:

Then it's cut into individual rectangles, dusting any sticky spots with sugar. Homemade marshmallows really are good! Sweet and flavorful. And they're fairly easy to make:

I didn't photograph the chocolate bark. I made some with bacon and some marbleized (dark and white chocolate). Bark is so easy. I may never make truffles again! Here's one of the goody plates ready to go.

So now onto 2012! I hope it brings great things for all of us.

Doing Christmas

2011-12-10T10:18:00.006-05:00

With the help of one of my favorite food writers I've figured out what to make for friends-and-neighbors treats this year. Homemade smores parts:

Homemade graham crackers
Homemade marshmallows
Chocolate bark (some studded with bits of dried cherry, and some with bacon)

Another joy of being on sabbatic is being able to really do Christmas. J is a real peach for holidays; being with him has really reinvigorated (reanimated?) Halloween, for instance:

And I've always dug Christmas, but he's made Christmas a lot more fun too. So being able to do more for Christmas -- instead of furiously grading and dealing with plagiarists and other screwballs right up until Christmas eve -- is especially sweet.

Class privilege

2011-12-04T15:27:00.002-05:00

Few things make me realize how fortunate I am as vividly as going grocery shopping. I had DJ with me last Friday. We drove over (though it's only a little over a mile away). DJ is still charmingly fascinated by all the goings on in the supermarket; I may not bring him so often when he isn't dazzled into tranquility.

I frequently imagine trying to make that trip as a single parent after a long day at work, with multiple would-up kids in tow, dangerously close to dinnertime, nervously adding up the cost of my items. Then I imagine doing all that by bus or on foot, which also means making the trip a lot more often. It's exhausting to think about.

I grew up in a rural working class family and spent all my higher-ed years surrounded by people who had money. As an undergrad, I didn't know any other students who worked as many hours as I did, and as a grad student I only knew one other who, like me, was actually living on her grad student stipend. It just became natural to me that I just couldn't do what, seemingly, everyone else did, like party and live in apartments without roommates. And I never expected that to change.

I got my first one-year salaried gig eight years ago, followed by the tenure-track one I have now, and it is still astounding to me how easy I have it; salaried, partnered, housed, insured. The single working-class mom of my imagination obviously adores her kids just as much as I do mine; I'm just perpetually struck by how few genuine stressors I have to face, compared to her, and how easy that makes it to just enjoy my family every day. That's the real privilege of class.

I did a lot to help myself get to this point, and I benefit from having a genuine dislike of shopping (yay!), but plenty of other people have worked just as hard as I have but haven't had the same privileges and lucky breaks. I could just as easily be living a life where I'm bone-tired at the end of every day, making the huge effort to have a couple reasonably pleasant evening hours before packing the kids off to bed and then fretting over how to pay for the brake job I need. Multiple times a day, every day, I'm just awed to be where I am.

Though, I'll probably have to make a special effort to remember this when I'm no longer on sabbatic, working four six-hour days a week from home.

Thrown over for a younger woman

2011-11-29T20:04:00.002-05:00

When my six-year-old niece arrived at my folks' house for Thanksgiving, she immediately rushed over to DJ to his HUGE delight. She gave him his bottle, and then the three of us settled down on the floor for playtime.

A little while later, she got up and scampered away for something, and DJ started crying hard even though I was RIGHT THERE.

And so it begins.

Firsts and lasts

2011-11-06T09:20:00.003-05:00

Firsts arrive like a thunderstorm; lasts are unheralded. Firsts are the life of the party; lasts are the wallflowers.

I seem to notice every little first. Like, the other day I saw you move one object (a book) to get at another object (a pacifier) underneath (which, of course, makes you a genius). And we recently had our first (rather messy) raspberry "conversation."

But lasts escape me. When was the last time you took a bath in the kitchen sink? When was the last time we nursed? Will I bring you back to bed with me in the pre-dawn hours anymore? Will I bounce you to sleep ever again? How many more times will you take your bottle wrapped in the circle of my arm and neck, while I hold the bottle and you hold my thumb?

One down, five to go

2011-10-15T14:02:00.003-04:00

We're officially TTC for number 2. I've had three periods since DJ was born and, miraculously, the two complete cycles were the same length (36 days). I've never had any month-to-month consistency before; I'm curious to see if it continues. And we bow-chicka-bow-bowed at the right time in the last cycle (according to the iPe.riod calendar on my phone). The most recent CD1 was the first negative result.

I'm calling that the first month of the six that we will try on our own before going back to the fertility clinic. I suppose it's possible we'll conceive unassisted, but I imagine I'll be back in the stirrups sometime in February or March, by which time I'll be 39. Trying on our own feels like a symbolic kind of due diligence.

As eager as I am to put the second TTC phase behind me, I REALLY don't want to lap any bloggers I follow. I'm rooting as hard as I can for the pregnancies and ART processes underway.

For me, having DJ at home makes facing the TTC gauntlet a hell of a lot easier than it was before. As much as I want to have a second, I don't have that same icy fear when I imagine being stymied in this goal. I know that isn't the case for everyone, so I'm grateful to be in that place.

We haven't gotten the iconic apple orchard or pumpkin patch photos yet, so Happy Halloween a little early!

Mommy track?

2011-10-04T21:10:00.003-04:00

WARNING: This is one of those oh-gee-sucks-to-be-you, high-class-problems kind of post.

It's no secret that, statistically speaking, motherhood carries a career penalty. Lately, though I've been thinking about what that really means. On the one hand, I got tenure just before DJ was born, so that was one balancing act I didn't have to perform.

On the other, though, I'm just now at the point where, professionally, I could (should?) redirect or amplify my career. This would be a great time to pump up my research and apply for more researchy, less teachy jobs or, alternatively, get into administration. I really dig faculty development, for example.

Even without a new job, I have this post-tenure urge to "build something." I've mentioned here before that I'd love to build a program to recruit and support students who have aged out of the foster-care system (special advising and mentoring, care packages during exam week, birthday cakes, etc). I'd also love to develop a community focused research center on campus.

But personally this is a TERRIBLE time to go to a ton of meetings and spend my weekends writing grants, all on top of regular (and growing) teaching/research/service duties, but that's what I'd need to do to go in any of these directions. If we manage to have another baby, this young-kid period will stretch for a few years.

Long ago, I figured out that the theme of my thirties is paths not taken. During my 20s, working through my social science PhD program (and mostly loving it), I liked thinking about how I could quit what I was doing and, whatever, go to medical school instead! It's all open!

Not so in my thirties. I'm all sorts of happy with my choices, but it's still an adjustment to realize that things are not nearly as open as they were; big changes now have big costs. And as a first-time mom at 38 I see more things I won't be: a 40-something mom with teenagers or a 50-something empty-nester who thru-hikes the Appalachian Trail. And I probably won't get to be the entrepreneurial mid-career dynamo.

In short, I'm a cliche: the professional women of the new millennium who realizes that she can't actually have it all. The good news is that it isn't all that distressing. Cuz, I mean, look at this cute little career wrecker:

It's hard to imagine having a lot of regrets down the line.

Adoption redux, film recommendation, and an update

2011-09-18T21:10:00.009-04:00

Two posts ago I wrote about the adoption reform movement. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you should go read the insightful comments, especially those by by Amanda (of the Declassified Adoptee) and an anonymous commenter who has an intellectual background in Media Studies and a personal one as an adoptee.

If you don't already follow Rain, you should also check out the wonderful discussion of adoption she is hosting on her blog, enriched with (up to now: 1, 2, 3, 4) guest posts (and a response from the fourth). And besides that, you should go check out her great posts about food and everyday life.

Also in the adoption realm, I recently saw a film, My Flesh and Blood, on Net.flix (streaming) that both was and wasn't about adoption. It centers on Susan Tom, a single mother of 13, nine of whom were living at home at the time of the film, all of whom had been adopted and some of whom have serious congenital illnesses. Eight of those nine have special needs of one kind of another. They're all teens or tweens at the time of the film. If the family sounds familiar, it may be because they were on an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. I haven't seen that, but I'd like too.

I can't think of anything to say about it that doesn't amount to a spoiler. So ... just go watch it!

Things here are going great! DJ is seven months old now. He's now sleeping through the night fairly consistently. We did end up letting him cry in the evenings, and it was exactly the missing piece. The first night (about a month ago), he cried on and off for about 40 minutes, sounding tired rather than anguished, and then slept straight through until 5. The next night 10 minutes, the third night 5 minutes, and then nothing. And he instantly started taking 60-120 minute naps (instead of 30 minute ones). A couple weeks ago it all fell apart (separation anxiety?) so we chose a good well-rested day to start it again, and, again, it worked instantly. His morning naps are still short, but his afternoon naps are often long. Ultimately, he just had to learn for himself how to get over that half-hour hump at both naptime and nighttime. And we feel good about how well we set him up for that challenge.

He usually starts squawking around 4 am, and I go get him and bring him back to bed with me to get him to sleep another hour or two. I love that soooo much. I love how he calms right down when we're tummy to tummy. I love to wake up with a little hand grabbing my face. And he's taken to stroking my hair, which is just as sweet as it sounds.

I'm especially happy about the morning co-sleeping because we're not nursing at all anymore, which I'm sad about. For a while we nursed first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. But in the morning he'd get frustrated (because he was hungry) and in the evening he just looked bored. So we just kind of stopped.

J is back to teaching, and I'm on sabbatic for the academic year. DJ goes to a great daycare Monday through Wednesday for about 6 hours, J has him most of the day Thursday, and I have him most of the day Friday. I'm getting four good days of work in a week, and it feels fantastic. I'm already so refreshed and excited about my research and writing, and it's only mid-September! I'm so grateful that I get to go back to work on such flexible, self-directed terms.

I wondered, back when I was longing for this so much, whether I had maybe ascribed too much importance to this dream of being a parent. I wondered if maybe I was fundamentally unhappy and that having a baby wouldn't actually change it. I'm even happier than I anticipated. I can't believe I have this great life! How in the hell did I get so lucky?

To close, a little video of DJ wrestling a shark:

CD1 and the amazing disappearing milk

2011-07-30T12:58:00.003-04:00

My period started yesterday. With the DJ pregnancy, the cyst prior to that, and the miscarriage before that, I haven't had a real period since, I think, November 2009. Damn. Relatedly, I think, my milk supply has tanked. I see a lot of possible contributors, but no definitive cause.

At DJ's four-month appointment, we were still nursing every 2 hours. The doctor said he should be able to go four hours between feedings. We found he could happily go three hours, but then there was more nursing at night. Then the whole not-pooping-for-almost-two-weeks-thing hit. For comfort's sake, we started nursing more frequently and offering DJ a binky when he was cranky, which was pretty much all the time. He's now a total addict. That's also when he started solids -- first just prune puree (#notpooping), then ,when things resolved, 2T oats and 2T of a fruit or vegetable twice a day.

Over the course of this, my milk supply dwindled. Pumping never yielded much; 3 oz from one breast was the most I'd ever gotten. But in the last three weeks, I've only gotten 1.5 oz total from both sides, and sometimes not even that.

I went back to nursing every two hours to promote more production and, hopefully, avoided regular formula, but it was obvious that DJ wasn't getting enough to eat. So now I nurse first (if I'm awake and around) and then we offer formula. Since we got more generous with formula, he's stopped nursing at night. He still wakes up a bunch of times, but now they're binky-replacement missions. Great.

The interwebs has not been helpful. Breastfeeding support websites say nothing about this. The BabyCenter forum for February babies has a whole bunch of posts from breastfeeding moms noticing a serious production slow-down around the same time. Unfortunately, every thread like that immediately gets 30 posts from others saying "We're still going strong, and I pump a few extra gallons every day and use it to water my houseplants" or whatever. Yeah, well, shove it up your generous earth-mother asses!

I'm sure lacto-fundamentalists would say we never should have offered supplemental formula or the pacifier. That I should have pumped more strategically and consistently. That I should take fenugreek and blessed thistle. That it has absolutely nothing to do with my breasts being small and DJ being big. That I can still relactate. That apparently I'm just insufficiently committed to maximizing my child's nutritive and emotional well being (though I should be proud of myself for trying!).

I don't know for sure what happened. It seemed like I was barely keeping up with his needs anyway, and the introduction of solids and the occasional formula bottle finally tipped the balance toward weaning. And now we're choosing to go with it.

I'm mostly OK with it. We can still nurse for the oxytocin and antibodies. I can miss feedings more easily and ditch pumping all together. In the inelegant parlance of dairy farming, I was planning to "dry off" and try to "breed back" before the end of DJ's first year anyway. And I really don't have a problem with formula. When I hear about people who formula-feed from the beginning, I don't get even one whiff of "oh, gee" about it. Maybe my sadness has more to do with my period arriving than the facts of the case.

The adoption reform movement (and Teen Mom)

2011-07-25T09:52:00.003-04:00

LONG PREFATORY NOTE:

This post is about what I've gathered from a short, casual, online inquiry into the adoption reform movement. I'm pro-adoption, but what I've read has complicated my thinking.

As a social scientist, I'm used to looking at social processes as distinct from the individuals involved. Most people (especially Americans) tend to think in terms of individuals; so when they hear or read a discussion of a social problem, they tend to assume that the author/speaker is criticizing a particular person or group. In reality, though, individual people aren't the problem; the overall pattern is the problem.

For example, take credential inflation: the fact that a bachelor's degree no longer confers elite status, and so more and more people are seeking masters degrees even though the jobs they go on to get don't really require that kind of expert training. They get the degrees to get past the real or imagined screens that hiring offices put up to shrink the number of applications. A recent NYTimes article explains the problem.

An individualist perspective asks, whose fault this is? Employers for shirking their responsibility to train on the job? Universities for selling revenue-generating masters degree programs that don't address real workforce needs? Students for lacking the resourcefulness to build a career after a bachelor's degree? As a social scientist, I see the overall pattern as the problem, not the perfectly logical decisions of the individual people involved.

When I look at problems associated with adoption as it is currently practiced, I focus on the processes (as shaped by culture and institutions) and not the individuals involved. People have to navigate the social landscape as it is, not as it would be in an ideal world.

NOW ONTO ADOPTION ...

As someone who considers expanding her family through adoption (and has for a long time), I've often been curious about critics. My curiosity was piqued by the criticism that some people (or maybe just one) were levying against Rain on her blog.

I followed one of Rain's critics to her own blog (which didn't have much material yet) and went through her blogroll to find voices that sought to explain the critiques of adoption practice to those not already on board. I found one that sheds a lot of light: the Declassified Adoptee, especially under the "About" tab.

I'll highlight two of her many points.

1. The "Angry Adoptee" stereotype:

She writes:

Unfortunately, the "Angry Adoptee" stereotype follows adoptees who do not sing the praises of adoption. We want our roots, our rights, and acknowledgement of being a part of our Original Families and because of it, we are seen as the products of failed adoptions. To the outside word, Adult Adoptees like me are viewed as either people whose Adoptive Parents failed or who are too self-absorbed to acknowledge the stereotypes and just "move on."

Her discussion of how critical adoptees are silenced reminds me of how people also can't deal with stories of intractable infertility. In our culture, we want unalloyed happy endings, and adoptees who see problems with the process and infertile couples who don't conceive and carry to term on their first IVF both tend to make people profoundly threatened. It's not fair to either group.

2. Criticism of pre-birth matching:

One practice that adoption reform advocates like the Declassified Adoptee single out is pre-birth matching. She writes:

I believe that practices such as promised but unenforceable openness, "dear birthmother" letters, and pre-birth matching are manipulative. Such things are hailed as providing expectant mothers with comfort in the family that they are choosing to adopt their child. When in reality, these methods may influence a mother's decision and make her feel that she is obligated to surrender or "selfish" if she doesn't give her baby to a "better off" or more "prepared" individual. Considering one's own ability to raise a child may be a time in an expectant mother's life when she is trying to be as honest as herself as possible, all the while looking at profiles of couples who are themselves putting their best faces forward. I am not sure how an impoverished, single mother can look at profile after profile of couples with four bedroom homes, kid-friendly country clubs, and pictures of them smiling next to the Eiffel Tower from their last vacation (not to mention intro paragraphs telling her how selfless and wonderful she is for considering adoption for her child) and not feel influenced to surrender her baby. An expectant mother should make her decision uninfluenced.

I encountered a couple vivid examples of this critique. I recently watched a few episodes of Teen Mom (which I had never seen). The show focuses on four young women, one of whom had made an adoption plan, together with her sweet boyfriend (who was the baby's father). I thought it an enlightened choice to include Catelynn & Tyler as "parents," recognizing that their journey didn't end when the baby went home to her adoptive parents.

They struggled. In one episode, they were frustrated that they didn't know the baby's full legal name. They met with their adoption counselor, who bluntly told them they didn't have the right to know that. They realized that the openness they had carefully chosen was completely at the discretion of the adoptive parents. They had no rights at all.

Curious about where things stand with them now, I went to the show's website and ended up watching the recently aired Teen Mom Adoption Special with Dr. Drew (who I'd never seen in action before).

It was absolutely unconscionable! One of the guests was Ashley (who had apparently been on one of the 16 and Pregnant seasons; never seen it), who placed her baby for adoption with her aunt and uncle and has regretted it tremendously ever since. Dr. Drew kept bullying her, trying to get her to say that the adoption the only appropriate choice, that parenting would have been selfish, and that her own overwhelming feelings of loss and regret were illegitimate and unfair to the adoptive family. Here's a blog post that largely paralleled my perceptions of the show, although I don't agree with their characterization of Catelynn and Tyler as dupes.

If the goal of adoption is to meet the needs of the whole adoption triad, than clearly the process involving Ashley has failed big-time. And pre-birth matching and the cultural norms that go with it seem to have contributed to this unfortunate outcome.

As an aside, another devastating loss happens when birth mothers decide to parent after a pre-birth match has already formed. Obviously, it's a birth-mother's right to change her mind, but the awful experience for would-be parents wouldn't occur if pre-birth matching just wasn't done. And it's a loss that affected couples often suffer in silence, because our culture doesn't encourage others to recognize it as a real loss.

Obviously, there are benefits of pre-birth matching for adoption process that succeed. What kind of process would produce better outcomes? And how can adults involved in these processes act with integrity while the processes are flawed?

CHILDREN AS PROPERTY?

Family sociology isn't my area of expertise, but one point I've read has stuck with me. Some argue that child-custody laws tend to treat children as property, because they only ask which adults have a "right" to custody and visitation with that child. How different would it be if we instead started with the premise that children have a right to all adults who are important and positive in their life? Laws would definitely view grandparents, ex-stepparents, and birth parents in a very different light. And it would probably make donor-gamete processes more complex as well.

I'M NO EXPERT

One concept from feminist sociology is "standpoint;" it's the idea that where one stands in society (gender, social class, race, geography, etc) gives one a unique, valuable perspective on social issues. Traditional social science tends to treat social issues as technical problems best left to experts who claim to stand above the fray. Standpoint advocates say we're all "experts" of our own experience and have insights to contribute to understanding complex issues.

In that spirit, I'm interested to see what people think about the complex issues raised by adoption. It's hugely different than it was 30 years ago, and as a society, we're still feeling our way to new norms and understandings. I think respecting the especially rich insights of people directly affected by adoption (and especially adult adoptees) doesn't mean that the rest of us have to just sit down and shut up. We're all capable of clear moral and pragmatic reasoning in a spirit of respectful dialogue.

With that, your thoughts?

My take on the sleep stuff

2011-07-13T20:22:00.004-04:00

***Warning: this is a very mommy-bloggy kind of post.***

I read a few books (Weissbluth, Pantley, Lewis & Granic) and countless discussion board posts and such, and here are my thoughts:

1. CONSISTENCY: Lewis & Granic cite a 2006 academic review article that concludes that all sleep-training methods work (from max-intervention no-cry approaches to basic cry-it-out), but what matters most is consistency. So, parents have to form a strategy that they can consistently apply, something they believe in and that fits their lives.

2. A PRAGMATIC NO-CRY APPROACH: Because we're both academics and it's now summer, it's relatively easy for us to embrace a slow, gradual no-cry approach. I don't have a huge ideological investment in it; I don't think babies are harmed by a week or so of bedtime tears, and I certainly don't look askance at anyone who let's their baby cry, knowing that their healthy, safe, and comfortable. But like Trinity, I recognize the privilege we have that we can prioritize a no-cry approach without tons of trade-offs. I don't know where I would stand if I had to get work duds on five morning a week and then perform intellectually, or if we already had a toddler in the family or something like that.

3. FIRST THINGS FIRST: A lot of the baby sleep literature talks about sleep training as something that happens in a week or two. But from where I sit, it's much more sequential. For us the first fundamental thing was to get a relatively consistent schedule. Bed-time became consistent over a month ago, but his day-time napping only got consistent a week or two ago.

After "when" comes "where." DJ and I (but not J) co-slept for a while, which was a good solution for the time. When DJ surprised my by going to bed in his crib without any coaching, I went with it, even though I kind of wanted to co-sleep longer. More recently the goal was to have him nap in the crib (instead of the Moby wrap); and we achieved that by bouncing him to sleep. His naps got longer and more regular.

Now that "when" and "where" are pretty set, we're working on "how." For two nights now, I've laid him in the crib without any prior bouncing and patted his butt (or hip if he's on his back) for 10-15 minutes until he went to sleep. I really thought I would be at it an hour, but, again, he surprised me. So now we'll start doing that at nap-time too. Then we'll try to reduce patting so that we can just do our bedtime routine, kiss him goodnight, and leave him to put himself to sleep. After that we'll get serious about night-wakings (if they don't sort themselves out).

When I was first reading about sleep training, it all seemed so bewildering. There were just so many moving parts, and I couldn't imagine it all coming together, and I felt so hopeless and incompetent. I just couldn't visualize how my Moby-dependent co-sleeping fussbudget was ever going to become a kid that we could just put to bed. Now I can sort of see it. And I feel like what we're doing is less "sleep training" and more like "sleep coaching."

If I were mentoring an even newer parent, I would say:

(a) Forget about all this for the first couple months; get to know your baby, and get everyone as much rest as you can.

(b) As things stabilize, try to detect and reinforce the schedule consistencies as they emerge (and they WILL emerge).

(c) When you're ready to initiate changes, address one or two specific goals, and don't fret about the ones you haven't gotten to yet. There isn't any boat that you're missing.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I sound all self-possessed and shit-togethery in this post, but I was freaking out about sleep issues a mere 36 hours ago, which should also be noted by those kind commenters who remarked on my emotional stability in the face of sleep deprivation.

And, here's a fairly recent picture of DJ to distract you from that disclosure. If you look closely, you can see his first tooth:

"Normal"

2011-07-12T10:51:00.004-04:00

When I first had trouble conceiving I longed for a complete statistical map. For couples exactly like us, what percent conceive on their own in the next year? What percent conceive on IUI #1? IUI#2? What percent go on to IVF? What percent ditch conception and embrace adoption? What percent end up still childless three years out? And what percent of them are OK with that? I felt so unmoored, so befogged. I craved this birds-eye view to calibrate my hopes by.

I now feel the same way about baby sleep. DJ is now 5 months old. He goes to bed consistently at seven, after a routine of bath -> boob -> sleepsack -> books -> bouncing. He'll wake up around 7:30 with this plaintive why-the-hell-am-I-awake wail, and usually again at 8. We bounce him back to sleep. By 8 he'll settle in for his "long" stretch until sometime between midnight and 2. Then he wakes up every hour or two until he's up for the day around 6. It works out to 4-6 wakings between 7 pm and 6 am. I try bouncing him back to sleep, but I quickly move to nursing him if bouncing doesn't work.

I've generally been doing the night shift because J has terrible night vision and he can't ever go back to sleep if he attends to the baby between 2 and 4 am. Since I can usually go right back to sleep after a little nursing, it's not a benefit for me to have J attend to DJ if I'm woken up anyway. So instead, J often takes the baby at 6 am and I sack out for another hour or two and J does most of the early evening wakings.

That's been reasonably sustainable for a few months, but it's really, really wearing on me, and I'm eager to get it down to two or fewer proper night-feedings. I'm having a hard time concentrating and making decisions. I'm forgetful. Emotionally, I feel fine most of the time, but I'm much more easily frustrated and fail to do things that I know will make me feel good, like playing instruments, exercising, and calling friends and family. I'm also increasingly feeling a sense of powerless dread in the evenings, knowing that I'm going to be repeatedly awoken.

I get the sense that DJ's sleep is "not normal" and I can and should aspire for better. At his four-month appointment, his pediatrician said that he is capable of sleeping through the night, that he wakes because he is now a "trained night feeder," and that we should sleep-train him. He also said he only needs to eat every four hours, which will help him sleep through the night. At that point he was eating every two. We quickly found that he could go three hours, but no more than that. We've also found recently that he'll suck down 6 oz from a bottle (without spitting up), but when I pump both sides at what would be a feeding time, I only get 3 oz total. He's clearly getting enough milk in a 24-hour day, but maybe not as much as he'd like at any one time, given his 95th-percentile size and my a-cup bosom. We're ramping up on solids.

We're going to try to wean him from the bouncing and and coach him to go to sleep more independently, which should reduce night-wakings. However, he hasn't pooped in ten days, and he's been waking more and having more trouble settling back down. So it seems like this is not a "normal" time, and sleep-training is bound to fail until things get back to "normal."

But last night I realized that there's always going to be SOMETHING going on. He's rapidly growing and developing, seasons change, teeth emerge, we travel, people visit, he'll get an ear infection or something one of these days. His daytime schedule has gotten more regular, but it too is constantly evolving. Like with struggling to conceiving, there is no "normal." And there is no way around that bottomless chasm between sound general principles and complex individual situations. We're on our own and we need to just pick a direction and go that way.

But I'm happy to say I'm not on MY own; J has become a true partner in this. For a while, I was the only one reading and fretting about sleep & scheduling issues. J was of the mind to let things roll. When I would say, "Maybe we should do X." J took it to mean, "Amy wants to be in charge of sleep and is telling me to do X." I felt all alone and frustrated, which J didn't understand because he thought he was being totally supportive. We finally figured out our disconnect. I marked the relevant parts of the baby sleep books, J read them, and now he and I deliberate as a team. I definitely want to keep THAT is normal!

Top side, bottom side

2011-06-30T21:28:00.003-04:00

In my last post, I said something about DJ's crooked noggin. Here's a photo that shows how his brow protrudes more on his right side:

And, no, that's not a ring in his nose, though that would be totally badass. At DJs last appointment on June 9th, the doc said that because his head circumference is growing as it should, we can be confident that no skull sutures have fused prematurely -- it's just good old fashioned positional plagiocephaly which will likely resolve now that he's more mobile. If not, he may need to wear a reshaping helmet a few hours a day.

A new issue has eclipsed that one. DJ didn't poop for almost two weeks. I read that breastfed babies often go 5-7 days without a BM. We called the doc on day 8 (last Friday) because DJ was clearly uncomfortable. They said feed him prune puree (his first solids!), give him relaxing warm baths, and check in again on Monday. Still no BM over the weekend, despite his increasingly frantic efforts. His discomfort got worse and it was interfering with his sleep.

They had us bring him in Tuesday. The poor little guy got a rectal exam which, understandably, made him scream. He probably thought he had been abducted by aliens. But his tummy wasn't distended, his bowel sounds were good, and there was no blood in the stool sample (collected in the rectal exam). The doctor had us bring him to the hospital for an x-ray to rule out Hirschsprung's disease. That happened yesterday (day 13 of no pooping). DJ hated being held still for the imaging, but the contrast-enema part of it was no big deal (tiny catheter) and it prompted big, prune-y BMs, which make him grin like a guy who just won Olympic gold.

So we're continuing with the prunes and checking in with the doctor early next week, hoping for spontaneous pooping between now and then. Right now his farts still smell like hospital.

There doesn't seem to be a particular cause; I guess it's just one of those things. Perhaps the onset of warmer weather and less frequent nursing combined with reduced mobility on two days due to a six-hour car ride to visit my folks. And maybe he forgot which muscles to flex.

The good thing is that we're very happy with the pediatrician. He took DJs discomfort seriously, explained his diagnostic thought-process to us, consulted with a specialist on DJs behalf, and followed up by phone yesterday and today.

In other news, he cut his first tooth already, he can roll over from tummy to back, and he's laughing more. His two biggest laughing jags were with my aunt tickling his belly and my brother entertaining him with fart sounds. And so it begins.

Heavy heart

2011-06-21T16:48:00.002-04:00

I had been cooking up a post about sleep and scheduling issues. But when other people keep losing cherished pregnancies, I can't muster much energy for my rinky-dink concerns. My heart is with you, Misfit.

A year ago today ...

2011-06-06T21:06:00.002-04:00

... I peed on a stick, saw the BFP, did two more just for fun, and then drove four hours with J in the pre-dawn hours to another city to catch our direct flight to Vegas, grinning like a dork-knob the whole way. If I had known then how great it has turned out to be, I might have literally smiled my face off.

DJ is still doing great -- he turns four months old this week. He has laughed a couple times, which absolutely melts me.

He has a check-up on Thursday, which I'm eager to go to. DJ's noggin has become noticeably asymmetrical, and I'm wondering if he's having that thing where some skull plates fuse prematurely. If so, I think we're looking at endoscopic surgery to release the fuse and 6-12 months of wearing an orthotic helmet to reshape his skull.

If that happens, I'll need some great ideas for his first Halloween costume. Storm Trooper? Insect? Flower? Snowboarder? Put a wig on it and then dress him like Tom Jones?

Keeping my promises

2011-05-30T19:46:00.004-04:00

There are three things I have promised in prior posts that I have not yet delivered. Here they are.

1. Cute, funny video of DJ learning to suck his thumb:

It's over a month old now. He can reliably get his hands to his mouth now, but he doesn't hang out and soothe himself that way (which is too bad).

2. Birth story:

Prior posts contain bits of the birth story, but here's the comprehensive version. I'm doing my DAMNEDEST to be concise.

Tuesday February 1st I had an OB appointment and learned that I was 2 cm dilated and 75% effaced. Cool! I had painless, barely noticeable BH contractions sporadically through the next week and hoped they were getting me further along. The night of Monday February 7th I was actually woken up by some BH contractions, which made me very hopeful. The next dayI went into my next OB appointment, eager to learn how dilated I was.

2 cm dilated and 80% effaced. Son of a B!%(H!

That night I started to get uncomfortable around 5 pm. I was feeling really lousy while watching The Biggest Loser (and not just because I'm embarrassed that I like that show). After a while I felt distinct contractions! I had J time them, and they were 5-7 minutes apart. I waited a couple hours to see if they would stop, and then called Rosie who encouraged me to call the doctor. By that point they were three minutes apart and moderately challenging; I could still talk through them. I remember thinking I could cope with contractions like that for hours.

Off we went to the hospital with our overnight stuff and our utterly useless labor kit (Sudoku book? Really?) . I hung out in the lobby for a couple contractions while J parked the car. It was just after midnight when we arrived. We walked up to L&D and they brought us into triage. Rosie joined us there. I'm feeling like hot stuff - hula dancing through contractions (I've SO got this!), rocking the snazzy no-slip socks , thinking "I bet I'm, like, 5 cm dilated!"

3 cm and 80% effaced. Son of a B!%(H!

We moved into a labor/delivery/recovery room. Rosie first found all the light switches and created a nice, dim lighting regime. She suggested a bath, drew it for me, and figured out how to have dim light in the bathroom as well. It was a regular tub with jets in it. I loved it. I started to feel really sleepy though -- no wonder, given how poorly I had been sleeping for the prior two weeks and the fact that it was now 1 or 2 in the morning.

When I was good and relaxed and over my disappointment about being only 3 cm dilated, I got out of the tub ready to do some work. The three of us walked a slow loop around L&D for a good while. I'd stop and grip the railing during contractions and Rosie would put pressure on my lower back. The contractions got a lot stronger. I couldn't talk; I went inward, focusing on accepting each one and relaxing into it.

At one point while we were walking we heard this unholy shriek. Rosie chirped, "There's a woman about to meet her baby!" J blanched.

The contractions got more intense and came one on top of the other. I felt a strong urge to push. Rosie said, "That's a great sign! Let's get you checked!" So we went back to our room. I laid down on the bed feeling so, so tired, but I thought, "Hey this is probably transition! I'm probably like 7 cm! Those contractions must have done a lot of work!

4.5 cm dilated, 100% effaced. Son of a B!%(H!

I started talking about an epidural. Rosie responded well. She laid out other options: back in the tub, more walking, some massage, and she suggested we ask for someone from anesthesia to come and answer my questions and take my info; that way if I decided on the epidural it would be completed faster. A great suggestion.

They sent in this impossibly young looking guy with a central European accent (J referred to him as Borat). He answered my questions and politely waited for each of my contractions to finish so that I could talk and listen again.

There was a funny moment when he was getting information from me. He asked me how tall I was. I was in the midst of a contraction, so I held up fingers like a game of charades. Rosie, J, and Borat all said in unison, "Five ... Eight...." How much do you weigh now? "Two ... Oh ... Five...."

I said yes to the epidural. I was less freaked out about having a needle between my vertebrae than I predicted. And getting the catheter was no big deal either. At this point it was about 5 in the morning. I only know this because Rosie wrote this stuff down -- I had no sense of time at all.

The epidural was perfectly dosed. I could feel each contraction, but they felt like the early ones. My legs didn't feel affected at all. The blissful part was that I could finally lay down and rest. Rosie and J both found places in the room to doze as well. The epidural made my limbs shake, which I found it really relaxing.

The next couple hours were great -- laying in the dark, my arms popcorning around, feeling the wave of each contraction, listening to the beep of the monitor. I chanted to myself: "I have PLENTY of room for my baby!"

They came to check me: 7 cm. Awesome! Later, 9.5 cm. They said they could try to move that last little lip of cervix, or I could just keep resting and let it happen on its own. I'll go back to dozing, thank you. And then finally: "You're ready to push. Would you like to push?" Why, yes I believe I would! Now it's about 8 am.

I was recharged and ready to go. I first pushed for a long time on my knees, resting my upper body on the upraised head of the bed. Either Rosie or the nurse kindly put a blanket over my bum, but I couldn't have cared less. I felt like I was pushing well in that position. but DJ and I didn't actually make much progress with it.

We tried some other positions including on my back (which I hated), and there were a couple decel incidents. One in particular lasted for what seemed like a long time. That's when they put an oxygen mask on me, gave me a shot of terbutaline, and put an internal monitor on DJ. The best position then was on my left side where I stayed until the end.

Rosie was annoying me some at that point because she kept telling me to fill my chest with air right before I started pushing (I'm an abdominal breather), and at the start of a contraction she would crank my right leg back before I could get a full breath. For some reason, I didn't have the words to tell her that, so I started resisting the push with my leg until I was ready. I also grabbed my own foot, thinking maybe she and the nurse would let go of my leg and let me do it myself.

I was also annoyed that everyone was telling me to push three times when the contraction was over by the end of the second push. I thought I would wear myself out pushing without a contraction, so I started faking that third push. In retrospect, that probably wasn't smart. I think DJ was getting fatigued, and I was unaware of that.

At some point, I noticed that there were a lot of people in the room (I didn't have my glasses on). Rosie noticed my puzzlement and said, "They're here for the baby. That's how close you are." Well, all right!

Towards the end there were MANY contractions where the doctor said"This one might be it!" But then it wasn't. Blurgh.

I was warned that the epidural doesn't actually do much for pain the perineum. And, wow, it really doesn't. After a bunch of this-might-be-it pushes, I realized that I was just going to have to tear to push DJ out; there was no way around it. So I dug into the next one and finally got the traction we needed.

Searing pain as his head emerged. I thought the rest would slip out. Oh, no. Much tugging this way and that to get the shoulders out. I could feel the tears deepening.

He was born at 11:04 am.

When just his head was out, the doctor said that "babies with his profile" (whatever that means) need extra attention after they're born, so they wouldn't be able to hand him to me immediately. Perhaps I should have felt a sense of panic, but I didn't. Maybe sucking down the oxygen made me placid. I had pushed for 3 hours, but it didn't feel like it. I could have kept it up for a long time.

J saw them take our limp DJ to the other side of the room. By my recollection, I heard him cry in about 4 seconds. Rosie says it was longer than that, but pretty quick. While he was away, Rosie helped me get my gown off my chest, and people were massaging my gelatinous belly in an uncomfortable way. That must have been when I expelled the placenta. I had no idea at the time. I asked later if it was time to do that, and they told me it already happened.

I couldn't see much of anything lying flat on my back without my glasses, including DJ either when they brought him to me. But I could feel his sturdy little back and limbs and damp cone-head. He latched on perfectly (which apparently makes Bunny want to stab me in the face, but in a nice way). I blurted out, "I had a baby!"

They took DJ again for his treatments, and J went with him to the other side of the room. I started to notice that it was taking them effing forever to stitch me up. My knees are splayed, my legs are shaking, and now, all of a sudden, I'm annoyed that there are a bunch of people with their hands in my hoo-ha. At one point I whined, "I'm just so WEARY of this!" The doctor said, "We're almost done!" My lower body must have felt like another universe, because I was surprised that they could hear me.

They kept saying "This is the last one ... oh wait, one more over here."

Say it with me: Son of a B!%(H!

They brought DJ back to me, and I put my glasses on and repositioned so that I could see him better. I watched his ears come out from the side of his head.

Finally, they were done, and all the medical people left. Rosie made her exit, and the three of us were left alone in a suddenly quiet room as DJ drifted off to sleep in my arms.

3. Comments on the doula experience

The best part about having the doula is that in the weeks leading up to labor, I knew that we had someone we could call as often as we wanted, who would have come to our house during early labor and even driven us to the hospital at our request. She did things that neither of us would have thought to do, like quickly learn the room lighting and write down the basic timeline of labor. She was next to me almost all the time, and often explained things to me. She also had a lot of good suggestions for the birth plan, which the hospital took very, very seriously.

The downsides, as I've described in prior posts, is that the commitment to helping me have the labor I want is belied by a bias toward unmedicated birth and she also gave me some troubling misinformation. It makes me wonder what else she got wrong.

Another downside, perhaps the biggest, is that I don't have much memory of J during the labor and birth. I know he was there, but he wasn't particularly active. He tends to defer to others, waiting to be asked to help. And I did turn inward during contractions, so maybe it wouldn't have been all that different, but for myself, it is probably the main disappointment of the experience. J has a more positive take -- he was comfortable staying on the margins, letting her provide more of the support.

What would it have been like without Rosie there? Would the nurses have been at my side more often? Would they have explained things to me? Made the useful suggestions for ameliorating pain and discomfort? Would J have been more in the thick of things? I don't know.

I don't regret hiring a doula. It was a well considered decision, and it gave me a lot of peace of mind leading up to the event. If the hospital weren't so flippin' awesome, the doula might have made a huge positive difference. If I wasn't so exhausted and went without the epidural, then she may have been a godsend. Once I got the epidural, a lot of Rosie's expertise was no longer relevant.

If, by grace of heaven, we get to do this again, I'd rather go without.

The mother's body

2011-05-20T21:18:00.003-04:00

This article on mothering.com helped me begin to put words to how being a mother has changed my embodied self. I'm still struggling with it, but that piece (though only tangentially related) helped me understand why I found my birth injuries so distressing and why I find parenting so restorative.

Coming of age, I've generally had a fairly stable truce with my body. As a kid and teen I felt athletic (I did a few sports) and neither fat or especially thin. I was free of injury or chronic problems. I felt unusually tall between 5th grade and 8th (which I hated) until a lot of the other girls caught up; now at 5'8" I feel sort of medium-tall.

I was blissfully free of body-image issues until ** BLAM ** I went to Girls Nation the summer before my senior year. There we were, a week in DC with two "senators" from each state. We had to wear dresses and white gloves all week (gotta love the American Legion Auxiliary). I wasn't into dresses, so I ended up cobbling together a wardrobe that was both unfashionable and unflattering. And meanwhile the entire southern contingent was made up of girls who compete in pageants. Impossibly elegant and poised, and slim, slim, slim. Almost overnight I went from feeling more or less neutral about my body to feeling like a dumpy, coarse peasant (which also had to do with being a working-class kid completely out of her element.)

With feminist resolve, I gradually made my peace with my build. I weighed 148 when I graduated HS, and at the time I thought I should weigh 120. Never mind that when I first hit my adult height I weighed 130 and looked all knobby and weird. In my adult life I've been somewhere in the 150s and sometimes pudged up into the 160s. A couple years ago I was in the high-140s and it felt super-skinny.

I tried to focus on what my body could do (I was a division II state champ shot-putter!) and not what it looked like. I had a real breakthrough in that direction when I came of age sexually. It helped me come to really like my body. For two days each cycle I felt fat and vaguely "doomed" but I learned to just wait it out and observe it as an interesting trick of the mind.

If I thought about it at all, I experienced my body as tidy and under control. Apart from the scars of a tomboyish rural childhood and a car crash when I was 8, mono as a teen, dengue fever as a grad student, and some little shin or knee pain when I used to run more, I had always been pretty free of injury or illness. When I came off the pill at 30 (after 10 years on) to discover that my cycles were persistently irregular, I didn't give it much thought.

Struggling to conceive, then miscarrying and then being benched challenged my view of my body as competent, but I still started this last pregnancy with confidence. I wasn't psyched to start the pregnancy at 166 lbs, but I figured I could handle it. And up until the SPD pain settled in, I felt good.

Looking back, part of why I found the SPD so distressing is that I felt like my trade-off for being of sturdy peasant build (rather than a slim WASPy one) was that I wasn't supposed to have problems like this. It was unfair, and it ruptured my sense of my body, my sense of myself.

The sturdy peasant paradigm also explains why I was so surprised and distressed by the birthing injuries. Sturdy peasants don't get serious tears and then have lingering problems! After the birth, my body was not at all tidy. I was bleeding from my injuries, discharging the lochia, dripping milk, frequently wet with baby spit-up, sprinting to the bathroom to avoid accidents (I didn't always make it), and feeling puffy and slack all over.

And, the piece-de-resistance, I had to go to the friggin' ER the day after we got home from the hospital to get a giant rock-hard stool (that had been packed down during delivery) taken out by hand, after all the undignified home remedies failed to work. I had to give my BMs a manual assist myself for a couple weeks, despite the Colace. I should have just gotten some latex gloves; instead I was constantly scrubbing my hand like Lady MacBeth.

I felt utterly broken; not just my body, but my self.

Now, three months later, I feel restored -- not the same, but whole in a different way. For one thing I feel suddenly middle-aged, in preservation mode. Once I was feeling a whole lot better in the pelvic region, I slacked off on my Kegels and my problems started to come back. Now Kegeling is like a prescription I'll have to take for the rest of my life to avoid being one of those old ladies who fart a lot and wear Depends.

I've lost weight (157 and falling). I feel energetic and muscley again. Though my ab muscles are normal, my tummy still feels really soft from the outside. I actually like it. It feels feminine, like that famous painting of Venus on the half-shell. Though I don't have any similar affection for my floppy, spongy butt.

That soft tummy comes from pregnancy and birth, but the lioness' share of my restored sense of bodily self is from parenting, somewhat akin to what the author describes in that Mothering piece. I love, love, love it when DJ is comforted or delighted by my voice, my face, my touch, and I love that wonderful warm rush from holding him close so many times a day. It's a transcendental sense of my body as shared; it's sort of like becoming sexual, except without all the adolescent sturm und drang (thank gawd).

I'd be so interested to hear your stories. I imagine our experiences are all very different in these subtleties.

The fourth trimester

2011-05-16T16:44:00.009-04:00

DJ is now a little over three months old, bringing us to the end of the fabled fourth trimester.

A lot of you have probably heard of Harvey Karp (Happiest Baby on the Block) and his theory that human babies are essentially born three months too soon, which is why they're so much less mature than other primate newborns. They have to be born that early, he claims, because otherwise their heads would be way too big.

With that idea in mind, people talk about how babies suddenly get a lot more interested in the world around them at 3 or 4 months old, and that's certainly true of DJ who is now almost 14 weeks old. It's fascinating to watch. The other day when we were out for a walk, he was staring at our shadow. He's been grabbing stuff, and today, for the first time, he grabbed one of his hands with the other.

I also feel like I've arrived at a point of recovery. My ab muscles don't feel so slack anymore, and all my pelvic processes are just about back to normal -- better than I predicted.

And I've also kind of "arrived" as a parent. A month or so ago I'd be holding DJ and thinking that I should be getting something done, as if holding DJ wasn't doing something. Now I'm perfectly at peace just sitting around with him. I have also ditched the books and stopped thinking about what DJ is "supposed" to be doing developmentally or predicting future milestones. He still eats every 2 hours and wakes up 2-4 times a night when lot of babies his age are nursing every 3-4 hours and waking up 1 or 2 times a night. Good for them. DJ will sleep longer whenever he's ready. This is all to say that I'm much better at living in the present.

Looking back over the last few months, here are some things I wish I knew:

1. One has to recover from childbirth. Somehow I was totally blindsided by being injured giving birth. I naively expected to just be a bit sore for a few days. I felt pretty broken for quite a while, and that affected me emotionally. It's so obvious, but somehow I didn't anticipate it. I cried every day for two weeks postpartum, for some reason or another. Sometimes it was just "He's s-s-s-so b-b-buh-beautiful!!" But some other times it was more like "I'm pretty jacked up here and J is the only one who seems to care!" Which brings us to ...

2. The attention one gets as a pregnant woman stops abruptly (and, surprisingly, that bothered me) . Once I was sobbing to J that everyone was taking a million photos of DJ, but no one seemed interested in taking any pictures of me and DJ together -- somehow that symbolized my new invisibility. When we met with the pediatrician before DJ was born he said, in a jocular tone, "You're getting all sorts of attention now, but everyone will forget about you about 2.6 seconds after the baby is born. Your job, Dad, is to take care of her." He was totally right. People would ask me about the birth, but they were only curious about (1) whether I had a C-section and (2) whether I had an epidural. Two close friends wanted to hear the whole story, and I was so grateful. Way back when I was kind of annoyed that I got so much attention during that pregnancy. I needed care and concern before I had a trouble-free second-trimester pregnancy underway; not during it. And apparently I needed care and concern after I pushed a 9 lb 3 oz baby out of my hoo-ha, but it wasn't so forthcoming -- like it's not supposed to matter as long as DJ is OK. I'm hugely grateful that DJ is OK, but, y'know, my well being matters too.

3. Most babies have a peak fussiness period around 5-6 weeks of age. This was in the books, but I didn't really notice it until week 10 or so. DJ was extremely fussy around that age, and I really wondered if we were making total hash of it. The nurse in the hospital baby care class told us that all babies have a growth spurt at 10 days old and it will make them fussy. We should write it on our calendar and plan to just stay home and nurse all the time. It was totally true for DJ, and it was SO much easier being prepared for it. I wish we were similarly prepared for the fussiness peak at 5-6 weeks.

4. Babies aren't linear. At first DJ hated baths. Now he seems to like them. At first he liked riding in the car, then he hated it, and now he seems OK with it again. Two months ago he had two nights in a row where he slept for 5 hours straight. When he stopped doing that, I got all distressed, feeling like he should be doing that consistently. Now I know better. Last night he actually slept for 6.5 hours straight. I now know that just because he did it once doesn't mean he'll be doing that consistently any time soon.

5. To be a parent is to be conflicted. The week before last we started trying to get DJ to take his daytime naps in the crib instead of in the Moby, because he's at least 16 lbs now, and it's giving us backaches. I'm very conflicted about that. He did well the first week, but last week he started rejecting the crib more. And it's become harder to put him to bed in the crib at night. I'm often wondering if we should have co-slept longer or should start doing it again. I try to remember how fidgety and snorty he is sleeping and how we can't nurse well lying down and how nice it is to have an hour or two to myself in the evening. But it seems like my little baby is all by himself for so many hours. And maybe we gave up on swaddling too soon. And I always thought I would do a lot of baby massage, but I haven't yet. In general, I feel great about our parenting, but I guess these conflicted feelings are inescapable.

And, to close, a cute photo of DJ with a handmade sock-monkey hat and matching afghan:

I Heart the Onion

2011-04-20T11:16:00.002-04:00

Once again, they get it wonderfully right:

Just When Couple Finally Stops Stressing About Having A Baby, They're Still Not Pregnant

April 16, 2011 |
HENDERSON, NV—After finally deciding to relax and not worry so much about having a baby, local couple Aaron Leonard and Shelley Akers announced Tuesday that at long last they remained no closer to conceiving a child. "After more than two years of trying to get pregnant, we decided not to put so much pressure on ourselves—and wouldn't you know it, still nothing happened," said Akers, 32, adding that you can never predict when God will choose to continue withholding His blessing. "I guess it's one of those situations where you're not expecting anything and then, totally out of the blue, you don't get it." Akers added that, for a while, she had actually begun to think her husband might be sterile, and that she was still very much leaning in that direction.

It's been a while since I updated. Things are good here. DJ is still big, still feeding every 2 hours, still going to sleep in his crib around 8 pm (most nights), sometimes sleeping four hours at a stretch (but usually 3).

I got some video of his latest hobby -- trying to get his hand in his mouth. It's too long; I'll post it when I edit it down. It's pretty funny. He stares at his hand for a while, sticks his pointer finger out, and then thumps himself in the forehead.

I'm behind on commenting but reading most days. I'm especially stalking Sarah's blog as she awaits the birth of her child; a wonderful moment in a beautiful adoption story. I can just imagine the loud electric hum I would feel all day long if it were me. I'm wishing maximum joy to the newly expanded family and an abiding peace for the birth-mother.

Well, whaddya know? Baby sleep books ARE useful!

2011-04-01T12:03:00.005-04:00

Three days ago I got my two baby sleep books from Amazon (Pantley's No-Cry and Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep). I was dying to read them. Around 8 that night, it was clear that DJ should go to bed for real. Normally, I go to bed with him, but I thought, "Maybe he'll hang in his crib for a while and I'll be able to read." So I put him in his crib (and myself on the grown-up bed in our adjacent room), and DJ slept until the next feeding at 10. I nursed him for 10 minutes, bounced with him on the exercise ball for 2 more, and put him back down. He did one cat stretch and then slept until 1 am, when we did it all over again. Around 4 am he started his whole fretful poopy dance. But he was OK doing that by himself for about ninety minutes.

Last night, it was basically the same routine, though we experimented with J going in to try to bounce him back to sleep without a feeding. No go. The kid does need to feed every couple hours.

So the books were really helpful. Without wanting to read them, I wouldn't have been inspired to try putting him in his crib! If I find any useful content in the books, I'll be sure to share it.

DJ wouldn't sleep by himself before. Maybe it's because he's older now, or maybe it's because we've focused on getting him more day-time sleep. His fussy-time has shrunk and he's more interactive since we focused on that.

He does almost all of his daytime sleeping in the Moby. I'd like to transition him to something else. The best candidate seems to be the bouncy seat:

A post about parenting (and doula update)

2011-03-26T19:04:00.003-04:00

First, a photo:

I took a bunch of photos of DJ when he's trying to poop. They're funny as a collage; this one is actually cute.

I realize I haven't posted much about the birth; I wrote up the birth story, but I'll have to condense it to post it. Here's an out-of-order post about parenting, so far.

BREAST-FEEDING: DJ latched on perfectly and nursed well right away. For that I'm very grateful. I was a little anxious about my milk coming in, but it did fairly quickly. He soon settled into feeding every two hours (as in, two hours from the start of one feeding to the start of the next). It was stretching out to three hours, and he's gone four hours at night a couple times. J has given him formula three times -- twice so I could sleep through a feeding (though my achy boobs woke me up anyway) and once because I went to my awesome doctor's appointment last week. Logically, I feel perfectly good about formula, but it still gives me a pang to skip a feeding.

I wasn't having good luck with pumping. Someone suggested pumping at the same time every day, an hour after the first morning feeding. OK, but which one counts as the first morning feeding? And they aren't at the same time every day anyway. Twice I have pumped and frozen a 2 oz meal, but these were an hour or so after J fed him formula. I don't know if I can pump without skipping a feeding.

SLEEP/FUSSINESS: He's not getting enough sleep. I took notes for a few days and found he only slept 9-11 hours those days. He should be getting 14-16. He was sleeping pretty well at night (dropping right off between feedings), but (like his mom) not napping well during the day. For about two weeks now, the lack of sleep has made him almost constantly prone to fussiness, and we've had more bad nights than good nights. If he's awake he needs to either be feeding or held and bounced on the exercise ball; otherwise, he's fussing/crying within 15 minutes. And his feeding interval has shrunk back to two hours. He's also stopped using his regular feeding cues and goes straight to shrieking when he's hungry. Dude! We answered those cues! What gives?

He has always made a sport of pooping, with an impressive display of wiggling, grunting, and squeaking. Lately, though, he cries and fusses when he's trying to poop. I thought maybe he was in pain, but if you bounce him, he immediately stops, so I don't think he's in pain. And, when he has slept well for a couple hours, he does the whole pooping song and dance without complaint. The worst is when he's crying while trying to feed (because he's pooping). It tears me up. I can bounce him to stop crying, but it starts again as soon as he's back on the breast and restarts the pooping project.

I think this all stems from inadequate sleep. I canceled a lunch date Friday to focus on getting him to sleep as much as possible during the day. It seemed to help. Today we were out and about, so he didn't get a lot of sleep. We're in for it tonight, I'm sure. I may be naive to think we can "crack the sleep code." I may be expecting too much when he's not even two months old.

CRIB TRAINING: We talked about starting it around the two month mark (April 9), but we may put it off for a couple weeks after that until J wraps up his teaching semester. We want to try the loooonngg sloooowwww "no-cry" style (though I suspect it's really just less crying at any particular time). Summer is a good time to try a few weeks of interminable nighttime soothing, something that would be totally infeasible if we had real jobs.

DEVELOPMENT: He hasn't smiled yet (socially), and that's driving me crazy. But he's good at holding his head up, and he turns towards sounds, and he looks me in the eye often enough to (temporarily) quell my fears that he's on the autism spectrum like so many other little boys I know. We don't really have any games yet. I sing to him (some favorites: Blue Moon, Here Comes the Sun, the soundtrack of Les Miz). He's grown some wonderfully squeezable thunder thighs.

EQUALLY SHARED PARENTING: Texts about shared parenting say it can be difficult for moms to cede the primary parent role. That hasn't been nearly as hard as I feared. I'm definitely more time-on-task with DJ (by virtue of my work leave and breastfeeding) and I'm more into researching things like sleep, but we make decisions together and we don't tell each other what to do.

On the whole, it's going really well. I really enjoy my time with him, and I feel like we're doing a decent job. I've had to remind myself to soak up this phase, because it only happens once. I miss him when I haven't had him in my arms or next to me for a while.

DOULA UPDATE: I emailed her about what I learned from the OB - very neutral tone. I did include a sentence saying, "I sense you are disappointed that I chose the epidural" and reiterated that it was a decision I feel great about. She sent a very gracious response. The upshot is that she copped to being a little disappointed, but explained that she sought to support me in whatever I chose and hoped I felt supported (I did). She thanked me for the info and apologized for being mistaken. I feel good about it. I'll say more about the doula experience when I post the birth story.

The R-word

2011-03-22T16:56:00.002-04:00

In my last post I described my distress to hear that DJ was intubated and "resuscitated." I had my six-week post-partum appointment today and asked about it -- turns out DJ was never intubated. What the doula saw was a scope they used to check for meconium in his throat and chest (since there was meconium on the scene when he was born). His lungs were clear, so he wasn't even suctioned (just his nose and mouth). The doula saw a bag, but it was attached to a mask, not a tube. The doctor said that babies aren't ever intubated in the room - only the NICU. The level of attention/stimulation he got is fairly common. It doesn't count as "resuscitated."

That's strike three for the doula. Strike one was her frequent use of the phrase "committed to a natural birth," and strike two was the bullpucky about epidural medications causing my pooping problems. I'll definitely have to shoot her an email -- maybe she'll be less likely to misinform other people.

The doctor also said that my pooping problems will likely get a lot better by 3-4 months post-partum. If not, she'll want me to start physical therapy, which has a very high success rate for helping people with my problems. Meanwhile I'm to keep Kegeling away.

Best doctor's appointment ever!

100th post - 5 1/2 weeks

2011-03-18T17:44:00.006-04:00

That image is horizontal on my computer. But there you go -- there's my little guy when he was one-month old. I put him in a onesie sized for 12 months. I'm going to try to take a picture of him in that same onesie and set-up every month for a year and frame 'em all up. I hope it still fits.

It's been a whirlwind, and I haven't had much media time, which is probably a good thing. I've been reading along, following people's stories with bated breath, but I rarely have two hands to type with.

It's so hard to capture this huge experience in words, much less a blog post. So here are some unrelated snippets.

* Parenting has eclipsed my old life so completely that I forget how young he is. For example, I read up on things like gentle sleep training or development milestones and am reminded that he's really just a month old! It feels like he's been here for months and months. I'm frequently vacillating between "I can't wait until he can X" (smile, sit up, play with toys, etc) and "I don't want him to grow up at all!"

*I got fairly jacked up giving birth. It turns out a third-degree tear means that the laceration goes through your perineum and into (but not through) the sphincter around your rectum. No one explained this in the hospital. My lingering problem is pooping. Suffice to say I'm popping the stool softener religiously. I have an OB appointment Tuesday -- I'm eager to ask about if, when, and how I can ever get back to normal. Cuz it sucks.

* Related to that; a major thumbs-down moment for the doula. We had our follow-up meeting the week before last, and I mentioned these problems. After I emailed her a picture of her with DJ, she responded and said that she's been doing some reading that says that one particular epidural drug can have a side effect of fecal incontinence (which is the opposite of my problem). She says I should call the hospital and ask if this drug were used and writes "you might want to consider that the next time you have a baby." F___ you and your fundamentalist bullshit. I feel 100% great about my decision to get an epidural, and it's patently obvious that my problem stems from the muscle injury.

* When we had that meeting with the doula she mentioned something about DJ being resuscitated. Uh ... how did we miss that? Right before the push that freed his shoulders (and the rest of him) the doctor said that babies "with his profile" need extra stimulation right after birth, so they wouldn' t be able to hand him to me right away, but he would be fine. It sounded innocuous, I could hear his heartbeat on the monitor, and I was sucking oxygen through the mask, so I didn't find that statement alarming at all. I pictured them vigorously rubbing his arms and legs. It turns out they intubated him and bagged him. It seemed like only about 6 seconds went by before I heard him cry and another 3 seconds before they gave him to me. The doula said it was a little over a minute before he cried. Jason saw him totally limp as they moved him from the delivery spot to the baby spot, but he didn't see them intubate him. I have no idea how big a deal this is. Does this happen a lot? Is "resuscitate" one of those words that's scary to lay people but isn't really all that hairy in this case? Did he have to be intubated? Or would a smaller, non-teaching hospital just have used a mask? Had his heart stopped? I have no idea.

I cried and cried about it; weeks later, it still gets me, even though he's thriving in every way. I really should try to get an explanation from someone. I didn't know to ask about it while we were still in the hospital.

* I'm only three pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight but I can't get into my pre-pregnancy jeans. Blurgh. We've been doing a lot of walking now that it has warmed up.

* I'm actually getting a sustainable amount of sleep, because we gave in to co-sleeping. At first we had the Arms Reach sidecar-style co-sleeper set up, but he wouldn't sleep well in it; only about 20 minutes at a time. I'd end up picking him up and laying him down on my chest on his back. I'd carry him into the adjacent nursery for feedings and diaper changes. But with feedings beginning every two hours and taking 45 minutes each, I would only have an hour in between. Once I nursed him in bed, fell asleep lying on my side, and woke up in the exact same position, 2.5 hours later with him deeply asleep on his back. It was a revelation. Now, he and I sleep on a mattress on the baby room floor without blankets. We go to bed around 8 (or earlier). I started skipping the diaper changes between midnight and 6 am (unless one was really needed). Lately, though, he has started being wide awake between 2 and 5. We're going to start persistent, gentle crib training at the two-month mark.

* Because J and I hardly ever touch each other these days! One of us is always holding the baby. And whoever isn't holding the baby is usually dealing with the laundry. My folks were here the week after we got out of the hospital, and in that week, J and I had a glorious nap together, limbs intertwined, in a way we haven't been able to do for a couple months.

* Being pregnant and giving birth were tremendous experiences, and I'm so, so glad I got to have them, but becoming DJ's mom has made me even more enthusiastic about adoption. Yes, I carried him, but he was still a stranger when they handed him to me. I felt like I became his mother the first time I rocked him to sleep. I've always wholeheartedly believed parents who say their bonds with their adopted children are just as deep and abiding as those with their birthed children, but now I can actually see it for myself. We're going to try to conceive a second (see previous bullet on crib training!) but whether or not we succeed, I think adoption might be in my future.

99th post

2011-02-24T10:44:00.006-05:00

The last two weeks since DJ came have been a delightful blur. I've kept up with blog reading (because that can be done with one hand) but not with commenting. He's gradually getting more predictable, and once I learn to use the baby sling, I think I'll be able to get more things done.

Here are some photos.

Here's us the day we came home from the hospital:

Here he is a couple days later during an alert period:

All ready to go to the supermarket (can't figure out how to rotate it):

And, my favorite -- totally milk-drunk (I'm glad he's a happy drunk):

He's a good, easy baby. He nurses like champ. He's gained back to his birth weight and then some. He's easily soothed. And, charmingly, he looks uncannily like J's baby pictures.

The sleep deprivation has gotten to me some. He nurses every 2-3 hours, and the whole nursing/changing cycle takes close to an hour, leaving only an hour or so in between. This morning J gave him two ounces of formula so that I could get four hours of sleep in a row. That was part of celebrating my birthday.

Like how I slipped that in there? I'm 38 today. So far J has given me four hours of sleep, buckwheat pancakes, a shoulder rub, a very sweet card (and another from DJ), and some fancy chocolate. Best. Birthday. Ever.

I want to write up the birth story soon. It really was a tremendous experience, and emotionally more challenging than I expected. We're having our follow-up meeting with our doula today, which, in my mind, is the coda to the whole experience.

Overall, it's going really well. The pregnancy weight is dropping off fast -- 34 lbs down, only 5 to go at 15 days post-partum. Hopefully, the 15 lbs of IF weight will follow. Our friends are bringing us great dinners every other evening. I've internalized the exhortation to "sleep when the baby sleeps." Not much else to say. I'm in heaven.

Donald James

2011-02-11T20:08:00.003-05:00

Donald James (or DJ as we've taken to calling him) was born Wednesday morning at 11:04 am weighing 9 lbs 3 oz (yes, OUCH!) and measuring 21 3/4 inches long. I delivered vaginally but ended up getting an epidural, which was an EXCELLENT decision! I ended up with four lacerations, one of them third degree. That wasn't fun, but the hospital and the doula were both excellent and an excellent combo.

We came home from the hospital today. My folks come out tomorrow for about a week.

Looking forward to getting caught up with everyone.

An online auction to bring a family together

2011-02-04T20:05:00.003-05:00

Wonderful blogger Sarah is accepting contributions toward the daunting costs of a private adoption of a baby due in April. Her loving friends and family have donated a slew of wonderful items for an online auction. Check it out here! It goes live midnight tonight (Friday, eastern time) and lasts until midnight Sunday. You can also make a donation through Paypal. The possibility of adopting emerged quite suddenly, so they are maximizing their resources in a compressed time frame.

When is the last time you had a chance to help a loving family come together?

Snaps for my doula

2011-02-02T21:17:00.002-05:00

I emailed her an update about my appointment with the OB and the symphysis pubis pain. About the dilation and effacement, she writes, "Less work to do on the big day!" Ooh, I like the sound of that.

And about the pain, she says "What we want to do is adopt positions that will allow the sacrum to move unrestricted during birth so that less pressure from the baby's head will be applied to the symphysis. This means squatting, hands and knees, kneeling, standing, side-lying, or completely on your back... but NOT semi-reclining during which you are lying on your sacrum and it cannot move due to the bed beneath you. "

Now THAT'S helpful stuff! Thank you!

Yep, hurts

2011-02-01T19:23:00.004-05:00

"Women with symphysis pubis dysfunction during pregnancy often face major functional difficulties resulting in a considerable decrease in quality of life." Depledge et al, 2005

"SPD has been recognised as an obstetric condition since the time of Hippocrates9,10, and as early as 1839 ‘jointloosening’ of the pelvis was described in the literature, with a clinical picture similar to that of SPD. Despite this long history, there has been a lack of clinical interest in and recognition of SPD." Leadbetter et al, 2004

"The condition is associated with much unrecognised obstetric morbidity. The prevalence in our unit over the 2-year study period was 1/36 women. Many medical and midwifery staff have little knowledge of SPD. Patients often felt ignored when they complained of pain." Owens et al, 2002

I spoke too soon about preventing symphyseal pain. After two relatively pain-free days, yesterday SUCKED! It was another day that I couldn't nap. I was also getting cervical pain, which is A-OK with me because it indicates progress toward labor. I had an OB appointment today which showed that I've effaced 75% and dilated 2 cm and that the baby is "pretty far down." So it may be that the increased pain was due to dropping, which makes me feel better. Yeah, I'll just go ahead and believe that. From what I read, the dilation and effacement doesn't really give any indication of when labor will begin, but, hey, I'll take it!

My OB didn't blow it off completely, but she was rushed, and seemed uninterested in exploring symptoms and solutions. What annoyed me was that she said, "There isn't really anything you can do." Uh, au contraire. I told her about the article I found describing exercises and practices. She definitely exemplified the comments I keep seeing in the academic articles saying that medical providers just aren't taking this seriously.

I asked a bunch of questions. She said that most people get a strain in their symphysis during labor (not before) and feel this pain for a few weeks post-partum. That directly contradicts what the research says, but whatever. I asked her if I'm at risk of injuring myself big-time during labor. She said there is some risk, but that it's rare and unpredictable. Only once (very recently) has she seen a patient's symphysis separate, and it was a woman who was birthing her fourth child after three absolutely problem-free births. The OB said, "I heard it pop." YOWZA!!! She said about the patient, "She's healing, but really slowly."

Normally she asks "Anything else?" before leaving, but today she said, "See you next week, if not sooner!" and started to leave. I had to stop her and say that I hadn't gotten any instructions about who/when to call if I think I'm in labor. Apparently I was supposed to get a handout about that two weeks ago. Charming.

Yes, doctor, I realize it's 12:50 and you probably have more patients coming in at 1 and you haven't had lunch yet because you're running late. I'm well aware of what time it is, because my appointment was at 11:20, and I've been sitting here bare-assed so long that I really have to pee again.

Today's conversation with the OB doesn't really change my plans. I'm still shooting for an unmedicated/low-intervention birth. It's just a reminder to take my own post-partum recovery into account as we make decisions along the way. Until then, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing to maximize my resilience.

Deconstructing "natural" redux

2011-01-29T15:59:00.003-05:00

Waaaay back at 15 weeks gestation, I wrote about how annoyed I get with the word "natural" because it's subtly judgmental.

We hired a doula, and so, obviously, the word "natural" is going to come up. One doula that we met with and decided against kept using the phrase "committed to a natural birth" which immediately turned me off.

I mentioned to the doula that we hired when we first met that I preferred "unmedicated" to "natural" and why. She heard me, and she seemed to be down with our more pragmatic orientation. I brought it up the other night, though, when we met again because she used that same maddening phrase the other one had: "committed to a natural birth."

It really set me off that day, because for about a week now I've been having A LOT of pelvic ligament pain. It seems to be "symphysis pubis dysfunction"; big-time pain right where the two sides of the pelvis come together in the pubic bone. I feel it mostly as overall pelvic achiness (though not in my back) and as something like a searing groin pull. It hurts a lot to lift one leg (like when putting pants on), to walk, or to go from one side to the other when laying down. The crappiest part is that when it's bad, there is no pain-free position to lay down in. It takes a lot of micro-adjustment to search for a pain-free position and sometimes there just isn't one.

The other day (a few hours before the doula came over), I was reduced to tears because I desperately wanted a nap, but I just couldn't find a pain-free position. I was so afraid that I was going to have this disabling pain and no sleep for the next 3-5 weeks leading up to labor. It also seemed like a lot of the non-medical strategies I had in mind for labor and delivery (swaying movement, frequent position changes, squatting with my knees out) just weren't going to be possible. Then it occurred to me that pushing a (big) baby out through a compromised pelvic ring could seriously jack me up. Some women with severe SPD actually come apart there, and it's not easily fixed.

So, when the doula used the phrase "committed to a natural birth" I explained all this and said that I would prefer to not have an IV in my arm, a tube in my back, and a catheter in my urethra, but if my non-medical bag of tricks is limited (and I haven't slept well for weeks), then I will not hesitate to request medicine or anesthesia and breathe fire on anyone who interferes. I think she heard me. J also thinks she's gotten an accurate picture of where I'm at, and he shares my impression that she's sincerely committed to helping us have the experience we want. And she gave me some good advice for how to find a pain-free position in bed.

The SPD pain has gotten a lot better. I found a great article from a physical therapy journal that explained some exercises and everyday techniques that were shown to help. It's mostly about engaging the muscles around the pelvic girdle, like lower abs, kegels, and glutes. I've been doing the exercises and using the techniques for a couple days now, and I feel worlds better. Walking is now an exercise in mindfulness, because I consciously flex my lower abs and kegels when I do it. It's still hard to find a comfortable laying-down position, and I can only do it so many hours at a stretch. No more reading in bed. I don't lay down until I'm on the cusp of sleeping, and I get up as soon as I wake up. I'm also letting J do most of the housework.

I'm hopeful that I'll get good sleep for this final stretch and that I'll have normal or near-normal mobility for labor and delivery. I know which movements and positions to avoid. I now know from my reading that my case is late (a lot of women start with this around 20 weeks gestation) and relatively mild (most have major back pain too, and some women have to use crutches), so I'm less worried about having this long-term, especially now that I'm almost completely pain-free from using the techniques.

It's a drag not being able to do my yoga or pilates DVDs or to tackle physical tasks around the house. And I hope my OB doesn't burst my optimistic bubble when I tell her about all this at my next appointment. But, hell, if this means I need a scheduled c-section, then I couldn't give a (perfectly natural) shit.

Full term/new term

2011-01-24T13:36:00.002-05:00

Today is 37 weeks, which is, in some official sense, full term. Not that Moose is ready for prime time, but it's still another nice milestone.

Today also marks the start of spring-term classes at my college, and it feels wonderfully decadent to not be teaching. I'm working, but with the same flexibility of intercession. Today, for example, I didn't get up early enough to guarantee myself a good parking spot on campus (plus it's freakin' cold out), so I decided to stay home. And since I'm home, I can sit around in my yoga pants.

Multiple times a day, I shake my head and think about how absurdly fortunate I am in many ways. Not that I don't whine about my achy pelvic ligaments (they really hurt!) or heave a weary sigh when I have to pick something up off the floor. Most of the time, though, I am in gratitude-mode. For example, having lived really close too the bone in the past, it still seems like a minor miracle that I can now go to the grocery store and just grab whatever I think we'll eat without thinking about the mounting total. I feel the privilege of that more keenly these days, even though it's been a good 8 years since I've had to watch every penny.

How did I get so lucky?

A year ago today ...

2011-01-18T10:47:00.003-05:00

... I woke up bleeding copiously and went in for an u/s to confirm that my twin pregnancy was over at eight weeks. I had just seen their twinkling heartbeats on the u/s screen a few days before. Needless to say, I'm SO HAPPY to be this far into a robust pregnancy as that anniversary comes around. My memory of that immediate period is vivid: a fog of grief in a grubby January week right before the start of a new, tiring semester.

A year ago tomorrow, I started this blog. This is my 91st post. I had been lurking on IF blogs; the m/c prompted me to join the conversation. My first comment was from real-life friend Kelli (thanks!). Other early commenters included Bunny, Adele, and Al. Over time, I've tended to link to bloggers that are like me: 30-something or beyond, bookish, and secular in worldview. As others have said, it has been an incredibly important lifeline, especially when I was stalled out with cysts and ambiguous lab results.

I've often had to fight a deep-seated assumption that I just didn't have the goods to conceive and carry a pregnancy. Following other people's stories was such a big help in nudging me into a more active, hopeful mindset. And whenever I had an interaction or experience made caustic by IF, it was such a comfort to immediately think "Here's something to blog about! They'll understand!"

IF makes us drill down to the core of ourselves, and it's such a privilege to draw on the candor and wisdom produced by that process. I'd love to think that wherever there is despair, there is also this kind of well of kindness and strength.

Yup, he's big

2011-01-16T14:48:00.003-05:00

We went for an ultrasound last Thursday, because the one performed at 28 weeks showed that the kid measured in the 86th percentile for size. (We were sent for one at 28 weeks, because the one at 20 weeks made it seem like my placenta might be low - it wasn't). This last week (the 35th) he measured in the 90th percentile -- his weight was estimated at 7.2 lbs! This is quite a bit more than the 5.5 pounds that What to Expect says for 35 weeks. Estimates by ultrasound can be off, but this is the second one where he measured big, so I think it's probably generally accurate. Both the sonographer and the doula (more on that later) said that he'd probably be about 9 lbs at birth.

On the one hand, it makes me feel a little better about the weight I've gained. Above-average weight gain makes sense for a bigger-than-average baby. On the other hand, my internal mother-guilt voice is saying that I ate too many sweets, and I've made a porker out of him in a sort of not-quite-diabetic-but-insulin-resistant way. I should probably nip this mother-guilt thing in the bud.

I'm actually not too freaked out about birthing a bigger baby. J and his dad are both 6 foot or taller. My dad and brother are both 6'4", so I'd expect a baby of ours to be on the big side. I'm 5'8" and think of myself as being of sturdy, peasant build. I think me and my hoo-ha can deal with a nine-pounder.

J on the other hand is pleased. He says he thinks of a big baby as healthy. And he's having all sorts of fun referring to the baby as "Moose."

At my last OB appointment (before the U/S) my Dr said that Moose doesn't seem too squished in utero, so she was doubting that he was all that big. I'm a little worried that now she's going to start talking about inducing labor. I would resist that mightily. My next appointment is Tuesday, so we'll see what she says. I may be getting my hackles up for nothing. She mentioned that she (at 5'4") had a 10-pound baby vaginally.

In other news, we got a doula! We met with two of them, and one was a clear standout. She's also a certified lactation counselor AND (be still my heart) a licensed massage therapist. We felt really good about her.

In other, other news, my awesome parents came for a visit this weekend to help us prep the house. Me and mom stripped wallpaper from the baby room, and Dad and J (acting on a suggestion of a friend of mine who used cloth diapers) installed kitchen sprayers in the two bathrooms (using the toilet supply line) so that we can spray baby poop off the diapers before tossing them in the pail. The sprayers are surprisingly powerful. Comical mishaps may ensue. The sprayers may prove to be a bad idea.

35 weeks, 30 lbs, and a goal

2011-01-10T14:58:00.002-05:00

I hit 35 weeks today, and --- holy smokes -- we've got to get busy with prep stuff. We have almost everything we need, and the baby room is cleared out and ready for work. But there is still a lot to do. I love the feeling, though, that if he were born today, he'd almost certainly be perfectly OK.

This past weekend was burned up hosting my band for a local gig. Playing a gig while 35 weeks pregnant isn't a big deal in itself. But since the rest of the band is from 2.5 -5 hours away, it means that we had 8 people coming (bandmates and girlfriends), 6 of whom were staying over at our place. Afternoon practice, then dinner, then gig, then back to our house. Lots of coordination, and hosting-work: Where is everyone going to sleep? Where will everyone park? What are we going to eat? Who needs directions to the bar? J was a total trooper - I did the food shopping and made a giant pot of gumbo for dinner (and it was GOOD), but he did all the house-cleaning and set up gear for a quick afternoon practice. He loaded and unloaded all my gear for me too.

We all got back to our place about 2 am after the gig and turned in about 45 minutes later. But I Just. Could. Not. Sleep. My legs were restless, and my mind was restless. Since there were bodies sprawled in the living room, I couldn't go downstairs and hang out and do yoga poses until I got sleepy (something I've done a few times in the last couple weeks). I was basically stuck in bed, trying not to keep J awake. I finally slept for an hour between 6:30 and 7:30 am and got up at 8 to start making breakfast. People left around 11, but the rest of Sunday was a total waste.

I've also gained 30 lbs from the time of the IUI, at which point I was a good 10 lbs heavier than what had been my norm for the prior few years. So I'm feeling like an absolute whale. I thought that since I was starting out pudgy, I wouldn't gain as much, but I was wrong. Oh well. High-class problems!

I have a goal for the rest of this pregnancy (which may be my only one, after all). Now that it is patently obvious that I'm pregnant (and not just pot-bellied) I'm waiting for a stranger to say something like "when are you due?" My goal is to have the presence of mind to look at them blankly and reply, "What do you mean?" Just ONCE I wanna pull this off!

One benefit of being older parents

2010-12-30T18:47:00.003-05:00

We've been talking about getting set up to save for college for this little boy, and J's father, who does financial stuff, gave us good advice. He told us that, instead of a 529 (in the kid's name), we could start a Roth IRA (in J's name). Unless I have a Doogie Howser in my belly, J will be old enough to draw on it without penalty when the kid is college-age. If the money doesn't get used for college, it's easily repurposed.

So, whaddya know? As much as I wanted to start this party YEARS ago, it's nice to discover some of the benefits of how things actually unfolded.

Reality has really been working for me lately!

The envelope please ...

2010-12-24T22:28:00.002-05:00

It's a boy!

Y'know, it's weird. I seem to remember hoping for a girl, and I think I even posted it, but now it seems like I wanted a boy all along. I love it when the reality is somehow more perfect than the hypothetical.

After the big reveal we tucked into the birthday cake (It's J's birthday today). After rapidly serving pieces to everyone, I settled down with my own. And (I'm sort of giving away J's full first name here) I looked at my piece, and it said "son" on it.

Gender reveal tomorrow (and a pregnancy milestone)

2010-12-23T19:58:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow is (obviously) Christmas Eve and also J's birthday. As some of you may recall, back at the anatomical u/s in week 20 we asked the sonographer to write the sex down on a card we brought. We sealed it up and posted it on the fridge. Tomorrow night we open it. Yes, I'll post about the results -- I promise. I'll go on record now saying that I've been hoping for a girl, but my intuition seems to be telling me that it's a boy.

I can also report that I've reached a little discussed pregnancy milestone. I had an OB appointment a couple days ago, and, as always, I had to give a urine sample. I got all set up on the toilet holding the cup, but where I felt I had to hold it, I COULDN'T SEE IT. I kept bending forward more and more, but my belly was perpetually in the way. I finally had to kind of guess. I succeeded, but, yikes. I've got a few more appointments to go!

Looking WAY ahead

2010-12-17T19:26:00.003-05:00

As is my wont, I've been getting ahead of myself and thinking about when to try for number 2 and how long to try before choosing a plan B, and what that plan B might be. The ongoing story of Rebecca K and her husband who pursued embryo adoption some months after losing their beautiful daughter to preterm labor at 22 weeks has touched me in a way I wouldn't have predicted. Rebecca beautifully describes the wonderful connection they now have with the donor family. Update: she got a BFP yesterday with a high three-digit beta!

I also just came across an interesting article on FitPregnancy.com about donor eggs. It's mostly a first-person account of her infertility journey and the arrival of her twin sons, but the author also emphasizes that talking about donor eggs is still taboo (like IVF used to be). She also reports that 12% of IVF cycles use donor eggs. That's higher than I would have guessed, which, I suppose, supports her claim that donor eggs aren't talked about as much as their use would warrant.

She's also puts IF into perspective in a funny way:

Besides, becoming parents was still well within our control, something I had decidedly lacked during my quest for a mate. Sure, infertility sucked, but it sucked a lot less than my years of dating guys with the emotional depth of a dust mite. After all, there aren't any adoption agencies for husbands.

I have to admit, if you asked me a few years ago, I would have said that I associated donor eggs and embryos with a worrisome designer-baby trend. I clearly did not get it. Now I've been thinking about it as akin to adoption: once a child is yours in your heart, you want your child to come home as soon as possible. And, hey, it doesn't get any sooner than coming home as an embryo to the womb!

I'd been thinking that plan B would almost definitely be adoption through foster care, but now I think donor gametes will also be a path to consider. At any rate, it's something we'll have to decide together when we get to that point.

Getting closer

2010-12-13T19:57:00.002-05:00

Today is the start of week 31. Only nine weeks until the EDD. Yikes! It's time to get busy with the baby room. And less than two weeks until we open the envelope to learn the sex. I'm looking forward to that.

Yesterday was a work shower. It was really nice. I'm not all that comfortable being the center of attention at an event like that, but I had a great time. We got lots of super-cute clothes and blankets (rather than the practical stuff). There's also a family shower coming up when I'm home after Christmas.

"Getting closer" also refers to J and I. IF brought us closer, and now impending parenthood is doing so in a different direction. He's such a gem. It's been really sweet. I can't wait until we've both wrapped up our semesters!

Seasoned

2010-11-29T19:06:00.002-05:00

With reference to one of Bunny's hilarious but also vibrantly meaningful posts, I want to claim that IFfers DO make better parents! Not that I'm a parent yet, but humor me for a minute.

One thing I got better at with my blessedly brief period of IF is trusting myself to make good, authentic decisions. On the one hand, I got better at turning inward: what do *I* feel is best for our family of two (buffering the influence of others, real and imagined). But I also got a lot better at questioning my former self. It can be easy to say what one would do given a particular situation, but the truth it you don't know until you're there. The idea is one thing; the reality is another.

I'm now feeling the fruits of that during pregnancy (29 weeks today!) and looking toward labor and delivery. Things that used to seem like no-brainers are actually important, open questions. I always thought I'd mightily resist the epidural, and I always thought I would totally have a doula. Now I don't really know. Both depend so much on the particulars. What doulas are even available in my small, not-particularly-progressive city? What does rippin' back labor actually feel like? I like the ideas of a doula and a drug-free birth; but I recognize that the realities will be what they're going to be.

I feel my rigidities softening as I look toward parenting too. We have principles in mind, but the reality is that we're going to raise the actual child we (hope to) bring home; not the idea of a child.

Maybe people who parent after IF are more conscious of appreciating their good fortune, but I wonder if the bigger benefit of IF is the way it seasons us to be both principled and flexible.

Not so into the ultrasound

2010-11-25T09:26:00.002-05:00

We had a follow-up u/s yesterday (at 28 weeks) because the 20-week one showed that the placenta was a little low. I was really looking forward to seeing the little niblet, but it wasn't actually that great. The baby seems totally fine. That's obviously the big thing.

But the baby was hanging out in a full pike position, so the technician kept thumping on my belly with the transducer to try to get the baby to stretch out. STOP HARASSING THE BABY! She did it again when she wanted the baby to unclench its fists. J and I didn't say anything when she was going for anatomical images, but as soon as she said, "I'm trying to get a good 3-D picture for you" we both started saying "That's OK. We don't need one. It's fine. The baby must be comfortable there." We just said it over and over until she gave up.

The only 3-D image we got is actually pretty funny. It's just a forehead, a hand (poised for a terrorist fist-bump), and a foot, with the toes pointing (improbably) inward toward the top of the head. It's at least as charming to me as a classic head shot.

The thumping sonographer reminds me of a story my father tells about after my brother was born. The nurse was remarking to dad about what a deep voice my brother had. To demonstrate, she flicked the back of his ear to make him cry. WHAT THE HELL?!? My dad wanted to punch her lights out.

Before the appointment, I was thinking, with a little sadness, that this would be the last time we get to see the baby until birth. But now I'm glad to not have any more scans scheduled. I want to let this kid gestate in peace!

Trimesters and semesters

2010-11-22T19:28:00.004-05:00

Today starts week 28 and the third trimester. I can't barely believe it. I guess we better get busy with the nursery! It's hard to settle into the reality of it. We have a follow-up u/s on Wednesday because the 20-week one showed that the placenta was a little low. I can't wait to catch another glimpse of the critter.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about the grieving co-author situation. I decided to email her (least ambush-y). I just wrote that I got the email from the editor, and I asked her what she "would like to have happen." Kept it simple.

She called me almost immediately. One of her chapters is just about done, and she works on the other a little every day. She thinks she can get them done by the end of December. She wasn't put off by my inquiry at all, and she seems to share my eagerness to have this thing done. So, hey! It's the best response I could hope for.

We talked for over an hour. She is absolutely dreading the return to campus next semester because she doesn't want to deal with the I-heard-what-happened-and-I'm-so-sorrys or the mutually horrifying how-is-the-babys. She's had two of the latter so far, both off campus. But even the former lays her out for hours.

I don't know how she's going to do it. I turn it over in my mind as if it were a puzzle I could actually solve.

On my end I'm eagerly anticipating the end of this semester. It's so close I can taste it! But there is a crap-ton of work to do between now and then.

I need advice

2010-11-19T11:10:00.003-05:00

It's about time for me to gently approach my colleague D about her part of a textbook we're writing together. I've written, edited, and finalized my five chapters. A third co-author has done the same with her two. One of D's has been drafted (still rough and incomplete), and the other one hasn't been shared. It's the only thing holding up the textbook manuscript that should have been submitted over a year ago.

I've been frustrated because this project has been consistently on the bottom of her priority list. She would constantly take on new writing/service commitments that would then take precedent over this one. It's been an issue for a couple years. I was more sympathetic when she was in the run-up to tenure, because research articles are MUCH more important than textbooks in tenure decisions. But after a bunch of articles came out, and it was clear that tenure was assured, she didn't change her pattern at all. This was still last priority.

As you may recall, D is the colleague whose baby died during childbirth in August.

Before the tragedy I offered to work on her chapters, framing it in terms of "you must be scrambling to get stuff done." She declined, saying that she works on the chapters in 15 minute bursts anyway, and so she'll be able to work on them after the baby comes. I was skeptical of that, but it's a hard thing to challenge because in academic culture she sort of "owns" those two chapters. I can't just take them over, but at the same time she's deaf to my entreaties to just get this damned thing done.

Today I got an email from the editor, politely inquiring about the status of the project, and I've been thinking it's time to ask D where she's at with it. She's physically recovered, working on other stuff, and attending department meetings (where I wear my most belly-hiding outfits).

If I just ask what's going on, she'll probably say that she's planning to turn her attention to the chapters soon. But then it won't happen. And she's back in the classroom in January. I can offer again to do some work on her chapters, but I imagine she'll decline.

Dealing with this textbook issue has been an intractable puzzle all along, but now it's REALLY snarly because she's grieving her horrible loss, and I am visibly pregnant at 27 weeks. I don't want to be a jerk, but I want to get this thing done before I (hopefully) get super busy.

Your thoughts? What can I appropriately do? Do I need to just let this go?

25 weeks & the name closet

2010-11-01T20:02:00.005-04:00

Today is the start of the 25th week and it's all good. Frequent mild heartburn, but I'm learning how to prevent it. J finally got to feel the baby move last weekend, and it was a great moment. He's not the most effusive person in the world, but he positively glowed.

Against my better judgment, I have been sharing our name deliberations with people IRL. The only wrinkled nose I've gotten so far was from my dental hygienist, but that didn't bother me.

Last weekend, though, J and I were with his folks, and when his dad asked if we were thinking of names I just clammed up. J and I both said that, yes, we've been thinking, and then J, not knowing what I'd prefer, left it to me whether to say more. I just sat there. His dad adeptly changed the subject.

I was surprised at myself -- I'll tell my dental hygienist, but not them? -- but in retrospect it makes sense. J's dad and stepmother aren't mean, but they're socially maladroit. They're very verbal about their trivial judgments. For example, I've never met the stepmother's cousins (who she's really close to), but I know that they are both fat, because somehow that gets mentioned every time they come up in conversation. What's weird is that his folks don't seem to think poorly of the cousins, or fat people in general, but they still feel compelled to remark on it.

The stepmother is definitely a "piece of work" -- abrupt, insensitive, fussy, with a startlingly lack of self-awareness. She's the person thrusting her menu at the server while the server is still trying to write down her order. She narrates the minutia of her activities to us like a six-year old would -- with no thought of whether or not it's amusing or interesting to us. J's dad is much better. He's sort of like Pat Sajak. Not smiley or especially genuine, but friendly.

They bicker. They eagerly point out one another's errors, except that usually it's that one person mishears what the other said. They could both use some hearing aids. It's not hostile, but the whole interaction is drawn out, purposeless, and tiresomely frequent.

When his dad asked about names, the four of us were on our way home from a restaurant. With the incessant yakking and bickering, I had just kind of gone to my happy place. I was startled to suddenly have a question addressed to me, but I guess my instincts guided me well. They're the kind of people who should learn the name as a fait accompli.

I'm so glad MY parents are normal!

A Village

2010-10-27T22:07:00.005-04:00

I was looking for something in my miscellaneous clippings file the other day, and I came across this 2007 NY Times article about a planned intergenerational community combining retirees and families raising children impacted by foster care. The goal is to create a close-knit community that can better support these children and provide elders with fulfilling ongoing intergenerational relationships. The first such community was in Illinois in 1994. The article says that the Kellogg Foundation is funding a replication of this model in 18 states. I want to follow up on that. What a brilliant idea!

Also, recently, the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute put out a report highlighting the critical need for post-adoption services to help these new families thrive.

Taken together, it seems like we're getting smarter about adoption, which makes me so happy. First, it stops being a weird, shameful secret. Next, we all realize that, while it's a different path (and therefore, not for everyone), it's not second best. Now we're at phase three, where we're ready to acknowledge the major challenges that many of these families face without diminishing the joy of new families springing to life.

*********************

Pregnancy update: 24 weeks! Have gained 3lbs a week for the last 3 weeks (blurgh). Got great baby stuff from a dear friend last weekend. Have to figure out where to put it. J still hasn't felt the baby move, even when we say, "C'mon, baby. Give daddy a high five!" Gathering recommendations for pediatricians. Bought life insurance for both of us. Feels very grown up.

Parallel universe

2010-10-20T09:54:00.002-04:00

An interesting first-person article appeared on Babble.com written by a woman who tried to conceive after 40. It was interesting to me because she's not nearly as tied in knots as most of us bloggers are.

It made me think of other women I know IRL who aren't exactly neutral about parenting, but are easily able to shift to child-free living as a plan B. A couple of them would be happy to be parents if they found the right partner, but the lack of a partner (a sadness in itself) doesn't always translate into teeth-gnashing about parenthood. I also remember a good friend from grad school saying that she suddenly had this intense desire to have a baby when she turned 30, but within two years, she says with a shrug, it went away.

I can understand people who choose child-free living as a first choice, but as someone who has been in the grip of baby fever for close to 10 years now, it is still surprising to encounter people for whom child-free living is a really pretty good second choice. I guess those people don't blog.

And speaking of conceiving after 40, I just learned that a friend of a friend is in the 18th or so week of a pregnancy at the age of 44. They had been using some interventions (I don't know the details) but conceived in an unassisted cycle. It makes me so happy to hear stories like that.

October 15

2010-10-15T18:02:00.007-04:00

I posted "Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day" as my status on FB, and it was interesting to see that a bunch of people that I don't know all that well "liked" it. I wonder who has had losses or who has seen it happen to people they love. I like to think this is making space for people to grieve out loud. Yeah, fellow-professor-who-seems-awesome-but-who-I-don't-really-know! We both get it!

I know that some people who had losses at 8 weeks like I did experience it as the death of a baby, and I absolutely respect that. It wasn't (and isn't) like that for me. Instead it was a lot like getting divorced a few years ago. No person died then either, but something died. I loved him like crazy, but his untreated mental health issues meant I couldn't make a life with him. That marriage and my winter pregnancy both started out as beautifully promising and very wanted things, and they both turned out to be ... I dunno. "Non-starters" is flippantly slangy, and "not meant to be" is something ignorant people say. I guess the phrase I want is "sadly unsustainable".

Those two periods of heavy-duty grieving felt a lot alike. Suddenly bolting upright in the middle of the night sobbing before I even realized I was awake. Staring at the ceiling. Pretending to be my regular self while at work (an exhausting facade to maintain). Watching people talk to me instead of actually listening. Not being able to immerse myself in anything.

The biggest difference was that I came back to life on a fairly steady trajectory post-divorce, but after the m/c it was just a seemingly endless morass of waiting for my cycles to resume and then being benched with a cyst, all the while watching months tick by. I had some good days and moments in that period, but I wasn't really healing.

I'm thinking of lost babies and pregnancies today, but I'm also sending my love to those currently ensnared in the maddeningly chronic loss-process of infertility.

***********************

Brief pregnancy update: End of 22nd week. Heartburn. Nutella. Have to hold my breath when I fold over to tie my shoes. Almost 100% maternity pants. Filled out hospital paperwork; read "Mother's Name" and thought, "Why do they want to know my mother's name? (pause) Oh, wait! I'm the mother!"

22 weeks

2010-10-10T00:11:00.002-04:00

This Monday, I'll start the 22nd week gestation. It's all good, so far. I still feel great.

Hitting 22 weeks makes me think of Rebecca K, at The Road Less Traveled, who, in a horrible turn, went into unstoppable pre-term labor towards the end of the 22nd week of her pregnancy with her daughter Lillian. Subsequently they learned it was likely due to an asymptomatic infection. Update: they're near completion of an embryo adoption! A beautiful process forging wonderful connections.

Rebecca's story is yet another reminder that tomorrow isn't promised. All I can do is love this child right now. And that I do.; more every day.

Two excellent documentaries about transracial adoption (currently online)

2010-09-27T16:54:00.004-04:00

Via the NYTimes, I learned about two award-winning documentaries on PBS's POV series that are both available to watch online for a limited time. Apparently there's a third in the series, but I don't think it's available yet.

The first is called Wo Ai Ni (I Love You) Mommy and it centers on a Chinese girl adopted by an American family at, ostensibly, seven years of age, though her mom thinks she's a bit older. She has a club foot and dropped wrists, which, apparently, in China means she doesn't have a future - no chance at a career or a spouse. In the documentary we see her meeting her new mom for the first time (terrified!) and we meet the loving foster family that she was in since she was abandoned as a 2 or 3 year old. The documentary follows her journey for a year or two. The new parents (and mom in particular) don't come across particularly well, but the girl thrives, and it's fascinating to witness. It's available to watch online until November 30.

The second is called Off and Running, and the protagonist (and co-author!) is Avery: a 17-year old African-American adopted as a newborn and raised in a loving family with two Jewish moms, a slightly older brother, and a much younger brother. Both brothers are transracially adopted as well, and the siblings have a beautifully engaging rapport. The thrust of the film is that she wants to establish contact with her birth mother and birth family. She does, but it doesn't go quite according to plan. This smart, driven, expressive, mature young woman is thrown into a period of turmoil, and her parents feel helpless. She gets her legs under her again towards the end of the film, which is so great because you're rooting for her with everything you've got. It's available until December 7.

Both films provide an unflinching look at the emotional cost these children bear from being separated from their first caregivers. And, in doing that they don't diminish the beauty of families forming from previously unrelated people. They're great on that level. But even better is that they're both about race. Both sets of adoptive parents (white in this case) do a lot to honor their childrens' heritage, but when it comes to *race* they're at a loss to understand. One of the privileges of whiteness is not having to think about race, to assume that it's not really a big deal or that it's just a synonym for culture. In both films we briefly see therapists specializing in transracial adoption who really tell it like it is. It's so great to have this shown so clearly.

I'm still strongly drawn to adoption. I'm obviously thrilled to be pregnant (20 weeks today!) and look forward to welcoming a newborn in February, but I can absolutely see how adoptive parents fall head-over-heels in love with their children to the same overwhelming degree. Maybe it's because I've had adoption on the brain for years now, but the joy of pregnancy and the joy of impending parenthood are distinct features on my emotional landscape.

HOLY @&%(&#!

2010-09-25T15:05:00.002-04:00

There is a PERSON in there!

I felt the baby move for the first time today when I was stretched out flat on my back in my underpants doing a crossword en route to a nice autumn weekend nap.

"Hey ... that's not a gas bubble!"

I'm absolutely blissed out. I can only feel him or her when I'm stretched flat. I can't feel it when I'm on my side or if I'm bent at the waist or hips. J hasn't been able to feel it yet.

I have been joking about having the baby in me, as in: "The baby and I are gonna go take a shower." or "The baby and I ate the rest of the ice cream." It's not really a joke now.

Though I retain the right to justify anything I eat with "the baby wanted it."

Ultrasound and such

2010-09-23T20:40:00.000-04:00

We had the anatomical ultrasound yesterday, and it all looks great. I had a scare when I heard this message: "This is Dr. so-and-so's office. We got your ultrasound results. Please call us at XXX-XXXX and ask to speak to a nurse." Icy wash of fear. I was NOT about to call them from my office. I grabbed my crap and raced home. It turned out that the u/s didn't get a good look at the kidneys, so they were recommended I go for another in 2-3 weeks. That's all? Whew!

We've got the gender-reveal card sealed up and stuck on the fridge. I gotta say, it was HARD to take my eyes off the screen when the sonographer was going in for the money shot. But we managed. The card isn't tempting though.

In this book, a lovely set of essays about adoptive parenting, one author recounting the adoption process wrote something to the effect of, "At that point, adoption stopped being something that was happening to me, and started being something that was happening to her." I'm starting to feel that way about this pregnancy. It's obviously happening to me (us, really), but it's also happening to his or her. It's a nice thought to sit with.

The big gender reveal

2010-09-11T07:56:00.002-04:00

J and I were talking about whether to find out the sex at the anatomical ultrasound, and I mentioned the option of having the technician write it on a card and seal it (thanks, N!) and then we could open it on J's birthday which is also Christmas eve. He LOVED that plan! So we'll do that.

When we open it, we'll have his family in the room and my family on the phone. We could have his 94-year old grandmother do the honors, which would be really sweet.

Whew. One decision made. Umpteen gazillion to go.

Whew!

2010-09-10T15:32:00.003-04:00

I had a regular pre-natal appointment today and the heartbeat is still there! She had to chase Glowworm around with the doppler to hear the heartbeat for more than a few seconds, which gave me my first frisson of motherly pride. That's it, kiddo! Explore your five-inch world!

It happened again, where I must have been really anxious and not known it, because I felt vaguely out of sorts in the hours leading up to the appointment and then a huge wash of relief when I heard the heartbeat. Next stop: anatomical ultrasound, September 22nd. We have a week and a half to decide whether to learn the sex or not. I'd rather not find out, J would like to, but neither of us feel strongly about it.

In other exciting news, our kitchen remodel is just about DONE! The flooring store is sending a carpenter to fix the door that the installer cut crookedly (to keep it from scraping the new floor), but other than that, we're done with tradespeople. Now it's just on us to finish caulking, priming, and painting window trim and crown molding -- hopefully this weekend. We've been without a kitchen since late June. I can finally COOK!

I've been busy getting the semester underway, so I've been reading updates (YAY, BUNNY!!) but not commenting much. Will rectify that in 3...2...1...

Ten notes from 16w5d

2010-09-04T09:41:00.004-04:00

1. I've gained 3 pounds so far. I'm pudgy around the middle (and, it seems, in the badonkadonk) but I don't have an identifiable baby bump yet.

2. Besides the obvious prolly-gonna-have-a-behbeh, the best things about being pregnant are (a) I'm filling out my A-cups for the first time in my life -- I'm not exactly "stacked" but it's still kind of fun -- and (b) I don't get those hot-weather pimples I usually get. Nice!

3. I'm "out" at work. It's mildly annoying and severely ironic how some people ask me how I'm feeling every time they see me. I don't need care and concern NOW. I needed it back when I was benched for months between IUIs because of an ovarian cyst and taking friggin' birth control pills. People who easily conceive probably think it's a perfectly logical question. But I keep thinking, "I'm FINE. I'm pregnant fer cryin-out-loud. Why wouldn't I be fine?"

4. I got a motherlode (pun totally intended) of hand-me-down maternity clothes -- good ones! -- from a colleague who is about my size. I like a lot of them! I think I'll only have to buy a pair of jeans and maybe one more pair of dress pants, depending on how big I get as the semester progresses. That's awesome, because I hate, hate, hate shopping. Hate. It.

5. I have an appt with my new OB (who delivers at the bigger hospital with a NICU) next Friday.

6. I'm looking forward to that appt, because even being 16 weeks along, the symptoms (and the belly) still come and go pretty dramatically. Sometimes I don't feel pregnant at all. It'll be nice to hear the heartbeat again. The anatomical u/s is in 2.5 weeks - looking forward to that too.

7. I frequently shake my head in disbelief about how fortunate I am. Not counting the three years of trying to conceive between 30 and 33, this stay in the land of IF has been relatively short. And the timing of this pregnancy couldn't be better. I got to take long first-trimester siestas during the summer when I wasn't teaching. My energy level picked up in time to start the fall semester. I'll be about 30 weeks when I'm done teaching, so probably not uncomfortably huge. My spring teaching schedule kind of sucked, and now it appears I won't have to do it. AND, I'm applying for a year-long sabbatic for the next academic year. If approved, I'll be doing sabbatic stuff about half-time that year (at half-pay). This kid would be 18 months old before s/he goes into full-time day care in September 2012.

8. After I miscarried last January, a good friend said something about how women have stories to tell each other about experiences of loss, and that my m/c will be a story I'll tell. I can't quite reproduce what she said -- but it was surprisingly comforting and uncharacteristically sentimental of her. I'm finding that she's right. A lot of people at work ask me how my colleague D is doing since the loss of her baby during childbirth about a month ago. And when they ask, they talk about their IF struggles and losses or those of people they know. Quite a few second-trimester miscarriages. I don't know if people are telling D these stories, and if they do, I don't know if it helps. I doubt it.

9. I feel driven to tell people of my rough road to get here. A lot of people ask me if D's tragedy freaks pregnant-me out, and that's my opening to say that the "pregnancy=baby" bubble was burst for me a long time ago.

10. I've had some unexpected waves of mourning in this pregnancy. I've been missing my maternal grandmother who died about 10 years ago and my paternal grandmother who died just over a year ago; I'm sad my kid won't know them. And Js mother died about 4 years ago, before J and I met. I've been especially sad lately that I'll never know her directly and that she didn't get to be a grandma. She would have been FANTASTIC at it.

What is "natural?"

2010-08-25T10:59:00.003-04:00

I really should be working on syllabi instead of blogging, but here I am!

I'm 15w3d and feeling good. I decided to change providers so that I can change where I'm planning to deliver. I was going to deliver the same place as my colleague D that lost her baby. The local OBGYNs that I've been seeing for well-woman care for years deliver there, and it's got good numbers and great recommendations from people I know. And I don't think anyone in that hospital did anything wrong (neither does D), but we have another equally excellent option in the area. A bigger hospital even, with a NICU, and so I recently decided "why not?" I gotta make the phone calls this week to find a provider in that network. I'll have to drive a lot further for all those appointments, but it's still only like 25-35 minutes.

D's loss also got me thinking about L&D options, which also got me thinking about how slippery the idea of "natural" is.

For starters, I don't like it when unassisted conception is called "natural conception" or vaginal/unmedicated birth is called "natural birth", because it implies that anything else is "unnatural." It's subtly stigmatizing. It wasn't that long ago that people tried to keep adoption a secret, as if previously unrelated people forming a family was "unnatural," when really, that's how families form! The stigma has mostly lifted from adoption, but not as much from donor gametes. I was struck by that trumped up unscientific survey done by the conservative Institute for American Values claiming that teens who had been conceived with donor gametes have all sorts of identity problems. The authors claimed, ultimately, that donor gametes (I'm paraphrasing) "deny these children the opportunity to grow up with both biological parents." Utterly illogical. The authors are actively trying to stigmatize donor sperm and donor eggs as unnatural. It's hateful, really; manipulating healthy skepticism about modern medical technologies to make unsubstantiated moral judgments against the people that choose them.

And take c-sections. They are just the last 10 minutes of an amazing biological journey, but some women who have them can't shake the feeling that they somehow failed in a "natural" duty. Or that their child's beginnings are hampered. Yeah, well, Rikki Lake can suck it.

The GMO-derived insulin that my Type 1 diabetic dad gets delivered through a little computerized pump at least 3 times a day is all sorts of unnatural, but no one judges him for using it.

At close examination the boundary between "natural" and "unnatural" is meaningless and laden with unexamined moral claims. Not every culture is so hung up on separating humanity from the rest of nature or so moralizing about technology.

Those aren't new thoughts of mine, but rethinking labor & delivery options in the wake of D's tragedy showed me that I still had (have?) some knee-jerk reactions against interventions in birth. Before, I envisioned myself strenuously pushing back against hospital tendencies to put laboring women on the intervention treadmill, and I'm still VERY skeptical about augmenting labor with pitocin, and I'd still prefer a low-intervention experience, but I gotta say, I've got a much more open mind.

Different topic: Three BFPs on my bloglist and one in real life! That's a start, universe. Keep going!!

NY Times article about how others respond to trauma

2010-08-18T08:32:00.004-04:00

There was an interesting piece in NYTimes.com this morning about how people respond to other peoples' traumas. Much of the article focused on those who disappear or offer what one expert calls "pseudo-care." That is, vaguely offering to do stuff but not really following up. Reading this doesn't make a person want to share more of her IF experience with others!

One line that resonated especially loudly was a quote from one expert: “Families say over and over, ‘It’s such a lonely time and I don’t have the energy to educate my friends and family, yet they don’t have a clue.’ ”

Second trimester land

2010-08-16T13:16:00.002-04:00

I'm officially in the second trimester today (14w0d). And I shared the news with my bandmates and some other folks in the city I used to live in. That was actually pretty fun, except when one bandmate gestured toward my belly and asked "So is that baby?" Ummm, no, it's bloat and pudge. Thanks so much for noticing.

And the gigs we played were FUN! My enthusiasm for the band has been flagging as of late, and I really needed a couple fun ones to reignite it.

And here in blogland, two BFPs in my blog list along with some excellent IVF retrieval/fert results. That's not quite a deluge, but it's a start!

Time for more victories

2010-08-11T12:56:00.002-04:00

Trinity, Leslie, Finch, Susie, babyinterrupted, and I have all been humming along with pregnancies for many weeks now. Our neighborhood of the ALI community is MORE than ready for some more family-building breakthroughs. It's been a while, judging by my bloglist.

And we've got lots of candidates right now. Adele, Bunny, Lisa, CGD, Egg, and Kelly are in the midst of some promising IUI cycles. Mo & Will and Lisa got great numbers for IVF retrievals. Al, Maddie, and N are cycling beautifully. Rain, Sarah, HopeBPatient, and Barren Babe are working through big decisions or transitions on their way to family building. And many others are focused on maintaining valued relationships and well being in a quieter time.

It is well past time for some BFPs or DE or adoption milestones! Here's hoping for a deluge of them in the days to come.

Good numbers and the telling

2010-08-09T16:10:00.004-04:00

I saw my OB today (13w0d). I heard the heartbeat. I didn't think that would be that big a deal, but it really thrilled me. I also got my results back from the NT scan. The likelihood of Down syndrome is 1 in 487. The likelihood of Trisomy 18 is 1 in 109,000. (I LOVE that last one!) These risks are substantially less than for 37 year-olds as a whole. So I'll happily skip the amnio.

I've apparently been denying some of my pregnant-after-IF anxiety, because while I didn't feel anxious going into today's appointment, I felt a HUGE relief coming out of it. I felt weepy even.

At this point, I'm thinking a lot about when/how to tell people. Leslie, I'm watching your experience closely! I think I'll tell my band-mates this weekend when we have a couple gigs. Though, before that I want to tell my ex-husband and the lovely man I was seeing post-divorce who was NOT a co-parenting candidate (went there, did that). I don't want either of them to find out second-hand. They live in the same community as my band-mates. It's where I went to grad school, which is about two hours away from where I live now.

I promised my Mom she could start telling people next week. That's in another state and doesn't overlap with my network at home, so that's fine. My parents and siblings know, and a few friends. J's parents and grandmother and a few friends know.

The main thing is that I just don't want to talk about being pregnant all the time. Some people may think that I'll be losing out on a big part of the fun, but, dang, I'm very happy about being this far along with such a good prognosis. The chit-chat just doesn't matter to me.

At work I've told D (I told her early on so that she wouldn't worry about being all pregnant in my face), a close mentor, and my department chair. But no one else. I'll probably be out by mid-September when the spring semester teaching schedule is due and my department colleagues notice that I'm not on it. Which means I need to work stuff out with the dean and HR soon.

I know who I'm NOT telling, ever: Facebook. I'll put something on fb when/if a little one joins our family. No belly shots. No u/s pictures. None of that.

Next steps: early September OB appointment, late September anatomical u/s.

In other news. J has decided he's like to drop some weight and set a goal of 20 pounds. Being a man, he's lost 8 already in a week and a half without doing anything dramatic. Jealous!

One last post about my colleague's tragedy

2010-08-06T19:21:00.003-04:00

A few questions about D and her daughter arose in the comments on my last couple posts. So just a few more comments about that here:

1. The cause of her daughter's death was the sudden, complete separation of the placenta, not the cord. I guess LOTS of babies are born with the cord wrapped around their necks, even twice. For her, it seemed to hamper her progress down the birth canal. When that's the case though, what usually happens is that the baby gets tired as contractions continue, her heart-rate dips, and they do a c-section. The sudden absolute placental abruption was just a horrible fluke. They did the c-section as soon as humanly possible, but it was just too late.

2. I was at first dismayed to learn that Denise was still in the birth center. But when I went to visit her, it seemed like a good thing. It's a large, lovely, comfortable, PRIVATE room, which you probably can't get in the surgical ward. And the wing is so new and well sound-proofed that you don't hear other families at all. There aren't photos of babies everywhere. Just a few soft-focus images in the hallways of pre-school aged kids in Amish clothing meditating in meadows. Not particularly evocative of real-life kids.

3. In interviews I read, Elizabeth McCracken praised a website for bereaved parents called glowinthewoods.com. They had a great section on how to help grieving friends. I forwarded that link to my coworkers. We've talked about how to sustain our proactive support far beyond the initial flurry, especially when we all get busy with the start of the academic year. I think together we can make a positive difference in their healing.

4. About me: In a weird way, D's family's tragedy has reduced (rather than heightened) my anxiety about my own pregnancy. It's the clearest possible reminder that most of this process is absolutely out of my hands. If I were at all religious, I guess this would express this feeling as faith -- not faith that I'll get what I want, but faith that whatever happens will be something I can handle.

Being a thoroughly secular humanist, it just means to me that I'm pregnant today, and that's enough. I keep thinking of this Robert Frost quote that a cancer-survivor friend posted on fb last week: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."

Update on my bereaved colleague

2010-08-05T14:47:00.003-04:00

I visited my colleague D today. She's still in the hospital recovering from the c-section. As you can imagine, she's utterly shell-shocked. She looks pale and haunted.

She told me about what happened. It all happened really fast. She had been pushing with no progress for a couple hours; with a pitocin drip and an epidural. Then the midwife told her not to push with the next couple contractions while she went to consult with the OB on duty. In the two minutes when she was gone, there were two super-strong contractions that D could feel despite the epidural, and then the fetal heart rate suddenly dropped precipitously. The nurse in the room immediately started preparing for a c-section as she called the midwife and OB, and they were already wheeling D to the operating room in the seconds it took the midwife and OB to arrive at D's room. But it was just too late. The most likely scenario is that the placenta suddenly and completely detached with those two strong contractions. The fact that the cord was wrapped tight around the baby's neck likely explains why there was no progress with pushing, but it didn't directly contribute to her demise.

I've been taking my own pregnancy day by day all along here, but D's tragedy certainly deepens that feeling. It's dampened my desire to tell people about the pregnancy. Not because I'm scared, but because the pregnancy feels less like real "news." It's like the difference between applying for a job and actually getting the job. You don't tell everyone about the application.

The few people that know I'm pregnant have been worried that I would take D's daughter's death harder than other people, but the truth is that the whole "pregnancy = baby" bubble was burst for me a long time ago so it doesn't change my outlook much.

In the meantime, I'll make a donation in D's daughter's honor to the March of Dimes, borrow a kitchen to make them a chicken pot pie (mine's undergoing renovation), and try to think of a nice gesture to honor her memory in the Christmas season. Maybe an ornament with her birthstone in it.

I read a few interviews with Elizabeth McCracken, the novelist who wrote an acclaimed memoir about the stillbirth of her son, titled An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. She emphasized that the worst thing after the disaster is that so many people acted as if it didn't happen; they would never mention it. I won't make that mistake.

That made me think of our recent discussions in the blogosphere about the hurtful silence surrounding infertility. My m/c wasn't out there for the world to see, so if people didn't talk about it, it's largely because very few of them knew. But everyone saw D's big belly. She can't often choose whether to disclose her experience to those she interacts with the most. People's silence must be even more bothersome, then, because you know it's deliberate.

It's another reminder that so much of good fortune comes down to dumb luck.

Awful news about my pregnant colleague

2010-08-04T09:24:00.003-04:00

I've mentioned that I have a pregnant co-worker.

She lost her baby girl at birth last night. Pitocin --> pushing --> loss of fetal heartbeat --> emergency c-section. But it was too late. The cord was wrapped tight around the baby's neck, and she was already gone. Malpractice or just one of those things? I don't know.

She'll be in the hospital a few more days recovering from the c-section. The person that told me about it said, "She's trying to get moved out of the maternity ward." DAMMIT! One shouldn't have to TRY for that! It should be immediately offered and carried out! MY GOD!

The tables have turned in an awful way. A few months ago, I had to grit my teeth through all the pregnancy & baby chit-chat that her condition inspired. In a month or two, it'll likely be me that's publicly pregnant. I hope people have the good sense to keep a lid on that kind of talk when she's around. I can do my part to dampen it, but people forget that kind of thing.

My colleague was attended by the one midwife that delivers at this hospital birth center -- otherwise you're seen by whatever OB is on duty -- and a doula. I was thinking I would do the same if she had a good experience with them. We're similarly reluctant to undergo unnecessary interventions. But now, of course, I'm rethinking that. Was there too much emphasis on avoiding a c-section? On whose part? I may never know. I hate to think I might have a safer experience because of this terrible tragedy.

There are just no guarantees in life.

First-trimester u/s

2010-08-02T19:54:00.002-04:00

We had the scan this morning - at 12w0d. The glowworm is the size it should be with a good 156 bpm. The NT fold was normal. It'll be a week before the bloodwork comes back, so I don't have probabilities for Down or Trisomy 18 yet. But it was really nice to see a little cutie with two arms and two legs. We're never totally out of the woods, but something inside unclenched when we got to see it.

The best part was that there was another patients name on the computer the first time the tech did the u/s. After we noticed that, the tech had to do the whole thing again! So we got twice as much imaging time as normal. SCORE!

When the tech asked me to put my pants down around my hips for the u/s, I thought, "Oh, that's right - they sometimes do u/s from the OUTSIDE!"

Funny item from itmademyday.com

2010-07-24T11:05:00.001-04:00

Quoted:

My sister (who has five kids) was making fun of my wife (who has had three miscarriages) for not having any kids. My wife waited until my sister wasn’t looking, then gave my sister’s 3 year old son a permanent marker, telling him it was magic and that anything he drew with it would be there forever. IM his D and mine!

Week 10: 1/4 of the way there?

2010-07-19T12:56:00.002-04:00

It's week 10, and so far so good. Nothing alarming has happened; I'm just kind of waiting for my next appointment on August 2nd (the NT screen). Except for being bloated and lethargic, all my symptoms are small and manageable. And the lethargy may just be that I still haven't adjusted to a coffee-free existence yet.

Four ways I've surprised myself during this pregnancy:

1. I'm spending more time fretting about the weight I'm (hopefully) going to gain than I thought. I started this cycle on the heavy end of my range, and when I add 30 pounds to that, I just about hyperventilate. I haven't gained any weight since IUI day, even though I'm eating more often, but it should start creeping up soon. While contemplating pregnancy in the past, I never gave the weight gain much thought. And after being in IF land, I never thought I would care. Turns out I do! I'll gain the weight, but ... damn!

2. I ate a corn dog at the county fair last weekend. I'm generally ooked out by processed meats, and lately almost all meats, and I never thought I would intentionally ingest nitrates during such a hard-won pregnancy. But damn, it was good! Most of my diet this summer has been organic dairy, fresh fruit, salads, and whole grains, so I don't feel bad about the corn dog. I'm just surprised that I suddenly HAD TO HAVE IT!

3. I also ate feta. My department did some super late hiring this year, and we were all out to lunch at a Greek restaurant with a candidate. I ordered a Greek salad, and right after that my very pregnant colleague did too, but she specified no feta. Since I'm not out to my coworkers, I couldn't very well change my order. I tell myself that it was probably domestic and therefore pasteurized.

4. I helped paint the kitchen. Though we got zero VOC paints that really didn't smell at all. And we had a door and two big windows open. It felt safe, but I'm still surprised to find myself even taking a chance. On the other hand, I was SURE To be very scarce during tear-out and other parts of the kitchen remodel that would likely release lead dust. And we sealed off the kitchen well during those phases too.

I guess I'm just trying to just be an ordinary pregnant woman, underneath all the conditional language about "if this one works out." And I guess not being overly obsessive about safety is part of clinging to that identity.

Just in case you didn't see it ...

2010-07-17T10:56:00.003-04:00

Leslie and I likely have a lot of the same readers, but in case you hadn't seen it, check out her awesome post on a recent Self article about infertility. There's a link to the article itself (pretty good!) and the comments to Leslie's post are great too.

XKCD cartoon about getting pregnant

2010-07-13T10:37:00.002-04:00

I love XKCD. Check it out here.

W8d7 or w9d0?

2010-07-11T14:00:00.002-04:00

I don't know how we do those calendrics. At any rate, I'm at the end of the week in which I miscarried last time. That feels good. The next milestone is the first-trimester screen two weeks from tomorrow (w11d1, I think).

I have been thinking about that somewhat controversial New York magazine article about how miserable real-life parenting is. The aptly thematic title is "All Joy and No Fun." The main claim seems to be that the culture of intensive parenting (termed "concerted cultivation" by sociologist Annette Laureau) has made parenting a lot of anxious work, and and now that people choose parenthood as a project of personal fulfillment (rather than economic necessity) the day-to-day drudgery and anxiety of it punctures their lofty expectations. Broadsheet had a great response to the article (including a good synopsis).

That dovetailed with thoughts I've been having lately about the trap of "This One Thing." At some point or another a lot of people fall into a trap of thinking that their lives would be perfect if only This One Thing were different: if only they had a partner, if only they lost weight, if only they lived in a different city, if only they owned a house, etc. But it never works; if they get that One Thing, they still aren't magically transported into a life of endless bliss, so they choose some other Thing, and the cycle starts again.

My bipolar ex-husband had the worst case of This One Thing that I've ever seen. And his Things always involved major purchases. Yah. Unsustainable.

It makes me wonder. Is having kids my Thing? Am I putting too many expectations on the experience? Why do I want this so badly? I can't really say. But maybe that's OK.

First OB appt: w8d4

2010-07-08T11:42:00.004-04:00

I had my first OB appointment. Not all that interesting really. No u/s; it was just like the annual "check under the hood" appointment together with lots of health history questions and blood work.

I decided to do the first-trimester screen for Downs and Trisomy 18. Some people skip it because they plan on doing an amniocentesis anyway. I don't think I'll do the amnio, unless the first screen is positive. I have nothing but respect for those who decide differently, but I wouldn't terminate a Downs pregnancy. In the case of Downs it would be nice to be able to grieve the child I'm NOT having and move on to celebrate the child I AM having BEFORE the child arrives. It sounds simple; I'm sure it's not.

I'm feeling pretty confident about this pregnancy (unlike Leslie about hers - go show her some love!), but my interest in adoption & foster care hasn't waned. Lately, I've been thinking more about the ones that age out of foster care. It breaks my heart to think of an 18 year old without a family to fall back on. I'm thinking about mentoring young women in that situation. If I get real ambitious, I'll see if I can create some formal program at my college (maybe in collaboration with the nearby community college that sends a lot of transfers our way) to specifically recruit and support aged-out students. In addition to academic and logistic support, I want to make sure they have somewhere to go on Thanksgiving and that they get care packages during exam week.

Working on Step 5

2010-07-05T09:12:00.002-04:00

This is w8d1; the week I miscarried last time. But so far so good. No cramping, no blood, appointment with OB office on Thursday.

Needless to say, I reeeeeaaallly hope this one works out. If it does, I'll be on maternity leave from teaching in spring 2011, and hopefully (be still by heart) on sabbatic leave for the 2011-2012 school year. On my campus one can request one semester at full pay or one year at half-pay. I've been saving my pennies and will go for the full year. How perfect would that be?

My daydreaming notwithstanding, I'm doing better with living in the present. Something awful may happen between now and February, but today I'm an expectant mom, and that's good enough for now!

w7d1: so far, so good

2010-06-28T15:19:00.003-04:00

J and I went off to the U/S late this morning and it all looks good. The little glowworm and its entourage of structures are all the sizes they should be, and it's in a good location. They estimated a due date of Feb 14th, gave me a handout about stuff like morning sickness and not smoking, and told me to call my OB. And that was that. Step 4 - check!

I feel a flush of survivor's guilt. It's been such a sad month for the brainy girls IF tribe, with terrible blows raining down on so many wonderful, loving women. Why did I get the lucky break? It's just as senseless as the losses. Leaving the clinic today (before I went through the waiting room to exit) I hid my "Congratulations" handout and u/s picture within the generic receipt so that I wouldn't inadvertently parade them in front of waiting patients.

I'm obviously not out of the woods yet, but I've been feeling a lot more confident that this one will work out. Which of course means that I'm back to reading Deborah Gray's lyrical prose about attachment in adoption. I'm weird like that.

Feeling better (because I'm feeling worse)

2010-06-24T09:03:00.004-04:00

I woke up nauseous again (just in time for a 5 hour car trip today), I have more boob soreness, and I haven't seen anything worrisome on bathroom tissue, so I'm feeling more optimistic. Hypothesis A is that my body simply acclimated to the higher hormone levels on Tuesday (and now they're climbing again). Hypothesis B is the one that will not be articulated. I'll go with Hypothesis A today. I never thought I'd say this, but Monday, hurry up and get here!

Be careful what you wish for

2010-06-23T07:19:00.002-04:00

I've been feeling super nauseous, which seemed like a nice robust pregnancy-thing to feel, not pleasant but reassuring. Yesterday and this morning, though, were different. Yesterday I woke up nauseous, and had some crackers before I got out of bed, but I didn't get nauseous all day, even though I went up to 6 hours between meals. Most days, lately, I have to eat something every 3 hours or so to stave off the nausea. And this morning - no nausea to speak of.

Yesterday differed from the days before in a few ways: I stayed home all day (didn't ride in a car, which seemed to increase nausea the few days before); I was physically active all day (emptying out the kitchen, steaming off wall-paper); and I got up earlier than usual. Today I got up earlier too (after eating dinner later). But still, I miss that old, nauseous feeling!

Today is an all-day retreat with my department, and tomorrow J and I leave for Pennsylvania where I play three gigs with my band. Monday is the viability scan.

Universe, if I have to miscarry again, can I at least not start bleeding during (a) an all day meeting or (b) on stage?

Step 3.5 ...

2010-06-15T15:02:00.003-04:00

Get a nice high beta level the day after you come back from Las Vegas even though you got all weepy two days ago CONVINCED that the tightness you felt was an impending miscarriage instead of the absurdly large breakfast served to you at Hash-House-a-Go-Go.

Step 4 appointment is Monday the 28th, which will be 7w1d. It's the same day the carpenter comes to start tearing out the kitchen for a remodel. Yikes!

Onto Step 4

2010-06-06T06:07:00.003-04:00

Step 1. Get rid of cysts - CHECK
Step 2. Do IUI - CHECK
Step 3. Get a BFP at 2 weeks - CHECK

Step 4. Get the all-clear at 6-week viability scan
Step 5. Get through week 8 without a big bleed
Step 6. Get into second trimester without incident
Step 7. Dig out that box of birthing-&-babycare books
Step 8. Have transcendent, wondrous birth experience. OR have startlingly crappy birth experience. I don't really care as long as we get to ...
Step 9. Bring home a healthy little glowworm
Step 10. Raise glowworm to be kind, wise, and funny as hell

Symptoms?

2010-05-31T14:11:00.003-04:00

My periods have always been all over the place, but I poop with Teutonic regularity. Yesterday, at 8dpiui, my motility came to a screeching halt. That happened when I was pregnant last December. It's certainly not the most glamorous pregnancy symptom, but I'll take it! One week to go until I can POAS -- at the crack of dawn when we leave for our Las Vegas trip.

[[There. See, internal critic? I CAN write a short blog post!!]]

It's in there

2010-05-24T16:06:00.003-04:00

The first time we did an IUI (last December) I was a bit giddy. I didn't really think it would work, but it was a major concrete step forward and, hey, you never know! This time I've been trying like hell to think of it as another step on the way to parenthood regardless of the outcome, but I'm failing pretty hard. I'm only one day into the 2WW, and I'm not obsessing over it or staring at the calendar, but I can't shake the here-we-go-again pessimism. It's not the be-all-end-all, but there's still a lot at stake here.

The experience was fine. J was scruffy and haggard because he's been working nonstop toward a major, major writing deadline. He joked about going to the clinic unshaven and wearing a crap-ass grubby trench coat. I joked about handing him a $20 when he came out of Andrology. He said he would reply,"But where's my sandwich?!?"

J and I are leaving for vacation in Las Vegas on the day that would be our first beta. So we won't be doing blood tests until the following week, which is fine with me. The nurse said to use a couple HPTs and call in the results. I said, "OK. I'm pretty sure they have them there."

IUI scheduled and distress tolerance

2010-05-21T10:44:00.003-04:00

I had a monitoring appt this morning and I've got one nice big follicle at 20 mm and a good, thick lining of 13 mm. I'm to trigger tonight and Sunday morning is showtime. I'm not nearly as excited as I was the first time around, but I am more excited than I have been this cycle. I've figured out the key milestones if this IUI yields a conception: the 8-week mark (when I had a m/c last time around), the first trimester, the 2oth week when I'd likely be showing, and the due date, which would be right around my 38th birthday.

I've also been thinking about how my perspectives on being an educator and being a parent influence one another. Readings on teaching & learning, attachment, and helping traumatized children heal converge on a key point about distress tolerance.

Securely attached children get better and better at tolerating distress as they grow. Children with disrupted or insecure attachment often have very low distress tolerance. Meanwhile, distress tolerance is a necessary precondition for learning. Because learning always involves facing the unknown, which inherently causes distress. In schools, one is constantly evaluated on how well one learns new things, which amps up the natural distress of learning unfamiliar ideas and material. Basically, if you can't tolerate distress, you can't learn.

A student I had this term who seemed on the surface sullen and disengaged turned out to be just super-anxious. After he did an in-class presentation he said to me, "I hate doing presentations because I feel like I'm being judged." I wasn't sure what to say, because, dude, you ARE being judged. I'm grading your performance, and your peers are filling out little feedback sheets. I managed to say, "You know what? No one in the room knows more about your topic than you do, including me. You got nothing to hide." And then his paper on the same topic was actually pretty good; he actually made some original interpretative points and explained his evidence well. I hadn't seen any of that in any of his prior writing. There was authentic intellectual curiosity in there, which I hadn't seen in any of his other writing in two semesters.

In the past, I've often thought that students like that don't want to be in college, only enrolled because of inertia, and really should just drop out and get a plumbing apprenticeship ASAP. But reading about distress tolerance and working with that kid have changed my thinking.

The writings about raising kids who've been through the trauma of abuse, neglect, and disrupted attachment don't often come out and say that parents should have modest hopes for their children's adult success, but the little vignettes of success stories tend to be like this: "She had a baby at 20, and we were disappointed, but she's a loving devoted mom!" Or "He dropped out of community college, but he has a job with a landscaping company and is living in his own apartment!" Reading about Rain and McRuger's hugely difficult experience foster-parenting two very, very damaged little boys, I can see what a success it would be if those two could grow up and just stay out of the criminal justice or child-protection system. From Rain's narrative, their bio-parents obviously have pretty minimal distress tolerance themselves.

Even though I'm not actively parenting yet, it's been quite a journey so far!

Infertility treatment and autism?

2010-05-20T09:41:00.004-04:00

Slate had a little (and it turns out misleading) item about a couple recent papers presented at a conference suggesting that infertility treatments are linked to higher autism rates. I clicked through to the Time Magazine article to see more.

The author of the Time Magazine article starts out with the mother of one autistic child wondering aloud whether the fact that he was conceived by IVF had anything to do with his autism, and then writes that she "might be onto something." Science writer Claudia Wallis: why the HELL would you align your prose with the hard-to-shake fallacy that autism is a parent's fault?

Now onto the studies. Here's a quote from Time:

The study, conducted by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that autism was nearly twice as common among the children of women who were treated with the ovulation-inducing drug Clomid and other similar drugs than women who did not suffer from infertility, and the link persisted even after researchers accounted for the women's age.
Moreover, the association between fertility drugs and autism appeared to strengthen with exposure: the longer women reported being treated for infertility, the higher the chances their child had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

They also described another study presented that noted (post-hoc) that children treated at an Israeli autism center were more than twice as likely to be IVF-conceived than children in general.

OK, but association does not equal causation. The Harvard people point out that they don't have info on whether children were premature, a twin, or born with a low-birth weight. Infertility treatments put children at higher risk for these, and they, in turn, are strongly associated with autism. They don't know if these factors can account for the statistical link between infertility treatments and autism. Good survey research is hard, but these variables seem like no-brainers. It's not like parents can't remember if their child was born premature, underweight, or as a twin.

It was this last part that the Slate article didn't explain, leaving their readers with the impression that all confounding variables were accounted for.

I wish the academic world weren't all publish-or-perish. Then this Harvard group could have waited until they had a fuller picture. Now it's like they just gave us infertiles something else to worry about. Ugh.

Wondergirl and sloth-like ovaries

2010-05-18T09:59:00.002-04:00

I had my second monitoring appt this morning. My follies are growing but s--l--o--w--l--y. I am to go back on Friday. I'll probably use an OPK on Thursday just to check. I have no scientific reason to think this, but I feel like my sluggish ovaries spell doom for this cycle. I successfully generated all sorts of imaginary fears on the drive back to campus. The best ones are these: (1) the uterine lining will ripen and shed before I get to ovulate or (2) the follies will suddenly stop growing and my RE will shrug and recommend BCPs. And I will blow a gasket.

And when I get pessimistic about conceiving, my reading binge on adoption and attachment comes to an abrupt halt.

I'm trying to maintain perspective; not succumb to that illusion that everything will be absolutely hunky dory if I could just have a baby.

Last week my coworker brought her bright, charming 5 year old in because a head cold kept her out of daycare. She's one of those super-verbal kids who says "please" and "thank you" and shares her wacky kid theories about the world. She's absurdly cute.

So there I am feeling a pang of loss as she skips around the hall spewing cuteness in all eight directions, and then I suddenly became aware of other coworkers (a couple) who also have a 5 year-old, but one on the autism spectrum. His mom told me that she doesn't much think about it until she sees other developmentally typical kids his age; then all of a sudden his deficits are in sharp relief and she grieves all over again. There we all are, sitting in our offices and (as I imagine) trying to tamp down our tired, old boring griefs and grade some damned papers already.

Parenthetically, I had a conversation with this little wondergirl last fall that went like this:

Wondergirl: Are you T's mom?

AmyG: No, that's _____.

Wondergirl: Are you L's mom?

AmyG: No, that's _____.

Wondergirl: Who ... you ... kid ...

AmyG: Who's mom am I?

Wondergirl: Yes!

AmyG: I'm not anybody's mom. I don't have kids.

Wondergirl: [Pause] Well, who ARE you then?

Yah, I think I hear your mother calling you. You better go find her!

So I'm trying to keep perspective. I'm healthy, I get to live with J, and (as of last week) I'm tenured. I have a lot of fun with music. Things could be a lot worse. So just get it together, ovaries!

A plan

2010-05-10T08:47:00.002-04:00

I think we've figured out how to get my two family-building impulses on the same calendar.

I'm eligible for a sabbatic leave during the 2011-2012 school year. I apply for it this coming fall. In general, we're eligible for one semester at full pay or one year at half pay. I'm definitely going for the year (I really need a break), and I think I have a good, concrete, achievable, not-too-taxing professional development project to justify it. So I'll have over a year (from May 2011 to August 2012) in which I'm not teaching or on campus much.

So here's the plan: if I don't get and stay pregnant by the time school starts this August, we'll start the foster-adopt process. We'll spend the 2010-2011 school year applying, doing the training, getting gear, maybe getting married if they make us. And we'll be good and ready for a placement when the spring semester ends in May 2011. Hopefully, the kids who would become ours get placed with us early in that period. If it works out right, I could essentially be a SAHM for a little over a year as we knit our new family together. Then our kids could transition to day care or school when I go back to work in the fall of 2012. If they aren't ready, I'll invoke FMLA and take more time.

J's a full-time academic too (non-tenure-track), but he generally only goes to campus three days a week and comes home as soon as his classes are done. I'd be home all the time, and he would be home a lot of the time. That would give us very fertile ground for attachment work.

Wow. I can't believe I just wrote "fertile ground."

It makes me feel worlds better to see a concrete path to parenthood. Obviously, we have no control over placements, and sabbatic approvals aren't guaranteed, but it feels great to arrive at a plan that seems both plausibly workable and emotionally authentic. Ahhhh.

Anne Lamott and Deborah Gray

2010-05-08T16:05:00.006-04:00

I just read an excellent essay by Anne Lamott on Salon, explaining why she hates mother's day. I actually like mother's day -- even now -- but I love her essay because she firmly rejects the myth that only parents know the deepest kind of love.

In other news, I'm on the third of the four how-to-help-your-effed-up-child-from-the-foster-care-system-heal-and-grow books that I ordered a couple weeks ago. It's by Deborah Gray and it's called Attaching in Adoption (thanks for the tip, Kelli!) and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it.

The first thing I love is that Gray genuinely includes the parents' experience. The other two books I read tended to acknowledge how difficult the behaviors of traumatized children can be for parents and siblings, but only continually admonish parents to imagine how THE KID feels. The message is "Parenthood is sacrifice. Who are you to think that you're supposed to enjoy this?" Similarly, these books remind you to take care of yourself but then isolate all the self-care comments in a short, late chapter. It makes self-care seem like just another aspect that the parent will fail at.

Gray, in contrast, explains how new families succeed when BOTH parents and children get gratification from the relationship. She acknowledges that it can take a while, but writes that things should be noticeably improving within 6 months to a year (depending on the child's age and history). In general, while the other books put the child at the center, Gray wisely puts the parent-child RELATIONSHIP at the center.

The other thing is that Gray tells you HOW. Gray and the other authors are all clinicians. The prior books though just tend to catalog the issues. Just when you think they're getting to some practical advice, it's not there. I think they intended to write for parents but ended up writing for other clinicians. Gray, in contrast, is talking to YOU. Thanks, Deborah! And happy mother's day!

Glow little glowworm glow

2010-05-06T16:08:00.003-04:00

In honor of having taught my last class of 2009-2010, a little Youtube video of the song that inspires my blog title. It has to be the happiest song ever. It always makes me smile.

Back in action

2010-05-05T11:36:00.002-04:00

All systems go, based on my U/S this morning. I start Clom.id tomorrow and start checking for ovulation on May 12th. I'm starting to get a flicker of good feeling about moving forward. I'll try to blow gently on that ember.

Parallel tracks

2010-05-03T19:35:00.002-04:00

I'm finally done with those infernal BCPs (as of last Friday), and I have a baseline U/S on Wednesday, the start of my second IUI + Clo.mid cycle.

A few weeks ago I was chomping at the bit to get started and utterly deflated to be benched by cysts, but now I can't seem to psych up for it. I can't even fantasize about it working.

At the same time, I'm feeling pessimistic about foster-adoption. Most of the time I'm energized by thinking about it. A couple weeks ago, for example, I was watching my first-year students do presentations in class and thinking how thrilled I would be to have any of them as my own kid. Even the snotty one who wears way too much eye makeup or the mouth-breather who can't be bothered to produce an original thought. At moments like that I think, I really am the kind of person who should adopt. Another was back in December when I was pregnant; I honestly thought, "Oh, darn! Now we'll be too busy to adopt for a few years."

Lately, though, when I think about foster-adoption, I visualize worst-case scenarios of falling in love with irreparably damaged children who then become a bottomless well of heartache and expense. A few years ago, I opted out of my marriage with R, a lovely man with bipolar disorder. Mental illness is unrelentingly toxic to a family. It isolates you from others (you can't plan anything), it corrodes trust and empathy, and it shits all over the everyday joys of togetherness. Obviously, most kids in the system are NOT mentally ill, but many are at risk and I can't jump into it naively thinking love heals all wounds.

Living with J is like floating along a sparkling current of warmth, affection, and good humor. He's so consistently kind, responsible, funny, and sweet, and I'm so thankful for that consistency every day. It's just so EASY living with him.

When I think about parenting lately I think about how EASY it would be to start out with a seamless attachment through gestation and birth like "everybody else" does. A few months ago, I couldn't imagine crossing the line into IVF. But recently I've been thinking, hey, 50-70% success rates, and -- I know how lucky I am -- I'm covered for it by my insurance.

I imagine the pull towards foster-adoption will return; it's an authentic pull, and I honestly don't feel it to be second-best to pregnancy and birth. It's a whole other path. For exactly that reason, though, it isn't a balm for infertility.

Mary had a baby ...

2010-04-26T19:20:00.003-04:00

... and her head popped off! Did any of you autocomplete that? I've been remembering a lot of childhood culture things lately. That one-line ditty came to me as I was mowing down my dandelions. I've also suddenly found myself thinking of Little Bunny Foo Foo and that thing where you squish your face in and say, "Hi, my name's Pudgy. My Mom's pudgy, My Dad's pudgy. We're AAAAALLLLL pudgy." etc etc.

I also had a sudden realization the other night about a childhood song. The background is that when I was a kid my grandparents next door had this curmudgeonly old black pony named Smokey that we'd ride around on sometimes.

So the other night I heard a fiddle player play a very, very old-time version of On Top of Old Smokey (it didn't sound like the waltz) and it suddenly dawned on me that the song is NOT about riding a curmudgeonly old black pony in the snow while going courting. I guess I always thought it was Smokey's (the pony's) fault that the guy lost his sweetheart for courting too slow. And two days ago - at the age of 37 - I finally realized, "Smokey's a mountain!"

And then, of course, I can only remember the first two lines of On Top of Old Smokey, but I remember On Top of Spaghetti in its entirety.

Only five more days of BCPs and a baseline ultrasound next week!

Beautiful adoption videos

2010-04-19T20:35:00.003-04:00

It's been interesting to see so much on the news about adoption, and especially older-child adoption and attachment issues. It's sort of like seeing someone you know on TV.

I've been meaning to post this stuff that I found a few weeks ago. My hard-drive went kaput; I got most of my files back, but I lost all my bookmarks. I just found these videos again, finally; they're all on the Adoptuskids channel on YouTube. Check 'em out if you're thinking about it. All these issues feel different when you "meet" real people involved.

Here are some to start with: the Thiel family story: Part 1 which includes the kids talking about how hard it was to be separated from their first family and how, for a while, some didn't know they necessarily wanted to be adopted. Part 2 is nice too; the youngest recounts the day her mom came to school to tell her the adoption was finally approved by the courts.

The one that makes me want to run right out and bring home a dozen or so waiting children, though, is this one.

Intriguing

2010-04-12T11:13:00.002-04:00

I know that my grief over IF doesn't at all compare to that engendered by staring down the business end of mortality, but this article in the New York Times about research on hallucinogens to help those in despair gain a new, hugely comforting perspective is deeply intriguing.

Not that I'm gonna go out and score some 'shrooms, but it makes me wonder (all over again) if I really could change my perspective on this whole s**tstorm.

Thanks, a set-back, and sisterhood of the parking lot

2010-04-09T13:14:00.005-04:00

I was so surprised that so many people read to the end of my long-ass post and offered their own heartfelt comments. Trinity's perspective was especially nice to read.

When I get to it, I'll post links to some beautiful video clips of happy adoptive families. My favorite is of a 10-year old telling the story (in charming 10-year-old-girl style) of the day the adoption was finalized.

Yesterday was a surprisingly early CD1, so I ended up going in today for a baseline U/S. The effing cysts are still there and still big, so it's back to plan A. BCPs for 21 days. The good news is that we can start a treatment cycle shortly after the BCP time; we don't have to wait for a period. We'll be back in action by mid-May. Meanwhile, I'm getting labs done on thyroid stuff, so maybe there will be some new information to take into account.

I feel like one of those donkeys pulling a cart toward a carrot tied to a stick. It's always, "A few more weeks? I guess I can live with that." I muscle down and take a few steps forward, but the carrot is just as far away.

I burst into tears as soon as I got back into my car today, texting J about the U/S results. When I looked up to drive away, I saw two other weepy women in two other cars, also using their cell phones. Man. Sucks to be us!

Searching for the straight scoop on adopting from the foster-care system

2010-04-06T15:30:00.005-04:00

In one of my down moments last week (I know - we all have to be more specific with a qualifier like that) I went looking for adoption blogs. I figured that our network here is an awesomely and life-affirmingly candid view of the lived experience of IF, and so there must be a counterpart for those who've adopted older children or children from the foster-care system. Since I was feeling brave, I went looking for the crappiest moments - people saying that they just can't do it or wish they never started.

Found 'em! I first found this beautiful post. J has two sons with attachment issues. She didn't say RAD (radical attachment disorder), but its serious stuff nonetheless. It's not a nightmare, but she's candid about their challenges. Among the many powerful things she writes in that post is this:

When I started this journey with P, two years ago I had no idea just how hard it would be. I did not know that my life would be filled with anger, rage, poop, sadness, longing, fear and developmental and cognitive delays that could of been prevented.

I knew it would be hard but no one told me it would be this hard.

No one told me because no one I spoke to had ever adopted kids like ours. There is not [one] worker at our local agency who has adopted older kids. There is no one in my town and none of my friends had done it either. We stumbled through as best we could for the first 6 months. We had hope that it would ger easier. It didn't.

Then she links to other candid posts expressing the worst moments. One of the best was Essie who writes "Adoption today is nothing like it was 20 and 30 years ago. Therefore there are almost no applicable theories or models to work from." Attachment therapists are largely self-trained and self-identified. She concludes:

Lastly, we are it. Those on the internet right now, reading, writing, lurking and commenting, we are it. People who are on message boards, putting up websites, writing their stories. We are the research, the evidence and the hope. At the speed of light we float our hypothesis, test test and retest, publish test and test again. We prove and disprove our own ideas every single day and our progress and our failures are the strategies for healing. We document and learn from each other.

J also links to Corey, a mother to 6, who recounts being out for a run and having these thoughts:

Anyway, I got to that point in the run where it’s really not fun and I’d really rather not be doing it, and everything hurts, and my stomach was rebelling, and I thought about all the times that I’ve said, Even if I could go back in time and change things, I would still adopt this sibling group (that had the 2 RAD kids in it)… and I thought, NO, I WOULDN’T.

She sort of takes it back later with this: "I don’t know. It is a moot point. We did. There IS no going back, so it’s a stupid question anyhow."

One of the real heart-breakers was Tudu, a mother of 9, who posts about a candid conversation she had with some of her kids (bio-sibs) at the dinner table. They explained that they like her just fine and trust her to keep them safe, but they don't love her like a mother, and they'd just as soon live with someone else as long as they could stay with their bio-sibs. The post is aptly titled "Screw Honesty."

That all set me looking for the happier cases. I didn't have much time for that, but I quickly found this blog by a mom raising three who came home as a sibling group four years ago. And, hallelujah, they're cute and smart and affectionate! Harm has been done to them, and they suffer from that, but they're doing OK. Most of the blog is stuff like: Oh, so it turns out a 6 year old won't just tell you that he's sick. He just goes to school and throws up all over the place.

Then I went back to the National Survey of Adoptive Parents done by the U.S Dept of Health and Human Services in 2007 to put all this in perspective. Most kids adopted from foster care are just fine. They're not (as a group) as well off as domestic-infant or international adoptees, but about 80% are doing well. Some highlights from parents of kids kids adopted from foster care:

18% have "problems with social behavior"
21% "have ever been diagnosed with an attachment disorder"
38% have ever been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD
About half are doing "excellent" or "very well" in school
75% of parents describe their relationship with their kids as "very warm and close"
84% say they are not "aggravated" (I'm not sure what that means)
81% of parents say that if they could do it over, they would definitely adopt again
14% say they would probably adopt again
6% say "probably not" or "definitely not"

So that all reinforces what I've thought before - you'd have to go into it thinking of yourself as a therapeutic parent. Four times out of five you won't have to be all THAT therapeutic, but it just might be most of your parenting life and you can't really know until they're home for a while.

Three things make me hopeful:

(1) If we foster and THEN adopt (rather than adopt waiting children), then we're fairly likely to be the first foster placement of our future kids; that'll reduce the trauma. Other kids would come and go, which would be a source of heartbreak, but I think we can handle that.

(2) It's anecdotal, but the parents I quoted as being absolutely overwhelmed have 6 or 9 kids, most of whom are coping with the trauma of adoption. If we stick with 1-3, it might be a very different experience. The basic survey report doesn't parse out bigger families from smaller ones; but maybe it's in the raw data which are available for download. If I run an analysis, I'll let y'all know what I find.

(3) J and I are all right with being a therapeutic parents. We make decent salaries in a super-affordable area, which leaves a lot of resources to address special needs. Our jobs offer a lot of flexibility, neither of us are under the gun to publish like crazy, and one of us could take a semester or two off if that's what it took. So we probably wouldn't have to sacrifice a career to do right by these kids. We're both familiar with serious mental illness. My ex, who I still love like family, copes with bipolar disorder. So we're not naive; but we both know how much better off our loved ones would be if they grew into adulthood with more robust coping systems.

I guess the upshot is that I set out to scare myself silly and wound up being more into this. So who knows. There's something powerful about seeing your deepest fears represented in black and white (or ones and zeros, in this case).

Better news

2010-04-04T11:17:00.002-04:00

Nurse Awesome called Friday afternoon, and it turns out that my blood E2 and progesterone were both elevated, which suggests that the Pro.vera actually triggered an ovulation. The Pro.vera didn't hit the cycle reset button, but OK, I'll take an ovulation. So no BC pills, and I'll likely have a real CD1 in a week or two. I'll call and go in for another baseline. And they'll do more thyroid testing.

So it won't be as long a wait as I thought, and it's a good explanation for the cysts - leftovers of ovulation. OK, I'll take it!

Well, crap

2010-04-02T11:29:00.002-04:00

I had a baseline u/s today for another Clomid+IUI cycle and it turns out I have two big cysts on my right ovary (like 28 mm). Not medically problematic, but it means we can't do a treatment this cycle. It looks like I'll take birth control pills (irony, much?) to get rid of the cysts and hopefully start a treatment cycle in May.

I haven't really felt cyclically normal since the m/c, so when Nurse Awesome and I saw the cysts on the screen my first thought was "I knew this wasn't going to work out."

I thought I was at least a little emotionally insulated for this outcome, but I was way wrong. It hit me HARD. I guess I've been hanging a lot of my hope on the fact that the first treatment cycle went off easily and yielded a conception. I've never had a cyst before (as far as I know) so this is a whole new, deeper level of IF anxiety. And who's to say come May that it'll be any different?

My second thought was "Screw this!! I'll clean out the spare room this weekend, furnish it next weekend, and sign up for the earliest possible foster-parent training!!" As it is, it's going to be a half-a-year between my m/c any my next possible IUI. It's a giant step towards the IF rabbit hole that I fear the most.

I'm having a really hard time shaking it off. At least I don't teach today, and with this being a holiday weekend and unseasonably gorgeous out, I don't have any appointments scheduled with students.

I also talked to Nurse Awesome about my thyroid questions and she encouragingly suggested a phone or in-person appointment with my RE. She said I had "well considered questions" to ask.

IF Film Reviews: The Blind Side (spoiler alert)

2010-03-31T21:09:00.006-04:00

J and I finally watched the Blind Side last night. As I'm sure everyone knows, it recounts the real-life story of how Michael Oher -- a shy, black, teenage ward of the state -- joined a well-off white family and became a sought-after football player. So, hey, a story of a multi-racial family formed by public-sector adoption? OK, I'll watch it.

The worst thing about the movie is that it indulges in a sort of Uncle Tom-ish trope: a large, quiet, and big-hearted black man is comically bossed around by a cute, precocious white child. I find it perfectly plausible that real-life Michael Oher and his real-life little brother had a genuine rapport. But c'mon! It seems like this weird white-guilt thing; whites yearn to be forgiven and accepted by black America, so we fantasize about being innocent children who forge this bond. In recent years, this trope has shown up in Remember the Titans and the Secret Life of Bees. And then there's the figure of the saintly black giant, like the guy in the Green Mile. So this movie, like so much of what Hollywood produces, is largely white fantasy about black people.

On the other hand, I will say that the Blind Side did seem to put some good stuff out there. First, Oher's first family made some important appearances. We meet his first mother (who grieves his loss). We also see Michael have an emotional greeting with his brother (also a teenager) and learn that they haven't seen each other since they were small. We see a brief but affecting flashback of cops tearing Michael out of his mother's arms. So the best thing about the movie was that it acknowledges that Michael's personal history prior to joining his new family includes unimaginable loss for both Michael and his first mother.

Second the movie acknowledges how Michael has to reconstruct his past. He tells his adoptive mom Lee-Ann (sp?) that he wants to get a drivers license because he wants to carry something with his name on it. That sends Lee-Ann on a bureaucratic goose-chase for his birth certificate that eventually leads her to his first mom. Towards the end, Oher is graduating from high school, and when each graduate approaches the stage, their baby picture is projected on an overhead screen. When it's Michael's turn, this super-cute pudgy, grinning baby shows up on the screen. Lee-Ann's husband asks her "how in the world" she got a baby picture of him, and she acknowledges that she just found *a* picture through her connections to the design world. The family kind of laughs about it. What I like, though, is that the filmmakers were willing, in a celebratory moment, to make us aware that this guy doesn't even have baby pictures of himself. They have to fake one in order to participate in this ritual. The film doesn't make a maudlin moment of it, but it's a valuable bit of realism.

So as a film, not that great, but it shows some signs that maybe our culture is getting wiser about adoption. That would be nice.

Sin of omission?

2010-03-31T20:28:00.003-04:00

You brainy IF blogger chicks are sooooooo great; thanks so much for musing with me. And thanks, Kelli, for wanting to understand all this. I think you really do, even though you haven't been in this exact place. A triumph of empathy!

I woke up with bonafide full-flow period action Monday, and so I made my first monitoring appointment for this Friday. But the bleeding totally stopped by Tuesday night, so I don't know what the hell THAT was about. Maybe I didn't have much of a lining to shed because I spotted for two weeks in late Feb/early March. I really don't know if the Provera successfully hit the reset button on my cycle or not.

I sort of feel like I should call the clinic and tell them, because they might say that it wasn't a real period, that I shouldn't come in Friday, and that I should just sit tight until I do get a real period. But I think I'll just keep my appointment - false pretenses be damned. I'm just so sick of having ambiguous symptoms and feeling stalled out cycle-wise. I want to get looked at and talked to. I want some next steps!

Back in the saddle... yippie-ki-yo.

2010-03-29T20:29:00.004-04:00

My period started today, so I called the clinic and scheduled a baseline U/S for Friday. If all is well, I'll start Clomid and wand my way towards a second IUI.

I'm conflicted about starting the cycle again. I haven't lost the 5 lbs I put on during the last one. I haven't gotten back into exercise. And I just feel sort of doomed. Conceive, miscarry, repeat. I haven't changed, so why should the outcome be any different?

I've been looking up scholarly review articles on thyroid and fertility. I can't claim to fully understand them (being a sociologist) but I did get that I've had one thyroid blood test (TSH) that came out normal, but that there are others that might be relevant. I also read that the stimulation from ART can trigger thyroid problems that weren't there before. The nurse said she'd talk to Dr. McCuterson about my thyroid questions and see about having other blood tests done when I go in Friday. I haven't seen Dr. McCuterson since my very first appointment, and I haven't talked to him since the m/c. I wish I had brought a more comprehensive list of questions to that first appointment.

I'm always torn between wanting to take charge (!) and wanting to avoid becoming obsessed. I want to focus on family-building, not just fertility. But like I told the nurse, it would so stupid to miscarry again when maybe something simple could make a difference.

I've also mentally been back in the adoption world - looking up stats on the diverse school districts, the real estate listings in those districts, trying to figure out how to build a multiracial community for this multiracial family I may be raising. That prompted me to join in on an excellent discussion about religion that Bunny started.

I see my mindset as a line graph: a rising trendline represents the growing voice of "forget this IF crap, your real kids are waiting for you, bring them home;" and a falling trendline represents the voice of "dammit - you wanna be pregnant, so pull out the stops and get pregnant already, it's now or never." Right now the pregnancy line is higher, but if current trends continue the lines will eventually cross.

J's a wonderful partner. He's unfailingly supportive and reassuring, without ever minimizing my grief. He hasn't emoted a whole lot about the loss, but he told the important people in his life, which shows it was a big deal to him. But I still feel pretty alone with this. J doesn't sit around brooding about it like I do. He'll listen to me when I want to talk about it and join in on assessing the merits of area school systems, but he doesn't look things up himself and he doesn't have much to say about how he feels.

I don't want him to gnash his teeth and rend his garments or anything. I don't know what I want, except to feel like we're doing all this together. He's a good feminist and notes that its my body being subject to all these treatments, so he sees medical decisions as absolutely mine to make. I tend to agree with that, so I really can't say what I wish he'd do differently.

Our relationship is great, but I can see why IF is hell on a couple. One sociological study of marriage highlights the damage done by a "failure of empathy." Maybe at the end of the day IF, like cancer, is a profoundly individual experience. Maybe it's just one of those times that partners bump up against the logical limits of empathy. And maybe people tend to attributing that unavoidable loneliness to some failing of their partner's. I've heard the phrase that "you meet yourself in marriage." It may be even more apt to say you meet yourself in infertility.

Another annoying thing about IF

2010-03-18T08:29:00.002-04:00

The people who have babies before you give their babies the names YOU were thinking of. Gol-dang it!

I start Provera today to bring on a period so that we can get going with the next IUI cycle. It's better than a holding pattern anyway.

And I read a good book with a crackpot-y title: Dr. Robert Greene's Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Pregnant. It was mostly common sense advice about nutrition, weight, and stress. And it was addressed equally to men & women. It inspired me to cut down on animal protein, buy some OPKs, and ask my Dr. about thyroid antibodies.

The plan and a question

2010-03-09T15:48:00.003-05:00

Nurse Awesome called me from the clinic. My blood progesterone level is ambiguous; it doesn't show definitively whether if I've ovulated and experienced a super-slow, super-sparse period, or if I havn't ovulated, and all that spotting was something else.

So the plan is that I'll sit tight for a week and see if I bleed. If I do, I'll call and we'll start clom.id. If not, I'll call next Monday and we'll do another blood draw.

A question for the blogosphere: thyroid. I have vertical ridges in my fingernails (always have) and I break out in hives sometimes if my skin gets chilled - this started happening in junior high. Dr. Google and my grandmother tell me that these are thyroid-related symptoms. All sorts of people in my family have thyroid issues.

They tested my TSH level as part of the IF work-up, and it came back normal. I also did a TSH test years ago, because I was complaining about feeling lethargic, that came back normal too. But should I pursue this? I'm stuck on the fact that I saw a heartbeat days before I miscarried. That makes me think it wasn't a dud embryo (at least the one we got a good look at; maybe the other was a dud). I'm wondering if maybe I do have a sub-clinical thyroid condition that will doom me to RPL. If so, I don't want to have to lose two more pregnancies before I explore that.

Anyone have experience with this?

Back on the bloodwork

2010-03-08T10:05:00.002-05:00

The lab requisition has been faxed. I brought my car to work so that I can zip out this afternoon and get my blood drawn to detect beta and progesterone levels. The doc might give me Provera to bring on a real period (although it isn't real if I don't ovulate, right?). I got it backwards before - no one is giving me progesterone.

The clinic people are always unfailingly nice and -- except for one jackass who did the post-m/c us and jackassedly announced "the good news is that your pregnancy is over!" (meaning that I wouldn't need a D&C) -- none of them have ever betrayed the routine-ness of all this. I just need to get over my hyper-competent academic issues and make more phone calls.

There are some cold winds blowing through a bunch of my IF sisters (and myself). Here's hoping spirits lift soon.

Feeling better

2010-03-07T09:17:00.002-05:00

I took people's advice and called the clinic to tell them I've been spotting (for 16 days now).

I don't know what my problem is - it's like I'm afraid that the nurse will get all high-dudgeon and sneer, "Are you having your period? NO, you're spotting. Is spotting the same as your period? We both know they aren't. Your instructions were to call when you had your period." Or conversely, "Why didn't you call us sooner?!?" But they never do, and, actually, so what if they did? The nurse said she'll talk to the RE, send in a requisition for bloodwork, and we'll see what our options are.

She mentioned that they can bring on a period, I think with progesterone. From what I've read in blogs, when I think of taking progesterone I picture myself growing and turning green like the Incredible Hulk and stomping through my classes in tattered clothing. Kinda sounds like fun! I could use a little aggression.

A mid-week dip

2010-03-03T14:51:00.002-05:00

We had our dept meeting, and PC (pregnant colleague) shared her good news. The four parents of young children in the dept immediately blurt, "DON'T BUY ANY BABY STUFF! WE HAVE CLOTHES! WE HAVE A CRIB! WE HAVE A HIGH CHAIR!" Each sentence felt like a stab to my belly. The worst was later, someone else who just heard the news said, "A little baby! Maybe two!" YEE-OUCH! PC has a confirmed single pregnancy, but *I* was supposed to have two!

I've been spotting for two weeks now, and I was nauseated yesterday, so I did a HPT last night and it was a BFN. I didn't really think I was pregnant, so I was surprised that it was such a downer.

I'm supposed to call the clinic when I get my period to get started with Clo.mid (days 5-9) and set up monitoring appointments leading up to IUI #2. I haven't called them because my spotting never turned into a period, but now I'm thinking maybe I should have. My cycles tend to be really long, often like 40-50 days, and also irregular, ranging from 28 to 56 days over the past year.

That's all to say that I'm at a low-point. I don't know what this crap-ass spotting thing is about. We really doubled-down on natural conception last month, and that didn't work. It'll probably be another month and a half before I get a real period. Then it'll be another month leading up to the next IUI, which probably won't work. Next thing I know, I'll be starting another school year with no change in status.

I don't show any signs of PCOS or low ovarian reserve. Our RE (who is really cute) said my cycles were "beautiful," which made me blush like a schoolgirl (how embarrassing). Dr. Cutie McCuterson went so far as to say that we have an "excellent prognosis." So I guess I'll ruminate on that until my mood improves.

Meanwhile, I've resolved to spend a good chunk of spring break de-cluttering the house. J's with me. We're going to act like we're moving and ruthlessly get rid of anything we don't love. The goal is to clean out the bedrooms that we're trying to populate. That'll be nice.

Stigma

2010-02-27T16:04:00.005-05:00

Last week wasn't such a big one after all. The book deadline was pushed back a month, spotting has not yet turned into full flow (grrrr), and turning 37 was actually no big deal.

This week might be bigger, because the pregnancy-talk lid is likely to come off. My dept has to finalize the fall teaching schedule at this week's meeting, and I think the pregnant colleague will be going public to explain why she's not on it. There are many parents of young children in our dept and building, so I expect that the pregnancy chit-chat will begin. Dreading that and reading Adele's lovely post about relating to knocked-up friends got me thinking about Goffman's stigma: "a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity."

After I got divorced a few years ago, I suddenly realized that I had something of a "spoiled identity." It wasn't that people avoided me; it was that when they talked about weddings or marriage, I'd have an impulse to contribute, but I'd keep silent out of fear that others would be uncomfortable hearing the divorced woman fondly recall her semi-hippie wedding and semi-functional ex. It's alienating that such a large and warmly remembered chunk of my adult life has been buried in polite silence.

Now that I've miscarried, I imagine pregnancy talk might be like this too. Hey, I experienced a little bit of pregnancy! I was sleepy and bloated; I had to pee every 20 minutes; I developed a love of prunes; I laughed at J's sudden aversion to seeing me shovel snow. But, really, imagine the horror if I said, "I was pregnant for eight weeks last December and January, and, yeah, I was almost falling asleep in my dinner plate!"

I'm pretty sure I'll be able to avoid most of the pregnancy talk without anyone noticing, especially since almost no one knows of my experience. I'm thankful for that and for the fact that I wasn't subject to it in the weeks right after the m/c. That would have about done me in.