Archive for the ‘The Pregnancy’ Category

Dear Uterus-

I should begin by thanking you for doing a good job for the last 9 months. Aside from being kind of bitchy and unnecessarily contract-y since 25ish weeks, you’ve done a great job of housing my son. I could not be more appreciative of that. If you had hands, I’d high five you. You’ll have to settle for an imaginary fist bump.

That said, as much as I am enjoying the painful, irregular contractions that are doing NOTHING to dilate my cervix, it’s time for you to get your ass in gear. And by ass in gear, I don’t mean 19 hours of regular contractions that evaporate into thin air. Because that was not my favorite day. I mean, real labor.

You were designed to do just this. Your mission in life is to gestate and expel a baby. You’ve done the first part, now it’s time to do the latter. I am losing my mind. My parents are waiting by their phones, practically doing labor dances, waiting for this baby to show up. People are counting on you.

IT IS TIME.

LET MY PEOPLE GO.

I realize that my official due date is still a little over a week away. Please do not feel required to go that long. The baby is fully cooked, he’s running out of room and out of fluid and his mother is running out of sanity. Everyone keeps insisting that once you do your job I’ll be miserable and not sleeping, but SURPRISE, I’m already miserable and not sleeping, so I may as well have a baby to obsess over while I’m awake all night instead of just painful hips and contractions. Not that those aren’t super fun.

If you cannot be persuaded to get this show on the road, can I at least request that you then simmer the hell down? I really feel like you shouldn’t be able to have it both ways, and another week or two of these contractions, without actual labor, might make me lose my mind. Which I know is of great consequence to you.

In closing, thank you again for holding onto my son for 9 months, but it’s my turn now. I am never going to be prepared for the pain that lies ahead, but waiting is not making it better either. Let’s get this party started. Like now.

Love,
Katie

So, yesterday was a really super duper fun day.

It started at midnight with contractions that got progressively more painful and closer together and made me convinced that holy crap, I was going to have a baby.

Spoiler alert: I’m still pregnant. Also grumpy and tired.

Throughout the day yesterday the contractions were reliably every 7 minutes for 19 hours straight. And because contractions aren’t fun enough, I was also horribly nauseous most of the time, which meant I didn’t eat or drink enough, which just made me feel more lousy. And then around 7:30 last night, the contractions stopped. Like, I maybe had 1 after 7:30, but that was it.

And today I’ve had like 2 (oh, had another one while writing this, clearly he disapproves of my contractionless braggery), and while they were absolutely freaking awful (I love that the hurt from my boobs to my thighs, yay nerve distribution), they certainly aren’t indicative of labor anytime soon.

I have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday morning and have to get an ultrasound later on Thursday to check my amniotic fluid levels (they’re low, so I’m basically just supposed sitting at home right now, drinking as much water as possible), but I’m pretty sure this kid won’t be making his appearance anytime soon. Especially if it’s up to him. Though he seems to love torturing his mother, he doesn’t seem to be eager to join the rest of the world outside my uterus.

In other less ranty and painful news, I did post pictures of the nursery, but never came over here to link them. There are more pictures here that you can click through to show the progression of the nursery from start to finish, but for your trouble, here are a few here too.

And that’s pretty much all that’s going on. We’re just waiting, impatiently. Basically, I’m being held hostage by a baby.

So, yea. I need to preface this story with the fact that I am not proud of our behavior. We are children, of this I am quite aware. But I also know that my husband and I are jovial people. We laugh a lot and even if we have the senses of humor of 12 year olds, I still love that we laugh easily and heartily. Just maybe we need to work on our timing.

So childbirth classes. My husband was not thrilled with having to attend these classes from the start and I won’t lie, I wasn’t enthused myself. But knowing that drugs are off the table for us, it seemed reasonable that we should try to educate ourselves on what was going to happen and a few non-medicinal ways to manage the excruciating pain that I’m about to face.

The woman who teaches the class is…nice. Like, one of those super touchy, feely nice people. The best way I can describe her is that I can imagine that her house is decorated exclusively in Precious Moments paraphernalia, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So she introduces herself, tells us she is a nurse who has worked extensively with pregnant women. She goes on to describe all the areas of the hospital she has worked in and then admits, casually, that the only area of maternal medicine she hasn’t worked in is labor and delivery. Um. WHAT? My childbirth instructor has never worked in labor and delivery? Sweet.

Later she tried to tell us that if no one signed up for snacks there would be no snacks at the next several classes, but she got flustered and said sex instead. Which of course made me laugh (I know), but I did it silently and covered it up with a cough. To which the person in front of me turned around and said, “you’re coughing.” How do you respond to that? It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t concern, it was like she was narrating. I wanted to reply with “water is wet” but she turned back around and instead took to asking the instructor the same question about doctors breaking water 800 times because if she kept asking it, eventually the instructor would know the answer.

It kind of went downhill from here.

They cleared out the chairs and had us get on our yoga mats on the floor, turned out the lights, turned on some Enya and had men start massaging the women. My husband, being a doctor, was struggling with the jaw massage and was instead kind of assessing my lymph nodes, which was NOT relaxing. That was when we started laughing.

A moment later, Enya still playing, the instructor had all the women get on their hands and knees and the men knelt behind them. Lest you think we are the only awful people, the couple next to us laughed at the awkwardness of the positioning because, uh, this is not something people typically do in public. And then the men were instructed in a massage technique for the women’s hips. In a soothing, almost seductive voice, the instructor said, “don’t worry, she’ll let you know if she wants it harder.”

And I lost it.

I know. I’m terrible. It was the combination of the position, the tone of her voice, the music. Everything. I didn’t just laugh, I straight up snorted. And then I died of embarrassment.

After the awkward all fours massage, we meditated. The women leaned against the men, we all closed our eyes, and the first thing the instructor said was, “You’re feeling very heavy…” and that was when my husband lost it because she was talking to a room of giant pregnant women. And he just never got himself back together. The instructor tried to get us to imagine a beach and by the time she asked us what we smelled in our meditation, my husband was completely done. I’m not going to pretend like I wasn’t laughing, but I was at least doing it silently. He literally had to leave the room to get himself together.

10 minutes later the class was over and we waited until coughing lady began asking the instructor the same question for the 300th time before we ran snuck out, embarrassed and hysterically laughing.

Not only do we have 3 more weeks of this class, but the instructor is also our breastfeeding class teacher. You guys, we are so screwed. I’m pretty sure that if our instructor has any say in it, we won’t be allowed to bring our child home, on account of the fact that we are in fact, still children ourselves.

I don’t know if it’s because I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel of this clinical (THREE MORE DAYS) or if it’s because I realized that the weeks of pregnancy are rapidly winding down, but I am finally rediscovering some of that happiness that I remember from months past.

I wrote at Babble this week about the things I’m going to miss about pregnancy, and the more I’ve thought about it since then, the more I’ve realized just how much I’m going to miss this stage. Yes, it is uncomfortable. Yes, my sleep is pretty crappy. But the good parts are just so good that the rest doesn’t seem to matter.

I was talking to my husband last night and trying explain to him what I was really going to miss when the baby arrives. Yes, I’ll miss (even crappy) sleep. I’ll miss our time as a couple. But moreso, I’ll miss the relationship I have with the baby.

Right now, it’s him and me, together, all the time. I feel him stretch, kick, hiccup. I feel him sleep and squirm. I know my husband can put his hand on my belly and feel some of his movements, but no one can feel it the way I can. No one can feel the tiny movements, the little stretches. No one can feel the tiny little foot in my ribs.

It’s just him and me.

In a few short weeks, it won’t just be us. It’ll be him and me and the world. I’ll have to share my son, have to let everyone else see and feel what I already know. And so I am doing everything I can to cherish every single moment I have with him inside. Every moment that’s just the two of us. I don’t ever want to forget these days. The feeling of happiness that I have when I feel my son kick. When I think about all that lies ahead of us.

I’m truly enjoying life in a way that I haven’t ever.

There isn’t a day that goes by now that I don’t think about the weeks to come, or the tremendous changes we are about to experience. Sometimes I sit on the floor of the nursery and imagine all that will take place in that small space. There is so much future there, so much that will develop and sometimes I can practically see it ahead of me. I see the victories and struggles, the sleepless nights and the naps in the rocking chair. A room of memories waiting to be created.

And I feel happy, and whole. I feel loved and needed. I feel the way I always imagined I would feel some day. As though I am finally where I always knew I was meant to be.

Once again I find myself sitting down to write, staring at a blank screen for several hours before conceding that I just don’t really have anything to write about. I have little bits and pieces to share and they’re all baby related because that’s kind of how things are right now. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t always feel like bombarding everyone with a constant stream of baby stuff. Which I totally do all the time anyway, but usually not on purpose.

I had an OB appointment today and was basically told that for the next 6 weeks I need to go to the hospital whenever I have more than 4 contractions an hour. I informed my doctor when she told me this that that would mean that I would need to go there right that second since I had easily just had 4 within the past 15 minutes while my insanely full bladder (from hydrating to try to simmer my stupid uterus down) waited impatiently to be called back for my appointment. She laughed and said that she was serious.

I am less than amused at this because honestly, it seems unnecessary and trust me, I’m a cautious person. The contractions are not regular, are typically not painful and my cervix was checked repeatedly this weekend and is fine. And yet, 4 an hour = hospital. The hospital said to only come if they got regular or painful, and I feel like they are going to get seriously irritated if I’m there every damn day. Which is what happens if I follow the rules.

She also made some heartburn medication recommendations, which aren’t exactly what I am taking right now, but they’re similar and either way, things are getting better. I’m still waking up 5 times a night to pee thanks to the bladder and bitchy uterus, but I’d rather be awake briefly five times than awake once for hours.

I’m kind of flabbergasted that I’m 30 weeks pregnant now. That’s 3/4 of the way through. That means that in 6 weeks, there are no more preterm labor precautions because they no longer consider it preterm. And that? Holy shit. That is crazy. I keep feeling like May is forever away and then I remember that this baby could easily come, healthily in April, and that there’s only a week left in February, and then I freak out. Sometimes in a good way, often in a not so good way because there’s still so much to do and so little time (and let’s be honest, motivation) to actually do it.

All of this sounds a little negative and that wasn’t really my intention because the truth is, I’m so excited about this baby. I guess I had just underestimated how hard the end of pregnancy would get. Or how quickly it would happen. It seems like I went from zero to misery pretty quickly. I would never for a moment wish for my pregnancy to end early because misery that ends in a full term healthy baby is totally worth it, but it’s hard to be as outwardly happy as I was a few weeks ago.

I still revel in the baby kicks and the way my stomach shifts and dances when he’s awake. I still find the fact that I am visibly, notably pregnant possibly one of the coolest and weirdest things ever. I just wish that I would’ve savored those middle weeks/months a little more. I guess it’s all a part of the pregnancy/parenting learning curve.

You guys, we have reached a critical mass. I have not slept through an entire night (and I’m not talking about getting up to pee, because that has been a constant since literally the day after I got a positive pregnancy test) in close to a month. The first one of you who tells me that this is preparing me for motherhood is forever banned from commenting, because dude, THAT IS NOT HELPFUL.

It started out kind of slowly. I would wake up with aching hips, which have been a problem for a few months now and would struggle to go back to sleep. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad, especially on a weekend, I could just turn on a tv show and let them kind of calm down. But on weeknights it was always frustrating because I knew how hard the morning would be. But at least the hours I was awake were pretty tolerable.

Not so much anymore.

Lately I’m up for hours with heartburn, or heartburn and nausea, or heartburn, nausea and hip pain. Last night I had the worst stomachache I’ve had in a long time and had to spend a solid 10 minutes making sure the stomach cramps weren’t from my uterus (they weren’t). It was 2 hours before I got back to sleep and considering I had only gotten 5 hours of broken sleep the night before, I really really needed the rest.

I am completely prepared for the idea of being up all night with a baby. I am not prepared to be up all night with a stomachache every night for weeks. When still working. And still pregnant. With an angry uterus. I do not need any extra stress in my life.

I really don’t want to resort to sleeping on the chaise couch thing that is kind of upright (to reduce the acid reflux) that we have in the nursery because a) I actually really like sleeping beside my husband (most nights) and b) I think the cats will not know what to do with themselves. Although, on the upside, the cats might not know who to pester at 4:30 am for food, and that might mean more sleep then, so I may revisit this. But it’s looking like a move to sleeping there is in my near future. Either that or giving up sleeping altogether, which isn’t much of a sacrifice at this point.

Work is getting to be hard and realizing that I still have 9 weeks to go is even tougher. I struggle to imagine I’m going to make it through the full 16 weeks at this point, if not physically than mentally, because of the way I already feel now. I want to make it, because the last thing I want is to not graduate on time and have to return to a non-paid clinical after the baby is born and delay my board exam, but obviously the most important thing is my health and the health of my baby.

I knew that the glorious second trimester was going to have to come to an end, I just didn’t realize that the end would be a screeching halt into a totally less pleasant place. Insomnia, heartburn and contractions are all taking some getting used to. Though if we’re being honest, I’m trying really hard not to get used to any of them, in hopes that they’ll all just go away.

What, a girl can dream right?

(And yes, this whole blog post was one big whine session. I am not sorry. Mostly.)

Today was not my finest day.

This morning, I got ready and stumbled downstairs at 6:45 to heat up 2 small cinnamon rolls as I have done every morning for the past several weeks. Don’t judge me. Cinnamon rolls are as close to a craving as I’ve ever had and I cannot get enough of them. I’m sure the results of Tuesday’s glucose test will make that come to a screeching halt soon enough.

Anyways, I realized as I was descending the stairs that I had never covered the cinnamon rolls I baked last night. Under normal circumstances I would not be all that worried. Maybe they’d be a little stale. But no, I live with the cat who has no self control. So all the tops of the cinnamon rolls were gone. He ate THE BEST PART OF ALL MY CINNAMON ROLLS. I may have come close to shedding a tear over this.

My favorite part of this story was that my husband didn’t even notice and ate two of them for breakfast. His only comment when I pointed out what happened was that he wondered why I had only put frosting on the sides of the rolls.

From there, I got in the car and found way more traffic than I expected and as the traffic came to a sudden stop, I watched in abject terror as the car behind me continued to speed along, unaware that I was not moving. Finally he saw and slammed on his breaks. There was NO chance he would stop in time and my only saving grace was that the car in front of me moved like 10 feet, so instead of a big accident, I moved forward as much as I could and got a friendly little love tap from the guy behind me. There are 2 very tiny circular scratches on my bumper from his license plate and I’m not pursuing it. I’m going to put way bigger scratches in my car than that, and I do not want the hassle.

Then I finally got to work, where I opened my locker door and then bent over to grab the water bottle I set on the ground. And then I stood up right into the locker door. There are almost no words to describe how surprising and painful that was.

And just when I thought the ugly part of the day was complete, I ruined my Easy Mac at lunch. Well, the water machine did it. It didn’t stop dispensing water when it was supposed to and so for lunch I had macaroni and cheese soup. It was really kind of awful.

And the worst part of the day was that though I saw my life flash before my eyes (what, I’m not dramatic at all) in my car and have a huge bruised egg sized knot on my head, I realized that I was far more upset about my cinnamon rolls and Easy Mac. The universe and my cat should both know better than to mess with a pregnant woman’s food.

As I wrote last week, things around here have been really happy lately. I feel like I’m an entirely new person living such a wonderfully blessed life. And of course I’ve always had a blessed life, but it’s so much more apparent to me now. Yes, there have been some serious hormonal ups and downs in these few months, but on the whole, things have just been so good.

But there is a downside to all the good. It’s all the worry.

It’s gotten so hard for me to sit back and just enjoy the happiness because I’m constantly trying to figure out what is going to cause it to go away. Lately my obsession has been counting the days until the baby is viable. It’s 2 more days, just in case you wondered. Not that I want my child to be born anytime soon, but I am finding such an awkward comfort in knowing that doctors would work to save him if something happened now.

Every time I feel him kick I am comforted (and giddy kinds of happy), but I constantly worry that I’ll go into labor early and instead of the happy image in my mind of coming home from the hospital with my brand new baby, I envision weeks and months in the NICU with my child. And this started well before my clinical, just for the record.

I worry that something is going to happen to my family. About half of my crazy pregnancy dreams are about my husband leaving me, or someone I love dying. I had a dream last week that my dad died and I can barely even tell you how horrible it was. Just thinking about the horror of that dream nearly brings me to tears.

I am so immeasurably happy, but in the back of my head I am always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s been so long since I’ve not had something sucky going on in my life. I have headaches I can manage right now, I am not drowning in school. I am happy. Everything is about as wonderful as it could possibly be. Today started and seems to be ending with a perfectly healthy and active baby kicking the crap out of my insides. I literally cannot keep a smile off my face. There are moments where I feel like I could explode from sheer joy. And it’s so foreign that it scares me.

I know that some worry is normal, especially in totally uncharted territory and truly, it’s not holding me back from my happiness. It’s just there, lingering, threatening to tell me that it told me so when or if something bad happens. And I so desperately don’t want it to be right. I want to hold onto this happiness forever because I cannot imagine life without it anymore.

I have sat down several times in the past few weeks to write here, and I have hesitated and left with the screen completely blank. It’s not that I don’t have anything to tell you, it’s that I feel like it’s not interesting enough. Like writing here and telling you that things aren’t wrong, that in fact, everything is so very right, is not what people come to read.

I am happy. Indescribably happy. Possibly as happy as I have ever been in my life.

Yes, each morning I fight with nausea that can only be controlled with medication, even now at almost 22 weeks of pregnancy. Yes, I have headaches every day, some of which slow me down considerably, all of which are really unpleasant. My physical state is perhaps not perfect and it never will be, but my emotional and mental states are so entirely over-filled with happiness that the rest seems to melt away.

I feel whole, like I am in exactly the place I am meant to be in my life. I feel like my marriage is in such a wonderful place, like the family we are building is exactly as I always dreamed it would be. I have wanted to be a mother for so long, and for this dream to finally come true is overwhelming and a little surreal. I didn’t know that I would be able to have a child, I didn’t know how my body would react. And that I can sit here at nearly 22 weeks and tell you how wonderful everything is, feels like too much. Too much good.

Feeling the baby kick each night before bed has become one of my greatest joys in life. I’m growing a child, a beautiful little boy and this fact never fails to completely boggle my mind. We made this baby, And each time he kicks is a reminder of the partnership we have. We are connected, not just he and I, but my husband too. Connected in this intimate way that no one else can understand. Yes, you can feel and sometimes even see the baby kick from the outside now, but what I feel, the connection I have with my child is so much more.

I’ve come to realize that he nourishes me every bit as much as I nourish him.

I know that in four short months, my life is going to change forever. But I also know that in the past 6 months, it already has. I will never again be the person I was before August, before this baby. He has changed me, changed the course of my life in every way possible.

And for him, for the family that my husband and I are building each day, I am grateful. I am happy.

Well, in case you haven’t seen, we know the sex of this baby.

And we are absolutely thrilled.

The genetics consultation went well. We are lucky in that we have very few other major risk factors to deal with other than my medical history. Though my husband is Jewish, his family is not of Ashkenazi descent, and therefore there are a few less scary diseases to worry about. Especially since my family is pretty much exclusively not Jewish, so even if he is a carrier, I’m not.

We got our first trimester blood test results and our risks for Down Syndrome and Trisomy 18 are pretty low, one is 1:80,000 and the other was something similar. Apparently we’re not in the lowest risk category, but we’re darn close. I still have to get another blood test to finalize the overall risk, but it looks like things are good there.

The ultrasound looked at every nook, corner, bone and organ of the little dude. And he looks pretty darn good. Extremely cute, too. And boy does he ever like to move. He moved to the point that I think the ultrasound tech was just about to give in on getting any images of his heart or brain because she’d get suuuuper close, and then he’d move. Over and over. And I didn’t even eat or drink anything crazy today.

The ultrasound tech took all the images to the geneticist, who came in and said that overall, everything looks fine. Her only real concern is that his heart is small. Not necessarily that it’s smaller than it’s supposed to be per se, but that it’s so small at this point because he’s very small that they can’t see all the things they need to see. It clearly has 4 little chambers, which is pretty key, but they want us to come back next month to get a second look when he’s a little bigger.

We happily obliged. I can always get on board with extra ultrasounds. So next month we’ll get a second look at his heart and in the meantime, I’m going to refuse to be too worried about it.

At my OB appointment yesterday my doctor decided to move the due date back to 5/7/12 because she didn’t like that the maternal/fetal medicine doctors moved it up a full week after I had my last ultrasound. So it was super fun today to discover that the baby is actually measuring right where he should be if he was due on 5/4/12. So I’m officially choosing to keep the 5/5/12 date. Because Cinco de Mayo is fun and my doctor is being obstinate about the date for no reason.

And that’s pretty much the whole deal. But just because I’m feeling like a proud mom, here’s a picture. Because he’s kind of a looker. If I do say so myself.