I slept for seven hours. This should not feel like a Herculean task.

I’m having a run of good doctors. This is… emotionally fucking with me. I don’t trust doctors and they scare the shit out of me. They have too much power. I haven’t yet met the OB I’m going to be working with but I talked to the lady I already like in the department. She says I have to agree to only two things to deliver with them: IV placement (just in case) but I don’t have to have an active IV bag the whole time, just a line in my body in case of emergency. I won’t give a shit about that. I’m not that needle phobic. The other part I need to agree to is periodic monitoring–at least every two hours. Given that I spent my last labor upset that my midwife was pissy about me asking her to monitor me (she wanted to ignore me and focus on her kids and let nature take its course) that sounds great.

Everything else is negotiable. The nice lady recommended that I try out the dude in the practice. He is the most chill, mellow, experienced person available. I think I shocked the nice lady when I said, “Yeah so many dudes have been around my crotch I don’t care about the gender of a doctor. Whatever.”

I talked about my marijuana usage. She asked why I use it. I started listing diagnoses. She nodded and said, “That seems fine.”

I got to see the one, single kidney bean growing inside me. Turns out I labeled the calendar exactly correctly for my week progression. I counted from the correct sex act according to the date scan. *pat self on back*

So, do you think I should tell Eldest Child that we conceived on her birthday or should I keep that a secret? Ha.

Eldest Child was conceived on our first anniversary. Future Middle Child was conceived when I got back from a rough trip to Portland immediately following a miscarriage. I didn’t have an empty cycle. Lightning was conceived on Eldest Child’s 9th birthday. Easy to remember timing.

SEVEN HOURS OF SLEEP. You don’t know how happy I am. Today we have a whole bunch of kids coming over. That sleep is going to help my mood a lot. It is going to be fun to see the mixed age of kids trying to figure out an RPG. This is Noah’s show and I’m going to be entertained.

I’m really grateful for how involved and interested Noah is in his kids. We have a weird, insular life and if we didn’t pay attention to each other it could be incredibly isolating and problematic. Instead we are all really happy and we have a tremendous amount of fun together. I feel so lucky. I know that there are pieces of this picture that I hold together… but Noah does so much. He gives so much.

I love Noah for being a good father. For taking it seriously that this phase of his life is about helping other people be ok. There are many ways to do that, but I like the way Noah does it.

As much as I once in a while wish Noah would watch a movie or a show with me, I’m really glad that mostly he reads to us and we explore the world of books together with our kids. We are going through Madeleine L’Engle books right now and it’s so fun to share them with the kids.

I like that Noah and I don’t put up a lot of walls between ourselves and the kids. Not emotionally and not in terms of time. Noah has a job and we work to protect his mental space while he’s performing it. But Noah doesn’t have a lot of separate hobbies. He shares what he does freely with the kids. He includes them and invites them. He would do the same with me if I didn’t have such a negative attitude.

For some reason I woke up this morning to dry heaves. It had been over 12 hours since I ate my cucumber sandwich so there wasn’t anything to come up. That was a weird feeling.

If you are ashamed to admit you do something, maybe you should change what you are doing. I’m not ashamed to talk about what I do or with whom.

I’m… going back to bed.