If Noah hadn’t gotten the all clear from his doctor I would be peeing on a stick right now. I’ve been seriously nauseated for days. I’m having weird lower abdominal discomfort. My dizzy is outrageous recently. COME ON BODY! KNOCK THIS SHIT OFF!!!
I went out for a while on Saturday night leaving Noah alone with the girls. This meant defrosting some milk for Calli, just in case. Apparently she didn’t actually want it during the night, but it was already defrosted and you can’t refreeze. So I helped her with the cup on Sunday. (We do have bottles but I’m lazy.) She sucked the milk down so fast it was startling. And then I got the rest of the milk from the bag and brought the cup back towards her. She saw the cup and started *whining* and lurching for it. She wanted it bad. I was impressed. So much for thinking she has zero interest in food. If I were a more giving mother I would pump more often so she could drink from a cup because she obviously wants to. But I’m lazy so she’s going to have to wait for a bit. 🙂
This reaction and her current slightly increased fussiness is making me wonder about me eliminating sugar from my diet. I know the milk is adequate still but I kind of wonder if the flavor is less awesome because she is used to me having a fair bit of sugar. My mood also sucks donkey dick. I am being a viper. 🙁 I do still think doing this for a month is a good choice because health-wise neither of us will suffer. I’m just unfun. 21 days to go.
Tonight I did two. Miles that is (ok it was actually more like 2.28 but whatever). It was both less and more challenging than I expected. This is me formally, officially, publicly (ack the horror!) stating that before September 10, 2012 I will complete a marathon. Yes, I know lots of good reasons not to do it (oh my poor knees) and yet this is something that’s kinda on my bucket list. I really really want to do this for a lot of reasons that are hard to explain. It’s important to me. And you know what? That’s a good enough reason. 🙂
So tonight I went to the gym for the first time in…. I’m not willing to think about how long. But I did it. I don’t think I will be hitting ‘badass’ any time soon, but hopefully I will no longer feel too out of shape to do the things I want to do. 🙂
(This has virtually nothing to do with weight loss, though I expect some of that to happen. I just don’t have a good exercise icon…)
So both girls cried for about a minute after their shots and were fine. I’m so glad. 🙂
However I’m not so thrilled with our pediatrician anymore. I’m very unhappy with being told I should start sleep training my two month old. “It’s ok to let them cry for a while. You need them to understand that they can’t be dependent on you.” What the fuck? She’s two fucking months old. She IS dependent on me. And never ever ever let your infant be in the sun, now here’s your synthetic vitamin d. And because we did HiB and PC with the previous pediatrician she was snotty when I said Shanna was in for Polio–her records didn’t show Shanna having those shots so started on a lecture about how it is pretty silly to worry about Polio while leaving my child open to Meningitis.
I want to go back to Kaiser.
In other news: Calli is 11 lbs 13 oz and 22.75″. Shanna is just over 30 lbs and just shy of 36″. Yay!
I’ll put pictures for rbus up soon. 🙂
I’m a bad invalid. I’m feeling better all the time, but I still have to be careful not to walk too much or I’m dizzy enough to fall down. So I’m feeling great and energetic while I’m sitting… but I’m writing checks my body can’t cash. SUCK! So the assumption that I will have to be in bed for at least two weeks was apparently founded. Damnit. Ok, I have actually left the house twice. And the whole next day if I tried to walk for more than about two minutes I slammed into walls as the vertigo hit me. So if I push it I need several days of recovery. I’ll eventually slow down enough to let myself fully recover.
Calli is a sleeper. I feel like I don’t know much of anything about her personality yet. I figure there’s time. 🙂
And then on to the gross body TMI (don’t read if my bowels are over the top for you):
Continue reading
Hoo boy. All the people who said that going from 0-1 is way harder than 1-2 must not be talking about the first week. The first week with just Shanna was pretty damn blissful. We all hung out on the bed together and didn’t do much. We alternated who was napping and it was awesome. Uhm… it’s not like that this time. Shanna has So Much Energy. And keeping her from jumping on the bed (HELLO! Healing from internal wounds here!!!) is difficult. Other than that she’s just pushing boundaries slightly more than usual but really she’s not being out of line at all. So yeah. We aren’t as patient as we should be, but we are both working on it. She is quite in love with Calli. 🙂
Thank all the stars in the heaven for tandem nursing. Given how much the rest of me hurts I was about ready to flip my lid when my boobs started hurting last night because my milk came in. So I called my trusty, always hungry, toddler over. Insta-relief. (Yes, there is still plenty of milk for Calli.) Every minute of discomfort while nursing through pregnancy has already paid off. 🙂
We are trying to figure out a sleep schedule that will allow me to heal as quickly as possible. It’s a challenge. I have so much going on in my brain that it takes me forever to fall asleep, nearly an hour after each wake up when I can normally fall asleep in under five minutes, so that’s extra challenging.
I sorta went against orders and took a shower today. My stench was seriously bothering me. For those of you who are childfree, when you have a baby you then have basically hot flashes for a while as you sweat out a lot of the extra fluids you have been carrying around. This is not pretty. But a shower (ok, I sat in the tub with the shower nozzle on because I can’t stand and being submerged isn’t a great plan yet) felt decadent. Huzzah for hygiene.
We have a rather remarkable number of people bringing us food. I cannot express properly my gratitude. I think that I will karmically owe food to every newly delivered mother I ever hear about for the rest of my life. It feels really awesome.
Noah is the most amazing, supportive husband I can imagine having. He has earned so many brownie points that it will be decades before I return them all. I guess I’m going to have to stop whining about his night off. He’s earned several years worth of them recently.
I’m tired and my physical recovery is predictably slow. Walking to the bathroom is easier. Returning a plate to the kitchen is still a stretch and if you’ve seen how small my house is that’s pretty sad. I could not stand long enough to dry off after the shower. After not standing during the shower. Ugh. I’m not feeling patient with this. But it’s only been three days. I need to give myself a lot more time. I feel perkier while I am sitting in bed. Once I am vertical my bravado is revealed.
Calli is… mostly asleep really. 🙂 But she’s sweet and we are already fond of her. Yay hormones.
ETA: If you give me any fucking advice or ‘next time you should’ in any way shape or fucking form I will delete the fucking comment and ban you from ever commenting again. I’m not sure I can express how fucking foul my mood is.
Today has been a fucking horrible day. So I spent most of the day trying like mad to induce labor. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s often painful and never fun. My doula was here for most of the day with us because she brought over a pretty powerful abortifacient that often, but not always works. I was taking it every fifteen minutes for hours an hours and it was certainly causing gnarly strong contractions. No cervical progress. At some point in the afternoon my midwife showed up and when she got here with her kid and the whole circus… the contractions stopped. The noise, the distraction, just EVERYTHING was too much. I asked for her kid (and my doula’s) to leave. So they arranged childcare and it was a couple of hours before both kids could be picked up. At some point in here I finally got my midwife to sit down and talk about what was going on with my labor–or lack there of. She told me that in her opinion I had ~24 more hours before she would call it and I had to go to a hospital anyway. Given the clusterfuck that would be having to deal with transferring childcare around I asked her if we should just go today and she said that was probably a good decision.
The circus moved to the hospital. We got there, checked in, did some exam stuff… then comes this startling revelation! They can tell if my water has broken by doing a super quick swab then wiping it on this little piece of litmus tape. Literally a fucking 30 second procedure and there is no god damn reason in the world that my fucking midwife should not be able to perform this procedure. The doctor said it is very possible that I did have a high leak because they often reseal themselves but at this time I don’t have a problem and I should just go home. (Then there was fuss with him being called out to deliver a baby RIGHT NOW and I wasn’t allowed to leave until he officially came back and signed me out. This was annoying because the nurse required me to stay on the table with the monitors.)
Then my doula says that she wants to go and she leaves me with the parting crack of, “And remember the next time I see you it should be real labor–five minutes in between contractions, for at least a minute for an hour.” Wow. Awesome way of giving me a smack for wasting your time. My midwife bailed at that point too. Fine. Then Noah and I wait around for a while and get a lovely little lecture from the doctor and nurse about how when my labor actually starts I should just come straight back to the hospital because what I am planning is a bad idea.
This whole fucking day is fired. Most of what I did today was unpleasant or flat out hurt. And it all could have been fucking prevented if my midwife had done a god damn 30 second long low-tech test.
The pee test is ongoing. Joy.
The blood tests don’t indicate preeclampsia. Whoo! This is a good thing. Apparently some things are a little bit unusual and my midwife says she will be spending some quality time with a reference book trying to determine if they mean anything but she isn’t too concerned at this point.
ETA: the slightly weird stuff seems to boil down to ‘Yup. Yer pregnant.’ So completely all good. Yay for less nervousness.
Now if I could get this damn headache to go away.
(I now get to feel more comfortable shrugging off all the weird symptoms as probably Meniere’s related. Yay!)
So this afternoon I need to go in to have liver testing stuff done and get a container for a 24 hour urine catch. Apparently I’ve been shrugging things off as no big deal that could actually be a big deal. Things like blurry vision with little spots of light dancing in my vision (I knew that some vision weirdness was semi-common during pregnancy). Severe sudden lower back pain (not crampy so I figured it was just a weird thing). Headache lasting multiple days that Tylenol won’t make go away (headaches are so common in my friends group that I don’t think that much of them). Mental confusion (isn’t everyone kind of batty when they are pregnant?). Major shoulder pain (I figured this was from sleeping on my side for months). Sudden nausea in the third trimester (I thought I was just unlucky). Stomach pain after not having a problem for months (different from my normal stomach acid pain–I can’t tell if I am hungry or full my stomach just aches like mad).
Hey, when you list all this out like this it looks kind of lame that I’ve been ignoring it. Well… it was always just one thing at a time and easy to ignore…
*sigh* I still have very good blood pressure (110/60) and my weight gain is still rather moderate (less than 12 pounds at 34 weeks) so I figured everything was all good. Guess not. Time to head off to the lab. 🙁
Pregnancy sucks so very much.
How’s that for a subject? Yesterday I went and spent time with my cousin. She is getting ready to move back to Kentucky and I won’t see her for many years. It was nice to see her as at this point in time she is the bio-family member I am the closest to and that I like the most. Which is kind of sad because I have distinctly mixed feelings about her. (She’s nice and she means well, but she is a serious whiner and she’s rather dumb.) We walked around downtown Los Gatos for a few hours because the house just isn’t kid proof. They have a house full of sick old people and they have medication bottles everywhere combined with the fact that they have a bunch of animals and the house is dark and dim and gross because no one cleans very well. Not the best place for a curious toddler in my opinion.
We walked for probably 2.5 hours. Not that long, but we did cover a fair bit of distance. Today I am totally freakin wasted. I have no energy at all. I have this long list of chores I want to be working on but I just can’t bring myself to work. 🙁 I need to pick up a friend at the airport in an hour and a half and I don’t think I’ll get anything done before then other than eating lunch. Ugh.
I want many days of hanging out in my house so I can rest and do some freakin work.
A lifetime of having an overly sensitive stomach has taught me the signs of vomiting long before I actually puke. It’s different from feeling nauseated which I can do for great lengths of time but there is no way I will actually puke. I generally have half an hour or so of notice that, “No really–it’s serious” so that I can go clean the toilet, pull my hair back, and just generally get settled. It’s a dubious gift but given that I almost always have issues with uhm problems from the other end when I am vomiting I’m awfully glad I get the opportunity to clean the toilet first.
Well, Debbie, you wanted me to post something. 😛
ETA: This is the suckiest part about being a stay at home mom. Unless I happen to get sick on the weekend I don’t really get a day off. 🙁
I took Shanna to her first visit with a new pediatrician today. We switched insurances again so I had to start hunting from scratch. I like this chick a lot. She did her PhD thesis on Intergenerational Abuse Issues. That seems like someone I should maybe hook in with. She is tolerant though not enthusiastic about the really delayed vaccines. She didn’t have a problem at all with us skipping flu and chicken pox entirely. w00t. She was very willing to talk about best practices on parenting stuff and at one point she said, “It is so nice to talk to a parent who is educated!” I’ll be buffing my nails for a while after that one. She asked me pointed questions about a lot of our parenting choices and how we are going to handle support network/social stuff given our homeschooling plans but said that all my answers were the best they could be. I appreciate that. It’s kind of sad how badly I need the rubber stamp of someone in charge in order to verify that my copious research is actually correct.
And then we went off to start DTaP. The shot technician started off emphasizing the pain and how it was awful but it will be over quick. I told him to stop and then I sat Shanna on the table and we had a little chat about how it will pinch and probably not be her favorite thing ever, but shots are to keep us healthy and they aren’t that bad. I asked her if she could be brave and hold still and she did perfectly. The shot guy was really surprised. He told me he’s never seen a kid her age be so calm and collected. That surprised me. Really? Every single kid freaks out? If it is that pervasive then maybe he should think about the fact that his approach isn’t exactly reassuring. 😛
And the doctor was impressed with her vocabulary, counting ability, and ability to sing (almost all) of the ABC song. 😀 Yay kiddo!
Ok, so compared to blacksheep_lj it doesn’t count as exercise. Thank all that is holy that I do not have to be compared to her. 😀 Sunday I worked the resale even and spent four hours standing and walking rapidly on concrete. That is a much longer block than normal for that kind of activity for me. Monday I went out with a friend and spent a couple of hours walking in a park. Last night we walked to the park with Shanna and that’s a good 2.5 mile loop without all the walking back and forth we did to add on it. And we did that at the speed of toddler.
Holy crap I hurt. I don’t normally do that much walking in three days. I used to, but I haven’t this pregnancy. I feel like my uterus weighs about 30 lbs and it is sitting right on top of of a sharp pointy bit (my cervix). It fucking hurts when I stand right now. Ok, so on a scale of 1-10 it’s only like a 3, but I’m not used to that hurting! Whine! My back and knees are very sore and unhappy with me because basically all of this walking was on concrete.
But I never got winded even slightly. I didn’t have to take breaks to sit down much. Once last night, once at the park and those were both more because I needed to change angles for my hips more than anything else. My legs aren’t tired at all. Oh good. I’m not nearly so out of shape as I thought. 🙂 My joints are going to hate me right now no matter what I do. Three days in a row was probably overly ambitious but I really should start doing this at least three times a week. I don’t want to get as out of shape as I did when carrying Shanna. 🙂
I was out of the house all day yesterday and came home kind of cranky. I’m not feeling stellar today either. I always feel icki the day after dental work for some reason even though this was pretty mild in terms of dental stuff. I will try to respond to comments tomorrow when I’m being less of a pill. I’m not mad at anyone or cranky with anything you are likely to figure out. 🙂
In other news: the implant process is completely done. I have a ‘tooth’ in that spot for the first time in 2.5 years. It’s kind of weird.
Shanna is some flavor of sick. She is whiny x’s 1,000. This is not normal. She is super clingy. She has a low grade fever. She keeps crying. She woke up in the middle of the night with a nightmare and had a terrible time going back to sleep. There is a youtube video, we call it The Hippo Song, and it absolutely terrifies her. She cries hysterically. (We’ve watched it 1.5 times.) She talks about how scary it is all the time. Last night she just couldn’t get over it. She has uhm intestinal distress.
My poor baby. 🙁
Maybe I should stop complaining that my life is boring. My life is not boring. My life is stable, safe, and awesome. Let’s go back to that. So uhm, I got to spend 5 hours in the ER today. Around 1:45pm I started experiencing mild lower abdominal cramps. They were intermittent and not too severe. Around 2:00 they started getting a little worse and it started getting hard to stand up completely straight. I started calling folks like my midwife, Noah, a friend who is also a midwife. The only person who answered was Noah. (I was at a friend’s house.) I told Noah I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do about it but I was concerned. Once I started getting fairly fierce lower back ache I burst into tears and announced it was time for the ER.
I sat in the waiting room for hours before finally getting seen at all. I spent a lot of time in the waiting room hunched over crying from pain. My midwife arrived after not too terribly long and we snuck off to the bathroom so that she could listen to the baby with the doppler. She said she didn’t know what was going on with me, but the baby sounded fine. My blood pressure instantly dropped. I stopped crying every time the fierce pain came and instead started breathing through what I was pretty certain was contractions.
For those following at home: I am 14 weeks pregnant. There is no way my baby could survive outside of me at this point.
Eventually I got in to see a doctor. (Amusingly this doctor is well known in the dance community. She immediately offered to get a different doctor if I felt uncomfortable with her giving me a pelvic exam. I muttered that given how many of her friends have already seen my crotch, one more person was no big deal. She tactfully ignored me. :D) She was friendly and professional. She didn’t feel anything problematic so I was back out to the waiting room so that I could wait and wait and wait for an ultrasound. It took another hour or so. The ultrasound technician was WAY chatty compared to my previous experiences telling me all kinds of interpretations of what he was finding. I’m pretty sure he was actually breaking rules but oh man am I not going to report him. The baby looked great. The baby is measuring a couple of days ahead of my dates but that’s not a big deal. The heartbeat was lovely. Development is universally on target or a couple days ahead. This is awesome. But I had a whole lot of confirmation that I was having very fierce contractions. My cervix was long and thick (that’s a good thing). I am no where near having a baby any time soon.
I had to wait a while longer to see a different doctor (shift change) so that I could get final results. No UTI. No obvious anything other than me having severe contractions. Uhm, I guess those just happen. Take Tylenol for the pain.
Then we were released. My midwife said that if I am not opposed, half a glass of wine should probably take care of quieting my uterus. I am currently sipping an awesome vintage.
You know, given how stressful my pregnancies are I really really really really don’t need to go through this a third time.
It’s ok to talk about weight while pregnant, right? It’s not somehow verboten? Just checking.
So a friend whom I like and respect has told me that the best thing to do while pregnant is to look at your weight, cut that in half, then drink that many ounces a day in liquid (mostly water, of course). Thing is… I’m trying like mad to do this and I’m dropping weight. I feel hungry but unable to eat because my stomach capacity is maxed out. I’m shaky and kind of weak on the days I manage to get to 11 cups of liquid. (I should be drinking 12+ according to that theory.) But if I drink only as much as my body feels inclined to take in I’m drinking 6-8 cups of liquid a day and I can eat. I feel much better physically. I don’t shake.
I think that the ideal of tons of water might just be an ideal for me. I’m beginning to think that is really a bad idea for my health and my pregnancy for me to focus that hard on water.
(For the record my midwife’s general philosophy is: don’t get dehydrated.)
I’m thinking about this because I’ve been trying really hard to get in my liquid today. I am up to 7ish cups of liquid. And I’m shaking like a leaf. I feel like shit. I can barely move around. And I feel like I am starving but my stomach is full. I think I’m done with this.
Hcg 12/22: 439
Hcg 12/24: 1517
Progesterone 12/22: 29