Gestational logorrhea: week 11

Met with a midwife yesterday, as part of my transition away from baby factories and hopefully towards a more slow-moving, considerate type of care. Slow-moving also means I am going to have to put up with waiting room time - up to two hours on bad days, I have been warned. The midwives I'm working with are essentially squatters within the office of an "OB to the stars" type doctor (who happens to have a soft spot for natural childbirth). We sat in his office to get my medical history down, and he popped in on us, needing to use the phone at his desk, but immediately gave up and went looking for another phone. My medical history is a long litany of, "no, no, nope, none, not that either." I am fortunate.

The midwife I met with happens to be the nurse who was on duty at the hospital when I delivered Jonah. It was such a pleasure to fill her in on the past 2.5 years, and I was quite moved that I'll get to work with her again. She made my extremely fast labor seem like something I could handle, and eventually I forgot that I had my husband and mother (and OB) there for support, and focused on her only.

The medical part of the visit was brief - urine sample, blood pressure, weight check (on a scale not as forgiving as the one I'd been on at the doctor's), and then an attempt to find the heartbeat with a Doppler (handheld audio device, more primitive than a sonogram). No heartbeat was found. The midwife offered to get the doctor in to do a quick sonogram to ease my mind (which wasn't at all troubled), but I truly felt like I could wait another week (next Wednesday I go to the hospital for a higher-level ultrasound that will begin to give us our odds for birth defects), so I passed. Sorry, Baby Fig, I don't have it in me (yet?) to be neurotic on your behalf. I just know you're OK in there, otherwise I wouldn't be OK.

GL week 10.2

There is a heart, flickering deep inside. My platelet count is low, but Dr Google indicates this is normal during pregnancy (and indeed it happened last time, too, but no one said anything about it). I have gained a whopping three pounds in the past month, which means - considering my food intake - that the first trimester must be equivalent to running a marathon in terms of the calories it consumes. I thanked the heart-flicker the best way I knew how - with french onion soup and an enormous cupcake.

Gestational logorrhea: week 10

The floodgates opened a couple times today, which is unusual for me lately. First, at the end of Jonah's final music class of the summer, which is also the last one we'll take with this teacher and possibly ever, since he's starting preschool five days a week in September. I've been taking him to music classes since he was four months old, so this marked the end of an era, and the beginning of the separation that will need to take place if he's going to be a happy schoolkid. I cried in the bathroom at the class site, sniffled a goodbye to the teacher (citing pregnancy hormones as the reason for my tears) and then openly bawled while pushing the stroller down the block. It was raining and no one saw me. Later, Josh told me during dinner how they had narrowly missed being hit by a falling tree branch while out for an afternoon walk. I was so overcome I couldn't swallow my food, imagining what might have happened. I left the table since I didn't want Jonah to start asking why I was crying (though he isn't quite at the point where my tears register, not yet). And I just spent an hour reading the blog of a friend of a friend who went through a harrowing medical challenge a few years ago, and I only just managed to find it and read it. At this point, I think I'm looking for things to make me cry, because other than sheer exhaustion (I martyred myself with a pre-7 a.m. gym visit today), I have nothing to complain of. All that's left is for me to race to the mirror and observe the effect of the redness on my eye color (it brings out the green very fetchingly), as I used to do in childhood. Better to just go to sleep. Tomorrow morning, we listen (and hopefully look) in on the spawn, at the doctor I'm planning to fire after my appointment is over.

GL week 9.3

I don't feel any feelings at all towards this growth, save possibly a little resentment, now that summer has truly hit and it feels so uncomfortable to move around. I can't remember if I felt this same way at this juncture with Jonah, because (as I discovered to my dismay) my first pregnancy was unevenly and poorly journaled. I hope I did feel this same way, in a limbo state and unconnected. Until movement makes itself felt, until anatomy can be observed, there is really nothing to feel (except way exhausted, as I am today, after traipsing around in the heat and then being rewarded with no nap to speak of). At least a little morning sickness would be a distraction - all I get is an uneasy feeling when I've forgotten to eat or pee once an hour. I remember the 20 week ultrasound as a definite milestone in terms of excitement - seeing the flexible spine undulating on the screen was incredible. The practical challenges that are beginning to assert themselves (where will we live, how will we get by, will Jonah hate his sibling) make all of this distinctly less fun.

Gestational logorrhea: week 9

I was such a baby, the first time around. The slightest aversions turned into insurmountable obstacles. Having to wash lettuce for a salad filled me with almost uncontrollable rage, even though I most definitely wanted to eat salad. The slightest feelings of nausea became near-misses. Brushing teeth was a twice-daily exercise in dry-heaving. (I know I'm lucky that's all it ever was.) I indulged my insatiable craving for pizza as though it were a religious duty, and gained much more weight than was really necessary.

This time? I think I'm just turning mean. See, I've got a two-and-a-half year old on my hands most of the day, which is to say: a ticking time bomb. I'm lucky that his fuse is quite long, longer than other kids his age, and he has prodigious vocabulary with which to express himself. This has spared me many meltdowns. But despite looking and speaking like a child beyond his years, he doesn't have a lot of horse sense. Yesterday he bolted away from me as we walked home from the playground. I couldn't believe he wasn't going to stop, so I let him get quite far away, most of a block, and then had to huff and puff my way to him. I'm lucky he didn't make it to the street. I was blind with rage when I finally scooped him up (using improper lifting position, which yielded a backache I probably deserved), got him in the stroller, and yelled in his face, which never works because he knows when he's going to be yelled at, and preemptively yells, himself. There was no "teachable moment" there, just a hormonal mom yelling at a yelling kid who wasn't going to get the point. I wish that was the only low point of yesterday, but there was more - we went to a restaurant for lunch, he was extremely sleepy and refused even a bite of food, and I only felt irrational anger about his lunch strike. He was out cold by the time we got home, and finally ate his lunch at 3 pm. But that doesn't excuse how mean I was to him.

Kids being the resilient little buggers that they are, there are no hard feelings on his part, today. I do wonder if deep inside he's starting to be afraid of me and my anger, which might be hormonally triggered but which I come by honestly via genes, thanks to a quick to anger dad (who, I learned recently, counts breaking our Pong video game by kicking it to pieces, because we wouldn't stop playing when he asked us to, as one of his finer parenting moments). A cautionary tale for you, ahhhhh.

Gestational logorrhea: week 7-8

In the heart of the uncertainty part. I know for sure I am carrying something around with me, a creature that makes it hard for me to go about my usual activities (taxing even outside of pregnancy, since they involve a 40 pound toddler) without hyperventilation or excessive hydration. But in this neutral zone after the first ultrasound (where there was no heart rhythm yet to hear) and the next appointment, two weeks from now, when I get the results of genetic tests and hear a heartbeat for the first time, it's much too easy to imagine the worst.

Even worse than imagining the worst, is how calmly and collectedly I am imagining it. It's not necessarily keeping me up at night. I imagine a series of phone calls I'd need to place and procedures to line up, if the worst is really the worst. What makes me cry is not that, but much simpler things - the notion of spending the week alone with my boy after enjoying a complete family unit for a three-day weekend. When I realized on Sunday night that our family unit, fat and happy after a holiday weekend of fun, sun, and food, was about to be torn asunder by the arrival of another work week, it was more than I could bear. Of course, I bore it. I guess I'm rehearsing bearing things. I woke up Monday morning with nothing but a feeling that I could bear it.

For now, in this strange limbo before my next appointment with the old doctor and then the first one with the new midwives, my proof positive that I'm working on a new person is an old craving. I made spaghetti with bechamel sauce for dinner tonight - something I haven't made since I was pregnant the first time around. Disgusting to look at, maybe it's even disgusting to eat, but it was incredibly satisfying.