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.

Gestational logorrhea: week 6

We saw it today - transparent sac
deep inside, with a yolky snack.
No beating heart. Early still for that.

The lack of preciousness this time around is astonishing. No time to navel-gaze, literally or otherwise. Barely time to shove food into my endlessly hungry maw, sometimes food pilfered from the firstborn's ration, when we're out and about. Lifting the boy out of his crib is a test of my endurance, which usually leaves me collapsed in the armchair in his room until I'm summoned to the rug for the umpteenth pretend picnic of the day. How tired will I be when I actually have something to show? Just now I look paunchy, only slightly paunchier than Before.

First appointment today left me with a slightly sick feeling about the new doctor I chose - turns out it's yet another Baby Factory. A thorough practitioner who talks at about 3.5 times the normal speed (even by NYC standards). In and Out (well, except with an hour-long wait to go In). I am hoping the midwife returns my call.

Gestational logorrhea: week 4

Here be found random thoughts on my current condition, which I'm still too much in shock to really believe... I doubt anyone is following along, but if you do, hi! and please keep this all to yourself. Thanks.

You are pregnant for two weeks before you conceive. I guess I was pregnant in my mind, with all the eating I was doing, and continue to do. Why did I think it would take more than one try this time around? After all, we weren't moving house or anything. However, this baby was conceived in a bed - how pedestrian! It is difficult for me to get after hours access to a library these days. Yes, you read that right.

I look at Jonah now and am suffused with equal parts pride (understandable) and guilt (for removing his privileged status of primogenito). He knows the book, I'm a Big Brother by heart (it was in a batch of hand-me-down books from my brother), but he has no idea it will apply to him. When quizzed about having a little brother or sister, he recites back what I've told him: "Gonna share my toys with them. Gonna teach them things." I wonder if he suspects anything.

Physical manifestations so far are limited to headaches (when I don't eat frequently enough, which is ALL THE TIME) and incredibly sharp twinges in my lower abs when I get up too quickly from bed or a chair. Eeeeeeeeasy there, big girl.