Coming to a Nursery Near You

Archive for January, 2007

Soooo, my 37 week appointment went really well! I talked to my nurse about Labor Nurse’s comments on my posting the other day. I asked her about whether the baby would have to have another needle stick because I had declined the strep b test and she said nope, because I’ll automatically get antibiotics when I go in for the c-section. YAY!!! AND, she said, because of me, they’ve changed their policy about automatically giving the strep-b test to repeat c-section moms Woohoo … I’m a trail blazer! LOL

In other news, the baby’s fine – the non-stress test (NST) went fine and I met another new (to me) nurse who was awesome. She was very friendly, gentle and just in general, cool. I’ve had such a long history of bad experiences with nursing staff, I just sort of expect them to look down on me, condescend or even better, call me a baby or ask how I’m gonna give birth if I can’t even give blood.

Soooooooo, it was a nice day! The doc is pleased with everything, and even said that the weight (26 freakin lbs) I’ve gained is fine too. So, yay. Next NST is Friday. Hopefully, I’ll keep my hormones in check and not cry your shoulders off again

After I wrote the book-long posting yesterday, I felt guilty. I realized afterwards, that through all the aches and pains and difficulties of my last pregnancy, I’d still do it 10 times over again if it meant having my daughter. She’s 1/2 of the reason why I get up every morning. Her brother, the other 1/2. They’re my life. My world revolves around them and I’d go through ANYTHING to have them in my life. So why the hell am I so worked up about what’s about to happen to me in the next 6 weeks? Maybe it’s because I can’t put a face to the person in my womb. Maybe it’s because I haven’t fallen in love with it yet. I don’t know.

My hubby is the most incredible daddy. He truly is completely hands-on when it comes to his children. He’s like a mother bear. Even as the shell-shocked first time dad, he was in there changing diapers and burping our son and doing what he could. He helped me when he could (and remembered) and evolved into an even more appealing, sexy life mate because of it. There truly is nothing sexier than the man you’re with becoming a GOOD father. When our daughter came along, he stepped up and just knew where he belonged. Even now, she sits next to him during meals and he helps her, etc. so I can actually eat a somewhat warm meal. I KNOW he’ll continue to be an incredible father to #3 (haha Heather).

For all his incredibleness, though, he does not bond with our babies before they come out of me. I think that he’s afraid to, and for some reason, I’ve caught that this time around. He doesn’t sit here talking to the baby in my belly… hasn’t been all that interested in what I do or buy for the baby. He was like this, though, for both of the others, so I shouldn’t expect anything else. Once he lays eyes on this baby, though – watch out world.

So maybe that’s been part of my problem – being afraid to attach myself to someone that I haven’t met yet. But, in a manner of 21 days (or less, depending on whom you believe), this little person will come and split my heart into a third portion. I’ll cry when I see this living, breathing being be removed from my nice, warm body. I’ll cry when he/she gets poked and prodded and cleaned and wrapped. I’ll cry when they present him/her to me to meet *ME* and I’ll cry every time I THINK about this baby for the next several months. My heart will be near bursting every time I look or think about him/her. My heart will be near bursting every time I see my son and daughter looking at this new person with the AWE that I know they’ll have. And I’ll try to be the best damned parent to this one as I am to my other two, for the rest of my life. And I know that within a matter of hours after my surgery, be able to say with full confidence, that I’ll take 10 more surgeries if it means having this new little person in my life.

So, can someone please just move the clock up a little – please?

(PS – this 2nd photo was taken by my ex this fall- isn’t it gorgeous?)

or more aptly entitled, “What’s Dawn Ranting About Today?”…

When I first got pregnant, I was shocked. I’d been on the Pill for months – but apparently, I’d somehow screwed up, because there were lines on the stick. Quite literally, within 15 minutes of my stick test, I was in the clinic office taking their “Official pee on a stick” test, with the same positive result. The nurse gave me my estimated Due Date (EDD) of February 20th, 2007. My hubby, and both kids were with me. I cried about the due date because, as you may remember by now, it’s my Nana’s birth date, and although she died 6 years ago, she’s still a very big part of my life.

I came home and cried. How was I going to go through another pregnancy. Pregnancy is hard on me. I wind up feeling like an invalid. It HURTS to be pregnant when you’re me. The delivery, and subsequent recovery time, HURT. It’s HARD. The breastfeeding issue… Oy! I breastfed my daughter for 14 months, and it hurt for 14 months. My breasts remained painful and at the same time, numb, for another YEAR or so after that. I’d just gotten them back to ME. While pregnant with my daughter, I’d experienced some sort of weird thing with my back and/or neck that made a *large* portion of my body (arms, legs, neck, back) numb. That never came back. What ELSE was gonna go numb with THIS pregnancy? What about my other 2 kids. They were gonna have to share me again. How was this fair to them? What if something happened to me this time? They’d lose their mother because she’d not been smart enough to take a simple pill. All I could see were the negatives.

My hubby lay down with me and tried to calm me down. He made me look at the positives, of which there were a few. There were things like … well, (our oldest) son is going to be going into adolesence soon – he won’t have time for (our youngest) daughter anymore – now she’ll have someone else to hang out with. Now they’ll both have someone extra at their birthday parties (they never have anyone there). He may have even thrown in the fact that we’ll be able to have “free” sex for the next 9 months. LOL During that time, I could visualize my daughter getting to be a Big Sister. I could visualize my son, as he entered his teen years in a few years, passing the baton off to her and saying “it’s your turn now”.

Well, it made it a little better. Over the next few days, as I told family members, and the rather lackluster responses from some, I tried to grow a thicker skin. still, thoughts of all the things that were to happen to ME, kept coming back. I created this blog so that I could laugh/cry about them here without having to annoy my hubby too much. And I have, I know. If you’ve read this blog from the beginning, and you’re still here, I’m amazed. I know it’s been a whine-fest. But you know, I needed this outlet. I needed a way to get out all the junk that whips around in my head at 2-3-4 am. Sleep has not been my friend in the last 32 weeks since I found out about this pregnancy.

I’ve remained closetly pessimistic that this baby would even take its first breath. Of the clothes and accessories I’ve bought, most are still on the hangers or in the packages. Yesterday, I did a baby wash of the clothing that’s been given to me (thank you, freecycle), and that’s all – there’s lots, don’t get me wrong. But it somehow feels like I’m jinxing myself if I take them off the hangers and wash them before the baby’s here… because if something happens, and I have all these new clothes, it’ll somehow break me.

It may even be the reason why we haven’t been able to settle on a name.

The fact that I had 2 miscarriages between my son’s & daughter’s births, remained HEAVILY on my mind too. Every ache, pain and cramp made me think “Oh, here we go again and won’t this suck.”

Every thing I’ve done, both good and not so smart, has been about making sure this baby gets to breathe that first breath. And all the ones after that. I’ve obsessed about his/her weight, worrying about mine too. I’ve selfishly cursed the scale every time I gained a lb, because of all that I’d JUST taken off. I’ve felt like a SLUG for the last 2 months because I’ve done nothing in this house except seemingly mope and go from couch to bed to desk. I cook, and sometimes I clean, but not with the energy or complexity that I’ve done before. I feel like I’ve neglected my other kids, because I’m so wrapped up in myself.

I’ve wondered, more than once, how I could have possibly worked during my last pregnancy – worked right up till 36 weeks – ON MY FEET, and this time, I can’t walk to the bathroom without a contraction – contractions that do nothing more than make me tired and cranky. It again makes me wonder why my body hates me so much, it won’t even do the seemingly normal things like go into labor, or labor properly or enable me to have a baby WITHOUT a major operation.

As I wrote in my blog’s description when I first created it, though – what pregnancy is neat and clean and pretty all the time?

I was traumatized by my first birth experience. So much so that I’ve never really written out my son’s birth story. Just laying in bed last night, THINKING about writing it out, and reliving some of the events of it, had me in tears. Perhaps it’s because even my very first gynecological experience was so shitty that everything that’s come after it has been so hard for me to cope with. And at 39, and entering what I THOUGHT was peri-menupause, that’s a long time.

So it was with all of these things that are constantly floating around inside my head that I was up too early again today. I was checking blog stats, following links, etc. and came across a blog of a woman who had lost her baby last week, at 8 weeks.
In my comment to her, I promised her that I’d try to change my thinking about pregnancy because, as her blog had made me realize, some people don’t have it so easy.

I tried for years to get pregnant when I was married before. I had no luck, which, looking back on it, was a good thing. He’d have made an awful father. I was told, at the time, that I’d probably not get pregnant – that I wasn’t even ovulating. When they offered the “opportunity” to have dye injected into my tubes to find the blockage, I declined. And proceeded to gain at least 5o lbs to assuage my guilt over not having the intestinal fortitude to go through with a procedure like that, and therefore deny my parents/grandparents the opportunity to have a grand/greatgrandbaby.

Drowning my sorrows in potatoes and pasta didn’t really help. I wound up hating myself more because of the weight. Duh. I looked like hell, felt like hell – hated my life. I finally, somehow, decided that I deserved more than what I had. My husband was on some weird life-changing thing that made him a miserable, abusive bastard. I found a “friend” on the newly found internet that made me realize I was worth more than what I felt I was. I began to lose weight and take an interest in myself. That “friend” was far away, but inspired me. Eventually, he & I grew apart and I found other “friends”. One of them was my honey, the man I share my life with.

Now, admittedly, I wasn’t the perfect wife either. We’d gone through counselling, but all it did was show further light as to why we weren’t gonna be married much longer.

Anyways, after years of unprotected sex with my ex, I left him and moved away. And within 14 days of moving and having unprotected sex with my new man, I was pregnant. It was way too easy. and mind blowing. But then, it was 18 months after his birth that I was pregnant again, not knowing it until I lost it. And then it was another 3 years of more unprotected sex before I was having another miscarriage, without having known I was pregnant. It seemed like that’s all I could do was lose babies. I mention that I didn’t know I was pregnant because my periods were ne
ver normal, and I’d regained the 100 lbs I’d lost. So the fact that there’s nearly 7 years between my children tells you something about my physical health. When I finally lost about 50 lbs., I got pregnant again and this time, it stuck. That was my baby girl, and what I thought was our last pregnancy.

Suuuurprise Surrrrrprise Surrrrprise! So, I know I’ve gone WAY off track with this posting, but this is what happens when I need to empty out my head.

Anyways, so now I’m 37 weeks pregnant with a hopefully healthy baby. From the ultrasounds, he/she looks good – I refused the extra tests because what’s the good in knowing smething’s wrong when you can just ASSUME something will probably be wrong LOL

It’s so hard to be optimistic! I’m old, overweight and stupidly diabetic. The whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of this baby’s heartbeat does little to calm my nerves about if this baby will be ok. If something IS wrong, how will I posssibly have what it takes to raise a baby who isn’t “ok”. But I told the woman who’d lost her baby that I’d try and find a brighter, more optimistic outlook for the rest of my pregnancy, which – when you compare it to some, has been a walk in the park. And for me too, if you discount the lost sleep, constant *constant* fatigue and the outlook of those first 6 weeks.

I look at my two children who, by all accounts, are happy, healthy, intelligent and compassionate human beings. (well, compassionate except for lettng mommy sleep in the bed, with daddy, ALONE.) I hope that giving them this extra sibling will be something that they’re always happy about (even when they’re fighting and calling each other names), and that in 30 years, when I’m probably not here, they’ll have each other to lean on and support and rely on. That this 3rd, who will be 10 years younger than it’s brother, will be glad that it’s mom managed to drag her way through 40 weeks of discomfort… and of course, that lovely surgery, to bring him/her into the world that sometimes royally sucks, but sometimes is truly amazing.

How exciting! As I was leaving a comment on Poobou’s blog, she posted again to say that her water’s broken and they’re at the hospital on Baby Watch. It’s their first, and how exciting for her! She was supposed to be induced on Monday, so my comment had to do with what she & hubby should be doing to help that along this weekend (lecherous grin). Turns out, that wont’ be necessary LOL

So, here’s to wishing a speedy and easy delivery for her & her baby girl

PS – an update – WELCOME to Little Ms. Catherine and a big congratulations to her happy (and relieved!) parents! I’m totally jealous! She’s beautiful, if teeeeny!

So, judging from the comments and phone calls, my last posting got people worrying about me. I really do appreciate their concern, but I promise I’m ok. As I said, I was feeling very emotional and I had to do something with it. I’m better now. For some reason, I had an extra infusion of pregnancy hormones earlier this week, but they seem to have levelled out, and I’m on a more even keel (if that’s possibly during pregnancy).

I had my 36 week appointment on Tuesday. I managed to talk my doctor out of that stupid strep test (it’s humiliating, truly) because I have *NO INTENTIONS* of delivering vaginally. I also got him talked out of checking for dialation, because again – it serves no purpose. Would I LIKE to know if I’ve started dialating? Sure – it’d be good to know if all the pressure and contractions have done something. But enough to have an exam? Nah. Thanks but no.

So, this was the day that I received confirmation that I’d be going in on February 20th (yes folks, that’s 24 days away). But what I found out is that I’m not FIRST! They’re doing another c-section before mine, so that means I’ll have a longer wait to eat or drink that day. It also means that my wonderful team of nurses will have split attention (which bothers me alot right now). So that’s been in the back of my mind. I’m hoping, though, that it’s yet another useless worry that I can toss away – that they’ll staff adequately so as to ensure that neither of us is left waiting/needing something because another mom has (thoughtlessly, of course) gone into labor too. LOL

I also got my goody bag from them (Read: pimped out by the formula company) but it’s a really neat backpack diaper bag so SCORE! I don’t have to buy one now! It’s all black – no baby designs for these up & comers LOL It was stocked full with formula, formula coupons, etc. and my nurse also threw in some extras like a dozen more packs of single-serve wipes, etc. It always, ALWAYS cracks me up when I’m out somewhere and there’s a (obviously) new mom pushing a newish baby in her cart and there’s a luggage-sized baby bag in the carriage too. What, exactly, do you need to carry in a bag that big? 7 sets of clothes? 30 diapers? An entire box of wipes? C’mon folks! All you need is 2 diapers, one of those neat little travel-sized wipes boxes, a change of clothes, an extra t-shirt and a blanket! Not the entire house! LOL

Ok, so I digress. But it’s still good for a snicker. And no, I didn’t have one of those giant bags even with my first So don’t go there.

I had a new (to me) visitor who left some great comments about my whole diatribe on what to bring to the hospital, and I think I’ll bring some of those things up the next time I go to the hospital. Especially since they remember me!

Hmmm… I’ve bought some really cute outfits for Sprout, courtesy of eBay. Of course, I could show you them, but then I’d have to kill you.

Most of my immediate family knows what we’re having. My dad resolutely refuses to want to know, which is pretty funny. He’s always like this, with all of our pregnancies (my sister’s, sister-in-law’s and mine), but I wonder if he’s truly gone the 9-8-4 months NEVER having found out (except for my sister’s big mouth).

I’ve chosen NOT to tell everyone what we’re having, though – mainly because I feel it takes away from the excitement on the day of the birth. You call someone to tell them the baby’s here… “Hi! Yeah, it’s a BOY! or Yea, it’s a GIRL!” is gone. Now, all you can say is… “it’s here!”
The folks who have asked are presumably pre-buying for the baby, so that’s why they *NEED TO KNOW*… but otherwise, you don’t (Note to Heather – No teasing the readers!)

But here’s a few hints, for those of you who haven’t entered the BABY POLL YET!! (there’s a prize!) I was under 6 lbs when I was born. I’m now 5′ tall, exactly. Hubby was a little over 6 lbs. Hubby is 5’7″. Both of my children were over 6 lbs, but under 7 lbs. Both were at least 19 inches long. And if you’re been paying attention, I’ve had one of each Oh, and I’ve gained less than 30 lbs

Ok, I’m starving, so I’m gonna go find something to eat