The pace is picking up . . .

It feels as though time is ticking more rapidly now. Last week, it was 12 more weeks until my due date and now it's only 11. That may not seem like a big difference, but next week it will be 10 weeks and the week after that it will be only 9! Yes, I know that this is how time works, but to me it still feels a little shocking to think that in just two more weeks I will be in single-digit countdown. 

I thought that time would start to start to drag throughout the entire third trimester, but I think it's actually picked up ever since about 25 weeks and I'm guessing it will continue to do so until 37 weeks or so, when it will probably start to drag again. I'm hypothesizing that I will feel compelled to get things ready before the baby is full-term, and then once it is, I will be tapping my fingers waiting for it to arrive. 

At our midwife appointment on Friday, I asked a lot of questions about birthing options. Here's the rundown of what I found out: 

1. As long as my weight gain continues to stay under control, I will be eligible for a waterbirth! I actually found this out at the appointment before this last one, but it was good to have a second midwife confirm it. I'm not sure of my exact preferences, but it's really nice to know it's a possibility. I asked a few other questions about it on Friday -- mostly about whether I'd need any special preparation (to which the answer was no) and whether I could still do it even if I end up testing positive for strep b or needing an IV for other reasons (apparently, there are no problems with that and I could even do it if I needed pitocin).

2. There are virtually no circumstances in which they'd allow for a scheduled cesarean. As long as I don't have placenta previa or other serious conditions that would make a vaginal birth impossible or dangerous, they don't schedule them.  Even if the baby is breech, they will try a ton of other stuff to get the baby to turn rather than schedule a cesarean in advance. 

3. There are very, very few circumstances in which they'd send me for an "emergency" c-section. Basically, the baby would have to be in pretty serious distress and there would have to be evidence that it wasn't going to work any other way. 

4. They don't do any kind of elective inductions. They don't even discuss an "induction plan" until 41 weeks and there'd have to be a medically-indicated reason for any labor-inducing procedures (even just a membrane strip) before that. 

I'm really glad that I'm finding this all out now and not later. I'd always kind of assumed that the standard of care at my midwife group meant, "We want you to have the kind of birth that you'd like to have." I was pretty surprised that there wasn't much, if any, wiggle room. Of course I'd rather have a low-intervention approach rather than a high-intervention one . . . and I appreciate that all of their decisions have the healthiest outcomes in mind, but my need for some level of control or choice is starting to make me anxious. 

So many people, when I've stressed out about how this baby's arrival is going to work with my school schedule if it comes late, have said something to the effect of, "Well, have you considered an induction if it really gets to that point?" I've always said, "No, no, of course not. I'd want to let the baby come on it's own schedule." Even though this had been my preference (when I thought I had a choice), it's kinda scary to know that I have no option for encouraging it to come on my schedule. 

Anyway, having these discussions has made me realize that I should perhaps really start thinking of my countdown differently. Perhaps instead of thinking of myself as having 11 more weeks to go, I should start thinking of myself as having 12. Just to keep things in perspective, since I'm less scared of the baby coming early than I am of the baby coming late. 

Heading into Trimester #3

Measuring the passage of time in pregnancy is a hotly-debated topic.

The easiest way to measure the passage of time, of course, is to simply measure a pregnancy in weeks -- using Naegele's rule, this gives you a due date that is exactly 40 weeks from your last menstrual period. Measuring in weeks seems simple enough. We all can agree on what a week is, and there's so much that happens in a pregnancy that weeks are a convenient unit of time for describing these changes. Everyone knows that you're not really pregnant for the first few weeks before you've even ovulated, and everyone knows that baby's rarely come on their due dates, but according to this technically-unscientific-but-very-interesting website and graph, it's a good way of measuring for a reason. 

So weeks are nice. 

The trouble comes from the fact that, for whatever reason, most people don't like to describe pregnancies in weeks. I'm not really sure why this is, but most people seem to prefer months or trimesters. Months I can kind of understand -- it's a throwback to "how many periods have I missed?" kind of thinking. I'm not sure where trimesters came from, but I can also kind of see the appeal -- first you're "newly pregnant" and then you're "happily pregnant" and then you're "uncomfortably pregnant." It's nice, when you're in that "uncomfortably pregnant" stage to think of it as "the home stretch." 

The three methods make oodles of sense on their own right up until the point where people try to start converting between these methods. All of a sudden, 40 weeks isn't divisible by three, so figuring out when you graduate to a new trimester becomes complicated. A month is not exactly 4 weeks, so calculating how many months pregnant you are becomes a headache. 

It would be nice if someone would just do the math and make a blanket statement to everyone about what the official policy is, but for some reason nobody can agree. The end of the first trimester (to my knowledge) is never described as starting before 12 weeks, but it is alternatively listed as 12 weeks, 13 weeks, and 14 weeks (and various decimal or fractional amounts contained within these weeks, such as "12 weeks and such and such number of days"). The end of the second trimester is even more variably described, with authors listing anything between 25-28 weeks. By some calculators, I won't be in the third trimester for another week and a half and by others I have already been in the third trimester for a week and a half. 

Calculating months is even more complicated. My last menstrual period was on June 9. Therefore, on December 9, I considered myself "6 months pregnant." By some people's calculators, I was at the 6 month mark over 2 weeks prior to this, because 24 weeks/~4 weeks per month = 6 months. However, of course we only actually have one month that is actually 28 days, and those other 2 or 3 days a month really add up. By the "a month is 4 weeks" logic, a pregnancy would last 10 months on average, and it really doesn't -- it's more like 9 months and a week extra. 

Again, this is where I turn to the blog that I cited earlier, as the author has a mathematical formula for determining what she considers the appropriate milestone. 

According to her formula, I am in my third trimester. (Yay! I don't have to wait another 3 days for the 27 week mark OR another 10 days for the 28 week mark -- I'm already there!). I am 6.1 months along, and have completed approximately 66.7% of my pregnancy. 

To be honest, looking at the math involved, I have to say that I don't know why there is so much of a discrepancy between methods. This definitely seems the most logical to me. 

It also seems to match up with what I have been feeling as I've entered the final trimester. I feel as though I've encountered some interesting shifts in the pregnancy within the last week or so. Not only has the hunger increased, but  I've felt my belly getting larger, heavier and more noticeable. When I walk, I can see it swinging from side to side. 

My midwife appointments have changed a bit too. At my appointment yesterday, the midwife palpated me more than usual and finally said, "I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that this is a baby head." They hadn't tried to locate specific body parts before. She also found the heartbeat almost instantly and commented that the baby was running out of places to hide. 

I also had my glucose screening yesterday. There had been some miscommunication about when we would be conducting the screening and so I was unprepared for the test (I had just eaten before my appointment). It made for a long evening (three hours for an appointment that I'd expected to take half an hour!), but I was glad that I waited around for my blood sugar to return to normal and then did the test that same evening. The blood draw wasn't as bad as I'd expected, and the result (a passing blood sugar level that was actually lower than the one that I had when they tested me at 6 weeks), was worth the extra wait time. 

Overall, life is good. I'm in the home stretch!

The Hunger Games (but in a more literal way . . . without the bloodshed)

I am starting to understand why weight gain can get out of control during pregnancy.

According to the scale, my weight gain is just fine. Because I started my pregnancy with a high BMI, a healthy pregnancy for me means gaining less than the average amount. I have been diligently watching the scale to make sure that I'm not gaining weight too fast or too much. I have my personalized weight gain goals from my midwife, and so far I've stayed within the recommended range. So far.

But what I've noticed is that something dramatic has happened in the last week. I can't seem to get full anymore. I will eat what used to be a normal breakfast and immediately think, "Well, what else can I eat in order to stop being so hungry?" It's like the food isn't even getting to my stomach.

This is certainly the case with anything "normal-sized" that I make at home. If I go out to eat and eat a big, restaurant portion, I will get full. But if I try to just eat small portions, snacks, etc at home, I will feel almost exactly as hungry as I did before eating anything at all. Either that, or I will think that I am full, but will actually be famished again within two hours.

Let's look at today as an example.

I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. This wouldn't be such a horrible problem if it had been a weekday and I had to be up at 5am anyway, but today was a Saturday. I'm not supposed to be up at 4am on a Saturday. Anyway, I tried to stay in bed for as long as possible, convincing myself that if I didn't leave the bed, I would be able to fall back asleep. Eventually, I had to get up and eat, though, so I did. Since it was early in the morning and I wanted to get back in bed, I didn't eat too much -- just some toast to settle my stomach. The toast silenced the "MUST HAVE FOOD NOW" alarm that was going off in my head, but didn't actually fill me up. I was fine with this, though, because my main objective was to silence the alarm and get back in bed. I was hungry, but I was able to ignore the urge to eat and pay attention to the urge to sleep.

Within a few hours, though, I was still unable to get to sleep and now no longer able to ignore the alarm. I went downstairs and ate a large portion of soup. Even after finishing it, I was still hungry, but we were planning to go out to eat with some of Ben's family for lunch, so I tried to ignore the feeling again. I didn't want to eat three meals before lunch. But by the time that we were leaving for the restaurant, I had to eat a few Thin Mints on my way out the door because I was so hungry I worried that if there was even a modest wait that I would start to lose my humanity in front of respectable restaurant patrons.

When we got to the restaurant, I ate a sandwich, a pickle, a large cup of coleslaw and 1.5 latkes. I felt full -- full enough that I left most of my bun on my plate -- but not regrettably full. Normally, I would have probably eaten the same amount of food (sandwiches and latkes just aren't as good as leftovers as they are right there in the restaurant), but I would have felt as though I should have stopped about halfway through. Instead, I felt fine. Full and good.

The lunch ended around 2pm and I didn't really start to feel hungry again until 5:30. At that time, I started to think about food, but got distracted enough that I didn't hear the "MUST HAVE FOOD NOW" alarm until 7pm. At that point, I heated up some hearty leftover chili. After a bowl of that, I thought that I was done for the evening. But two hours later, I was famished again.

So here I am at nearly 11pm, eating a tuna salad and crackers when all I really want to be doing is going to sleep for the night. And I won't be able to go to sleep as soon as I'm done either, since lying down right after eating gives me heartburn. And I've just eaten the last bite of the tuna and I'm not full enough to be able to trust that I'll be able to actually coax myself to sleep before the next hunger alarm goes off. So I may still have one more late-night snack that I'll have to do before I can really get myself to sleep.

The most frustrating part of all this is that food isn't really all that appealing. It's not normal hunger that makes you want food. Instead, I want to be doing other things. Like sleeping. But instead I have to plan more and more of my day around my ability to procure nourishment. Eating small frequent meals doesn't seem to do much -- I feel almost as hungry as when I started, so it's terribly unsatisfying, and there's only so many options for food that can be furtively consumed when you are teaching a room full of middle-schoolers. But eating bigger meals only tricks me into thinking that the problem will be solved, when really it only sometimes works. The rest of the time, it's only a temporary fix and then I end up ridiculously hungry again -- as though the first meal didn't even count.

Anyway, I have yet to see how all this eating is going to affect my weight gain, but I can only assume that this is why most women typically gain the bulk of their weight during this last part of the pregnancy. I am certainly going to keep trying to maintain a healthy and slow gain, but if this hunger keeps up I'm not sure I'm going to be as happy with my daily hops onto the scale as I have been.

Nesting -- Part II

I am often amazed by my husband's commitment and follow-through with an idea. 

Until this weekend, we'd done almost nothing as far as setting up the nursery or any other nesting activities. We'd bought some baby clothes at a consignment sale and that was about it. 

On Friday, I used my extra holiday-season employee discount at the Science Museum's gift shop to buy the "Stim-Mobile" that I had had my eye on. I think that this was our first new baby purchase. 

On Saturday, I first mentioned the idea of us switching rooms with Bambin@ and we took our measurements and explored our options, as described in yesterday's post. 

On Sunday, my father-in-law came up and he and Ben installed a hanging bar in my closet. 

Afterwards, we went to IKEA and bought a crib, a mattress, a changing table, and all the related linens so that we could set them up at my in-laws house for holiday guests this Christmas and then move them to our home once they'd served their temporary purpose. We also bought the rug that I'd wanted for the nursery. 

Today, while I was at work, Ben and his dad made the room switch in its entirety. I came home to  an entirely different upstairs. The twin bed, baby's dresser, and glider/ottoman were in the new nursery. Space for the changing table and crib were demarcated and the Stim-Mobile was on the floor in the spot where the crib will eventually be. Our bed, my desk and our end tables were in what had formerly been our office/future-nursery. The printer was absent entirely -- no doubt, stashed somewhere waiting to be relocated. Everything looked perfect.  I have no idea how they did this. It seemed like a nightmarish round of tetris to me -- to get one large bed out of a small room and into a room where there is currently another bed, a desk, etc . . . and then to get the other furniture from that room out and over to the small room. The hallway separating the bedrooms is little more than a landing, so it seems like some sort of bizarre witchcraft that allowed this to happen.   

But that's Ben for you. I make an off-hand remark and think that enacting it will take several weeks of careful planning in order to execute. Instead, within 60 hours he turns it into a dream come true. "Oh, you'd like the back and front halves of the second floor to be flip-flopped? No problem, babe." 

Nesting

I've been out of communication for awhile, but a lot has been happening. Thanksgiving was a busy and fun trip. I really enjoyed hanging out with family and especially seeing my sister and brother-in-law for the first time since getting pregnant.

On the day that we left Chicago, though, I came down with some crazy muscle aches that -- coupled with a sore throat -- seem to have been virus-related rather than just aches and pains from traveling with a fetus. I ended up spending two sick days at home in bed. I have lost count of how many sick days I've taken so far this year, but I'm quite certain that I'm well beyond my paid time off for the year.

Coming back to school after two days of a sub (and after a week away from my students) was difficult for everyone involved, but at least I was starting to feel better.

Then on Thursday evening, my nose started feeling runny and stuffed-up at the same time. I started coughing more than I had been. All of a sudden, I felt like my face was puffed up with phlegm or something and all of Friday I was coughing uncontrollably and at times could hardly squeak, much less speak.

The timing of all of this couldn't be worse. It's right around the time that Ben and I had started to feel the pressure of "There's a lot we have to do to get ready for this baby!" in our ears. We'd been planning to spend the weekend working on cleaning and moving things around to get ready. Our plan was to move my desk to the living room to the spot where the TV is and the TV to the basement in order to make room for the baby's things. In order to do this, we needed to sort through and sell off a lot of books that were in boxes on the floor of the baby's room, and go through a lot of junk that was currently inhabiting my desk. And instead I was barely functional.

Saturday morning, as we were discussing some goals for trying to get things accomplished, I looked around our bedroom and said, "I was just thinking about when we first saw this house with [our realtor] and how we imagined this room as our kids' room and the other room as the our bedroom. Funny . . . sometimes that still kind of feels like the more natural fit to me."

Ben's ears perked up and he said, "Well, if we were going to do that, now would be the time to do it."

We spent the next few hours taking measurements and using floorplanning software to see if it would work. It was really fun. It reminded me of other "fresh starts" that we've had together -- moving into our apartment in MN, house shopping and setting up the new house . . . As a person who came home as a newborn to the same 2-bedroom apartment that her parents continue to call home, I've never had the experience of "moving" in the same way as some other people that I know. I have moved several times, but always as a couple or as a single person, never as a family. I can kind of see the appeal now, though. The freshness of it all. The chance to go through stuff and decide what's really important and what's not. Getting to set up furniture in new rooms and pick out new paint colors.  I love our house, but I am now understanding the appeal of moving to a new home every few years, as I know that some people do.

Even though we'll be staying in the same house, I'm excited to move bedrooms. It makes me so much more excited to set up the nursery, knowing that it will truly be the baby's room. (Up until now, there were lots of "loose ends" with the transition of our office into the baby's room. For example, my dresser has always been in the closet of the office. We didn't really have anywhere for my dresser to go in our room, and so my dresser was originally going to stay in the baby's room, at least for the short-term. Now instead of my dresser staying in the baby's room, I'll just move into the room with my dresser and all of our furniture will be in our room and all of Bambin@'s furniture will be in his/her room.) I'm almost tempted to paint the nursery, since we'll be emptying it of furniture anyway. But that feels wasteful, since the paint job was done right before we bought the house and it's a nice neutral color that will provide a good backdrop for other decor. Makes more sense to wait until Bambin@ is old enough to help choose the new color anyway.

The adrenaline of it all made it much easier to start going through some things. I've packed away nearly all of my non-maternity clothes that I won't be able to fit into for at least another 3 months and sorted through about half of the books and desk-clutter that needed to be dealt with. Now it truly feels like nesting season! 

Kicking up a Storm

We can both say with certainty that Ben has gotten to feel a kick!

Until now, most times that I've told him to come put a hand on my belly, the baby will stop moving immediately. In the meantime, I've started to be able to see the kicks from the outside, but just barely. I was commenting to Ben that it seems as though every time that I watch my belly, nothing will happen. And then I'll look away and immediately I'll feel something and catch a glimmer of it out of the corner of my eye. My guess is that we have a shy baby on our hands (or in my womb, as the case may be).

Shortly after I was saying this to him, I said, "Did you see that?!" and he put a hand on my belly. We waited for a moment and then we both saw and felt a little kick at the same time. It was very rewarding for me to see Ben reacting at the same time as I did.

I love feeling the kicks. It's interesting how scared I was of this part of the pregnancy before getting pregnant. I thought for sure that it would freak me out and that it would make me panic. I couldn't imagine how anyone could call it a good feeling or be reassured by it. It seemed like the most terrifying experience -- to be kicked and punched from the inside by a being that you cannot defend yourself against.

I know that the kicks will get more painful as the baby gets stronger, but right now they just feel awe-inspiring and I'm enjoying the moment. It's so cool to know that we've got a real little baby and that it's moving around and developing its own personality.

It's especially rewarding after the tough week that we've had. After our hospital experience at the start of this week, I seemed to be recovering, only to have an absolutely awful day yesterday. It was one of those days that made me very grateful that I was giving tests and quizzes in most of my classes. It made me even more grateful that I am blessed with an advisory of students who could be trusted to be left alone for 10 minutes while I went to the restroom to throw up.

Silver lining to being sick in bed? Lying down with a glass of water on my belly . . . and seeing the movement of a kick as Jurassic Park ripples on the water.

Slow recovery, but getting there

Turned out that it wasn't really morning sickness at all. After treating it as morning sickness (trying to eat snacks and drink fluids to get things back on track) for a few rounds, I began to realize that I wasn't even able to keep down small amounts of fluids, much less English muffins or pecans. I called my clinic and spoke to a nurse (not a midwife, but one of the nurses at the clinic) around 8am and was told that it sounded like a virus that's going around. She advised me on what to eat and drink and when to call back if things weren't improving.

After 12 hours of throwing up, I called back and talked to the midwife on-call. She advised to try one more round of ice chips and pedialyte, but that she thought I should come in and get hooked up to an IV for fluids and Zofran and get checked out all-around. When she called back, I hadn't thrown up the ice chips and the small amount of pedialyte that I'd tried, but I wasn't feeling great. So she told me she wanted me to come in within the hour so that they could get things going. Before leaving for the hospital, I weighed myself and found that I was two pounds below my pre-pregnancy weight.

I went to the labor and delivery unit at St. Joe's. I won't pretend that I enjoyed my visit at the hospital, but I have to say that the experience only offered further confirmation of my decision to go with this practice of midwives. The midwife on call was not one that I'd met before our phone conversations, but I thought she was great. The nurses who took care of me were wonderful and supportive as well. They listened to me, they were conscientious of my needs and concerns, and they seemed calm and confident.

By the time I left, I was feeling hydrated and generally better, but weak from not having eaten in so long. Upon weighing myself back at home, I found that I was up two pounds (so back up to my pre-pregnancy weight). After arriving home yesterday, I was able to finish off some ice chips and then do pedialyte, a saltine cracker, and some white rice. I was surprised at how much the rice filled me up. I was so hungry that I thought I would be wanting to eat piles and piles of bananas, rice, applesauce and toast (the "BRAT" diet that was recommended to me), but instead I found that my belly felt very full after just a small bowl of rice. Since then it's been pretty much the same. I've been trying to stay hydrated, but it's actually kind of difficult to eat more than a small item at a time. As much as food sounds SO good and delicious, when it comes to actually eating it, it's harder than I'd expected.

It's weird, as a pregnant person, to have to go against all the pregnancy food recommendations. For example, the BRAT diet isn't very high in nutrients or protein. That's why, when I first started throwing up, it was so difficult to stop eating. Everything that you're told is that it's important to eat small meals and snacks in order to combat nausea. That it's incredibly important to keep your blood sugar even, for the baby. That high-protein snacks are the way to go. It was really difficult for me to stop the "this is what's best for a healthy pregnancy" track and start hearing the "this is what's best to make you stop vomiting" track.

The whole time when I was in the hospital and they were advising me to not rush back into eating foods too quickly, I kept thinking, "But I'm pregnant! I'm supposed to be eating every 2-3 hours and I haven't been able to eat any foods at all since yesterday. Surely my baby must be freaking out in there."

But I suppose on a short-term basis the baby will get its resources from somewhere if it really needs to. Which may explain why I lost so much weight. Although maybe that's normal for fluid loss with that much vomiting? I'd be interested to compare how much weight a person loses from a normal case of a stomach virus, in comparison to when they're pregnant. Does the body burn more fuel reserves to compensate when you're pregnant than otherwise?

Anyway, the point is that I'm okay and it looks as though the baby is okay too. The reassuring thing was that my Bambin@ was kicking pretty regularly throughout all of it.

never come to that

A few days ago, we had a very strange conversation for me.  We were talking about how to interact with the medical staff during the birth, and who got to say what when.  I wanted to know how much she wanted me to speak up, and how much decision making I should plan on doing vs. amplifying the decisions she had made.  She said something that really took the wind out of me.

"It's your kid too, so you have to have a say in that."

Call me oblivious, but I'd never thought about it in those terms.  We've gone far beyond the "fetus" stage in terms of how we've bonded to Bambin@, but I hadn't made that transition in terms of "entity that may have divergent or even oppositional medical needs than those of my partner."  Whoa.

I don't think it's likely that such a conflict of interest is likely to arise, at least in the medical sense.  The pregnancy has been straightforward (if not easy) and no indications of high risk conditions.  We're exceedingly lucky in this regard.  So that part is easy enough to put away, and our birth planning is going on pretty much as I'd expected before.

But it's almost a guarantee to happen in other smaller ways through out the next years.  As a couple, we've rarely had to weigh anything as more serious than our commitment to each other.  How do we spend our time?  How do we choose what's important?  How do we answer any question?

Look at the other person.  There's your answer.

I'm fully aware that plenty of folks have done this before, and that this isn't exactly a new worry.  I've just never done it.  Knowing that I love this kid almost immeasurably is easy when Arden is always in clear custody at all times.  Where's my Bambin@ is not a question I've been asking.  My attention can be on both of them rather easily at the moment.

It's a bright clear morning today, the kind that reminds me a great deal of our time at Mac.  I'm sitting at Shish, drinking coffee and writing.  Really reminds me of Mac.  We've been really lucky to have some great years together in which we had the luxury of really focusing on each other.  So even if I don't know exactly how it will shake out, that track record gives me a lot of faith that somehow we'll still manage to keep being good to each other, even in the mist of a project as involved as creating, loving, and growing a kid.

Why, baby, why?

I still have no conclusions on what the 7th stage of morning sickness is for me. Up until this morning, I would have said that it was looking like "relief" but now it's feeling like "despondence." Yesterday, I was cautiously celebrating 3 weeks of being vomit-free (since 6 weeks of pregnancy, my longest vomit-free streak had previously been 4 days, I think). I was still nauseated from time to time, but I had successfully avoided losing my cookies for quite awhile.

But then a few hours ago I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like I needed to puke. I went downstairs to try to grab a snack to keep it at bay, but found myself clutching the toilet bowl before I'd downed even three bites of my applesauce. This has been going on for about 3 hours now. Zofran has not helped (at least, not that I've been able to tell), eating food has made it worse, drinking fluids has made it worse.  I've even given up on trying to lie down again, as it has had negative outcomes every time I start to get into any kind of semi-prone position. Tired as I am, I don't want to throw up again. So what is there left to do while I wait for my next bolt to the bathroom? I've already spent the last few "in-between times" writing my lesson plans and sending them off to my principal. Now all I can think to do is blog.

But my battery is dying, so I'm just going to post.

More Movement!

Last night I felt the baby move from the outside. I've occasionally thought that I've been able to feel movement from the outside before, but I couldn't be sure. The relativity of touch is kind of abstract for me. It's like when you are tapping your fingers together -- you can't necessarily tell what sensation is the feeling of touching something and what sensation is the feeling of being touched . . . because it's all you. That's how I'd been feeling with the baby -- it was kind of like, "Well, I just felt something and I know it happened right here in this spot on my belly where my hand happens to be resting. But I'm not sure whether my hand felt it or my belly felt it."

But last night it was definite. I was on my computer and I had my hand resting on the right side of the belly. When I felt the kick, it was really definite. I felt it in my hand perhaps even more than in my belly. It happened once, then again, and then a third time. I felt kind of frozen and unsure of what to do next. Bambin@'s kicks usually seem totally random and unexpected. I've never been in a situation where it's happened in succession like that. I tried not to move around too much and called out to Ben that if he came right away, there was a chance he might feel the baby kicking. He came hurrying in and put a hand on my belly, but of course it didn't happen again. :-(

Can't wait to be able to share it with him. With any luck, Bambin@ will cooperate next time!

Dear Bambin@ . . .

Yesterday was a momentous day for us. There are lots of elections for various offices, but it’s always particularly exciting every four years when there’s a presidential election. This year, not only was there a presidential election, but there were two proposed amendments to the Minnesota Constitution and every voter in Minnesota was given the opportunity to vote for or against these amendments.  

One of them was the voter ID amendment. The purpose of this amendment was to require more restrictive identification in order to vote. Back in my first year of college, I had my first opportunity to vote in an election. I was supposed to vote “absentee” (by mail) for offices and ballot initiatives in my home state of Illinois, but my ballot didn’t come in the mail on time. Instead, I went to the local polling place for my college campus and registered to vote there. The registration process involved showing my college ID and giving the address of my dorm in order to prove that I was living on-campus and in the boundaries of the polling place. Because of Minnesota’s same-day registration process, I was able to exercise my right to vote in Minnesota rather than in Illinois. I remember this as an important turning point for me as I began to think of myself as a Minnesotan. If this amendment to the Minnesota Constitution had been in effect back then, I would likely have been unable to vote at all that year. The idea that other people in similar situations, maybe even you when you grew up to be a young adult, would have the right to vote be restricted like this made me very uncomfortable.

The other amendment was the marriage amendment. The purpose of this amendment was to re-define marriage as being between a man and a woman. You see, at the time that I am writing this, it is currently not possible for two men or two women to get married in our state. There are many same-sex couples who live together and have families together, but being legally married is something that can only happen between a man and a woman. When your father and I got our license to be married from the government, we even had to raise our right hands and swear that one of us was a man and one of us was a woman. I sincerely hope that by the time you are reading this, this fact will seem terribly outdated and foreign to you (as it does already to me and your father), but for right now, it is the state of how things are in Minnesota and much of the rest of our country. While it is not possible for same-sex couples to get married here, we’ve been seeing lots of changes in the last few years as some other states have begun to make it legal for two men or two women to marry one another. Some people in Minnesota don’t like these changes and it was decided that there would be a question on the ballot asking voters if they wanted to define marriage as being just between a man and a woman in this state. If a majority of voters voted “Yes” to this question, then the state Constitution would be amended to say that marriage is only between a man and a woman. This would make it harder for Minnesota to become a state where same-sex marriage would be legal. If there wasn’t a majority of voters voting “Yes” then the law would stay the same – marriage in Minnesota would still be only between a man and a woman, but there wouldn’t be something in our Constitution saying that this is how it should always be.

I brought you to the polling place with me, all snug and secure inside my belly. There is so much that I can do to protect you right now, but I know that that won’t always be the case. As I filled out my ballot, I rested my hand on my belly and thought of the world that I hope to create for you. I thought about whether you’ll choose to get married someday and what it will be like for you the first time you vote and start to make decisions about what kind of world you want for your family.

When your father and I got home that evening, we built a fire and turned on the news. Election coverage is usually pretty exciting, but in every election, there are always those who are happy with the results and those who are disappointed. We were terribly nervous that this might be a year when we would be disappointed. There were many exciting pieces of news throughout the evening, including two states that voted to make same-sex marriage legal, but here in Minnesota we still didn’t know whether our voters would vote for a constitutional ban on it. I had to go to sleep before I knew what the results of either of the amendment questions would be.

When I woke up in the morning, I started looking for election results right away. When I found out that Minnesota had turned back both amendments, my heart quickened with pride. You may have trouble understanding this, but the recent polls had indicated that there was a good chance that these amendments would pass. When I looked at the raw numbers, I saw that not only fewer than half the voters voted for them, but more than half had voted against them. This meant that not only was a majority of Minnesotans unwilling to vote for the amendments, but a majority of us actively made the choice to vote against them.

I spent much of the rest of the day overwhelmed and excited. I cried tears of joy on the way to work. In particular, it had been a landmark day in gay rights history. For the first time, voters in all the states where a same-sex marriage question was put on the ballot had made a choice in favor of marriage equality. Until yesterday, the states that had legalized gay marriage had all done so through the legislatures or the courts, never through a direct poll of the people. In most cases, when the people were asked to vote on a marriage equality issue (which has periodically come up in several states, often more than once, over the last 15 years or so), they had made the choice against marriage equality. Last night, however, four states made key changes in this trend.

I very much hope that this is a sign that positive changes are on the way. I hope that you will spend the majority of your childhood and the entirety of your adulthood in a society that values you for who you are. I hope that you will never doubt that your vote will count, that your voice will be heard, that you deserve the privilege of exercising your rights as a citizen. I hope that you will find happiness with a partner who you love and that you will always feel that your love is accepted by the community in which you live. I am hopeful for Minnesota. I am hopeful for us as family, raising you here in Minnesota.

Between the election news and the math content that I was teaching today, I was a very excitable person all day long. You responded by vigorously moving about in a way that I’ve never felt before. You used to make noticeable, big movements about once every few days or even go weeks at a time without any huge movements. Today, though, I was feeling you flip around in my belly every few minutes. I hope all my adrenaline didn’t scare you. I hope that you felt the love that I feel for you and the hope that I feel for the society that we're creating for you. After all, I voted for you. I voted for my bambin@’s future. 

Love, 

Mama

Busy Baby Friday

Yesterday was a very busy day for us. We started with our first doula interview. It reminded me a lot of when we were getting married and interviewing florists, photographers, etc. You come with a list of questions  (some of which are printed from a website and some of which you just want to ask) and then try to work those questions into a casual conversation and assess your "fit" with the person at the same time. It's terribly awkward because although you're trying to have a pleasant conversation, you're also aware of the fact that you're hiring someone to spend time with you on what is likely to be a very stressful day of your life. As you can imagine, this aspect is magnified as you move from "wedding day stress" to "delivery of a baby stress."

The trouble is, the questions that you print from a website are usually very boring and awkward to ask -- like, "What was required of the training that you received in order to become certified?" Frankly, I don't particularly care. I don't ask my doctors what their particular degree programs required of them and I've never had a parent of one of my students ask me what was required of me in order to get my teaching license either. It doesn't seem like relevant information -- if DONA says that a doula is certified, I'm not particularly interested in questioning their methods, and I'm not even sure how I would do that. It's not as though I could say, "Hmmm...yeeeaah, that's not really enough for me? Isn't there a certification process where they, like, put you through doula boot camp? With 5 to 10 laboring women at once? That's really more the kind of training I'm looking for."

Other recommended questions (like, "What's your fee?" and "Can I call you if I have questions?") are easily found on most doula's websites. So what you're left with out of a list of 15 or so questions is just maybe one or two that you actually want to ask and feel comfortable asking. So then the rest of the interview is a bit awkward -- you want to make sure that they haven't come all the way out to meet you for no reason, but you also know that you're supposed to interview a doula before hiring her so it's not like you could have just hired her without having done this interview. So what do you say or do in order to decide whether you're a good match for someone when all you have is a list of standard questions? Tricky business. Perhaps it's less tricky for folks who aren't as socially-awkward.

Thankfully, we got along very well with this first doula that we interviewed. It helped that she had a lot of different services that she offers (photography, birth notes, postpartum doula care as well as birth doula care, private childbirth classes, etc). So when in doubt, we could always just say, "So I saw on your website that you offer [insert particular service], tell me more about how that works." It also helped that she was very pleasant to talk to and seemed to understand that we were newbies to all of this. We have two more scheduled for next week and then I am hoping that we can just go ahead and hire someone. I will feel so much more comfortable once this is crossed off our list.

After the interview was our ultrasound. The ultrasound was pretty fun and low-key. It didn't take as long as I'd expected -- only about half an hour instead of the 45 minutes to an hour that I'd been prepared for. Part of that may have been that we weren't asking them to inspect the genitalia or give us any information based on it. Part of it may have been that this radiology department seems to always give really fast ultrasounds (our first one back at 10.5 weeks was only about 7 minutes long). Either way, I wasn't disappointed. I felt like we got a good look at our little bambin@.

A cute little profile. 

My favorite -- a tiny foot!

We did successfully avoid seeing any sex-revealing anatomical structures. At one point I thought I'd accidentally seen something, but after a little more time with the ultrasound imagery, I decided it was actually probably the umbilical cord. At one point the technician did tell us that she would have to look at the pelvis and that we may want to look away and so we did. I hadn't thought that they would need to look at the pelvis at all, so of course now I'm wondering whether she could tell Bambin@'s sex or not. I never got a chance to ask her whether she could tell, and perhaps it's best that way. I'm just hoping that she didn't include any information about it in our file for the midwives. Our midwives said that they certainly don't need to know, and I'd prefer that it not be on any paperwork where it might accidentally get slipped to us.

Fingers crossed that everything looked happy and healthy. Of course, the technicians can't really give much qualitative information. So every piece of information that they do give ("The baby seems to be about 14 oz" or "The heartbeat is 144 bpm") is met (at least by me) with a certain degree of, "Oh good! Wait, is that good?" I know that an average fetus is about 12 oz right now, for example, but I don't know if 14 oz means that it's "too big" or whether it's still within the normal range. (Is there a bell curve in the house? I need a percentile chart, please.) I'll appreciate some interpretation at the next midwife appointment.

The Sex of Our Baby

Since getting pregnant, we've received a lot of questions from family and friends (and, let's face it, mostly from my students) about whether we will be finding out the sex of our baby. Since our ultrasound is in a matter of hours, I thought now might be a good time to share our reasons why we are not intending to find out the sex of Bambin@ today.

We're trying to avoid any tendencies to stereotype our child. 
I know that we will find out Bambin@'s sex eventually. I don't pretend that we won't ever know whether we have a son or a daughter and, eventually, s/he will have to grow up in a world where gender stereotypes exist. But right now is such a particularly vulnerable time -- when we know so very little about our baby. I fear that if we only knew the sex, the inclination to put too much stock into that piece of information (to start dreaming and thinking about our life with a particular type of baby) would be very hard to resist.

We intend to have more children and would like to re-use clothes and other baby items in the future. 
Baby stuff is so cute. And so gendered. It's difficult to find gender-neutral items anymore. Most clothes for girls scream (either through imagery or words) that they are to be used only for girls. For boys, I think there's a little more overlap, but it's so frustrating to find a nice pack of green, brown and blue bibs (perfect for either sex!) and have the last one say, "Man of the House" or something to that effect. Non-gendered items do exist (either by strategically shopping for "boy" or "girl" clothes that really could be used for either or by finding that coveted middle aisle of yellow, green, and orange items), and it is satisfying to find them. If we knew the sex of the baby though I think we'd be tempted to start expanding into the territory of items that would not be able to be used for a second child, and that would be frustrating later on.

This is what our parents did, and our parents' parents, and . . .
I'm kind of a sucker for tradition. I like that waiting to find out the sex is something that links us with previous generations of family members. In particular (and this feeds in to the first two reasons a lot), my family participated in a "non-sexist parenting group." The families that participated in this group formed a big part of my social upbringing as a child and so I credit my parents' interest in this with a lot of what makes me who I am today. I feel committed to trying everything possible to give Bambin@ a similar experience.

Sex determination by ultrasound can be incorrect. 
We know a few people who have been told that they were going to have girls and delivered boys instead. Since this will likely be our last ultrasound of the pregnancy, we wouldn't get multiple opportunities to "confirm" the sex before the arrival of the baby. While I'm quite sure we'd be happy with whatever baby popped out, I am very anxious about the possibility of spending the next few months expecting to have a child of one sex and then be surprised at the birth. If I were already getting an amniocentesis  I would consider taking a look at the chromosomes (because how awesome would that be?) and determining the sex that way. But since we are not, I'm just not interested.

We don't have a preference. 
There was a time when I strongly wanted two girls. I grew up in a family of two girls and the idea of brothers was a little scary. Those days are now in the past -- in part because our visits with Baby Walter of Wisconsin this past year have been so intensely rewarding that the idea of raising boys feels much more familiar and natural. We're both excited and would be happy with a baby of either sex.

Does this mean that we're not curious? No. We're very curious! And we totally understand why others would choose to find out. We're just really excited to meet our little Bambin@ in person and learn all kinds of things about him or her in a few more months.

I'd really like to just Amazon Prime my baby now, please.

There are very few things in life that we have to actually wait for. If I wanted to take a spur-of-the-moment trip for the weekend (and had the finances to do so) I could buy a plane ticket and be airborne within a couple hours. Between Hulu and Netflix, I can watch a plethora of television and movies "on-demand." With a wi-fi connection and computer (or even just a smartphone on its own), I can go from wondering something to finding the answer in mere minutes. I can purchase almost anything I'd want and have it within two days with Amazon Prime.

So this whole notion of waiting 9 months for our baby is a little . . . uncomfortable.

Even when I tell myself, "You're halfway through!" or "Only 20 more weeks!" I still think, "Seriously? 20 more weeks? We still have months left to go?"

Even when I remember that we're creating a human being from very little raw materials (that 16 weeks ago the baby was the size of a poppyseed and now it's the size of a banana, etc), it still feels like a terribly slow process. For realsies? The baby isn't even a pound yet? After 18 weeks of gestation? What's it been doing all this time? There's really nothing else I can do to grow this baby faster?

I spend too much time looking ahead to what will happen in the coming weeks. There's a vlogger that I like who had her baby in the summer of 2011. I enjoy watching all her videos and had thought that I would watch her weekly vlogs in accordance with my own weeks (watching her 13 weeks pregnant video when I was 13 weeks pregnant, etc). Of course, since her baby was born over a year ago, I know how the story "turns out" but it's still fun. But . . . it's pretty hard to stick to just one at a time. I find myself saying, "Well, I'm 20 weeks pregnant now, but in her vlog she was talking about what happened during the timeframe from week 19-week 20, so if I want a preview of what I can expect in this coming week, I should really go ahead and watch her 21 weeks vlog . . ." And it just snowballs from there. Suddenly, each week I'm watching three weeks ahead, and at this rate I'm going to be watching her 6-month postpartum update by the end of my pregnancy.

I feel like it's the second trimester doldrums around here. After the anatomy scan on Friday, there won't be many big developments for awhile. But what's tough is knowing that the waiting is going to get so much harder! I'm already having trouble sleeping and feeling sore all the time. And I feel huge. Being uncomfortable as I get bigger is only going to make me more impatient for Bambin@ to arrive.

Sigh.

I'd even pay for the one-day shipping, if I could.

Halfway to Bambin@!

Today I am 20 weeks pregnant! 20 down and 20 to go. I'm not positive about how I feel about this milestone.

A 20 week baby bump (plus a steak dinner). 

Reasons I feel like this isn't such an accomplishment:

1. Because pregnancy is measured from the last menstrual period, I don't feel like I am "halfway" through my pregnancy quite yet. In another week, I will be halfway through gestation (since conception didn't occur until about two weeks into the "pregnancy.") And since the positive pregnancy test didn't come until I was 4 weeks pregnant, I don't feel like I'll really be halfway through until I'm 22 weeks or so. Is that crazy? I guess I just feel like I'm somehow "cheating" by counting the weeks when I didn't even know I was pregnant -- or the weeks before Bambin@ had even been conceived. I guess it's a little silly, since the baby could come late or early . . . there's nothing to actually say that any of these milestones are really the halfway mark. 
2. Ever since about 17 weeks, I've already been thinking of myself as "about 20 weeks along." So to actually make it to 20 weeks feels like it should have happened awhile ago. 
3. There hasn't been any real change in baby movement for the last three weeks or so. I'm still just feeling the little taps and flutters here and there. I feel like, by now, I should really be feeling some more pronounced movement. :-( 

Reasons I feel like this is a really big deal:

1.  I'm halfway through my pregnancy! Because both of our parents have "countdown" plaques, it's kind of exciting to know that, from this point forward, the numbers for the weeks remaining will all be lower than the numbers we've already hit as "pregnancy milestones." So for example, last week I was 19 weeks along and 21 weeks to go and next week I will be 21 weeks along and have 19 weeks to go. That's pretty spiffy. 
2. I'm starting to feel more comfortable with having the belly. When I think of myself as being in the middle of the pregnancy, rather than early pregnancy, I feel more okay with the fact that I have a protruding bump. 
3. Our mid-pregnancy ultrasound is next week! 

It's hard not to be impatient, though. Especially since we're here in Florida visiting with Amanda, who is so much closer to the end than I am.

Mandi looking adorably pregnant.

Speaking of which, we're having oodles of fun down here, and this is perhaps the best way to celebrate 20 weeks. Just hanging out, lounging at the beach . . .

Ben and Mandi enjoying the ocean.

. . .  and putting together baby gear! While Mandi was at work yesterday, we put together her swing and bouncer, which are adorable. I can't stop patting the soft fabrics.

Our grand accomplishments!

We also got to visit her birth center and a baby consignment sale where we both picked up some good finds. Can't wait to meet both our babies!

Rough day?

Yesterday was a bit tough on us. 

It started on Tuesday evening actually. I was talking on the phone with my sister when I started coughing. And coughing led to throwing up. Needless to say, I had to hang up on her and make a break for the bathroom. 

It wasn't a pleasant experience and when I looked in the mirror, I saw that I had lots of little red dots around my eyes and on my cheeks. This was not unusual. Burst blood vessels with vomiting has been an unfortunate side effect of the morning sickness. 

But the next morning was a bit more unusual. While I was getting ready for parent-teacher conferences, putting on my cute maternity dress and smiling in the mirror, I saw that I had a dark red splotch across the sclera of my eye. Apparently I'd suffered from a subconjunctival hemorrhage (a broken blood vessel in the eye) as well as the red spots on my face. I was going to be spending the entire day making eye contact with parents and students during face-to-face meetings . . . and I looked like I belonged in the haunted house that had been constructed in my classroom the previous week.

So then I showed the eye to Ben and he started researching what (if anything) I needed to do. 

Ben has what's called recurrent vasovagal syncope, which causes him to faint when confronted with certain types of stressful situations (like feeling pain, seeing someone in pain, reading about medical phenomena . . . you may have some idea of where I'm going with this, and yes, we've already decided that we will be hiring a doula to help us through labor). Usually he recovers in about 15 seconds, but it's always a little scary to see someone lose consciousness like that. 

When Ben fainted yesterday, I didn't realize right away what was happening. I thought he was just a little dizzy. And unresponsive. And then I ran over to see if he was okay, started shaking his arm, tapping at his face, calling his name. 

To make a long (it felt like an eternity) story short, he didn't recover in the usual amount of time and so I started to fear that he was having trouble breathing, or was having a seizure, or . . . I don't know. In a few more seconds, I was on the phone with 911 -- and I was a mess. 

I had always assumed that I would be awesome in a crisis. That I would be the one who clearly and concisely yelled to the accident victim, "Can you hear me?" and then called to a passerby, "You call 911, I will check vitals and begin first aid!" Or, better yet, who put 911 on my speakerphone while I simultaneously delivered top-notch first aid and communicated effectively with the emergency dispatcher. 

In real life, I was simultaneously trying to revive Ben by propping up his head (apparently the exact opposite of what I should be doing) and asking him if he could hear me while the emergency dispatcher was trying to ask me for my address. In response to her question (which I had not heard at all over my own voice), I began to tell her what was happening with updates every three seconds to let her know what new noises he was making or colors he was changing to. 

I learned an important lesson about myself. I am an absolute basketcase when someone I love is in trouble. 

As you may have gathered from the tone of this post, my husband did recover. In fact, he recovered while I was still in my minute-long conversation with the dispatcher. And despite the fact that the second thing he said after, "I'm fine, I just fainted," was "I can't see!" (which was not at all reassuring to me) within a few more moments he was almost back to his normal self and his vision was restored. 

I was pretty shaken up for the rest of the day. And for the rest of that day I started most of my conferences with a jittery explanation of why I looked like I was bleeding from the eye and also why I was forgetting the names of most of the people around me. 

Luckily, everyone is sympathetic to a pregnant lady. 

Slow Ride

One of my current goals, on par with "keep the house clean" and "eat your vegetables" is to spend time on us as a couple.  I give the other two examples because it's something I always know is a priority and it does happen most of the time, but it often slips when anything big is going on.

As we talk about the fact that we're starting a family, and that we're the process of aquiring these new identities as family members, more specifically as parents, I really do want to keep the spirit of what made our time together as "just us."

Last night, I met up with Arden after her shift ended, and we checked out the new Egypt exhibit at the Science Museum.  It was not as significant as the big touring exhibits that have come through, but it was a lot of fun and had some good info.  We wandered around, chatting together, then splitting up, and so on.

Not once did I wonder about where Bambin@ was.

As it was the kind of evening that would be very difficult to have post-partum, I think it was rather perfect.

Last week's midwife appointment . . .

So today I just set up my next midwife appointment and it made me realize that I'd meant to post about last week's appointment. 

Last week was my 14 week appointment. I'd been in the week before because I'd fainted and so I'd gone in to get checked out. At that appointment was the first time that we heard the heartbeat with the regular doppler (as opposed to with the ultrasound). 

The heartbeat had sounded really far away and quiet, so a week later when the midwife tried it, I was concerned when it was taking a little while to find it. 

Then she said, "I'm having a hard time finding it . . ." I tried not to freak out, but I was worried until she finished her sentence with, "because there's so much movement." 

Me: (chuckling with relief) Really? How can you tell? 

Midwife: Hear that sound? (She pointed out a few sudden, high-pitched static sounds that reminded me of the sound that cats make in movies when they're startled by something thrown in their direction.) Everytime you hear that noise, that's the baby moving around. 

I listened to the weird "wirr! wirr!" noise a few more times, totally content with the fact that I wasn't hearing my baby's heartbeat. A moving baby has to have a good heartbeat, right? 

And then all of a sudden, she found it. It was loud. And it felt closer and more thrilling to hear than I'd expected. I wanted to just keep the doppler on my belly all afternoon -- until the "wirr!" noise returned to signal that our bambin@ was no longer interested in sitting still for me. 

But the midwife had other appointments. Sigh. 

Maternity Pants and Movement

So I'm officially wearing maternity pants now. I don't know how much I'm actually showing a "bump" but I've long since stopped trying to hold my abdominal muscles tightly. I have found that since about 10 weeks, it would just hurt if I tried to hold my stomach in. So as soon as most folks around me knew about the pregnancy, I just stopped trying, leading to a potbelly appearance. I have gained very little, if any weight (sometimes the scale shows a gain of 1-2 pounds and other times it shows me lower than pre-pregnancy), but it wasn't like I started with a flat stomach and now my belly is definitely poking out.

At first, the potbelly look was really embarrassing. Right around 12 weeks, I was picking up some Thai food and the woman who was ringing me up asked me if I was pregnant. I must have blushed over my whole face. I affirmed the pregnancy, but inwardly I was adding, "But you're not supposed to be able to tell yet!" It was especially embarrassing when she asked how much longer I have to go and I had to say "About six months...."

But now, I rather like the belly. It helps that I'm no longer trying to hide it from anyone. I rub it often because of my round ligament pain. My students love it when I absent-mindedly rub my belly.

Back to the pants. My stretchy skirts and one pair of stretchy shorts had been serving me well, but with chilly weather approaching, I was needing to start wearing pants. None of my pants fit anymore, so I bought three pairs of maternity pants at Target a few weeks ago and I've been officially living in them for the last week. I love them.

Of course, they don't quite fit yet. I've been folding over the stretchy belly area to make them a little more comfortable, but they still slide down. I have been told that if I get a "Bella Band" and put it over the maternity pants, it will keep them from sliding down so much. So that's the next item on my shopping list.

As well as a "Snoogle" or a "Preggle" or whatever those crazy body pillows for pregnant ladies are called. I'm hoping to pick one of those up soon, so I can start experimenting with it. Right about now is when I'm supposed to stop sleeping on my back, and I need a little help to keep myself on my side.

As far as the second half of my post's title, I have not felt movement yet. At least not officially. Even though I've been awaiting it with great anticipation, I could honestly say that I hadn't felt anything that felt even close to movement until this past week. During this past week, though, I have definitely had some more, "What was that?" moments. They are usually times when I'll feel a little sensation like the Pillsbury Dough Boy being poked in the belly. Or sometimes it will feel like a muscle twitch (but different from the round ligament pain).

Then, on Saturday night, I was lying on my side, eyes closed, before falling asleep. Suddenly, I felt this really quick little feeling that felt like a "pop" kind of sensation. I can't really describe it. My eyes opened and I just laid still for a few moments, trying to think about what it could have been. It didn't feel like gas or a muscle spasm. Just like a little "pop." I told Ben and he said, "I bet it was Bambin@."

I'd like to think that it was, but I am prepared to concede that it's still too early. I don't feel a strong urge to put a label on it just yet. I'm sure that, soon enough, I will be willing my baby to stop kicking me in the liver.

The Seven Stages of Morning Sickness

I know that every woman experiences morning sickness differently, and that it is often different for the same woman during different pregnancies. Here's a run-down of how I've experienced morning sickness so far in this pregnancy. 

Stage 1: Anticipation
The day after we saw the two lines on the pregnancy test, we had to get up early in the morning and head off to Switzerland. In order to do this, we boarded a vaparetto (a water bus) to go to the train station. To board the vaparetto, you get on this little floating station. The moment that I stepped onto it, I felt a wave of intense nausea. I didn't know whether I would throw up or break out in a cold sweat. I thought to myself, "Oh no, this is it." 

Luckily for me, that particular feeling was kind of a one-time deal. I've actually never felt quite like that again through this whole pregnancy. I have felt awful, mind you, but not like the nausea that I experienced in that moment. And it took a good week and a half before I felt noticeable nausea of any sort again. 

During that week, though, I had a lot of anxiety about whether that feeling would return again when I hit six weeks, whether it would be like that the entire pregnancy, whether I would never want to eat again or whether I would be able to keep any food in my stomach for the next several months. I tried my best to appreciate every day that I felt good and not get too nervous on the days when I'd start to feel bad. 

Stage 2: Panic I
The first time I threw up, it was scary. I don't throw up often. More often than not, I think I will throw up and then am wildly unsuccessful at doing so. So it surprised me when I did. And it surprised me even more when I felt a little better after doing so. The process of throwing up is just awful. There is nothing that could make me feel any better in that moment, but there was a definite sense of relief when it was over. 

Still, I told myself,  perhaps I'd be like other women I've known . . . who experienced bad morning sickness, but only threw up a few times. 

Stage 3: Mini-Acceptance
By the end of that weekend, I'd already thrown up three times and I gave up my dream of a low-vomit pregnancy. Throughout the next couple of weeks, I learned that there was little that I could do to prevent myself from throwing up. I figured out how to tell whether I would need to or not and learned that vomiting and nausea often had little to do with one another. I tried to look on the bright side. At least I was able to feel some relief from vomiting, instead of feeling sick all the time. At least I was able to keep most of my food down. At least I wasn't being admitted to the hospital for IV fluids because I was vomiting so much. There were plenty of things to be grateful for, and I still had the end of the first trimester to look forward to. 

Stage 4: Panic II
My next wave of panic came when my vomiting started to get worse and more painful. I will spare you the particular details of why this became so, but suffice it to say, I have learned through experience that there are different types of vomit and they result in varying experiences. This also came around the time when everyone around me started to say, "Well, at least this is the worst of it and it should start getting better now." And yet it never seemed to. It was also around the time when several people reacted with surprise when I told them that I had morning sickness. It made me realize that perhaps I had it worse than I'd thought. That perhaps the "norm" is to throw up only occasionally or not at all, and that I didn't have as much to be grateful for as I'd thought. 

It didn't help that I got a sinus infection around this time and was suffering from post-nasal drip and coughing. Kinda difficult to avoid vomiting when you're gagging on phlegm. 

Stage 5: Pride
I experienced a stage in which I would tell myself, "Yeah! You're a badass mama for throwing up all the time! Look at you, being all hardcore!"

This was, as you might expect, the briefest of stages. 

Stage 6: Panic III
As I've entered the second trimester with little change, panic has set in once more. I've passed all the other milestones that folks have reported to me -- that it would get better at 10 weeks, at 12 weeks, at 13 weeks, at 14 weeks. At this point, if it's not better yet, there's no particular reassurance of when it will end. When people find out that I'm still throwing up, there's a sympathetic nod rather than a quick assurance that the end is in sight. 

I've also noticed a disturbing lack of relief after vomiting. It used to be that I would feel immediately better (not normal, but better) and now I've started to notice that throwing up makes me feel worse or the same. 

I really hate to throw up, but it's not even about that anymore. It's the feeling that the second trimester -- that most blissful of times -- may slip out from under me because I still feel awful. The panic comes from wondering whether this will stay with me throughout what it supposed to be the best part of pregnancy. It comes from worrying that it will stick with me right up until morning sickness turns into labor vomiting. 

Stage 7: ?
I don't know what stage 7 holds because I'm not there yet. But I'm hoping it's something like "relief" or "acceptance." Either of those would be okay. Even if it doesn't go away, I'd like to be able to gracefully accept that the second trimester may not be as blissful as I'd imagined and that the third trimester may just be all-around rough. I'll let you know what stage 7 is and what it brings with it when it happens. 

I really am grateful for the fact that I'm able to have times when I am nausea-free. I know that some people never get that feeling. 

How we found out about Bambin@

We found out about the pregnancy while traveling in Europe. We'd been traveling in Vienna and Prague with both sets of our parents and Ben's sister for a week when we began to suspect that I could be pregnant. This is the story of how we found out. It is almost all directly from the notes that I wrote down the day that we got the positive test, so it may provide more information than most people would care to know, but c'est la vie.

Family dining in the Czech Republic.

On Thursday, we were in Prague and I suddenly began to feel PMS symptoms. They were perhaps stronger and more painful than usual, but they were not categorically different from my usual symptoms. I felt certain that my period would come soon and began to expect that it would start any moment.

Blissfully unaware that we were already parents.

I had been charting my BBT for awhile at that point. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, your basal body temperature is your body temperature in the morning, right when you wake up. In women, ovulation produces a noticible upward shift in the range that these temperatures can be. So, if you are recording your temperature at the same time every morning, then you should notice a general shift right after the day of ovulation. Cool, huh? Since the shift doesn't occur until after ovulation, though, it is recommended that you also check your cervical mucus -- as cervical mucus changes indicate rising fertility, whereas a temperature shift indicates that the most fertile period is already over. But there is no quantitative method for charting cervical mucus, and I am much more comfortable with quantitative data, so I hadn't been consistently observing my cervical mucus. Using the temperature method, I had a rough idea of when I typically ovulated each month and how long my luteal phase (comprised of the days after ovulation and before menstruation) typically lasted.

Unfortunately, my charting had been inconclusive that month because my temperatures had been very sporadic and I had stopped taking my temperature once we'd arrived in Europe, so I wasn't sure exactly when to expect my period or when to consider myself "late." I knew that an early estimate would mean that I should expect my period on Friday, July 6 and a late estimate would mean that I should expect it on Sunday, July 8.

On Saturday, Fertility Friend (the website I'd been using to enter my data and create my charts) was proclaiming that I should take a pregnancy test. On Sunday, I decided that I should test on Monday morning, but I wasn't sure where to find a pregnancy test. After some internet research, I found out that Tesco (a European supermarket that I knew well from my days in Ireland) sold a house brand pregnancy test. I decided to buy one at the Tesco around the corner from our hotel in Prague before our flight to Venice. 

A cute car on the walk to the nearby Tesco.

My parents had already left Prague that morning, so I didn't have to worry about running into them next door. Ben's parents were still in the hotel, though, and so I knew that I had to be discreet. When I went into the hallway, I could hear my father-in-law, Gib, on the floor beneath us, talking to Carol and Elisabeth. I jumped in the elevator and took it down to the lobby rather than risking going past them on the stairs. When the elevator stopped, I poked my head out to make sure they hadn't come down the stairs in the meantime, as it had sounded like they were making plans to go out. I scurried out of the hotel, looking behind me as I quickly turned down the street. I felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house. It wasn't that going to Tesco would automatically paint me as a woman who intended to discover whether she was pregnant or not. But I was worried that if I told them I was going to Tesco, they would offer to join me and then I wouldn't be able to buy the test.

Our hotel in Prague.

As it turned out, Tesco didn't sell pregnancy tests. Or at least not any that I could find. I walked up and down every aisle -- even the breakfast cereal and the jam aisles. I even looked through the ten refrigerator cases devoted to types of yogurt. It seemed far more likely that it would be in the toothpaste-tampons-condoms-baby formula aisle and so I walked up and down that one three or four times, but I walked all the others at least once for good measure as well. But no luck.

So we left Prague without a pregnancy test.

At the airport in Prague. Nervously wondering whether there was a fetus amongst us.

 As soon as we checked in to our hotel in Venice, I asked the gentleman at the front desk where we might find a pharmacy. He said that the only one that would be open on Sunday was the international pharmacy (just the kind of pharmacy I wanted!) and gave me directions that coincided with our proposed walk to the Piazzo del San Marco.

Our hotel in Venice.

Little did we know, there was a non-International pharmacy right around the corner from our hotel with an exterior vending machine that sold a pregnancy test, amongst other convenience items. 

What a convenient way to purchase a pregnancy test!

But of course the man at the front desk didn't know what we wanted the pharmacy for, so it was good of him to direct us to one with humans in it. It's lovely to see pregnancy tests in vending machines, though, I must say. I have taken a few tests over the years and even though I have never been underage when purchasing them and in fact I think I may have been married for all or nearly all of these purchases, I have always felt embarrassment at the check-out counter. I don't know why. I guess it's just such a personal thing to be sharing with a stranger.

In any case, we didn't know about the vending machine, so we found the Farmacia Internazionale on our walk. 

Our local Venetian pharmacy.

Ben thought that it looked closed, but it seemed fairly open to me and so I walked in. A man appeared at the desk and in heavily-accented English told us that the store was closed, but that if we needed something, he could help us. I paused for a moment, wondering whether it would be polite to try to ask for the test in Italian (I had looked it up before, so I knew that it was in our Rick Steves Italian phrasebook, but the wording had since left me and so I would have to ask Ben for the book in order to look it up again.) I decided that I shouldn't waste the time of a man who clearly spoke better English than I did Italian and just bit the bullet and asked for a pregnancy test. He said, "Ah, yes, I have just this one." And then he left for a moment and returned with a box.

A knowing woman invites me to pee on a stick.

 The test was all in Italian -- a Test di Gravidanza -- so he kindly described how to take the test, how long to wait, etc. My favorite part was when he pointed at the results pictures on the outside of the box. Pointing at the "positivo/incinta" picture, he said, "If it looks like this, then you are happy . . ." and we had a good chuckle together. I was glad that Ben was there with me. I think it made it clearer to the man behind the counter that we would be happy with a positive result. In all the other times that I've bought a pregnancy test, I have never talked with a pharmacist about it before. I wonder if my options in Italy provided me with the perfect balance. I could either buy one at the vending machine and have total discretion and anonymity. Or I could have a chuckle with an Italian father-figure as he explains to me how to use it. In the US, the experience is this weird middle-ground, where you don't really talk about it with anyone, or even say the words "pregnancy test" out loud, but you have to sheepishly bring it to the checkout counter and hand it to a 19-year-old boy to be rung up.

I fell asleep that night with much anticipation. I had planned on testing once in the evening, and if it was negative, using the other test in the box in the morning with "first morning's urine." But as it turned out, I was so dehydrated that I couldn't produce much that night anyway, so I decided to fall asleep and wait for morning.

Around 6:00am, I woke up and needed to use the restroom. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't. So I grabbed the test off the nighstand and stumbled to the bathroom. The instructions from the pharmacist had been to hold the test in the stream of urine, but the bathroom was quite cramped and I was concerned about how to do this without creating a mess. So I collected it in a plastic cup and dipped the test instead. But the dipping also presented a problem. The test said that I should, "Tenere il tampone assorbente sotto il flusso di urina per almeno 10 secondi." 

The instructions. Very Italian.

I wasn't sure whether "almeno" meant "no more than" or "at least" and Rick Steves' phrasebook did not include this word in the dictionary. Furthermore, neither "at least 10 seconds" nor "no more than 10 seconds" was consistent with what I remembered from what the pharmacist had said (which I had remembered as either 3 seconds or 5 seconds). So I decided to compromise by dipping the stick and counting quickly to ten. When I got to ten, though, I nervously continued on to twelve and then decided that that was enough.

I re-capped the test and laid it flat on the sink. Then I got back into bed. Ben turned over and asked me how I was doing. I told him not to drink the apple-juice-like fluid from the cup in the bathroom (I hadn't poured it out yet, in case the test was defective and I had to use the other test from the box). I waited for the requisite three minutes and then I went back into the bathroom to check on the test. 

Oh my! I appear to be quite "incinta."

Peering over it, I called out to Ben, "It's positive." Ben called back, "It is?" and got out of bed. I said, "Yeah, it's lighter than the control line, but they say that that doesn't matter." When Ben came in, I added, "It is, right? You see that line too -- I'm not hallucinating, right?" He said, "No, I see it too. That's definitely a line."

When I'd first seen the test, it didn't surprise me, initially, that it was positive. But the more that I looked at it, the more stunned I became. Sharing it with Ben made it all the more unbelievable. That we were both seeing this. That we were both happy and nervous. That we were saying to each other, "I'm pregnant!" and "You're pregnant!" (Which we did for much of the rest of the day.)

We spent the rest of the day doing all the things we'd already planned to do. We visited the Doge's Palace. We went to a Gelateria on the palazzo near our hotel. We toured the Basilica. For much of the day, we felt just like tourists, not like expectant parents. But every once in awhile, the reality would sink in again and we'd look at each other and "Squee!" or "Meep!"

A celebratory gelato.

 

In the first few days, I wouldn't know what to think in the morning. It would take me a moment to remember that I was pregnant, that this was real, that it wasn't a dream. We only had the one day in Venice, so the rest of our trip was spent in Switzerland. 

Am I glowing yet?

I feel so lucky that I didn't experience any morning sickness during the remainder of our trip. I hadn't expected any, since I know that it usually doesn't hit until week 6 or so, and I was only 4 weeks pregnant at the time. But once it did hit (which I'll write about later), I was extremely grateful for that last week in Europe, when I was peeing a lot and still experiencing PMS-like symptoms, but for the most part felt normal and good. We went hiking in the Alps and ate delicious food and enjoyed the chilly weather that we'd missed during the 90+ degree heat that we'd had in the other cities on our trip. It felt so good to be distracted and happy and enjoying just the two of us . . . but knowing that there were three.