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.