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 I sincerely hope that by the time you are reading this, this fact will seem terribly outdated and foreign to you (as it does already to me and your father), but for right now, it is the state of how things are in Minnesota and much of the rest of our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.