Fade Away

I hate everything about this post.

Yesterday around lunchtime, I went to the bathroom and noticed some reddish streaking on the toilet paper, and a tiny blood clot about the size of a mustard seed. Rob and Westley were out running errands, and the house suddenly seemed uncomfortably quiet.

I paged my midwife, and stood in the silence. Then I set the timer on the microwave for 20 minutes. (If you don't get a call in 20 minutes, you're supposed to page again.)

Four minutes later my phone rang. My midwife prescribed "pelvic rest" - no sex, no orgasm, no jogging. Not that I've jogged recently. Or had sex, for that matter.

I sat all day, drinking water, occasionally getting up to pee, checking the toilet paper. Always some pink or brown streaking there on the white. Sometimes a tiny bit. Sometimes a tiny bit more. By 9:00 PM, I was still spotting, and starting to feel uncomfortable. Rob dialed the pager number for me.

* * *

By 1:15 PM, the ER observation room across from mine had been cleared twice. I'd been sitting cross-legged on my narrow bed, watching through the window for three hours. It would be at least another hour before I got the ultrasound I'd come for.

We met our midwife, Bev, at the clinic this morning to check things out and listen for heart tones. I brought her a little Ziploc bag full of my red-streaked toilet paper. Her brow furrowed when I handed it to her, and even before I climbed up on the table, I was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to hear anything on the Doppler.

Nothing came up but the whoosh of my own insides. It was time to seek out an ultrasound (and on Sunday morning, that that meant going to the Emergency Room). Bev said, "Prepare yourself." That babies at 12 weeks move around a lot, that Dopplers aren't perfect, but . . . "prepare yourself." I don't know how one prepares oneself for an ultrasound showing no life - except to expect it. I didn't want to expect anything negative; I wanted to be calm happy and hopeful.

The longer I sat on that ER bed, the less hopeful I felt.

Rob and Westley had gone out for lunch. The room was cold, dim, and so, so quiet. Tomb-like. The TV had no remote. I was glad to have my journal:

There's a mirror across from the bed, so I can see myself out of the corner of my eye. Or else I can look up and see how miserable I look.

* * *

A young man with an armful of tribal tattoos wheeled me into Radiology, a ghost town of a department on Sunday afternoon, and parked me in a room with an ultrasound machine.

Phillips, I noticed immediately. Not Siemens. (I used to work in technical publishing. I've seen the manual for several Siemens ultrasound machines in more than a dozen languages.)

"Hello?" my chauffeur-nurse called out, and his voice echoed.

"Hi," a female voice came back from around a doorjamb.

I was glad the tech was a woman, even though when she came into the room she looked half my age and was chewing bubblegum. Over my shoulder, the nurse disappeared quietly. The ultrasound tech, Becky, said almost nothing once I was on the table. She'd angled the monitor away from me, but I could still see most of it. And I knew what I was looking at, and what it meant.

The outer-space landscape of my uterus with a curved black hole on one side, a few inches long on the monitor. Not a flicker of movement.

There was nothing, Becky explained later, when the ultrasound goo was wiped away. No crown-to-rump to measure, no heart to be beating. (Though she didn't say it like that.) Essentially, I had a tiny empty sac with no sign of a fetus.

* * *

Becky wheeled me out into the silent hall. She took two blankets out of the warmer, and draped one over my legs. The other she wrapped tightly around my shoulders, mummifying me.

"Someone will be by in a minute to take you back to Emergency." And she left.

I sat in my wheelchair, wrapped in my warm blanket cocoon, unable to lift a hand to my face. I started to cry. The occasional doctor or nurse walked by, completely oblivious to the wheelchair. I felt invisible, like a piece of paper someone had thrown away.

I sat alone - staring at the framed pink patchwork quilt, about the size of a baby blanket, that hung on the opposite wall - for five or ten minutes.

My chauffeur-nurse appeared from around a corner I didn't know was there.

"I'll take you back to Emergency."

I nodded, and burst into tears. I was getting good at crying in front of strangers.

"What happened?" he asked.

I thought about what to say. All I could manage was, "Bad news."

"I'm sorry," he said, sounding not particularly committed to his sympathy. Then, a second later: "Something about a pregnancy?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

Rob and Westley were waiting for me in my ER room. They didn't let us go home for another hour and a half.

* * *

Rob drove home. The three of us were almost silent. I felt numb, and my head was very quiet inside, except when it drifted into singing the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." (Why that song? I wondered. I can't remember the last time I listened to it.) The view as we crossed Lake Washington was a heartbreaking kind of beautiful.

* * *

The closer it gets to completely dark outside, the more I seem to bleed.

It's the first day of Spring. The symbolism is all wrong.

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Twelve Weeks

Sometimes I forget I'm pregnant, but it usually only lasts a second. Occasionally, Rob has to remind me, when I wonder aloud, "Why am I so tired?"

"You're growing a person - and a placenta - from scratch."

When I think about it, it makes my head spin. There is a new, unique human being growing inside me. A human being who supposedly looks undeniably human at this point, with limbs, fingers, toes, and a tiny face with eyes and ears where they should be.

I'm so curious about this baby. Is she a girl? Is he a boy? (There is just one of them in there, right?) Is everything all right, safe, healthy? Will this child have an energy similar to Westley's, or will my children have radically different personalities? I've never been so anxious and excited to meet someone, and my September 30 due date seems awfully far away.

Food and I officially made up this week. (Hello, legumes! Hello, leafy greens! So nice to see you again.) I am eating what seems like a ridiculous amount, but I feel like I'm always hungry. And I can't seem to get enough fruit. I never had much of a sweet tooth before, but sugary things suddenly sound delicious. My three-pear-a-day habit seems to curb some of the sweet cravings, but I still have a hard time passing up a gluten-free vegan cookie when one is available.

My go-to jeans became unquestionably too tight, as of yesterday. I feel much heavier than I think I look. Maybe I'm just anticipating the inevitable hugeness.

This is the last week of my first trimester. It feels like a beginning. I'm glad to be leaving behind the sickness and the disbelief - Is this really happening? Am I really going to have another baby? - for a place of certainty, and pure joy.

I'm really fucking happy to be pregnant again.

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The Pronoun Game

Westley seems fully convinced that the baby is a girl:

"When the baby comes, I will tell her all about robots."

"Mommy, I will show the baby this puzzle and she will say, 'Wow!'"

"Is the tea going into the baby's body? I hope she likes peppermint!"

I have no idea where this came from. I've been avoiding gender-specific pronouns since we first told Westley that "there's a baby growing inside Mommy." Once in a while, I'll offer up an "it" or "its," but I usually default to simply "the baby." And unlike the first time around, I have absolutely no clue as to the sex of the person currently sharing my body.

With Westley, I was certain I was pregnant with a boy from about 10 weeks on. It sounds kind of mystic-crystal-revelations, but I felt that the baby had an undeniable "little male" energy. It was almost as if he was saying, "Hi, Mommy! I'm a boy!" This time? Not so much as a peep. As I contemplated the double pink lines on my pregnancy test, I flashed on the idea of having another baby boy. But it was mostly a wondering (and a little worrying). With Westley, I knew.

This time, my kid is the one who seems to know. I'd really like to ask Westley why he keeps using female pronouns when talking about the baby. I'd do it if I thought he'd understand what I was asking him. But I also know that Westley randomly assigns a sex - usually female - to things in his world. He maintains that Gromit of Wallace and Gromit, Oscar the Grouch's pet worm Slimey, and, most recently, the monkey Steve in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs are all girls.

So maybe this has nothing to do with the baby whatsoever, and Westley just likes girls. I'm understand that's fairly common among boys.

* * *

Edited: Last night when I used "she" to refer to the baby - to avoid sentence clunkiness - Westley looked at me like my hair had just turned purple.

"Is the baby a girl?" he asked, the excitement bubbling up.

"I don't know," I told him. "Maybe."

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Let's (Not) Go Shopping

I got bitten by the shopping bug this week. Here's what happened: I woke up feeling somewhat human again (i.e. nausea seems to be gone) and I suddenly got really fucking excited about being pregnant. Then I decided that since I'm already about a quarter of the way through this pregnancy and this baby is going to need stuff, I should get on that! So as to, you know, be ahead of the pack in the preparedness department.

So I started to think about all the things we're going to need:

1. A car seat, for sure.
2. Um . . . er . . . let's see . . . oh, I know! Breasts!

But I've already got those like crazy. (You should see them. They're insane. If I'm this big at 11 weeks, I'm going to be obscene by 40 weeks.) And everything else I can think of? We already own. Or else it's stuff like newborn-size diapers and itty-bitty white onesies, neither of which is going to disappear off the face of the planet before the baby gets here.

Rob and Westley, August 2008, rockin' our beloved Ergo carrier.

So I won't be celebrating the happy return of my normal-person status with a baby-gear shopping spree. But so much for the better really, as most of that "must have" crap is actually completely useless.

(Oh, and also since we're paying out-of-pocket for all of my maternity care. Ouch.)

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Expectant Aesthetics

For a second, I thought I was losing my mind.

Something looks wrong here. No, it doesn't. Wait...yes it does!

Then I spotted the change: Starbucks' Web site has a new font. I don't remember what it was before (probably some version of Helvetica), but it looks like Trebuchet now. And it's more spring green-y. And while I probably would have noticed this before I got pregnant, I'm not sure it would've annoyed me so much.

(Incidentally, I know that because I live where I do, I'm supposed to love some cool, little-known coffee shop favored by serious writerly types with stylish laptops. And I do love a couple of those. But I really dig Starbucks coffee.)

Now that I'm gestating, my tastes have changed - and not just in my mouth. The look and feel of everything has started to get on my nerves. My furniture seems all wrong, style-wise, and I'm suddenly having a powerful "craving" for curtains. Clothes that I used to love no longer look right to me even though, for the most part, they still fit perfectly. I had to change my default radio station. Once-funny jokes now rub me the wrong way. And don't get me started on my hair.

I need a bangs trim...and an attitude adjustment.

I don't actually know if my new grumpiness aesthetic has anything to do with being pregnant. But if pregnancy hormones made me sensitive to wheat and soy and make my once-stick-straight hair wavy the first time around, why shouldn't they affect my taste in movies (and music, and fashion, and fonts)?

* * *

Speaking of fonts, my blog has also been driving me crazy as of late. And its colors are much quicker and easier to monkey with than those on my living room walls! I'm going to do my best to keep from changing the look of things around here at random intervals, but it may take me a while to find a layout that doesn't annoy my picky pregnant brain.

.....................................

Post-Kid Kitchen: Making Up With Food

After several weeks of on-again, off-again nausea, I'm starting to feel like a person again. A very hungry person. And while I still feel a little edgy around protein-rich foods, carbohydrates have been sounding wonderful.

At first, I practically lived off fruit: three pears and a giant grapefruit for breakfast, a pound of grapes for lunch, that sort of thing. Then, out of nowhere, my pregnant nose caught a whiff of French fries cooking somewhere, and I had a flash of, ohmygod that sounds SO good right now!

Unfortunately, fried food and I no longer see eye to eye. I love it, but it wants to date other people. People whose stomachs are not quite so sensitive to fat (and the likely gluten-by-proxy that happens to potatoes when a restaurant cooks all of its fried offerings together).

Because the real appeal of French fries (for me) is that warm, salty, potato-y flavor, I decided to whip up some potato soup. It scratched my food-itch and then some, coming together quickly and turning out much more satisfying than I'd expected. The secret ingredient is the potatoes themselves, half of which get blended with vegetable broth to give the soup a creamy base with no cream, dairy or otherwise.

Creamy Potato Soup

Serves 4 generously

3 lbs potatoes

4 cups vegetable broth

2 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion

1 large red bell pepper

2 medium carrots

2 cups water

2 tbsp nutritional yeast

You're going to need two pots for this.

Peel your potatoes and dice them fine. Place vegetable broth and half the diced potatoes in pot #1 over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and cook 10 minutes or so, until potatoes are very tender.

Meanwhile, dice the onion. Heat olive oil in pot #2 over medium-high heat and add onion. Dice bell pepper and carrots, adding each vegetable to the onion as you finish dicing and stirring occasionally. When the onion looks nice and translucent, add water and remaining potatoes. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to medium and cook, covered, 7-10 minutes, until potatoes are tender.

When your potato-broth mixture is thoroughly cooked, blend with an immersion blender until smooth. (You can also transfer the mixture to a blender or food processor to blend.) Add the blended potato mixture to pot #2, and stir to combine. Right before serving, stir in nutritional yeast.

* * *

P.S. Rob suggested that this soup could be garnished with roasted chickpeas for some nice crunch (not to mention protein). While that sounds delicious to me in theory, legumes and I are not currently on speaking terms.

.....................................

Taste Tested

I kind of enjoy the Bionic Nose of Pregnancy. While it's not exactly pleasurable being able to smell bad breath or too-much-cologne or just-used-catbox 100 feet away, I like feeling like a superhero with a Super Sense of Smell.

A Super Sense of Smell I should have trusted last night when I heated up the wok and swore I picked up the scent of detergent. One mouthful of stir-fry was more than enough to know that something was horribly, soapily wrong.

Since banishing last night's dinner to the yard waste bin, everything has seemed off. Toasted millet bread with soy-free Earth Balance tastes oddly metallic. Grapefruit, whose sourness I usually relish, seems too sour. The peppermint I popped to help ease my nausea tasted like aftershave. I just finished a small bowl of plain white rice that, while stomach-settling, seemed oddly "planty." Lemon drops taste awesome, but only for a few sucks; once that crystallized outside part is gone, no thank you!

I hope this is just psychological fallout from having bitten into dish-soap-infused broccoli last night, and not a new pregnancy symptom. I certainly didn't have anything like this when I was pregnant with Westley. The closest I came to experiencing tastebud craziness was when I'd go on food jags and eat one thing for a week, before suddenly being repulsed by that very thing. I still remember the tomato sandwich that put me off tomato sandwiches. What had been The Best Food Ever was now all wrong, God, no, get it away!

(Ugh. I just grossed myself out thinking about tomato sandwiches.)

If this taste insanity doesn't end soon, I'm going to be in trouble. I'm running out of things to eat. What do you do when almost nothing sounds good, and the things that do sound good taste wrong?

The one glorious thing that has yet make my tongue be all WTF? is actually the perfect marriage of three things:

Lemon juice, sugar, and bubbles.

Not a lot of nutrition going on there, sadly. So now I feel queasy and guilty, because I'm depriving my fetus!

I'm given to understand that one solid cure for all of the unpleasant food-related pregnancy stuff is good nutrition, with protein at each meal and snack. That sounds very sane and reasonable and worth a try...until you realize that the raw almonds you just started munching on taste suspiciously (and disturbingly) like Canadian bacon.

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Babies In Broads

On the eve of his third birthday - well before I was pregnant again - Westley suddenly became very extra double-curious about babies inside mommies. Specifically, when he was the baby inside this mommy. And his new favorite question became "how?"

"How did I get inside your belly, Mommy?"

"Daddy put you there."

"How?"

"With his penis."

This got a huge smile. I think Westley thought I was joking. "How did he do that?"

I walked right into that one, didn't I?

Rob and I exchanged looks. "You know," I said to Westley, "I think this would be easier to explain if we had a book. With pictures. Should we look for a book about how babies get inside mommies?"

Westley practically jumped up and down. "Yeah!"

I am on this! I am probably the only person in the world who's excited to talk with her preschooler about sex. But I can't help it. I think reproduction is magical and rad.

So we hit up the library. I came armed with a list call numbers that I'd looked up at home beforehand to minimize Westley's wait time. I glanced quickly through Where Did I Come From? and quickly remembered how skeeved out by it I was as a child. (I'm sure many people find the super-cartoony illustrations tasteful and non-threatening. As a child, I found them ugly and off-putting, and I can't seem to shake that impression.) I settled on It's So Amazing!, and When You Were Inside Mommy.

"How does the baby get out?"

For about six weeks now, we've been talking about the Special Tube called the 'vagina' that's very, very stretchy - stretchy enough to let a baby out. And how babies are small and flexible.

"But how does the baby come out?"

"The muscles in the mommy's uterus squeeze, and the mommy pushes the baby out through the vagina."

This is clearly making sense and making no sense at the same time. Westley can't wrap his mind around it. "But...how?"

I just smile. Because I can't really believe it either.

.....................................

Post-Kid(s) Kitchen: Eating for Nausea

Food and I broke up this week. Between my kidney-bean-sized passenger and a cold that Westley was nice enough to share with me, I've been balancing nausea, loss of appetite, and post-nasal drip that makes everything taste "off." The thought of eating makes me feel like a contestant on Fear Factor. And cooking? Pretty much out of the question.

My wonderful doctor (who is also a licensed midwife, and was the student midwife who saved my life present at Westley's birth) said, "The first three months are just about surviving." But I feel like I should at least make an effort to consume more than pickles and lemonade, the only two foods that sound good - if anything could be said to "sound good" right now.

So far, I haven't come up with very much. Pasta puttanesca has been going down pretty easily, but I don't feel like I can eat it for breakfast. Enter blended fruit.

Take Your Iron Supplement with This Smoothie

Makes a lot, probably 2 or 3 servings, but I just drink the whole thing myself

1 cup pineapple juice

3 Clementines, peeled and broken into sections

1/2 cup unsweetened frozen raspberries

4 strawberries (fresh or frozen)

Combine everything in a blender and blend until smooth. Serve immediately. That's it! Lots of fiber and 296% of your RDA for vitamin C.

Unless you count boiling gluten-free pasta, practically the only thing I've been able to cook this week has been a super-simple soup, based very loosely on Chinese Corn Soup. I say "very loosely" because it's not much more than corn and vegetable broth - but it's been the perfect thing for my cold symptoms.

Almost Instant Corn Soup

Serves 2 - or 1 sick person who doesn't feel like eating much else

1 1/2 cups super-flavorful vegetable broth (I use a powdered broth concentrate, and just make the broth a little stronger than usual)

1 1/2 cups corn kernals

1 Tbsp cornstarch

2 Tbsp water

Combine vegetable broth and corn in a pot over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. In a small bowl, whisk together cornstarch and water until well-combined. Add the cornstarch-water mixture to the boiling soup and stir. Continue to stir for about 2 minutes, until the soup has thickened slightly. Serve immediately, garnished with baby corn (pickled or not) and chopped scallions.

I'm hoping that as my cold disappears, I'll start to feel less like cooking and eating are things I have to force myself to do before I lose the nerve to do them. I was feeling really tired (unbelievably tired) but otherwise awesome before the cold reared its ugly, mucousy head. In the meantime, I'll be racking my brain for things to eat when I don't feel like eating.

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Embryo in Broad

Of course this would happen the one month I wasn't a "preganoid" lunatic.

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Preganoia Will Destroy Ya

Since ditching IUD numero dos a few months ago, I have become a hyper-crazy symptom-watcher. Every twinge or tummy rumble can only mean One Thing:

"I must be pregnant!"

The non-plan plan had been to treat the (maybe) having another child thing in a very relaxed, no-big-deal fashion. No talk of "trying" or timing or ovulation. We'd just go about our normal, everyday activities (though not, ahem, every day) and not think about it.

Except that I can't stop thinking about it! I am a preganoid lunatic.

So I do things like come out of the bathroom topless and stick my chest in my husband's face. "Do they look bigger?"

"Not really."

"But feel!"

"Um...they feel about the same. Maybe a little smaller than yesterday, actually."

Because, yes, I made him do this yesterday too.

Over the past two weeks, when I haven't been making my husband manually estimate my bra size, I've been taking naps and crying over every little thing (including but not limited to Disney's Robin Hood and not one but two Katy Perry videos!). I remind myself that I haven't been sleeping well, and that sleep deprivation (in me) means teariness and even sometimes nausea. So I'm probably just really tired. But what if I'm pregnant? Oh, God, I'm totally pregnant!

Besides, lack of sleep doesn't explain why I've been craving curried everything. (Black bean curry, potato curry, delicata squash curry, mmm...)

Last night, I had heartburn for the first time in, um...ever? No, wait. There was that one other time. When I was PREGNANT!

The problem is I go through this every month. And then every month, I get my period and feel like an idiot. For about a week and a half, and then I decide once again that I'm pregnant. And I think about taking a pregnancy test, even though I'm probably not pregnant and even if I were, it's way too early to test. Some months, I take a test anyway. The little 'minus' sign convinces me about half the time.

Someone should make giant, economy packs of pregnancy tests for crazy girls like me who want to take one every day. Or maybe I should skip a step and just start peeing on $10 bills.

(As I'm writing this, Rob is out shopping for more curry ingredients and a box of Mother to Be tea. I think he might be an enabler.)

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Vegan Pregnancy Blog

If you arrived at this site after searching for a "vegan pregnancy blog," please leave a comment to let me know what you're looking for. I think and write about pregnancy often, and I do eat a vegan diet. And since I'm planning to get pregnant again, I could certainly do some vegan pregnancy blogging. But before I venture down that road, I'm interested in what questions my Googlers might want answered.

Thank you!

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Bellyaching

I don't know when it happened, but every woman of childbearing age in the greater Seattle area is pregnant. It's unbelievable. Every time I go to the grocery store, take Westley to the park, or even just glance out my front window, it looks like a Lamaze class just got out!

Although up here, I guess it's more likely to be a "Birthing From Within" class.

Regardless, I keep noticing all of these lovely expectant mamas - many toting around children close to Westley's age - and I'm feeling sort of left out.

No, wait. It's not quite "left out." More like... I desperately want to be pregnant!

I am so fucking envious of these women, and I can't stop wishing it were me rocking basketball belly and the "glow."

My, oh-hey-the-IUD-is-out-might-get-pregnant-soon casual attitude has transformed into something bordering on sick, baby-carrying obsession. I'm not quite as bad as the woman I knew in college who would pat the sides of her lower abdomen and declare, "I'm pregnant with half-babies" (referring to her zillions of eggs). But I am plowing through all the pregnancy-and-childbirth books in the house at a surprising rate. I'm getting all hyper-Fertility-Awareness with myself. I'm probably one circle dance and a full moon away from smoking some "Mom To Be" tea.

"What is wrong with you?" I ask my pregnancy-fantasy self. "You hated being pregnant!"

It's true. I did hate being pregnant. Physical awfulness for five months, emotional awfulness for several more than that (not to mention my nightmarish plummet into postpartum depression), and, in the background, a life in a state of complete upheaval. Good times, my pregnancy.

Pregnancy Fantasy Me tries to convince Me-Me that I wouldn't hate it now. That the life upheaval part was the real issue last time. Now I wouldn't be dealing with a job that I hate, a miserable commute, or an unemployed husband. I wouldn't be about to move into a new house. I wouldn't have to take a crowded bus to midwife appointments with a heavy work bag and a giant belly.

And as for the body thing and the not feeling great, well, I certainly wouldn't be going out for enormous veggie burgers and French fries twice a week! (Pregnancy-Fantasy Me has a point, there.)

I'm ashamed to admit that the fantasy is pretty seductive, even when I try to brush some of the rainbow glitter off of it. I have to consider just how much better my life is now. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, very much improved. Pregnancy couldn't possibly be as miserable the second time around, could it? (And some of that misery has to be a figment of my imagination, doesn't it?)

For a moment, I quit fighting the fantasy and started playing around with Due Date Calculators. BabyCenter's due date calculator will let you put in a future date as the date of conception - very enticing for someone in a pregnancy daydream space. So I pretended that the expected start of my next period was my Last Menstrual Period in the obstetrical date sense.

For some reason, seeing my fake 2011 due date freaked me right out.

Then, while clothes shopping for Westley today (underpants are go!), I rounded a corner and found myself in the maternity section.

Oh, sweet Mother Mary, maternity clothes. Whether or not the memory of my overall pregnancy misery level is accurate, the outfits are exactly as ghastly as I remember.

Pregnancy Fantasy Me thinks this is a great excuse to learn to sew.

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Under the Baby Radar

My mom likes to tell me how, as a toddler, I had "nursing mother radar." If there was a woman breastfeeding at the mall, the park, the zoo...I always noticed. I could spot a breastfeeding mother across a crowded stadium.

"She feed her baby!" I would announce to my mother, who would have to search for a minute before she spied a nursing mom at the very top of the bleachers.

Apparently, this kind of radar is partially hereditary. Westley doesn't pick out nursing moms the way I used to (though he will tell you which animals make milk for their babies). But he never misses a baby.

"Mommy, I see a baby over dere!"

"Where?" I look around. A woman clear on the other side the market is wearing a tiny newborn in a Baby Bjorn.

When I tell Westley he has "baby radar," he cracks up like this is the best joke in the world. Then he gets pensive.

"I fink I want a baby."

"Not 'til you're 30, dude."

While Westley's attention to detail might be a little gift from the gene pool, his sudden interest in babies makes perfect sense. There has been a lot of talk about babies 'round these parts. As in, Rob and I have been having not-quite-daily baby-mentioning discussions. It would be nearly impossible for Westley to miss that something is up.

I'm de-IUD'd. We're past the pre-planning stage and into the planning stage. The kind of planning where you look over your insurance coverage and run into a (familiar) miserable, half-pissed-off, half-fearful feeling. Never mind sending two kids to college! How are we going to pay for the birth?

Westley hasn't been part of that planning. But he has been present for several of the conversations mentioning the word "baby" over and over, rapid fire. When Rob explained that we were talking about Mommy having another baby, Westley was enthusiastic.

"That baby would be a brother or a sister to you, buddy," Rob told him.

"I fink I want a bruhver baby."

"That would be cool," I said, "but we don't get to pick. We just get what we get."

"I fink I want a sister baby."

"That would be cool, too," Rob agreed.

Westley thought a moment, and then announced, "I want a bruhver baby and a sister baby!"

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The Pre-Planning Stage

Rob and I decided recently to seriously consider stopping at one child. We put that idea out on the table and left it there.

It actually seemed to sit pretty well, much to my surprise. I'd always imagined I'd have at least two children (except on the days I thought I'd have none). When Rob said early on that he wanted two, I pictured us with one of each: a rich man's family. Before we had one child, two seemed like a reasonable number. Now that we have Westley, two children seems like twenty. "I'm not sure I could go through this again," I said to Rob on the evening of a particularly grueling day. And that's when the One Child Plan emerged.

The more we thought about it, the more stopping at one made sense. Pregnancy, birth, and the first year of Westley's life basically kicked our asses: physically, emotionally, financially. My health checked out. I got closer than I ever have to saying "I want a divorce" and really meaning it. Now, when we're still working to stitch our relationship back together and haven't even begun to pay back our savings account, hitting "reset" on the child-rearing timeline seems ridiculous. Stopping at one would mean we could just keep moving forward.

All Westley, all the time.

The minute I make up my mind on a major life decision-type-thing, I start to feel the tiniest questioning itch. It's not even as noteworthy as an inner voice of doubt--more like a grain of sand--but it's there. And the more that grain of sand rolls around in my mind, the more it starts looking like a pearl. I think, You're wrong! There's a better option! Look how shiny it is!

I have to admit right now that my mother is frequently the source of those sand grains. About having children, my mother says (and I'm not paraphrasing), "A sibling is the greatest gift you can give your child." What a fabulous grandparental pressure-filled greeting card that would make! Admittedly, however, there's something to consider in that statement. Having a sibling means having a peer to practice all that important peer-stuff with. A brother or sister is the perfect ally against Mom and Dad which, let's face it, is often essential for a person's mental health. But having a brother didn't keep me from missing out on the peer-relations front. And besides, having a baby because my mother thinks it's a good idea? Has all the makings of some Lifetime-Television-for-Women crazy shit. Of course my mother thinks it's a good idea for me to have another baby! She's the grandmother!

Still, I'm carrying around that tiny, almost-pearl idea. It doesn't help that suddenly all of Seattle is pregnant--or else the new trend in birthing classes is to take field trips to the grocery store. There are pregnant women everywhere, which makes it hard not to think a.) I Know What You Did Last Winter, and b.) why not me? And lately, Westley himself is the ribbon-icing on the diaper cake: he has become obsessed with all things "baby."

Westley has four dolls, all of whom he calls "bay-bee." He carries whichever of them is his current favorite over his shoulder, like he's going to burp it. He can spot an actual baby a mile away (even though sometimes the "baby" is a child older than he is). Annie Rose is My Little Sister is one of his favorite books. My beautiful (and goofy) friend Amanda is pregnant, and it took Westley about three minutes and my mentioning it once to figure out that there was going to be a baby. And then he couldn't stand how awesome it was. He had to point to Amanda's belly and give it kisses over and over. Now we can't mention Amanda's name without Westley asking "bay-bee?"

Given Westley's current obsession, it's difficult not to lose myself in fantasies about what he would be like as a big brother. So often at the park an older boy will engage Westley, and show him how to do something like take a "shortcut" up the back side of the climbing structure or slide down the tube slide head first; I try to imagine a four-year-old Westley teaching his little brother the secrets of the playground. I try to hear Westley telling his little sister about all the things he loves: dancing, Sesame Street, dandelions, guitars and oboes, the pool. The picture in my head is blurry, hard to bring into focus. Two children? My two children? It seems like an impossibility. It seems crazy! And yet, something about it just seems...right.

"I want another one," I said to Rob.

"I know you do, baby."

So, there you have it. We're not quite ready for a second child. Okay, we're not even "not quite" ready. But we're ready to be thinking about being ready. I definitely want Westley to have turned three already when his brother or sister is born. In terms of "planning," that means out with the IUD and off with the pants and on with the gettin' it on a little less than a year from now. That seemed like a reasonable amount of time last week, when the "let's stop at one" idea was officially replaced by "let's have another." But now, a year seems like no time at all. It might as well be next week, in fact. I don't know how we're going to be ready to "try" a year from now. (Practice? Heh.)

I realize that our "plan" is not set in stone. It doesn't have to be next summer; any pressure I'm feeling about having another baby soon-ish is entirely self-imposed. But I want Westley to have a sibling close to his own age. And getting knocked up next year means I could be done having children before I turn 30, which sounds kind of awesome. On the other hand, two children before I turn 30 sounds kind of crazy. For starters, how the hell am I going to deal with being pregnant and taking care of a toddler?

Advice from any of you bloggy people who have embarked (or are currently embarking) on the two-child journey would be very, very welcome. How did you decide it was time to go back for seconds? Was age-difference a factor in your decision? What am I really getting myself into? Feel free to comment or post a full, tell-all report on your own blog.

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Midwives Help People Out (Insurance Companies? Not So Much)

I am feeling a combination of dread and rage as I look over Rob's and my health insurance options for the next year. The rules, the restrictions, the buts and excepts and only ifs that pepper the language of these official forms always arouse a dull fear in me--I'm sure that someone is trying to rip me off--but it's worse this year. This year, there's a birth to consider.

For the record, I'm not pregnant yet. (Just like I haven't seen Evil Dead II...yet.) However, Rob and I are seriously considering putting me at serious risk for pregnancy. That is, we're thinking about not using any birth control and seeing what happens. (The last time we did this, I ended up with a big belly and then a baby, so we're pretty sure that's how it works. [Although, really, I'm not entirely convinced. I mean, what about all those times I had sex and there wasn't a baby? What about all those times you had sex and there wasn't a baby?]) The thing making me insane right now is how few choices I have with respect to prenatal care and birth if I want insurance to cover any of it. I'm not intending to start a pro-life vs. pro-choice debate here, but my prospective insurance company would rather I have an abortion than a home birth.

I'll happily say that I am pro-home birth--for myself, and for anyone who wants to try it. The hospital is not a place I want to be, especially when I'm feeling vulnerable and possibly (probably, definitely) in pain. I don't judge anyone for delivering in the hospital. I don't judge anyone for wanting to deliver in the hospital. Treat others as they would be treated, I think. It's none of my business what anyone else does. And I say this because there are people who envision militant leagues of pro-home birth mothers trying to force their hippie ways on others. And who knows? Perhaps there are such militant home-birthers somewhere. I'm just not one of them. In fact, a big part of me still can't believe that I had Westley at home without any medication on purpose.

When I think about having another baby, I can't imagine giving birth anywhere but home, barring an emergency, of course. And while I know there are many wonderful and capable midwives in the Seattle area, I cannot imagine anyone I would rather call when I go into labor than the women who helped Westley into the world.

I just keep looking at the insurance information forms and thinking, I want a home birth. I want a home birth. I want a home birth.

And then I stop myself. Becuase isn't the point to have a baby?

Well, yes. In the end, it's about the baby and not the birth. But the birth still matters. A good experience surrounding the birth of a child can make a huge difference in terms of getting a family off to a good start, and a bad birth experience is horrid. And the process of having a baby is a huge deal if for no other reason than unless you're lucky crazy Michelle Duggar, you probably only do it a couple of times. In your life. What else do you do just twice?

It seems ridiculous that by choosing to have a baby at home, by wanting to work with the midwives whose guidance and experience I so trust, I put myself in a position where my health insurance won't help me. Yes, I get it, I get it: insurance companies aren't in it to help people. They're interested in making money. But if making money is the goal, why cover hospital births and not birth center or home births? Why cover doctors but not midwives?

If I pay for my home birth out-of-pocket, which is almost certainly what will happen, that money has to come from somewhere. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it would come out of our downpayment fund, which isn't growing nearly as quickly as we'd imagined it would. I'm feeling split in two and incredibly guilty. On the one hand, I have an obligation to my family as it currently stands to make sound financial decisions. On the other hand, a second baby is probably also a last baby, and nothing is going to stop me from wanting the birth I want. And yet, borrowing from the housing budget feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul's vagina. Or something.

The thing that sucks the hardest? At the end of the day (well, at the end of September, actually), I still have to choose an insurance plan and sign on the dotted line. A plan that includes in its name words like "Open" and "Choice" and "Access." Right. As long as you see one of these twenty-seven doctors not more than three times a year, and you weren't even thinking about having a baby in the living room.

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Disfigured

I found one of the pictures of pregnant me the other day in the whole "move everything over to the new computer" process that is still going on despite the fact that "the new computer" just goes by "the computer" these days. There are only a few pictures of me pregnant, so the image isn't something I run into electronically on a regular basis. And it seriously freaked my shit out.

I remember this perfectly. The yellowy lighting in the bathroom that made it impossible to apply natural-looking make-up. The maternity dress that I wore at least twice a week towards the end of my pregnancy, when I had gained well over the recommended 25-35 pounds and nothing else fit. The feeling tired and heavy and looking the worst I'd looked in a good long time, and yet deciding that some day, someone was going to want there to be photographic evidence of the gestation process. Thinking some day, someone would smile about this.

That someone probably won't be me, it turns out. My first thought--even though I clearly remember taking the picture--was, "I never looked like that!"  And yet, evidently, I did, and for some reason, that disturbed me. 

Maybe it's because on most days, I have a pretty good sense of what I look like. Or, at least, I've become accustomed to my mental image of myself, which is not, shockingly enough, pregnant. Even when I was actually pregnant, I didn't look pregnant for a long time (except from certain angles). Rob made a joke as part of his toast at our friends' wedding that included mentioning my knocked-upness, and afterwards, more than a few people came up to me and said, "I didn't know you were pregnant." So, pregnant or not, I think of myself as not looking pregnant. But in that picture, I'm pretty undeniably pregnant.   

For the past few weeks, Rob and I have been in baby-making negotiations. I alternate between thinking trying to have another child in the next year or two is a fantastic idea, and thinking it's a horrific idea. We've discussed waiting until Westley is potty-trained to start trying to conceive having sex without birth control and seeing what happens. We've discussed having another baby as soon as possible, and putting baby-having behind us. We've discussed not having any more children. And it's all still up in the air, and for now, that's where it will stay. But there is one question that keeps gnawing at my brain, a little zombie of uncertainty: 

What will I look like next time?

Of course, every pregnancy is different. So I guess there's only one way to find out.

 

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Maybe Not Baby

Last week, I couldn't stop thinking about having another baby. It started innocently enough: resale shopping almost always involves mild confusion ("There's no way this is a Medium!") followed by realization ("Oh, it's maternity!"), but my most recent trip to Goodwill yielded almost exclusively cute pregnancy finds. I didn't buy anything, but I was sorely tempted. Because we'll probably have another child, and it's always good to be prepared for next time, and a mod-print maternity dress for $4.99 is hard to pass up.

"Next time" has been firmly established in Rob's and my minds as starting sometime around Summer 2010, and I still think that's a good plan. Westley will have turned three by the time the baby is born, he'll probably be in preschool, and we might even have a little bit more money than we do now. But somewhere between contemplating pregnancy duds at Goodwill and purchasing a gently-used pair of orange sneakers for Westley at one of our favorite kids' clothing shops, I started to think that "next time" could be now-ish.

Suddenly, every other sentence out of my mouth started, "When we have another baby..." or "The next time I'm pregnant..." I started looking back at pictures of Westley as a newborn, feeling sad that I'd been too depressed and insecure and disappointed by unmet expectations to enjoy his tiny-babyness. Rob observed, "You know, this is why so many kids born about two years apart." It's true that if I were to get pregnant as soon as possible, Westley would be almost two when his little brother or sister was born. There must be something deep and biological at work here. The more I noticed Westley walking on his own with his arms at his sides (instead of curled up by his chest, T-Rex style) and looking less like a baby, the more having another child seemed like the right thing to do, somehow. I mean, they're just so little and sweet.

Hold me closer, tiny duder.

Last week, I couldn't stop myself from entertaining thoughts about starting all over again with another tiny, precious baby. I was actually convinced it was a good idea.

Then this past Monday, I came down with the stomach flu. I woke up in the early morning shaky and nauseated, threw up in the kitchen sink, and spent rest of the morning crying and dry-heaving over a waste basket. Rob got the doctor's number off the list on the fridge, and polled me about my symptoms.

"Has she felt like this before?" the nurse asked him over the phone.

When she was pregnant," Rob answered. He quickly added, "We don't think she's pregnant."

It really was just the flu, and I'm not pregnant. And I've changed my tune completely. Thanks to this little stomach bug, I remember just how completely awful it was to be pregnant, I'm in no hurry to have another baby again any time soon.

Nothing like a bonus round of morning sickness to squelch your baby lust.

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The First Nine Months

The last year and a half has been a crazy, scary, joyful journey. Westley has been part of my life for eighteen months and it’s hard to believe he wasn't always here. My little man-person will be nine months old tomorrow, and it feels like such a milestone. He looks more and more like a little boy every day, moving out of babyhood as he works to eat, talk, and move on his own. He has been outside my body as long as he was inside it. I'm looking back and looking forward at the same time.

Six Weeks Pregnant

I leave my seat at the front desk to call the midwives' office from the small, windowless Interview Room. My hands are shaking as I talk to the woman at the office's answering service.

"How far along are you?" she asks.

"Uh, about...five and a half weeks," I say, suddenly self-conscious about having to think in Pregnancy Math, which is not like Regular Math.

Silence on the other end of the phone. I stared down at the scrap of paper I'd brought in with me. I'd written my own phone number at the top, because I always forget it when asked by someone I can't see.

Her voice came back suddenly. "Birth date?"

"I'm due November twenty-eighth, oh-seven." A number from an online generator, memorized since the afternoon the two purple lines appeared on the pee-stick.

"No, your birthday."

"Oh, uh...um..." I should have written that down on the scrap paper, too.

Three Months Pregnant

We have dinner with Rob's parents at the vegan pizzeria and tell them, and his mother promptly tells everyone. I'm so angry at her, and angry at Rob for not also being angry with her. She shared news that was not hers to share, and deprived him the opportunity to introduce his unborn child to the family personally! I'd imagined Rob calling his grandfather in Alaska and receiving congratulations and old-fashioned-sounding advice, whatever the baby-having equivalent of "don’t go to bed angry" is.

After saying good-bye to my in-laws that evening, I throw up. I’d been feeling sick almost constantly for weeks and in a crazy way, it's rewarding to finally have my nausea validated.

Now everything makes me feel like vomiting. Thoughts of feeding my fetus salads and whole grains and fresh things disintegrate. I get on food-jags and eat basically one thing for a week or so, until it starts to repulse me completely, and then I find something new: tomato-and-Vegenaise sandwiches, hard pretzels and lemonade, plain bagels with Tofutti cream cheese, bean burritos (from Taco Bell), soy yogurt and soy pudding, veggie burgers and fries, pounds and pounds of melon...

Four Months Pregnant

I thought I would feel pregnanter by now.

Five Months Pregnant

What is my body doing, anyway? Incubating a tiny human being. How did I get here? Being twenty-four, reasonably healthy and having lots of sex, for starters. Oh. Right.

Rob measures years in Christmases. If someone is in prison for ten years, he thinks, that's ten Christmases. When I think about Christmas, it sinks in that there will be a tiny, newborn human being in my house, and I begin to feel my future shifting. It's like the way I felt after getting married. The wedding is supposed to be The Day, and it's built up as a Happily-Ever-After with no mention of the enormous journey that follows. A couple's future as parents is similarly misshapen. So often the idea is about having children, not having a child. But that little heartbeat, that thwump-thwump-thwump underwater rave coming through the doppler, belongs to a little individual. A single new person who will make Rob a father, and me a mother.

Rob puts his hand on my belly just in time to feel three strong kicks from something round and firm, like there's a hard-boiled egg pushing on me. This is not a future-tense family. We have a child.

Vacation

I'm hoisting my carry-on suitcase into the overhead bin when the woman behind me says, "Here, let me help you. I remember what that was like." I'm almost six months pregnant and it’s the first time a stranger has noticed and said anything to me. I feel sort of elated, and the baby kicks for most of the long flight.

My college girlfriends, whom I'm visiting for five days, are pissed as hell that I didn't tell them right away. We make up almost immediately, and they determine that since there are five of us and three beds, the expectant mother should get the bed by herself. They make sure I have rice milk for my cereal, and Sarah tries to listen to the baby with her stethoscope. Choosing names quickly turns from the classic and plausible to the ridiculous.

They don't care that I got pregnant kind of on purpose but mostly by accident. They like to think that I was trying, because "trying" sounds so official and grown-up. I guess I'm the grown-up in the group now.

Seven Months Pregnant

Unless I'm naked or wearing something with an empire waist, I still don't really look pregnant, and it makes me want to cry. I have belly fat rolls instead of a baby belly. I wasted too many years being fat, and worked very hard to lose weight before I got pregnant, and now, instead of looking cure and pregnant, I just look fat again.

It's fucking unfair.

Eight and a Half Months Pregnant

People at work keep asking if I'm ready. The question makes it sound like there's a disaster coming and I should be stocking up on canned goods and bottled water. Ready. The word alone suddenly has me feeling certain there's something I haven't thought of. Something pivotal. Of course, it doesn't help that we really have nothing for the baby. Not even a house.

Rob and I are moving out of our house soon. I've been hesitant to buy anything until we have a place to put it. The tiny, windowless nursery in our apartment used to be the laundry room, but things have been rewired, water has been redirected, and doors have been installed. One of the walls is painted swimming pool blue. Very serene.

There is nothing calm about my life right now. After three months of no work and waiting for a phone call, crossing fingers, and agonizing over interviews, Rob has a job. A good job. A job that is going to take care of us, make everything okay. It's both a huge sigh of relief and a question mark. A new home, a new job, a new baby.

If I'm not ready, I'd better get there fast.

Nine Months Pregnant

The sun is setting outside, but all I see is black. My eyes are closed, and I press my teeth together, feeling pain in the darkness. Pulling like a rubber band stretched taught. Contracting. Is this it? I exhale. I slowly open my eyes. I look at my husband and wait one minute. Ten minutes. Nothing.

I try to keep my mind clear and calm, try not to get excited at the prospect of labor or disappointed by another painful Braxton-Hicks contraction. I feel a heel digging into my ribcage on the right side, and picture the baby upside down, its head pressing me open from the inside. I wonder if concentration and mental toughness can make my cervix start to dilate. I wish there were more I could do. All there is to do is wait...


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