Death and Destruction in the Nursery

I believe having a relatively toxic-free environment for a newborn is somewhat important. That's one of the reasons why we had the nursery painted and the floors refinished in April so that hopefully all the off-gassing would be done by when ever we got around to procreating. I've been opting for organic things where possible, as long as they don't need to be hand washed by virgins in angel's tears or some such nonsense. So far, so good, right? Hah! Foolish and arrogant girl!

Brooke was out of town for the weekend on a Porsche guy road trip (of course this would happen then). I was finally feeling well enough and motivated enough to do some housework and then start working on the pile of boxes in the nursery. I cleaned up the kitchen, including the big mess of cinnamon and ant bait poison for our on-going ant problem. No ants had been seen in awhile so I finally cleaned it up... feeling that as soon as I did the little bastards would reappear. Oh how true that suspicion would prove to be!

Ants in kitchen prior to Antpocalypse

Then I go upstairs to start on the nursery and look for some ribbon to hang some art (our house has picture rails everywhere) and at some point while I'm digging through the box I realize I'm standing in the middle of this HUGE mess of ants! Yeah, they had reappeared all right, in a big trail going diagonally across the entire nursery, from behind one big pile of boxes to behind another big pile of boxes.

I'll spare you all the sordid details, but suffice to say there was some frantic vacuuming, much swearing and sweating (my formerly cozy flannel pj's became a damp, stifling, shroud), shoving of piles of boxes, more vacuuming, and finally a hosing down of the room of bug spray when it just seemed like they were everywhere! Even had a bag of new baby clothes fall over onto the bug spray covered floor. Nifty.

Finally located the offending box (I think) they were after... not a forgotten chocolate bar or bag of chips, it was my special effect makeup, most likely some fake blood which is basically just corn syrup and coloring (which is kinda creepy if you think abut it as my friend Matt said, vampire ants!). I pushed the large, heavy box down the stairs and thank god for my awesome neighbors... when I appeared all sweaty in my PJ's on their back porch panting and asking for help with my ant emergency they carried the box down to the basement where I doused it with bug spray.

So, now my nursery makes me gag when I walk into it, is covered in poison and stuff thrown everywhere, and we have a house guest showing up on Sunday who is supposed to sleep in there. Oy.

I seriously believe these things are just Nature's way of testing me and trying to prepare me to be a better parent. I almost lost it a few times, but in the end seemed to have triumphed (for now... the paid professionals will be coming to make sure we keep that advantage) with no tears or puking, though it was close on both counts. Glad we still have five months to get the room cleaned up and aired out!

Wait... only five months?!!? Holy crap, I can't believe we're almost at the half way point!!! Aggghhhhhh!

All Right, Mr. DeMille, I'm Ready For My Close-Up!

Me at 14 weeks

Me at about 12 weeks

Alrighty, here begins the parade of pregnancy photos of me and my belly. I have to confess that the one on the left is a "reenactment" in that it's really me at 14 weeks sucking my gut in to try and give a bit of a "before" photo. Turns out the baby doesn't suck in so well. I plan on taking all the photos in this dress as its very stretchy and should accommodate my expanding girth, though it does get a bit sheer at the limits of its endurance.

Now that I'm generally feeling better (until the next weird symptom shows up I suppose, I understand there's a lot of them) and starting to manifest the reality of my condition, getting more excited about it is getting easier. I keep reading these pregnancy books where various women talk about their pregnancies and about how psycho they got. I got a little cranky last night and snapped at Brooke but while it was related to being pregnant in that I was trying to tell Brooke how I hurt my foot and he was laughing because I wasn't making much sense because of my frequent bouts of fuzzy brained Pregnancy brain, it wasn't crazy off the wall hormonal loony. I also felt bad for it right away and sent an email apologizing (he fell asleep right away).

OK, off to bed... while I'm tending to not feel so nauseous these days, I'm still taking Benadryl and I can feel the minute it kicks in. I hope to stop it soon as I'm tired enough as it is, though all the sleep is nice. Looking forward to experiencing one of the nicer side effects, the pregnancy dream induced "big-O!" Yes, it's true, not a myth, and proves that my god is a merciful, if somewhat sardonically humored god, noodly appendages and all.

And You Think I'm Dark?!!?

No, I did not create this. I just happen to like it a lot. I think I will print this out and put it up in the nursery. Just in case. I now feel fully prepared to be a Mom now!

 

Pregnancy Has Turned Me Into a Hormonal Psycho!

(For those of you hoping for a bit of schadenfreude, you're about to be disappointed.)

So, one of my big fears about being pregnant (after general health issues for me and the baby) were based on  the horror stories about how pregnant women are so overrun with hormones that they just break down crying one minute and are raging psychos the next with seemingly little control over their mind (this goes hand in hand with my fear of growing older and Alzheimer's, but that's a ways off). Ugh!

So, I've found that my hormones have definitely come into play and turned me into this raging worthy-of-Bad-Girl's-Club-and-Bridezillas bitch... but only in my dreams. (Told you) As I mentioned before, I've been having these very vivid and realistic dreams pretty much every night. Several of them are about me going into these raging fits, the throwing-things-around-the-room-while-screaming type fit. For no good reason. I even know I have no good reason while I'm having this fit in my dream. I wake up drained and with a residual adrenaline rush and feelings of anger at whomever my dream fit was about, but they go away quickly, but it makes my stomach hurt (more) and makes it hard to go back to sleep (which is difficult these days anyways).

I had one last night, fighting with my Mom about something. It was right after I woke up crying from a dream about my Grandma where she was teaching me swing and Charleston moves. I'm always somewhat lucid at some point in these dreams, rationalizing that it has to be a dream, but trying to convince myself that it's not because I'm enjoying it so much. I always wake up crying from those dreams because I realize she really is gone and whatever happened in my dream won't be able to happen in real life. She was a neat lady and I wish she was still around to meet her great grandchild. She died in 2003 and was a catalyst for me making big and very positive changes in my life. I wish she was around to see those too. She'd really like Brooke.

Not to say I haven't had my emotional ups and downs, and I'm certainly more prone to cry at sentimental movies now, I think they're related to feeling like crap for two months and being exhausted and frustrated more than pure hormones (which judging by the amount of "morning" sickness I've had, I certainly have an abundance of those!), though I understand the hormones can give you some crazy dreams. I still have a long way to go, and perhaps they'll get the better of me down the road (delivery room does NOT count), but so far, so good. One unfounded fear down, hopefully many more to go. :-)

Now, my totally different dream about Ben Stiller on the other hand.... ?!!? Ben Affleck I could understand, but Stiller?!!? He's like a Jack Russell on PCP, high-strung and unpredictable and prone to disaster... I don't know what THAT was all about. Weird.

Don't Worry, It's A Keeper!

This is just what my dream was like. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now some of you may have been understandably concerned about my lack of gushing about the joys of being pregnant and instead all the bitching about being nauseous and throwing up all the time, and wondering if a trip to Planned Parenthood might still be an option if I wasn't able to eat a med-rare steak (the smell of cooked meat is my biggest technicolor-yawn trigger right now) sometime in the near future... well, don't worry. Not only am I feeling better, but I realized the other day that what I was likely feeling wasn't gas or indigestion, but the baby moving! That's pretty cool... if you saw the way it was leaping around in there on the ultrasound, it's actually amazing I don't feel it more! I'm even tempted to use the word "awe" here.

I've had very vivid and realistic dreams the last four nights that I could feel (and even see, as in fists and elbows pushing my stomach out) the baby moving. They are so realistic and tactile that I'm shocked awake (not realizing I was asleep) lying in the exact position I was dreaming I was in, and nearly rolled over and woke Brooke up to have him feel. Only when I realized that my hand (where I "felt" the baby move) was near my ribcage (baby still below belly button) did I realize I was dreaming. While it's kinda cool to have a preview of sorts, it's not cool to be awoken from a dead sleep confident that something is punching its way around your abdomen. That then becomes kinda creepy and hard to go back to sleep. I really hope the attached photo is Photoshopped. It looks painful.

Also along the lines of "it's a keeper" is the fact that all of our test results have come back clear. Not sure if we'll do an amniocentesis (test where they shove a giant needle through my stomach wall to suck up a bit of amniotic fluid to test for stuff like Downs and more) or not. Large part of me wants to know now, but there's also a small (1 in 1,600)  risk of miscarriage and false positives. Jury is still out on that.

I'm currently 13 weeks, 5 days, baby is about 3.5 inches long, and bouncing around like a Mexican jumping bean, although we are fairly sure it's not in fact Mexican. I've lost 11 pounds, but have put on about 3lbs of "baby stuff", so that probably means I lost 14lbs of fat... who knew pregnancy could be a diet plan. I definitely had it to lose too... having gone up two cup sizes in the last three years, I'm just fine with going back down a bit before production starts rolling and they go up again. I never thought all those years ago in high school as a "late bloomer" that someday I'd be wishing for smaller boobs... definitely falls in the category of "be careful what you wish for!"

So, the long and short of it is that now that I'm not feeling like crap all the time any more (even made it out for sushi tonight!*), and have felt the baby move, it's becoming more real and thus more fun and easy to get excited about. I've found I tolerate pain a lot better than nausea. I think that might come in handy later.


*Yes, yes, I know, sushi is on the "no, no!" list. I don't care, it sounded good (not much of anything else does these days), I need the protein, and 61 million Japanese women who ate sushi while pregnant can't all be wrong. They still kick our ass at math. I understand that you're just not supposed to eat bad sushi as it sucks extra bad to have food poisoning while pregnant. Oh, and keep the tuna to a minimum too because of the mercury. Having my first full meal in weeks (and keeping it down) was worth it.

Call Me "Preggers" at Your Own Peril

She is definitely "preggers"

I don't know exactly why I hate that term so much. I've hated it long before I got (ahem) PREGNANT, it just brings to mind images of a 16 year old girl, somewhere in the mid-west, who got knocked up by her boyfriend (who invariably has two first names like Billy Bob or Bubba Joe) while drinking Boones in the back of his pickup truck after a romantic night of cow tipping. "Preggers" does NOT bring to mind a 35 year old agnostic woman who is married to someone she is not closely related to and living in Ballard, Seattle and has never once been cow tipping.

So, pregnant, with child, bun-in-the-oven, the aforementioned "knocked up and shit," carrying a baby, offspring, spawn, parasite, even the far-too visually inspiring "crotch goblin" work better for me than "preggers" or even "prego."

Consider yourself warned. Hell hath no furry like a pissed off pregnant woman. :-)

Tell Me About Your... Spider

WARNING-Not a post for those with sensitive stomachs.

OK, here's a joke for you (parental types may want to skip it)... what do an 80 year old hooker and I have in common? Answer... a very compromised gag reflex. (insert rim shot here)

So the latest manifestation of this pregnancy is a nearly instant gag reaction to icky things. I was finally feeling better, not overly sensitive to smells, eating different foods, not especially nauseous and now this. Nifty.

It started Thursday morning when I squashed a big spider that crawled out of my laundry. I almost instantly threw up. It was a very close call. The last time something like that happened was years ago when a bunch of people were in the kitchen of a friend who had a very nervous, skittish dog and someone dropped a pot that made a huge noise. The dog immediately ran out of the room while pooping and it was the most godawful thing you've ever smelled. It was pure fear and death all in a smell. All of us were fighting the instant urge to be sick. This was like that. I have no idea why, I've squashed many a spider and used to tape them to the wall à la Vlad the Impaler with no qualms. So what the hell?

I was working on set later that day and the client was a Psychologist. We were talking about spiders and I mentioned my incident that morning and she told me that in Freudian philosophy a spider represents your Mother (doesn't everything though?). In light of that, it was interesting that I had such an instant and visceral reaction to killing something that represents motherhood. Put that in your pipe and smoke it Freud!

Of course, I had the same (actually worse, I'll spare you the details) reaction that evening to cleaning up the pool of barf my dog left me after he'd gotten into some chocolate as a present on the kitchen floor. Certainly didn't help that the last thing I'd eaten was a chocolate brownie. This better go away before the baby arrives as I understand there are often lots of icky things coming out of them and I don't want to be adding to it!

I Didn't Know I Had A Monster Inside Me!

These two shows seem to be about the same thing.

So I couldn't help but be amused by the proximity of these two shows on the TV line up. Both shows are about people finding out in usually surprising and unpleasant ways that they've had something growing inside them and living off of their body for awhile. The bottom one is usually about some disgusting worm found in some 3rd world jungle, the top one is a baby (or two), but while one is usually cuter than the other they're still kind of about the same thing.


I haven't seen the second one, but I have seen several episodes of the "I Didn't Know Sex Could Make You Pregnant!" show, because given my three month experience with the process, I'm fascinated that any one could NOT know they were pregnant until they saw a head sticking out of their bajango. To be fair, most of the women are larger frame (but not all fat), and have been told they were sterile for one reason or another or were on birth control. One was 45 and had her tubes tied. One was 57! Many had negative pregnancy tests. Most skipped their periods for one reason or another frequently. If you think about it, many pregnancy symptoms are experienced by everyone at some point or another (indigestion, heart burn, weight gain, back aches, moodiness) so it's not like those are treats reserved only for the knocked up.

However, some of them are just idiots. The woman who had heartburn, mood swings, cravings for PICKLES (I kid you not), 20lb weight gain, back aches, and (here's the kicker) STARTED LACTATING a few weeks before her "ovarian cyst" pain took her to the ER was just a moron. So was the woman whose Mom (an RN) took her blood pressure because she was all swollen looking and it was 190/114 (very high) and still refused to go to the doctor. Then her husband leaves for a business trip while she's having pain she associates with her ongoing ovarian cyst issue (that also supposedly made her sterile). It gets incredibly bad, she still doesn't call 911 or her Mom, even when she (yup, you guessed it) saw a head coming out of her bajango. Even after she delivers on the bathroom floor, she STILL doesn't call for help. She does call her husband the next day to tell him that she had a "surprise" for him when he got home. Two days later, he gets home, she shows him their baby, and he thinks she's gone bonkers and stolen it until she shows him the slaughter house scene in the bathroom. She STILL hasn't sought any medical help for her or her baby. She of course turns out to have preeclampsia (bp is now 210/140) and it's a miracle she didn't stroke out or have a heart attack as a result. I hope they can afford a nanny because that woman should never be responsible for a relatively nice house plant, let alone a baby.

Anyway, I guess the thing I take away from all of that is even though these women still drank, smoked, ate lots of crap, had rare meat, sushi, soft cheese, no prenatal care or vitamins... all of the babies turned out OK. So hopefully while I've been sitting here eating fruit and rice crackers and mac and cheese for weeks on end, our little spawn is still plugging merrily away in the growth process despite my inability to take vitamins and organic salads in by the pound.

I still wouldn't mind having a few less pregnancy symptoms in the mean time.

Introducing Shannon the Pincushion! Oooohhhmmmm...

Me contemplating the needle in my third eye.

So I've had my seventh acupuncture treatment for the nausea. Interesting experience. Not instant results necessarily, but I like the clinic (NW Acupuncture Clinic) and Susan, the Sadist, er, Acupuncturist. They specialize in reproductive treatments, and might come in handy when we get closer to the due date as they say they can work all kinds of miracles with back and tailbone pain, there's even a spot on the foot for encouraging a baby to turn if it's breech.

It doesn't hurt (most of the time) as much as I thought it might. Usually it's nothing or a tiny prick. Once in a while they hit a nerve and it sends an electrical type shock down my arm/leg and can hurt for a bit. Sometimes I get a little bruise, but otherwise no big deal. They often leave these tiny little thumb tacks in my wrists and stomach, and little beads on my ears for acupressure points. The ears work the best. I'd hate to see how bad I'd be feeling if I wasn't doing this!

It's interesting the approach to pregnancy that different people take. Some are very "whatever my Doctor says is gospel, give me all the drugs you've got!" others are frankly braver than I am and are going the Douala and home birth route with a "I'm sure it will all work out fine!" attitude. I'm somewhere in the middle. This is one of the only projects I've undertaken without already having lots of firm opinions and ideas to build on.

Every issue requires new thought and research as I just have had no basis to form an opinion about a lot of it. Circumcision, strollers, co-sleeping, toilet training, type of diapers... the list seems endless! I know we don't want to be the super anal "organic only/washed in angel's tears" type parents, but it's hard to make a distinction between that and "actually... it turns out that actually is pretty bad for you" type stuff (like lead paint on furniture, asbestos in bedding, melamine in baby formula). I hate fear based marketing, but when the stakes are potentially so high it's hard not to want to err on the side of caution... we'd just go crazy and broke trying to do it all the time!

It would be super swell if they could stick a needle in my "maternal instinct chakra" so that I would just magically know all these things. I'll have to ask next time, I'll let you know how hard they laugh.

I'm Pregnant, Yea?

Yup, as my friend Matt would say, I'm "all knocked up and shit." Tomorrow will be 12 weeks, first trimester already over! Seems so fast, but also so slow what with all the nausea and exhaustion. I feel like I missed out on what summer we did have because I was too sick and/or tired to enjoy it! Hopefully this nausea will be done with soon, and I can begin to enjoy eating again. While it's been nice to lose 10lbs before putting on another 20 or so, feeling hung over for two months isn't my ideal weight loss plan.

Brooke has been fantastic, so supportive, loving and patient, he's a lot more excited about this than I am right now, but then he's not the sick/exhausted/sore one! Once this part is over I think I'll be a lot more excited about it too. Right now it just feels like I have the flu or attended some raging party that I have no memory of, just the residual hangover.

So far we've had two ultrasounds and some blood work done, and everything looks good so far... blood pressure is good/low, Rh+, not pre-Diabetic, no elevated levels to cause concerns genetically, A+ (never knew that before!), yadda, yadda. I'll still be worried about things like Autism and the like for a long time to come, but feeling a bit better about our odds for a healthy baby. No reason to be more concerned than anyone else, but the horror stories of people dealing with special needs children has kept me childless so far. Fingers crossed!

Basically, this is an act of faith for me right now. I can easily visualize all the reasons not to have a kid... the exhaustion, the mess, the fighting, the cost, the loss of personal freedom/privacy/finances... a visit to this website has endless examples of why perhaps my fur child Jester is a better, safer, cheaper option: http://www.shitmykidsruined.com/. These are real, tangible, mostly inevitable parts of being a parent. Most of the reasons to have a child are theoretical: the sense of wonder of a child, watching something we created discover and learn about the world, the joy of successes, the love shared... those are all things other parents talk about, but until you actually HAVE a child, hard to fully comprehend, no matter how many Facebook posts you read.

So... I have faith that our child will be healthy, that my husband will be a loving and supportive father, that our families will be there for us when we need them (and give us room to figure things out on our own when we don't!), that we'll be the parents who maintain a social life and their friendships (eventually!), that I'll be able to handle the next 28 weeks and the birth to come, that I'll be the kind of parent I want to be, not the one I was afraid I'd be. So... right now while I can't eat and physical activity makes me ill... I'm going on faith, and for an avowed Agnostic, that's saying something.