And Now I'm Going to Write About My Kid

Mostly because I need to get rid of that rantiness of the last post.  I will say the two good things that came out of the ransacking of my office were (1) I am scouring it (I still need to deal with what the messy corner where I have piled things that need to be properly filed, and if LG had actually been successful at her fingerprinting project earlier this summer, I'd have her dust for prints) and (2) I found a copy of a poem written right before my DE cycle [see how "current" that file was?] that is actually worth revising.  Yes, I am capable of turning almost anything into a good thing, at least when it comes to non-fertility-related things.

So, without further ado:

Tiny Boy is on the verge of walking!  He took a few steps a couple times yesterday (he's been cruising holding on to furniture since roughly 7 months and hasn't ever attempted walking otherwise); actually the first time he did it, he tipped over because I called out LG, he's WALKING, at which point he got startled.  And he is chatting up a storm.

Some of his repeated "words":

mama
LG's name (3 different versions, because she's THAT awesome)
da=cat
di-ta (?)=cracker
ba=book
be=bread
mi=milk/nursing (which he also signs)
uh=up
da-die, or more recently ba-bie=bye bye

And there's probably a sentence for "do not stick me in that fucking carseat/crib/high chair again" that, of course, goes deaf on maternal ears.

How Many ER Visits Can Gwinne Make in One Year?

No, that's not really a rhetorical question.

First there were the bats and the rabies shots.

And then there was the Ceiling Fan Incident of 2012.

And then last night Tiny Boy didn't stop puking so the resident on call told us to head to the ER in case he was dehydrated.  (Perhaps we should have been given anti-nausea medication before we left the recovery room?)  We were there until nearly 2:00 am.

How about that plan to SLEEP after surgery?

He's on another fake walk with Gram and I'm going to see about a nap for myself.  Not really how I'd planned to spend my first official day on sabbatical.

My Little Peanut

If you were reading during the era of Beta Hell, March 2011, you might recall that when I went in to my 5w2d ultrasound, fully expecting to be told that my pregnancy was either (a) not viable or (b) ectopic, both Dr. Gorgeous and I were pleasantly surprised to find an appropriately-sized gestational sac and the first hint of a yolk (despite my having a beta of maybe 900).

She told me, in a conspiratorial whisper, I think there's a little peanut in there.

Well, here he is, something like 16 months and the Reign of Terror later:

Big Baby

Tiny Boy turns 8 months tomorrow.  Tomorrow!!!  How is that even possible?

He's huge.  Okay, he's not huge.  He's 16 lbs with a puffy cloth diaper on, which is both small and more than three times his birth weight.

He's crawling.  Within a week, he's gone from taking some crab like tentative scootches forward to crossing whole rooms to find me.  Like, I need to get those baby gates up NOW.  (My friend A. has had one of them through two children, the oldest of which is a first grader.)  He'd really like to get into the kitchen to play with the cat water, which was exactly what LG did at that age.

And this morning, we woke up to a TOOTH.  He won't let me see it, but there's a sharpy in there.  And he's a huge grouch.

So it turns out that loon of a pediatrician was right on all physical counts.  Yes, he still has reflux, and, yes, he's teething.  No, we will not be Ferberizing any time soon (though to be fair, he slept much better last week next to me when I was basically comatose than when I dump him in the crib by himself).

8 months?!  That's like my whole pregnancy ago.  Wow.

Tiny Boy's To Do List (31 weeks!)

1. Figure out why I can't get my knees to move forward
2. Slide off mom's bed (damn, she caught me!)*
3. Play with penis as often as possible
4. Fingerpaint with carrot mush
5. Throw my spoon on the floor 
6. Pet the big kitty who flops on me
7. Stand up in the crib and yell
8. Practice my new favorite word (dadadadada)
9. Scootch backward until I slide under the armchair
10. Ask if I can go back to the pool and splash 

* Seriously.  Apparently naps alone in the bed will not be happening anymore.  Argh.

Six Months!

Tiny Boy turned six months on Saturday.  I happened to find one of his preemie onesies on LG's floor (she used it for her doll) and threw it in the laundry.  Marvelous Mother's Helper said to me did he REALLY wear this?  Umm, yeah, he did.  About 9 lbs and 7 inches ago.  According to his pediatrician, Tiny Boy is currently 14 lbs 6 oz (5th percentile) and 25.5 inches (10th percentile), which makes him both a teeny tiny guy and, well, ginormous compared to what he was at birth.

He's a kid, people.  He sits up and throws toys and screams like a banshee to get attention.  He is, according to many people, the smiliest baby they've ever seen.  In a few days we'll take another stab at "solid" food--we did rice cereal and sweet potato for a few days last month and ended up in the rocking chair with a belly ache in the middle of the night.  Right now I give him a sippy cup at dinner, because he's clearly envious of the goods on LG's plate.

Sleep?  Well, that still sucks to tell the truth.  Night sleep is slowly improving, in that we no longer have an extended wakeful period in the middle of the night, and about half the time we don't even need to do the rocking chair at 4-5 am.  He's much less restless than he was; he feeds frequently, but I'm not bothered by that.  Still, he generally wakes after the first 40 minutes (which is almost inevitably when I'm trying to get LG out of the shower or into bed), and his longest sleep stretch, if I'm lucky, is three hours toward the beginning of the night.

Day sleep is erratic.  Some days he's able to take a legitimate nap for 1.5-2.5 hrs in the afternoon (along with one or two shorter ones), but most of the time I'm lucky to get 3-4 40 minute naps out of him.  We took a 5-hour car ride this weekend to visit family, and he took two "naps" of 20 minutes and 30 minutes.  If that isn't nap resistant, I don't know what is.  He's a very light sleeper, which is a real challenge with an older (loud!!) sibling in the house.  I've tried music and all kinds of white noise and it really doesn't help.  I don't really know what to do to get him to nap, as there doesn't seem to be any reason for why he sleeps better some days than others.

All in all, it's been a crazy whirlwind of babyness for six months, and I'm both sad that it's ending and ready to get back to the other parts (the writerly, intellectual parts) of gwinne.  This mothering stuff is hard work.  But, really, as much as I wanted this baby, I don't think I adequately imagined how wonderful it would be.

Raising Boys and Girls

I imagine this will be the first of many posts as I sort out what it means to be raising a boy.  At five months, other than the fact that he has a penis (and a penis with a "defect," no less), Tiny Boy might as well be Tiny Girl.  He's a baby.

Except that I am ridiculously aware that I call him Little Boy, not his actual name, much of the time.  I also call him a whole host of other nicknames, as I do LG, which bugs her.  Button.  Monkey.  Doodle.  I think the Little Boy thing is an extension of the nicknames I called him in utero, when really all he was was a baby with a sex; I had no idea what he would look like, act like, etc.

So a couple weeks ago, Tiny Boy held hands with the granddaughter of my mother's best friend, who has known me since birth.  He cooed at this two-month-old and batted his ridiculously long eyelashes.  My aunt made some crack about how he's her boyfriend, which is obviously a fantasy about my mother's grandson and her granddaughter.  Then she proceeded to say how he's obviously a boy, while the other baby is so obviously a girl.  To which I replied, I think if I dressed him up in all pink you wouldn't know the difference.

Now, even as a teacher of gender studies, I don't dress Tiny Boy in things that are obviously for girls.  Nor do I like to dress him in clothes that are obviously for boys (really I could do without all those pseudo sports onesies and all that crap with trucks on it).  I haven't rejected blue for him, but when I shop, I get as much gender-neutral stuff as I can.  I did the same with LG.

But at some point--and I know from LG it happens right around age 3-4--he's going to be inundated with gendered messages and start coming up with his own.  LG was convinced at that age that wearing a solid color--even pink--was for boys.  She got over that, and now blue is her favorite color.  She also calls herself a tomboy, which freaked me out.  I pressed her on it.  I asked her what that meant.  She told me it meant she acted like a boy.  I said, what does that mean?  She couldn't explain it.  She has so internalized that girls do certain things and boys do other things that she can't even explain what those things are.  Have I mentioned I teach gender studies?  That the kid does not own barbies and has never seen a Disney princess movie?

I do wonder how Tiny Boy will express his boyness, if he'll do stereotypically boy things because that's who he is.  But damn am I going to try really hard to let him see the possibilities that the world offers him outside the Boy box, just as I tried really hard to let LG see the possibilities outside the Girl box.  And clearly she has, if she does things--and even if she can't name them I know what they are--that are "boyish."  Only I really wish she could just say she likes to run and climb and hang out with the guys, instead of calling herself a derogatory name.

And now I'm going to rescue my son from his babysitter, which is the subject of another post.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Tiny Boy and I took a trip on The Blasted Highway of All Things Fertility today.  We took the same exit I took for three years, just made a right instead of a left, and found ourselves at Doctor of Boy Parts #2.

We had basically the same conversation I had with Doctor of Boy Parts #1, back when Tiny Boy was only 5 weeks.  Since then I've come around to thinking he'll probably end up having the surgery, but maybe not.  #2 agreed that his condition is borderline, that his penis will in all likelihood function normally with or without surgery (just with a bit of effort on his part, in terms of learning to pee standing up).  The new piece of information is that surgery done on infants is much more likely to be successful than surgery done on an older child/adult, though the older person would, you know, actually be able to consent to having the surgery.  But I think I'd rather Tiny Boy be upset that he didn't get a choice than having him make the choice as a Big Boy and not have it go well.  Maybe.  If we we go forward, it won't be until he's 10-12 months, so we've got some time yet.

*

So I made a left turn when we were coming out of Doctor of Boy Parts #2, and I kept going another mile and there we were.  Thankfully, a receptionist who knew me was at the desk.  Thankfully, there were no patients in the waiting room (the advantage of Dr. G not being there).  There was Nice Nurse who saw me through countless IUIs and botched IVFs, Happy New Nurse who gave me beta results last spring, the great ultrasound tech, the friendly andrologist, the same old phlebotomist with feathered hair.  No Nurse of the Everchanging Nickname, but otherwise the gang was pretty much all there, excepting, of course, Dr. Gorgeous.  Lots of hugs.  Lots of cooing over the baby.  And, well, of course I was in tears by the time I walked through the door.  We've got Kleenex, the andrologist said.  Boy do I know that.

I don't know what I thought would happen, but I knew I needed to go back there. It wasn't cathartic.  But I needed to bring that baby into that space and show people (even if I was crying) that they made me happy.  There are no words to express the gratitude I have for all of them, not just Dr. G.  After all, I saw much more of them (how many ultrasounds?) than I did her.

I am raw, people.  The minute we got on the highway my brain started spinning through those countless internal monologues about cycles and whether or not to do DE and whether or not to do IVF, and I had to stop myself, look at the baby in the rear view mirror and consciously think It's OVER.  And, despite the odds, it ended in the best possible way.

*

There's a Carter's outlet on the way between here and there.  A couple times, when I was hopeful, early in the process, I stopped there and picked something up.  A monkey onesie he's worn a few times.  A duckie sleeper.  But I never actually bought something for my son, just for a hypothetical much-wanted baby.  Mostly Tiny Boy wears hand-me-downs.  Some from a wonderful online friend (you know who you are!), some from Best Professor Friend, who has a two-year-old son, some from A, and some, even from LG (because what I saved was mostly gender-neutral).

I splurged.  I bought him a bunch of stuff he probably doesn't need (but he does need shorts, right?  and who can't use more onesies with animals on them?) and I pushed my sleeping baby around the store in his stroller and I was just any other mother of a 4-month-old.  Only I wasn't.

My scars are real and still tangible.  A purple gash from my c-section, a line of bruises (yes, even at 19 weeks postpartum) from lovenox, a thickening in my veins.  And then there are the scars that are less literal.

It was a really long road, Nice Nurse said, but you made it.  Yeah, I did.

Boys and Girls

Still info gathering about what to do (or not to do) about Tiny Boy's hypospadias.

So, as I am wont to do when I need medical advice, I asked Dr. Gorgeous if she knew a pediatric urologist.  And as I scanned the LONG list of names at University Hospital Down the Highway of All Things Fertility (because what other nickname would I give it) I noticed that there's actually a female pediatric urologist on staff there.  Which made me all kinds of happy.

And now I don't know if I'd like to see her, just because she's female and (therefore in my gender-biased head) easier to talk to, or if I go with Dr. Gorgeous's rec (who sounds so fabulous I doubt he's taking new patients, but you never know).

I suppose this is a good dilemma.  Gosh, I miss teaching gender studies.

I Should Know Better

I recognize that I should know by now that if I actually record this observation for all the internets to read that it will no longer be true.  I also recognize that last night might be a post-vaccination fluke.

However...I am really hoping that I have solved the problem of the thrashing baby.  When LG was tiny, she'd sleep pressed right up next to me, like a little heat seeking missile.  Tiny Boy, on the other hand, rolls and thrashes (even fully swaddled), ends up 180 degrees from where he started.  He's on his back, on his side, and if I don't catch it, his tummy.  He kicks and punches me.  He rolls his head and tush from side to side.  Even if he's asleep, he's clearly restless, and it was these sorts of antics that made me eventually stop co-sleeping with LG (at around 2).  But last night, after I realized he was uncomfortable in his stupid sleeper (too short?  tag in the back?) I put him in a t-shirt, swaddled him very loosely with a blanket, tried side-lying nursing (which is generally a failure because he's too small or the angle is weird or something), and the kid slept.  Right next to me, sandwiched between my breast and a boppy pillow.  I think we could have avoided the 3-5 am misery if he hadn't required Tylenol and a diaper at 4:00.

Could all that rolling just have been trying to get to me and failing miserably?

I'll let you know how it goes.  Have to leave the kid in 15 minutes to go to campus.  First time with a non-grandma, non-mom-friend babysitter.  Sniff.

Not So Tiny Boy

Tiny Boy, whom the pediatrician informed me today was not even on the growth chart at birth, is now a whopping 12.5 lbs and 24 and 3/4 inches (10th and 25th percentile, respectively).  So I am simultaneously pleased that he's growing so well on breast milk and saddened by the fact that he clearly wasn't getting the nutrition he needed in utero.  I'm guessing, based solely on the sizes of the donors, that he's probably about where he "should" be, but I guess we'll see what happens in the next eight months or so. 

Right now he's playing with a babysitter, as apparently 4-month shots, though identical, are not nearly as upsetting or sleep-inducing as 2-month shots.

Now if he would only learn to roll over and sleep at night...

Blue Eyed Boy

The boy has blue eyes.

And I don't think they're going to change, as they are blue, not that dark blue/slate gray color he had (and LG had) at birth.

They're beautiful, and he gets compliments on them all the time.  And this is just one of the many ways he fails to resemble both LG and me.  It's one of the things that marks him as my DE child (though, to be fair, I do think it would be genetically possible--though not likely--for me to produce a light-eyed child on my own, as I have two grandparents with light eyes, and my sister has hazel eyes).

Both donors I chose had brown hair and brown eyes.  Although I didn't care too much about their looks, I did want to up the chances that the kiddo would have a vague resemblance to me.  And, indeed, when I showed their baby photos to my best friend, the first thing she said was that looks like LG.

Tiny Boy also has blond hair, but I suspect that will darken.

Yeah, he doesn't look like either one of the donors, not more than a tiny smidge (like, I can tell which nose he got.  I think).

And I'm waiting for the questions to start, like:  does his father have blue eyes?

In the whole scheme of things, I don't care.  I have a baby for crying out loud.  But it's not like looking in the mirror when I look at LG.  He's my son.  But I'd be lying if I said it's exactly the same.

Random Bullets of Life with Kids

• I woke in the middle of the night convinced that Tiny Boy had succumbed to SIDS.  He was cold and sleeping, well, like a dead thing.  And I picked his little swaddled body up muttering oh my g-d until finally he moved.  The whole episode probably lasted 20 seconds, but wow I can't take that kind of fright.
• I took Tiny Boy with me to the dentist today.  Which sucked.  He was sleeping when we left the house and of course needed to eat when I was mid-way through my cleaning.  So I took a nursing break, which only kept us there longer, as the hygienist took a break from me to work on another patient, so then he was crying because it was naptime.  Oy.
• Despite the above, Tiny Boy managed to take a 1-hour nap and a 3-hour nap in the bed.  And--knock wood, fingers crossed--went to sleep easily at 6:30 tonight and won't wake for a while to feed.
• Because of the above, I missed an opportunity to take Tiny Boy to see Dr. Gorgeous at her outpost in my hometown.  (Apparently NOT waking the baby is more important than showing off the baby.  Good to know.)  I'll just have to catch up with her another time.
• Because of the above, I had some time in which to clean up the kitchen while LG did her homework.  And I'd be hanging out with LG now, except she prefers books to her mother's company.  Yes, she is my kid.
• Am interviewing mother's helper folks later in the week.  Having some scheduled work time is sounding good to me, as much as I'm truly enjoying watching Tiny Boy discover what he can do with his hands.
• I broke down and bought two pairs of non-maternity pants a size larger than I usually wear.  I'm really happy I did, though I suspect if I gave it another few weeks I'd be able to wear my old things.
• The house is largely a mess.  I haven't written more than 100 words at a stretch in I can't remember how long.  And I'm happy, people.*

* Crying almost daily still--post-reproductive traumatic stress disorder be damned--but happy.

Random Bullets of Sleep Deprivation

• I am afraid that Something Remarkable might turn into one of those mommy blogs I generally don't read.  But it is 11:46 and I am in my pajamas while Tiny Boy sleeps (thank goodness) in his swing and I don't have much else to say.
• Can I say my neighbors rock?  They volunteered to walk LG to the bus stop when they walk their dog, which keeps me from needing to (a) get dressed and (b) have a 5 lb baby outside in 20 degree weather.
• Said neighbors also sent their 9-year-old over to shovel my driveway and between her and LG, they got most of it done passably well.  (And we're not going to talk about the fact that I actually tried doing some of it myself, which I'm sure is not on my approved list of activities until at least 6 weeks post-surgery.)
• Although I have not talked much about her lately, LG dotes on her brother.  She reads to him, holds him every day, and tries to teach him his letters and shapes (I did explain that he's, umm, still learning English, but perhaps he'll end up being the smartest kid in his infant daycare, if I ever enroll him in daycare).
• When I told A about Tiny Boy's stop breathing episode, her reply was, has he not read your chart?  And apparently he still hasn't gotten the memo, as last night he spewed milk out his nose a good hour after nursing and then screamed so much he exhausted himself and fell limply back to sleep.  Little boy, you have to stop freaking your mother the fuck out.
• Yes, folks, Tiny Boy appears to have reflux.  Been there, done that, had Kid #1 on zantac at 9 weeks.  But the milk out the nose thing was new.  The result was I spent about 75% of last night sleeping with him on my chest, which is certainly not the safest thing to do, but it's really the only way he rests comfortably after nursing.  Have I mentioned I'm exhausted?
• InB, thank you for insisting that I put an auto-reply on my email.  Now I just need to remember not to check it anyway.  It only brings guilt.

40 weeks or 15 days

So today's my due date.  If things had gone swimmingly well, I would have hopefully had a VBAC in the past week, or a scheduled c-section tomorrow or Tuesday (my birthday!).  Instead, I have a 15-day-old sleeping in a crib.  Although he still looks like a baby with IUGR (comparatively large head, skinny belly, scrawny limbs, and even more wrinkly skin than your average newborn), I can tell he's plumped up since his last doctor visit, and just in the past few days,as predicted, he's started acting more like a baby and less like a fetus (he has eyes!  he especially loves looking at his sister!).

Tiny Boy is clearly doing better in the world than in my body, which is both a marvelous thing and another reproductive strike against me.  Both my "full term" pregancies have been cut short for medical reasons, and I miss that intrauterine time, just as I miss the miscarried embryos who never had a chance to become a child.  It's hard for me to get my head around the fact that I will, in all likelihood, not be pregnant again.  Because for all its complications, I like the experience of pregnancy.

But having two extra weeks of babyness?  Right now, that seems like a damn good trade-off.

Still Life with Tiny Boy and Little Gwinne (II)

(Where was I?  Oh, yes, rambling about the birth...)

II.  A Little Premature

Turns out, despite everyone saying that 37 weeks is full term, 37 weeks isn't exactly full term.  At least not for growth restricted babies.  I wasn't sure what to expect immediately after birth; I was told that if Tiny Boy was okay I'd be able to hold him right away, and that some women even manage to breastfeed in the operating room, but really it all depended on him.  Fortunately, I did get to hold Tiny Boy for a while as the doctor put me back together, but for the entire 2.5 hrs I was in recovery (with M) he was in the nursery (with A), as his breathing was labored and his blood sugar low.  Also, a lot of trouble regulating temperature.  He was checked frequently for these issues in the first twenty-four hours but luckily didn't need to spend any more time in the nursery (much less the NICU).

He's healthy.  And in some ways freakishly strong (he can hold his head up and roll from one side to the other in his crib!).  But he's tiny.  By Tuesday, he'd dropped the usual 6% percent of his body weight, which might be okay for a larger baby but put him at 4 lbs 12 oz.  Much panicking about milk supply and supplementation with formula ensued.  Fortunately (?), by Monday night I was also a hugely engorged cow and started pumping milk, which the nurses or my mother used to cup feed him.  Although he's got a great latch, breastfeeding exhausts him, and he's usually asleep after 5 minutes.  He sleeps much more than I remember LG sleeping, and I need to wake him (both night and day) to nurse.

Generally speaking, newborns freak me out because of their size and fragility.  Tiny Boy is so small that preemie diapers slide off him.*  His ribs are visible, and his hands look like wrinkly old man hands.  This is why he needed to be delivered early; based on my last ultrasound measurements, he was a nearly 38 week baby, with a head circumference of a 36 weeker and an abdomen of only 32.5.  That asymmetrical growth (what they call "head sparing") is, apparently, the major clue that the problem is most likely placental insufficiency and IUGR, not just a normally tiny baby.

By all accounts, at a week old, he's doing great.  He's up to 5 lbs, and hopefully will be back to his birth weight on Monday (inside my body, he gained about 7 ounces in two weeks; outside, he seems to be gaining an ounce per day).  The pediatrician is pleased, but she's also treating him like a preemie.  Minimal visitors, esp. those with children, for 6-8 weeks; keep him out of public places with germs.  She was thrilled that he won't be in a regular daycare setting until probably after 6 months.  LG knows to use hand sanitizer the minute she walks in the house.  My body was failing him, and now I'll do anything I can to protect him.

It's really hard for me to get my head around the fact that he's here, he's (mostly) healthy, and he's mine.

I've got about half an hour before I need to wake him again, so I think I'll stop here.  Next up:  Post-Reproductive Traumatic Stress Discorder; Where is Nurse Patty when you need her?; And being a single mom of two.
 
*If any of you have tricks for diapering 5 lb babies, finding clothes that actually fit, and securing them safely in car seats, please pass them on!

Still Life with Tiny Boy and Little Gwinne

Well, folks, he's here.  Sleeping in a moses basket next to me.  My mom's downstairs on the phone.  LG is at school, probably at lunch.  I don't know that I have the words to characterize the past five days, so I'll try to give you some highlights.


I.  The Birth

Both A and M accompanied me to the hospital on Saturday, and we had a good four hours of levity before the surgery.  But by the time they had me walk back to the operating room, I was, to put it bluntly, an emotional mess.  I found myself thinking a lot about the extra valium Dr. G prescribed after my embryo transfer.  Even the doctor--who was not my doctor, but Dr. Gray Zone--told me they could put "happy medicine" in my IV if I needed it after birth.  At this point, M went to the waiting room, A waited to be allowed in the operating room, and I was taken for a spinal.

Sobbing ensued.  Someone making an observation that the baby was freaking out on the monitor, probably because of my anxiety level.  Someone making a stupid comment about hormones.  The question, again, about why I was on heparin and when I took my last dose.  (Do you know how many times I had to say recurrent pregnancy loss before my son was born?)  More sobbing.  Blood pressure inching higher.  The anesthesiologist, whom M nicknamed Dr. Radio Voice, told an assistant to get the surgeon now, that we were more than ready.

At some point around now A was allowed in.  I kept crying.  A tried to get me to say if the problem was physical or emotional but I just kept crying and she stroked my arm which was, as she said later, pinned down like Jesus.  Turns out that was exactly the right thing to do, even though I couldn't make any words come out of my mouth.  (Have I mentioned I hate IVs, blood pressure cuffs, heart monitors, all the tubes that take me straight back to my D&C?)  The doctor didn't say much during the surgery.  Initially, that I'd healed very well from c-section #1 and then that they were dealing with some scar tissue on my bladder which was making it take longer than usual.  And then she told A to get ready to take pictures.

Whimpery baby noises.  A saying over and over he's okay, he's okay, he's not that small, he's okay.  Rinse and repeat.  And then, friends, it seems I had a son. 

(Well, this has gotten much longer than I anticipated, and it's now 2 hours and a lot of tears later, after my lunch and Tiny Boy's repeated harassment by his grandmother to try to wake him up to nurse, which I will tell you about whenever I find some more time to write...)

For now, I'll leave you with this:

Feeling Loved

Thank you all for your good wishes (and advice!).  I'm definitely feeling the love over here at Chez Gwinne.

It's really amazing how large my support system seems to be, given how completely introverted I am.  And I'm not just talking about you, whom I know mostly through the computer.  Several of LG's friends' parents have volunteered to take her, not only for baby emergencies but as regular drivers to various extracurricular activities.  Neighbors have said they'd be happy to help out in that unspecified way that neighbors do, and perhaps if it snows enough to warrant shoveling in the next few weeks, I'll take them up on it.  And A. and M., who are my dearest friends here, just might get into a fist fight about who gets to see Tiny Boy surgically excised from my uterus (yes, that's an overstatement, but I really don't know how to choose!).

I'm still not sure how I'm going to spend my day:  the pajamas and movies on the laptop sounds quite appealing, but I should also do stupid stuff like buy a nursing bra that might actually fit (I've been squishing myself into a 34C during pregnancy but anticipate cup size going up, which is, you know, astonishing given that I'm usually a 32B, but that's enough about my breasts).  There's also a campus event I feel guilty for not attending, and I might, depending on how I'm feeling later this afternoon.  But the fact that I can't get into my school email--well, let's just say that seems like a sign from the universe that I don't have a job today other than gestating.  Tonight, LG is going to paint my toenails so they're pretty (ahem), and we'll probably play a game of Life and cozy up in my bed with the cats.  She is super excited about her brother's impending arrival, and is bursting at the seams to tell someone his NAME.

I'm starting to get my head around the idea that in not much more than 24 hours I won't be pregnant any more.  The idea that I will be a mother of TWO and there could be a baby using all this baby stuff?  Well, not quite there yet.  Just hoping I get to help bump up Dr. G's DE live birth rate stats at this point... transfer was exactly 34 weeks ago.  How weird is that?

A Baby at Chez Gwinne (35w1d)

Last night A. gave me her tutorial on cloth diapering, as I am considering it for The Boy.  That in itself is not surprising.  But listening to a tutorial on cloth diapering is, I suppose, admitting that I actually think it's possible there will be a baby at my house who needs diapers, cloth or otherwise. 

The baby things are piling up around the house.  A cute little animal sheet from PBK.  Sleepers in newborn sizes (I didn't believe in them when LG was a baby, just started her in those 0-3 mo versions...but I'm guessing even if he's full term, which is unlikely, this guy won't weigh more than 5 lbs and change).  A car seat.  A swing that is actually in my living room, as it seemed to take too much energy to put it in the basement.

I'm not quite sure when this happened.  Maybe it's just at 35 weeks, with monitoring every 3-4 days, it seems unlikely that the bad thing will happen.  I mean, I know it does happen.  I've known people both IRL and online who have survived the bad thing.  But right now, I really don't want to acknowledge the possibility that it could happen to me.  I'd much rather talk to LG about how things are going to change when her brother is in a crib, instead of in my uterus.

So cloth diapers.  Really not sure.  Environmentally and economically, I'm all for it.  Practically?  Not so much.  Maybe I'll see what happens when this little one actually comes home.  I mean, he will come home, right?

Good Boy!

LG's brother (aka The Boy, The Peanut, Mr. Baby Man, etc) decided to cooperate on his NST.  I had a 3:00 appointment and LG's bus comes at 4:08 (yes, I should be walking to the bus stop, not typing).  The MA gave me/him some grape juice and off he went; 30 minutes later, we were out the door with a see you back on Thursday! and a smile.   Yahoo!