Still kicking….

If anyone is still out there…. my apologies for stopping this blog rather abruptly.  I’ve been posting a little bit on my family blog, and if you’d like that link, let me know and I’ll send it.  It’s a lot more cheerful than this one (which is why I stopped posting on it for so long).   My family insists on cheerfulness– so it’s not to everyone’s taste.

I’m still pregnant– which is a miracle, if you ask me.  Things are looking very normal.  I’m feeling good and thankful and a little tired too.  I’m continually amazed to think we’ll have a son in January.  At Thanksgiving, my mother in law said “Next year at this time there will be a little one crawling or walking around,” and I had that gut reaction like “Oh great!  Who’s pregnant now?”  How dumb. I still have moments when it seems unreal.

It makes me so happy to think that Enat and I will both be bundling little baby boys up to bring home this winter.  Yay.  That was the best news I had heard in a long time.

As my grandma used to say (to what end I’m not sure, but it seems to fit): “The world is always turning around.”

bleh– bad thoughts be gone!

I’m making my first SINCERE attempt to banish my negativity.  It’s doing me absolutely no good.  In fact, I’ve read in several places that it could be doing me a lot of harm.  And frankly, I’m sick of it.  I know that a million bad things can happen.  Most of those things are not in my control.  Those that are in my control, I’ve got them covered.

I hope I’ll just naturally feel better when the baby starts kicking or something.  But in the meantime, I’m going to smile, damnit!

I’ve been practising this since Sunday night (after an emergency doctor’s visit, which turned out to be nothing, which sort of proves that I’m losing my mind a little in this pregnancy).  It’s going pretty well so far.

Sedation? Please?

Sorry to have left you in the dark for a while there.  I just haven’t been the best blogger.  This is probably becuase I started teaching an intense summer class a few weeks ago, which seems to have sapped all the time/energy I had before.

Things are going okay here.  Physically, I keep getting good news.  Mentally, I can’t figure out what my problem is.  I continue to have a lot of fear and anxiety associated with this pregnancy.  Not fear of birth or of getting big.  I’m so over that fear (as of now).  Just the same old fear that my baby will die.  I won’t even get into the nightmares here.

I’m trying to do the right things like take belly shots and think of names and be excitied and talk about it with people who are interested and tell people and dream happy dreams and pick out nursery colors.  I’m so far from that today though. I just want to be sedated for the next 5-6 months until someone wakes me up and says, EVERYTHING WAS FINE, HERE’S YOUR BABY.  SEE?

It’s not that I’m not grateful and thankful, etc.  I’m incredibly so.  I just can’t shake the past.

I’ll blog a happy blog soon, I hope!

maybe movement

Today I was diligently working in my study/research carrel at the library, when I felt a little funny tickle from the inside… right in my lower abdomen where the OB uses the doppler to hear the heartbeat.  I won’t jump to any wild conclusions and start saying I have felt the baby kick or move at 12 weeks 3 days, but it did feel pretty funny.   And what growing baby wouldn’t want to encourage her/his mama to get as much work done as possible while it’s still possible?  It makes me like that research carrel a lot.

Otherwise, the Mr. Sleepingcat and I are planning a little mini-break for the end of August.  We didn’t plan very well in advance, and now don’t actually have a whole week free to vacation, but we’ll probably get 3 nights away.  Maine or Cape Cod.   We just returned from my cousin’s wedding in Maine, and the drive wasn’t too bad.  If we had only planned properly, we could have stayed up there this week for a vacation.  Shucks!

Almost to week 12…

Week 12– the “magic” week to some people–starts Saturday.   Today, at 11 weeks, 5 days, we heard the HB again, nice and strong.  Despite reassurance, I immediately started to have one of those sneaky second-guesses… what if the doctor mistook my HB for the baby’s HB?    Why would I insist on thinking that?  My doctor has been practicing since the late 70s, and she seems very competent.  I’m just a paranoid freak, and I guess I better get used to that.

In other news… we are liking our dishwasher quite a lot!  It’s very nice to have dirty dishes out of the way while they are waiting to be washed.

I finally saw Waiting for Guffman, the only Christopher Guest film I’d never seen.  It was HILARIOUS… and of all the people who might read this blog, Maria Flores, you better rent that movie tonight if you’ve never seen it.

We’ll be seeing my folks at a wedding in Maine this weekend… I’m still not in the mood to tell them.   So it’ll stay a secret a while longer.  And in case you are wondering, there really is no belly to speak of yet. I only gained a pound so far.

dishwasher or no?

Our friends are selling their dishwasher– portable, apartment sized, countertop… Initially we were excited to get it, but then we had to buy an air purifier for the apartment and our summer appliance allowance (which we didn’t even think we had) seemed a bit small. So right now we are in limbo. They’ve posted it on craigslist, so we no longer have first dibs.

What would you do? Do you love your DW? Hate it? Think its a bit of a waste?

By the way, all is well in my uterus, as far as I can tell. At our last appointment (with an OB, not RE) we heard the heartbeat on the doppler, which was very nice. Our next appointment is not until July 3. I hope we don’t go crazy in the interim. I won’t bore you with all the details of how I imagine things are going wrong…. I just want to be calm and grateful that I’ve made it this far! I’m working on it!

bad blogger

I’m sorry I’ve been a bad blogger.  Sometimes I just don’t know what to write about.   I started to get self-conscious about blogging about the pregnancy, especially b/c all of the things I could have been writing would follow the same roller-coaster: SCARED and RELIEVED, SCARED and RELIEVED.   I’ve had a lot of scares– severe backaches, more spotting than any pregnant woman ever wants to see, loss of symptoms, etc.  However, we’ve had 3 great ultrasounds.  The last one showed the baby measuring ahead a few days.

I had more spotting last night and this morning.  No matter how often I hear that it “can be normal,” I can’t ignore the fact that it has never been a good sign for me.  They offered to have me come in today for an u/s, but I said no.  I mean, they can’t do anything to save a failing pregnancy, and we have an u/s scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday) anyway.   Not to mention our RE is 1 hour away, and we had things scheduled this afternoon.    Am I panicked?  No.  I’m just waiting, and I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for.  I’m expectant without knowing what to expect.

On another note, our move went as well as it could go.  Most things escaped unharmed, except for a small dent in the frige, and a new stain on the back of our couch.  (OUCH.)  Mess with my couch, mess with me.  I love that thing (pictured above with my glorious kitty).   Things are great at the new place in general.  It’s LOVELY to have my laundry on the floor where everything else is.  A little less lovely is the dude who smokes on his porch downstairs.  Ick.  I hope he doesn’t take to smoking inside in the winter.  Then I’ll have to get brave and say something.

All is well, for now.

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but everything looks normal and healthy for now!  We’ve never, ever, gotten this far in a pregnancy, and it’s sort of hard to fathom that everything is still on the up and up.  Why this pregnancy?  Why now?  I’m just happy.  Bebe’s heart is beating away at 148bpm, and bebe has grown!

Will post on the impending move sometime soon . . . right now I better start gathering up the random items in this study.  Why is it that even after packing “everything” my room is still scattered with stuff?  Purses, facecreams, pencils, photographs, etc.  I have a SERIOUS aversion to packing boxes that aren’t easy to label, like “BOOKS” or “FILES.”   I haven’t even attacked the closet in this room. Yipes!

back into that room tomorrow…

Last night I was tossing and turning worrying about my ultrasound tomorrow.  I hope I exhausted myself enough so that I actually sleep tonight.

I’m trying awfully hard to be hopeful.  But some of my more pronounced symptoms have left me.  Like the sore breasts (all gone).  Not a terribly good sign.  I’ve still been a bit queasy, but (argh) that happens to me when I’m nervous too, so I’m not sure what I can attribute that to.  I did throw up once last week!  That kept me happy for at least a day.

I’ll post tomorrow or the next day with the results.

Keep your everythings crossed for me!

MEPA (Multiethnic Placement Act)

For those of you who missed it, there was a write up on MEPA in today’s NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/us/27adopt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

This was also a featured topic on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today, but unless you are already very well-versed in domestic trans-racial adoption, it wasn’t too enlightening & sounded a lot more like an on-air debate.