Bao in the Oven

It was so beautiful here this weekend. Mama Jae and a bunch of friends and I went on a 2.5 mile hike with our dogs on Sunday, and it was amazing to feel the air on my skin and the euphoria from challenging my body. I was definitely a drag on the group—I was super slow, and had to stop to sit and chug water/ eat a snack a couple of times—but everyone was awesome about it. It is amazing to think, though, that I used to be able to do that hike nonstop, in the summer, no problem. We had dinner with those friends Sunday night, and I slept super late on Monday (after a bout with insomnia on Sunday night/early Monday morning). After going to physical therapy and buying a new pair of shoes (I only had one pair that were work appropriate that I was actually wearing), Mama Jae and I had lunch together at a restaurant with a patio. Then I went on a long walk with our dog, and we had some friends over for dinner and it was a blast. It was one of those weekends where a lot gets packed in, so it felt nice and long. It was capped off by a milestone—last night Mama Jae felt the bao move for the first time. I have been looking forward to that for so long, and I’m so glad it has finally happened. Yay!

Now that it’s spring, I tried on a lot of the clothes my oldest sister had sent again that are season-appropriate. Thanks to her, plus the purchase of a dress and a pair of pants, I can now dress myself appropriately for work for precisely five days a week. That is, until my stomach grows out another few inches; then it’s over and I will have to bite the bullet and buy more stuff. But for now, phew. Especially since we are about to go on a budgeting spree (that’s the opposite of a spending spree, right?). Thank goodness for hand-me-downs.

Before getting pregnant, I was all about skirts and dresses, but over the past few months I have been in pants only. Today, I am wearing a dress for what may be the first time since October 30, when I wore one in celebration of taking a positive hpt in the morning. Even that day, I remember the dress and tights feeling a little snug already. Since then, I have either been incapable of wearing a dress, due to lack of maternity tights, or it has been too freaking cold. But a couple of weeks ago I got a cute little maternity number at TSWTSTLLYSAAI and busted it out this morning. Spring must be on its way, even if it’s not here quite yet.

Not much to report here. We’ve been keeping the house as sparkling as possible for showings, and have had quite a few, as well as an offer, which was way too low. But things are promising on that front. And in a mere two weeks, we will be headed to my hometown in the mountains of Virginia for a kick-ass baby shower that my sisters are throwing for Mama Jae and me. Our registry is in good shape, I think. What do y’all think about registering for things like clothes and toys and books? We have a lot of the basics on our list (and who knew there were so many?), like the car seat and carrier and breast pump and burp cloths etc., and I’m thinking that in terms of the funner stuff, like toys and clothes, people like picking those things out themselves. Am I going to be mad at myself for leaving stuff like that off?

Here I am last night, at 21 weeks, 4 days:

21 weeks, 4 days

Last night, a guy friend of mine asked me if I’d experienced any of the stereotypical emotional changes that come with pregnancy, and I had to say yes. The second trimester, for me, has been everything the books said it would be. I feel fabulous and beautiful, and I often wake up happy and stay that way all day. It is quite lovely, although at times I wonder if all of my snark has left the building. Maybe it’ll be back in the third tri with a vengeance—who knows.

I passed the glucose tolerance test—score! Still have to do another one in a couple of months, but what a relief to know that so far, and knock wood, PCOS hasn’t reared its ugly head to affect this pregnancy in the ways that it could.

Next week, a friend of ours is going to go with us to The Store With The Symbol That Looks Like You Shoot Arrows At It (TSWTSTLLYSAAI—so much easier to type than just the word with a period stuck in it!) to help us register. She rocks, and it’ll be so nice to have her well-researched input to help us wade through the many aisles of baby related paraphernalia. Despite the research I have done, I still have no idea what to ask for, much less what some of that stuff even is. Hopefully our little shopping trip will clear some things up.

The bao is wiggling around in there as I type. I think she is waving hi to everyone reading. (Now the remaining little sliver of my snarky self is emerging, urging me to delete that last sentence lest it makes everyone vomit. Too bad, snarky self! See you in a month and a half.)

First of all, thank you all so much for your celebratory comments about our little baby girl! Though I would have been thrilled either way, there is something about a little girl, for me anyway. I guess I always pictured myself as having a daughter. And now it’s actually happening. There is still something not-quite-believable about this whole thing.

Not to switch gears to doom-and-gloom too drastically, but last week I was That Girl. You know the one. You’ve been TTC for a long time, and on the day you get a shitty piece of news, such as a negative pregnancy test or that you need to skip a cycle or that your insurance company is comprised entirely of assholes, That Girl, be it a friend, colleague, coworker, or relative, shares that they are pregnant or some other tra-la-la, sunshine-and-bunnies news about their pregnancy. Such as, I don’t know, ultrasound photos, just hypothetically speaking.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my older (lesbian) sister, RG, has been TTC since last spring. She has been the picture of grace in the face of my paltry four tries before success. I know that TTC has been the hardest thing she has ever gone through—she’s said that nothing has ever affected her as much as this process has—so I know that even with the brave front she puts on, her happiness for Mama Jae and me can’t NOT be tinged by what I know must be a huge grab bag of sad/jealous/angry-at-the-universe emotions. She wouldn’t be human otherwise. I also have read enough of this community’s blogs to know how devastating it can be to be faced with a difficult TTC road in and of itself, and how when That Girl comes along, all of those emotions are only exacerbated.

I know this. I KNOW IT. So why I didn’t think to check in with RG before telling Mama Jae to include her in the list of family members we were going to email the ultrasound photos is beyond me. But I didn’t. I guess I was so happy and excited to share that I just wasn’t thinking. But as it turns out, on the day the email went out, RG had a negative pregnancy test. A few days later, she called me to tell me that she got that email on that day, and I burst into tears, knowing how devastating and awful that must have been. I felt horrible. She emphasized how happy she is for us, and that she doesn’t want to be out of the loop, but asked that I just check in with her first to see if she is having one of those crappy days or not before sharing big pieces of news like that. Which, of course, I am more than happy to do. I just hate that something I did made her day that shitty.

I have always, always felt like an incredibly lucky person. I have been lucky in my family and childhood, in my career, in love, in health, and in personal relationships. There have been very few times in my life when I didn’t get something I truly, truly wanted. Until I got pregnant, I had this feeling in the back of my mind that karma would catch up with me—that my luck would run out—and that I’d have a hard time getting pregnant. But that wasn’t the case. (There is still a little nagging feeling somewhere in my mind that something might be wrong with our baby, but I think that’s a typical worry of pregnant women, and most of the time I trust that she will be perfect.) This is all to say that I wish there were some way to share luck. I would give almost anything to see my big sister pregnant. It is something that she has wanted for so, so long, much longer than I’ve wanted it. It’s just so unfair that she has wanted it longer than I have, that she’s tried longer than I have, and that I’m pregnant and she’s not. Why can’t the universe just be fair? She deserves to have a child. She and her partner would be great mothers. So why isn’t she just pregnant already?

If I’m remembering correctly, they have been trying for less than a year, so I’m hopeful that they’ll be successful in the end. I just wish the end weren’t taking so damn long to get here.

(This post is brought to you by the words fabulous, amazing, and incredible.)

Yesterday was indescribably fantastic. In all three categories: pregnancy, home, and work. To get the most boring out of the way first, we finished the yard work (house going on the market this weekend, PHEW) and I finished putting up the show a day early. Check. Now for the fun:

It’s official—Mama Jae and I are having a girl. A little girl. A little tiny baby girl. A daughter.

I will never forget the few minutes in the bathroom after the ultrasound during the ER visit, when I said to myself for the first time, “We are having a daughter.” I couldn’t believe it, yet at the same time the pregnancy became much, much more real.

We got to look at her for a solid 15 minutes during the ultrasound yesterday, from all angles. All of her little tiny organs are perfect. Her little limbs are solid. She is measuring right on target. We got to see her little brain and her little heartbeat, which we also got to hear again. I think that it’s my new favorite sound, that whooshing. Amazingly, we got to take home a dvd of the entire scan, so we have our daughter’s first video appearance recorded for posterity. It’s incredible, and I get to listen to my new favorite sound whenever I want. We also got printouts of some photos:

Mama Jae calls this one "shaking her fist at the uterus paparazzi"

baby hoo-ha, with helpful labeling

There were other still shots, but these are the two best. There was one of her face that made her look either like the  woman in the lower right from Picasso’s Desmoiselles D’Avignon or like she had syphilis (or, if you believe some art historians, both). Not sure why that one made the “let’s print THAT out!” cut. On the other hand, that 3-D scan thing they have is amazing. When the ultrasound tech switched to that mode, we could really make out the bao’s movements, and it was just incredible to watch. I now know that the baby’s head is on my right side and her feet are down close to my cervix and on the left, and that the placenta is anterior, which means that it’s attached to the front of my body, which may mean that it could take longer for me to feel movement. But I’m pretty sure at this point that I am feeling her move. There are no words to describe how amazing all of this is.

We had a great, and brief, visit with the doctor, who we realized we really, really like. We went in there kind of thinking that this would be the last appointment there and we were going to switch to the midwife practice, but we left thinking about how much we like our doctor and how valuable that is. We will probably still make a pro and con list, just to think things through, but I think we will wind up staying with her. It helped that we did not wait for 2 hours in the waiting room this time. The ultrasound tech came and got us pretty much immediately, and after peeing in a cup and bloodwork (had an early glucose tolerance test—wow, is that drink vile!), we saw the doctor pretty soon after that. Much, much smoother. The doc also gave me a referral to physical therapy for some back pain that I’ve been having, so that is great too.

Now that the home and work stress are over, I am back to super-happy, enjoying-the-pregnancy mode. I’m sleeping great—no peeing in the middle of the night! It’s a miracle—and feeling fantastic.

Thank you all so much for your great suggestions about baby registry items. I really appreciate your input, and there were a lot of things I never would have thought about, so thanks. I think we want a carseat/stroller/carrier combination—anyone have any specific brands they really liked or didn’t like?

Thanks, everyone, for your helpful thoughts and opinions about the various childbirth classes. Mama Jae and I decided to go with Bradley, and our classes start next month. So we’ll see how that goes. The e-mails I’ve exchanged with the instructor leave me less than confident—she can barely type, it seems, much less punctuate—but I guess grammar and teaching about childbirth don’t really correlate, so it should be okay. (Right? Eek.)

Things have been, as suspected, crazy around here. I feel like I am being pulled in three major directions: Pregnant, Putting Up New Shows, and Putting the House on the Market. The result is that I’m not doing any of the three as well as I would like. I’m not eating great or resting as much as I would like, because work is crazy and weekends are spent taking multiple trips to Lowe’s and trying to find time between snowstorms (hello, wtf, it has not snowed in four years and then THIS?!?) to do things like spread mulch. I am not doing so well at work because I’m tired and slow and restricted in what I can and can’t do (no more scrambling up and down ladders to light a show for me!). Similarly, there are so many things I can’t do at home because it requires chemicals or lifting, or I’m at work when it’s warm enough out to do the shit I can and need to do outside. It is very frustrating.

Most frustrating of all, I think, is that I feel like I don’t have time to just enjoy where I am in this pregnancy. I’m going to be 20 weeks on Sunday, and it feels like it is going so super fast. I am not sure what, exactly, I would be doing to enjoy the pregnancy—sit and stare out the window? admire my growing belly in the mirror? read more books? do more research?—probably all of these and more, actually, now that I am making a list about it. Oy. I guess the silver lining is that at least all of this craziness is happening while I have enough energy to manage it all.

Luckily, one of the shows is ahead of schedule, and it’s the more difficult of the two, so I’m over the biggest hump at work. Now, if I could just go home for an hour during the day and get this stupid yard work done, I’d be golden!

The other thing that’s happening is that I think I might be feeling the bao’s movement, but I can’t tell. It seems like I’ve ALWAYS just eaten something, so it is hard for me to figure out whether I’m digesting or feeling a little six-inch long (six inches?!? when did that happen?) baby twirling around. Tomorrow, Mama Jae and I go in for our second doctor’s appointment. We will have an ultrasound—SO EXCITED!—and the “official” word on the bao’s sex, which we think we’re ready to share with the world at large. I’ll also do an early glucose tolerance test. Hopefully the massive quantities of cake and bread pudding I have consumed in the last four days will not be a problem.

My sisters and mom are throwing us a baby shower in my hometown the weekend of March 20, which is so awesome. The invitations have been selected and the menu is in the works. My uncle, who lives in Seattle, and Mama Jae’s brother and his partner, who live in San Fran, are flying in to attend. I’m really looking forward to it, and it’s coming up so soon, which makes me realize that we need to register somewhere. I have really loved reading the posts of those of you who have made “top ten essentials” lists recently, and it would be great to hear more of your recommendations. Hopefully I will find some time soon to do some research of my own, but in the meantime, what things should definitely go on the registry, in your opinion?

Hey everyone, I am kind of a stressball over here, but I’m hoping you’ll forgive my absence on your blogs long enough to help me out. In the midst of house prepping and gallery changeovers, I’ve also been getting emails from my local list serves with subject lines like “Space running out in [Kickass Childbirth Class]!” My oldest sister swears by the Bradley Method—she said she never could have gotten through natural childbirth without those classes—and I think we are going to go that route, but I would love to get more input since I know nothing about any of the other options. Which classes did you do or are you considering doing (I’m especially interested in your choices if you had or want(ed) to have natural childbirth) and what did/didn’t you like about them? I’d really appreciate any words of wisdom here!

I am descending once again into bad blogfriend- & bad blogger-land. Hopefully the house goes on the market this coming week; then in March after the new shows are up things should return to a more normal pace. I’m thinking of you all though and hoping that when I get a chance to catch up I will read all kinds of fabulous stories about successful inseminations and new pregnancies and bouncing babies.

So you know how all the pregnancy books tell you that if you need to pee, you should not wait? They say things like “pregnant women are more likely to get UTIs, and if you hold your pee in, the bacteria in your bladder can get into your kidneys and you can get an infection.” There’s also the discomfort level, of course. However, this week, I learned a third reason the hard way: if you have to pee, and hold it, and then sneeze, a little bit of pee will come out.

So, in early January my first OB appointment was canceled, because of a threat of snow that never really happened. Everyone was predicting a huge storm, with 6-12 inches, and so the city basically shut down, including my doctor’s office. I think maybe a quarter of an inch fell.

This week, a similar “snowpocalypse” was predicted. I didn’t believe it, because of the boy-who-cried-wolf nature of the previous storm. So my parents and I continued making our merry plans for them to drive down.

Enter 6 inches of snow in my city. My museum closed after an hour of being open on Friday, and it was decided that it would be closed on Saturday again. “Score—four-day weekend!” I thought to myself, and with my parents coming in on Sunday, I spent Friday and Saturday lying on the couch, recovering from the previous weekend’s huge amount of house-related work.

You know what’s next. The snowstorm, like all other weather that hits our city, then makes its way up the interstate between our house and my parents’, and by Saturday night they had about a foot. The roads were too dangerous—the typically eight-hour drive between here and there has several mountainous areas—so my parents couldn’t come. WAH.

So on Sunday and Monday I did as much as I could, including taking *four* trips to Lowe’s on Sunday. I got a lot done, but now I am exhausted, and we still have to hire painters to do stuff to the house, and it still needs to be “staged” and photos taken and paperwork signed before it can go on the market. The painters have to wait until the weather changes to paint the porch. Mama Jae is sick, and I slept like crap last night. Heater is broken in my office. It’s going to be one of those weeks, I think. (Whine, whine, whine…sorry.) Bleh.

Mama Jae and I have been quite busy these past couple of weeks, getting the house ready to sell and with work/school stuff. This week is by far the craziest, for Mama Jae especially, since she is trying to write a paper, prepare a presentation, and attend a several-day-long meeting, with attendant wining-and-dining of out of town guests. What with that happening this week, and us focusing on house stuff last weekend, it feels like a really long time since we had QT together. One or the other of us has had stuff to do every night this week, and that trend will continue until Saturday, when she has to really focus on work to meet a deadline next week.

Meanwhile, the quotes from the painters made our eyeballs pop out like warner brothers cartoon characters. I had been hoping to avoid painting, even though it would be water-based latex, because of the whole fume-inhalation thing. But once we got these quotes back, it was clear that we couldn’t afford for the painters to take care of every little nick and nail hole. So I had decided to try to get as much of it done by myself as I could this weekend (with the windows open and the fans on, of course), and we’d hire the painters to do the rest, because work was really going to start getting crazy next week and we need to put the house on the market as soon as we can.

Enter my parents. They live an eight-hour drive away, but as soon as I told my mom what the coming weekend entailed, she offered to get on a plane to come down and help. That quickly evolved into both of my parents driving down for the weekend, and as soon as those plans seemed to be coming together, I felt a huge weight that I didn’t even know was on my shoulders lift off. I know we can knock a ton of things off of the list while they are here. Plus, I love that I will get to spend that much time with them—so often, when I go home, it’s to a big group of extended family, which is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll be so nice to have them all to myself for a couple of days. I am so grateful that they are as awesome as they are. I can’t get over how generous they are being. Plus, they are bringing their dog, so Oliver will have a friend spend the night! He will be terribly excited.

In other news, realizing that being sixteen weeks means I’m four months pregnant (math was never my thing), as well as my mom’s request for a photo of my growing bod, led me to take a belly shot yesterday. It’s on the preggo page if you’re interested. I was thinking about the pregnancy yesterday, and realizing how much I love being pregnant, or this phase of it anyway. Despite fighting insomnia some nights, I feel fantastic, and my hair is shiny and bouncy, my growing body feels really good to me, and I have cleavage for the first time in my life without resorting to weird pushing-in movements with my upper arms. For a small-chested girl, this is a big deal: the other day as I was sitting in bed, my underboob was actually resting on my abdomen, just a little bit. It was a very strange and unfamiliar sensation. My mom keeps saying “you think they’re big now—just wait until your milk comes in!” THAT will be interesting.