Next month, we move. We have so much to do before then it’s ridiculous to even attempt listing it all here. So instead I will talk about Essie. Essie is awesome. She now has like five words in her repertoire: NO, MAMA, UH OH (more like AHH-OOH), YEAH YEAH, and sometimes Mama J or I is MIMI. Also I think I heard her attempt to say STRAWBERRIES this morning but it only happened once and I’d been awake since 4:30 a.m. so I can’t trust what I think I heard.
I was up since 4:30 because that is when Essie woke up and decided to throw a crib party, one of her favorite nocturnal activities. No crib party is complete without the following:
- Doing the worm
- Playing Throw the Duck, Monkey, and Sippy Cup of Water Out of the Crib and Onto the Floor, Then Freak Out About It Until a Mom Comes in and Puts Them Back In, Then Cry When She Tells You to Go to Sleep and Leaves the Room
- Jumping up and down
- Seeing how many different kinds of squeaky noises can be made with a 60-year-old crib (that reminds me, I need to check the screws on that thing to see how they’re holding up)
- Giggling
- Crying
- Babbling
At 5:45, I figured out that she was probably up for the day. Mama J is sickaroo, so I let her sleep and brought Essie and the Asshole Formerly Known as My Dog Oliver downstairs. Like me, Oliver was none too happy about the 4:30 wakeup. He let me know by rolling around in some shit he found in the backyard. So. By the time my alarm went off at 6:30, I had already been up for 2 hours, cursed at a dog, bathed him, and scrubbed and de-pooped the tub.
Anyway, so we can still count Essie’s vocabulary words on one hand. I think, based on the STRAWBERRIES incident this morning, that a) she is interested in talking and b) that it is going to be the most adorable thing ever when she says words. Her little voice is so cute when she’s chatting to herself, and for some reason actual words are so much cuter. Not sure if that’s just me.
This weekend we head to my hometown for one of my sister’s weddings. Essie, along with her younger (by a few months) cousin, who is the daughter of the brides, will be a flower girl. This should be both adorable and interesting to watch.
We are skipping TTC again this month because of timing. My period was wicked late this month, I’m guessing because of all the upcoming major life changes and attendant stress. We’ll see how June goes. THAT should be totally stress-free (eyeroll).
As hard to believe as it is, we are actually definitely moving to New City. Mama J and I were there this weekend. We saw apartments. We chose one. (It is AWESOME. And available NOW. We could move NOW, in theory. More on this later.) We visited a ton of daycares. We have to choose one. We ate. I met her new colleagues. We walked our asses off exploring our new neighborhood and city. We held hands. In public. We envisioned ourselves there, and we LOVED IT. Now that we’ve been, and we know where we’re going to live, it seems much more real, and I could not be more excited. It can’t come soon enough.
Essie had her first temper tantrum tonight. In public. At the “toddler social”, where 30 other toddlers wandered around perfectly well-behaved. Will be drunk soon.
Apparently this site had some sort of malware, but now it’s gone. Yay!
The short of it: Mama Jae is safely home from a very long, very far-away conference. My parents were in town playing with Essie while she was gone. Everyone had a blast. Before she left, Mama Jae submitted her dissertation. She defends it on Wednesday and is generally a rock star. We are flying up to New City (tee hee) at the end of the month to check out faculty housing. I am madly applying for jobs and talking to the awesome lady at New City University whose sole responsibility is taking care of families new to the university. She is setting up childcare tours for us. Suddenly things are happening, after so many many months of waiting. It’s a little surreal. For me, I think things won’t really sink in until Mama Jae and I are up there, walking through the city, holding hands.
Protected: I am finally allowed to tell you where we are moving
Just to cap it all off, I started spotting on Sunday, making me realize that the past two weeks have been one long, cruel setup for a lame April Fool’s joke. Eff you too, period!
We are jumping off the crazy train for a month. The timing for insemination would butt us up against the weekend again, and it happens to be a weekend when Mama Jae is out of town at a conference and of course we want to do this together. I am relieved, frankly. I
need some time to regroup and gear back up. (And chow down.) And refocus and have room to think and to have our next attempt be not at a time when other areas of our lives are so up in the air and insane. More on the moving away from Nashville front a bit later.
We had a great weekend, despite the bad news. Mama Jae and I went on a date on Saturday night, and it was awesome. Ate some good food, got some QT just the two of us, hung out with friends. An added bonus was that having a babysitter seemed to function as a reset button for Essie, whose sleep the week before was all wackado. Normally we do the routine, plop her in the crib, and that is that until the next
morning. Since the previous Friday, she had been REFUSING to fall asleep at her normal bedtime, at times for almost a couple of hours. Because Mama Jae was in dissertation-finishing mode, she was staying at her office late every evening. So I was up there for a long time every evening staring at Essie until she either fell asleep or was tired enough not to protest when I left the room. It made the stresses of last week—second half of tww, Mama Jae’s working so hard, trying to figure out what’s going to happen to us next—that much more difficult. One night of the babysitter putting her to bed and she seems to have remembered how to sleep by herself (knock wood).
So in a few days Essie will be 21 months old. And still not really talking. She definitely says “mama” and “no”. Usually “mama” means “Mama Jae”, but sometimes “no” is just a babble word or used to express a wide variety of needs and desires. Also, she says something that sounds a lot like “buddha” quite often, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what she means. (Unless there is something really weird going on. Sometimes it sounds more like “booty” so my guess is no.) One of her teachers said something offhand about trying to get her to talk at dropoff a couple of weeks ago, so I asked her about it, and she said that even though she’s not talking, Essie understands and processes things more than kids who are older than she is. So that was
good perspective. I do, however, wish that she would consider using words. I’m not worried, really, but am at the point where I’m considering checking with the doctor to see whether we should take the next step. Any parents of late talkers out there have words (other than NO and MAMA) of wisdom?
Well, we tested.
It was negative.
I am surprised and confused, and bummed. Mostly because having had this experience, I now know that I can’t trust my body’s signals, especially when they are exacerbated by the side effects of introducing all of that letrozole and hcg into my system, plus my psychosomatic tendencies. I was SO SURE. Even as I spent the last few days trying to talk myself down, there was a secret part of me that just *knew* I was pregnant. I can’t trust that voice anymore.
This TWW was really insane. And the next time we do it, it will be more insane because of this experience. That is really the thing that I’m upset about right now. Rather than having this be over, it’s only going to get worse.
Today, I’m just going to let myself be sad, and probably find a chocolate milkshake to inhale. Then I will start to think about all of the delicious things I can eat (oysters!) and drink (prosecco!), and how I can probably look at jobs in the places we’re considering with a stronger sense that it’s morally ok for me to apply for them. And about how it would have been crazy ridiculous luck to get pregnant the first try anyway. And about how excited I am to wear those summer clothes I haven’t fit into in years (once this asshole misleading
bloat goes away). And about all of the other exciting things happening for our family. And I will look at my beautiful, sweet little girl and know how lucky we are to have her. But that will be tomorrow. Today is all about being sad and cranky. And chocolate.
Thanks to all of you who are reading this and cheering us on. Your support means a lot to me. I know a lot of you are like me, and read but don’t have time to comment (or can’t figure out how to log in to leave comments on wordpress blogs, if you’re really like me). Just knowing you’re out there means so much.
This TWW has been quite the mindfuck. Over the weekend, the HCG wore
off. My boobs shrunk and I became less bloated. I was convinced that
the HCG was in cahoots with my tricky body and tendency to
overanalyze, and that there was no way I was pregnant, that it was all
psychosomatic. I was actually totally fine with it, because I hadn’t
done a lot of preparation (read: drinking and eating whatever I
wanted) anyway so would be glad to have a couple of weeks in which to
go crazy, which for me is like actually consuming an alcoholic
beverage more than once a week. Actually, what I wanted to do was eat
a bunch of sushi, over-easy eggs, and rare steak, and maybe a glass or
two of champagne to celebrate mama jae finishing her dissertation. So I was
fine with it, really, I was. Really.
Things have changed over the past couple of days. I have spent the
early part of each day, from wakeup to mid-afternoon, thinking that I
am definitely not pregnant. Every symptom I recorded the day before is
nowhere to be found, and is very easily explained away by another
cause anyway: my boobs were huge and I was bloated and had cramps and
a lower back ache? Must be the drugs, which is manipulating my cycle
and my period is coming! I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since
the weekend? I always have second-half-of-cycle insomnia, plus I am
anxious about moving and am so psychosomatic about this pretend
pregnancy that I am doing this to myself! I need to pee and eat in the
middle of the night? Mama Jae has been working 14 hours a day and so I
haven’t been eating well and it’s hot out so I am drinking more water
and I often have to pee in the middle of the night anyway! I wake up
boiling hot? The weather is changing! I am also inexplicably chipper,
energetic, and happy, given how little rest I got the night before.
Then, in the mid-afternoon, the symptoms start again. The low backache
usually comes first. Then the heavy feeling in the lower abdomen,
sometimes accompanied by odd cramps. Things are smellier than normal.
I get hot. I am bloated. My upper arms start brushing the sides of my
boobs (this never happens to me normally). Sometimes I burp. Sometimes
I feel borderline queasy. Symptoms ramp right up, so that by the time
I boing awake sometime in the middle of the night, I am so hot that I
think I have a fever, all kinds of weird-ass things are happening in
my lower abdomen, my boobs are so big they are taking up significant
real estate on the bed, and if I don’t have a glass of milk
immediately there is a chance I might starve to death, and why don’t
we keep pumpkin pie in the house? And it’s the middle of the night so
things are strange and somehow crystal-clear in a way that, by light
of day, makes no rational sense. (Also there are a lot of birds
chirping their fucking beaks off. Seriously. I have never lived in a
place where so many birds think that it’s appropriate to chirp between
the hours of 1-5 a.m. Wait. Why are these birds making me so
irritable? Irritability! Another symptom!) So in the middle of the
night, I am pregnant. And therefore unable to turn my brain off and
fall back asleep for hours. The birds do.not.help. At some point I
fall asleep anyway and have incredibly weird dreams. Then it’s morning
suddenly and the whole thing starts all over again.
Last night there was the added bonus of discovering that despite my
complimentary FF VIP membership wearing off like 2 years ago when I
was pregnant with Essie, they haven’t communicated that to their
iphone app. So now I have Early Pregnancy Points to contend with. Excellent.
If I am not pregnant, I can never trust any symptom in any other TWW
ever again. But there is no possible way I’m pregnant. That would be
insane.
This two-week-wait has me firmly in its clutches. I blame the trigger
shot. I have felt pregnant since I was inseminated. Which is obviously
too early to feel pregnant. Big boobs. Bloated. Weird dreams.
Difficulty sleeping. Strange sensations in the lower abdomen. How much
HCG was in that shot?!?! Because I don’t remember feeling this way in
any of the previous attempts. Except for the one that worked. Which,
of course, is the only one I recorded obsessive-compulsively about,
making it the only one I have any sort of data from, which is the only
reason why I remember any symptoms at all. Sigh.
It would help if I had something just interesting enough to distract
me without being so interesting that it stresses me out. Too bad!
Because instead, when I’m not thinking about whether or not I’m
pregnant, I’m thinking about the exciting things that are happening on
Mama Jae’s job search front. I can’t say anything about it here. Yet.
Suffice it to say that my brain is a ping-pong ball bouncing between
craziness induced by the TWW and craziness induced by the
WTF-is-going-to-happen-to-us-next.
