OB visit

Mama Jae and I *finally* got to see the OB on Thursday. I say finally, because not only did we have to wait a month initially when I called in December to schedule it, so that our first appointment would be in early January; and not only did we have to deal with rescheduling it because the “snow” made the office closed the day our appointment was supposed to be; but we also waited in the office for two hours before we were seen. We are unsure whether this was a fluke, or a sign of a poorly run office, or what, but we hope it doesn’t happen again.

The visit itself was fine. She sat with us for quite a while and took time to answer all of our questions. We liked her pretty well—she just seemed normal, and young, and she was easy to talk to and did not make us feel rushed at all, even though we knew how behind she was. We found out that the doctors there deliver around 85% of their own patients, which was an unexpected and happy surprise. If it’s the middle of the night, it would be the doctor on call delivering, which is the only time when it may not be our doctor. So that was good. We asked her a bit about her approach during delivery, telling her that we thought we’d want to go natural, and she said that if all goes well, natural delivery is great. (What we should have asked is, “what would you consider something NOT going well?” Like, if it’s “This labor is taking too long and I want to go home; let’s give her pitocin,” then we would *not* consider ourselves to be on the same page.)

After we chatted and had our questions answered, I had an exam and we got to listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Everything looks good. Next visit, in about a month, I will do an early glucose tolerance test, which she advised because of my PCOS. We will also get an ultrasound, with the official report on the baby’s sex.

Which reminds me. I did not mention this before, because it was all so crazy and weird and terrible and eventually amazing and it has taken a while to process, but when we were in the emergency room a couple of weeks ago, the ultrasound tech, after assuring us that everything was fine, asked us if we had been planning to find out the sex, because she could tell us if we wanted to. We had discussed it a bit in the weeks previous, and had decided we were going to find out, if for no other reason than we couldn’t really see why not. So I said yes, without pausing or thinking that perhaps the emergency room at like 6 in the morning after a blood scare and lack of sleep and the emotional roller-coaster ride that accompanied the weekend was not the best time to learn this information. So she pointed some genital bits out on the screen and asked us if we could tell. I guessed, and guessed wrong, and suddenly we knew what we are expecting.

We’re still not ready to tell yet. The ultrasound tech was pretty confident that she’s right, but you never know. Plus, as I said, it was not the best set of circumstances and I at least was a little sad to find out that way (but the sadness was mixed with amazement and excitement and elation and joy and fear and pretty much the entire rest of the spectrum of human emotion). So we’ve kept it to ourselves, except for very few family members. We’ll probably tell people after our next appointment. Since the ER visit, I have gotten over my sadness about how we found out, and have moved on to being really excited about it. Really excited. And strangely, knowing the bao’s (probable) sex has been the thing that has finally made me able to understand that there is, indeed, a baby in there, and I feel more able to bond with the bao during the pregnancy for that reason. (There is a part of me that has a problem with myself about this, because everyone is a person regardless of what sex they are and gender is a construct etc. etc. so it shouldn’t matter what sex the bao is because I would love it either way etc. etc… However, I think that I would feel more able to bond if the bao were the other sex, too.) So now I am really glad that we know; otherwise, we’d be waiting another month to find out, and it’s really exciting to feel that I can bond with the bao for longer before the birth.

Sorry to keep y’all hanging. We’re going to keep this little secret to ourselves for just a little while longer.

Anyway, we are still thinking about switching to the midwifery practice. We liked the OB fine and all, and we realize that once you get into labor and delivery, there’s not a lot you can control. However, the idea that midwives, in general, are more willing to let you labor for longer and intervene less than OBs are is making us think hard about this. We also don’t really having a strong sense of what our OB’s past experiences are.

I am also kind of bored of thinking about this, especially with so much happening at home and work. We spent all last weekend running errands and packing boxes in preparation for putting our house on the market. As I sit here typing in my office, Mama Jae is at home with a crew of our fabulous friends, who are doing things like moving furniture and boxes and other crap out of our house and into a storage unit and raking leaves and weeding. We have more people coming tomorrow, and we also have appointments set up to get estimates from handymen, painters, and cleaning people. Getting ready to put a house on the market, even a tiny house in pretty good condition, is an incredible amount of work! We are also about to go into exhibition changeovers at the museum, so I’m starting to do all the preparatory work for that. It’s going to be a crazy couple of months.