From my office door
My favorite time of the day is climbing in to Em’s bed first thing in the morning. She has a morning voice that is both squeaky and scratchy all at once.
I rub her back and kiss her on the cheek. These days I smile at those long legs sticking out from that tiny pink blanket she insists on sleeping beneath.
“Goood morning, kiddo. You have to get up in about five minutes, ok?’ Continue reading
“What’s that?”
“It’s like a vitamin, kind of,” I said , stirring the glass of Metamucil.
“What kind? What is it for?”
“Well, when you’re pregnant your stomach and all of your insides don’t have a lot of room so you have trouble going to the bathroom and stuff. This is fiber, and that helps.”
“So you don’t only have really small poops?”
“What?” I asked her, realizing this entire conversation was going to be repeated at school in all likelihood.
“I mean, you just have small poops, right? The baby poops and it comes out your butt.”
“Not exactly. We have to leave in five minutes. Get your backpack.”
It’s easy to feel like I am the only person in the house that feels so pregnant all of the time. But I have to wonder how much time she devotes to thinking about it… because when it comes up she seems to have a pretty well thought out vision of how it all works. Right or wrong. And really there is no telling her she’s wrong these days.
My first child was a sloppy mess from the start. He peed in the house.
The Baby & his Grover
He whined when left alone. And he had very sharp teeth.
The Choppers
He ate the corner of my couch. He stood in his food bowl when he ate his dinner.
My Sloppy Dining Companion
I loved him from the very first night we brought him home. And I was proud of him as he grew in to a big strong boy.
The Handsome Teenager
When I was pregnant with Emily I imagined the two of them fast friends. Fisher and I would lie in bed at night and I would tell him everything I was afraid of.
Snoozing with My Confidant
When Emily was about two months old I was sitting on the couch with the two of them, tears rolling down my face. Her dad asked me in that way that a man talks to a post-partum woman if I was okay. “Yeah, I was just thinking that she will grow up with him and then one day she will have to understand what it is like to lose a dog, and it breaks my heart. I mean she is going to love him so much and he is going to die…” Through the hormones I could see that perhaps I was getting ahead of myself.
Tiny Pals
There were a million hard things about Em’s dad and I separating. But the hardest may very well have been pulling out of the driveway, Fisher’s head poking through the pickets on the deck. I missed that dog every minute of every day. But as I said to anyone that would listen, you can take a man’s kid and half of his stuff, but only an asshole would take his dog, too.
My Kids at Play
Fate and a cross-country move brought Fish back to me last year. He still smells like corn chips. He still likes to sleep in the middle of the bed. I still get choked up when I think about the relationship that a kid has with their dog.
First Trip on the School Bus
And now Fisher is eight years old. I hope that he is around to walk to the bus stop when the time comes to send this new baby off to school. He’ll be a little grayer, maybe a little slower. I was thinking about whether or not he will have the same patience for this baby that he had for Emily, if he will be as tolerant with the “pony” rides and the dress up games. For now I find peace in the fact that he is already forging his relationship with the new baby. Recently I remarked to MQD that it seems I pick dog hair out of my belly button almost daily lately. That’s what that means, right? Fish is bonding with the new baby?
Tonight, send a message in Morse code from your window. See if anyone responds.
This was a fairly simple task. I wake up anywhere from four to nine billion times in a night so a couple of days ago I looked up a Morse Code translator and saved a quick message to my phone. Saturday night was a tough night for me what with the freaky dream and impending hormonal meltdown so when I woke up Saturday night it didn’t seem like the right time to bang out a This Book Will Change Your Life challenge. And for some reason I had made up my mind that this would be a late night missive. I think everything that happens in the middle of the night is open to greater interpretation. No one plays Bloody Mary or Light as Feather Stiff as a Board (with any success anyway) in the middle of the day. Where is the fun in that?
Sunday night I woke up several times. My neighbors across the parking lot had decided that Sunday, the night before the first full day of school, would be a most excellent night to sit on the porch and drink cognac and listen to their car stereos. And since I hadn’t saved the Morse Code message “For fuck’s sake, can you turn down the bass!” or “Remy Martin from a brandy snifter beats the shit out of Hennessy from an orange juice glass!!” I didn’t really have an appropriate message planned out. On the off chance they even heard my message, tapped out on my bedroom window. But really…. if you were ever inclined to think someone was sending you a Morse code message – half lit on cheap cognac and three blunts deep is the time.
(And lest you think I am being presumptuous with regards to their choice of beverage, our walk to the bus stop takes us right past my neighbor’s recycling bin. They make keep late hours and have little regard for potential noise violations, but they seem to take their recycling quite seriously.)
So, Monday night. It was on. I hopped in bed with MQD at a reasonable hour. Fish snuggled between us both, his head in MQD’s armpit. I read for a short while, the snoring from their side of the bed a kind of lullaby, I quickly decided to hit the hay. It usually takes me in the neighborhood of 45 minutes to fall asleep but last night I was out by about 9:30.
Pregnancy Wake Up Round One was not until almost 1 am. Almost a full four hour sleep cycle, who is the luckiest girl!!??
Standard routine: Wake up, assess need to pee. Need to pee is urgent. Wiggle feet around until I am free from the shackles of dogs and cats sleeping on the blankets between my legs and stumble in to the bathroom. Pee. Flush. (This is a change to the routine. (We were formerly an “If it’s yellow let it mellow household” but the cat pee frenzy of 2011 has put a temporary ban on that plan.) Throw the animals out of the bed. Reclaim some bedding and my Snoopy if MQD was sneaky enough to snag it. Assess level of sleepiness. Check email or read RSS feeds. Listen to a chapter of current audio book if that doesn’t do the trick.
Last night’s routine: Wake up, assess need to pee. Need to pee is urgent. Note that Fisher is still in the middle of the bed. Quick trip to the bathroom, throw the animals out of the bed. Wide awake. Remember I am not listening to any kind of a book right now and wonder what I am going to do to kill time for the next half an hour. Remember the Morse Code message.
(600+ words later and I got to the point of my story! Record time, Kelly.)
.. .-.. — …- . -.– — ..- I tap out on the window. Morse Code for “I love you.” A good positive message to send out to the Universe.
I waited, let my mind wander. Mentally wrote an outline for this scintillating post in my head. And just before I fell back to sleep. BOOM! That incredibly loud one note blast of a sound that I generally associate with a big power generator blowing or a single clap of thunder. As I wondered to myself if that was Universe Morse Code shorthand for “Go Fuck Yourself” I got distracted.
…………… Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap, parental Morse Code for tiny kid woken from sound sleep by loud ass noise hauling ass down the stairs to your bedroom. “Mom?”
I pulled my covers back. She climbed in. The Universe did not respond to my message exactly as I had hoped. But I got a late night snuggle with a little lady that is growing up way too fast for my liking. So, I am calling Day 87 a success.
Emily June, six weeks old. You know the sappy hormonal woman is going through old pictures lately, right? That was predictable.
Posted in Family, Parenting, Pregnancy, This Book Will Change Your Life
Tagged Family, Henessy, Morse Code, Parenting, Pregnancy, This Book Will Change Your Life
I was standing in a crowd of people that all smelled a little like sweat and a lot like beer when he said “Hey, how the hell are you?” And I smiled the “Oh wow, I haven’t seen you since high school” smile.
We exchanged some “You look greats” and a few “What have you been up to” kind of questions when I started to feel my cheeks get flushed. There are obligatory “you look fantastic”s and then there are the kind that you can dish out to someone you knew long ago in a meaningful way. These were definitely the kind of compliments that can make a gal stammer but not the kind that make you feel like you’re being hit on.
He leaned against the wall and suddenly the crowd of people seemed to be gone. I got all antsy and took a big swig of water just for something to do. I could remember seeing that smile in the hallway when we were young and thinking I wish I had known him better because he always looked like he knew a funny secret. He grinned and said “Just water for you, huh?” and I smiled and gestured to my pregnant belly and somehow he managed to say in a way that didn’t sound like bullshit “oh wow, I hadn’t even noticed.”
And he hugged me and I felt like my whole body was on fire. Like if I held on just a little longer I might know the secret that made him smile, too. It was awkward when I let go and I said “I better be careful, I am a pro at making a scene” and my eyes welled up with tears inexplicably. He smiled and hugged me again, dipped me like a movie star.
“Me, too.” he said. And that smile again.
“Who cares about the scene, huh?” and I laughed. “You just get this one life, right?”
“Oh, I know that. But do you?”
And I woke up. That kind of wide awake from a dream where you turn to see if your alarm clock had gone off and then are surprised to find it is the middle of the night. My first conscious thought was that I was going to blush when I saw him next. And I rolled over and reached for MQD and he wasn’t in bed. In the same breath I realized that MQD was gone (likely he had fallen asleep on the couch) but that the boy that made me blush and suggested that I was the one that needed to remember that we have just this one life had passed away a little over two years ago.
Analysis of one’s dreams is the height of navel-gazing in my book. But this one really got me. “You just get this one life” is my standard advice. Why was I having it handed back to me?
I have remarked recently on the fearlessness with which MQD and I have taken this Marriage Bull by the horns. I am, by nature, not one to take kindly to change. I stay put. It’s the Taurus in me, perhaps, that doesn’t want to give up combined with the laziness that is bred of insecurity. But lately I have made great strides in that department. For years it scared me to say out loud that I wanted something, the good old “don’t try and you never fail” hadn’t served me so well in my twenties. By thirty I had so little to lose it seemed like a good idea to start wishing and trying.
Five years later I am trying and wishing my ass off.
MQD is a do-er not a talk-er. It is inspiring. I talked and talked about a baby that I wanted so desperately. And science be damned, I think he made this baby happen. Because he gets things done. We sat up late nights and laughed and drank wine and planned on getting married “someday” and it was MQD that put on our shared google calendar “Go ring shopping.” I fell in love with a house and five days later he had a mortgage broker, a real estate agent and a plan.
Sometimes I feel like I am riding the coattails of his actions. They may be our dreams but much of the time it his actions that get the ball rolling. If pressed he’d tell me that my belief in him and my support is crucial to him having the courage to take these big steps. We have a pretty perfect marital synergy in that respect.
So when I found myself sitting on the floor Sunday afternoon with my head in my hands, big fat tears rolling down my face I realized what it was that I wasn’t letting myself do. That advice about how you only get one life? That is just one of my inner mantras. The other I have adopted in the last five years is the simple “fake it ’til you make it.” It seems I have gotten a little too good at the latter.
It is so important to me to identify and reach for my dreams these days. And in order to do that I need to feel positive and capable. So I have focused extra hard on the “fake it” part, and believe it or not I have “made it.” I feel good almost all of the time.
But in doing so I was failing to let myself feel afraid. I just crammed it all back down so I could keep reaching for the next milestone, keep dreaming bigger. Maybe what my dream visitor was encouraging me to do was to go ahead and voice my fear? I am not sure yet if that is what he was telling me to do… but I know that after I said it all out loud I felt better. So, I thought I’d better write it all down before I lose the courage it takes to be afraid.
I am terrified. I am afraid I won’t be able to love this baby as much as I love Emily. I am afraid I won’t be able to love MQD as much as I do now once I have to share my heart with the baby and Em. I am afraid MQD will resent me not bringing in the income I am now. I am afraid that it will be five more years before I feel like myself inside my body and that I will be forty god damn years old next time I lose the “baby weight.” I am afraid that I will repeat the mistakes I made in my last marriage. I am afraid because it is all happening so fast and it is what I wanted so desperately. What if I get what I have always said I wanted and I am still blue?
This weekend I came up with a bunch of questions and very few answers. I’m still not sure if I am taking full advantage of “this one life.” But I am present. And I am feeling. Even the shitty hormonal-pregnant-putting my baby on a school bus feelings. I am even feeling those. And I feel pretty okay. The one answer that I managed to come up with that I completely believe is the one that will tide me over for a while. I sent MQD a text on Sunday post meltdown “I am scared, but in my “not crazy” mind I know we have what it takes.”
I went to sleep last night with the kind of burning eyes you can only get from a good cry. And it felt good. And I slept hard.
I wish this was gonna be about my most excellent Latin dance skills. But sadly it is not.
Ever since Karen wrote the other day about her thoughts and feelings on the pregnancy body I have been keeping a mental checklist of thoughts on my own. I really thought this go-round would be similar to my pregnancy with Em and that I’d find comfort in the fact that creepy weird pregnancy things that no one ever talks about would not sneak up on me. I mean, I have done this before, right? Evidently that is not the case.
In the few short days I have been thinking about this I have come up with more than a few delightful side effects of pregnancy that have astounded me all over again. Here they are in order of ascending grossness.
First sign of my struggle with the pregnancy body is that I stop looking in the mirror without my clothes on. The only bathroom in our house with a shower is not large, but it does offer two fantastic features. A window in the shower and a mirror that is not directly across from you. The window means you don’t have to turn the lights on in the morning, which I have always rather enjoyed and the mirror’s relationship to the bathtub means you do not have to actively avoid looking at your full-frontal naked self every morning when you get out of the shower. This is always a perk, in my book, but even more so pregnant. Consequently when Em and I hopped in the shower the other day after the swimming pool I was ill-prepared for her observation.
She is laughing. I am washing my hair. Like a fool, I ask her “What?”
“Your boobs look like they have a chopped off hot dog sticking out of them.”
I’ll give that a minute to sink in.
Damn, kid. She had ruined my illusion. The illusion I had of myself with perfectly normal boobs. I have seen enough boob both in real life and in umm… film and pictures to have a preferred boob style. And let’s just say that hot dog nipples and enormous areolas nine shades darker than the skin tone surrounding them were not it.
How had I forgotten about this? Sure, I have been gifted jugs a cup size larger than my normal of late, but in exchange I have had to trade in my perfectly normal nips (n squared, if you will) for this freak show. And don’t get me started on the gigantic blue vein that should pop up any day now.
Moving on… in order of ascending grossness, you are both reminded and warned. A week or so ago I realized I had an appointment with my midwife coming up and that I should probably remember to ask her if I can take a stool softener. I know I can google it. But I try to have one question. It makes me feel like a “good patient” to have a question at each appointment. Yes, I am that approval seeking.
While the constipation was unpleasant enough, it gets worse. The fact that I had begun to envision the “ring of fire” that comes with a baby’s head crowning every time I tried to produce a dime sized turd was making me both worried and furious. Worried that if these totally unsatisfying bowel movements were making me cry and imagine the pain of labor that I’d never survive an actual unmedicated labor. And furious that while I had been in the bathroom for upwards of twenty minutes the toilet still resembled a game of marbles. One in which no one even brought a shooter.
So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I drank a cup of real coffee. And it was delicious. And that morning’s drive to work was fabulous. I miss coffee.
Twenty minutes after I got to my office I thought I was going to die. I would be found dead. In the office bathroom. A dent in the top of my head where it had caved in from the sheer gravitational pull of the ferocious diarrhea I was experiencing. Oh and my shirt would be ripped open. Not (as you might expect) to give a sexy sort of Woman Ravaged on a Cover of A Romance Novel look (and you are supposed to have already forgotten about the hotdog nipples and the diarrhea in order for that imagery to be effective) but because I thought I was having a motherfucking heart attack and I needed to see if my heart was, in fact, beating on the outside of my chest from the caffeine.
Lesson learned. While the coffee did produce the opposite effect of constipation, it was no more desirable.
Flash forward to the next day. Same intestinal disaster. With the added bonus of vomiting. I am coming up on day five of this good time. This morning as I wretched in to a trash can and wondered if I might be able to get upstairs to the other bathroom before “the spirit” moved me again I looked down to the floor. “Thumbs Up!” said the cheerful giraffe sticker Em had stuck to the floor. I had no choice but to laugh. Thumbs up, alright. Up my ass if I am gonna get anything done today besides sit around in the bathroom.
So, that’s the top three things I have forgotten about pregnancy so far. Freak show hot dog nipples, constipation and it’s bitch of a sister diarrhea.
In other news, it’s Casual Friday for me. Pigtails, flip-flops, my favorite crooked glasses and my boombox belt buckle. While you may disapprove of my freaky nipple and poop talk, you have got to applaud my efforts at taking a picture of a belt buckle (that I can not see) with my phone. For you. I do it all for you.
I don’t talk a lot about the reasons why Emily is the best kid ever. (And before you convince yourself that I am already screwing up the new kid in-utero, know that we have addressed this. Em will be the “best kid ever” and Baby D, as Mike as dubbed him/her will be “the best baby ever.”) But damn that kid slays me daily.
I have found myself, at sixteen weeks pregnant, smack dab in the midst of “no longer first semester crippling tired” but still exhausted. Definitely pregnant looking, not just fat as hell, but not yet comfortable with the emerging pregnant body that I had somehow managed to totally forget was going to appear. And so hormonally driven to the point that when I got home from work yesterday evening and MQD was making dinner and turned to switch his ipod over to The Gravy Boys, playing Happy, a song we danced to at our wedding I pulled my hands back from him (hands he’d taken in his, lovingly, presumably to dance with me) screeching “I have BANANA on my hands, I can smell it! It’s disgusting.” I’m a peach recently. (And incapable of linear thought, evidently, but stay with me. )
So, that’s me the last few days. I sing the praises of the Husband on the regular, like a proper newlywed, but back to Emily. That kid has kept my cranky at bay quite a bit lately. Last night, amidst my grumpiness, we snuggled up on the couch the three, (four, no five, cats and dogs love sharks, who knew!) to watch some Shark Week. I promptly fell in to a catatonic sleep. I could hear Em & MQD go upstairs to read a book and get her tucked in to bed. I could hear MQD come back downstairs and go in the kitchen. I was willing myself up off the couch to deliver my kiss goodnight and failing miserably when I heard her little feet coming down the stairs.
Anyone with children knows they sound like a herd of elephants when they walk around the house (pitter patter of little feet, my ass) unless they are returning downstairs after being put to bed. Then they are quiet as mice. The magic of being a parent allows me to sleep through being stepped on by the dog, sat on by my 40 pound kid and Shark Week “turned up to 11” and still sit upright when I hear the little lady has popped out of bed and is sneaking down the stairs. Just as I started to say “Em, go back to bed, I am coming right up” I see her face. Something about her eyes stops me and I don’t say a word. She puts her arms around my neck and said “You’re so tired, mama, just go to bed. I came down here to get my hug and kiss. See you in the morning, now you get some sleep.”
Determined to stay grumpy I stumbled towards the bedroom. As soon as I lay down, however, I smiled. That kid. She is kinder than I even aspire to be.
In keeping with the spirit of my Bad Mood That Will Not Cease I developed a crippling hangover style headache about five minutes after I went to bed last night. So, I got up, grabbed an ice pack and hit the couch. MQD had (again, lovingly, dammit this family is making me look like an asshole!) joined me in bed to hold my hand, asking me “Is there anything I can do?” moments before falling promptly to sleep. He can fall asleep in record time. Quite possibly even faster than Fisher. There is nothing more irritating than being tired, incapable of falling asleep and surrounded by slumbering loved ones. And besides, only when everyone is asleep can I watch truly shitty television in secrecy. And eat ice cream from the container.
All of that to say when I woke up this morning I wasn’t thrilled to be awake. After just a handful of hours of fitful sleep I pried my eyes open to say goodbye to MQD before he left for work. “Is Em up?” I asked “Yep. I brushed her hair. She is putting away her laundry.” Music to my ears!!
Not only do I have the kindest child on earth, I also seem to have spawned a kid that loves to organize. When she was overtired after a trip to Disney and a a few long days on vacation, what did she do? Retire to her room to organize her suitcase. When she is cranky from a long day at the pool and no nap where does she run off to? Her room, to organize her markers. While some parents might awake on a Saturday to the sound of silence, bolt out of bed and run to find their kid, dreading the disaster they will most surely find, I wake up late on a Saturday to find her cleaning her room.
I popped my head in to her room before jumping in the shower to see her smiling, organizing her socks. “This top drawer gets so messy. Before I put away my laundry it needs to be more organized.”
She is kind. She is tidy. Reasons one and two Em is the best kid ever. Reason number three is short and sweet. That kid is funny.
I was in the bathroom putting my make up on when she came up the stairs, slapping her knee and shaking her head. When she was three or four I taught her to say “a real knee-slapper” in response to someone’s joke. Probably around the same time I taught her to roll her eyes, when I first began to believe sarcasm was a quality to be cultivated in a child. She still rolls her eyes, much to my chagrin. But she also still slaps her knee, much to my delight. So, knee slapping away, she is coming up the stairs. “What’s so funny?”
“How many times do you think Fisher had breakfast today?” I pause, unsure of when the punchline is coming. “Well… Two! maybe even three!! I fed him while you were in the shower. I just saw he is eating AGAIN, so you must have fed him when you went downstairs to get dressed. Oh man, I bet Dad fed him this morning, too…” and she strolls back into her room to finish tidying up, giggling to herself.
It was not particularly funny, the dog eating twice, possibly three times this morning. It was her delivery. She could give a rat’s ass if I thought it was funny. She was amused. She shared. But mostly it was for her. Cracking herself up. Just for her own entertainment. Takes after her mother.
Em is a delightful reminder. Be kind. Clean up after yourself. And most importantly, entertain yourself. No one else is as funny as you.
Unless you live with these clowns. These two make me happy I never get rid of the crap in my “costume box.” Silver lamé and a fur buff make for some pretty hard core fun.
If you thought this would be a post about Sexy Time you will be sorely disappointed. While The Jerk is my favorite movie of all time, sadly this morning I found that my special purpose is not so scintillating.
It seems from the moment I got pregnant I have been consumed with noting just how fast Em is growing up. Perhaps it is my hormones driving me to see that my “baby” is really quite capable of taking care of herself, so that I can shed a little of the guilt that comes with imagining trying to take care of an infant without taking anything away from the baby I have loved for the last six years.
If I am lucky when I wake up in the morning Em is still asleep. I revel in climbing in to bed with her and feeling her warm little body against mine. So many years of co-sleeping behind me, I miss her morning face. Her squinched up sleepy eyes as she awakes. And most of all the face she makes when she realizes that I know she is awake and she can’t fool me with her groaning an stretching. Occasionally I let her sleep in and she strolls in to the bathroom to chat with me while I shower. And more occasionally she is already awake when I get upstairs.
This morning she was up, lights on, door closed. This is a new thing for her, and one I am trying to respect. “Are you up, Em?”
“Yup, I’m getting dressed.”
Yesterday she received not one, but TWO new outfits in the mail from my mom AND a new pair of shoes. New shoes are to Emily roughly what they are to me. Nirvana. I certainly understood why she was up and ready to roll so early.
When I got out of the shower I hollered in to her room again. “Do your new shorts fit?”
“Yup, I just need to tighten the elastic.” If you have children, in particular one built like a bean pole, you are familiar. But for the sake of the three readers that might be reading that do not have kids I will explain. In most kid’s clothing these days there is elastic inside, with buttons, so as to tighten the waist to a particular size. To accommodate the bean poles, the kids that get taller every year but no bigger around. For this, I am grateful.
“You don’t need my help?”
She exits her bedroom, new outfit in place, socks perfectly folded down, new shoes tied. “Nope, I am going in three holes on each side. Fits perfectly.”
“So you don’t need me at all, do you? You’re all grown up?”
“No. I need you. ” An almost imperceptible pause. “To make sandwiches. And to pay.”
And there we have it. My Special Purpose. To make sandwiches. And to pay.
Damn kid, good thing she’s cute.
There are things you do differently with experience. Even if you do them exactly the same, the second time you do it with conviction. You are more certain that this path is the right path. Or perhaps you are more certain that you stumbled down the right path the first time quite by accident and that you will surely stumble down the path that is right again.
“No two pregnancies are the same!” say the cheerful women in the grocery store. And the midwife. And the woman at Em’s school. And my mother! (So, of course it is true!) This has certainly been the case. Everything about this first few months has been different. I think in large part because this time I know.
I know that this little being I am cooking will change my life in unimaginable ways. That I will love them in a way that I did not know was possible. That I will continue to feel their every movement, anticipate their every feeling long after I share my body with them.
Knowing this brings with it a fear I never had with Emily. I was never particularly afraid of miscarriage or a birth defect with Emily. Because I only loved the “idea” of a baby then. I could get pregnant again. And at 29 the red flags of “advanced maternal age” were not lurking behind every corner. But this time I know that I don’t want to get pregnant again. I want THIS baby. And I certainly do not want to shoulder the guilt of feeling that it was MY age that brought pain in to their less than PERFECT life. So there is Fear.
And with that Fear comes a deeper reverence.
I know I can do it. That is different this time, too. There is fear, certainly. But there is more Confidence than fear. My body grew a little human that grew up to be a sassy little thing that I adore. And my body will very likely not let me down. I can do it. I know this.
And I know it will not last forever. When I came home from work those first few weeks and could not imagine cooking dinner I knew that I’d not spend the next nine months on my couch. And I knew that my baby would be just fine if I did not eat anything but Cheerios and peanut butter jelly sandwiches for a week straight.
I know that I am not actually losing my mind. My first pregnancy I wondered if I’d ever be able to watch an SPCA commercial without hysterics. Or if I would ever be able to get out the door in less than five trips. I know now that my hormones will level out and eventually I will go back to just having quiet tears roll down my face all the god damn time instead of full on bawling. I will get out the door to get to work in only three trips, just like normal.
I know that I probably won’t pee in my pants. And that I won’t have to pee every 30 minutes forever. This is of particular importance to me today. The toilet in my office is broken, so I have to run next door to pee. And this is different now than it was when I was pregnant with Em. I’d never have been able to pee in a bathroom that was closer to a conference table filled with four people than it was to the sink. And I’d definitely not have been able to have done it three times during one 90 minute meeting, but this girl has got to go! And my first pregnancy did change that. I can pee anywhere now. Any time. On command, it is quite a skill.
Lastly… I know my shoes won’t fit in a few more months. And I love my shoes. So while I may comfortably settle in to wearing the same damn pair of jeans every day and a black shirt of my choosing I will be wearing fanfuckingtastic shoes until I am either too afraid I will topple over or I can’t jam my big fat pregnant feet in to them.
“Is there anything else you are concerned about?” the midwife asked me.
“Only that it seems like I am 20 weeks pregnant, so I am worried sick that I have 14 babies in my stomach.” I laughed. And joked offhandedly that Dr. Google assures me that muscles have memory and that my stomach is just not fighting the pregnancy. I leaned back on the table and she measured my uterus. “measuring at just about twelve weeks, so I wouldn’t say that you are likely carrying multiples. But never say never, right?” She smiled. And in an effort to include Emily she asked her “Do you listen to Justin Bieber? My kids do, you know that is a Justin Bieber song, Never Say Never.” She is chatting away as she folds the paper towel in to the top of my underwear and presses the “microphone” part of the fetal doppler monitor against the top of my pubic bone.
And I started to cry. Thump thump thump thump at 150 beats per minute. Neither Em nor MQD knew what they were hearing and they both looked at me with the “Is that… what I think it is …” face and my midwife stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh no!! You haven’t heard your babies heartbeat yet and here I am chatting about Justin Bieber!! I am so sorry! Let’s start over, get your phones out!”
And that is how I came to have a video of my filthy feet. Em had my phone and expertly started shooting video. MQD fumbled with his phone and eventually did find the audio note. I had stopped nervously laughing by then. But this moment… this is one I will never forget.
Posted in Family, Parenting, This Book Will Change Your Life
Tagged doppler, fetal monitor, Pregnancy
Excitement on the side 
