This is likely my last pregnancy entry, as I’m going to be induced in a couple of hours.
I am feeling quite an eclectic mix of things right now. Scared, yeah. Excited too. Like I’m about to walk off a cliff, too.
I’m not focused on the pain as much as the unknowns. I know it will hurt. I have no idea how much or how I’ll tolerate it. Hopefully I’ll tolerate it just fine with a few pharmaceuticals.
My biggest fear is how the boys are doing and how’ they’ll do during the process. I pray that they tolerate it well and that their bodies are developed enough to have a good start to life.
I am very excited hold them in my arms.
I am a little sad that this very, very sacred time of carrying life inside me is coming to a close now.
Yes, I’m bringing back the famous moms over 35 or over 40 posts. I always want to know who I’m keeping company with in the pregnant over 35 department.
Now I know, Ana Ortiz is on the list.
She’s 38 and expecting her first baby. She’s also from the television show Ugly Betty, which I will tell you right now, I’ve never seen. Because if I’m watching television, it’s the high-brow shit like The Cougar™.
At some point last week I lost track of the days. I didn’t know the date and I had to ask Alex what day of the week it was. At first I thought this was a bad sign that bed rest was driving me into a meltdown, but then when I thought about it I didn’t quite know. Maybe free floating in time for a little while isn’t so bad, especially when the last 28 weeks have been an intense marking of days resulting in no small amount of stress here and there.
Even so, be assured I was completely aware when we all reached Week 28.
It was last Wednesday, 12/3. Two days after my last ultrasound and check-in with the OB/GYN and all was well with us. It was some point after that, but before I started to feel fairly ill that I found myself totally unaware of what day it was.
Then Friday night I began to feel sick to my stomach and got a headache. I had no appetite. A couple of Tylenol took care of the headache, but I had a really tough time eating. I wasn’t sure what to think of this. I hadn’t been anywhere to see people I could catch a stomach bug from. I do know later in pregnancy women lose their appetites because there’s not much room for the stomach. With twins this is obviously going to happen earlier. But it seemed to happen suddenly, with no improvement on Saturday or Sunday. I just didn’t feel right.
Then mid-Sunday morning the contractions started again. About four an hour, not regularly (like one in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 8 minutes, 30 minutes, etc.) which is supposedly okay, but I had just had a good week with hardly any contractions all day on most days. So the onset of this was unnerving. And the contractions were a little different. Some of them were painful, crampy. The kind they said to look out for.
I’ve read that nausea, diarrhea (oh yeah, for your daily dose of TMI, I had that too) can be early signs of labor. Plus I was having the contractions and they went on and on from about 11 am until around 5, which was when I finally broke down and called the on-call service again.
“Come in,” they said. Of course they did. They always want you to come in. “It’s the only way we can tell anything.”
I am getting really tired of pelvic exams, by the way. But two – yes two – last night showed that my cervix is indeed still closed and thick. The first pelvic they did soon after I arrived so they could do another Fetal Fibronectin test (fFN). The resident said, “How do you feel? You’re not contracting at all.” Well I felt great when I heard that.
But after the pelvic, guess what? I was contracting a whole bunch.
“We’re going to start an IV for fluids.”
No, you’re not. If I’m not going to have surgery, and you’re not planning to give me IV meds, you are NOT giving me an IV. Sorry. I mean, why do they even want to give me an IV for that when I can drink?
“Okay, I’ll bring a pitcher of water.”
Great.
Another ultrasound showed Doot and Bing to be totally fine in there, though Bing has flipped around from head down to transverse. Ouch. I asked the doctor if that much movement could have triggered the onset of the contractions. She said no. I didn’t believe her (she’s one doctor there I don’t like all that much, which is pretty good given that there are about 72 doctors I’ve seen there so far).
My fFN came back negative, though. That’s another 7-14 day insurance policy against pre-term labor. Three residents, a medical student, the doctor on call and the nurse all came in to tell me. No shit – six people. Three of them remained to give me a second pelvic exam, “Just to check your cervix to be sure the contractions aren’t changing anything there. Hey (lackey medical student), can you go get my maglite from the other patient’s room?”
It was still the same, and I am not at all certain the second pelvic wasn’t just practice for them.
Is it me or are pelvics getting more intolerable?
“We feel comfortable sending you home.”
Good. Fine with me.
I am back home now and see my regular OB/GYN tomorrow. Of course, I am with a group that has 743 doctors so the only thing regular is the office space – not the physician. I am still not feeling great, but not sure now how much of it is mental. Am I contracting? Sometimes. I’m trying to just ignore it unless it’s super obvious. You can get pretty stressed out with this stuff. At least I can. Even when you’re supposedly doing okay.
I’m already tired of the hospital, and I’m sure I’ll be there again and again before the big day comes. And as helpful as it is to write, I confess it’s hard to blog when you feel sort of shitty all day. Though for whatever reason I still feel like it’s important. To me, at least.
Now, let us not forget there are two babies inside of me growing and growing. It’s week 28 and the boys are:
through the 28 week hurdle, which is a huge deal when you’re worried about pre-term labor. 90% of babies born at 28 weeks can survive.
2.3 oz (Doot) and 2.5 oz (Bing) each and continuing to grow. I thought those weights were fairly kickass, but then I saw this chart and realized that they are merely average. That’s okay. I know their spectacular specialness will shine in other ways. And in pregnancy, I think it’s good to be average.
are opening and closing their eyes. But you’ve got to wonder, what can they see in there? It’s gotta be fairly dark, especially under the covers most of the time.
still kicking, after all these weeks.
As for me, the above has covered most of it. But a few other things to mention:
Colostrum. I’m not going to say anything more about that, other than it was one of my “what the hell is that?” moments last week. If you don’t already know what it is and truly need to know, go here.
Mood. Was feeling pretty good last week when the contractions had subsided. Not so much this week with an upset stomach and all. It’s like a dingy damp cold towel has been wrapped around my brain and I can’t get it off. It’s absolutely no damned help at all that “general malaise” is often cited as a precursor to all kinds of terrible pregnancy problems, like HELLP and/or pre-term labor.
Alex put up curtains in our bedroom to block out the light so I can sleep during the day. I love that man.
As badly as I want Doot and Bing to hang in there for the next 10 weeks and go to full term, some days I feel so done with this pregnancy stuff. It’s little things that I miss being able to do, like go for a walk or hey, how about out of the house to someplace that’s not a medical facility? I now have too much fear about every little thing I feel in my body and I am a lot more frightened of giving birth than I let on.
Can I say all that and not feel like a jerk? Because when you’ve overcome infertility to get to this point, sometimes you just feel ungrateful voicing those feelings. I swear, I am not ungrateful.
I’m just tired. And worried.
And I know, I know. “Get used to it – you’re about to be a mother.”
Just a note to let you all know things have been mercifully quiet with my uterus the last few days. That’s not to say the boys aren’t rocking out in there. In fact, it feels like they’ve been throwing a sock hop.
One of two things seems to be happening. Either a) I’m NOT having very many contractions anymore or B) I’ve managed to successfully ignore them. I don’t think it’s B, or at least I hope not. It’s tough because the entire ordeal has made me a lot less trustworthy of my body, and that’s exactly what I have to be right now.
But every little twitch or flutter, I find myself pressing on my belly. Is it hard? Is it starting to ball up? Is that a contraction or is the baby just moving around?
It doesn’t help that different doctors tell me different things about this. For example, one doctor told me that if I felt just one part of my belly getting hard, it was the baby moving. On a different day, a different doctor told me that was a localized contraction and I should monitor it. He said if I felt the baby moving, then no. But you know what? I don’t always feel them when they move. I am not sure how that can be at this point, but when I was hooked up to monitors I heard a lot more movement than I felt.
So I’m just, well, I just kind of don’t know.
I do know that overall I feel better, and I feel less tightening in my uterus, so I think the bedrest has really made a positive difference. Though I look at the weeks stretching out ahead and the walls of my bedroom and think, “AFFFHHSJSJAALALLLPASAAADRRRGFGHHHHH!” That’s shorthand for, “Oh my fucking god I can’t wait to do dishes and walk the dog and clean the house and go out of the house for any reason besides the doctor and this room so needs to be painted and holy crap I still have unfinished work stuff I need to take care of and oh shit I didn’t bring the disability forms with me yesterday and I need to get those filled out and argh I should really be more productive than lying in bed all day on the internet I should read a good novel and catch up on some phone calls but I really hate talking on the phone and don’t want to explain this shit all over again and again and I haven’t even started any Christmas shopping oh fuck it we’re broke anyway can we get a pass on Christmas this year or what and oh that reminds me we need to send a gift to our nephew who just had a birthday and “ALEX???? Can you bring me some ______________?”
They sprung me last night when one of my doctors, another high-risk Maternal Fetal Medicine (MFM doctor) decided to do another Fetal Fibronectin (fFN) test. “Let’s just see,” he said. He was curious if my last test could have been a false positive. I was curious too because you know, I just had this feeling. I don’t know what it was. Something about the look on the resident’s face as he wielded the swab. I didn’t quite trust it.
Last night at around 6:30 the new fFN test came back negative, which is a 98% insurance policy against preterm labor in the next 7-14 days.
“Pack up – you’re going home,” they said. I so wasn’t expecting that. Luckily Alex had just brought me sweat pants or I would have been leaving the hospital in my bird jammies. But I would have left just the same.
Monday night I started a different medication called Indomethacin. It’s sort of like strong Advil. You can only use it for about 48 hours or else you start to have risks for the babies, but this medication actually seems to work – a lot better than Procardia. And I haven’t had any side effects from it. So my contractions stopped. Two hours at different times of day, on the monitor, with nada, zip, nothing from my cranky uterus.
“Have you been feeling any contractions?” they asked.
See, here’s where it starts to get frustrating. What I thought I’d been feeling as contractions were often not picked up in monitoring. Or, I’d feel nothing at all, and they’d tell me they’d picked a few contractions up. So now I don’t really know what I’m feeling. That doesn’t help.
My plan? Do NOT to over think this. Last time my body was acting in a troubling way I knew it and I called the doctor. This is me, trying to learn to trust my intuition – something I’m normally really bad at. But I think my intuition has been pretty spot on during this pregnancy. So I’m not going to obsess over every little twitch. Not with a 98% assurance that things are okay for now.
So, this was quite the tricky pregnancy diary update. I tried starting it a number of times in the hospital and as you can see it’s a late getting here. Not that I couldn’t blog, mind you. But blogging specifically about the boys’ development and my wait for labor was so close to the epicenter of my fear for the last several days, it wasn’t a real go-to blogging topic.
But we’re alright now.
And hey guess what? I’ve been calculating my weeks wrong, so when I was writing these updates all along I thought I was a week behind where I was. As of today we have finished 27 weeks worth of gestation. That means last week was week 27 and now we are crawling to that magical 28 number – the point in time when 90% of babies born prematurely survive. This is key given the last couple of weeks.
Here’s the package as of last night:
Funny, for a month’s worth of growth it doesn’t seem so dramatically bigger than week 23, does it? But it is bigger, that I can tell you. And so are they.
In the past couple of weeks, the boys have:
grown to about just over 2 lbs each, according to our last ultrasound on 11/20. Not too bad for twins, if I do say so myself.
been flipping around in there like two-pounder circus fish, if there was such a thing as circus fish (there isn’t, right?)
fully developed hands, which I am certain they’re using to spar with each other in utero
fingerprints and foot prints
begun to recognize my voice. Too bad it’s not giving them something more compelling to listen to besides “Alex?!?! Can you ________ ? (get me some water, let the dog out, throw this in the laundry, etc, etc, etc.“
And what’s important to note, according to Mayo, if babies are born at 27 weeks they have about an 85% survival rate. I don’t like to think morbidly but after 5 days in the hospital worried about such possibilities, I couldn’t escape it. So there it is.
As for me, well you probably know all that’s needed about the last few weeks from the previous few entries, but I’ll share some belated wisdom:
I KNEW I should have been out of work earlier. I knew it because of my back pain, which I bitched about endlessly here from week 21 on. I really thought the degree of pain I was having was not right, and I am kicking myself that I wasn’t more assertive about going out of work sooner. On the weekends when I could lay down every time I started to feel uncomfortable I had little back pain. Every day I had to stand or sit for longer than an hour I had problems. The contractions both times started the day after I’d been to work. I explained this to one of the doctors after the first hospitalization, but still she said, “Let’s put you out at 28 or 30 weeks.” I should have said, “Uh, no dear, I know how I feel and I’m not going back.” Let that be a lesson to me. Especially since work didn’t care one iota about me coming back.
I didn’t mention it, but I am on strict bedrest now. And after less than 24 hours of being home, I’m staring at the walls of my bedroom going, “Damn, this room needs to be painted.” Nesting instincts are a piss poor match for strict bedrest. I can get up to go to the bathroom, take a quick shower and downstairs once a day. Not going to get a lot of nesting done in this context. “Alex, can you please paint the bedroom?” No, seriously, he’s got enough to do.
Thanksgiving will now be here. Everyone wants to visit, which is really nice. But I will be horizontal and Alex will be frantically putting the house in order today to receive said guests on short notice. I am not sure but I think he gets the raw end of the bedrest deal. I think a nice invite for him out somewhere tomorrow with a plate of leftovers for me might have worked a little better, but oh well. Thank god he’s a good sport and has a better sense of humor.
And anyway, I’m still totally psyched for turkey, and all the more so with my dog at my feet drooling at the chance for dropped crumbs. (Okay I admit, not all of them are accidental.) But I’ll have to work on Alex to get the whole “afternoon tea” thing down.
Everything is still status quo, but it’s Monday and I’m not going home from the hospital today. Probably not tomorrow either.
This mostly boils down, once again, to what I call my “clusterfuck of life timing” issue. Because I am having preterm contractions now at this moment, when we – me & the boys – are only 26 weeks and 5 days along, and because of my positive Fetal Fibronectin test, the medical team is understandably nervous about sending me home.
Now, they would have sent me home if I could take Procardia, a medication that stops contractions, but I seem to react badly to it. I tried to take another low dose this afternoon but within 15 minutes I had heart palpitations that made me feel like I was in a full blown panic. Man did that suck. There are other medications they can use to stop contractions, but none of them look like a good long-term bet for me right now, so I think the plan is to just watch me here and make sure I don’t go into labor.
They will probably keep me here until we hit 28 weeks, which would be next Wedneday. At that point they said they might be more comfortable with “watch and wait” at home. But we’ll see. As I now know, anything can happen in a week.
I am pretty okay with this plan, as much as I want to go home. I’d rather be bored here than home biting my damn nails over every flutter or tightening in my belly. We’ve come a long way to get to this point and I will do anything, anything at all to keep the guys in there gestating for as long as possible.
A little while ago a 14 year old Chaplain (okay, maybe she was 26?) came in and asked me if I wanted her to pray over me. It was so awkward, but I felt bad for her so I said okay. She rambled a little, “Um, God, um, heavenly father, dear Lord um please be with um Amy here today…” and I tried to look serious – but it really wasn’t easy.
Besides that, they brought me a cannoli and a cream puff this afternoon and asked me if I wanted tea or coffee. And the pastries? They were totally edible!
As long as wireless holds and the boys stay put, we’re doing just fine.
If you’ve read much of this blog before, then you may already know that I had IVF in order to get pregnant, and maybe you know that’s because I have blocked fallopian tubes after an ectopic pregnancy (naturally conceived) I had last year. You might even know that I’ve been trying to get pregnant since January 2005.
And you may recall me saying that infertility sucks balls. Before infertility, I was the kind of person who’d look at someone undergoing treatment like IVF and say, “there are so many kids already born who need homes – why would anyone go through IVF?” Oh yes, I did say that. And I meant it, working with a lot of homeless kids in shelters at the time. I mentally stab myself in the leg with a fork for that now.
So. For the past 3+ years I have been as avoidant of any baby-related social event as I could be. I was extra specially hyper avoidant of the dreaded friend/extended family member’s baby shower. Just. Couldn’t. Do. It.
Because I have an ego, early in my pregnancy I’d made an announcement to those I thought needed to hear it – no baby shower! I did not want to ask my family and friends to participate in an event I had willfully (maybe even spitefully) ignored for the last 3+ years of my life. I just couldn’t face those people or look at how poorly I’d handled my feelings over being infertile in the social context. So more avoidance had been my plan.
How was I going to get the hundreds, or perhaps thousands of dollars worth of gear I was going to need? Hell, I thought these babies would be more like puppies. A cardboard box and some sheets would do, right? They don’t do anything but eat and sleep for awhile – how much could they possibly need? (Hey, I might be 39 years old but what did do I know about babies?)
Six weeks ago or so, someone let it slip that a surprise shower was in the works. I won’t say who. Actually, no less than five someones let it slip. I was told out of kindness, so I would be able to either stop it or prepare myself for it. When I found out, I cried. I was angry, frustrated, a little humiliated and damn it, here was another thing about this pregnancy that felt out of control.
Then I mentally slapped myself. Because I suddenly understood clearly that this baby shower wasn’t about me, and this was something I was going to have to get used to if I was going to be a Mom.
See, the masterminds of the dreaded affair were my stepmother and her daughter, my stepsister, “A”. A has been battling cancer for almost five years. She’s been recovering most recently from lung surgery ever since April. She is still on oxygen and has dialysis three days a week (from the damage previous cancer treatment has done to her kidneys).
There is nothing – nothing – like a loved one’s cancer to make you understand what is and what is not a big deal in life. My ego? SO not a big deal. Even though I couldn’t see that at first, my stepmom could. And she understood that my babies needed stuff, and that I was going to need help no matter how reluctant I am to admit it or accept it.
While my stepmom was booking the restaurant and paying the bills, A was in charge of all the details – from the invitations to the decorations to the shower games. She put that shower at the center of her free time for over a month, painting custom made centerpieces and hand rolling adorable little favors between dialysis and schlepping into the city for experimental chemo treatment. “I loved doing it,” she said. I know she did, too.
If that realization wasn’t humbling enough, all of my extended family came out. All of them – even those whose RSVPs I never returned when they had showers of their own, to whom I’d never bothered to send a card or gift of acknowledgment of any kind when their own kids were born. They were all there and they outfitted my two kids better than NASA equips the shuttle.
I told you I am an ass. Did you think I was kidding?
To top it all off, would you believe that it was A’s best day since her surgery in April? She didn’t use her oxygen for most of the event, despite the fact that she was running around, handling gifts and guests and wait staff. I haven’t seen her with that kind of energy since before her operation.
When I stood up to thank everyone, I cried. I’ve done my share of crying over the last few years, but somehow these pregnancy tears are different. Yeah, I still get those snot filled migraine styled headaches when it goes on for too long. But I’m not in mental anquish when the tears come.
I think I’m just experiencing the literal awesomeness of what the whole thing means.
You know, the life cycle and the continuation of our very existence. The way love in a family can transcend any one member’s social transgressions and promote the healing of a bitter past and maybe thensome.
Ed.’s Warning: This post is epic and contains varying amounts of bitching, moaning and gratuitous hospital footage.
Me, Bing, Doot, circa 23 weeks
Included in this extra special week was one historic election and one trip to the emergency room. On the same day, even.
Last Saturday I was suddenly feeling much worse. I’d been trying to get a grip on some debilitating back pain for weeks and had restricted a lot of my activities to reduce pain. Remember, no pain meds allowed and Tylenol, I’m sorry, doesn’t do it for me. Not that I mind being a couch spore. My remedy for back pain has meant spending most of my time between my bed, the dog’s couch, and the kitchen table. I’ve become furniture for the cats, basically.
On Saturday I became incredibly out of breath and was having heart palpitations over even the smallest activity – like walking up six stairs to go to the bathroom or taking a shower. Sunday night I woke up in the middle of the night, went to the bathroom and when I came back to bed my heart was thumping in my chest like I had a 12 pound freshly caught Tilapia flipping around in there. It was kind of, you know, scary.
I called the Doc’s office on Monday. They didn’t seem terribly concerned about it, but they did push my regular appointment up to Tuesday morning. That would be…
Election Day.
Coolest f'in president ever, k?
Now, I have been wringing my hands, biting my nails, on the edge of my seat, anxiously pouring over every bit of political text I can find for months and months. I did some canvassing for Obama in PA during the primary, but given my physical circumstances I wasn’t inclined to do much more than give a lot of money I didn’t have and argue with people in my family. (That arguing politics with family while pregnant thing – not recommended, really.)
Suffice to say, I’d waited a long damn time for election day.
With early reports of lines in NYC being as long as 2 hours, I worried about how I was going to handle a long wait to vote as right now, it’s too painful for me to stand in line for 10 minutes at the grocery store. But I’d worried for no reason because in my very liberal little town, the polling place at 8am had no lines – just a bunch of happy voters, smiling and milling about. We voted, grabbed a couple of coffee rolls to celebrate, and went home to sweat it out as we waited for the results.
At 10:45 am we had the distraction of my doctor’s appointment, and the walk from the parking deck to the OB/GYN’s office just sucked. I felt like I was sprinting the whole way. “Can this be normal?” I reported everything to my doctor. She checked the heartbeats of Bing and Doot and they were fine. Mine? A little off.
“Your heart’s skipping around, jumping all over the place.” She decided to send me to the ER. “You’re carrying twins, so this probably isn’t the last time you’ll be over there.” Words of comfort, to be sure.
When I got there they bumped me to the front of a long line of assorted disheveled, pissed off sick folks. Hooked up to the pulse monitor I could hear my heart jumping all over the place. Man did that suck. You really count on certain things in your life to be steady and predictable. The beating of your own heart would rank about #1 on that list, even if you don’t consciously think of it. When it’s as erratic as a McCain campaign stunt, the whole world starts to feel a little shaky.
They put me on a stretcher in the back, popped an IV into me, took oh about 17 quarts of blood, stuck a heart monitor on me. I couldn’t look at it though. I got an EKG and the doctor came back and explained I had some extra hearbeats – PVCs he said. Premature Ventricular Contractions.
Well thank heavens I had the presence of mind to bring my new little camcorder – the Flip. I love this thing with all my heart and I’ll blog it another time. But in any case, it’s the size of an iPod and here’s what you can do with it:
Not the most flattering video of me, but hey, it’s totally real!
So anyway, were the PVCs anything serious? In and of themselves, no. But could they be a sign of something really bad? Combined with the shortness of breath and fatigue, yeah. So the testing commenced. An ultrasound of my legs showed no blood clots or anything, which was good. But now, here’s where I get upset.
I had to get a chest x-ray and a CT-scan of my lungs. No direct radiation to my boys but there could be a little “scatter” and SHIT FUCK DAMN YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET ANY RADIATION WHEN YOU ARE PREGNANT!
So, why did I agree to do it?
The doctors were concerned I might have had a pulmonary embolism. You know, that blood clot thing in your lungs that can kill you.
Here’s where I invoke my right to smack the shit out of the resident assigned that day. My hospital is a teaching hospital, affiliated with the medical university that I’ve worked for since 1999. I’ve helped train my share of residents when I was clinical staff on the psych unit. So guess what? I have a right to SMACK THE SHIT out of the residents when they annoy me.
What was annoying me? I asked, calmly – logically, responsibly – “Can you tell me the risks this test poses to my unborn children?” And you know what I got in response?
“The risk of this test is to them is a lot smaller than the risk to you if we don’t do this test, trust me.”
Hello? Is that what I asked you, bitch? NO. I asked “WHAT is the risk to MY UNBORN.” Not, “What’s the bigger risk?” or “Should I really have this test done?” I was quite the perturbed.
With more reasonable prompting, he did go over some of the risks, which include really great things like an increase in childhood cancer rates from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 7,000. Is that risk still relatively small? Yes. Is it smaller than the risk of pulmonary embolism? Yeah, of course. Did it make sense to have the testing if the doctors were really concerned? Of course it did.
But I still felt god awful for having exposed my kids to even that much risk. Really god damned awful.
Guess what? I didn’t have a pulmonary embolism. Thank God. Seriously, thank God. All of my labs were normal. I was fine, other than my heart jumping all over the place. Verdict? Gosh we dunno. Plan? Outpatient follow-up with cardiology for more thorough evaluation. Go home now. It was 7:30pm.
I went home to begin watching the election results, though I almost couldn’t do it as the day had been so emotional. But I did anyway, because, seriously, how could I not watch one of the greatest moments in the history of the modern world?
I was glad I did. At 11pm when Keith Olberman announced Obama was our new president-elect, I cried. Man, did I cry. Then during Obama’s speech I cried. Hard.
But I felt good. And you know what? My heart felt good. Because I knew then that I’d be bringing my boys into a world where we have a chance of making the world a better place. And as I gradually start to move into my new role as a mother, I realize there’s nothing I care more about than that.
So how are Doot and Bing doing in week 23? They are:
Kicking, kicking, kicking. In fact, last night I had my first experience of actually seeing a well placed kick by Doot lift a paperback off my belly. Whoa! Sometimes it’s adorable. Sometimes, not so much. Like that kick to the bladder this morning.
Able to hear me and Alex, for sure. Do they think it’s weird how much we talk to and/or about the dog? Do they like that Kings of Leon song I keep blasting over and over? How do they like the Rachel Maddow show? The things you wonder about.
Developing their lungs and the blood vessels to the lungs, which is all kinds of important right now. Statistically speaking, when they get to 24 weeks old they’ve got a 50/50 chance at viability outside of me if their lungs grow enough. But…here’s to praying there’s no need for that.
And as for me? Well, if the long entry above the bullets wasn’t enough for you, let me recap:
I’ve got some physical stuff going on right now that’s not exactly what I’d hoped and dreamed my long wished for pregnancy would be. But you know what? So far it’s nothing so dreadful that I can’t sleep at night worrying. I can deal with it.
I am always, always, always worried about money. I don’t know if this will ever stop now that I’m about to be a mom, but God I hope so. My strategy so far is to try not to think about it. Good plan, eh?
I’m trying to figure out how to salvage the rest of my work responsibilities from now until D-Day given the stuff going on. But for some reason, I don’t care all that much. Changing priorities, anyone?
