I’m waiting for your Second Birthday slideshow to export and thinking, wow, could it really be two whole years, already? Really? No… really?
I won’t ever forget this night in 2009. Right about now, Dad and I were trying to get a little rest before waiting for you guys to arrive. We were really excited since we knew you were on your way. Okay, terrified too, but mostly excited.
The day you were born I was so sleep deprived and on so many different meds I felt a lot like I was on Mars. So I don’t remember a whole lot about it except that you were so wonderful and you smelled so good and you were so beautiful and so tiny and so perfect. And so very, very mine.
I guess growing up is about you guys gradually becoming less mine and more your own and I’ve decided that’s okay, which is good I think since I have no choice. Every day you learn something new, like how to draw a circle or what yellow is and how it’s different from scratchy or tiny, or that you like puffed rice more than Kix, or how to operate the remote control helicopter. Well, not quite, but impressively close for boys your age. And each new little thing like this stacks up on all those other little things you know and remember and pretty soon, you’re saying things like, “miss Mommy,” when I come home from work and haven’t played with you all day or doing things like sneaking the masking tape out of the junk drawer when I’m around the corner and proudly pronouncing it, “Circle.”
All these little feats of magic add up to one incredible, continuous transformation over time, from being that spark in my heart to that zygote in the petri dish to that fetus in my belly, to those helpless little newborns Dad and I held in our arms, so shakily but so proudly that day two years ago, and now in only two years all the way to this–my big, beautiful boys.
Some tell me I can call you my babies forever, and I probably will. In my heart, I’ll always hang onto the tiny, helpless memory of what you came from, the one that will forever need me, will always be mine. But know too that at the same time, I’ll hold the deepest, most profound gratitude in my heart as I watch you become the boys and in time, the men you were born to be.
I haven’t been here, but then I keep telling you that and so you must know it by now, if you’ve been here and I’ve not been. The reason I haven’t been here is because at work, they now want me to work. Can you believe this shit? And at home, well, there are kids and a dog and a man and two cats, wait. Forget the cats, they suck.
The boys just started sleeping through the night a few weeks ago, but oh my god heavenly bliss! They sleep from around 8pm until anywhere between 6 and 7am, and compared to the living hell of getting up three to four times a night, we are getting sleep. We’re averaging about 6 or 7 hours a night – IN THE SAME BED – even. That’s huge.
But what else is that I’ve gotten to be sleep greedy, so right now it’s 10pm and I have to get up at 5:30am for work tomorrow (not a typical day, but sheesh, that’s early) and I should already be in bed, but I’m not, though I will be soon. As soon as I finish typing this. By the way, I was pumping for most of that paragraph. I got good, yo.
Blogging takes a backseat to sleeping. I know that’s effed up, I do know it. But that’s the way it is.
But on to the good part of this post: Doot and Bing, in heady discourse regarding the merits of breakfast and its ranking among the things we eat. Around the 1:15 mark Doot makes a startling discovery: he has a hand. It’s right there, on the end of his arm.
I’m sorry blog, that I didn’t blog this week. I wanted to, really I did. But some weeks what with two babies and a job it’s just really hard and I’m sorry but this is the truth.
It’s not even like I don’t have anything to blog about, because I do. I’ve got lots of things, see, and when I’m able to remember what those things actually were I will tell you, and then perhaps blog about them too.
I wouldn’t have bothered to post such nonsense, but I needed some sort of introduction to this random video of my cute kids.
Today WM presents three videos. I’m calling this triptych “To pea, or not to pea: The birth of an aesthetic sensibility.”
Above is Doot’s introduction to sweet peas. Yes, they’re organic. No, we didn’t grow them; they’re handy single-serving packs from the big baby food conglomerate and, yeah, they’re about $0.70 a serving, pretty danged expensive when you’re on a frayed shoestring budget. However, they are very convenient, and to New Jerseyans, convenience is everything. (Cue the DKs reference “Give me convenience or give me death.” Yes, I understand the irony.) The other justification I have for my laziness is that while we’re trying out solid foods, I’m not going to buy a bunch of stuff and have it rot in the fridge when they only eat a little bit of it. Their parents already have that problem with the produce intended for adult consumption. I have utopian visions that eventually when all four of us eat the same produce we will eat our way through large heads of leafy green lettuce and buckets of succulent cucumbers. It may be on pizza with lotsa mozzarella, but a boy can dream.
Up to this point, the boys have taken to solids like wombats to sedgegrass. Other than an unfortunate episode with prunes (expelled from both ends in force), they eat rice cereal, sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and bananas. Based on facial expressions and enthusiasm, sweet potatoes and bananas are the favorites. Hello sweet teeth.
Doot is not into peas. Check out his expression. He had downed a bottle not all that long before when he was introduced to them, so we thought perhaps he just wasn’t that hungry. So I tried them again yesterday. He may be a sweet pea, but Doot is not into them.
The development of facial expressions and nonverbal communication at five months is impressive. You can really tell the difference, when, just a couple of minutes later I offer him some sweet potatoes. Yep, the kid is hungry, all right. Ixnay on the legumes, hello beta carotene.
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?
