CD1

Some recent happenings:

• Since the last time I posted, I not only got my endometrial biopsy done, but I got the results. It turns out I have an “immature” endometrium. (Just like the rest of me! Har har!) Sooo, that could have been the cause of miscarriage #1 and #2. It is easily treated with progesterone, so it’s all good. The only annoying thing is that I have to either try (and use progesterone starting at 2dpo), or not try (and use birth control). No “just seeing what happens,” because if something happened and I didn’t use progesterone, that would be bad.
• The other kind of crappy thing is we’re talking A LOT of effing progesterone – 200mg twice per day. The nighttime dose is no big deal since I’m going to sleep anyway, but the morning dose is going to make me a walking zombie 12 days a month. But, I’m lucky that this is an easily fixable problem so I will put on my big girl pants and upgrade my morning coffee from half-caf to a full-caf.
• So, we’re going to try. I’m going to be 35 next week, we want at least one more kid (and it took us three years to have this one), so I guess it’s time.
• In other news, Henry turned 1! We had a little party for him and he got spoiled rotten with toys.
• He’s walking all over the place, it’s been so nice out lately and it’s so fun to watch him toddle around outside.
• His new favorite toy is the plunger and the toilet brush. Obviously, we take them away but he’s pretty resourceful for a 13 month old and always seems to find them again.
• He’s transitioning to toddler room at daycare and it’s not going well. I am filled with angst and want to quit my job and stay home with him. Alas.
• I am down to pumping once a day, and not getting much. My body seems to be weaning itself without any help from me at this point, so I’m just going with it. I’m trying to give Henry breast milk at home since at school he drinks a lot of cow’s milk (he’s not a fan of food, so much) and it makes him constipated. (Which isn’t fun for anyone.)

I think that’s all for now!

 

Back in the saddle

Happy Thanksgiving! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! I guess a lot has happened since the last time I posted. I’m having a hard time remembering the blog-worthy parts, so instead I will just tell you about my doctor’s appointment today.

I finally got my period back a few months ago (9 months postpartum), and my husband and I aren’t using any protection (except for the fact that we have an infant and my sex drive is in the crapper) so I decided I should get myself to my miscarriage doctor to get checked out. I went this morning and was unexpectedly depressed by it. You see, for the past few years I have had the following theory about my three miscarriages:

• Miscarriage #1: Happened at about 6 weeks. Was probably a chromosomal error.
• Miscarriage #2: Chemical. Also probably chromosomal error.
• Miscarriage #3: Fetal demise at 12 weeks. Normal chromosomes. Probably from chronic endometritis that I probably got in the D&C from miscarriage #1.

Except that today I found out that miscarriage #1, was, in fact, normal. (She had sent the tissue out for crazy high tech testing, but I had gotten pregnant with Henry and graduated to my OB before the results came back.) This is sort of rocking my worldview because what if there is something really wrong with me and Henry was just a fluke?

I know that I’m lucky to have him, and that if we just have him that will be A-OK. But I am stressed about starting to try again now, and my cavalier attitude of “it worked before, so it should work again!” is sort of in the crapper. Before today, I was sort of thinking I was not ready for another pregnancy and all the anxiety and stress that would come with it, not to mention the whole having both an infant and toddler to take care of thing. Now I feel like I need to get this show on the road.

The plan is to do an endometrial biopsy next month to see how my uterus is holding up in there, and then go from there.

Broken pump, starving baby, and leaking boobs the size of basketballs

We got back from our trip to California on Sunday and lo, it was a relief. Because on the last day of the trip, I realized I had left my pump charger in the hotel (we had checked out and driven the two hours back to LA by the time I realized this). And by the time I realized it, it was 10pm at night and the baby was asleep. Our flight was at 9am the next day – so no time for a quick stop at Target (especially on a Sunday). And the pump only had about 10 minutes of battery life left.

This is pretty much an exclusive pumper’s worst nightmare. I could not get the milk out for the baby to eat, and my boobs almost didn’t make it past airport security given the fact that they were about to explode. Luckily, we had bought formula earlier in the trip as a result of a bad-fridge-milk-spoilage snafu, so that part was fine.

My approach to the basketball boobs problem:

Step 1: Decide to try nursing again after 9 months of exclusive pumping. Surely it will work now, because I am desperate!  It … did not. I got bitten, I screamed, and we are done. D – U – N DONE nursing. Forever. Again.

Step 2: Watch YouTube videos on hand expressing milk and desperately try to take the edge of in the shower. I really couldn’t figure it and didn’t get much out.

Step 3: Ask my husband if he felt like a snack. He did not.

Step 4: Panic.

When we landed, we drove right to my office, as I keep a spare pump there so I don’t have to schlep it back and forth every day. Once we got there, I could not figure out how to get in off hours – all the doors were locked and there was no security. (On Monday, I asked my boss and found out how, but it isn’t an obvious way.)

From there, we headed to Target. I bought a manual hand pump (Medela Harmony) for $42, busted out my left boob in the car in the parking lot, and started cranking away. (You’re welcome.)

Later I remembered that I have three friends who own Freestyles, and I could probably just borrow one of their chargers, which I did. And life was good.

So now I own three (3) breast pumps. And yet, I really want to wean myself from it, so I think it’s time to get started with that.

Important Update: It Wasn’t the Yogurt

Yesterday we flew to LAX. Henry got really fussy mid-flight, so I thought I’d walk him up and down the aisles. Mid-walk, he hurled on me. At least it didn’t get on anyone else! Yuck.

Other than that the flight went great!

Blog Share!

Yay Blog Share! Below is an anonymous post from one of the blog share participants.

***

I am 39 years old and a recovering anorexic. While behaviors were present in my pre-teen years I wasn’t fully aware of being anorexic until high school. My restricting came and went. Very few people knew I was sick – and on the outside I seemed healthy. It wasn’t until ten years ago that a relapse into the disease made it obvious that I had a serious problem.

After hospitalization and years of treatment I am back in recovery…and out of shape and overweight. My current BMI is 34.6 – according to the chart that is obese and near severely obese (35.0). My weight gain is a combination of things (and could be multiple blog posts) – black and white actions on my part concerning both food and exercise, and medication. I have a hard time finding the middle ground. With exercise and food it’s more of an either/or and not anything in moderation. I keep working on this day in and day out. It’s never far from my conscious thought. Additionally, the medications I take to keep me healthy lead to weight gain – such irony!

My message to you after sharing a tiny bit of my back story: 1) if you see someone who is overweight don’t assume that person is a lazy slob. As with most things, there is a lot more to a situation than what is seen on the surface. And B) if you are self-conscious about your weight or other physical attributes rest assured that no one is nearly as interested in what you look like as you are.

Love yourself. Love others. Life is way too short.

***

Here are the blogs participating:

Andrea Unplugged

April on Ashley

Bright Yellow World

Drifts Get Deeper

Malfeasance

Our Little Geekling

The Reluctant Grownup

Together They Come

Did I Say That Outloud?

Snarke

Operation Pink Herring

Nonsense and Frippery

Mama Bub

Heidikins

Nothing is Easier than Self-Deceit

And You Know What Else

I guess we aren’t ready for yogurt

Ugh.

I’ve been puked on a lot in my nine months as a mother. I have never really minded it all that much, I have to say. It creates a lot of laundry but has never grossed me out. I suppose it is like poop – when what’s going in is mostly breastmilk, what’s coming out is really not that bad, you know?

Until yesterday. We tried yogurt for the first time on the advice of Henry’s pediatrician, and that. Was the foulest. Hurl I have ever encountered. It stunk up everything and kept coming up for half an hour, befouling three pairs of jammies and two sheets (there were aftershocks), and OF COURSE it got in all over his hair.

No more yogurt for at least a month. I don’t know if that’s what made him hurl, but I can’t deal with that again for awhile.

***

We are starting the estate planning process now that we have Henry. Choosing guardians is proving quite difficult. We have three options – the husband’s sister (we’ll call her SIL), my friend E (you might remember her as the mother of twins and harbinger of doom), and my parents.

My parents would be great except they’ll be 80 when Henry graduates high school, and that’s less than ideal. My friend is E is my top choice, but the husband is concerned that she is not family. Also, she’s my friend, and he doesn’t really know her all that well. My SIL is my husband’s top choice, but I just do not feel comfortable with that. I am worried she won’t give my parents as enough access to Henry. And I have a few concerns about how she’s raised my niece – things that are fine, really, just not how I want Henry to grow up.

I don’t see how we’re going to agree on this, unless we just name my parents and hope for the best on the age thing. Have any of you had this discussion? How have you compromised?

***

Today or tomorrow I am participating on Blog Share, hosted by -R-, on this here blog. Blog Share is the chance to write an anonymous post – so I write something and it gets posted on one of the other participant’s blogs, and someone else writes something and I post it here. This blog is itself sort of semi-anonymous in that I post pictures of myself and my baby (and I’ve met some of you in person), but I haven’t actually TOLD anyone I know about this blog. Including my husband.*

At the same time, I’ve written very little on here that I would feel embarrassed about anyone I know reading, if they found it.** So I might take this opportunity to write something I would not want someone who knows me in real life to read.

Anyway, it’s fun! The anonymous posts are always really good, and it’s a great way to find new blogs.

* I also haven’t hidden it from him.  I type on it when he’s in the room, leave the browser history as is (though we have our own computers). A few years ago, I used to have a blog that all my friends read, and the fact that they read it was stifling my honesty and what I wrote. At the time we talked about me having a new blog that I didn’t tell anyone about, including him. So … now I do.

** Other than the stuff about me putting my pee in the fridge. And my gunk.

Dear Henry, at 8 months

Dear Henry,

I have exactly today to write this post, because tomorrow you turn nine months old. Nine months! My lands, child.

Last week you finally figured out how to crawl. The month before it finally clicked was difficult for you – you wanted so badly to be on the move and would constantly hurl the top half of your body in random directions, but you couldn’t figure out the mechanics of moving your arms and legs. And let’s just not talk about the sleep regression that accompanied the learning to crawl era. The very day that you figured it out, you started sleeping through the night again. Both that, and seeing you loving your new mode of transportation, make me so happy. There is only one problem now – because you look down when you crawl, you haven’t quite figured out when you’ve reached your destination. This means that you headbutt everything. I am a little nervous about someone calling DCFS on me because of all the bruises on your forehead.

Also, your dad and I haven’t baby proofed  yet. We should probably get on that. 

Your dad and I are super big geeks, and we dressed you up as Captain Kirk for Halloween. I figured that we only had two Halloweens to pick your costume for you, so why not go for it?  We didn’t do anything terribly exciting for the holiday, but we did go to a party in your aunt’s neighborhood where your dad and I were pretty much the only two adults dressed up. I’m not sure that anyone found our Mr. Spock and Uhura costumes as hilarious as I personally did, but that’s why we brought a phaser with us.

Right now you love:

• Taking my glasses off my face – the most fun game ever! Especially when Mommy and Henry both have pinkeye and the glasses are here to stay.
• Standing at the coffee table and banging stuff on it
• Other kids, especially older kids. You find them absolutely hilarious and just giggle and giggle at them.
• Sleeping on your belly
• Eating peas
• Our puppies and kitties
• Baths

And you hate:

• Sitting still, as there is way too much to do on the floor
• Cauliflower. You puke every time I try to give it to you. (I’ve stopped trying to give it to you. Very effective, my man.)
• Naps
• Getting out of the bathtub

I think you’re awesome, Henry. I love you so much.

Love,

Mommy

We don’t talk about baby poop at adult dinners

A few random thoughts today.

Regarding my crappy social life, I went out to an adult dinner the Saturday night. Like, it started at 8pm. Normally, I start getting ready for bed at 8pm.

Anyway, so the evening started out with my friend driving the two of us there (my husband stayed home with the baby), and I pumped on the way. This worked out great and saved a lot of time, but I didn’t allow myself enough time to unhook myself before we pulled up at the valet. AWKWARD when the valet guys opened all the doors in the car and I’m trying to screw on my milk bottle cap while still wearing a nursing cover. 

Dinner was fine and it was good to get out and socialize. I made the mistake of talking about baby poop and got scolded, though. I have to remember that you don’t do that at adult dinners.

***

My dog Kevin all of a sudden seems to love Henry. Before, he certainly didn’t dislike him, but he would move away from Henry if he was crying or throwing a fit or whatever. And there were some sibling rivalry/adjustment issues at first (I think this was taken the day we brought Henry home):

On Friday, though Kevin gave Henry a kiss on the face. (I might have gotten grossed out by that, but since Henry is sick and pretty much a big ball of snot right now, there are more disgusting things on his face, you know?) And we moved Henry’s crib into his own room last week, and now in the middle of the night, Kevin will go in there to sleep. Like he’s keeping an eye on him or something.

I love that my babies love each other.

***

Henry is trying so very hard to crawl. He totally wants to be on the move, so he constantly hurls the top half of his body in random directions. Then he gets stuck on one of his legs. I can see the wheels moving in his head as he tries to figure out how to go forward, but so far it hasn’t clicked. He can go backwards by lifting himself up on his hands and then slipping back, but that’s more frustrating for him than anything since he keeps getting farther and farther away from his intended destination.

Yesterday he pulled himself up to standing for the first time (that I’ve seen). He LOVES to stand. His favorite thing in the world is to stand while holding onto the coffee table, with one hand holding onto the coffee table and the other banging something (preferably a Medela bottle cap) on it. Bonus if the TV is on (which it rarely is when he’s awake).

***

I think I am starting to want to quit pumping. I’m down to four times a day, and I don’t really mind any of them except for the early morning one. On work days, I pump at 6am. Before, Henry was sleeping through the pumping on work days, which made things easier, but lately he has been waking up at 5:45am every day (he poops and then can’t go back to sleep).  I am pretty much over wrangling the baby before and during the morning pumping. I hate trying to change a diaper with 20oz of milk bursting to get out of my boobs. I don’t like trying to feed him a bottle while I pump, since I usually put him in his high chair and he really does best with bottles when he’s lying down. I feel terrible when he gets bored and upset and wants out and I still have 10 minutes to go.

On the other hand, I really enjoy eating apple fritters and Ben and Jerry’s to my heart’s content. The weight thing? Totally over it. I eat when I’m hungry and my weight has stabilized. Still no period, though.

I think I can make it to a year. Definitely getting ready to see the light at the end of the tunnel, though.

My social life is in the crapper

When I was younger, I always used to wonder why my parents had no friends. I mean, looking back, I guess they did have a few – a neighbor or two, maybe a golf buddy for my dad – but really, they didn’t socialize much.  I sort of thought they were kind of lame in that regard.

Now that I have a kid, I totally get it. At least for the baby years. Given Henry’s 7:15pm bedtime, getting out and doing anything social on a weeknight means a quick, rushed dinner, and so it is usually reserved for special occasions. On Friday nights, I am TIRED. This leaves the weekends, which frankly are more tiring that the weekdays. Then there is the planning aspect – it’s difficult to plan things with other people, because I never know when exactly is going to be a good time – when Henry will not need a nap and I won’t need to pump and I can use our car and blah blah blah. Plus, many of my friends have their own kids, so they have all the same problems.

We usually manage to do one social thing every other weekend. Last weekend we did a quick 5:30 Sunday dinner with friends. This weekend it was more or less just us. The weird thing for me is – I’m getting to the point where my husband is really my best friend. 

Now, to some extent, he’s been my best friend for a long time. But the thing is – I’ve always ALSO had a girlfriend filling that role – and now I’m not sure I do.  For a long time, I’ve had a best friend, T. She lives in Australia (she relocated there years ago, but we were roommates together right out of college). T is the person I could tell ANYTHING, no matter how embarrassing, how gross, whatever. We Skype once a month and used to do a yearly trip (I would visit her, she would come back to the US, we met in Fiji once), plus email. But now that I have Henry – it’s hard to keep up with any of that except the Skypes. Sometimes it takes me a week to respond to a basic email – I see it, and I mean to write back, but I have so many little things to do that it just doesn’t get done. I still consider her a good friend, but you lose something when you don’t make the effort to keep up as much. And that’s all on me.

And then I have had a local best friend, A. A and I had a rough time last year – she said something that really hurt me about how I was “wasting energy” by being sad about my miscarriages. She apologized the next week, but I never really got over it. I mean, I understand that she didn’t mean to hurt me, and I forgave her for that, but what she said is so much a part of who she is and how she thinks about things. It makes me want to keep my guard up around her. Add that to the whole being exhausted/scheduling difficulties thing, and we don’t get together much right now.

So … is this how I become my parents? I wonder if they just lost touch with all their friends when they had babies and then never managed to rebuild the relationships or create new ones. I don’t want that to happen to me.

My employer poops on flexible work arrangements

 

I kind of hit my breaking point at work a few days ago. My boss is a great guy, and I think that he genuinely likes me, values my contributions, and wants me to succeed in the company. So, he had been given me all kinds of opportunities – he was going to make me a project leader, he was going to give me two direct reports (I’ve never managed people before) and he was going to give me a group of students to direct in their internship.

The thing is, I’m still new to this company. I mean, I guess I’ve been here 11 months, but it was broken up right in the middle by my maternity leave. I go to meetings and a lot of times have no idea who most of the other people are, or, if things go off on a tangent, what the hell they are talking about. There are politics I don’t understand yet, and I’m always afraid of making a gaffe. I feel like I’m out of my comfort zone the vast majority of the time.

Also, I’m introverted, and I would prefer to spend most of my time at my desk, working.  (Not that I can’t relate to people, I just find it tiring to do it all day long.) The new roles my boss wanted me to take on mean a lot of meetings, a lot of careful handling of situations.

Plus, there is the fact that I want to work part-time, and the new responsibilities would mean more work, not less.

Anyway, I’m not usually one to say no to people. But I was so overwhelmed by everything I was going to be taking on, that I just kind of exploded. (In a nice, professional way, of course. I furrowed my brow and such.) Over the course of a week, I met with my boss every day to work out how to make things better. I told him that all this stuff was too much, that I could take on one of the new things, maybe two, but not all three. And I told him that I knew it was probably a non-starter, but that I wanted to work four days a week.

He looked surprised and said that he’d have to ask his boss. Now, I pretty much knew this wasn’t going to happen. There are a couple of women at my office who have had babies over the last couple of years. One tried a flexible work arrangement (4 10 hours days, with the fifth day off), but it didn’t last long before they told her to go back to a normal schedule. Another, who had her baby a few months after me, asked to work from home one day a week, but her boss said no, because if he let her do it, he’d have to let everyone do it. But even though I knew it was a long shot, because he didn’t dismiss it out of hand, I started to get excited about the idea.

When he came back after talking to his boss, he said that the only part time options my company offers is for 20 hours a week. (I wanted to do 32.) That’s not really an option, both because I can’t really afford to cut down that much, and because it would be pretty hard to do my job. What he suggested, though, was “working from home” with Henry there one afternoon a week. Which means, of course, that I wouldn’t really be working. And I would be getting paid for it. But I would be sort of trapped at home, and if people called me, I would have to at least answer or get back to them in a reasonable timeframe.

I really appreciate that he’s willing to try this out for me.  And I guess we’ll see if it works. I mean, it’s not like I have any other options. It seems like most employers don’t hire part-time workers (at least in my industry). I know people who have been full time and then scaled back to part-time after having a kid, but not people being hired part-time.

The bigger issue, I think, is that I don’t really have any sort of passion for my career. At best, I find it mildly enjoyable, most of the time I find it a mild annoyance, and sometimes I hate it. Is that how most people are? I would quit this job in 10 seconds if I won the lottery. Is that normal? Or should I start thinking about a new career?