Days like this will soon come to an end March 14, 2009

With Mike away the last few days on his annual trip to spring training baseball games, this year in Florida, I have had a lot of really relaxing time to myself.

Yesterday I worked during the day, and then went and got an hour and a half massage (yes, spoiled, spoiled, spoiled!) and went out to dinner with some girlfriends.  Today I had some things to do like cleaning bathrooms and the kitchen and going to order the glider chair.  Other than that I spent a lot of time doing crafts and relaxing.  I sewed a new curtain for the nursery, did e-mail, knitted, curled up in my “nest” to finish the book I’ve been reading (The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett – I totally recommend it) and ordered Thai food for dinner. 

Nowhere to be, no one to take care of – it was a lovely relaxing day.  I haven’t been lonely at all since he has been gone.  Each day other than today I have spent some time with friends, but today was fine too.  Mike and I were talking the other day about how much I have changed in that regard in the last 9 years.  Used to be when he was away it drove me crazy – I didn’t know how to fill the time with him gone.   And I HAD to have plans each evening with friends, otherwise I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I suggested maybe I am just more comfortable being on my own, have more hobbies to keep me busy, etc.  But then we realized that maybe it isn’t something so deep.  Maybe it is that we have cable TV now and I have that to keep me company.  Kind of a horrifying thought…Is that really why I am okay on my own?  I hope not.

I skipped the gym today even though it was on my to-do list, in favor of curling up and reading.  Sometimes it is hard for me to remember that relaxing and taking it easy IS productive during this brief period of my life.  Growing another person is hard work for my body – and I have been to the gym 4 days this week.  So, I cut myself a little slack.  I am headed to yoga in the morning too, so I’ll feel good about that. 

My due date is two months from tomorrow.  I know that after that (or at least soon after that) these lovely relaxing days will be no more for a while.  I am not complaining – that is what I signed up for, and I am excited for it.  But it is strange for me to think that soon I will hardly ever be alone.  I spend SO much of my time alone these days, between my solitary job, my homebody-ness of late, and Mike’s work and travel schedule.  Soon I will have another little person that I will be spending 24 hours a day with at least for the immediate future.  I am excited about it, but also feeling a little wistful already for all this alone-time.  I just have to take advantage of it over the next couple weeks.

Also, in reality, this could potentially be the only time I get to experience being pregnant.  I hope to God that it isn’t.  I really, really hope that we are abe to have another child.  But, in case it is, I really want to enjoy the next 9 weeks of feeling the baby move inside me, knowing that I am nurturing and growing this new life.  What an amazing experience.  I sometimes feel like May 15 (or thereabouts) can’t get here soon enough so I can meet this little man.  But at the same time I need to remember to enjoy these days too, before my life is changed and before this being leaves my body.

Nesting March 12, 2009

I definitely have been nesting the last few weeks – literally and figuratively.  I decided a month or two ago that our house is consistently too dirty, so I decided to make a cleaning schedule. Now a reminder comes up in my Outlook to-do list each week to clean the bathroom and kitchen surfaces, every-other-week to vaccuum the house and mop the kitchen floor, and other tasks on different schedules.  It helps and gives me a good reminder to do things like cleaning the humidifier that I would normally put off.   Crossing the task off the to-do list is often incentive enough to actually do it.

And, I’ve been literally nesting too – my favorite thing lately has been to build a “nest” in my bed with pillows and  quilt and curl up there and read and nap.  It is so comfy cozy.  Good thing there isn’t a TV in our bedroom – I might never leave my nest.  Mike is gone for a few days, and last night I didn’t even get under the covers – I just slept under the quilt in my nest. 

My belly seems to be growing larger by the day, but my belly button hasn’t popped out yet.  The top ridge of it is kind of sticking out a bit, so that you can see it through my clothes depending on what I am wearing, but the whole thing isn’t protruding yet.  Now that my belly is bigger my boobs (which are HUGE) don’t seem quite so ridiculously enormous.  It is a little more proportional now.  Though I have to admit that I do miss my marathoning-body, I do love my pregnant body too.  My thighs rub together (which they didn’t two years ago), my arms have more flab on them, and it isn’t just my belly that’s getting bigger.  But who cares!?  My body is finally doing this amazing thing that I thought it was going to reject altogether.  I’ll lose the weight eventually (which will definitely mean cutting down on the sugar intake that I have been following throughout my pregnancy), and for now I am not too worried about it.

Every few days the baby has a crazy-active day and then I spend the next few days worried because he isn’t so active.  Every time I go to the gym I think he gets lulled by the motion and I don’t feel him for a while – that is always a little worrisome.  Today he is having a less-active day and I have been focusing, trying to feel movement several times today in order to make sure he’s still alive in there.  You read things in magazines and hear stories about late miscarriages and stillbirths and infant death and though I know it is rare, it is hard not to worry about it, especially when it isn’t easy to just get pregnant again.  Just have to stay positive…

I am kind of thinking about cloth diapers at the moment, but what a pain in the butt with our laundry two floors down (the outside stairs) in the basement… but I read that disposable diapers don’t decompose for 500 years if at all… with around 6000 diapers over the course of this baby’s babyhood, that’s a lot of damage.  The gdiapers seem cool, but way expensive, and so I am back to maybe cloth.  Mike will resist this… but maybe he can be convinced.  I thought it was going to be way harder to convince him to not circumsize this little boy, but I won that battle pretty easily once I presented him with the facts.  I still need to do some research.  I’m not that into it at this point, but feel environmental (and financial) guilt when I can save those diapers going into the landfill, and potentially a couple thousand bucks…

31 weeks tomorrow.  This weekend I need to go order our glider chair (we opted for the world’s most expensive one it seems) which should arrive in about 6 weeks.  Hopefully before the baby does.  It is very comfy and modern, though, and can move into our living room once we’re done with it in a nursery capacity.  We’ll just have to be really careful to keep it as clean as we can.  I am a little worried about baby spit up on the brown upholstery.  I guess that’s why god invented burp cloths. 

The back storage area is slowly but surely getting cleared out.  There is still some more work to do, but we can’t take the bed down and put the nursery furniture up until after my shower on April 18 anyway since both of my parents are coming to town with their significant others.  One set will stay with me and one set will stay with Mike’s parents.  But we definitely need to offer a decent place to sleep since once the baby comes their options will be the pull out sofa and an air mattress.  At least until we move…

I am just working a few more weeks, though they are pretty slow weeks with two clients out of town for two weeks each.  I also accepted the contract grant writing gig that I did last year.  I raised my price by a whole $1000 and they accepted. It actually should be a little easier this year, but with four being accepted last year, I now have a demonstrated record of success, so I think they’re willing to pay a little more.   Mike warned me not to ask for too much because of the economy, but I started high and they accepted without any negotiation – so I feel pretty good about that.  The deadline is April 21, which is coming up pretty quickly as far as grant deadlines go, and should give a pretty good cushion between the deadline and my due date.  And I should still be totally done working by my shower, which will give me four weeks to relax and get ready for the baby.  I am pretty spoiled that I am able to do that.  I am pretty spoiled in general (says the girl who will get a 90 minute prenatal massage tomorrow).  At least I appreciate these things, though, and don’t expect them or take them for granted…And I do what I can to contribute – like taking the grant writing job.  Sometimes I feel a little guilty that I am not bringing in more income to help out, but I am really so much happier now professionally than I ever was working in an office, and that counts for something (fortunately for me I have a husband who understands that fact too.).

30 weeks March 6, 2009

Today I am 30 weeks pregnant.  3/4 of the way there, 10 weeks to go – how far I have come from this year last time when I was not even started with IVF #2.  I love my growing belly (even though other parts of me are growing too which isn’t as fun) and over the last week or two have started to be able to actually watch my belly move and jump as the little guy in there moves around.  Amazing.  The baby seems to have had a bit of a growth spurt over the past two weeks too, because it really seems to me like there has been a lot of belly-growth over that time.  I am still gaining about a pound a week, but it seems to be manifesting itself much more in an outward growth of the belly than it was before.

And just this week, I think the baby has a name – at least a first name.  We aren’t sharing it, but I think we have decided what it is going to be.  We have a couple ideas for middle names, but haven’t made any decisions yet.  Our friends in NYC just had their baby this week, and we had been waiting to see what they named him before making a decision about the name for our litle guy.  They chose names that weren’t on our list, so we were happy about that. 

I really thought that once I was pregnant I would have no problem with pregnancy announcements, and it is really bothering me that that hasn’t proven to be the case.  Yesterday one of my very best friends announced that she is pregnant with baby #2 and due in mid-September.  While this is WAY less painful than it would have been a year ago, or even less than that, I still find myself feeling sorry for us that we are not in control of the size of our family like 90% of the population is.  We might have another baby, we might not.  I have always (or as an adult at least) wanted three kids, Mike has always wanted two – what happens if we are a family of 3 from here on out?  This is where I remind myself how lucky I am that we will even be a family of 3 and not just the two of us from here to eternity.  But, there will still be some major disappointment to come if it comes to pass that we aren’t going to be able to get pregnant again.  (I think it is only going to be in the cards financially to pursue a few more rounds of IVF OR adoption – not do IVF first and then move to the very expensive option of adoption if that doesn’t work.)  Only time will tell, and there’s no point worrying about it now, but it does still make me very sad.  I don’t want to feel this way when my friends make pregnancy announcements – I am sure there are way more of those on the way over the next 10 years.  I just hope that I am able to make my own too.

I have never been so great at looking at the positive – I tend to focus on what I don’t have and what is wrong with my life.  Things are about as good for me right now as they have ever been, and still I am thinking that there is something wrong.  Right now there isn’t, but certainly the possibility is out there that there might be down the line in a year or two.  I wish I was able to let that go until the time comes to worry about it, and appreciate all the wonderful things that are going on in my life.  Right now I have a flexible job that I like, a healthy marriage and an apparently healthy baby on the way (and I am healthy too, which hasn’t always been the case).  And I am happy overall, and most of the time I do appreciate these things.  But, somehow it is still hard for me to hear even my best friends’ announcements.  (Though, like I said, WAY less hard than before – there were no tears, not even the threat of tears, no anger, no days-long depression as there have been in the last year or two.)

Ten weeks still seems like a ways away before meeting the baby, and fortunately it gives us time to clear out the nursery/guest bedroom and get the new furniture in there and get everything set up.  Almost nothing has been done so far.  Thirty weeks ago I was in the middle of a cycle that I was convinced wouldn’t work, it was summer, and I was really not a happy camper.  How much can change in that amount of time.  There is lots to be done in the next ten weeks, but I am hopeful that it will go by smoothly and quickly and before I know it my son will be here.