Category Archives: health

baby updates, health, Monkey, New Jersey, Otter

100 and counting…

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100th post!!

Today is my 100th post on this blog! I wish I had something very interesting and important to say for this momentous occasion, but I don’t!! I do however have pictures of the frozen foliage in my front yard, news about the health of my little girl, and pregnancy jabber.

Monkey has recovered nicely from her role in “The Exorcist: Satan takes New Jersey!” and slept through the night, waking this morning with a voracious appetite and good spirits. My spirits have improved as well, since I was not up all night alternately holding her hair back and washing vomit covered bed-clothes. Yay!! No more vomit! (Thus far, Lee is not feeling very well, so we shall see if the saga continues.)

Today I am studying for the bar, Monkey is playing around the house, and we are enjoying the rising temperatures and melting ice. Things are beginning to move in the wind again, instead of just cracking in half and falling into the back yard.

Here are some pictures of the perfectly iced over tree and bush in the front of our house, these were taken this morning, so there has been some melting, but they still show how eerily the ice covered everything. It looked like a set for some mythical movie, every single thing had a fine coating of ice on it. All the fences, trees, bushes, flower stems, etc. Even the house has a shiny thin coating of ice on it. And the snow on the ground was so hard and frozen no footprints were left in it when you passed by.

The pictures don’t show the detail very well, as my camera is limited to the abilities of a point and shoot, but the tops and sides of each branch and leaf is coated in a thin sheen of ice. It still feels like a winter wonderland, as long as you don’t have to go anywhere.

However, the neighborhood and surrounding town is recovering, the downed power line outside our house was taken care of yesterday evening and the plows have been through so it is easier to get around the town. We may even venture out today! I think we are both a little stir crazy, having been stuck in the house for a few days in a row with no school or guests. Of course, nothing beat the day with no power for sheer stir craziness, but I have to say I am grateful that did not coincide with the 24 hours in which she forcefully expelled everything in her stomach. I am so glad that is over!

Otter has moved into position in this 33rd week of pregnancy and has begun to move around low in my womb. He moves around a lot still, and now has the size and strength to move my stomach with him. Last night he was rythmically kicking me while Lee and I were watching my tummy jump in time to the baby. His nickname is Leviathan Baby, as he rolls my stomach from side to side and causes parts of it to stick out oddly.

I suffer from this odd belief that I am going to give birth early, even though I logically know that chances of it are slim to none, and that he will likely be born closer to the 15th of April than his due date, the 1st. However, I am taking the bar exam at the end of this month, and am positive this is the cause of my concern. The thought of going into labor while taking the bar with complete strangers an hour’s drive from my husband and house is horrible. I remind myself that the worst case scenario has Lee and Ellen driving to a hospital in Somorset, but I still worry. It is par for the course for bar exam takers, we all become obsessive about one thing or another while we prepare for licensure. (Okay, more obsessive.)

I will post more updated baby belly photos sometime this week. I have gotten a lot bigger and now have an outie instead of an innie. (Or as Lee so poetically puts it “Look honey! You’ve popped!)

Well, it is back to studying for the bar exam for me. Thanks for spending your valuable time reading the various things I have said here, I appreciate the connection. It is hard not to feel homesick, but connecting with everyone from time to time in the comments section really helps. Blessed be to all of you!

P.S. This is an awesome shirt! I have to have it!

health, house"keeping", Motherhood/body image, pregnancy

The game’s a foot!!

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Yesterday we felt a foot! Or was it is hand?

It was definitely an appendage of one form or the other, and Lee and I each got to feel it rest right under our hands. I almost felt it in my hand at first! It had edges and definition. He becomes more and more of a little person each day.

Monkey sings Otter a lullaby at night after I sing her one, and he kicks mightily away as she sings into my tummy. He is really going to know who is sister is when he comes into this world. She is so excited that she has really spent a lot of time talking and singing to him.

I am still nesting, the instinct growing stronger and changing form as we get closer to Delivery-Day. This week it is a scrapbook of artistic images of me and my belly to commemorate this pregnancy. I wanted something to remind me of what it looks like for me to be pregnant. It is a pretty neat project so far. I am having fun with my Photoshop elements program and my pictures. Most of them I will not post on the Internet, as they involve no clothing, and once you put naked pictures out there, out there they stay. However, this one is I feel is harmless enough.

I am trying to capture the sense of quiet peace that fills me from time to time. So much of pregnancy is hard, and so many of our culturally supported memories are the hard ones. Nausea, sleeplessness, cramping, feeling fat, etc. I wanted to create memories for myself that reminded me of peace, and beauty, the internal sense of fulfillment one gets when you’re growing a baby. That way, even though I more often look sleepy, or a little rumpled, or tired and grumpy, I will remember feeling beautiful and calm, and ready for baby.

It has been an interesting project. When Monkey was in my belly I had a cast done of my torso, but I have not gotten it from the artist, and recently found out he had passed, so it is unlikely that I will have that memory, in any form other than a memory.

Of course my mom took a ton of pictures of me while I was carrying with her, so it’s not as though I have no memories of that time, they just aren’t full on belly nudes.

I am also making curtains and designing a little book and doing all the other stuff that lends itself to a sense of readiness for baby. We have our first meeting with Ellen, who is our Doula for the grand day, this weekend, and our having our tour and birthing class the following weekend.

I am still anxious about delivery, and a little sad that this is my final time doing this. It is such a complicated thing, pregnancy, I can’t imagine signing up for a life of it, but I am sad to see this part of my life slip into the past. Sometimes I wish life’s experiences were less ambivalent.

health, pregnancy

John Hurt

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I am in a John Hurt way at the moment…

He is trying to break out of my stomach in a bloody screaming horror movie mess!!!

Okay, not really, but that is how it feels sometimes. The problem is this, I have really sore Round Ligaments and have had them since early month 4. The spot is so sore that I actually hit my doctor when she poked at it.(Really though, why poke at the exact place someone tells you is hurting?)

Otter, in his fiendish babyiness, has decided to roost flush up against the round ligaments on my right side. He has been pressing his darling little back up against them for a week now.

This lovely snuggling results in me feeling a rolling pain in my side every few minutes. It keeps me up at night, it keeps me up during the day! I can’t get comfortable! I tried pushing against him to get him to move, but doing so hurts too much.

Argh!!

And of course, there is nothing you can do for it. Well… except take tylenol, which is the same as doing nothing, but with a nasty after taste. Ow! There is goes again! What makes it worse is, when he wiggles and kicks around, he presses further into my side. OOW!!

This kind of pain is bad because I recognize on some level that it is not even on the scale of labor pain, so how can I plan a natural childbirth if I can’t just breathe and soothe this lovely pain away? If I can’t soothe away pain that hasn’t even hit the scale yet, how in the world am I going to soothe away pain that does hit the scale???

A random note about pain scales. I am a horrible patient to deal with becuase I have suffered from Migraines for about 19 years. Therefore, I do not have the ability to answer the question, How badly does it hurt on a scale from 1 to 10? You see, I start examining the pain and I think, well, I could go to work like this, or school, I could drive a car, I could go to a place with many people, and it wouldn’t hurt more than it does now. So it must not be high up on the scale. Granted my comparison pain is migraine pain. A 10 on a migraine scale renders me drugged on percoset in a dark silent room lying down for three days. So really, should the scale be higher than 10? Should there be a different scale for me to work with?

Back to the John Hurt experience. On a scale of I don’t notice it to Oh MY God I need a doctor!!, the pain is around a, occasionally takes my breath away.

I am getting tired of it though, and I start to wonder if there is something going on. Am I in early labor? Are these pains braxton-hicks contractions? (BTW, despite medical science’s reassurances to the contrary, they are not freakin painless.) Should I be calling my care provider? I get them all day long, but I am still pretty sure they are the baby in collusion with my body, tormenting me.

Sigh. Please send me some energy and any hugs you have to send, I could certainly use them.