My head hurts

Thank you so much for the recipe ideas!  I'm totally going to make recipes of everything you've suggested and I'll definitely post on my progress.  You guys are the greatest!!


So, whenever I'm not here writing or reading and commenting on your blogs, I'm researching.  Pregnancy, birth, carseats, strollers, diapers, what to buy, what not to buy, when to buy it, what you have to have or your kid will be dumb, the stuff only dumb people buy and everything in between.  My head is swimming, my eyes are sore and I need a nap.  Drew and I have decided to start buying stuff after the first of the year so I'm reading up now so the purchasing process is less painful but the research is overwhelming!


The only thing that's fun is looking at nurseries and getting nursery ideas.  I have a folder where I'm saving all the cute pictures I come across but even that causes cuteness-overload at times.  I know I don't want anything pink and I don't want a theme - no classic Pooh, Disney princess or even zoo animals.  I know it's my kid's room but I have to be in there too and I want it to blend with the rest of the house while still being a baby girl's room.  Thankfully, I have some ideas - and if y'all would help me and please tell Drew that airbrushed murals do not belong in our nursery that would so great.  I'm trying to be open-minded but I keep sneaking glances at Drew to see if a cholo has somehow invaded his body.

airbrushed mural

cholo

My husband 

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...

As for the pregnancy bit, I'm almost to the halfway mark - I'm 18 weeks and change and I still have ankles!  I'm so nervous that I'm going to blow up for the second half and I'm terrified of cankles!  There is a very popular blogger that chronicled every. single. thing. about getting ready for a baby, then she got pregnant and now she's a bona-fide mommy blogger.  She got cankles while pregnant and for some reason was obsessed with them, taking pictures of them and posting them on her blog!  With no warnings or anything - just one day, you'd click and bleccchhhhh!  Cankles!  


And now that I've named my fear to the universe I will get cankles tomorrow.  I will not post pictures but you will hear my cry to the heavens.  Every day, I'm drinking enough water to float a battleship in an effort to keep the cankles at bay.  Which of course means I have to pee fifty thousand times a day but I'll do it - I'll do just about anything not to get cankles.  I'm super concious of my posture at all times, being sure to keep my feet flat on the floor and not crossing my legs which might encourage swelling and if there's anything else I can do, puh-leeze tell me!


The Hypnobabies studying is going well and a lot of the wording is very similar to what I use in final meditation in my yoga classes.  Drew and I were listening to the first CD and shortly into it I exclaimed "Hey this is yoga!"  Drew immediately shushed me and said that I was breaking his concentration.  After the obligatory poking fun of the lady's earnest hypno-voice, we settled down and it's actually very handy.  I'm looking forward to the rest of the program.


But here's the super funny thing:  the Hypnobabies hypnotizes the dog and it makes her pee!  At first we thought it was a coincidence, but three times now the dog has piddled on the floor when I'm playing my CDs!  And she's completely housebroken!  Each time, Maya has laid on the floor wherever I'm playing the CDs, giving an occasional big sigh, and when she finally gets up there's a small puddle o' pee on the floor!  So now, I have to listen to it with earphones on or when Drew takes her for a walk because I'm getting tired of cleaning up after her.  There is no warning about this on the packaging and I wonder if anyone else has experienced this or if it's just my highly suggestible dog.


Tomorrow is my come-to-Jesus with my OB.  I'm really nervous and I hope she doesn't take the hard line with me.  I talked with my MFM and I got another opinion from a midwife and they've both said that with my clotting factors it's not really safe to go past 40 weeks, which is pretty much what I've found through my own research.  The $60,000 question is when is she thinking of inducing me?  Is that date set in stone?  Is there some test that she can do to see if me and the baby are doing okay with the pregnancy so that I don't have to be induced?  And if I have to be induced, can we exhaust all natural methods before going straight to Pitocin, do not pass go, do not collect $200?


I'll be asking her about her labor philosophy as well - under what circumstances does she cut episiotomies, how she feels about continuous fetal monitoring, eating and drinking during the birthing time, (Hypnobabies does not use the word 'labor' - dangit, I just said it again.  I'm a bad Hypnostudent.  I need to do more Hypnostudying.), and anything else I can think of between now and tomorrow morning.  I know she's doula-friendly, she's receptive to birth plans and she has had several patients who are yoga instructors so I think she's open.  I just don't want to come off militant and combative yet I want to make sure my desires are heard and honored to the best of her ability.  I just have to remember that this is still a business, I'm still a consumer and it's not wrong to speak up for what you want.  


Additionally, I need some new reading material - I'm getting kind of full of baby stuff.  What are y'all reading these days?  What's your favorite blog?  Besides yours and mine of course.  I found one the other day that made me stop in my tracks.  I was so taken in by the first post that I couldn't stop reading.  That doesn't happen often and maybe you'd like it too - Mr. Sponsorpants is a virtual AA sponsor but his words ring true even if you're not in recovery because you can substitute any problem for the alcoholism and it still resonates.  It's been a while since I found a blog that grabbed me like that and I thought I'd share.


Your turn - whatcha readin'?  I'm swimming in baby stuff and I'd love to come up for some grown-up air.    

Whatcha eatin'?

Okay you guys, I need your help - it's major.  Kesha came over last night and we hung out and eventually I had to make myself something to eat.  So, let me break it down for those that don't know.


Drew loves to cook and he's very very good at it.  He can go into a grocery store, pick random stuff off the shelves and make a gourmet meal with it.  It's his creative outlet and I loooove being the recipient of all that creativity.  Me?  I'm lost if it has more than three steps and doesn't come in a box.  When I was single I lived on Pasta Roni and mac n cheese.  Sometimes I would get super fancy and throw in a can of tuna!

I have a love-hate relationship with food.  I love to eat, hate the prep.  The cutting, the chopping, the measuring, the boiling, the broiling and then the waiting!  I just want to eat and get on with my life, whyyyyyyy does it have to be so hard?  And because I have no patience and I get easily defeated I usually mess up the easiest recipes.  Now, at 34, I have a horrible mental block against cooking and I get an serious attitude whenever I have to cook.  


I tried to overcome it - I even braved a ridiculous thunderstorm and a throng of chubby white women to get The Pioneer Woman's cookbook!  She's got some great recipes and I successfully made her mashed potatoes but I tried three times to make her bacon-wrapped meatloaf and every time the middle came out pink and cold - even after cooking for an extra hour!  I hate cooking.


Last week I had to go to the grocery store because there was zero food in the house when we got back home from Philly, but I was lost.  Drew and I usually go grocery shopping together and he gets the fresh produce and the exotic ingredients while I dump in my five boxes of Kraft's finest and my 10/$10 boxes of Pasta Roni.


However, with Agent S on board, Pasta Roni and mac n cheese don't cut it anymore.  What's that?  Why Agent S?  Well, remember when we were going to call the baby Sonoma back when I was supposed to get pregnant on vacation, but then thought I didn't when in fact I actually did?  The first trimester was, shall we say, a little rough and Drew and I weren't necessarily focused on fetus names for those first few months.  Between fear of losing it, fighting and all the other nonsense I think we actually acknowledged the baby once, maybe twice.


Thankfully, nothing bad lasts forever and Drew and I are friends again and the baby is kicking!  Right now I'm the only one who can feel it but I do feel it and it's awesome.  Drew and I were chatting about fetus names and I told him Sonoma didn't resonate with me anymore and we needed another name so he came up with Agent S - because she's a baby spy.  A baby trained assassin, if you will.  Kicking ass and taking names.  And then I was all Oooh yeah!  She's fighting my clotting factors so she can stay ALIVE!  I love it!  Yes, I'm already forcing my dreams onto my child.  I will accept my mother-of-the-year award by mail or in person.

My daughter's gonna be a bad-ass

But back to food!  I was near tears by myself in the grocery store because I didn't have the first clue about what to buy!  So I called Kesha and she talked me off the ledge and I made several purchases that worked for me.  Specifically, those meals in a bag.  You know those things?  You heat up the pan, dump in the whole bag and ten minutes later you're eating!  Right up my alley.

Last night it was a TGI Friday's meal in a bag and I was nearly defeated because things were in separate pouches and I had to add the pouches one at a time!  Cook the chicken for a little bit, add the veggies and pasta then cook for a little bit, then add the sauce and sprinkle with the bacon at the end.  Kesha's my witness - I nearly lost it.  I was getting all agitated, mumbling that this adding things one at a time is too much for me and I just want to eat and this is ridiculous and I don't have time to mess with this nonsense and I'm not buying this one again.  I felt like Bon Qui Qui with the cookies and cream milkshake.  What's that?  Who's Bon Qui Qui?  Oh no!  We have to fix that right now!   I tried to embed the video but it wouldn't let me - rude.

Besides, that bag had almost 1000 mg of sodium per serving and there were two servings in one bag!  I can't keep that up!  Plus, I have to learn how to feed my kid good food and Drew shouldn't have to eat that stuff on the two nights that he's home.  Even though he loves to cook, I really should make him something every once in a while.

Which is where you come in!  I need advice!  I need to get past this mental block against cooking so I can cook tasty healthy things for Agent S and The Man.  Do y'all have favorite websites with easy recipes that I can start trying?  Drew got me a book with 101 things you can do with mac n cheese but I'm a purist - the mac is perfect just as it is.  It shouldn't be messed with.  At most you should serve it with a side of fish sticks or chicken fingers and I sound like a three year old boy right now.

Please tell me I'm not hopeless - please tell me that people who hate cooking can still cook.  I just need to start easy so I don't get demoralized.  I need to build my cooking confidence.  Please tell me there's a way to make a meal that doesn't have a lot of steps, that doesn't take a lot of time, that's healthy and tasty and won't trap me in the kitchen for six hours.  Oh, and not chicken - at least not right now.  Chicken does nothing for me right now.

I got a complicated order!

Monster, thy name is Facebook

Thank you all so much for your kind comments regarding my little announcement!  You are all so great and I'm smiling non-stop!  And a super-cool thank you goes out to those who commented for the first time - it's like meeting new friends!  Even the anonymous ones - I'm counting you too!  Thanks you guys!


And guess what!  I think I'm feeling some movement!  I first felt it on Saturday.  I was coming home from yoga and I felt a bubble pop in my low abdomen - just one.  I dismissed it, thinking my body was acting funny from class.  But I felt it again a few minutes later in the exact same spot, the exact same sensation - one small bubble popping, an internal *bloop!*  I thought, no way, the doctor told me just the day before that it would be a month before I could feel anything.  But a few minutes later, I felt it again!  Every day since then, I've felt it in the same general area, same sensation and that's gotta be what it is, which is so freakin cool!  It's nowhere near consistent so I'm not bothering with kick-counts or anything like that, but when it does happen I get a little smile on my face.


Also, Drew and I had a wonderful weekend.  I have come to believe/know/be convinced that I hold the keys to the crazy.  You know that fridge magnet If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy?  Totally true in our house.  I believe that we're doing well because I am in the second trimester now and I've leveled out - somewhat.  Drew and I really only fight when I lose my cool and rarely the other way around.  However, MY cool?  The yoga-cool?  When that's gone, it's World War III - some of y'all know exactly what I'm talking about and those who've read my blog for a while have a darn good idea.  It's not pretty when I'm not happy.


But this weekend, I was happy so we were all happy.  Not once did we fight and I even caught some funny 'family' moments Sunday night!

We were watching tv and Maya was unhappy that no one

was paying attention to her.  So she fixed that.

This giant beast has an eye infection and every morning and

night I have to fight her to put the cream in her eyes.

She's wise to me now and runs when she sees the tube - it's been super fun.

She doesn't dare get this forward with me.  

It's like she knows who she can rough-house with and it ain't Mama!

I've also started my Hypnobabies studying.  It's quite a lot of material and between that and the books that I'm reading, I'm learning more about childbirth, US maternity care, bureaucracy and I know all kinds of medical terms now!  This stuff is so fascinating and what I like best is that I'm getting a good view from both sides of the fence.  I reject fear-mongering outright.  I have no use for the granola side saying that all doctors, hospitals and interventions are the devil, just as I toss aside the medical-hospital types who claim that you're just a moron if you don't take advantage of every medical advancement available to you.  The middle ground isn't easy to find but it's there.  Bottom line, most babies live, no matter if you're at home or a hospital.  But just the same, some babies die - no matter what you do or where you are, home or hospital.  It's that societal/cultural thing that absolutely refuses to accept that and we run to technology, thinking that the more machines we use, the more medicine we take, the more doctors we see, we can guarantee a positive (read:  live baby) outcome and that's just not the case.  But that's a whole other touchy subject so I'll leave that where it is. 

Doing my part to get educated - these are just the books!

This doesn't count aaaaalll the internet searches I'm doing when

I'm supposed to be working - this is serious business y'all!

Which kind of brings me to the title of this post.  I read this article last Friday and wasn't going to say anything about it even though it's been swirling around my mind ever since.  This right here was the reason I got off of Facebook but then my cousin sucked me back in, and right now I log on once every couple of weeks at best, usually to look at pictures of my cousin's babies.  The last time I updated my status it was an all-call for some apple juice.  I haven't even announced my pregnancy, mostly because everyone I care about already knows and even though I cut my friend list, I still have 'friends' on there that don't necessarily need to know.  Yet, my blog link is on my page so it's not like it's a secret.  Frankly, I consider that a sign that announcing my pregnancy on Facebook is not necessary and I may do like one of my high school girlfriends and one day just add a picture of me and the baby to my photo album and leave it at that. 

But then today, Stirrup Queen wrote a post that totally hit the nail on the head and I just want to second it and encourage you to read it.  A Little Pregnant posted a fictional FB feed outlining what FB looks like to infertiles (and for conversation, that includes everyone who's ever had trouble trying to conceive, not just those who know for a fact that they can't ever get pregnant) which is what got me going in the first place, as I saw this elsewhere before Stirrup Queen's post today.

Specifically, what riled me up was the isolation that infertiles feel - that the whole world is pregnant but them.  And God knows, I know that feeling intimately.  But you know what?  Spin this whole topic and you can talk about isolation from every standpoint - the single girl, the girl who's married but her husband sucks, the unemployed girl, the girl who works but at a job that sucks, the girl who's broke, the girl who has no friends, the girl with a secret, the girl who has kids that misbehave all the time - all of us get punched in the gut at one time or another and it's rarely on purpose.

You know when I get wistful?  When I hear/read about a woman whose husband is home every night.  I sleep alone four to five nights a week every week.  Yet a military wife will throat-punch me because she hasn't seen her husband in four or five months AND she doesn't even know if he's alive.  I get wistful when I hear about couples who rarely fight or who resolve their fights within minutes.  When things were super bad with me and Drew I admit, I could only take certain blogs in tiny doses because their marriages seemed so perfect.  But, I should be happy I'm married at all, right?  I should try not having a date for two years, right?  Is that the answer?

I get wistful when I see small, well-behaved dogs - no lie.  I love my dog but you guys know - that dog ruined my sanctuary and that was very hard to accept.  There is dog hair on every inch of my house and I hate it - and then there's the occasional dog-ish smell.  I could sweep and vacuum every day and the improvement can be measured in seconds because with one good doggy-shake, there is hair everywhere all over again.  These days I pick my battles - I pretend I don't see the hair, I Febreze all the time and I clean once a week or right before we have company.  And she's not small and cuddly - she's a fracking beast (see above) and I fight her for space in the bed, on the sofa and just about everywhere else all the time.  So many days I fervently wish for a little dog with good manners, yet someone else surely would come along and slap me for daring to whine about something so trivial.  

I get wistful when I hear about people making wedding plans because there was so. much. drama! surrounding the time I got married that we never had that.  YET, one year later here I am, just as married as anyone else but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't wistful that I picked out my dress alone and then cried in the car after.  But then here comes the single girl telling me to shut up, at least I'm married!

And oooh Jesus!  Don't let me say anything about being pregnant!  But I will anyway - I get wistful when I hear about uneventful pregnancies and I get downright jealous of that pregnancy innocence.  That shit is painful!  But I sure as HELL better shut my mouth because I have a live baby in me right now.   

That's why Facebook sucks.  The medium is too big, the net is too wide and people are allowing themselves to get their feelings hurt far too easily.  Since when did we all become living, breathing, gaping wounds, unable to withstand the slightest breeze?  Since when have we become so wrapped up in our own pain that we're unable to simply see things for what they are?      Since when do we take frickin status updates so freaking personally??  Since when do we un-friend someone (don't even get me started on the ridiculousness of that particular term) just because their life has an element we wish we had for our own?

Don't get me wrong, I was firmly in the everyone-is-pregnant-but-me camp but I'd like to think I wasn't hateful of other people's good fortune.  And come on you guys, it's FACEBOOK - not real life!  These people are not out to twist the knife in your heart!  For that matter, no one on the Internet is out to get you and you alone!  There is no bullseye on any of our backs - I swear!  

When I was in college, I accidentally found myself in a philosophy class.  Before I dropped it with a quickness, we talked about pain and the philosophical definition of pain.  After long, brain-draining, circular discussions we arrived at the conclusion that pain is what YOU say it is and it hurts however much YOU say it hurts.  

There is no measuring stick for pain and we are all justified in feeling hurt, whatever the reason.  What's trivial and bearable to you can cause someone else's world to implode.  But that doesn't mean we're not entitled to hurt!  However, walking on eggshells is not the answer - it's no way to live and frankly, it's not possible. 

I wonder if we can just be mindful?  Can we just acknowledge that we all carry burdens and our burdens are heavy and painful TO US?  Can we simply focus on carrying our burdens with grace instead of getting all butt-hurt because you perceive someone else's burden to be less important than yours so they shouldn't be crying so much?  Or have we become too narcissistic, convinced that we're alone in this and no one else has or ever will feel the pain we feel?

The burdens I bear are heavy and painful to me and while I will not post them as status updates on my Facebook page, I have and will continue to write about them here.  My writing is the way I learn to bear them with grace and it's how I gain perspective.  I never seek to rub anything in anyone's face and while I apologize if I've ever done that, I also gently ask that any offended party remember that I'm just a nameless, faceless person on this planet and I have way too much on my own plate to intentionally try and mess up your world.   

Yeah, Stirrup Queen wrote about Facebook and infertility and she did it far more eloquently than I did, but you can exchange infertility for your burden of choice and it's the same story.  

For all of us.