Inside Out

Yesterday was Baby A's inside out day! At 39 weeks, she's been an outside baby for just as long as she was inside. On Sunday, she'll be turning nine months old. Since I never did get around to sharing any belly photos, here's the comparison:

The 38 week shot is the last one I took since my water broke on the morning I turned 39 weeks. What a difference (almost) nine months makes! I'm still not sure where the time went, I just know that it's gone by way too fast.

What she's up to these days:

• Tooth #3 just cut through and #4 is not far behind. 
• Lots of smiles and giggles. She can be so playful and I live for the sound of her laughter.
• Just started waving and pointing. 
• She can babble like a champ! She's been saying "mamama,""dadada," and various other sounds for a few months now. Lately, she's been stringing together different syllables but no real words yet. 
• She does understand some words! This has been so much fun to see. During meals, if I ask her if she'd like some water, she'll either get excited and say "ba!" if she wants to drink or look away if she doesn't. 
• She knows what to do when we get a camera out. 
• Loves to look at her reflection in mirrors or screens. 
• Can sit up, though she hasn't totally mastered pulling herself up to sitting yet.
• She can stand with support and wants to be on her feet all the time. 
• She can lift her butt in the air but that's as close as we get to crawling attempts. Why bother when we can stand, right?

There's a HuffPo piece making its way around the internet right now and even though it's a little early, so much of it rings true for me. This part especially, every day:

Sometimes, when we're looking at each other laughing, I also feel the urge to cry, because you must be too good to be true. I never want any of this to end.

This little girl makes my heart so happy, it hurts. 

Books of 2014 - Pregnancy & Baby

Last year was a mixed bag when it came to reading. For the majority of the year, I read books related to pregnancy, birth, and babies. I tried to read novels too but they were a slog. It was hard to get into anything and maintain interest. In this post, I'm rounding up all of the baby related books and sharing my favourites.  

Pregnancy & Birth

I continued use The Mother of All Pregnancy Books as a reference (I discuss it in detail here). The "Complaints Department" chapter and chart of medications were the most useful. If I didn't already own that, I'd have bought the Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy. I borrowed that one from the library and really liked the section at the end of each month that broke down various symptoms and indicated if/when to report it to your doctor. Finally, though I am generally not a fan of Dr. Oz, I did enjoy YOU: Having a Baby. I didn't make it through the section on labour and delivery but everything up to that point was interesting. I liked that it wasn't the typical weekly or monthly guide. 

As we were gearing up for our baby showers, Baby Bargains was awesome for building our registry. That, along with the Lucie's List site helped us keep our registry pretty simple and focused on what we'd need.  It was helpful to have an idea of the different brands and what to watch out for.

In my birth story post, I mentioned that I had hoped for a med-free birth. To that end, I read Ina May's Guide to Child Birth and Husband Coached Childbirth by Bradley. If you are interested in going that route, I highly recommend Ina May's book. Initially, I was put off by the fact that the first half of the book consisted of birth stories; it felt too hippie dippy for me. By the end, though, I found it very empowering and increased my confidence a lot. The informational portion rubbed me the wrong way; it was biased, fear mongering, and not consistent with current research. The Bradley book had a lot of useful information but Bradley himself seems insufferable. 

Baby Care & Development

If I had to do it all over again, I'd spend less time focused on birth and more on what to do with a newborn baby. Many late night nursing sessions were spent googling various things I didn't know I would need to know. The books I have referred to regularly since A arrived are Baby 411 (by the same people who did Baby Bargains) and Dr. Sears' The Baby Book. My own parenting philosophy lies somewhere in between the two ends of the spectrum these books represent so I've found them to be a good combination. 

Thanks to the other moms in my birth month group on The Bump, I discovered The Wonder Weeks. I highly recommend this book and it's corresponding app. Everyone talks about the physical growth spurts but there are also cognitive ones, and those lead to predictable patterns of fussy behaviour. The book describes what baby is learning during each "leap" and how to help. I liked the suggestions for developmentally appropriate toys and games because my experience has been with older kids so I had no idea when it came to babies. The best thing about this book might be that it always reassures me that "this too shall pass." The app has a calendar that is customized to your baby's due date and describes each Wonder Week, along with some play suggestions. You could get by with just the app but it wouldn't hurt to check out the book from the library. It has a lot more detail and check lists.

At six months, we introduced solids. Since we are mainly doing baby led weaning, I read up on that as well. I definitely recommend reading this if you are interested in BLW because it provides information about choking vs. gagging, which is a common concern.

Infant Sleep

Oh, where do I begin with this one? Once the sleepy newborn stage wore off, we had nap issues galore. We could handle those because night sleep was going well. Around 4.5 months, that went to hell too. Two and a half months later with no end in sight, we were exhausted and reaching our breaking point. I read a lot of sleep books. I read a lot of blogs (Troublesome Tots is awesome). In the end, Ferber rescued us from the depths of sleep despair. Out of the many sleep resources I consulted and methods I tried, only a few were truly useful. These are my favourites:

The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep, Dr. Harvey Karp - Similar to The Happiest Baby on the Block (we watched the dvd, it's good!) but more focused on sleep. I'm a big fan of Dr. Karp and the 5S's were a big help with our fussy newborn.

Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, Dr. Marc Weissbluth - While Weissbluth is best known for being an advocate for full exctinction sleep training (crying it out with no soothing), that's not all this book is about. There is a lot of solid, helpful information here about sleep and sleep issues. It covers newborns through adolescents and this is the only book that discusses how to handle colicky babies in any detail. The formatting isn't great and often gets a little too academic, but still worth it for the information.

Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, Dr. Richard Ferber - Everyone's heard of Ferber but few have actually read the book, so there are a lot of misconceptions. Ferber recommends graduated extinction, or crying it out with soothing, but just like Weissbluth, that's not all that is discussed here. Lots of good information, though not as thorough as Weissbluth.

If you are giving me the side-eye right now for recommending Weissbluth and Ferber, consider yourself lucky that you were never desperate enough to need either of them. And if you haven't had kids yet but think this is awful, never say never! That's how we started out too.

And there you have it. In the next post, I'll list my favourite non-baby related books from last year. That will be a much shorter list!

Birth Story

When I last posted in 2014, I had just entered the third trimester of my pregnancy. Before returning to the discussion of books, I thought I'd share how things turned out.

The third trimester was tough, particularly the last stretch from 34 weeks onward. That's partially why I stopped blogging at that point; everything required too much energy and brain power! On the day I hit 39 weeks, I had an OB appointment scheduled for 11:45 am. Shortly after 1 am, however, I woke up feeling something wasn't quite right. Over the next few hours, the slow leak I'd felt turned into a gush and by 5 am, I knew it was baby time. So much for my plan to decline a cervical check that day! I had a light breakfast and a quick shower, and bounced on the exercise ball for a while. A few random contractions came and went but no regular pattern emerged. At 8:30, I started getting concerned that I wasn't feeling any movement so we decided to head to the hospital. 

At the hospital, triage confirmed that my water had broken and that I was barely a fingertip dilated. I was admitted and sent to walk the halls in the hopes of getting things moving, with the warning that if I wasn't in labour by 1:30 pm, they'd have to induce. Hospital policy is that once membranes have ruptured, baby needs to be out within 24 hours due to the increased risk of infection. They were willing to give me 12 hours to do it on my own but I was running out of time. All along, I'd been preparing to have a med-free birth so as I walked the halls, I was trying to make peace with the fact that it wasn't going to happen.

At 1:30, they started the oxytocin drip and we waited. I progressed steadily and labour was generally uneventful. I did have some awful back labour for a while and the nurse said my contractions were showing a couplet pattern, so they suspected that the baby may have initially been sunny side up (which could be why I didn't go into labour on my own). I was really disappointed that I couldn't use the tub in the birthing room that I'd hoped to labour in because of the continuous monitoring. I did get to try the ball and a few different positions, but the monitors made it awkward. After being checked at 4 cm, the contractions got really intense and started coming on top of each other. I was having a very hard time relaxing and breathing through them, and wasn't getting a break in between. That was the point when I decided to get the epidural. That was also the only time during the process that I cried because it felt like failure, or like giving in. I know that's not true but it was not what I'd planned or wanted beforehand, and in the moment, it was hard to accept that. 

Once the epidural was placed, I was able to relax and as much as I hadn't wanted it, I think it was the best thing in the long run. I needed the rest and wouldn't have been able to without it. Around 9 pm, I was fully dilated and they gave me an hour or so to labour down before pushing. During this time, they also turned off the epidural. I started pushing around 10:30...and kept on pushing. The baby was stuck and it seemed like no matter how hard I pushed, she just wouldn't budge. We were closing in on the 24 hr limit and they told me that if she wasn't out within three hours of pushing, we'd have to decide between the forceps or vacuum to get her out. I pushed for the full three hours and made it just in the nick of time. It was agonizing and I've never been more physically exhausted in my life, but I absolutely didn't want any more interventions. Our beautiful baby girl was born at 1:49 am, weighing 7 lbs 15 oz and 20 inches long.

My sweet girl at six days old.

It would be another three days before they let us go home because my bladder stopped functioning properly after delivery. I had a really hard time with the hospital stay; I was so exhausted from the pushing that I barely remember those first moments and hours with my daughter. During the four days in total that I was there, I barely slept and the bladder issues were more than a little uncomfortable. A lot of that time still feels like a blur and it took several months before I could think about it without sadness or anxiety. 

Seven months later, we've survived the roller coaster ride that is the newborn stage and it's starting it feel like we might actually know what we're doing! We have a little girl who adores her daddy, thinks peek-a-boo is the funniest game ever, gives wet kisses, and sits up like a champ. It's been so fun to watch her personality emerge. Our lives have been turned upside down and inside out, but it has been completely worth it. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Making Progress

Back in October, I was longing for that magical time in the second trimester when energy was supposed to return and everything was supposed to feel wonderful again. That time actually did come but it was pretty short lived - from about 20 to 24 weeks. Now that the third trimester and its various discomforts have arrived, I'm over it. But today is not for complaints! Some good things happened this week and I'd rather focus on those.

1. I passed the glucose test! It ended up making me feel crappy for the rest of the week so I'm very relieved that I don't have to do it again.

2. I finally have an OB and got my first appointment scheduled. He was one of my top two choices and I'm so excited about this, I can't even tell you. My family doctor is a piece of work and I cannot wait to be rid of her. I've written about her before but that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. We have a very large medical community in my city but it's mostly a lot of specialists. There are not enough family doctors to go around and the good ones aren't typically accepting new patients, which is why I've stuck with her up until this point. Now I can get the ball rolling on finding someone else and start getting on some wait lists.

3.Tonight, I will finally finish Under the Dome. It was an almost two month long slog and I can't wait to be done with it! Next up, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

I'm also working out maternity leave arrangements right now but I will save that for a separate post. That subject gets a little complicated!

Sugar is Evil

Worst. Blogger. Ever. I know. I'm sorry.

There are so many things to update about and I will try to do that on a somewhat regular basis while I still can. There are less than 100 days left before baby gets here; how the heck did that happen?! For the time being, I figure the best way to get back in the habit is to just dive right in because if I keep waiting for the right time, it'll never come.

This week will be 27 weeks. We found out over the Christmas break that we are having a baby girl and while this scares the pants off us (have you talked to any teenage girls recently?), we are so excited to meet her! Her name is still undecided, though we've narrowed it down to two choices. I have pictures to show but they will have to come in a future update since my laptop crashed a couple of weeks ago and they are not handy at the moment.

Today, I went in for the glucose tolerance test. The drink itself was surprisingly decent; it tasted like flat Orange Crush. I didn't feel the greatest during the hour I had to sit there waiting, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Unfortunately, you can't consume 50 grams of glucose in a 5 minute period without some kind of crash and it is hitting as we speak. Here's hoping I passed because I really don't want to have to do this again over a 3 hour period!

As far as the books go, reading has slowed waaaaay down with pregnancy. I don't have the energy or attention span to keep up the way I used to. It's nearly March and I'm still working on book #2 for this year. Very unusual for me! I got way behind on reviews last year but I'm hoping to at least summarize or list the rest of the books from 2013 at some point. In case you are wondering, this year kicked off with When You Reach Me (a great YA novel that was pretty light and easy, a perfect fit for me right now) and I'm currently slogging through Under the Dome. I've got about 100 pages left and I can't say I enjoyed it that much, despite devoting two and a half months to it.

The plan is to update again Wednesday or Thursday of this week. See you then, if you're still here!

Say Hello to My Little Friend

Last week, we got to see our little blob again and got a picture:

Everything was measuring on track (you can see the numbers on the bottom right) and the RE said the heartbeat looked good. The cross hairs on the photo mark where baby's head and bottom are. To me, it's the cutest little blob I've ever seen.

I couldn't stop staring at that photo for the rest of the day but had a hard time connecting the tiny person in the picture with what was happening inside me. It seemed like two separate things, neither of them completely real (even though I threw up right before we left for the appointment that same morning). Today, I could actually feel the beginnings of a bump forming above my pelvic bone and now it's starting to sink in. This is really happening.

Next week, I'll have my first appointment with my family doctor. It looks like the midwife thing is a no-go so I will have to spend some time researching good OBs. Nothing is guaranteed but my GP at least asks if we have a preference for specialists, so I should be able to make a request when referral time comes.

The first trimester has been a bit of a drag so far but I'm starting to see glimmers of my former self again in between bouts of nausea and exhaustion. I'm hoping that will start to taper off soon and I can get some energy back. Now if my body can just figure out the whole "sleeping through the night" thing again, we'd be all set!

Being Thankful

It's Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada and I have a lot to be thankful for this year. I also have a lot to look forward to, starting with the 8 week scan this Thursday when we'll get to see our bean again. I will confess, however, that I've been doing more complaining lately than giving thanks.

I promised myself that I was not going be one of those women who tries for so long to get pregnant only to constantly complain about it once she is. As it turns out, that's a lot easier said than done when the first trimester is a rough ride. I've been doing my best to limit the moaning and groaning but this week, the insomnia, nausea, aching breasts, bloating, gas, constipation, and exhaustion really started to wear me down. Not being able to predict my appetite, my mood, or my energy level from one day to the next (or from one hour to the next) is getting frustrating. Work has been slow so I had hoped to get all kinds of things done around the house. Instead, it's all piling up while I lie on the couch staring at it.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought this might be a good time to revisit the Good Things project and remind myself that there are still good things happening while I'm semi-conscious on my couch. Here's what I came up with:

• All of those symptoms are caused by a baby. There's still a baby in there.
• We'll get to see it again in a few days and finally get a picture to keep.
• DH has been wonderfully patient and understanding, and willing to live on carbs with me while I continue to avoid most meat.
• We survived three consecutive days of family meals this weekend without our secret getting out and without me feeling horrible (at least not in public). 
• I don't have to worry about lesson planning and facing my classes every day feeling like crap this semester. Supply teaching has its advantages.
• Egg McMuffins and hash browns. Breakfast of champions (and the only breakfast that appeals to me these days).
• Just 4.5ish weeks to go until the second trimester and hopefully some relief.

If you're in Canada, I hope you've had a great Thanksgiving weekend!

A New Type of Waiting Game

They say that there is a magical time (also known as the Second Trimester) when the nausea goes away and energy returns. I am very eagerly anticipating this magical time because right now, I am a useless lump.

On Thursday, we had our viability scan with the RE. It didn't go exactly like I'd expected but the important thing is that all is well so far. We saw the yolk sac and fetal pole on the ultrasound, and a beautiful flickering heart beat. It still blows my mind that there's a little creature in there with a beating heart!

We didn't get a picture; Doctor P. said he doesn't give them out this early (I was 6w1d at the time) because everything is too small. We also didn't get any measurements. They prefer to just check to make sure that everything that should be there at this stage is there and wait until later on to start measuring. This seemed odd to me but it all went so fast I didn't have a chance to question it. I am supposed to go back in two weeks for another scan and at that time, they will do all of the measurements and give us pictures to keep. I thought I was supposed to be done with the clinic after the initial scan so this was a surprise, but I'm not going to complain about another opportunity to see our bean!

If I am done with the clinic after that 8 week scan, I'm not really sure what happens next. I've contacted the two midwife clinics in my city and am on the waiting list with both of them but it doesn't look good. The demand in my area is much higher than the supply and one of the clinics I spoke with already had 30 women waiting with May due dates. I will most likely be stuck with my GP until the time comes to refer me to an OB.

For the time being, we wait - for the next scan, for midwife call, for me to start feeling somewhat normal again. Turns out, that game doesn't end with a +HPT ;)

Of Nausea and Prunes

The good news is that I'm still pregnant, chugging along at 5w5d.

The bad news is that "occasional bouts of queasiness" has turned into full on morning sickness. For the last few days, right around lunch time, the nausea would start and stick around for a few hours. At first I assumed it was because I was hungry but eating didn't help. And this morning, I was actually sick to my stomach. That one snuck up on me; I wasn't even feeling nauseated until suddenly, I was overwhelmingly so. Also, stewed prunes have recently become part of a complete breakfast. Those go great with the nausea...NOT.

So, in the span of a week, I've gone from feeling mostly ok to feeling mostly like this (though considerably less cute):

But I am not complaining. I will take whatever crap I need to take as long as it means baby is staying.

(Seriously, though, stewed prunes are gross.)

TTC Friday: Surreal

Where has the last month gone?! Work has been so busy that everything, blogging included, fell by the wayside. The school year is winding down now, though, and it's time to start catching up.

The last month has been somewhat surreal as far as TTC goes. When I last posted, I had just gotten a +OPK on CD64. Here's how that cycle turned out:

I was convinced during the entire LP (luteal phase) that my period was coming because everything felt like typical PMS. When I saw the temp spike on CD76, I remember thinking "WTF?"  but then it went back down and by CD78, I was sure my period would start the next day. It was the usual pattern. I had no plans to test at all and had already mentally checked out of cycle 6. Then my temp went back up and, well, you can see the rest.

I've been trying to come up with the right words to describe or explain those few days but  I can't quite get there. On the one hand, it is a relief to know that we can conceive and maybe it's a good sign that things are working. On the other hand, it still seems awfully cruel, after all this time, to have been given those few days and then have it taken away. Most of the time, DH and I are optimistic but some days (like today) are just hard.

Stress has been a big factor in my life this past semester and it's very possible that my last cycle was so long because of it. I'll never know for sure but it's likely. This cycle, I've started listening to the Circle + Bloom freebie recording to help manage the stress. It has worked wonders so far, though the jury is still out on what effect it may have on my cycle. I'm not sure I'm willing to spend the money on the full program but I do believe in their philosophy, and I have noticed positive changes since I started using the free download. School being out for the summer will go a long way toward relieving my stress too!

As I get further on in this cycle and (hopefully) closer to ovulation, the anxiety is starting to ramp up. Part of me wants to believe that we'll be able to get pregnant again really soon and another part of me is terrified that we'll lose it again. I hate that the excitement of getting a BFP is gone and it's now a source of fear.

We're also preparing ourselves for the 1 year mark next month. I saw my new family doctor this week and have been referred to a fertility clinic so I am waiting to hear back on that. My fingers are crossed that I won't need that appointment but nothing about this process has been that easy, so I'm not holding my breath. Now we begin the research into what's covered by our provincial health care plan/our own insurance and what's not. It's also time to start having those conversations we've been  putting off about how far we are willing to go with testing/treatment.

In my head, I always knew this was a possibility and I kow it's what needs to be done, but I still can't quite believe that we are here.