Crush

Jake has a crush.

Though he's 34 years old, he has morphed before my eyes into a junior high kid purely smitten.

You know how when you're a teenager in love, you can't talk about anything else except the object of your affection? You find the most obscure ways to draw conversation back around to this or that insignificant thing your crush did or said, and everyone around you becomes hopelessly annoyed?

Jake has been struck with the crushbug, and it's ALL about Snippet. Wherever we go, whoever we run into----friends or complete strangers, Jake finds some way to bring the baby into conversation. It's utterly adorable. He does this when I'm around, or when he's at work---with co-workers, with clients, with anyone who happens to mention anything at all related to pregnancies or babies. His whole face changes when he announces, "Yeah, actually, my wife is pregnant. We're expecting our first!" He gets that same goofy grin that teenagers get when they announce their first girlfriend or boyfriend at the family barbecue. When the listener congratulates him, his face has, "Aw, shucks" beaming from every pore as he says, "Well, thank you. We're really excited."

I'm surprised by his behavior because he's not usually one to air personal details so freely. He's normally more reserved around strangers, but with the Snippet news, it's like he just can't contain his joy. It seeps from him at any possibly relevant moment. It's doing wonders for my worried mind---his happiness is just that contagious.

Another unexpected affirmation arrived this week, while I was scanning through the new baby registry Jake and I set up at Babies R Us. Every few days I think of some other little thing we forgot, and as I was adding the latest whatever-item, I noticed that someone had already purchased our diaper bag for us. I was initially stunned, because only a handful of people know that we're registered. But, I was further amazed at the confidence of the buyer. Someone who cares for us fully believes that all will be well, enough to put down some money on that bet. Each uneventful day that passes has me thinking they won't have any need to keep the receipt.

The Unending Internal Struggle (are you soooo over it, yet?)

I had this great post shaping up about the Birthing Philosophy chat I had with my OB Doc #2, but my head is just in a different place. I'm feeling like a completely CRAZY PERSON.

I now own maternity clothes, but when I look in the mirror, I just see a chubby woman. All I see is that hideous pre-weight-loss stomach returning to me. I was actually pinching myself this morning in the shower, trying to see if my old under-boobs are reforming. (fyi: I don't think so. I think it's just skin---pulling at it made it seem worse, but I think so far I'm okay.) This whole thing is SOOOOO fucking with my head. There are moments I feel like I'm inventing the pregnancy notion to justify the weight gain. How stupid is that?

I pulled up the digital pic of my 6-week ultrasound on my computer to meditate on it for awhile, to remember that this is all really happening and something amazing is going on. I started crying as soon as the picture popped up, and thought to Snippet, "WHERE ARE YOU? Are you okay? Why don't I know you're there?"

The entire internet says she's in there, swimming and kicking around, but I feel nothing. I know, rationally, that I don't feel anything because she's still just the size of an olive, but this whole system seems so flawed. What did women do before the age of ultrasounds and dopplers to provide them evidence of all this? Why isn't the evidence I have ENOUGH?

Newbie in a Strange Land

I did the unthinkable this weekend. I stepped into a maternity store. Me. The girl who used to walk in a big arc around maternity stores in the mall, and intentionally look the opposite direction of them, even if it meant careening into the pretzel kiosk. Me. The girl who was sometimes brave enough to glance at those stores, then feel my eyes tear up and launch into an assault of self-insults about the stupidity of such a move.

I hadn't planned to visit one of them until a few weeks from now, but two things pushed up my visit:

1. My uncomfortable tummy pudge
2. An unexpected gift card from SIL

Yes, the tummy pudge has grown. I was getting desperate about it for a few days, until I launched an all-out internet attack to find out why it was happening. Here's the thing: the area down by my pelvic bone, where the baby is actually hanging out, is only slightly swollen. It's my tummy roll above that area that has freakishly grown. It made no sense to me, and was making me feel like a mini-blimp, having it float out there in space when just a few weeks ago, it was a polite little roll. The internet research did wonders for my self-esteem as I discovered what I realized was a totally obvious cause---my uterus has already doubled in size, and the fat that used to be down there had to go somewhere, so UP it went, forming a greater union with the pre-existent belly roll.

Unfortunately, the new jumbo roll is causing some discomfort when I wear anything except my pajamas. I ordered a Bella Band, and that makes things much comfier, but I was starting to have fantasies about pants actually meant to accommodate swelling and bloating in the nethers. I thought I would deal with the Bella Band for a few more weeks, but when the gift card showed up, that was my ticket to indulge in some greater comfort.

I was nervous on the drive up to the mall. I suppose some people might think I should have been giddy, but my stomach was a mess of nerves. As I approached the store, I felt my eyes tearing up. As I glanced through the clothing racks the first few minutes, I wasn't actually seeing anything. I was moving my eyes in an unfocused blur across the colors and textures. The air felt too hot, and too thick with judgmental eyes. Honestly, I felt like the store knew I didn't belong there, like somehow I was a fake. I imagined the girls behind the counter whispering...things. It didn't help much that, to the outside world I don't look pregnant at all. I just look like I've had a bit too much cheesecake. When one of the sales people came over to ask if I needed help, I saw her glance at my stomach and back up to my face, trying to guess my motivation for visiting the store. I blushed a hot red, and fumbled a reply about not needing help, just looking....Really, I was thinking, "Are you kidding? I have no fucking clue what I'm looking for."

The overwhelmed haze finally cleared after about ten minutes, and suddenly bits and pieces of pregnancy articles began popping into my head as I sought to decode the different types of clothes. I gathered up a big stack of pants, all made differently and in different price ranges, and hauled-it up to the fitting rooms. I still have no clue why the "Mimi" simple black pants were $75, as there was nothing spiffy or special about them. I threw them in the "rip off" stack, and then tried on an incredible pair of $30 jeans. They fit perfectly, and I actually felt a little bit foxy for the first time since the pudge appeared. Here's hoping I don't gain a massive amount of weight all over, as the sizing charts recommended that I purchase pants in the size I already wear. The stretchy expansion panel is built into just the belly area, so if my ass blimps out, I'm screwed.

Although...our newly remodeled Taco Bell is set to open in just a few weeks. It's been closed for two months. There's no way I'm missing opening day, fatass or not. (I can always do extra time on the treadmill, right?)

Happy Milestones

Turning 10 weeks pregnant today feels oddly similar to the joy of turning 10 years old. I keenly remember how happy I was to be 10---to finally be the long-sought DOUBLE DIGITS. I think my joy had something to do with feeling a closer kinship to teenager-hood with its glorious abundance of double digits. I knew that 10 certainly didn't qualify me for membership in The Teenage Club (aka: the coolest club on the planet!), I felt like it at least got me something like prequalifying status.

That's how I feel today at 10 weeks pregnant. I'm now starting to feel a sense of ownership of the Big P Word. It's me---I'm it. Turning 10 weeks feels like I'm a solid member of The Pregnancy Club. I no longer have to answer happy questioners that I'm "just" Xweeks pregnant, as though I'm some kind of pregnancy poser. Granted, I'm not out of the first trimester, but I'm getting close. I'm definitely in the prequalifying stages, at least. Not only that, but I'm officially one-quarter of the way through my pregnancy---a full-fledged member of The Quarter Club, a group of badass pegnancy newbies. We're a hormonal bunch that feels a little less afraid, a little braver, a little happier, a little more willing to trust that this might all end up okay. We're not nearly the jittery chickens we were a few weeks ago. And, yeah, if we're badass at one-quarter through, just you wait until we hit the halfway point. We'll be killah.

In other wonderful milestone news, I'm thoroughly overjoyed to spill the beans about my friend, Karen. I met Karen as a fellow diary writer for Preconception.com back in 2004. She and I began TTC just within one month of each other, and were both equally convinced that a trouble-free road lay ahead. We have consoled one another over the past 4+ years as time and worry wore on for the both of us.

But, now, just as she happily celebrated Snippet with me, I'm so excited to celebrate the news that Karen and her husband have been selected by a birth mother to adopt a beautiful baby girl!! If you, like me, are itching for details leading up to the baby's birth in July, you can keep up with Karen's story at her New Blog. Happy hugs all around!!!

Minor Gains

I met OB Doc # 2 this week, at my 9-week checkup. There's still one doctor yet to meet in the practice, but Jake was impressed with the guy we met Thursday, calling him "Mr. Smooth." Jake says that doc could walk into a room full of women and get a date with any one of them---not because he was especially handsome, but because he gave me an incredibly meaningful and timely compliment without it sounding contrived at all.

I've been really upset at the amount of weight I'm already gaining. I didn't expect to gain anything during the first trimester, but my online research shows this was a flawed assumption from the start. There are lots of reasons why women gain weight during the first trimester, but that knowledge isn't all that comforting when I've just spent the last year working my ass off to work my ass off, and now the scale is tripping back steadily in the opposite direction that it should. I've gained 6 pounds since that first positive pee stick---not quite a pound a week, but damn close. Most of it has settled in my heavier boobs and pudgier stomach.

The culprit for the weight gain is three-fold: Nausea has finally kicked in and rears its head every 2 hours, nearly on the clock. If I try to ignore it, it just grows stronger and I feel worse. If I have a snack, it immediately disappears, so you can imagine I'm not ignoring it much. The other reason is that when I wake up in the morning for my 5:30am workouts, I feel like a big slug. I'm all bloated and achey and the last thing I want to do is jump around and haul myself on and off of sweaty gym equipment. The third reason I'm packing on winter weight in the spring is that this new weight gain is completing sapping my motivation. When I was losing weight steadily, it was incredibly motivational. But, now, when a week of hard work at the gym yields only more weight gain instead of weight loss---well, it makes the whole thing feel damn pointless.

I'm trying to retrain my ego, trying to accept that this is how it's supposed to go. No one except me seems worried about it, and that is probably the most comforting aspect. Hence, my doctor being christened Mr. Smooth. At my appointment I bluntly asked him if my weight gain was normal, or if I should be concerned about it. He was completely undisturbed, and said, "No, you're totally fine. This is all normal. I'm really not anticipating any problems with you. You're young, you're thin---you'll be fine."

Yes, people----He called me Thin. And, he did it this totally off-the-cuff way that made it seem like casual fact, rather than a contrived compliment. This manner of delivery is what earned him Jake's admiration, and made me feel so much better about things. My normal response to such a compliment is to question the person's rational thinking abilities, but he's my doctor. I figure if he were worried that I was careening into obesity, he would definitely say something about it. He would want to stop me early on from wandering down a destructive path, but he's not worried at all. I'm trying to believe him.

Unsteadiness of Conscious Thought

I'm a slow processor. In general, the simplest decisions are difficult for me to make, let alone the big ones. So, this whole baby thing---it's basically turning my brain into a big bowl of mush. My thoughts are constantly racing from past to present to future, and occassionally just clusterfuck mode where nothing will process anymore. Here's what I mean:

PAST: I am still experiencing moments where I actually forget I'm pregnant. Nine weeks into this thing, and I still haven't trained myself out of infertility mode. I've actually caught myself thinking about the clinic a few times, or channeling unrelated pissiness toward Jake into wondering when he's going to quit smoking so we can have a frickin' baby. (FYI---yes, he's still smoking....grumble, grumble) This category also consists of lots of memories of my own childhood, and hurried attempts to make mental notes about things my parents did that I NEVER WANT TO DO. Lots of wishing that things will be so much better for my child and resemble hardly at all the life that I had.

PRESENT: These moments mostly consist of the panicky phrases, "HOLY FUCKING SHIT" and "OH FRICK. FRICK!"

FUTURE: This is the most active part of the whole stew, though it holds no chronological order and ranges from the realistic to the ridiculous. My fantasies bounce from looking forward to this summer, when my friends and family have already (already, holy cripes!) scheduled my baby showers. Dumb thoughts like wondering if I'll look "pregnant enough" when I attend them, whatever the hell that means. Then, racing-racing way forward to an actual baby in our house. Wondering if our dogs will totally hate the poor thing and try to bury it in their favorite flower pot in the back yard. Sometimes I think about the actual labor and delivery and hope it will be the amazing experience I really want it to be, wondering how we'll explain to Jake's family that I'm not fond of having an audience in the delivery room.

All of this musing is controlled by the slightest outside factors---a bit of overheard conversation that trips something, a song, a smell, the way a bird flies past my office window. It's like my thoughts and memories are hanging by trigger-hairs with short fuses, constantly blipping and exploding and turning over one another. It makes focused thought awfully difficult. It makes knowing how to blog about any of this difficult, too. It's just hard to make my thoughts do something coherent right now.

Then, there's the dumbest thought of them all, this one in the very present tense. I don't FEEL pregnant. I don't LOOK pregnant. What if this is all a big misunderstanding? With the ultrasound in-hand, of course, it would have to be some kind of really involved conspiracy, but hey....anything's possible, right? I'm not saying it's rational---I'm just saying in my mind, "pregnant" equals "woman with big visible belly-bump." No one thinks much about women in early pregnancy, who carry their strange new identities around, secreted from most of the world.

My Darling

Jake and I have been long-time Wilco fans, even since we took a chance in 1996 and spent college-era money we didn't have on their second album, "Being There." Our minds were happily blown, and the continued attraction, at times, hedges the silly and ridiculous. We continue to spend money we don't have on their subsequent albums and a multitude of concerts, with Wico taking the prize as the band whose live shows we have seen the most and love the most (though, Neko Case, jumped a few spots with the Ithaca show last month.) We have purchased concert tickets when we barely had gas money. We stood outside in the cold dark at the 9:30 Club for hours during the terrifying DC sniper spree, just to make sure we could get good spots right up against the stage. It's just not quite the same thrill if we can't see spit and picks flying.

When their album, "Summerteeth" came out in 1999, I found the song, "My Darling" so charming. It's a song written from a father to a child---very simple and endearing. I found it incredibly touching that a man could make himself so vulnerable, exposing his love for his child to the entire world. It wasn't my favorite song on the album, but it made me smile.

When Jake and I began TTC in January 2004, I would happily listen to this song and daydream about Jake singing it to our child one day. He learned how to play it and sing it on his guitar. When I listened to it, my eyes were teary, and I worked on memorizing the lyrics. We couldn't wait to make it a nighttime lullaby staple.

Years passed without the arrival of children, and the song suffered. It became so much less enjoyable---a source of small pain, a little dig at what we didn't have. I started skipping it on the album. If it began playing before I could hit fast-forward, my eyes would tear up a little at the piano intro, but then I would degrade the song to defend myself and think, "It's cheesy anyway. I don't want to hear that shit." Wilco rarely plays it at shows, so I never had to suffer through it in person. It wasn't that I couldn't appreciate a father's love for his child anymore; It was that hearing the song made me think of those assumptions from years ago, and I felt stupid and naive, and strangely humiliated by that naivete.

Last week, in preparation for seeing Wilco live at Tower Theatre in Philly, Jake and I had all their albums on rotation. It's part of our ritual for psyching up for a show---we load up everything by the upcoming artist into the car and house stereos and basically go on a binge. By the time the show night arrives, we're like junkies pumped on the super-good-shit, waiting for that one last awesome hit to send us over the edge. It was during this binge that I rediscovered, with much pleasure and happier tears, "My Darling." I hadn't thought about the song in awhile, and had been mostly trying to warm up to their newer albums (and loving their awesome live album, "Kicking Television.") When "My Darling" and Jeff Tweedy's soft, genuine voice began to play, the whole song was reborn. I bawled in the car on my way to work---so happy to be able to love this song in a whole new way:

MY DARLING

Go back to sleep now
My darling
And I'll keep all the bad dreams away
Breathe now, think sweet things
And I'll think of all the right words to say

Because we made you
My darling
With the love in each of our hearts
We were a family, my darling
Right from the start

Grow up now
My darling
Please don't you grow up too fast
And be sure, darling
To make all the good times last

Because we made you
My darling
With the love in each of our hearts
We were a family, my darling
Right from the start