Last week I took Simone and Scott to a 3D ultrasound. Simone has been very excited about (and frequently impatient for) the upcoming arrival of Baby Twyla, but I think seeing the moving face of the actual baby I am housing helped make it less abstract for her. It certainly did for me.

I mean, look! That is a real baby! MY baby. That face up there? Is INSIDE OF MY ABDOMEN.

She looks SO like her sister in a few of these. A few remind me of my baby pictures, and I can definitely see Scott, but she doesn’t resemble either parent so much as she does Simone. Of course, she doesn’t look precisely like Simone, either. She is her own little person, which is such a strange, exciting thing to see.

(We saw that yawn in real time!)

I don’t know exactly why it has been so hard for me to post here—truthfully, it has been hard for me to accomplish much of anything—but I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that my emotional state is one that doesn’t bear close examination. I am buoyantly happy, but that happiness is stretched tautly over the surface of something else; I live mostly as though I am going to give birth to a live baby in 40ish days, but much as I want to be, I am not convinced that this will actually happen. It’s not that I think that it WON’T happen, only that I am not confident in its happening, can so easily imagine it Not Happening, and that is enough to be exhausting. The tension seems especially high now, when we are so close. I am trying to savor this last part of my last pregnancy, and mostly succeeding by moving forward as mindlessly as possible, and I suppose there is some willful blindness I have to adopt to do so that is harder to sustain in writing. Does that make sense?

Anyhow, here I am, at 30 and 31 weeks pregnant. respectively.


Both pictures were taken at the foothills of Mt. Laundry, yes, and in front of a streaky mirror, BUT! Our apartment has been painted! You can’t tell from those pictures, because all you really see is the doors and woodwork which are still white (along with the bathroom and kitchen), and also the pictures were taken on a phone, but the main areas (living room, hallway, etc.) are “Sweet Bluette” by Benjamin Moore and the bedrooms are “Sweet Dreams.” Both colors are a vast improvement over the dingy, sallow shade of “Landlord” everything was painted before. We have boxed up the majority of our books for storage, and have lovely new bookcases for the few hundred remaining. Furniture has been discarded, delivered, assembled, and rearranged, and in general the non-baby-related aspects of Operation: NEST! are proceeding apace. I still haven’t gotten up the nerve to purchase the items I need for the actual, you know, B-A-B-Y, but the bassinet is assembled, if mattress-less, so that is something.
I can’t wait until it is all done. I am going to take “After” pictures all over the apartment, like one of those “Pretty Things!” bloggers. I feel that having my home both beautiful and clean is an historic event, like an eclipse, or a shuttle launch, or the discovery of a new species, and demands extensive documentation.

My husband deserves some kind of award for everything he has done during this pregnancy. He has been a prince, and I shudder to think of the state I would be in if not for him. Every household chore? Performed by Scott. Laundry, dishes, cleaning, moving all furniture to the center of the rooms when informed by wife that THE APARTMENT MUST BE PAINTED OR WE WILL ALL DIE AND ALSO THE PAINTERS ARE COMING IN 48 HOURS? Scott, Scott, Scott, and Scott. During the first trimester I was too ill to leave the couch for months, and now I have days where I contract if I dare to be upright for more than a few minutes at a time, and he has waited on me and entertained Simone through all of it without a murmur of complaint; when I stumble out to the living room for my midnight leg and back massage, he has the grace and great good sense to appear happy to see me. We go out for brunch as a family, or lunch just the two of us while Simone is in school, and have so much FUN together—it may not sound earth shattering, but I assure you, the Scott of last year could not, would not, have handled this. Pregnancy aside, it is hard to believe I am married to the same person I was married to a year ago. That is a whole other entry, but trust me when I tell you that it is pretty astounding (inspiring, even) to see another person transform in such a purposeful, dramatic way as an adult. If I’d had the faith required to allow myself higher expectations–both for myself and others–a long time ago, I might have spared everyone a lot of misery and bother, but who knows. The point is: things are good. (And it is probably wise to have that written down for easy reference before New Baby Time, when sleeplessness and hormones are sure to blow everything sky high for a while.)

This will be obvious to those of you who have had third trimesters, but fetii look different on ultrasound at 30-some weeks than they do at, say, 25. Suddenly they’re all fat and smooshy, less like adorable animated skeletons and more like round baby humans. You can see their fat little arms and their fat little cheeks; I’ve probably got three and a half pounds of person in there now. Somehow, though, they still feel as though they are all bone, don’t they? All bone and FERAL, and maybe sharing cramped quarters with another of their kind—their mortal enemy, with whom they are engaged in a fight to the death. (Badger in a sack! I think every time she really gets going, It’s a badger in a sack!)
Twyla is a particularly active baby, which is good, as evidenced by the way I reacted the one day last week when she wasn’t particularly active (attempted to rouse baby, got no response, decided she was dead, was too afraid to use doppler, dressed for L&D while mentally preparing for series of excruciating scenarios helpfully provided by my brain, emerged from bedroom and calmly informed Scott that I had to go to the hospital because baby wasn’t moving, broke into violent torrent of weeping that could not be stopped, but had unexpectedly helpful effect of goading said baby from her nap into series of irritated kicks). However, this boisterous level of activity is not as charmingly painless as one might hope. I have had occasion to Google both “can fetus kick its way out cervix uterine rupture” and “how strong is amniotic sac?” The last time a nurse rattled off her customary “Since your pregnancy began, have you been hit, slapped, kicked, or otherwise physically hurt by anyone?” the question gave me pause, I’ll tell you what.

I am more pregnant than I have ever been. 26 WEEKS pregnant. Soon I will enter a whole foreign trimester. Some of it will feel familiar to me, having been so very, very vast last time, with twins and all (in many ways, it’s been the second trimester that felt new this time), but still. This baby is older than Simone was when she was born. Screw pregnancy newsletters; I can look at Simone’s BABY PICTURES and get a reasonable idea of what Twyla looks like in utero at any given gestation from now on.

(Yes. Her name is Twyla. I let that slip on Twitter the other night. When I’m feeling particularly pleased and hopeful, I call her Twyla the Tenacious.)

The new season of Mad Men premiered Sunday night, and it sent me into something of a tailspin to realize that (customary caveat applied) by the time the season ends, I will have a new baby. A baby in my home, a baby who is a couple of weeks old, even.
Do you know how SHORT a season of Mad Men is? I do, because I complain about it every time. AND YET! When the last episode airs, I will probably be watching it while NURSING, or something.

On the one hand, it can’t come soon enough for my get-the-baby-out-alive-anxiety, but on the other…I have SO MUCH to do before that season finale airs.

I know—all a baby really needs is a boob and a clean, de-splintered drawer to sleep in, blah blah blah. This is only partially about the actual baby. We’d been dithering until about a week ago about moving, and have at last decided to stay in our apartment at least another two years. The location is really impossible to improve upon, and while it still KILLS me not to have any outside space, well, we can GO outside, and by staying here and saving we have a better chance of buying a house we really love down the line. However:
1) We have been treating this place as temporary for almost four years now (have yet to really put up any pictures, for instance), which is hardly conducive to the happy, home-y, settled feeling I am desperate for, and
2) It has gotten unacceptably grime-y (the ceiling fan blades! The windows and baseboards!) and messy (Hoarders Lite, over here).
The plan, then, is that instead of starting fresh elsewhere, we will make this place clean and lovely and more like a home. As I said, the apartment has gotten filthy in hard-to-reach-but-easy-to-be-horrified-by places, it is time to DECORATE, already, and we are seriously in need of a purge of our belongings. We are finally getting permission to paint and there is furniture that must be replaced and a room that needs to turn from Office back into Child’s Room and I have honest to god SPREADSHEETS detailing the million tasks that must be completed within the next Mad Men season because yes, it needs to be done before the baby comes. Do not tell me that it doesn’t all have to be done before the baby comes, because I WILL CUT YOU. This project is making me crazy, but it is also the only thing keeping me sane. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it is true.
You see, I have a viable baby inside me. I do NOT want that viable baby to come out early—we got so lucky with our outcome last time it seems certain we wouldn’t be again, and besides, I am quite enchanted with the idea of delivering a great big 37-weeker that I can hold the very same day—but I am excruciatingly aware of said baby’s viability, and my uterus’ murder-y history with babies, and the thought of having a healthy 30-some-weeker snuffed out by some unseen malfunction is never far from my mind. I can’t do anything but trust my doctors and hope for the best, on that front, so you can bet your ASS I am going to get this apartment whipped into shape in the next 11 weeks.

I thought I might do some Before-and-After-ing here, on this old Website of mine, but the Befores would be so, so bad—no really, so bad—that I suspect it would just be a repeat of the time I posted this entry and received hate mail for MONTHS. Worse, because sorting is already in progress, so in some cases the Befores would just be pictures of boxes and piles. (I apologize for how unintentionally filthy that last sentence was, by the way.) I promise to show you the finished product at my customary tedious length.

Scott will be doing most of the actual, physical work, because my uterus can’t seem to tolerate more than 10 minutes of activity before going AWOOGA! AWOOGA! and dissolving into panicked contractions. I did manage to sort through most of Simone’s baby clothes the other day, which led to the conclusion that we do not need any more, at least for the first six months. Which is good! but also makes me feel horribly guilty because it means poor Twyla will always be wearing hand-me-downs. I found this far more upsetting than I suspect any reasonable person would.

My emotions have been volatile. There has been a lot of weeping, but not necessarily for any specific/rational/explicable reason. On Monday I started crying as I left for Simone’s spring conference, because…I’m not sure. The closest I could figure was that it was because Scott had class and couldn’t come with me, and also I hadn’t slept well the night before, and also I wanted a piece of cake but wasn’t allowed.

I wasn’t allowed cake, incidentally, because I failed my one hour glucose tolerance test so spectacularly that I don’t even get to attempt the three hour. I passed the one hour with ease in the first trimester, and thought I had dodged that particular bullet this time, but nope! I’ve only gained a total of three pounds all told (hard to believe given my magnificent prow), so lord knows I can’t blame it on that, and I wasn’t more than slightly zaftig to begin with. I’ve been checking my blood sugar since getting the news, and every reading has been scrupulously normal (even the one taken after a celebratory meal of takeout penne and mango sorbet), so apparently the only thing that causes my blood glucose to rise to unacceptable levels is that godawful drink of theirs. Of course when I reported to the diabetes clinic yesterday I got the same lecture they gave me last pregnancy, about how I need to eat more (the GD diet, believe it or not, asks that one consume a tremendous amount of food). I tried not to become too exasperated but suspect I failed, because I am still on round-the-clock Zofran, and LADY, I AM JUST HAPPY I AM MANAGING TO EAT AT ALL.

Can I point out, as long as we’re on the subject, the absurdity of having this not eating/gaining enough problem after spending the last two-plus years salivating over food I couldn’t have because I was trying to lose weight while locked in battle with my damn thyroid? And no matter how I changed my “calories in/calories out” equation (DO NOT EVEN GET ME STARTED) I kept right on gaining—20 pounds in the six months before I got pregnant! And now I eat whatever I please (including this awfully sinful macaroni and cheese from a local restaurant that I eschewed for years out of virtue) and am about as active as your average ficus, and I am being sighed at by nutritionists.

In other news (unless you follow me on Twitter, in which case this is not news at all), we had a bit of excitement Thursday night, in the form of Baby’s First Trip to L&D.

Despite the weekly 17-P injections, I contract a lot: my pattern has been sporadic contractions throughout the day, and an uptick with activity. I get my shot every Monday morning, and by the weekend it must be wearing off, because my contracting become noticeably more regular—my response to which has been to spend Sunday afternoons in bed with a heating pad and a contraction timing app, guzzling water and waiting out the hours until my next shot. (You may remember that I started the 17-P injections almost solely as a precaution, because of uterine irritability, but with the strong, increasing contractions it looks as if we can say that my preterm shenanigans last pregnancy were likely not entirely due to Ames’ death after all.) One particularly alarming Sunday netted me a cervical ultrasound, but it showed no shortening or funneling or anything untoward, suggesting that these contractions of mine are more bark than bite. General policy since has been that as long as they don’t stay regularly in excess of six an hour with water, rest, and heat, I needn’t do anything about them beyond limiting my activity as necessary. (The stairs to our third story apartment are a particularly notorious culprit.) The extent of this limit is vague (“don’t go on any long walks” being a recent guideline), so I let my uterus be my guide. Alas, the farther along I get, the more badly my uterus behaves, and on Thursday I had several hours with more than six contractions. They were irregular in intensity but coming about three minutes apart when I sped off to triage.

The triage desk is just inside the entrance to the birth center on the way to the NICU, and standing there, signing all the forms that would allow them to care for Twyla should she happen to make an appearance (all the while mindful of the fact that I was only about three days, gestationally, from when Simone was born) made me ill. I kept tearing up and raced through the paperwork as quickly as I possibly could. I am certain my signatures were entirely illegible.
(Of course, everything was FINE, and I probably could have waited a bit before getting so verklempt, but as I have mentioned, the logical parts of my brain don’t seem to be operating at full capacity lately.)
In the room I shimmied into a familiar abdominal ace-bandage to hold the monitors and donned a gown. A nurse came in and positioned one disk to monitor contractions and one to monitor heartbeat, and I felt that odd mix of hope that there would be no more contractions and hope that there would be a few and that they would show up on the strip. Those of you who have dealt with preterm labor are doubtless familiar with this—obviously, you don’t WANT to be having contractions, but because it can be hard to pick up early contractions on the monitors, it’s difficult not to feel both desperate (because you are scared, and KNOW there are contractions, and want them to be taken seriously) and embarrassed (because if the contractions don’t show up, everyone will think you are crazy and paranoid and will be secretly eye-roll-y back at the nurses station). After a bit of adjusting, my contractions showed up, but happily there were not many of them, though there was a lot of background wiggly uterine irritability on the strip. The contractions themselves looked like gently sloping hills, and I remembered the mountainous peaks they were during actual labor with Simone, and wondered, again, how on EARTH I stood that every 3 minutes for 16 hours.

The nurse gave me a dose of Vistaril and then a shot of Terbutaline which: OW. Burny. It was remarkably effective at stopping the contractions—I only had three in the hour-and-a-half I was there post-shot—but I wasn’t fond of the Terbutaline, and have no interest in seeing it socially. I vehemently disapproved of the unwholesome jitters it imparted, and when combined with the Vistaril, the result was a paradoxical caffeinated bonelessness. A small price to pay, and all that, but it’s a good thing the nurses warn you about the “did I do a large quantity of cocaine and then forget about it?” effect, because otherwise I imagine a person would assume they were in dire need of a cardiologist and possibly a notary for thier living will.

The fetal monitoring portion of my stay was a pleasant surprise. You see, SOME babies, in the past—I won’t name any names—became quite testy and uncooperative at the first whiff of a monitoring session. SOME babies made a fleet of poor, overworked nurses drop everything every 90 seconds or so to chase after their heart rate, three hours a day, for weeks. Twyla, despite being the most active baby I have ever harbored, was much more cooperative than a certain (as I said, unnamed) one of her predecessors.

The worst part of the visit was the cervical check. Now, these are never pleasant, and always involve me assuming a vulnerable position (legs bent and spread, fists balled under ass as requested to give “better access”) while a nurse does an unspeakably painful Hand Jive inside my vagina. This time, though, was something special. The head of the bed—which was elevated—suddenly gave way, sending me crashing downward with someone else’s digits inside of me. The good news is that my cervix was nice and closed. The bad news is—did you READ that?

Anyhow, while they were up there they did a fetal fibronectin test (a positive got me admitted at 24 weeks last time) and it was, blessedly, NEGATIVE, which gives me something like a 95% probability that I will NOT deliver within the next two weeks. Huzzah for third trimesters!

My, this has been a whiny post, hasn’t it? Why so whiny, lucky still-pregnant girl? This last complaint, at least, is actually a plea for help:
I will give all my riches (about $117 at present) to whomever can cure me of my horrible, panic-attack-inducing Restless Spirit Leg.

Every night, I fall asleep only to wake a short time later with the most horrible feeling in my legs and sometimes more of me. “Restless,” though, doesn’t convey just how awful it is: it is a physical feeling, but I am also panicky, and feel I need to get out of my own self IMMEDIATELY—Akathisia, you know. I flex my muscles over and over and finally stumble out to the living room, sniffling pathetically, to lay on the couch while Scott massages my legs. I also take a Klonopin, which helps immensely but makes me wring my hands and feel like I am a bad mother even to the unborn, despite the fact that I KNOW it’s a low dose and there is no research saying anything damning about it in the 2nd trimester, and that last time after Ames had died they had me on benzodiazepenes for my Grieving and everything was FINE. Still. The doctors in my practice don’t all agree about benzos in pregnancy and so I’d avoided them until now. Almost without fail, after the leg massage and Klonopin I am able to return to sleep without further incident.

Further information:

–Taking the Klonopin before I try to sleep does not stop the Restless Spirit Leg from occurring.
–I have long since stopped taking Unisom, because antihistamines make Restless Leg worse.
–I AM mildly anemic (hemoglobin 10-point-something, down from 12 in 1st trimester), which I have heard could-possibly-maybe-but-maybe-not be a factor, HOWEVER I can’t take iron supplements. I am already bunches of Colace for the Zofran, and I tried a supposedly not-as-constipating form of iron supplement (gluconate? can’t remember) about a week ago and the resulting situation was so bad that I am not prepared to talk about it on this public Website.
–I ate a banana before bed last night, having vaguely remembered something about THAT helping, and no luck.

Seriously, if one of you can rid me of this affliction I will give you any of my cats you like! Your choice! Please!

If you don’t have any Leg ideas, maybe you could tell me your best Hormonal Pregnancy Meltdown story? Last time I was pregnant enough to get to the Sudden Onset Weeping stage I had actual things to weep about, so it is very weird to find my emotions swinging wildly out of control over nothing or in ways (clinging to spouse, nesting) that remind me that I am, in point of fact, an animal. An animal that needs windows that aren’t so dirty they make her want to DIE and also to find just ONE COMFORTABLE SLEEPING POSITION FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Hey, have you seen what I’m wearing? It’s new:

I call it VIABLE BABY.

—Simone turned FOUR yesterday, you may have noticed. We are having a big party this weekend, and you can expect quantities of pictures and maybe some weepy maternal sands-through-the-hourglass-of-time talk to follow. FOUR! FOUR?

—This pregnancy is taking place almost exactly four years after my last one, only behind by a month and a half, and it is odd to be pregnant during another presidential election year. I now firmly associate watching primary coverage with pregnancy, and suspect I’ll come over all nostalgic in 2016. Maybe I’ll feel phantom kicks every time I see an electoral map?

—Speaking of, I am finally starting to feel the baby move daily. Not a lot, or consistently, but it is helping my anxiety to become more a whirr than a roar.

—I have had more energy and been in a much improved mood ever since Chinese New Year on the 23rd, so I am giving all the credit to The Year of The Dragon. It is said to be particularly lucky. After last year, The Year of The Crying Woman, I am fully prepared to enjoy the spit out of it.
(I don’t actually believe in such things, but this would be such a happy, convenient belief that I am trying to will it into existence.)

—19 weeks!

—My actual delivery date will depend upon a lot of things, but it will definitely be before the end of June. Now that it is February, June does not sound nearly as far away as it used to. I can’t make up my mind whether this relative closeness is a relief or a cause for panic. Both?

—Gestationally speaking, Simone was born about six weeks from now. HOLY HOLY, you guys.

—With the twins, I had pelvic bone separation, a painful condition that makes walking, putting on pants, or attempting any movement that requires the lifting of one leg without the other excruciating. To my surprise and extreme annoyance, it started much earlier this pregnancy, and I wince and waddle everywhere I go. I am now in physical therapy as a result, and actually quite enjoy it, mostly because this therapy takes place in a warm pool. The one problem is that exercising in water is misleading. It feels as though you aren’t doing much of anything at all, but your muscles beg to differ later on. Worst of all is that upon getting out of the water you rediscover gravity, and are transformed into a you-sized quantity of Ununoctium. Usually I can barely hoist my way up the stairs and out of the pool, where I find everything that had stopped hurting when weightless has taken up bothering me again with redoubled effort.

—Last time after my session I was in so much pain that traversing the parking garage to my car took geological time, and brought me nearly to tears. I had to pick up a prescription before going home, and I’d been counting on also picking up some of my new favorite thing in the whole world, namely Haagen-Daz Pineapple Coconut ice cream. Alas, when I’d finally shuffled my way to the ice cream aisle, I discovered they didn’t have any. That, I am ashamed to say, brought me the rest of the way to tears.

—If you haven’t had Haagen-Daz Pineapple Coconut ice cream, you should just skip the rest of this post and go find some. Here is the flavor’s official page, with a place at the bottom to punch in your zip code and locate the nearest store stocking it. Go there now.

—I’ve had a cold, which did disgusting things to my throat, thus acting as a trigger to my gag reflex, and the night before last, Scott and I were stricken with a dramatic and cleansing bout of food poisoning.
HOWEVER, aside from these temporary setbacks, I have been spending much less time on the bathroom floor in the last weeks. I’m not yet able to wean my Zofran dose, but I am feeling leagues better, in sharp contrast to my last pregnancy, when I actually got worse around this time—possibly because I was already gigantic and consuming anything at all presented an organizational challenge (I was measuring full term when I delivered, and that was in the second trimester). So far this pregnancy I’ve had terrible nausea with very little vomiting, followed by improved nausea with lots more vomiting, and now, at last, rare(!) vomiting with nausea that sometimes disappears altogether, as long as I take my meds. I can enjoy food now, provided it is the perfectly right food consumed at the exactly right time in the precisely correct quantity. Those conditions are demanding, yes, but when they align, it is GLORIOUS. At my last appointment I had finally moved the scale a pound over my pre-pregnancy weight! (Though I’ll bet the vomitous fiesta of the past few days has undone all my good work.)

—Given my lack of weight gain so far, I would like very much to know where my body is getting the extra materials to construct new edifices: I have a belly in the strangers-feel-free-to-comment category, and what’s more, my bosom has developed a horrifying case of gigantism. As I recall, my 19 week bra size was as nothing compared to my postpartum size last time, and I have now progressed to an F/G, as in FFS, what am I Going to do when my milk comes in? I mean honestly. Will upright locomotion even be possible?

—I’ve been having contractions since about 16 weeks, and after a week of this they checked my cervix, which was still appropriately long and closed. (Of course it was also curvy and oddly situated enough to inspire interested murmurs, as per usual.) Long cervix or no, the contractions rather terrify me, if you want to know the truth, and all the uterine irritability has earned me weekly 17P shots for the duration. I think the contractions have lessened quite a bit since I started the injections, but it is possible I am imagining things, as it has only been two weeks.
My doctor had originally decided I wasn’t a candidate for the 17P, and I was on my way out when another doctor, who’d seen my chart, decided to amend the plan. Her thinking was as follows: When I came in at 22w2d last pregnancy, I was having contractions and my cervix was soft. That was when we found out Ames had died, and the contractions and such were attributed to that. You know the rest of the story—contractions continued, cervix shortened, water broke at 24 weeks, labor at 25 and 5. While there is no reason to think that Ames wasn’t the reason for everything, the fact is that I still presented with contractions and a soft cervix at 22 weeks and progressing preterm labor with cervical changes afterwards, and here I was this time at 17 weeks with contractions, so better safe than sorry.
Funnily enough, they won’t let you give the injections yourself, even though it is essentially a once-a-week version of PIO. I discovered this because my insurance won’t pay for a nurse to come and give me the shot, as is usually done, so I have to go into the clinic once a week—which is fine! But attempting to make things easier I offered to just do the shots myself, and the nurse looked at me like I was crazy.
“You can’t!” she said, “It’s not like Lovenox—these have to be given with a bigger needle, in your backside.” I assured her that I was well aware of that, that in fact I’d given myself eight weeks of daily intramuscular progesterone post-IVF, but she only looked more horrified and unconvinced, so I dropped it. I’m pretty sure I came across as some sort of deviant sharps enthusiast.

—I’d just like to point out, again, how truly inept my body is at pregnancy. It regurgitates its nutrients and thickens its blood, and then its joints slip apart and its child-bearing organ nervously contracts at the slightest provocation. With a bit of help from medical technology and/or pharmacology (and this time the help was only secondary, the result of chemical prodding for an apathetic thyroid), my body makes perfectly lovely, healthy babies…and then immediately sets about trying to kill them. It seems vexingly contrary. I hope the 12 weeks of progesterone suppositories, 20 weeks of 17P, daily Lovenox injections, baby aspirin, etc. etc. MY GOD etc. will be enough to appease it this time.

—If you follow me on Twitter you know this already, but at an ultrasound a week or so ago we found out that the baby is really and truly a girl. We are pretty excited, over here. Another thing you may have seen on Twitter is an ultrasound photo—a very alarming and ghostly-looking ultrasound photo that I assure you was an extremely charming and adorable ultrasound MOMENT, during which my newest daughter yawned widely:

I know. A little chilling at this time of night, but if you check again in the daylight I think you’ll find she’s pretty cute.

I haven’t posted because I’ve felt I’m expected—possibly even required—to post about my father, and…I don’t want to. His dying was both expected and a shock. It’s complicated, both the Rube Goldberg-like route he took to death and my feelings about it and him and us. Writing about it, even thinking of writing about it, is unwieldy and exhausting. I don’t want to, not because it would be too painful, or because I have suddenly developed a sense of propriety that would preclude dissecting my every internal burble in virtual public, but because there is so much else vying for space within my head (to be quite frank, being pregnant after a stillbirth leaves little room for thoughts of anything else), and I am working so hard to believe that Good Things Are Ahead! (i.e. the baby won’t die), that now that it is over—the seeing him for the last time and the wondering if I ought to have handled that differently and the dying that made such wondering mute—I want to put it all aside for a bit, taking advantage of the fact that our long near-estrangement means that his death will leave my day-to-day life largely unchanged.

2011 was a singularly grueling year, and having seen the back of it, I’m not feeling reflective. This probably won’t last—I have the tiresome ability to come over all contemplative at the sight of a discarded gum wrapper, after all—but if all I can do at the moment, or all I want to do at the moment, is look fixedly ahead, so be it. I’m sure this reflects poorly upon me in some way, but ah well. I don’t care enough to forego posting about the things I DO want to post about, at least not anymore.

Right now, I am about 16 weeks pregnant, and three days ago the baby looked like this:

I’ve been convinced for a long time now—based upon absolutely nothing at all, mind—that this baby is a girl, and at Saturday’s ultrasound the tech was 80ish% sure I am right. (With the twins, they said at 17 weeks that Ames was definitely a boy and Simone was very-likely-but-let’s-check-again-next-time a girl, so maybe it is harder to be certain with girls?) I had no preference at all—boy, girl, some new model entirely—but it has become increasingly hard not to think of the baby by its name (or what stands an 80ish% chance of being its name) and so if it is a boy I suppose I will owe it an apology.

This past week was the 4th anniversary of a certain horrible week that changed everything, and, as expected, it was trying. One of the days I woke up convinced the baby was dead. My doppler wasn’t much help with Ames and Simone as I could never tell for certain if I was hearing two separate heartbeats, but this time it has been a godsend, and I imagine it will continue to be until I am feeling regular, consistent movement (I felt some for the first time last week, late at night, but nothing definite since). Another day last week found me spending the afternoon in bed with a run of contractions (Braxton Hicks?) that eventually subsided with water, heat, and rest. I say this every year, but oh, I will be glad when January is over.

Simone continues to be the very best thing up to and including sliced bread. The other night, we were sitting in my bed, in near hysterics over something or another, and we finally subsided into giggles and sighs.
“Ah,” said Simone, in the peculiar accents of a 3-year-old, “it’s funny to laugh!”

My dad died last week.
The funeral is tomorrow, thus in between his dying and his funeral fell the holidays, which were honestly joyful; the day he died was also the day I saw an apparently healthy and obviously human baby at my nuchal translucency scan. It would be nice if events occurred in emotionally coherent groupings, but as I am all too aware, they seldom do. To be fair, even my emotions seldom occur in emotionally coherent groupings, especially when it comes to my father. I suppose this is fitting, then.

More, much, anon.

My brother is visiting our mother in Switzerland for some pre-holiday cheer. To me, of course, holiday season in Switzerland means only one thing: everyone’s favorite sack-toting, child-beating sidekick, Schmutzli. I have happily incorporated this particular aspect of Swiss culture into my own seasonal festivities, and so asked my brother to keep an eye out for anything Schmutzli-related. But he had a better idea.

You see, Max and my mother are leaving for a quick jaunt to Barcelona tomorrow, and in the course of his research, my brother had discovered a Spanish holiday custom that seemed to him to demand import. “We’re starting a whole new tradition!” he enthused. And then he proceeded to tell me about it.

Now, Max has a history of playing me for a fool. For instance, he once convinced me that the town of Killdeer, North Dakota was named for a bird called the Killdeer. This is true—what is not is that the Killdeer is so named for its practice of hunting in swarms, hundreds of the small birds rising up as one body to cover and bring down a full-grown deer.
(I know. I know. But you should hear him tell it!)
He loves to trot out the story of how he convinced me of the existence of The Tiny, Bloodthirsty Killdeer, and so when he started in on the story of The Catalan Shit Log, I naturally thought it was not the log that was full of shit, and went online for some fact checking.

My suspicion was almost immediately replaced by some unnameable melange of delight and escalating horror:

So—let me get this straight.

First you find a log. Then you wrap that log tenderly in a blanket and bring it into your home, where, beginning on the Feast of The Immaculate Conception, you ply it with nightly gifts of food. After 16 or 17 days of this, you gather the children, and together you shroud the log and beat it fiercely with sticks, crying “SHIT LOG! SHIT!” until it defecates candy, fruit, and small gifts. Eventually the log has nothing more to give, at which point you throw it onto the fire.

I…I honestly have nothing to add. I’ve never met a set of facts LESS in need of embellishment. There are Youtube videos of cherubic school children gleefully thwacking the Class Shit Log. The traditional Beating Song translates like this:

Shit log,
shit turrón (nougat),
hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
shit log!

What I find most bizarre—recognizing that, in this case, “most bizarre” is high honor indeed—is the fact that families personify this log, paint a face upon it, treat it as a treasured guest, and then, two weeks later, come together to taunt and beat their wooden charge (severely enough that, according to legend, it not only loses control of its bowels but finally urinates) before setting it ablaze. And for what? Nougat, traditionally. Nougat!

When my brother and my mother return to the states next week, they will not be alone: with them will be our family’s Caga Tio. I am not sure I have the heart to participate in this particular tradition, especially given the pains I have taken to impress upon Simone that we never, ever hit our friends. What am I going to say? “Unless they might shit nougat?” I grant that it would likely be safe to add a nougat-feces exception, but it’s a slippery slope, and I’d be setting a dangerous precedent.

These are the kinds of parenting issues I am faced with at the holidays—whether or not to let my child participate in scatological celebratory beatings, given that she does already have a knitted finger puppet of a character holding a staff meant for festive seasonal child abuse. I don’t quite know what this says about me as a mother. I am not convinced I want to.

Do you ever do that thing, where you are just going to rest for a bit, maybe to help your preschooler fall asleep, and then you open your eyes and it is the next day?
Yeah. Sorry about that.

Anyhow, the appointment yesterday was fine. Weird, but fine. More on that in a few paragraphs.

I never got around to telling you about my FIRST ultrasound appointment, and I meant to, because it was An Experience. I was just over six weeks then, and walking into the perinatology clinic gave me a strange, uneasy feeling. I had been back twice since my last pregnancy, once to check on Ames’ autopsy while Simone was still in the NICU, and then later for testing and discussion of the autopsy results—a post-mortem post-mortem, you could say. Returning in the context of a new pregnancy was more difficult than I had expected. I felt jittery and sick. When I tried to check in, the receptionist told me that the ultrasound was still on, but my peri appointment had been canceled. A nurse came out to explain things to me, and I tried to explain to HER that I needed to start Lovenox, that I’d heard it should be started as close to conception as possible, and that was weeks ago, and to my absolute HORROR, I found myself crying. Which…I don’t even…I was as shocked as anyone, let me tell you. The nurse pulled up a chair (I was that patient) and reassured me that they could absolutely start my Lovenox without a full appointment, and that a doctor would see me for a minute after the ultrasound to get me set up with the prescription. I don’t know whether that nurse remembered me from my last pregnancy, but I’m sure she’ll remember me now, alas.

The heartbeat ultrasound itself went well, as you know, which was a massive relief—I didn’t realize until I saw the heartbeat how much I had been expecting NOT to see it. The tech was very sweet (perhaps she had been warned that I was unstable?) and afterward left to get the doctor. And guess who that doctor was?
HINT: you may remember him from such lines as “You can see here that Baby A is demised.”

It was…something. The adjective escapes me. Of all the ultrasound suites in all the perinatology clinics in the world, you know? I mean of course I knew it could be him, or I would have, had I thought about it. But I hadn’t, and it was a surprise.

He came in beaming and full of congratulations and I shook his hand feeling dazed. I don’t think I’d seen him since that awful day, though it’s not like that was the only time we’d met—he was also the doctor who told us we were having a boy and a girl, and I saw him in Labor & Delivery around 16 weeks. Needless to say, it is the 22 week visit that sticks in my mind.
He obviously remembered me, or at least had remembered upon reviewing my chart, and said he’d order the Lovenox and have a nurse meet me in an exam room to go over the details. I was shown to said exam room, and…it was the room in which the DEMISED ultrasound took place. They hadn’t even changed the artwork. That dreadful poster: faux-hand-colored, boy in Olde-Tymey hat and girl with a bow. The ultrasound machine and exam table, everything was in the spot it had been. I felt I might very well have been on a horribly morbid episode of Candid Camera.

The nurse didn’t come in right away, so I had some time to sit dumbly in the chair (the same chair I’d sat in to chat about the twins’ movements, and later to call Scott) and remember that day with a truly sickening level of clarity that was far less like remembering and far more like reliving than I would have wished. I decided, while I was waiting, that I would simply have to switch clinics, but exposing that decision to even the dimmest ray of logic forced the conclusion that switching clinics was a foolish and untenable idea.

So—that was the day of my heartbeat ultrasound.

Yesterday’s appointment was much better. It is already less unsettling to be back in the familiar office, and the nurses are truly lovely, as usual. It helped that I was in a different exam room this time (I have thought of requesting that I never be put in the other exam room again, but I am afraid that will make me seem even more unhinged that I doubtless do already). I won’t deny that the place still feels a bit grim and haunted, though. If you read Half Baked, you may remember the doctor I called McGleamy. I loved him so, and was sure he’d get a kick out of the book. Back when it came out I’d decided to send him a copy, and it was when I was looking for his address that I discovered he’d been killed by a car while crossing a street in front of the Los Angeles Airport, in 2009. There is a lovely plaque in the clinic, with his picture, and it makes me terribly sad. So yes. Grim, haunted. A little.

I did have the same doctor (I am trying very, very hard not to think of him as Doctor Demised, though this is a challenge). He told me that if ever I need reassurance, I can simply “drop by” and someone will give me a quick Live Baby Check. He was very kind, and in a way it isn’t such a bad thing that he was there for what happened before. Though, to be quite frank, he seems to regard it as largely irrelevant, and this is what made the appointment so odd. Quoth he: “this is a whole new pregnancy, and what happened last time…there is no reason to believe it will happen again.”
Which, okay, but is there a reason to believe it WON’T? I kept bringing it up, and he kept gently steering me away, reminding me that I am on both Lovenox and baby aspirin, and that we don’t know exactly why Ames died, and that there is no reason I shouldn’t just sashay on through this pregnancy like a Normal Lady. He’d say things like “You can stop the aspirin at 37 weeks,” and I’d laugh and mime writing it in my calendar, because COME ON, like “I’ll make a note of that, and also can you tell me about the clinic’s evacuation procedures in the event of a zombie apocalypse?” but he was serious. The nurse gave me a booklet with all three trimesters in it, and information about hospital preregistration and “birth” classes, and I accepted it all with a panicked smirk and some mumbled genuflections, and that was that.

I’m nine weeks tomorrow. It’s still early, blah blah blah, but early, late—will there be a time when I feel reasonably convinced that this is going to end in a baby? Honestly, why would there be? I suppose it’s as good a time as any to be hopeful, then. Right?