1 Mother 2 Another

I make this one tea periodically –
it’s a yogi tea, tastes like the chai tea lattes you buy at
Starbucks minus the sugar and milk. Anyway, I like it because
there’s no caffeine and it’s mildly sweet on its own,
so I make a few quarts at a time to keep in the fridge, adding
honey and milk as needed.


At any rate, a friend of mine is in her first trimester and having
a hard time with it nausea-wise. I gave her a quart of the tea
– one of the primary ingredients is ginger, and I thought
it’d settle her stomach. The result? Two enthusiastic thumbs
up, and a request for more tea. Kindly enough, she refrained from
calling me at 2 a.m. when she actually ran out, and waited until
the next day to make the request.

When I first became pregnant with Maddie,
I had women coming out of the woodwork with advice. What to eat,
what not to eat, where to shop, whether or not to breastfeed, you
name it and there was a person with an opinion. Most topics I
expected, but I was astonished at how many women felt the need to
give me “body preservation” advice.


One client immediately wrote down the address of a store that sells
circulation hose; she advised me to start wearing them “RIGHT
AWAY” so I wouldn’t get varicose veins. Another client
was kind enough to feel my boobs and tell me to “kiss their
perkiness goodbye” unless I started sleeping in a jog bra
every night. But this paled in the number and ferocity of comments
I got about stretch marks. Every single woman I met had the
“perfect” solution for avoiding stretch marks. Being
the obsessive researcher I am, I hit the internet and got the
low-down. Want to know the most sure-fire way to avoid stretch
marks when pregnant? Here it is:

As I inch towards 38 weeks and my belly
inches towards Guinness Book worthiness, I sit here, still sick,
still pregnant.


On the upside – while feeling worse Monday morning, a whole
day pretty much in bed made me feel significantly better by the end
of the evening. And Madeleine’s had a slight drip, but
I’m hoping it stops there.


On the downside – I’ve stayed in bed pretty much the
whole day, and haven’t even had the baby yet.

Halcyon Days my Aunt Fanny.

Yes, I’m enjoying my last few weeks with Maddie. Yes, they are precious. Yes, I know they’ll never come again and should be savored.

On the other hand, enough with the pregnancy already.

There’s a Greek myth about the
goddess Alcyone who fell in love with a mortal. When he died at
sea, she drowned herself in grief. The gods felt pity for the
couple, transformed them into sea birds, and would calm the seas
every year for a couple of weeks to enable the birds to safely lay
their eggs. Over time, the phrase “halcyon days” came
about to describe the two weeks around the winter solstice that
sailors believed were typified by unusually calm seas; a sort of
calm peace before the storm.


And that’s where we’re living right now: in the calm
peace before the storm. While a part of me tenses in expectation of
all that’s coming our way – my husband’s
continued job search and the possible move that may result from it,
adapting to a newborn in the house and all the sleep deprivation
that comes with her, and oh yes, let’s not forget the joy of
labor – another part of me is physically willing myself to
try to simply dwell in the moment.

So great news at the OB’s office today – I’ve officially gained weight and am darn happy about it. Never thought I’d say that in my life.

Tomorrow’s my big visit to the OB
– the one where she takes another sonogram of peanut and see
if she’s gained enough weight. If the answer is
“yes” then I’m fine to keep plugging along; if
the answer is “no” then I may be facing bed rest and an
early delivery.


Obviously I’m not a big fan of bed rest, especially with a
toddler already here. Bed rest feels like the time when I have to
make everyone else in my life work harder so I can lie around and
literally eat bon-bons. But more important, I’d like to avoid
an early delivery; since Maddie was a scheduled c-section, I have a
dream that at least one of my kids will get to come when
she’s good and ready.

As I’ve said numerous times before,
my waistline is expanding at a terrifying (to me and the buttons on
my pants) rate in this pregnancy. I spent all of my first pregnancy
wearing those low-slung maternity pants, never really graduating to
those up-to-the-boob panel pants. When I manage to squeeze myself
into my sausage casing-er, pants- this time, though, those low
rises don’t stay risen very long; soon after I start moving
they give up the fight and slide all the way to the bottom of the
belly, leaving me with a gangsta-style hanging crotch and an
unseemly (in wintertime) amount of bare belly showing.


Clearly, I’m bigger than last pregnancy. Even my friends who
are used to me still see me and have their eyes pop out of their
head. But apparently, I’m not big enough for my doctor.
She’s putting me on a “get the girl bigger”
diet.

A couple weeks ago the whole family came
down with a moderate cold. A few rough days later, Daddy and Maddie
were fine, while Mommy, whose body is busy multitasking, was taking
a bit longer to recover. I’ve had a hard time shaking off
that last bit of stuffiness, fatigue, and sluggishness. In fact,
about a week and a half ago, I noticed I was feeling a bit
nauseated as well. Then I noticed that it was only for a couple
hours each morning.


Yes, that friend of every pregnant gal’s, morning sickness,
was back.

Towards the end of my first pregnancy, I had a hard time drinking enough water to satisfy my OB.  When I was sent for a 28-week ultrasound because of a lack of growth (though I sure felt bigger!), it was discovered I was low on amniotic fluid.  Every visit after that, my doctor did a “slosh check” and would pronounce me “doing well” or “a quart low”.  By the end I was drinking 4 liters a day and still barely keeping Maddie in liquid.

I realize that staying properly hydrated is incredibly important for a pregnant woman; getting enough liquid helps everything from swollen ankles to weird cravings, since oftentimes we’re not actually hungry, but thirsty.  But by the third or fourth liter of the day, I was truly hating the taste of water.  I had a deep desire for root beer, cranberry juice – anything to make the liquid more exiting.

On March 13, someone stood up and gave me their seat on the subway for the first time this pregnancy.

I was 30 weeks pregnant at the time.

The person who offered me their seat was a woman.

This offer has yet to be repeated.

One of the best parts about being pregnant for a second time is getting the chance to have those, “Oh, yeah!” moments over and over again. There’s a chemical released during labor and afterwards called oxytocin – a true multi-tasker of a hormone – that actually has been proven to have amnesiac properties to it, meaning that it helps you forget how bad the whole experience was. Sort of nature’s way of making sure you don’t remember so much that you only have one kid.

Combine that with the famous Pregnancy Memory (also known as the Black Hole), and everything old is new again. Every little milestone I’ve hit with this pregnancy, I think, “Oh, yeah! I remember this feeling!” and it’s so instantaneous, so familiar, that you can’t believe you ever forgot that feeling. I’ve had it with the bad – lower back pain, fatigue, Dog Nose – and with the good – feeling the baby move, hearing the heartbeat at the doctor’s office.

I remember very well the first time I laid eyes on a pair of pregnancy panties. I was watching the movie She’s Having a Baby and they did a humorous montage of how life changed with her pregnancy. As Kevin Bacon folded laundry, he held up a pair of delicate, lacy, obviously pre-pregnancy panties. He then held up a pair of those ginormous, white cotton, high-waisted pregnancy undies. You know exactly the kind I’m talking about – those shapeless, unattractive underpants that we used to call spanky pants as kids; the kind Mary Catherine Gallagher wore on Saturday Night Live. The message was obvious – pretty underwear is a thing of the past once you get pregnant.

I vowed that this would not be me.

So when I became pregnant with Maddie, I had this underlying fear that at some point the pregnancy police was going to come along, wrestle me to the ground, and force me into a pair of spanky pants. “You’re going to be a mother! Shame on you! Where’s your granny panties?” That sort of thing.

Not having a boy ourselves (nor, to the
best of our knowledge, are we about to have one), Brian and I have
not done a lot of research into circumcision. I do know that what
used to be a relatively standard procedure has recently become the
object of much more scrutiny, and the subject seems to be almost as
much of a hot button topic as breastfeeding in some circles, with
both sides holding strong opinions.


I’m not trying to stir up a hornet’s nest by bringing
up infant circumcision today, but a medical journal recently
published a report on the National Institute of Health’s
recent study about circumcision and AIDS prevention.


The numbers are staggering, and the world health community is
sitting up and taking notice.

On my Top 5s page I offer some of my
favorite maternity wear sites, but I have to give a quick shout-out
(completely unsolicited) one more time to href="http://www.2chix.com/">2 Chix. I got a couple of
their cute maternity tees back when I was in my first trimester
last fall, and they’re still going strong.

My husband recently found out that
he’s losing his job as his entire New York office gets shut
down. We’ve spent the past two weeks coming to terms with
this white elephant of uncertainty in our lives, trying to figure
out how we’re going to get ready for a new baby in the midst
of such upheaval.


It’s obviously been a lot for us to process, since it’s
taken me two weeks to get to a point where I can write about it.
Brian’s looking for work wherever he can find it, and the
very real possibility exists that it ain’t in New York. So as
if financial uncertainty and losing our corporate health care
weren’t enough, now we’re faced with the idea of
selling, buying, packing and unpacking a house with a newborn. The
sheer volume of details overwhelms me.


And that, of course, is setting aside the emotional impact of all
this. I’ve lived in New York for 12 years now and love it
fiercely, warts and all. At the same time, we know it’s
nearly impossible to raise a child easily in New York without a
pretty hefty amount of cash, so we’ve always had this
nebulous idea of moving out of the city at some point. Just not
fresh from the delivery room.

Yep, we’ve got a family member who
is growing at an astonishing pace. She’s rapidly outgrowing
her seasonal clothing, almost faster than suitable clothing can be
found for her. You could truly say she’s growing like a weed.


If weeds grew sideways and had ridiculously large bellies.

I recently hit the 20-week mark in this second pregnancy, and as I move forward towards the five-month mark, I recall that this is the time in my last pregnancy where it began to feel as if it were moving more quickly. Do you know what I mean? At the very beginning you’re excited and dreamy, and perhaps exhausted and nauseated, but you have this long pregnancy stretching out before you. Then suddenly you “pop” and have something that’s clearly not “just fat” in front of you, and it becomes much more immediate and real and you start to look anxiously at your “to-do” list. Or perhaps, start to think anxiously about making a to-do list.

I’ve hit several of those moments over this past pregnancy – those times when something you’ve forgotten completely about your last pregnancy comes rushing to the forefront and you can’t believe you ever forgot it. So I’ve compiled a bit of a list, because Lord knows I’ll forget it again if there’s ever a third time. And why is that? The answer is item number one on my Things I Forgot list:

So we’ve been “out of the
closet” with this second pregnancy for about two weeks now,
and have run through most of our daily friends and family. From
here on out, it’ll be the
running-into-the-casual-acquaintance scenario, where you
can’t casually bring it up without sounding self-centered so
you wait to tell such people until you’re visibly pregnant
and not just possibly getting heavier. I know you know what
I’m talking about.


I remember telling everyone during the first pregnancy, and how
excited we were to spread the news. We told parents and respective
best friends right away, then kept our cards close to our vest
until we hit that crucial 13-week check-up. You know, the one where
you hear and see the heartbeat and everyone breathes a sigh of
relief that it’s gone well so far. Man, those first three
months were hard to wait through. Several times I was tempted to
blurt it out to a friend or client – “I’m
pregnant! I’m sorry, what were you saying about your new
couch?” But I remembered my several friends who had
miscarriages during their first trimesters and couldn’t
imagine having to go through that painful explanation over and over
again.


So I kept quiet.

(Note: I originally wrote this entry a
month ago; I’m catching you up on my first trimester!)

I’m starting week ten in this
pregnancy, and that’s the only word for it –
harder.

I know I mentioned in an earlier blog that
I didn’t have morning sickness with my first pregnancy.
I’ve not hit the actual puking point in this one, but
I’m definitely dealing with on-the-edge nausea and managing
that seems to take up an inordinate amount of time.