Pregnancy Archives - Page 5 of 7 -

Grace in Small Things: #2

June 3, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

I’m a bit stuck for words right now for some reason. Too much thinking in my head and not enough thinking with my fingers.

In the absence of being able to give you big thoughts, I will give you small ones. Things I appreciate when I take time to notice them. Last week’s reflections were helpful.

A dog who likes to visit me in bed (even if he farts).
Fruit salad at the start of summer.
Some new clothes when one is busting out of the old ones.
Seeing the new baby.
Moments in which I appreciate that my first baby is still pretty little, even if he won’t be that way for long.

What have you noticed lately?

Waging a battle against embitterment and taking part in Grace in Small Things.

Filed Under: Happy things, Motherhood, Pregnancy · Tagged With: family, Grace in Small Things, gratitude, lists, moments, perspective, toddlers are weird

We went for the 18-week ultrasound yesterday. (Except it was 20 weeks, but whatever.) Card and envelope in hand, we went in planning to ask the tech to write down baby’s gender and seal the card for us to open later if we chose to. Apparently, though, the clinic has a policy about not writing anything down. (Previous issues with handwriting? Who knows.) In any case, she said she’d note it on one of the pictures so we could find out that way.

This was great in theory.

We picked up the pictures from the front desk and didn’t peek. We went out for brunch and didn’t peek. We got home, put the envelope on the counter and didn’t peek.

I was so very tempted to. My husband would have opened it up right away, but I was still wavering about whether or not I wanted to know. I did but I didn’t. I wanted to know but didn’t want to lose the possibility of one or the other.

And then my sister dropped by on her way home from work right as my husband was about to leave for a class.

Oh screw it, I said. Let’s open it.

I peered down into the 8.5×11 envelope, still not really wanting to look. My husband, bless his heart, didn’t rip it out of my hands.

But I couldn’t do it, so I handed it to them. You look!

I held my breath while my husband took the page of pictures out of the envelope. He and my sister scanned it in silence for a moment while I waited for some sign on their faces that they knew. But none came.

They scanned again. Hands, feet, spine, ankles – all kinds of body parts were labelled but not the one we were looking for. I came around and looked with them. All the pictures were the ones we’d already seen, and none looked like one that might have been taken when the tech turned our screen off. There was no label – no GIRL or BOY – that gave us we were looking for. And believe me, we looked.

So much for that.

My husband intends to call the clinic today to see if he can find out, but I’m less optimistic that they’ll tell him anything over the phone. So maybe we will get to find out, and maybe we won’t.

Do you think this is a sign that we’re not supposed to know?

Still a cute little peanut, isn't s/he?

Filed Under: Pregnancy · Tagged With: photos

Exhibit A

May 23, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

I pulled out the baby name book the other day and discovered something stuck inside it. It was a list of boy names my husband had made when we were expecting Connor.

I haven’t looked at the list since, but there are some names on there I will never forget. Like Milton. Or Hector.

For a while now he has denied that he ever put certain names on the list, but I have proof – in his own handwriting.

I had forgotten about Edgar though.

With a thousand pardons to anyone who happens to have (or love) one of these three names, I submit this photographic evidence as Exhibit A. I think this is proof that not only should I have ultimate veto power, but I really should be allowed to just name the baby myself.*

Some of these names are potentially still on the table for this baby (should it be a boy, though today I had a further hint that it might be a girl), while others have been tossed aside (for less offensive reasons than that they immediately bring to mind the horribly nerdy character from Office Space).

What “interesting” names has your partner in parenthood suggested?

*Just kidding, honey. Maybe.

Filed Under: Pregnancy ·

To Be or Not to Be…In the Know

May 15, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

For about a year and a half, Connor has been talking about his baby sister. Now, I’ve never been very good at math, but I think that’s longer than I’ve been pregnant.

I’m not sure where this idea came from, and he hasn’t been able to say. I could understand if his friends had baby sisters, but none of them do – they’re all baby brothers. He doesn’t even know that many girls, because our baby groups have been mostly boys.

A baby sister… I wonder if he’s right?

He’s been so sure and so consistent that I really do wonder. There’s also this weird experience I had where I stood in the middle of the framed-in foundation of our first house when it was being built in 2003 and I swear I could see us there with two kids – a boy and a girl. (Which was one of the really hard things about leaving that house – wondering if we somehow had left the second child behind.)

So now the second child is on the way and I swore I didn’t want to find out if we were having a boy or girl this time. We did find out with Connor (and didn’t tell anyone) but having had a scheduled c-section last time due to my darling breech baby makes me sort of want to keep the gender a surprise just in case it happens again. If I don’t get the birth experience I want, I’d like something about it to be like the storybooks.

Silly, I know, but after the gong show that was my last post-birth experience, I want to keep something unknown and exciting.

Except I’m starting to waver. What if Connor is right? I would be so jazzed to know we’re having a girl. And if we’re not, I’d sort of like to go back to my vision of two brothers (and prepare C for the fact that he’s not having a baby sister).

It’s a conundrum.

My husband really wants to find out, but I’ve told him I get to call this one. (A woman who hates being pregnant and had the joy of PPD has to have some perks, right?) I’ve proposed that we get the tech to write it in an envelope that we can choose to open later if we wish. That strategy is mostly to avoid the very anti-climactic experience we had last time where we had said we wanted to know and then the tech just said, “And there you go – a boy.” (It’s entirely possible I’ve had too many fantasies about what this whole experience is supposed to be like, which probably explains several of my problems.)

So… do we find out? Did you? Or would you?

Note: Dear husband, I know how you feel so no need to attempt to sway the discussion. 🙂 xo

Filed Under: Pregnancy · Tagged With: mom's instinct

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Pregnancy

May 2, 2012 by Farewell Stranger ·

Are you familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? The idea is that lower needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be addressed, as represented by the graphic below. So humans’ basic needs – food, water, shelter, sleep, etc. – have to be taken care of before we can move on to security, love and belonging, confidence and achievement, and, ultimately, the ability to be creative, spontaneous, and to take the moral high ground.

This theory is meant to explain our motivations. Movement through these levels isn’t implied to be linear or even consecutive. We can bounce from one level to the other, and occupy different levels at the same time, especially when dealing with different issues.

And that’s pretty much all I remember from Psych 101.

In any case, I can totally see how this theory would apply to my own life. I was thinking about this as it relates to pregnancy and I think this situation really warrants its own very specific hierarchy of needs.

I figure it would look something like this:

I am maybe, sort of, almost pondering working my way into the purple layer. But honestly, most of the time I’m still stuck down in the orange. And I’m okay with that. Just don’t eat my Cheerios.

Filed Under: Pregnancy ·