Thrifting

Saturday and Sunday, I went on a dual mission of thrift-shop visitation. Both parts of the mission were driven by new-parenthood.

Part the first: to buy clothes that fit my current size and shape instead of bitching and moaning about how few of my pre-pregnancy clothes fit. I'm not going to go on any weight-loss diets while I'm breastfeeding, so unless I find the time and motivation to start working out, those pregnancy pounds will stay put for a while. Although I'd eventually like them to go away, I can accept the changes much more gracefully now that I have clothes that fit. At Impact! Thrift in East Norriton, I found several sleeveless tops, two skirts, and a pair of pants to expand my summer work wardrobe, and at the Philadelphia Aids Thrift just south of South Street, I found four pairs of pants, three tops, and another skirt. All this, for about $60.

Part the second was to browse the childrens' books section and find nifty books for young 'uns, but especially old books, the ones that I remember from my own childhood. I succeeded at both Impact! and P. A. T.; I found "The Little Engine That Could", "Robinson Crusoe", "A Fisherman's Tale" by Beatrix Potter, and some that aren't so old, or at least I don't remember them: an amazing pop-up book called "One Red Dot", an illustrated "King Arthur", and... Heather will be so pleased... my child's first book featuring a bat (Stellaluna).

I've started reading to Annika, and although she doesn't show much interest at this point, if nothing else it's good practice for me!

Perspective

For a while now, I've been certain, but without evidence other than intuition, that this baby will arrive early. I've been told several times by the nurse-midwives at the birth center that first babies have a tendency to be overdue, so I shouldn't be surprised if nothing has happened by my due date.

On Monday at my appointment, I got the first hint of evidence that I might possibly be right: the cervix is still closed, but has gotten softer and thinner (a process called effacement), and the baby is positioned fairly low in my pelvis, with her head down. Neither of these things necessarily mean that labor will start soon, but they're some of the preliminaries. I asked when I would be considered far enough along to deliver at the Birth Center, and the answer is "it depends." If there are no complicating factors whatsoever, they'll allow it at 36 weeks - a milestone that I just passed yesterday. If the mother is positive for Group B Strep and will therefore need antibiotics during labor, they require 37 weeks or better. I haven't gotten my culture results yet to know whether GBS will be an issue or not, but I'll soon find out.

I was excited both by the news that pre-labor changes are starting to happen, and that if labor did start early, I might be able to deliver at the Birth Center earlier than I thought. On Tuesday morning, it seemed that labor might actually be imminent - the baby had shifted even lower, and I was getting cramps that felt a lot like menstrual cramps. Braxton-Hicks contractions, probably; there was no distinct pattern to them. The intensity would vary, but I couldn't distinguish the beginning or ending of individual contractions. By the afternoon, the cramps had faded, and by the next morning, the baby had shifted position slightly so that she didn't seem to be pressing downward as much.

Although I knew that I should be feeling relieved, I was mostly just disappointed. It's difficult to be patient at this point, even though it's irrational to want to hurry things up - physically, it's almost certainly easier to be pregnant than to be recovering from childbirth and dealing with a newborn. But that didn't stop me from being cranky and wondering how I can possibly make it through another month - possibly even six weeks - of the various discomforts, plus the waiting and wondering if every cramp or backache just might be the start of the real thing.

Sitting at my computer and looking, I guess, for commiseration, I did a google search for "tired of being pregnant." As it happened, one of the first things I came across was the opposite of what I was looking for. It was a blog post written by a labor & delivery nurse, about how she is tired of pregnant women whining at 34 or 36 or 38 weeks that they're tired of pregnancy, ready to get the baby out, and want to be induced or c-sectioned. She raged against women who don't seem to realize or care that an early baby is more likely to have trouble breathing, trouble nursing, trouble fighting off infections, and convince their doctor to give them an early delivery. She held that women who carry their babies full term should be thankful for it, and think of all the women whose babies were premature and didn't make it, or had serious problems because of it. The post ended with "Go ahead readers...flame away at me over my opinions on this subject []", but the long, long string of comments that followed was almost entirely from moms who agreed, because they'd had a premature baby themselves, or been induced early because of pre-eclampsia or other complications. Many of them said something like "I would have given anything to be pregnant for longer, and it drives me crazy when women who stay pregnant for the full term complain about it!"

It made me feel guilty about wishing that mine would be early, even though I would never have an induction or elective c-section to bring it about. I don't feel too guilty about it, though, because every woman who's getting close to term gets impatient. But that dose of perspective did make me realize that I shouldn't feel too sorry for myself - I'll take all the pains and annoyances of late pregnancy over coping with a baby that's not ready for the outside world yet.

Brains and guts

One thing that came up during my first Birth Center prenatal appointment, while going over my general medical history, was that I have a few episodes of depression and/or anxiety in my past. No huge drama, no hospitalization, not even any medication for it, but still it's there. The nurse-midwife cautioned me that women who have such a history are more likely to suffer from post-partum depression than women who haven't had past problems. That doesn't mean I will have PPD, but that I should be alert to the possibility. She said that many women have trouble recognizing the signs because there's so much else going on at the same time - sleep deprivation, the physical recovery from birth, sore breasts from starting to breastfeed, body image issues, the sense of huge new responsibility, and the list goes on. With all that, it's hard to say what's "normal."


I wondered whether that might happen to me - would I be able to tell if I was having problems more than just the usual adjustment period to being a new parent? Thinking about it made me realize that at least for me, mental health is nowhere near as self-evident as physical health. I know at any given time whether I'm in a good or a bad mood, but if it's a bad mood I can't say whether it will go away in an hour, or a day, or whether it might drag on for much longer. I can tell after a specific stressful event that it caused a stress reaction, but if it's the more ongoing, long-term kind of stress, I can't easily say whether it's getting to be too much, or if I'm coping well. I can't tell by "asking myself" whether I'm just having a bad day or a bad week, or if it's something that I need to take steps to fix.


Then I realized that I do have an excellent built-in barometer of my overall mental health: my stomach. I may feel stressed or moody, but if I'm eating normally, that's a good indicator that it's nothing too serious, and will resolve itself soon. When I lose my appetite or feel sick to my stomach and there's no obvious physical cause, it's a probable sign that there's something that I'm having trouble dealing with. In particular, during a few times in my life that were especially stressful, I thought that I had some mysterious stomach ailment; eventually I figured out that I was having panic attacks, but without the stereotypical hyperventilating and heart-pounding.


So for me, as for many people, a "gut reaction" is a not just a metaphor. It's an interesting example of the inseparability of mind and body. I wonder whether this tendency to physically express mental turmoil evolved for some reason - can there be any possible advantage to having physical symptoms of unhappiness? Or is it just a side effect of the fact that the physical brain is part of the body, and that having thoughts and emotions is a chemical process, and is not independent of the rest of the body's workings? It just seems funny that for all its power, the brain isn't very good at identifying and troubleshooting its own problems.

Pincushion

Many of the annoyances of pregnancy are generated by one's own body, but there are some that are external. This morning I went to get blood drawn for the second part of "sequential screening," which is a series of tests including ultrasound and bloodwork to look for Down's Syndrome and related chromosomal abnormalities. It's not the principle of such testing that annoys me, it's the practicality of the way it's implemented. It would be nice if there was a consolidated prenatal care center that served all the various needs, but at the two hospitals I've gone to for care the two times I've been pregnant, that's not how it works. You end up going to the ob/gyn's office for regular checkups, which are very brief after the first one. There's a separate facility for high-tech ultrasounds, and a lab across the hall where they collect blood samples for bloodwork, plus for my initial round of "test-everything-possible" bloodwork I had to go to Qwest Diagnostics. Between the ultrasound appointments, the regular prenatal checkups, and other stuff like the bloodwork, it seems like just about every week there's some appointment that demands my time. And it'll get worse - in month 8, the prenatal checkups will be every other week, and in month 9 they will be every week.

Looking on the bright side (sort of), I guess it's good training for the frequent visits to the pediatrician after the baby is born.

Mini-update on the mini-human

I had a regular pre-natal checkup this morning, and all seems to be well. At this stage, such appointments are very brief - weight, blood pressure, urine sample, and a check of the fetal heartbeat with Doppler, then "Any questions?" and if not, I'm on my way. At first, I felt sort of ripped-off - I have to make the trek to the ob/gyn office for less than 10 minutes worth of care, when I'm not sick?? But all those routine things really are important to keep tabs on during pregnancy, and it does provide an opportunity to get information. For example, I had been wondering if it's recommended to get a flu shot during pregnancy, or if it could be risky for the baby. The answer is that it's safe, and definitely recommended.

The doctor asked whether I've felt the baby moving yet, because it's around the time that its movements start to become noticeable. I think I've been feeling it move for the last 2 weeks or so, but it's hard to say for certain. Things feel generally "different" in the lower abdominal region, but there are two distinct sensations that I'm about 80% convinced are fetal movement. One is little brief jerks that feel a lot like when you get a muscle twitch, and are probably kicks. The other is a strange shifting/crawling feeling that's a little bit like butterflies, or a mild version of the feeling you get on a rollercoaster; I figure that might be the baby changing positions or rolling over.

15 week ultrasound

On Thursday afternoon, my husband and I went to Abington Memorial Hospital's Fetal Diagnostic Center, which is where they do all the high-resolution ultrasounds and amniocentesis and whatever else might be done to make sure that babies are developing properly.

I wasn't quite as nervous this time as I was with the first high-res ultrasound at 11 weeks. That time, I was (I think) outwardly calm, but inwardly biting my nails and squirming. I had a sort of negative association with ultrasounds because with my first pregnancy, I had no signs that I was going to miscarry until I had an ultrasound and learned that all was not well. So when I got pregnant again, I was pessimistic and refused to get my hopes up too much, but that didn't stop me from being very, very jittery about what the ultrasound would show. It was a major relief when the 11-week ultrasound showed that things were fine, but I was still a bit nervous - things can still go very wrong later in the first trimester or even early in the 2nd.

I relaxed when the technician said "There's the baby!" almost as soon as the ultrasound device touched my belly, and it was clearly baby-shaped, and moving. She proceeded to take a series of measurements of just about everything, all the while narrating what she was doing and pointing out what was what. I was amazed at how much can be seen now, and how much the bone structure has developed since last month - you can easily see the ribs and spinal column, arm and leg bones, etc. First she measured the dimensions of the skull, and the brain inside. At this stage, you can clearly see that there are two hemispheres, and there's still some space around them inside the skull. Then she looked at the heart - now evidently a multi-chambered thing although you couldn't easily see all 4 chambers at once. The heart rate is 144 beats per minute, which is normal for a fetus at this stage, and already much slower than the 163 of a month ago. Next she measured the abdomen, and pointed out the stomach and bladder. She looked at the arms and legs, took measurements of the femur and tibia, checked the spine, and used some sort of temperature monitor (I think?) to measure the blood flow through the umbilical cord and the blood circulation within the fetus. We also got a look at the face both in profile and from the front. The frontal view looked spooky because the ultrasound shows both the flesh and the bones under it, so it looked sort of skeletal.

The one thing that caused any concern is that the placenta is "low-lying" which means that its edge is near the cervix. That is a potential problem because if the placenta covers the cervix later in the pregnancy, it tends to bleed, and it makes a c-section mandatory. But fortunately, the placenta generally gets shifted upward as the uterus grows, so for now it's just something to keep an eye on.

All in all, I was very happy with the whole thing. I have another one scheduled in a month, and at that time we should get to find out the gender. I can't say I have any particular "sense" of whether it's a girl or boy, and waiting another entire month to find out seems way too long. On the other hand, knowing the gender answers only one aspect of the question "Just who is this new person?" And that question gets answered little by little over a span of about, I'd say, 20 years.

Crazy moods

One of the things I have found most unsettling about pregnancy so far is mood swings. I was prepared for morning sickness, I expected the tender breasts. But the moods! I had heard that it's like PMS. Ah, no, I wish!

I'll share the most extreme (and therefore most entertaining) example, but I should preface it by saying that most days are nothing like this - I'm usually fine, or just a bit tired and "blah."

One day, I came home from work in an edgy, itchy-trigger-finger mood. It wasn't caused by anything at work; the day had gone pretty smoothly. But there it was. I went around doing the usual routine things; feeding the cats, bringing the mail in from the mailbox, scowling at the pile of dirty dishes that hadn't magically cleaned themselves overnight, and trying to figure out what I could eat for dinner without having to cook. My husband was stuck late at work, and had no idea that luck was actually with him that day.

I went through the mail, and saw an ominously pink envelope from our car insurance company. Sure enough, it was a notice stating that the bill was overdue, and our insurance was scheduled to be terminated at such-and-such date. Many of the household bills are my responsibility to pay, but this particular one was HIS fault.

I went beserk. I stomped around, hyperventilating, and looked for something to break. I wanted the sound of glass shattering, I wanted to smash anything and everything in sight. But the tiny part of me that remained sane said, just loud enough to be heard in the storm, "You don't really want that kind of mess to clean up right now, do you?" So I snatched a box of crackers off of the kitchen table, hurled them on the floor, and stomped on them (yes, just like a toddler having a tantrum). The crunch it made would maybe have been satisfying, but I was aware of how funny it would look to a hypothetical onlooker, and that just made it worse. I've always thought it's a good thing to be able to laugh at yourself, but in this case it was like having a split personality where one was tormenting the other by making fun of their troubles. This was enough to turn the murderous rage into a crying jag, which started off looking a lot like hysterics because I was entirely too worked up to have a nice quiet cry. Finally I tired myself out, and went to sleep. By the next morning, I felt fine except for a slight headache.

Now, of course it probably wasn't all about the pink envelope, or even the hormones. No matter how much you want a child, preparing to be a parent is stressful. Lots of new things to worry about, and any pre-existing worries or issues suddenly loom larger. This is actually a fairly normal process to go through during pregnancy, I know. But much like other pregnancy troubles, it's comforting to know that it's normal, but nonetheless it's rough going sometimes.

There's really nothing surprising about the equation (major life change)+(hormones)=emotional earthquakes. But it's still a bizarre experience to have such disproportionate reactions to minor things.