22w1d

Sorry I haven't updated, sorry if I worried anyone! I got hit with the plague and it took me forever to recover. Luckily I work from home, so I didn't have to take sick days. I was waking up at 8:55 am and going back to bed by 6:30 pm. It started out with some sneezing, and then what felt like a low grade fever and exhaustion. By the end of day two, I was coughing and my head felt like it was filled with cement. By day four, I was coughing so hard I was vomitting with no warning. I've been feeling better since last weekend, but this week work kicked my ass. I'm finally coming out the other side of a crappy, tiring few weeks.

I've started working on the nursery. With Gregory, we had his baby shower and by the end of the week, he was gone. All of the clothes had been folded and put in drawers. They weren't touched until a few months later when we moved. I sat in the glider emptying the drawers into cardboard boxes. They were moved into the second bedroom of the new place and left there until this week. It was rough going through everything, but it was necessary. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the extra washing machine we've been hiding in there...

We have also decided on a name, which I'm keeping to myself for now because I'm afraid to share it, as if I'll jinx little Bubba. Marc and I each came up with our own list of names and then shared. We immediately vetoed a few names and managed to work our way down to two. Marc kept saying he wasn't sure which name, so in my infinite impatience, I flipped a coin. He protested that we couldn't name a child with a coin flip, but that's exactly what we've done. I have the quarter in a baby bottle in Bubba's room, waiting to be put in his baby book.

18w6d

Back from the big ultrasound...and we have a three vessel cord! And I guess we have to find a new nickname - it's not fair to call a little boy Beulah.

I'm over the effing moon!

18w2d

I'm having a bad day. At this point in time, I work fulltime from home. Part of the reason I accepted this position was because I could work from home. There are a few of us in my area who do this since the office near us is not large enough to accomodate our group. All this changed this week and now I'm being told I have to go work in the office - not all of us, just two of us. Everyone is pretty resistant to this change, but we sort of accept that it's going to happen and there isn't much we can do about it, besides make the transition benefit us. I spoke with the person who was charged with handing down this decision and explained why this is bad for me, including the fact that when the position was offered to me, they told me my salary was offset because I would be working from home. Right now we've let it up in the air, since we agree it's best to wait for my doctor to give me the all-clear to travel 3 hours a day and be more than 2 hours away from my hospital. I just feel so helpless. I had planned to have the baby home with me the first year so that I could nurse. Now I feel like the world has been turned upside down again. I went from 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with my child, with some help from a part-time nanny to having to put my child in daycare for 12 to 14 hours a day. I'm so angry, so despondent, so frustrated. Marc doesn't really understand because for him, nothing changes. I feel like I've lost something huge here. We have other options for childcare, like leaving the baby with his mom everyday, but that doesn't seem right to me. Which just leaves me back at square one, feeling really shitty and really helpless.

18w1d

I'll say right off the bat that everything is fine. Last night I had some contractions that were on the painful side. I never really got the point in labor with Gregory where I dealt with painful contractions. I'd been having contractions from about an hour after he died straight through, but they weren't very painful or regular. It wasn't until it was confirmed that he died that they even picked up, and within an hour or two I was in surgery. So last night I went and put my feet up on the couch and watched the Yankee game for a bit, and they went away. Had dinner, went to bed. I woke up around 2am and they were back. It felt a lot like gas pain, but it wouldn't go away. I'm on Z.ofran, and that can cause pretty bad constipation, so I thought maybe that had something to do with it. I definitely felt my uterus squeezing, and at points it felt similar to menstrual cramps. I was feeling pressure and the contractions were as frequent as 4 every ten minutes. I started checking my symptoms online, and preterm labor came up a number of times. When it still hadn't subsided by 5:30 am, I took a warm shower and called my doctor. He agreed that I needed to get checked out to be on the safe side. So off to L&D we went.

They monitored me from about 7am to 10:30am. They weren't picking up contractions on the monitor, but figure it might be uterine irritability. Beulah's heartbeat was in the 160s, which is what it's been consistently the entire pregnancy. So I'm back home with instructions to drink lots of water and to stay off my feet for the rest of the weekend. The hospital was hard - they were busy, so they'd run out of triage beds and I was in a recovery room. About an hour in I realized that I was in the exact same spot in the exact same recovery room as I was in after my c-section. I did get choked up at points, things felt so similar to when I went in the morning Gregory was born. Walking up to the desk to explain I was alarmed by something and my doctor instructed me to come in for monitoring; the nurse not being able to find the baby's heartbeat right away; talking to some of the nurses who cared for me the last time. The hardest thing was trying not to give in to the sheer panic I felt just being there.

But I'm damned glad I went, even if it turned out to be nothing serious. I imagine it only would have become worse with the stress of not knowing if the baby was ok, and it could have turned into something more serious. My mind is at ease, and I'm proud of myself for not just writing it off as growing pains (even if that's what it is!) and for putting my health and Beulah's health over the risk of people thinking I was stupid and panicky. I still feel guilt that I ignored my own instinct that something was wrong last time, and I wasn't about to walk down that road again. I'm still feeling some contractions, but they are not painful, not regular, and not as strong. Back to bed for me!

17w1d

Morning sickness got worse for a bit there, and even the Z.ofran didn't help. I'm finally back on track with keeping food down.

My aunt is home, my grandma is back at the nursing home (and looking good). We saw her today, she's starting to walk in therapy. Marc's grandma is not well now - she's at the hospital, they think it's pnuemonia. Her son came home on Wednesday and found her passed out on the floor. We saw her today as well, and she seems better. She's worried that they are trying to trick her into living in a nursing home by saying she's going to need to go to one for some rehab. I promised her that they can't make her live there for good, and that I'd break her out if they tried. She asked if we were having another baby, and she's very excited that we are. Cat's out of the bag!

Off to help Marc with the dishes, his most dreaded of all chores.

16w4d

Things I've learned this morning:

1. I need to start keeping garbage bags near my desk. The walk from the living room to the bathroom is too far, even when you are running.
2. A swiffer doesn't do a great job cleaning up popcorn-puke.
3. My cats are far more intrigued with my vomit than I am with their vomit.

15w6d

All is well with little Beulah! I told my doc he scared me last time and he felt bad. We did try the doppler again, and finally realized it's pretty broken. We did pick up Beulah's heartbeat for a bit towards the end, and it sounded good!

Next doc appoinment on 10/11, and I have my big ultrasound planned for 10/04. He also wrote me a prescription for the nausea and vomiting. Of course, no one ever seems to have it in stock, so hopefully it will be filled by tomorrow evening when we go to pick it up. The idea of a weekend with no nausea or puking makes me think that I might actually find the energy to clean my house or something...