Merry Christmas from the family

I'm off to the 11pm service at Eastshore tonight, and Josh is off to play World of Warcraft, and Houdini is off to lick herself until she gets confused and licks her bed for five minutes before falling asleep, and Zoe is off to sulk that the dog is still around. It's been a pretty intense year for us: I got my BA, we ran our first 5K, I started graduate school, we moved to Ballard, we had a legendary party (apologies to the neighbors!), and I got pregnant. I really can't wait for next year.

I asked Josh what he was hoping for with regards to the kid, and he laid this bit of wisdom on me which I think is a pretty solid baseline for baby expectations: "I just want them to be healthy and have no compulsion to kill and eat people."

Merry Christmas!

I'm sorry, your WHAT is spreading?

People lie about pregnancy. Sure, they tell you that you'll get nauseated by the sight of chicken, that you'll be tired and emotional and you'll tear up at the end of Elf for no good reason, but they don't tell you about the secret insidious scourge of pregnancy: relaxin.

Relaxin is a hormone your body makes anyway, but during pregnancy it's produced at 10x the normal rate. This means that your joints loosen up. This is good in some aspects: your pelvis isn't a single solid fortress, it's many parts jointed together and relaxin allows them to spread apart to prepare for birth (commonly referred to as your pelvic floor spreading), and it means that your back can recalibrate to your uterus spreading and pushing against your spine. On the bad side, relaxin contributes to the legendary pregnancy foot growth (I am willing to commit blood sacrifice if my feet won't grow-- they're already a size 11!), and as it is produced, the spreading it triggers in joints can be painful.

In my case, my pelvis has been aching from the spreading. I've been combating this with a lot of careful applications of heat and Tylenol, as well as a lot of lying around. If I drive for more than ten minutes, it's painful. If I stand for more than five minutes, it's painful. My back hurts as well, so when we go to our monthly prenatal appointment on the 30th, I'll speak with my midwife about getting a prescription for recurrent prenatal massages.

On the more "fun" side of pregnancy, I bought my first maternity jeans this week. I didn't think I really needed them, but they are SO much more comfortable than the "non-pregnancy jeans and Belly Band" combination I was rocking, and quite frankly, they're cuter than some of my non-pregnancy jeans. They also made me realize that yes, there is a bump there, however tiny, and it is growing even as my weight isn't changing. It still doesn't quite feel real yet, but I know that will change eventually.

I did live on the wild side this week: I had a cobb salad with blue cheese at the Soundsations holiday reunion dinner, and I had a small scoop of home-made champagne-grapefruit sorbet at a friend's holiday party (Becca made it and it was DIVINE, especially with raspberry topping). And before you clutch your pearls, the champagne is cooked down before it's rendered into sorbet.

In non-pregnancy news, I turned in my last final for the quarter on the 13th, and I've spent the week cleaning, napping, watching movies, and catching up on my fun reading. My goal is to finish the Wheel of Time books by the end of the year, which is no small feat: each hardcover averages about 800 pages and I'm halfway through the third-to-last one (there are a total of 13 titles in the series and I started the first one in January of this year, with breaks in between the books). I'm also trying to blow through the stash of trashy romances I've built up over the years from thrift store visits and free box finds, because some friends and I are starting a great/awful romance trading circle and I want to have some legitimately good and some legitimately horrible titles to get into circulation. I also want to finally go through my DVR-- I still haven't watched the last five episodes of Mad Men!

We're almost done with Christmas shopping-- thank goodness for the internet and Amazon, which have for the most part kept me out of malls and firmly in the grasp of sanity.

I'm sure I'll be posting more later, especially once I get the office cleaned to my liking and pictures uploaded so you can see our darling idiots being their darling idiot selves (I mean the cat and dog, obviously).

“So I decided to become a midwife… I wanted to deliver a thousand babies. And as each one arrives, especially the little girls, I’ll be there first to whisper into her tender little ear: REBEL! REBEL!”

-Emma Goldman

The patriotic carb overload

We had a lovely, fairly low-key Thanksgiving with my parents and Colby yesterday. While I love making massive amounts of food for massive amounts of people, I just haven't had the energy to do so. I did try out a few new recipes this time: AllRecipes' sausage, spple, and cranberry stuffing, Smitten Kitchen's salted brown butter krispy treats, and Rachael Ray's cranberry-orange sauce. Dad brought key lime pie and pumpkin pie, and Colby brought (and made) fruit salad.

Today we're just avoiding Black Friday madness, lounging in our own filth, watching movies (thus far, Crank and The Runaways), and attempting to conquer the mountain range of leftovers in our kitchen.

Heartbeats

Today we had our first official prenatal visit. We chose to get care through Swedish Ballard's Midwifery clinic, and after today's visit, I think I can safely say that I'm going to be very, very happy with my choice. The student CNW and the CNW that we saw were both wonderful, kind, empathetic people who made both of us very comfortable and we weren't afraid to ask questions or be open about concerns.

Neither of us knew what to expect from the visit-- I'd heard different things from different women, but everyone is a special snowflake and you never know what you'll get. I had my blood drawn for complete workups, I peed in a cup (they test for protein in urine to make sure my kidneys are functioning), and they did a physical exam to make sure everything was progressing as normal. I'd heard that they might be able to hear the heartbeat on the first appointment, and we asked the CNW about it. They did a Doppler scan, which is the surface wand thing (obviously, I'm not a technical expert). We were told that it was unlikely but possible.

We got very, very lucky and were able to hear it! It was a quiet fluttery thing but it's there, and now everything finally feels real. The constant desire for naps, the sudden distaste for meat (or almost any other food except for Babybel cheese), the aches and pains all feel like they're pointing towards a goal instead of just, you know, making studying and focusing on grad school that much harder.

Speaking of graduate school, it's progressing, both too slowly and too fast. I'll be thankful when this quarter is over and I can take next quarter's classes (specifically, Young Adult Materials: Evaluation and Use). As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I spoke with my adviser (Marie is amaaaazing!), who was very sympathetic and understanding and suggested that for spring quarter, I take only online classes in case I need to do bed rest. I'm also due during finals week (because I like to make things difficult!), so I'll need to e-mail my profs and ask about possibly taking Incompletes until I can finish the remainder of the work over the summer.

In conclusion, I'm going to be using this space for the extended updates on the pregnancy and our family so that I don't clog everyone's Facebook feeds with crazy pregnancy/mommyblogging.

Pregnant with antici........

pation!

We decided to start trying to get pregnant in September, after we'd thrown our Last Great Party and life had settled down for work and grad school. Intellectually, I knew there was only a 24% chance of conceiving each month, AND I'd only been sans IUD since July 28, but I was still hopeful that we'd conceive sooner rather than later.

Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. "It", in this case, is rampant fatigue, nausea. At first, I chalked it up to the stress of adjusting to grad school-- not just intensive study, but it's all online so I'm never really not at school. Classes started on September 29, and I didn't pay much attention to how I was feeling for a couple weeks.

Then I started doing the math and realized that it was the week my period was due. I managed to hold off on testing immediately and decided to wait until it was October 13 (one calendar month after the first day of my last period), and then I couldn't wait any longer. I'd stopped at Barnes and Noble and picked up a book on slow-cooker cooking and on a whim, What To Expect When You're Expecting.

My hunch was correct-- we tested that Friday night (twice!) and got two positives. Because I have a physical inability to keep my mouth shut on secrets, I told Audrea and Hannah, we told our parents, and then I had to tell the girls next door because they'd invited us over for wine. Josh wanted to keep it somewhat quiet until I'd gotten it confirmed by a doctor, so on the following Monday morning, I went in and tested at the doctor's office and confirmed that yes, I am pregnant.

Our first actual pre-natal appointment will be November 24. We're going to be using the midwifery clinic at the nearby hospital, and I'm excited to go. Once everything is confirmed as okay and working correctly, we'll make the news more public (aka Facebook official).

Meanwhile, I'm eating every Babybel cheese that crosses my path, nauseated by the idea of pizza, and ready for a nap at any time.

The upcoming arrival

I've been volunteering at Greyhound Pets, Inc, a retired greyhound rescue and adoption group in Woodinville for the past few months. I wanted to volunteer with animals, and we wanted to adopt a greyhound, so it was the perfect intersection. I've been able to meet all the dogs and get an idea of who might be a good fit for us. On my birthday, we went out to find a dog to bring home this week.

As we walked down the row of kennels, it was just after turnout, so most of the dogs were sacked out (ten minutes of playing is a lot of effort for a greyhound). I wasn't sure if I wanted to try taking out Houdini or Bridgitte (who we'd taken out before). But when we got to their kennels, Houdini made the decision for us. She was dancing around and so excited to see us, she couldn't stop wriggling. When we took her out to the turnout yard, she'd run to me when I called, but she always veered over to Josh, butting her head into his chest and burrowing into his arms.

It was love at first sight. We bring her home tomorrow.

Heyyyy

I think we've been down this "I'll update my blog regularly" road before. This one, hopefully, will keep you appraised of where we are when we disappear, what we're doing when we ignore your calls, and how we're surviving grad school and life.