Halloween

Target has officially changed over from "back to school" to Halloween. The due date is BEFORE Halloween. eep.

33 week panic

As of yesterday, we are 33 weeks along. That is insane! It's funny because earlier on in the pregnancy, you have that due date set in your head and you think you have all the time in the world. Even a month ago, I was like "whatever, I have until practically November to get things organized." Um, no. Now that it is SEPTEMBER FREAKIN' 10TH, the reality of being prepared has hit me full force. The general advice is that you should actually be 90+% ready by 36, 37 weeks, since it wouldn't be out of the question for the baby to come at any time by then. That means....yeah, I don't have until "practically November," I have three weeks! Yikes.

What makes this even harder is the ridiculously slow pace at which it physically takes me to do anything, plus the fact that I have been, on average this week, sleeping 10.5 hours per day. Believe me, you will get a LOT less done every day if your day doesn't start until basically lunch time and you move like a very large, slow turtle.

As I have been reading quite a few WTF blog entries lately, I feel the need to contribute with my own: So apparently according to the rest of the world, I "don't look that pregnant." What they mean is, 'based on my extremely limited knowledge of you and pregnancy, I judge that you are physically not as large as I expect a 33 week pregnant woman to look." Ugh. My MIL actually had the gall to tell me the other day that I am the "daintiest pregnant woman she's ever been around." WTF??! Dainty?? Do you not see me struggling to tie my shoes? When buying some baby supplies last night, there was something we needed that was on back order. The sales woman eyed me up, without asking when I was due, and said, "well, you have plenty of time to wait for it to come in." SO annoyed. I chalk this up to several things: (1) Women who were formerly pregnant remember being larger than they actually were, (2) nobody actually paid attention to how small I was to begin with, and (3) people are stupid.

The ironic part of this whole thing is that my nurse practitioner says I have gained too much weight. Yup. I am so dainty that I have already gained about 35 pounds (which for the uninitiated, is the top amount you are "supposed" to gain by the end in a singleton pregnancy). [On a side note, I felt bad about "gaining too much" for about two days and then realized I don't give a crap. I eat healthier than I did pre-pregnancy, I exercise within reason for 33 weeks (no one-hour cardio sessions, sorry), and I'm not going to ignore my body when it's telling me I'm hungry. My mom gained 60 pounds with me and lost all of it so whatever.]

baby showers!

Since I normally only complain, I thought I should post about something else for once. :)

The first shower was two weeks ago. It was hosted by my aunt and held at my parents' house, which is several hours away from our house but is much closer to a lot of my family, high school friends, and many family friends who have known me since I was a baby. One of my oldest friends (we were BFFs in 1st grade) even made the trip. It was really nice and not nearly as awkward as I had feared - and we got a ton of stuff!



Unfortunately the only photo I took was of all this "loot" on my iphone so I apologize there are no super-cute and exciting photos like most people remember to take. Oops. We didn't have any super-fancy food but my grandma did make some excellent brownies that included broken up pieces of toffee Symphony bars.

Baby showers are kind of weird because the point is mostly to get stuff, and unlike bridal showers, most of the people at the shower will not really be included in the "main event." Unlike our wedding though, we *really* needed all of the stuff and *really* needed the help financially. Me not earning any money whatsoever this year has made things a little tight, which makes me even more thankful for all of the generous family and friends we have. Which reminds me - not included in the photo are the biggest gifts, from my mom and MIL. My parents got us a crib and are also helping us pay for cloth diapers, and my in-laws bought us a stroller and car seat. HUGE relief to at least have those things!

I also have to point out, way off in the left of the photo, is the beautiful quilt my grandma made for us. It is gorgeous, and in purple & gold (Vikings colors). She must have spent a ton of time working on it and it is so cool to think that our son will have something special like that.

I know this is getting pretty long, and DH is asking me when I'll be ready to run to Target, so I'll try to wrap this up.

Shower #2 was ridiculously, fantastically perfect. :) My sister-in-law, who is also one of my best friends, hosted and she went above and beyond. The decorations, the food, the special order chocolate with peanut butter frosting cupcakes, the games - I couldn't have asked for anything better. This shower was also mostly for "all the young folks" - basically all of my law school friends. I was shocked that so many people came! And none of my friends have kids yet so they were all excited to have an excuse to buy baby stuff. It was very odd to be the one answering questions about pregnancy and babies, instead of being given unsolicited advice from 1980.

Back to today's task: Washing all of the baby clothes we received over the past two weeks. I swear to god those little plastic tag thingies are driving me insane...

useless

I've used the word "useless" more in the last few weeks than the rest of my life put together. Unfortunately, it sums up how I've been feeling about myself the past few weeks. To top it all off today, I had ONE thing that I had to do today and 100% failed. Seriously, the ONLY thing I had to do today was go see my therapist. I knew this when I got up this morning. I even had my calendar open for several hours around lunchtime. Yet I somehow completely managed to forget about it by the time the actual appointment rolled around, and then got a call from my therapist about 10 minutes after my session was supposed to start. I feel really bad about it - it costs my therapist money and it bugs me even more because it just isn't "me" to flake out and miss appointments. Hell, I am the person who gets there 15 minutes early "just in case" (in case of what, I'm not even sure). I just hate this feeling of being so undefined and out of control.

Besides today's screw-up, it's getting harder and harder to do chores. And since I am unemployed and am only a student 10% of the time, that's really all I do. I've been getting Braxton-Hicks contractions whenever I lift anything bigger than a gallon of milk, which actually limits a relatively large amount of housework. We also really need to polyurethane the new doors we installed and paint the trim for the hallway, but of course I shouldn't do those things because of the fumes (and of course DH is dragging his feet on those things, but then I feel like an unappreciative nag whenever I mention them to him since he is the one working and I'm the one sitting on my ass all day). Why do the pregnancy books fail to talk about this? It can't really be that abnormal. Although I guess I shouldn't trust the books because all of those authors seem to think women are obsessed with the whole weight gain aspect, and I couldn't care less about that.

It's weird too because I am sure there are plenty of women in the third trimester who dream of having no job, but I just really suck at handling this. My therapist pointed out last time that I've never had this much downtime in my entire adult life, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. She probably didn't know that encouraging me to embrace an easygoing lifestyle for a few months was going to cause me to miss my damn appointment. lol.

I feel bad that I pretty much only blog when I'm feeling down about something, but honestly when things are going well, I don't feel the need to write it down. I've had two wonderful baby showers in the past 10 days and I *promise* I will write about them soon (although, again, unfortunately I failed to take even one photo at the nicest one so there will not be any visual evidence).

doubt

We have reached the third trimester. Crazy. Amazing. Scary. Relieved. The books say that if he was born now, he'd still have an over 85% chance of surviving. I don't know what kind of survival this would look like, and I'm sure it would totally fricking suck, but for some reason, this makes me feel better about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, reaching this point has also forced us to arrange for a few muscular dystrophy-related tasks that will need to happen at the birth and soon-after. This of course has made me think abut the whole MD thing (you know, the entire reason I went through IVF in the first place? ha) and the slight chance that the test was wrong and our baby really does have the "bad gene." I know the chances of this are slim (like, less than 1%). And I know that the chances of some other unknown obstacle occurring are probably higher. But I still don't feel good about it. Last night it actually kept me up - for whatever reason I woke up at 5am and then the MD-worry popped in my head. *sigh*

We told ourselves at the beginning that if for some crazy reason the test gave us a false negative, and we ended up with a kid with MD, that we could make peace with it. Because we did all we could. But it would still really really suck. And part of me wonders what would have happened if we had just implanted one of the girl embryos, because then the worst scenario would be having a carrier. But then I think maybe we wouldn't have even gotten pregnant to begin with because the boy they transferred was the strongest guy. Ugh. So yeah, neverending cycle of doubt with no really good answer.

Just trying to get to a place where I can accept things as they are. I need the hope to outweigh the doubt again.

thankful but...

After reading someone else's blog this morning, I realized again how tricky the transition from "IVF blog" to "pregnancy blog" can be. I feel bad because I know most of the people who read this found me through the infertility community, but at the same time, blogging was such a good way to deal with stress during IVF that it seems silly to hang it up now. I think I also feel guilty because I was lucky enough that I did not have to endure the full-scale infertility journey that so many women have had to go through. PGD seems to hold this odd place in the blogosphere (if it even has any actual place - thus far I've only found two other bloggers whose primary "issue" (?) is PGD-related).

So anyhow, I am almost 26 weeks along now and completely thankful for the little guy growing in my uterus. And even more thankful that I feel him kicking and moving around consistently throughout the day (like right now). I wanted to type that first because above all else, I do need to keep my focus on what is really important - that we are well on our way to having the healthy baby we've desperately wanted.

That being said...I am majorly stressing out about the timing of it all. I know, I know, there is no magical non-stressful time to have a baby. But I've now put myself into a position where I feel like I must take the bar exam while trying to appropriately mother and care for a 4-month old. There are just so many unknowns and it is kind of impossible to make a truly informed decision at this point. I have no idea how long he will be sleeping at night by that point. Or how hard breastfeeding/pumping will be. Or how difficult it will be to begin the bar review courses when he is somewhere around 6-7 weeks old. Ugh.

I've considered putting off taking the bar until July (they only offer it twice a year), but that means putting the rest of our life plans on hold - it would significantly slow down our plans to move, and extremely limit my job prospects (unfortunately, DH just can't make enough to comfortably support three of us forever). Plus I'm afraid I would forget a lot of information, especially considering that I am already pretty much done with law school. I have one 3-credit class this fall. That's it. And I honestly don't care what grade I get.

Really not sure what the best thing to do is (I've already come to terms that there is no "good" option, just one that would be better than the other). Sadly, googling "bar exam newborn" brought up very little. Damn you internets!

just in case

I doubt anyone is even out there reading this, but if you are, I felt that I owed at least a short post to let the world know that everything continues to go well. 24 weeks today! Can't believe that that first injection was over six months ago! The whole process already seems like it was some strange dream (nightmare?) - my memories are so blurry and all I remember is being uncomfortable and foggy the whole time. It sucked but I am so thankful we even had an opportunity to give our baby a future that was not possible 20 years ago.

Baby is kicking away on a regular basis now. His kicks are definitely getting stronger - enough so that it is pretty distracting at times. He's already waking me up early a few time a week squirming around in there. I don't mind though, at least he's quietly waking me up at this point. :)

Baby showers are later in August and I am starting to freak out a little about not having ANYTHING yet. I assume we'll get lots at the showers but if we don't, it's going to be a lean fall. And of course I couldn't find a paying job this summer so money is not what it has been the last few years. Ah well, all he really needs is a place to sleep, right?