heartbeat

I couldn’t wait.

For a whole week, I had been feeling groovy.  So groovy that I thought I surely couldn’t still be pregnant.

So yesterday at church I talked to my midwife.  She said, “If you’re worried, let’s just go ahead and listen for the heartbeat.  Are you coming to the missions meeting tonight?  I can just bring my doppler and we can listen for it…”

Instead, DH and I met her at her office this afternoon.  “First, I want you to know that I’m not too worried.  We may not hear it right away.  Sometimes you have to wait five or ten minutes.  And even then, if we don’t hear it…you’re still pretty early.  We can order an ultrasound.”

I laid down. She put the doppler to my tummy.  Immediately, we heard  a heartbeat like a train choo-choo-ing towards us.

“That’s a really strong heartbeat.”  She smiled.

ten weeks; where are the symptoms?

Nausea?  Nope.

Extreme hunger? Gone.

Exhaustion?  The last couple of nights, I’ve been chirping around until 11 and waking up around 6.  I’m a little lethargic today, but I’m on vacation right now, so I’m supposed to be.

Headaches?  Not since last week.

Skin breaking out?  Not as much.

Moodiness?  {I can’t believe you would even ask that! You are sooo insensitive. Leave me alone.} Just kidding.  I don’t know.  I’m pretty happy. Of course, I’m also on summer break.

Nesting?  Isn’t that supposed to happen in the third trimester?  Nonetheless, DH and I did a complete deep-clean of our room this weekend, and bought a new, brighter comforter and some colorful things for the walls.

Hopefully, this is just an early easing into the second trimester.  I still have two weeks before the appointment where I should be able to hear the heartbeat.

week nine, and telling your boss

Weeks eight and nine have been the weeks of headaches. I still haven’t had any of the traditional upchucking morning sickness, for which I’m grateful. Instead, I seem to go through phases. One week I’ll be especially exhausted, the next week my skins will break out, another week I’ll be unusually hungry or slightly nauseated. This week, it’s been headaches. The headaches started with a monster last Friday that woke me out of a sound sleep at 5 a.m. and never left. I spent the second half of the day in bed because moving made my head pound even more.

I thought that headache was a kind of first phase of the sinus infection that had been going around the house, but over the weekend, I never developed the sore throat or cough that others had, and I never got a fever.

The headaches since that one haven’t been as bad, but they’ve been recurring, often starting when I wake up in the morning. I’m happy to have any symptoms of morning sickness these days, though, as I wade through the first trimester anxiously awaiting 12 weeks and some measure of assurance of a safe and healthy baby.

I had a big (metaphorical) headache at work this week. I was scheduled to meet with the boss to discuss next year’s contract and schedule. DH thought it would be duplicitous of me to meet with him without telling him about the baby, and since my boss is a trustworthy and like minded man, I decided to tell him.

Whoops.

He freaked out, and seemed to be about to rescind the teaching contract he had offered me for next year.

I freaked out. Really. Can’t afford to lose the job right now, and can’t believe this kind man would (illegally) discriminate against me!

A couple of emails and days later, we met again. Turns out he was just surprised and stressed and needed a few days to think it through. I’m hired on, full-time for the fall, and he’ll work with me in the spring. Whew! I guess if I learned one thing to pass on, it’s that you should be very careful about the TIMING of this talk with the boss. Don’t tell him at a time when he’s already stressed, and be ready to fully affirm your commitment to the company or organization as a way to reassure him. Even if you have a great relationship with your boss, even if you trust him (or her; please go back and change all my male pronouns to male/female, I’m too lazy to do it), don’t assume the sharing of this news will go smoothly.

take charge!

My grandmother emailed this morning after reading all about my pregnancy. She reminded me that, fifty or sixty years ago, most women were a lot less informed about fertility, conception, and pregnancy (they didn’t have Google, for one thing). In her first (of five) pregnancies, she didn’t even know she was pregnant until the third month.

Her email reminded me that I should recommend to you the one book that more than any other helped me understand birth control and fertility.

Take charge, girls!

Toni Weschler’s book taught me what really happens in each cycle, and how to know the signs of ovulation. Using only her charting methods (called the Fertility Awareness Method, or FAM) for birth control, we didn’t conceive for ten months. Using only her charting methods for conception, we conceived in the first month that we tried.

But this is a book for any woman, sexually active or not. If you want to understand and take control of your body, read it.

here’s a scary movie

(because you have to see several pregnant women naked. other than that, it’s not scary.)

The documentary “The Business of Being Born” covers some of the same ground as the book “Pushed.” While it is lighter in terms of the research and history presented, it carries a different kind of weight because of the images, the personal stories and births you get to actually watch. Woven throughout the movie are scenes of various home births accompanied by midwives. These scenes are altogether unlike the scary hospital birth melodramas we see on tv shows, where women are writhing and screaming, pinned down on beds. The women giving birth in the documentary are in pain, but they are in control, walking, changing position, moving into birthing tubs, doing whatever helps manage the pain. Watching them testifies to the fact that (for most,) giving birth is not a medical emergency, and shouldn’t be treated as such. It is a natural life process, and the woman’s body, with some guidance, knows what to do. Knows the best way to do it.

Here are a couple more interesting facts that show up in both the book “Pushed” and the documentary “The Business of Being Born”:

Giving birth laying flat on your back puts more strain on your body than almost any other position (unless someone out there wants to try giving birth while standing on her head). Standing or squatting, you have gravity to help you, and the structure of your pelvis is more open. Why do we use hospital beds? Maybe it’s a holdover from a time when doctors used to give women medicine to make them forget the birth entirely, and then tie them to the hospital bed and leave them in the corner until labor progressed enough.

The body naturally produces a special concoction of love-endorphins as the baby is born to help the mother deal with the pain, and to bond her to the baby. When a mother is on an epidural, however, the release of those endorphins is inhibited. (Could this lead to higher rates of post-partum depression?)

I prefer the book to the movie, but if you’re short on time, watch the movie. It’s a reasonable defense of midwifery and natural birth.

eight weeks

I have this cute little banner on my iGoogle homepage from Lilypie which counts down the days of my pregnancy.
It’s not all that encouraging, at this point: “Only 224 days to go.”

Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care

This was the first book I read about pregnancy, back several months before I became pregnant. I found it by chance while surfing Amazon to check out my friends’ reading suggestions on GoodReads. I love a good piece of investigative journalistic type writing, so I gave it a shot.

While definitely a little slanted towards midwifery and natural childbirth practices, the book provides fascinating statistics about childbirth and maternity care. Did you know that there are at least 23 countries in the world with smaller incidences of mother or child death in childbirth than the USA? One thing all those countries have in common is that the primary caregivers for pregnant women are midwives.

I borrowed the book from the library, so I don’t have it any more and can’t give a proper full review. Suffice to say that the book was the scariest book I’ve read this year, and also the most interesting. Any woman who is even thinking about becoming pregnant needs to read it.

first midwife visit

She says I have great bone structure and could easily deliver a 9 lb. baby. Watch out!

you might wonder

The day after reading, in a pregnancy book, that the first sign of miscarriage is a general sense that you are no longer pregnant, I begin to wonder. I am not sick. I don’t feel nauseated. I’m not particularly hungry. I feel fine, actually. Is this a general sense that I’m no longer pregnant? Where are my signs? Sure, I’m falling asleep fifteen minutes into movies and at every other chance I get, but when in my life have I not been a sleepy girl? That’s just who I am.

After that, I decided to skip reading the section on “Pregnancy Complications” – I don’t need to know the things that could go wrong.

On the other hand, since there really aren’t any signs of miscarriage, wonder for a moment about the reality of having a baby. It occurred to me yesterday, after seeing Prince Caspian with my husband, that after we have a baby, we won’t be able to go to the movie theater on the weekends. Not without a babysitter.

I’m not ready to not be able to go the movie theater.

week seven

I feel fat.

I’m not supposed to be eating for two yet; but when I start to feel hungry, I start to feel nauseated, so I try to keep from ever feeling hungry. Which means I eat a lot. I have a pooch. And I am not talking about a dog.

The baby is the size of a blueberry.

(Not big enough to cause any pooching, incidentally.)

We decided this week to tell our grandparents, our aunts and uncles and cousins and close friends. It’s encouraging, when you feel unsure about all the changes, to tell people who are sincerely one hundred percent thrilled. It makes you feel like maybe you aren’t completely crazy after all.

So far, three out of four relatives have sent emails to me in pink fonts, indicating their expectation that my firstborn, like myself, my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother’s older sister, will be a girl. One of the four wrote in blue…the lonely holdout voter for a firstborn son, like a Ron Paul supporter whose rEVOLution just isn’t quite catching on.