The good just keeps coming

Measuring 17 weeks yesterday when they did another ultrasound. Amnio went off without a hitch (gotta love being of "advanced maternal age"), and got the preliminary results today. Results for Trisomy 18 and 21 are normal - no extra chromosomes, none missing. And it's a GIRL! We're naming her Emmeline, and her older sister is beside herself with happiness.

Let's see if she still is when she has to share her barbies.

Moving right along

Almost 14 weeks by LMP, over 14 weeks by measurment. Not surprising, since we weren't trying, and deliberately stopped doing it before I thought I was supposed to ovulate. Someone clearly had other ideas.

Baby still alive and kicking. Gorgon still tired and retching. The Kraken has been informed, which may have been a mistake, as she is pummeling us with the pregnancy equivalent of "are we there yet".

Life is good.

Update

9 weeks pregnant today. Had an ultrasound on Wednesday, and the doctor's feedback was "That is one good looking baby". Still going strong! This is farther than I've been able to get with a pregnancy since the Kraken made her entrance almost 5 years ago, so I am very, very hopeful. Doc says based on progress thus far he would estimate my risk of miscarriage at 1-3%. Not nothing, but it beats the hell out of the 40% risk that women with my history usually carry.

Will keep you posted!

The slacker resurfaces

Been forever since I posted. Work is busy (which is a good thing in this kind of economy) and it seems like every night and weekend there is something going on. I am starting to feel a tad overextended, and fear for what it will be like when the Kraken is old enough to have things like soccer games and play practice.

In other news, with any luck around May 17th we'll be delivering the Kraken's younger sibling! That may seem like optimism in the extreme after the events of the past two years, and maybe it is, but I can't bring myself to spend 9 months freaking out about it. I was able to start taking my heparin shots the minute we found out we were pregnant, and as of last Friday an ultrasound shows a real live baby, with a heartbeat and everything. Haven't left the ultrasound clinic without a caveat of some kind (heartbeat too slow, baby too small, twins sharing a placenta, no baby developed) since the Kraken joined the Gorgon household, so I am encouraged. Plus, I feel like someone ran over me with a car, which has just GOT to be a good sign.

Wish me luck. I can't promise to post much until I get out of the first trimester and feel like a human again, but hopefully I'll be back in a few weeks with a good update.

Another detour on the journey

First of all, apologies to anyone reading this that I did not tell that we found out last week that we were pregnant again. Our plan was not to tell anyone until we were at least 12 weeks along, and as it turns out, that was a sensible plan. Pregnancy loss number 4. This one so early that I never even made it to the doctor. One week I tested positive, started my cocktail of daily shots and supplements to prevent miscarriage, and the next week I knew in my bones that it was over before it had begun. Today's bloodwork confirms that my HCG levels have dropped to less than 5. Nothing left but the inevitable bleeding, which ought to make the weekend interesting.

The good news is, I had less than a week to get my hopes up, and I never really believed it, even after 6 positive tests. The bad news is self evident. We are starting to talk about options. The Minotaur suggested this evening that we take a month off from the relentless pursuit of a second child, and then spend the next few months getting busy when we feel like it, and see what happens. In the meantime, I am in full Internet research mode for adoption options. If anyone has had a positive adoption experience or knows someone who has, please, share the agency name. As much as I hoped to experience the pleasures of pregnancy (and no, I'm not kidding, I actually LIKE being pregnant), I suspect it is not to be, and therefore am looking at my options. I myself come from a household with an older biological child (me) and a younger adopted one (my brother), and am forever grateful to the woman who made the decision that made it possible for me to have a brother.

In the meantime, I am tired, confused, and more than a little bit afraid. But mostly I am so very, very tired.

Just overheard.......

The Kraken tell her father "Daddy, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, I love you".

I was laughing too hard to hear what the bad news was.

Back again

I have been deliberately not posting for awhile, for fear of yet again letting my fertility woes take over the blog. I have a doctor's appointment next week, so hopefully that will at least lend to my situation the appearance of progress, even if nothing gets decided.

In the meantime, time marches on in the Gorgon household. As of this weekend, the Kraken has a newly decorated bedroom - we're calling it "bordello chic" for the delightful combination of grape juice purple and pepto bismol pink she picked for the walls. Two and a half days of sanding, spackling, painting, and frantically trying to keep four year old fingers off freshly wet walls. This morning? The first words out of her mouth, wearing a radiant smile all for the momma who made it happen (the Minotaur got none of the credit, having already gone to work) - "Momma! I sleeped in my new room last night!"

It was so totally worth it.

Conversations on the stairs

Documenting from tonight, when the Kraken found me crying on the steps because of yet another fucking negative pregnancy test (the 6th month in a row, meaning it's time to go back to the doctor to get evaluated for fertility issues in addition to the fabulous clotting disorder).

Kraken: Mommy, why are you crying?
SG: (So not wanting to explain it to a four year old) I'm okay, honey, I just have something in my eye.
Kraken: Did you get it out?
SG: I think so.
Kraken: Here. Let me wipe away your tears for you. That's really all I can do.

Gulp.

A series of firsts......

For the Kraken on our beach vacation this past week:

1. First....well....actual beach vacation
2. First trip into the pool with the floaties without clinging to a parent every single second
3. First actual trip to the bottom of the pool when floaties were forgotten and footing was lost (not a happy face when I pulled her up, I tell you)
4. First time into the ocean more than big toe deep
5. First movie at a movie theater (Up - completely fantastic)
6. First Happy Meal (I hate McDonalds and never set foot there willingly)

A few firsts for me as well.

1. First sea turtle in the wild, spotted three feet away from the boat I was sitting in
2. First entire day on a frakking YACHT. Holy cow, would I do that again in a minute
3. First manta ray in the wild
4. First time spotting the wild ponies of the Outer Banks
5. First time staying in a beach house swank enough to have a bleeping elevator!
6. First time unabashedly walking around in front of my mother with at least four tattoos showing (yes, I know, at age 38, this is rather sad)

All in all, a rather momentous vacation, and one that simultaneously seemed to go on forever, and ended far, far too quickly. I could totally have used another week.

Kids say the darnest things

Tonight in my house? The game is called "Pull off Daddy's skin".

Random cuteness

Gorgon (at bedtime) - Kraken, I love you so very much.
Kraken - That's funny. How do you know?

I grow old, I grow old

I have a Facebook friend, a woman I knew in college. Back then, we ran with the same crowd, but I wouldn't have called us bosom buddies. Now, uh...._____ years later, as grown up women with one child each and fertility issues, we find comfort in each other and a friendship we never had back then. She is a great ear when I need to vent, and I hope I fulfill the same role adequately for her. However, tonight she is on my shit list.

She reminded me, in a FB email, that she became a teenager TWENTY SEVEN YEARS AGO. That made me do some basic math myself.

1. First dyed hair - 25 years ago
2. Graduated from high school - 21 years ago
3. Pierced nose - 20 years ago
4. First tattoo - 20 years ago
5. First time I said " I am totally going to marry this man" - 18 years ago

And now the baggers at the grocery store call me "ma'am.

Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth a little.

Another weekend, half gone

Well, I am not pregnant. The newest medication does seem to be normalizing my cycle though - no spotting for 10 days BEFORE my period this month. Maybe we'll get lucky (heh) this next cycle, and I won't have to go in and get put on Clomid or some such. I mean, I am a woman who made twins on her own last year - what the frak will happen to me if they put me on a fertility drug??

To the promise that returning to blogging meant a reduction in obsessing about aforementioned pregnancy or lack thereof - I bring you........unrelated news!

Well, not really. Not a whole lot going on here other than the usual summertime in the South stuff. You know, multiple trips to H*me Dep*t to find ANYTHING that will keep the ()#$*%( deer out of my tomato plants so I don't have to gun down Bambi in front of my four year old. A trip to the grocery store to get candles for the Minotaur's birthday cake. The Kraken's first ever viewing of Monsters Inc. (the highlight of the weekend thus far - no princesses!) A little romp through the backyard in a bathing suit (the Kraken, not me. I don't want to scare the neighbors).

So, you know. Nothing new. Just all the stuff that, mushed together, makes up our lives. And it is some seriously good stuff.

Tonight's cuteness

(Overheard while cooking tacos during the Kraken's nightly bedtime ritual with her daddy)

Minotaur: Kraken, you need to use the potty before bed.
Kraken: Daddy, nothing's going to come. You are KILLING me!

(this is the part where I dropped the spatula on my foot)

What kind of parents

Tell their daughter that she has to play quiet games because it's 15 minutes until bedtime, and then instigate a full fledged nerf cannonball fight with the Playmobil pirate set? And does it make me a bad person if I teach her to aim for her father's face?

Sunday

You know what's awesome about having a childless couple over for supper? Someone else to play freeze tag with the Kraken so the Minotaur and I don't have to. Good times.

Here I am again

Forgive me, internets, for I have slacked. It has been almost five months since my last posting. To some extent, this is due to my discovery of the wonderfully entertaining Facebook, where I have been spending most of my online time catching up with people I went to school with in the first grade, and discovering that one of my former clients is quite good friends with one of my former um.........friends. Eeeps. Heheheheheh.

Another main benefit of Facebook is that the avenues for self-expression are more restricted than blogging, so it's the perfect medium for letting people know how well I know 80's horror flick storylines and what I made for supper the night before. But, going on endlessly about the one topic that's eaten my life whole like a peckish boa constrictor for the past year and a half? Not so much.

If anyone still has this blog in their newsfeed, you will remember that in 2008 I suffered three miscarriages, four babies in total. Towards the end of the-year-that-will-live-on-in-infamy, it was discovered that I have a clotting disorder that is in all likelihood the cause of all the misery. And now, my daughter's pediatrician has informed me that it is also probably the cause of the severe anemia that put the Kraken in the NICU for the first day of her life, and almost required a complete blood transfusion on her four week old body. There's one that will make it hard to breathe for a minute. A little more clotting in that umbilical cord, and I would not have my daughter.

As you might imagine, spending a year in and out of pregnancies, wincing every time you go to the bathroom for fear of that telltale swipe of blood on the toilet paper that tells the story of the misery to come, doesn't really lend itself to thinking about anything else. Talking about anything else. BLOGGING about anything else. Every post was an update on the most recent pregnancy, or pregnancy loss. I started to feel like the hamster in the wheel - running, running, running, but getting nowhere fast. I gave up the blog, I thought for good, because it was one more place for me to completely shut out the rest of my life. My life was suffering. My daughter was suffering, living with a mother who burst into tears at Target, or the dinner table, or in the car.

From that fact that I am, in fact, posting, some of you may be beginning to wonder if I have finally succeeded where I have previously failed. The answer is, I don't know. This is our fifth month of trying to conceive again. I am taking prenatals, an additional folic acid supplement, low-dose aspirin therapy, and progesterone. I am on day 23 of a normally 29 day cycle. Too early to test, but late enough for those annoying symptoms that are common to early pregnancy (hopes UP, hopes UP!) and PMS (crap, shit, fuck, dammit, hell). This is my least favorite part, and the time I am most likely to obsess about the maybes and the probablies.

So why am I here? I don't know that either, but I suspect it has a lot to do with the book the Minotaur brought home to me - Mommy Confidential - the memoir comprising the collected blog posts of Mindy Roberts, famous for The Mommy Blog. Fun book, but not always easy to read because she blogs through some seriously tough shit. Divorce, career change, complete emotional meltdown - it's all there. And going through it with her.......I remembered. You know, why I used to blog? The years go by more quickly than summer vacation when you're ten years old and suddenly the Kraken is almost 5, and I am sidling towards 40 with my eyes averted so I won't have to look. I want to remember it. The little details, the inconsequential moments that, when strung together like Christmas lights on a tree, make up our lives. Some of those lights may be burnt out or cracked, and the wires frayed from when the cats chewed the cord half through, but it's all part of the show.

I want to be part of my own life again, no matter what else is to come in this next round of spin the baby wheel. It's a life that has a lot of good things in it, and I WANT TO REMEMBER.

Home again

And getting reacclimated to my normal life after 2 weeks of the Great North American Christmas Tour. About 3 more weeks before we hop back on the baby making train, so I'm drinking my gin and playing on the Internets this evening.

Happy New Year, everyone!