My big belly

Here it is, the first real pregnancy picture... I can't believe how much my belly has grown lately! It's really popped out. There's very few of my pre-preggo clothes that fit me anymore. But I have 5 pairs of pregnancy pants, a few skirts that can still fit me, a few dresses and a fair amount of shirts, so I am hoping not to have to do much more preggo clothes shopping. I only have a little over two months of work left, so it shouldn't be too bad.

I have to say, though, that if it wasn't for my natural aversion to shopping, getting maternity clothes wouldn't really be so bad. There's lots of really flattering styles out there these days, and many outfits designed to make us pregnant ladies look good and stylish, and still feel comfortable.

What I miss most, though, is my heels. I never realized how few pairs of shoes of mine had flat soles (3 pairs). All of my sandals have heels, my nice shoes, my work shoes, my boots... And walking around in heels is a recipe for backaches. So I try to rotate my 3 pairs of shoes throughout the week :)

So that's the update from the preggo front!

Funny of the day

Some people have a way with words....

Today, someone at work stopped me in the hallway, and the following conversation took place:

Colleague: So, I am assuming that you are expecting a child.
Me (in my head): Well, technically it's more of an alien-hybrid, but sure...
Me (out loud): Yes I am.
Colleague: Good, good. At first I thought you were just putting on weight!
Me - nervous laugh.

Not sure what reaction he was expecting. He's definitely a well-meaning guy, but still... Not the most tactful way of congratulating someone on their pregnancy :) Luckily, I found it rather funny.

Now I'm wondering what kind of other humorous exchanges my pregnancy will generate :) I'm sure there's lots of potential there!

Update

Good news update: FIL had brain surgery on Monday, as far as anyone can tell everything went well, he should be discharged from the hospital today. They had only put some probes in last week, to identify which parts of the tumor needed to be removed. And we figured it would be months after that before the actual surgery would be scheduled. But they had a cancellation, so they were able to fit him in this week! He's feeling ok, seems to have all of his memory intact. Now we just need to watch for seizures (or lack thereof).

In other news, DH might have found a car to replace the Probe. No reason to get excited yet, but we may be going to NY state on Saturday to check out a 1999 Z3 coupe, metallic green with tan interior. From the pics, the car looks really sharp, but we'll see how this saga progresses :)

Work has become really crazy this week. Lots of new issues cropping up, more people leaving, so more work and less resources (story of our company these days). I have to consciously work at lowering the stress level, but overall I think I am doing ok. I should be starting to figure out where and how to delegate my workload in preparation for my leave, but for now we're already too busy just trying to stay afloat. I am really hoping that my manager gets someone else into our team soon so we can start catching up on stuff.

On the fun side, tonight we're going to see Rush in concert. I'm looking forward to it, haven't seen the band since their last concert in the vicinity (Montreal?), and they always put on a great show. We'll see if the baby enjoys it ;) I went to see a Beethoven concert on Wednesday, and there was a very quiet part with only wind instruments for a little while, and then the whole orchestra came in with a bang, and it seemed to startle the baby because I got a monster kick. It was kind of funny! Overall, though, I think the baby found it quite enjoyable. Must have been the happy hormones from mommy :)

I keep forgetting to take pictures to show you how big my belly has become. Maybe this weekend I can remember...

Back at home

Traveling is a lot of fun, but it can also be exhausting. We're back home, and back at work... On the plus side, it's nice to be home, and sleep in one's own bed. On the minus side, work has piled up while I was gone, so now I have a lot of catching up to do. But it's fun work, so I don't really mind.

People at work are starting to notice that I am pregnant (I guess now that I've reached the 5 months mark, it's about time ;)). And I have to start preparing for my leave, start delegating stuff to other people, and planning for the work partitioning after my departure. Since I need to use up my vacation time before my maternity leave (cannot carry the vacation over to 2009), I will most likely take a week or two off in December, which combined with the holiday shutdown means that I will be finishing work in late November or early December. That means I only have 3 months or so of work left... All of a sudden time seems to just zip by!

In exciting news, my sister-in-law just gave birth to a baby daughter yesterday. She's a real cutie, just like her older brother and sister. Hopefully we'll get to go back to Halifax and visit them sometime soon!

Time to go home now... TTFN

Trip blog

If you want to follow our adventures in Newfoundland, here's a link to the trip blog:

http://realtravel.com/canada-trips-i5411009.html

We'll try to update it as often as we can!

Discoveries

On the plus side, I've discovered this week that a big belly makes one's legs look nice and slim. Yay! On the minus side, I am discovering that having your boobs reach your belly (only when bending over!) is not a fun feeling. So there you have it, you win some and you lose some :)

Today is my last work day before the holidays. Two whole weeks with no pager, no meetings, no worries about deadlines or things that need to be fixed yesterday... I really do like my job, like anything involving people it's got it's ups and downs, but I am definitely ready for a break.

We packed most of our stuff last night, just the cooler left to pack this afternoon, and getting everything loaded into the car, and then the adventure begins! We're stopping over at my parents' house tonight, and over the next two days we need to get all the way to North Sydney in Cape Breton, NS. Shouldn't be too bad of a drive, especially since it's the weekend we shouldn't get caught in any rush hour traffic in the bigger cities. I'll try to blog from the road, we're bringing the laptop, so it will all depend on connectivity. Hopefully we can find a few hot spots here and there...

Next update from the road :)

Busy, long but fun day

Wow, what a day! DH is at the ballgame tonight, so I am sitting at the computer writing updates to the blog. A nice quiet finish to a busy day!

We started the day going for a test drive at one of the dealerships in town. The dealership is at the other end of the city, but it was early in the morning, so it didn't take too long. We wanted to test drive a 2003 Audi TT just to get a feel for the car (in case you're wondering- drives VERY nicely). It was quite a bit of fun, although the salesman that came along for the ride was a little annoying. The first thing he told me, before I even sat down in the driver's seat, was that I was going to stall the car. Not that I might, or that it's easy to, but that I would stall it (I didn't in the end). To be fair, he apparently said the same thing to DH... Then he proceeded to tell me how to drive, commenting on my driving style, that I was shifting too early, that I wasn't speeding up quickly enough etc. But I did get a good feel for the car, and I guess that's what matters most :)

After the test drive, we made a quick stop at CAA to get all sorts of maps and other goodies about Newfoundland. Then, DH had a doctor's appointment, to check out his finger. See, the last time my family was in town (around 6 weeks ago), my little sister brought a football, and we played a bit in the yard. DH hit his finger while playing, and it bruised and swelled. He had injured that finger playing football before, so he figured it was a sprain again, just like last time. So he iced it and the swelling went down, and then he left it alone to heal. Well, after all this time, the finger still didn't feel quite right, so he wanted to go get it checked out. Well, he got a referral for x-rays, and they confirmed that his knuckle was broken :( And it doesn't seem to be healing well :( Not sure what the next step is yet, we will have to wait until the x-ray results make it back to our doctor...

When we got to the doctor's office, we realized that DH had left his driver's license at the dealership... So after the appointment he dropped me off at home, and went back to get his license back. In the meantime, I frantically cleaned the house, because my family was arriving in less than 2 hours. It'd been a while since we'd seen them, so I was really looking forward to the visit. T'was a short one but a good one. They only stayed for around 5 hours, but we had a divine barbeque (steaks, sausage, tons of vegetables: zucchini, beans, broccoli, peppers, tomatoes, all accompanied by a delicious salad and an assortment of yummy breads). My little sis cut up some veggies and made a dip, which was an amazing accomplishment, given that we had close to no dip ingredients available. She improvised pretty much every ingredient, but the result was delicious. We will never be able to properly reproduce it, and the list of ingredients sounds a little odd (cream cheese, mayo, Dijon mustard, pickle juice, garlic, onion, fresh oregano and thyme, salt and pepper, and I'm probably forgetting a few), but everyone agreed that it was unbelievably good, with any vegetables, even kohlrabi :O

Unfortunately the feast and the visit had to end. My folks are departing on a 3 week trip to Europe next week, and need to pack and prepare, and my sister is working all day tomorrow. So the fun had to end :( But it was a great visit, and my stomach is still full and grateful ;)

Tomorrow afternoon I am going to drop by a friend's place for a get together, and then in the evening we're going over to some other friends' for a barbeque. Talk about a social weekend. And we should really be packing for the trip... I guess that will have to happen on the weeknights :)

Lemon tree

This picture is a picture of the lemon tree I am trying to grow. When we found out I was pregnant, I planted a few lemon seeds, just for the heck of it. I found somewhere on the internet that you should put them in very wet soil, seal it in a plastic bag (to keep the moisture in), and put it on top of the fridge. I followed the instructions on a whim, not really having much hope that it would work (Ottawa spring is not really the ideal place for lemon trees...). I went to check on it over the next few weeks, and it didn't seem to work too well. The water seemed to evaporate, and it didn't seem to be warm enough on top of the fridge. I added some more water, and promptly forgot about the whole thing. Turns out I don't look at the top of our fridge very often :)

Then, a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon my little planter over the fridge again. It had been there for a few months now, had fallen over on its side, and was looking quite pitiful. But when I looked closer, I noticed something green... Turns out my lemon seeds had germinated! So now I have a lemon plant that I have to take good care of. Chances are, given my not-so-green thumbs, that it will not survive even until the baby's arrival, but it's made it so far, and I'm going to try my best to keep it alive and green. We'll see :)

Half way point

Well, I am now officially at the half-way point of the pregnancy. Week 20! Ok, so that's only according to the weird math of pregnancy (40 weeks in a pregnancy, but the first two are really before conception, so they barely count). Believe it or not, I am still having a hard time really believing I am truly pregnant. Even though I can only fit in 2 pairs of my pre-pregnancy pants, and it's getting pretty hard to ignore the bulge growing in front of me.My guess is that until I hold my baby in my hands, I won't be fully convinced that this is really happening to me. It's been such a long road...

Because of my ever-expanding belly, this week I have made my first pregnancy pants purchase. They're actually capri pants (got them cheap at an end-of-season sale: 11$+tax!), and I suspect I will be wearing them a lot over the next few weeks. Especially the last week of August, first week of September, when we will be going to visit the beautiful island of Newfoundland. We've had our holidays booked at work for months, but never got around to actually planning the holiday. Finally this week we booked the ferry, and we're starting to book a few places to stay. Only one week of work left, and then we hit the open road. I'm really looking forward to it, it's been such a busy year at work, I need a lot of rest and doing nothing :)

In other news, we finally have power in our garage. Not sure if I mentioned it in the blog, but around February, the garage lights and outlets started misbehaving, and it turned out we had a problem with the underground wires buried between the barn and the garage. We had to wait for a thaw to get at the cables, and then we had to get the schedules lined up between us and the electrician, and then we had torrential rains when they were supposed to come (no digging in the flood), then they had a big job scheduled, then they found a bee's nest in between the barn walls (had to call pest control to get rid of them), but in the end, today they were able to show up and finish the job. And now we have power in the garage. It's about time, it's been half a year now... Of course it's a lot more important to have power in the garage in the winter, to have the lights come on when we get home from work, and to be able to plug in the block heaters.

In other fun news, the kitchen table and chairs we ordered a few months back have shown up, so we now have an official kitchen breakfast nook. We'd been using a convertible poker table (with the felt out and the glass top in) as our kitchen table with the dining room chairs. Now we have an actual set for the kitchen :) It's really a small set of a round table (with two extension leaves) in varnished maple, and found chairs in birch with soft cushions covered in some kind of dark green vinyl-type material that seems to be very easy to clean (especially important with a spitting baby). Now we just have to wait for the couch we ordered a few weeks ago, and I think we won't need any more furniture for another decade (well, except for the baby's room I guess). Our old couches have been slowly moving downstairs into the movie theatre room :)

In automotive news, DH is getting more serious about looking for the right second vehicle for us. He's currenly leaning towards a 2000-ish BMW Z3 coupe, or an Audi TT coupe from the same era. He's even considering importing one from the US, as the prices are a lot more competitive there. I guess our lives just aren't complicated enough, so we keep looking for more challenges ;) I have the feeling that is about to end, though maybe babies are not quite as challenging as I remember it from my youth :)

Next time, there will be some pictures, I promise. I just discovered that our camera batteries are completely drained, but as soon as they are recharged, I will go trigger happy!

Happy trails!

Cute?

Or creepy? You decide ;) I think it's kind of neat to see the ultrasound pics of our little munchkin, but I know a lot of people find it disconcerting. I don't think it's the best shot they got, but I guess they were holding on to the best shots to send them to the people that can actually interpret them (this clinic was kind of old-style, we got a print of the picture, nothing electronic).

From what we could tell, the kid's got all the important organs (kidneys - check, heart with all four chambers - check, stomach - check, umbilical cord - check, toes and fingers - check, full spine - check). The cheeky monkey insisted on facing away from us, stubbornly staring at my back for pretty much the whole half hour of the examination. As a result, I was asked to move around to give the technician a better view. In the end, I still don't think he was able to determine the sex. We weren't going to ask anyway :)

The baby does have a good sense of humour, though. Despite facing away from us, it let us know it knew exactly what was going on by kicking fervently and waving around the tiny little hands with long fingers. Even the technician had to laugh at that!

So I think that's it for the ultrasound pictures for a long while. No more tests or examinations scheduled for the next few months. I'll have to post some pictures of my expanding belly, though :)

Good news all around

First of all, the good news is that FIL is out of the hospital. It turned out he was trying to reduce the dosage of his medication (with doctor's supervision of course), but that didn't work out all that well. Sounds like he's doing better back on the original dosage of the medication.

At home, it's been a very busy week. After managing to get rid of most of the water in the basement, we decided it was high time to install a sump pump. Because our setup is a bit unusual, and we didn't want someone coming in and telling us they have to drill some extra holes all over our basement, we decided to install the pump ourselves.

It's not really too complicated of a job, if you know what you're doing. Since we didn't really know what we were doing, I ended up going to the hardware store every evening this week just to pick up a few parts here and there. The guy at the Home Depot who gathered "everything we would need" forgot to remind us to get teflon tape for example. Sigh!

But in the end, the pump is finally installed. It's a little sad that it took us a whole week of evenings to do it, but we are pretty happy it's done. At first we installed a temporary solution, with a temporary flexible hose coming out through the window. Aside from the fact that the (brand new, purpose bought) hose was full of holes that were only marginally helped by duct tape, the first try worked reasonably well. So then we moved on to solid plumbing. Two check valves, one T connection, three elbows and 20 feet of pipe later, we have a pretty spiffy looking plumbing solution. Not too shabby if I may say so myself.

Aside from the plumbing work, we also had to clean up a lot of the junk that got wet during the flood. It was mostly old boxes and old paint cans and that kind of stuff, so nothing to get too upset about. But it still all had to be cleaned before mold started getting established... So lots of hauling of stuff. There's still a lot of un-wet boxes that have to be moved to the barn, because we've realized they're more likely to survive there :)

And yes, I have an unusual attachment to cardboard boxes. They have served me well in the past, and I don't like throwing them out while they still have lots of life and usefulness left in them. I figure as far as obsessions go, it's a pretty mild one, so I'm not too worried :)

Just when you think you have it all under control...

... something is bound to come up.

We were (or actually it's more like I was) starting to feel pretty good about our BBQ hosting abilities this summer. You see, this year we finally assembled the BBQ that we bought a few years ago, and we'd been having friends and family over for a BBQ at least every second week. Last weekend we were hosting my volleyball team. I was feeling pretty good, having done some house cleanup and prep during the week, and I thought we'd have a leisurely Saturday getting ready for the event.

Well, it didn't quite turn out that way. Just after breakfast, DH headed down to the basement to take a look at something, and he came back in great panic: the basement is flooded. Now, we have gotten some water in the basement on occasion in the past. Usually, it just means that water gets in in one corner, and has to find its way to the sump, where it usually just flows out and into the ditch through the drainpipe. It's annoying, and sometimes we try to mop it up so that we don't have to wait for it all to flow away, but in general it's limited to a small corner of the unfinished part of the basement, so we're not overly worried.

But this time, it was different. The drain pipe itself was pumping water back into the basement. The water level was a few centimeters off the floor, and it was making its way into the finished part of the basement at an alarming rate. So we went to work, trying to get the water out of there, plugging the drainpipe, getting a shopvac for quicker water evacuation. Unfortunately, there is no way to get rid of the water in the basement itself, as we have nothing that would pump it out, so we had to carry all the water upstairs. Overall, we probably hauled up over 200 gallons of water. Up and down the stairs for 6 hours straight...

Then people came over, and we had a nice BBQ. The weather was beautiful, pretty much the first day this month where it hasn't rained. Bugs weren't too bad (except for the hornet that stung me twice, grumble, grumble), the sun was nice and not too hot, a great evening overall. Except when everyone left, and we went back to the basement, the water level had gone up again. So again, we trekked water upstairs, plugged the drain holes even more solidly, and convinced that we did as much as we could, went to sleep a little after midnight.

Of course, we didn't sleep all that well, worried about our precious, recently finished basement. But in the morning everything turned out to be fine, the water level had not risen again, and clearly the worst had passed. We got a sump pump, and tried to clean up some of the damage (nothing big, mostly just junk that we were keeping around that we're glad to get rid of in the end). Tonight we'll be installing the sump pump (fingers crossed), and cleaning up the rest of the damage (mostly empty cardboard boxes). We are planning to go to London (ON) for the weekend, so we need to have everything settled and cleaned up before then. If the sump pump installation goes well, it should be no problems.

So how's that for a weekend adventure? Not the kind of thing you're hoping for when barely into your second trimester, but hey, them's the breaks :)

In sad news, I just heard that FIL is back in the hospital after suffering 5 seizures again. Crossing fingers and sending positive healing thoughts!

Big long story

I've been meaning to post this one for a while... Just as a record for safekeeping. It's long but true, I haven't done much editing to it after the fact. A little timeline of the beginning of this year.

Thursday, January 25th: Just got my period (after an evening of playing volleyball). A shame, because I was starting to feel quite pregnant, being a few weeks late and all. Of course late is a relative term, since I am the most irregular person even my doctor's ever heard of... I must have been making up all the symptoms, wishful thinking and all...

Friday, January 26th: Period over? Can't be. Now this is definitely new, never heard of a 12 hour period... Googling furiously, and the only thing I can figure out is that I am indeed pregnant, but had some bleeding. Best odds I can find is 50/50 of this ending up in a miscarriage. Trying not to obsess too much about it all.

Saturday, February 3rd: OK, finally broke down and peed on a stick... What do you know, it was positive! Wow, I got a positive! Hard to believe, really. Will repeat the experiment the next day for sure... In the meantime, called my doctor's office to book an appointment. It's all feeling a little surreal! And of course I can't forget what happened on the 25, it's always in the back of my mind... 50% chance, but I'm willing to take it. Better than a 0% chance of being pregnant I guess...

Wednesday, February 7th: Doctor's appointment. She sounds all excited, and not at all concerned about anything. Just said I have to stop playing volleyball. I'm willing to give up pretty much anything to make this happen, so as much as I am going to miss the volleyball, it's off limits from now on. Cautiously optimistic? Maybe. Have an ultrasound scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Can't wait... Oh yeah, it's my sister's birthday... Didn't even send her a card, though I did call and leave a message with a "Happy Birthday" duet with DH.

Thursday, February 8th: Ultrasound clinic. Waiting is tough. Lots of other women, some look just as preggers (or un-preggers) as me, some really close to the end. The mood overall is of subdued excitement. Most women have someone with them, and I'm furiously scribbling on my PDA just to pass the time. Just before I go in, DH gives me a call, which helps calm down the nerves a little... The results: slightly alarming... The tech said that I was "definitely pregnant", though not as far along as we'd thought. Alarm bells going off in my head. I knew I wasn't as far along as my doctor thought, because that would have meant conception just around Christmas time, and with all the guests and stuff, there was definitely nothing of that sort happening at the time. But even by my most conservative estimates, we should have been at more than 6 weeks. I guess it's time to start worrying... Next doctor's appointment is not until the 19th, so I just have to sit and try to not fret until then...

Monday, February 19th: Longest 11 days of my life. The doc seems unperturbed, very excitedly babbling about the need to plan, getting on the midwife waiting list (done!), making decisions about pre-natal scans, and diet changes and blood tests and all that. DH and I quietly listen, finally allowing ourselves to believe this may be actually happening. Super long questionnaires are filled out, new appointments scheduled, and we're sent on our merry way. Is it possible that this is really happening???

Tuesday, February 20th: Back to reality. Second ultrasound appointment was today. The news is essentially bad, and the tech was nice enough to tell me right there and then, after consulting with the doctor on the premises. And just to make sure, on top of a regular ultrasound, I got an intra-vaginal one (yes, it's just as much fun as it sounds...). She spent a lot of time trying to get images of my ovaries, contributing to my paranoia... In short, though nothing has grown since the last time. Results will be sent to my doc, and she'll let me know what's next. The words "not viable" have not been uttered, but I know that this is the diagnosis. The cute little sac I've come to know and love has nothing growing in it, and I will soon have to say goodbye. No amount of googling will fix this mess...

Wednesday, February 21st: Today is my other sister's birthday... Kind of ironic if you think about it. I'm not in much of a celebrating mood, but having a nice chat with her actually gets my mind off this awful mess. I'm trying to plan as many distractions as I can over the next few days, because I just can't sit and dwell on things. I might never get back up...

Friday, February 23rd: I'm in a meeting at work when I get the call from my doctor. Have to take it, so I beg out of the meeting (luckily it hadn't really started yet). I like my doctor, she's clear and to the point, but also compassionate. We keep my next appointment as scheduled, and she tells me to expect an expulsion fairly soon (i.e. miscarriage). Go to the emergency if bleeding more than a pad an hour. Sounds pretty simple, really...

Sunday, February 25th: Ok, enough waiting. I'm taking things into my own hands. Went skiing with friends in the morning (partially to keep myself distracted, partially because I thought physical exertion has to help things along). And as expected, by the evening I was "expelling" things. Wicked cramps and bleeding is all I remember from the Oscars evening... Luckily by bedtime I was feeling fairly ok (the double dose of advil probably helped), and I was able to get a good night of sleep.

Monday, February 26th: Not bad, I'm thinking. Went to work all day, then did a bunch of cooking and cleanup... Probably still running on the hormonal high of pregnancy that seemed to be turning me into a Martha Stewart clone (organizing the house, baking and cooking and everything). But by bedtime, the wicked cramps came back. And then got worse. Then worse again... DH is calling me Crampy McDoubledOverson. Called Tele-Health, the nurse at the other end went through her questionnaire and said that I should not be in so much pain at this point, and I should go to emergency...

Tuesday, February 27th: We greet the day at the ER. We arrive at 12:30, and settle in the waiting room. Every few minutes I just bend over with pain, and I'm sure people are thinking I've gone insane (the rest of the time I appear quite normal). The two hour wait doesn't seem too bad, though I am starting to bleed quite heavily. When I am finally admitted, I get a very nice cubicle (ER code for a cozy little room), and I get my own little gurney. They take a bunch of blood samples, and a urine sample (noone told me I'd have to pee!). They leave the needle in my arm, in case they have to connect an IV - this is starting to get serious. The doctor is mumbling something a D&C, which I want to avoid at all costs... I keep thinking maybe I should have stayed home after all. Although I probably would have gone insane from the pain - at least at the hospital I am constantly distracted, and I think the adrenaline is working wonders. By the time the doc wants to "examine" me, I am barely feeling the cramps at all. I have new appreciation for my regular doctor, as she's never angrily ordered me to relax while inserting that unpleasantly cold and sharp speculum... Yeah, you try to relax and forget that I'm lying half-naked on a gurney in the ER, bleeding profusely and cramping! The good news is that he can't see much stuff in there, mostly just blood. So the threat of D&C has passed... I am relieved! The bad news is that one of the machines that was supposed to do the analysis of my blood needs to be recalibrated, so we have to wait another hour before we can get discharged. DH orders me to have a snooze (now that the cramps are very mild), and I gladly comply. Unbelievably enough, I had a pretty good sleep... In the end we are discharged, but have to come back for an ultrasound to confirm the status of the miscarriage...

Tuesday, February 27th (part 2): So we go home, get some rest, have a bite to eat and go back to the hospital for the ultrasound. I am getting quite comfortable now lying half-naked on a gurney, getting poked and prodded by strangers. The ultrasound technician again insisted on doing an intra-vaginal. I've lost all sense of modesty, and eagerly allowed the rubber-glove clad poking instrument to be shoved inside and poke around... But it was done and over with in record time. Then I had to go back to the ER to hear the verdict. Two hours later, I was given a clean bill of health, and told that there was just one small piece awaiting to be expelled. The ER doctor also gave me a copy of all the records, so that I can bring it to my next appointment with my doc. The report includes this charming line: "maternal ovaries are unremarkable". My ovaries are still reeling from the insult!

Wednesday, February 28th: So after an uneventful night of sleep, I decided to go to work. Everything seemed to be going ok, until the evil cramps started making a comeback. Thankfully a coworker provided me with a bunch of Tylenol, so I was sort of able to slowly limp through the workday. Working at my desk was not all that bad, after all the time in between cramps I was fairly lucid, and I was able to make it through the cramps with no screaming or kicking ;) But I was worried about my team meeting in the afternoon. It's a little harder to hide pain when trying to sit very quietly in a meeting. But it turned out I didn't need to worry. Around 5 minutes before the meeting, I had a monster sneeze. And it turns out that was all that I needed to get that annoying last bit "expelled". I really wish the ER docs or nurses would have told me. 3 days of evil cramps and all I needed was a sneeze? Give me a break!!!! OK, so it was a major sneeze, and the resulting bloody mayhem would have turned all but the most solid stomachs, but still. I was just amazing that it's all it took. After that, it's all smooth sailing. All I have to worry about from now on, is the emotional scars... And that won't take too long, will it?

So here you have it. The full account of my pregnancy, miscarriage, ER visit, and the sneeze that ended it all.

Busy, busy, busy

Been working pretty long hours this week. This is what happens when I'm not carpooling with DH, I don't have a forced "quittin' time", so I stay for hours trying to finish things. I didn't get home before 8:30 the last 3 days... But I have some hope that the busiest time is behind us (at work).

Things may be looking up at work because the fog of the first trimester finally seems to be lifting from my brain. I think I've been more productive this week than all year. Which is kind of sad, I know...

So I know a lot of people are wondering why I'm taking so long to "come out" and announce my pregnancy. I mean, I've posted it on the blog, but truthfully, I don't have that many readers :) In real life, both our families know, my boss knows, and 2 friends at work (both guys) know. I'm certainly out of the first trimester danger zone, so why the secrecy?

First off, I think I am still a little scared/disbelieving. It doesn't help that I pretty much jumped straight from a miscarriage into another pregnancy (well, ok, I did wait that month or so for things to get settled, but really, that was just enough time for the hormones to drop, and then they went up again). So I am still very skittish about the whole thing. I keep thinking "oh, once X happens, I'll really feel like it's real" (where X can be any of: 3 months are up, I see the ultrasound, I hear the heartbeat, I feel the first kick). But it's still not quite registering. Which is very annoying, because I'd always had this fantasy of enjoying every moment of my pregnancy, after all, it's such a short yet great time in one's life. So now I'm kicking myself in the posterior for not enjoying it more (which doesn't help at all with the enjoyment ;)). Sigh! Do I always have to over-analyze everything???

Then there's another factor. I have this thing where I really don't want to make a big deal out of this. You couldn't tell from reading this blog ;) I just don't want to be one of those obnoxious pregnant ladies that think the world revolves around them. And you know what's funny? I actually never really realized that they existed until pretty recently. So let me explain with an example: I'm having lunch with a friend, who's 5 months pregnant. This other friend or acquaintance of ours, also 5 months pregnant, walks by, and stops for a little chat. Obviously the talk turns to pregnancy (I have no issues with that). About halfway through the conversation, though, the second pregnant lady decides that I don't have anything interesting to contribute (neither lady knows that I am in early pregnancy at that point), turns completely towards my pregnant friend, and ignores me completely. She didn't even say goodbye, or have a nice lunch to me, just the pregnant one. Well, excuse me for not having a belly that's showing! Just cause I'm not obviously pregnant like you, doesn't mean that I don't know and don't care about anything related to pregnancy, or that I'm an inferior human being to you. Grrr!

Ok, so that was an extreme example, but there's plenty of others. Especially around here, where it seems like every woman in the office is either pregnant, thinking (and talking) about it, or on maternity leave... So for example you have the women who can spend hours telling you how unbelievably hard it is to chose the right colour scheme, or the right designer furniture for their baby's room. It's really not a huge deal for me personally (I can talk babies and decorating for hours), but I can see how annoying this can be for others, and how self-absorbed and self-important it makes one look. So in my effort to try and avoid being an annoying "look at me, I'm pregnant!", I'm sort of going to the other extreme of minimizing it.

Ok, now this blog post is certainly starting to look all self-important and self-centered. This is going to be an uphill battle!

Next time I'm going to publish a post I wrote after the miscarriage, just so that the whole episode is well documented on this blog. Like ying and yang, you have to take the bad with the good, so I figure I'd post some good stuff with some bad stuff, just life stuff I guess ;)

Life in the fast lane...

So yesterday I had my first visit with our midwife. She's really nice, I very much enjoyed my visit. She gave me TONS of reading material, some magazines and two books. I started reading last night, while DH chivalrously mowed the lawn :) I haven't even started looking at the books, although they look very interesting. It's mostly about birthing and not so much about pregnancy, but I have to start somewhere! I may pick up a few pregnancy specific books at some point.

Now that I've seen the midwife, I have to schedule another ultrasound (very much looking forward to that one!), and we've already booked up some follow-up appointments, and things seem to be moving a lot more. It's feeling a lot more real all of a sudden...

Though part of me still remains very cautious. And with good reason: the fiance of a coworker, who had just announced her pregnancy, and whose due date is days after mine, just spent the weekend bleeding and visiting hospitals, and has been put on bedrest to prevent the possiblity of a miscarriage. And there I was, thinking we were past the "danger zone". Sigh! Luckily, it seems her baby is doing ok, so hopefully the bedrest will be enough to get everything sorted out. I'm certainly crossing my fingers for them!

So there we are, precariously teetering between boundless excitement and paralyzing fear. I had never expected this to be such a roller-coaster ride! But you gotta take the good with the bad, and so far, I wouldn't change my experience for anything in the world! After all, I wouldn't be me anymore if I did :)

Well, it's probably time to leave work soon. Just a few more tests I have to run... Again, eternal optimist that I am, I keep hoping that this week will be the biggest "crunch", and if I get everything done that I want, I might finally be able to breathe a little next week. I tell you, I never learn :)

Later,

Big news

OK, so now that both of our families have been duly informed, we can finally make our big news public: I am pregnant! It's still kind of hard to believe, especially considering some of the hurdles that we had encountered in the past. My due date is believed to be January 3rd, which still seems so far away!

Got my first appointment with my midwife today. It's all very exciting! Although I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little scared... Just last night I had another nightmare of bleeding all over the place... But I am certainly trying to concentrate on the positives :) I've made it to the second trimester, so the chances of miscarriage are now a lot lower. Last week I actually had a chance to listen to the baby's heartbeat, and it sounded nice and strong :) The happy munchkin was swimming all over the place!

Well, that's it for now. Work is still CRAZY busy, so I have to get going. Hopefully from now on the updates on the blog will be a little more regular (I should have plenty to talk about ;)).

Take care!

Yowza!

Long time no post! I've been extremely busy at work, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down... Maybe another month or so... There might be a tiny little glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel :)

But at least I managed to take most of the long weekend off. My family was in town, so I got to hang out with everyone, and it was really great. We played football, frisbee, had a barbeque, watched a movie, all sorts of fun. It was really nice having the chance to catch up with everyone. My middle sister got a job!!! As a computer programmer no less! It's probably not quite a long-term commitment, as she isn't too fond of a cubicle-dweller life, but it's a good chance for her to earn some cold hard cash, and at the same time get a chance to see what's out there. I suspect she will make some great contacts, and maybe find a position that's not quite as "boring" as software design, move there, and soon enough she'll be running the place :) She's very smart my sister!

My little sis, the baby of the family, has been volounteering at a physiotherapy clinic, getting ready to start university in the fall (in physiotherapy). It's still very hard for me to believe that she's old enough to go to university. I mean, talking to her, it's obvious that she's pretty mature and ready for higher education, but in my head she's still the little kid who likes nothing better than to be the baby in the family ;) But that's just in my head... In reality, she's a full adult now. They grow up so fast!!!!

On a separate note, this weekend also marked a year since our arrival in China, as well as a year since meeting our friends' twin girls for the first time. It's been a pretty exciting year for that family :)

Later!

Update

In a funny bit of coincidence, just as I posted about our car trouble, we got a call from the mechanic letting us know the problem has been diagnosed. Turns out it's the distributor (just as we suspected), and it needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, we had had the original, 11 year old distributor replaced in April 2006, and it's an aftermarket one. It's less than half the cost of the manufacturer recommended one, but it looks like it doesn't last that long. The thing came with a 1 year warranty, and lasted just long enough to be out of the warranty period. Silly thing. Our mechanic did call his supplier who offered a 10% discount on the replacement part. Sigh.

We talked it over, and decided to give this funky distributor another chance. It's a lot cheaper than the "official" part, and really, we're not sure the car will last us another year. I mean, it's been good to us so far, but it's starting to show some electric glitches, and that's never a good sign.

So I'm guessing we'll be on the market for a new vehicle soon. We'll probably be looking at something used (2-5 years old?), something fun yet reliable, and hopefully easy on gas. That's a lot of requirements, I know. We've been talking about this for the last few years ("What would we ever replace the Probe with?"), and haven't found any convincing answers yet. Some of our requirements are a little contradictory (fun to drive and easy on gas? good commuting car, yet not too small? exotic yet affordable?), and I think we're both looking for slightly different things. Of course this would be mostly DH's car, as he does the bulk of the commuting in this family, so it definitely has to fit his criteria more than mine. I'll be posting more as the decision making process unfolds :)

I think the hardest part is that we don't want to have to say goodbye to the old car. It's served us so well, and it's still so much fun to drive. We'd love to keep it going forever, but we're not necessarily interested in having to leave it in the shop every week. Hopefully, it's not time to say goodbye yet, but we definitely have to start preparing for that eventuality.

Next post, no car talk, I promise :)

Car trouble

So I've been meaning to write this car trouble story for over a week now... Sigh. The reason I haven't written it yet is probably two parts busy, one part procrastination. Make that four parts busy and one part procrastination... Two Fridays ago, DH was driving to work in the old car (as he usually does). For some reason I decided to take it easy that morning and leave a little later, so I was still at home, slowly getting ready when he got on the road. A few minutes after he left, the phone rings. It's DH: "The car died, and I am stranded in the middle of the intersection". In those moments, I am glad we finally broke down and got a cellphone, even though we barely ever use it :)

Anyway, DH called the tow-truck, but he asked me to come pick him up, so that he can get himself to work in the other car. I rushed into the shower, and a few minutes later I was out the door. I got to the intersection, with no car and no hubby in sight... I drove around in circles for a few minutes, hoping to find him in the immediate vicinity, but to no avail. So I kept going, and a few kms later, there he was, pulled over with the car acually running. Turns out the car eventually decided to start again, and DH left me a message at my work number (though I never checked it). But all's well that ends well, we swapped cars (at that point I was only maybe 3 kms from my work, so I could have walked the rest of the way), and he managed to get to work on time.

I had a few errands to run that day, but I wasn't all that concerned, since the car was running fine. I got all my errands done, and then after work went to a friend's place, for our almost-monthly "stitch and bitch" get together. A great time was had by all, and time flew past way too fast as usual. So here I am, heading home at around midnight, when all of a sudden, the car dies again. If I had any thoughts that DH had done something wrong in the morning and somehow stalled the car, I knew now that there's definitely something going on with the car itself. I was going 90km/h when all of a sudden the tach went to 0, and I had no more power steering (ouch!), and was slowly coasting to a stop. Definitely, this wasn't related to anything that I might have done.

Anyway, I come to a stop on a small residential street, right in the middle of a bus stop (I really didn't have much ch0ice in where the car decided to stop). That's when I remember that DH did not leave the cellphone with me... Luckily, there was a gas station right across the street, open 24h. So I get out in the rain, after attempting in vain to start the car again, and go to the gas station, where I meekly asked the attendant if I could borrow the phone. He was nice enough and gave me the phone, which I used to wake up DH, to get him to come down and rescue me from the cold and rain. You see, only DH has CAA membership, so he has to be there with the car to call the tow truck (if we want it done for free that is).

Anyway, to make a long story short, the tow truck showed up around 1am, at which point the car graciously agreed to start again, and since we were only a few minutes from home, we managed to get it all the way down the driveway on its own (with the tow truck following right behind). DH even thought he could get the car in the garage, so he stopped in front of the door, got out of the car to open the garage door, when bam! the car died again. At least at this point it was in the driveway, and we could just leave it there...

So it looks like the car just dies for a few hours at a time. We managed to get it down to our mechanic down the street, but he hasn't had a chance to take a look at it yet. Since the car is now 12 years old, we're trying to get used to the idea that we may have to say goodbye to it for good... Though we are still hoping it will not come to that. Mostly because it's such a fun car! We've been trying to think what we would replace it with if we had to, and can't come up with anything as fun (and within our budget). I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to it :)

So that's my sob story of being stuck with a dead car in the rain...

Hope you're all safe from car trouble (and any other kind of trouble for that matter).

Weekend cuteness

Ok, so there's been countless cuteness moments this weekend. I think I'm going into cuteness overload :)

First it was our friend's twin girls on Friday. They will soon be 2 years old, and they're so cute. They can say all sorts of words, and they look so cute in their ponytails!!

Then yesterday I was cutting the grass, and all of a sudden I hear lots of commotion. Turns out the mother horse is teaching the new foal how to gallop. She's chasing her all over the place, and making her practice turns and stuff. So cute!

Then there was the turtle I saw on the side of the street when heading to work, and after that, little goslings on the work campus cooling off in little puddles of water... I should bring the camera with me more often!

And last night at our friend's birthday party, we got to play with his 5 week old son. Such a cutie! I even got to feed him, which was so much fun! Except every time I tried to burp him, he would just fall asleep. I guess he was getting very comfortable :)

Then this morning we noticed that in the robin's nest that's in the window of one of our guest bedrooms, two baby birds have hatched (and there's still two blue eggs left). They are so cute, whenever anyone approaches they open up their little beaks asking for food. We're trying to leave them undisturbed, so the parents don't abandon them. But they are so cute!

So how's that for a weekend's worth of cuteness?