One

The Cub is one. A full year. JD thinks it flew by. I don't think it did so much as the birthday snuck up on us. Either way, he is beautiful and gorgeous, and more expressive and able every day.

I tried to explain to a friend what I was feeling on Cub's birthday, and it all seemed a strange mess. I am, apparently, still wondering whether he is here to stay, as betrayed by relief-like feelings on the cuff of the day. Which, you know, make so very little sense. Since, of course, there's never a line getting to which guarantees continued sunshine and ponies of various sizes and colors.

And then there's also the part where I am not anywhere near being done processing the pregnancy. Which, I have to say, is annoyiiiiiiing-- would've made for a much nicer rhetorical device had I cleaned, sorted and aired out all that stuff by now. For one, I would've been able to perhaps speak intelligently on this momentous occasion. For another, headspace is at a premium around these parts, and I really do need it back-- I have a job to find, and my current one to finish up in a spectacularly competent manner assuring me glowing letters of recommendation for years to come.

The celebration on the actual day was very low key-- a couple of babies for the ultra-social Cub to share germs with, plus their parents to share chips and hamburgers with us. My parents arrive Thursday, and there will be a family celebration Sunday. To mark the year since his homecoming from NICU, as I said to my mom who would've preferred to have come this past weekend, but had to change plans to also accommodate my FIL's big round birthday party.

So we are now in the anniversary of the week the Cub spent in NICU last year. As transient as that experience was, it's also apparently indelible, at least so far. I don't know whether it will get better in future years. But for now, out to dinner with friends Sunday, drinking a toast to the Cub, JD and I both knew exactly where we were that time a year before-- in the kid's NICU room, me asking the neonatalogist what else they had in their arsenal, should things keep going in the wrong direction, as they had been all day, and JD pacing the room or crouching in the chair, hearing not a word of what was being said around him.



It's something that we in DBL learn early, and notice often-- a good day for one is sure to be a disaster for someone else. When he was born, the Cub wasn't due for another three plus weeks, and short of his scheduled induction date by more than two weeks. It wasn't supposed to be his birthday. But it was supposed to be another baby girl's, half a world away. Had things gone to plan for them, that beautiful girl's mother would've spent this past weekend fussing over the details of the most perfect birthday ever. But they didn't. And so instead over the past year Sally and Simon have been learning to live without their first-born daughter, Hope. Please stop by and remember with them.

Show and Tell: Self-portraits in shadows and water

It's been a while since last I participated in Mel's Show and Tell. So long, in fact, that in the meantime it has moved from Sundays to Thursdays. So we now rejoin this lovely community tradition, already way the hell in progress.

The Cub is turning one this Saturday. Still a bit surreal. A lot surreal, actually. It's blatantly obvious that the only thing keeping him from trading in his baby designation, which looks on him like nothing so much as one of those onesies, overstretched from use and fitting, still, only because of the use and attendant overstretching, that the thing keeping him from trading it in for the otherwise way more appropriate toddler one is that he, you know, refuses to actually toddle unassisted. Even in just the last week, sudden and impressive development of hand-to-mouth coordination, and now-- desire to eat with a spoon. So to look at him, yes, a year is about right. But in the abstract spaces of my head it's a lot more like a year? already? really? wow... All adult and complete-sentence-like of me, I know.

I know what I was doing a year ago. I know, too, that in my head, I am not yet done processing that pregnancy. I am working on it, though. There are things yet to say. But today seems like a good day to look at pictures.

I took these, with a friend's point and shoot, last year at the shore. 55 weeks ago, days before ending up in PTL and on bedrest.

I got a chance to download these from that friend's camera only recently. They are all electrons, from start to finish-- from being taken with a digital camera to being, now, stored on a hard drive. And yet to me they have the feel of those old black and white family photos, of events and people long ago.

If you want to see what the other kids are showing, summer break be damned, please stop by Mel's place for the master list.

Perspective

I actually figured all of this out a while ago (though, as is usual these days, didn't so much post), but a post today at Beruriah's brought it up again. It's about timing. People with babies the Cub's age, plus/minus a few months in either direction are pregnant again. Not overwhelming numbers of them, but enough for me do a gut check.

I've never made a secret on this here blog of the fact that I want to raise three children. In my before life, I was going to aim for a rather short age gap between the younger two-- two and a half years or so, give or take. In my after life, I was considering an even shorter gap, mostly because I didn't want Monkey to be too terribly older than the youngest. I am eight years older than my sister-- it works and has worked for the duration. I wasn't so sure about longer gaps. By the time I'd had the Cub, though, I was pretty clear I needed a break from this pregnancy thing. Told my MFM I won't be back for at least a year, probably more.

At some point I started to push my mental target for the "next time" ever further out. Factoring in things like the job market (blows; also on academic calendar-- matters both for being able to interview and for being able to start and finish at least my first year at whatever my next job might end up being), and talking to adults who've had longer age gaps with their siblings, and to parents of kids with longer gaps. Monkey, by the by, has started asking a few months ago. And really? The nerve on that kid! Oh, she also thinks eight is a good number. Ha! Told her that ain't happening.

But all of this was happening sort of on low boil in the background, with the occasional eruptions of "I am so not ready yet!" here and there. Until, that is, Christina found herself somewhat unexpectedly pregnant again. You see, Christina was due last year a day after me. The Cub was born shy of 37 weeks, but the lovely miss Cate went almost all the way to the due date. So, you know, when it's Christina who turns up pregnant now, it really rocks my world. I think I even told her in my comment that I can't imagine being there myself right now.

And then. Then I thought about it. The Cub was 11 months old when Christina found out. Which just happens to be three days longer than the interval between when A was born and when we found ourselves in possession of a piece of plastic with two lines in a window. So... ahem... right.

It seems that the actual operative idea here is that I can't imagine, am not ready to do that again. And I really think it's not about the distinction of doing it with or without a baby already at home-- I think for me it's much more about the stress of the pregnancy itself.

My pregnancy with the Cub was hard. Emotionally hard (DUH) but also objectively complicated. (There are things to say about that, and I will say them, hopefully soon.) I am also still incredibly overweight-- weight of two pregnancies (on top of extra ten still hanging around since Monkey), less a few pounds now, thanks to my friend metformin. And I need to lose a hell of a lot more before it's not insane to start piling fresh new pounds on.

I am finding comfort in that again above. It's like I forget that before A died and was born, I was actually pregnant with him. Not forget forget-- I can tell you all kinds of dates and facts about that pregnancy, but sort of dissociate from it, as if it too lives in the before. The again is soothing, a reminder that my body has been through a whole lot in the past little over three years, and that there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that fact.

So that's my new internal refrain, whenever I learn of someone else going another round with only a short break: "I did that last time. And right now I am just not ready to do it again." Somehow this feels both more honest and more reassuring to me than my old tune of "wow-- I can't even imagine doing that now."


ETA: It just occurred to me that even though I certainly don't assume a good outcome when I think of a future pregnancy (either in attaining one in the first place or in maintaining it to the point of a take home baby), talking about it in terms of "doing" might be read by someone as if I in fact assume. I think "attempt" would've been more precise. As in "I did that last time. And right now I am just not ready to attempt it again."

Processing

I remember reading bereaved bloggers whose tragedy came before my own talk about how people forget, how friends say inconsiderate things, how time comes, sooner for some, later for others, when people grow tired of accommodating your new self, the one still (or permanently?) sensitive and raw in many places, when they want you to have gotten "over it" already.

And what I thought about that was "not MY friends." Not the friends who dropped everything and came to stand by us. Not the friends who called, and brought food, and asked to see the pictures, and let me talk about how beautiful A was. Not my friends, who, when pregnancy came up as a topic, always and deliberately included my pregnancy with A in these conversations. Surely these people wouldn't forget, or displace, or expect me to revert to my unaffected, my "before" self.

Um... yeah. I am still processing not so much the careless remark from this year's shore trip (it has been apologized for), as the aftershocks of finding out what some of our friends really think. Processing and thinking. Thinking about duty over at Glow, about what we owe others, and what others owe us. Please feel free to stop by and add to the conversation.

Free your goat Friday: wet and tired

The goats of today, they are connected. I got soaking wet because it was pouring when I needed to move the car. I needed to move the car because coming into work this morning I was cutting it too close for an important meeting, and had to grab the first parking spot I could see-- a 2hr meter. I was cutting it close because I just couldn't get up this morning, which, in turn, is due to one very lovely baby boy whose nighttime antics have lately been less than lovely. Oh, and for the second day in a row weather predictions have been wrong wrong wrong, with rain arriving much earlier in the day and coming down much harder than predicted. Hence, me not grabbing the umbrella from the car when I got to work. Hence, me getting wet on the way to the car, but not on the way back. Though I must've cut a puzzling picture on the way back from moving the car-- a clearly completely soaked person under an umbrella.

Ok, so now that my poor goats are off to dry themselves and get some rest in the pastures, won't you let yours go and join them?



Bling borrows the image from this story.

Warp

It's been an interesting, in the sense of that famous, but apparently fake Chinese curse, couple of weeks inside my head.

It seems strange, incongruous, that the baby I feed sweet potato to, the boy who flings himself at me, laughing and squealing, off the side of the pool, and who doesn't mind getting a face full of water from the shower head or from a wave in the ocean, the baby who really likes his boob juice, the boy who is, I swear, at once the sneakiest and the sweetest thing there is, that he is the same baby whose health, quality of life, and, possibly, the very life, hung in the balance* a year ago. A whole year ago. Just a year ago. Exactly a year ago. I am having trouble processing this.

Last year I ended up in the hospital at the tail end of the first of two weeks we were supposed to have been at the shore. It's a tradition now-- our large and noisy group of friends rent a bunch of condos in a development by the shore, some for a week, some for two. It functions a bit like a commune-- we cook and eat in subgroups or all together, we keep track of each other's kids, feed them, run sleepovers.

It is a great place. And I have a complicated relationship with it, revolving around my reproductive status. The first year we rented there, I was just pregnant with A, first trimester and shoving progesterone up my hoo-ha. The next year I wished I was pregnant, and the year after that was last year. With contractions and the hospital.

This year's week at the shore worked out to be the same week on the calendar as last year. I realized that well ahead of time, and I knew it would make things tough for me. I was right. Packing for the shore was anxiety-inducing. Actually being there was uneven-- at times relaxing and nourishing, hanging with the usual suspects or with friends who flew in from out of town just for the weekend, and at times difficult, inherently, or because of a friend's careless remark.

Last year we were sharing a condo with the family whose youngest son, M, was supposed to be A's best friend, due as he was mere four weeks after A. This year they have the whole place to themselves-- they had an extra person stay with them most of the week, and needed the bedroom. But that person left Saturday, and they offered us her bedroom so we could stay through the weekend (unlike these friends, we were only staying one week this year, and were supposed to have left Saturday too). That is how come we ended up staying an extra night in the very same unit where we spent the week last year, from where I drove to my appointment the morning of the day that ended with me hooked up to the magnesium pump.

That morning I was up early thanks to some painful contractions. I didn't know if I would get to come back after the appointment. I thought there was a nontrivial probability that I wouldn't. Because of that, I wanted to get a few things done, to make things easier for JD and Monkey in case I end up in the hospital for monitoring. Coming up the stairs from the basement after throwing in a load of laundry, I saw JD in the big chair reading to Monkey and M, the two of them nestled on either side of him. I stood there for a while, taking that picture in, the would've been picture of my family. Yesterday coming up the same stairs after throwing in another load of laundry, I happened onto Monkey playing on the carpet with the Cub and M. She was very good at corralling the over two and the not yet one, and oh, but the scene echoed.

A year ago now things were already looking up-- I had made it through the 48 hours needed for steroids to do their thang, and my contractions were behaving. Earlier that day Monkey came for a visit. She'd had nightmares after JD left the shore to join me at the hospital. Not really surprising-- nearly eighteen months before that week her mom left for a check with the doctors, then her dad left to be with mom, and when they came back, they told her her baby brother had died. When her small face appeared in the doorway, her eyes were wide with fear and desperate need to have that fear be unsubstantiated. She was so tentative walking into the room. Suddenly I could see just how small six years old really is. JD had told her about the machines in the room, and the IV bags, and that I would be in bed, and she eyed all that. But it was the belly that held her hope, and, unlike that last time, it was still big and round. And there was a sound in the room-- baby's heart rate monitor, which I had asked the nurse to leave on pretty loud. A bit later, when she got comfortable with her surroundings, and JD went to the bathroom, she danced to that sound. That was one of the sweetest things I've ever seen.



*Then I didn't think his actual life was in any real danger due to the onset of labor any more (as opposed to the possibility of him dying inside of me, of which I was scared up until he was actually born), since he was past 33 weeks at that point. Now I think it was. I mean to write about that sometime soon.



P.S. Free your goat Friday was on vacation this past week, along with us. It will return in only a few short days. Get your goats ready, people!

Free your goat Friday: 4-letter word

I've got a whole herd of tiny little goats running around. They may yet grow up to be featured on this very blog one of these Fridays. But not today. Today I've got precisely one goat that has been got. One big fat, practically obese, goat. Hey, look at that-- goat is a four letter word. So is work. Which is what got my goat this week. What a coincidence.

This week work's been like gas-- expanding to take over all available volume... err, time. Boo hoo. Things it ate? Two big blog posts. Important ones, at least to me. A ton of little things too. Like family time. Who the hell needs family time? Grrrrrrr...

Oh, well. Meeting with boss in the am. Hopefully, the crazy ends then, at least for a bit.


And how are your goats this fine day?


P.S. Oh, I seem to have lied. Oooops. Another goat. Well, a fly. An annoying one, that doesn't take a hint. It's been buzzing around my kitchen (where I sit at the table working on my laptop) for well beyond what could possibly be considered not worth a mention. Where's POTUS when you need him?



Bling borrows the image from this story.