Unknown-itis

Several months back I was talking my baby for a walk and we passed the neighborhood school.  It occurred to me then, I really have no idea where we will be living when Evan is ready for kindergarten.  In all honestly, I don't know where we will live when he is ready for preschool.  And the latter presents problems because I need to start trying to get on waiting lists.

We live in the city and while there is more than enough room for 2 adults and one toddler, things will be too close for comfort with another baby.  On one hand, I am in no rush to leave the city.  Even though we don't have a yard, we are a very short work to the largest park in the city and can even walk to the city zoo.    We know we wouldn't sell this place to get another place in the city.  A move means a move to the suburbs, which means a significantly longer commute for my husband who now takes a bus and need be, it is about a 15 minute car ride.

I feel there are a lot of factors when determining when to have a second child.
1) finances- luckily we have much of the gear from the first child, but would need another bed and likely a bassinet, which we didn't use the first time around.  Evan costs us about $200 a week in food, diapers, classes, and supplies, so I can assume through toddlerhood we would double this.  Plus they pick up more activities and expenses with age.

2) Spacing of kids- ideally I would like three years apart between kids, but after the struggle to have the first kid, I can't assume it will just happen.  It could take a long time- so do I start early or start when I would want and prepare myself the age gap could be much greater?

3) Housing- this is a big one.  We have a three bedroom place but the third bedroom is on a different floor.  We use that room as a guest room/office/ and my workout room that I use daily.  I would be sad to give it up.  I never had the baby stay in our room because my husband was working.  As soon as he cried, I turned off the monitor, closed my bedroom door, closed his door, and took care of him so my husband could sleep.  I don't want a baby that doesn't sleep through the night sharing a room with Evan and keeping him up.  So either the new baby could sleep in our room, or I will be post c-section sleeping on a pull out couch in my former workout room.  It just isn't ideal.  But it isn't ideal to move while pregnant, with a newborn, or two toddlers either.

I suppose there are no right answers.  Change is difficult, but I don't want to jump the gun and sell our city home until I know we need to move.

Here's What they Don't Tell You

If you are having problems getting pregnant, people want to lift you up by telling you all the good things that life without kids means.  Sleeping for starters, freedom to come and go as you please, seeing a first run movie in the theater- you get the picture.

Here is the big one you probably have not been told- with children comes disparaging comments about your parenting from your in-laws.  If things were strained before, just wait until baby comes along.  I get along well with my in-laws, but sometimes I cannot believe the things that are said.

Let's take today.  My mother-in-law comes over to see Evan.  I am slightly freaking out about his lack of language acquisition (another post to come on this) so I have been making a conscientious effort to label things and repeat words.  He thinks animal noises are funny.  Please forgive this digression, but why are there so many baby products geared around farm animals?  Maybe this is ethnocentric because I have lived in a city or suburb my whole life, but it seems like overkill.  Evan alone has a tracker toy that totes along a wagon of animals, a little people farm, and a page in his 100 first baby words book dedicated to farm animals.  They sell baby flash cards of just farm animals.  I guess they are cuter the Little People meter maids and streets and sanitation workers.

As I was complaining-  Evan picked up his animal book and I started doing my new word game with him.  In my view, there is only so many times you can ask, "what does the cow say?" and get no response.  So now I ask, "what does the cow say when he is happy" and I say moo all excitedly and tickle him, and then I ask "what does the cow say when he is surprise?" and I bark  moo and lift him unexpectedly. I run through a rainbow of emotions and the move on to another animal who is also feeling overly emotional. He thinks this is hilarious.  So she asked why was I doing this.  I responded, "to help him build vocabulary and to learn to label his feelings?" And she says, "you need help." with her mouth cocked up and this judging look in her eye that my sister-in-law and I have seen all too often.

It is not like I can snap, "I would like to see you do better" since the product of her parenting is my husband.  I guess these judgments come with the territory, but I could definitely do without the snarky remarks.

Can I be Breezy?

My good friend from grad school introduced me to the term "breezy".  As in, "Do you think he is going to call you." To which she would respond, "I am not going to worry about it, I am trying to be breezy," as she slyly glances down to see if her phone forgot to ring and she had a missed call from the man being discussed.  Well for her, a man, a good one at that, did call back and she was married last year after being "breezy" about getting engaged.  And now, with that same breezy attitude, she is taking a stab at getting pregnant.

We met for lunch this week and I asked when she was testing and she said she wasn't sure, in a couple weeks, she wasn't tracking her cycle.  Of course, on account of her being breezy.  This is so antithetical to everything I stand for, I rudely retorted, "You are not 16 in the back of a '67 Chevy, you need to do some planning here!" We are super close, so I can say this sort of thing to her.

And so the reality dons on me, that I don't think I can breezily try for baby number two.  I kind of thought I could take things as they come.  However, I was speaking to a friend who went through several rounds of IVF to have her daughter.  Since it was such a struggle, they "aren't preventing".  Yet every month, she starts to feel nervous during the TWW and gets disappointed when she isn't pregnant, even though she isn't fully trying yet.

Part of me thinks, no matter what happens in TTC a second child, I am a mom and love being one, and we could be happy as a family of three.  Then reality seeps in and makes me realize I might be internally a fertility freak again, living by the reading on my monitor and waking everyday at same early morning minute to get an accurate temp reading.

I think it is fair to say I don't wear breezy well.

Those Girls

If you are anything like me, (and hopefully you are not), I secretly judged how other pregnant people acted when I wanted to be pregnant.  Like the ones that complained how hard, tiring, uncomfortable, inconvenient (feel free to fill in the blank) it was to be pregnant.  And those that made their husband's carry their purses because they were just too dainty to do so.

I vowed I would not be one of those girls.  And as a matter of integrity, I wasn't.  I was so determined to be grateful and to let the world know it.  As my husband could tell you, one of my favorite phrases is, "you should be so lucky", usually used humorously as to why he should feel so fortunate that I love him so much.  This great turn of phrase can easily be applied to the moms-to-be, whom I liberally judged. You should be so lucky that your back aches and your rings are too tight.  You should be so lucky you get winded going up a flight a stairs and can't bend to tie your laces.  I did, however,  suspend harsh judgement for those that were legitimately in a bad way such as excessively nauseous requiring hospital visits and severe sciattic nerve pain.  Bedrest also garnered my sympathies. Otherwise, if you waddled and wailed about it, you were on my list.

When I was pregnant with Evan, I vowed to complain as little as possible.  The god's honest truth, the most uncomfortable part of being pregnant for me (outside of taking progesterone and having an anal strep exam in my third trimester) is the consistent need to use public bathrooms, which repulses me.  But there were months that I didn't sleep and heartburn was my number one trusted companion.  I just didn't want to be like,  those girls.

In my own mind, I felt like I was better because I knew what a gift it was to feel those symptoms, because I knew what it was like when the symptoms suddenly went away.  However, I had an eye-opening experience the other day.  I was talking to someone that had lost a baby, was told she may never be able to carry a child, and then went on to have a child after four rounds of IUI.  She said, she was the opposite, she was so excited to finally be one of those girls that could complain about her back, her lack of a waistline, and the kicking that kept her up all night.

So while I have now walked a mile in those swollen feet, and know what it is like from an insider's and outsider's perspective, I realize now I was too judgmental.  And maybe if you find yourself rolling your eyes at your rotund, complaining friends, just know you too will soon be wanting to complain about the trouble with being pregnant.  So be careful what you judge, because you will really want to complain when your time comes.

Gone but Not Forgetten

I have been a bad blogger.  I felt like once I had a baby, readers stopped commenting or sending me notes, because I was no longer one of them.  I thought to a degree, that there is a kinship among those of us who have worn our brand of scarlet letter, that you root for each other because it is a success story and something that helps us hold on to hope.

Recently, I have received a flurry of e-mails from readers who have found the blog after researching things like luteal phase defect, progesterone, the Clearblue Easy monitor.  It got me thinking, maybe there still is a place for me in this space, because I completely identify with the person I was when I started the blog.

My title of the post is Gone but not Forgotten, because I will never forget what I went through in order to have a child and that influences each day of my life. It is still very much apart of me.

A couple of week's ago, I went to the Ob/gyn for my annual exam.  A woman came out from an exam room, sat on a couch across from me and was quietly crying.  I also saw about 4 very pregnant women waddling about, oblivious to what this girl was going through.  But I had been that teary-eyed girl in the waiting room.  She said during her exam they didn't hear a heart beat and she was waiting for an ultrasound.  She was in her first trimester.  The same thing happened with me when pregnant with my son, I told her, and he was fine.  I got called back a couple seconds later and I couldn't calm down, because I was so upset about this woman, and wanted to know that her baby was okay.

This past weekend I was at a party and was speaking to someone I had met, and liked, over the years.  She had twins a couple months after I had my son.  Turns out we went to the same fertility doctor.  We started talking about what we went through and how hard certain situations had been like friends announcing they accidentally got pregnant, siblings getting pregnant at the same time we had miscarriages, and the constant need to pee on a stick.  There is an understanding we shared of what we have been experienced and an appreciation of what we have.

In some sadistic way, I miss charting temps and turning my monitor on each morning.  I actually miss the nervousness of the TWW.  With that said, I am jumping back into the blogging game because I know from emails, that there isn't as much information on the web as we would like.  And I also know, that some people, like myself, take comfort in knowing that if someone had their silver lining than I will too.