In With the New. Please.
by Alexa on January 17, 2012
I haven’t posted because I’ve felt I’m expected—possibly even required—to post about my father, and…I don’t want to. His dying was both expected and a shock. It’s complicated, both the Rube Goldberg-like route he took to death and my feelings about it and him and us. Writing about it, even thinking of writing about it, is unwieldy and exhausting. I don’t want to, not because it would be too painful, or because I have suddenly developed a sense of propriety that would preclude dissecting my every internal burble in virtual public, but because there is so much else vying for space within my head (to be quite frank, being pregnant after a stillbirth leaves little room for thoughts of anything else), and I am working so hard to believe that Good Things Are Ahead! (i.e. the baby won’t die), that now that it is over—the seeing him for the last time and the wondering if I ought to have handled that differently and the dying that made such wondering mute—I want to put it all aside for a bit, taking advantage of the fact that our long near-estrangement means that his death will leave my day-to-day life largely unchanged.
2011 was a singularly grueling year, and having seen the back of it, I’m not feeling reflective. This probably won’t last—I have the tiresome ability to come over all contemplative at the sight of a discarded gum wrapper, after all—but if all I can do at the moment, or all I want to do at the moment, is look fixedly ahead, so be it. I’m sure this reflects poorly upon me in some way, but ah well. I don’t care enough to forego posting about the things I DO want to post about, at least not anymore.
Right now, I am about 16 weeks pregnant, and three days ago the baby looked like this:
I’ve been convinced for a long time now—based upon absolutely nothing at all, mind—that this baby is a girl, and at Saturday’s ultrasound the tech was 80ish% sure I am right. (With the twins, they said at 17 weeks that Ames was definitely a boy and Simone was very-likely-but-let’s-check-again-next-time a girl, so maybe it is harder to be certain with girls?) I had no preference at all—boy, girl, some new model entirely—but it has become increasingly hard not to think of the baby by its name (or what stands an 80ish% chance of being its name) and so if it is a boy I suppose I will owe it an apology.
This past week was the 4th anniversary of a certain horrible week that changed everything, and, as expected, it was trying. One of the days I woke up convinced the baby was dead. My doppler wasn’t much help with Ames and Simone as I could never tell for certain if I was hearing two separate heartbeats, but this time it has been a godsend, and I imagine it will continue to be until I am feeling regular, consistent movement (I felt some for the first time last week, late at night, but nothing definite since). Another day last week found me spending the afternoon in bed with a run of contractions (Braxton Hicks?) that eventually subsided with water, heat, and rest. I say this every year, but oh, I will be glad when January is over.
Simone continues to be the very best thing up to and including sliced bread. The other night, we were sitting in my bed, in near hysterics over something or another, and we finally subsided into giggles and sighs.
“Ah,” said Simone, in the peculiar accents of a 3-year-old, “it’s funny to laugh!”
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A Title Eludes Me.
by Alexa on December 26, 2011
My dad died last week.
The funeral is tomorrow, thus in between his dying and his funeral fell the holidays, which were honestly joyful; the day he died was also the day I saw an apparently healthy and obviously human baby at my nuchal translucency scan. It would be nice if events occurred in emotionally coherent groupings, but as I am all too aware, they seldom do. To be fair, even my emotions seldom occur in emotionally coherent groupings, especially when it comes to my father. I suppose this is fitting, then.
More, much, anon.
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Shit Out of Log.
by Alexa on December 7, 2011
My brother is visiting our mother in Switzerland for some pre-holiday cheer. To me, of course, holiday season in Switzerland means only one thing: everyone’s favorite sack-toting, child-beating sidekick, Schmutzli. I have happily incorporated this particular aspect of Swiss culture into my own seasonal festivities, and so asked my brother to keep an eye out for anything Schmutzli-related. But he had a better idea.
You see, Max and my mother are leaving for a quick jaunt to Barcelona tomorrow, and in the course of his research, my brother had discovered a Spanish holiday custom that seemed to him to demand import. “We’re starting a whole new tradition!” he enthused. And then he proceeded to tell me about it.
Now, Max has a history of playing me for a fool. For instance, he once convinced me that the town of Killdeer, North Dakota was named for a bird called the Killdeer. This is true—what is not is that the Killdeer is so named for its practice of hunting in swarms, hundreds of the small birds rising up as one body to cover and bring down a full-grown deer.
(I know. I know. But you should hear him tell it!)
He loves to trot out the story of how he convinced me of the existence of The Tiny, Bloodthirsty Killdeer, and so when he started in on the story of The Catalan Shit Log, I naturally thought it was not the log that was full of shit, and went online for some fact checking.
My suspicion was almost immediately replaced by some unnameable melange of delight and escalating horror:
So—let me get this straight.
First you find a log. Then you wrap that log tenderly in a blanket and bring it into your home, where, beginning on the Feast of The Immaculate Conception, you ply it with nightly gifts of food. After 16 or 17 days of this, you gather the children, and together you shroud the log and beat it fiercely with sticks, crying “SHIT LOG! SHIT!” until it defecates candy, fruit, and small gifts. Eventually the log has nothing more to give, at which point you throw it onto the fire.
I…I honestly have nothing to add. I’ve never met a set of facts LESS in need of embellishment. There are Youtube videos of cherubic school children gleefully thwacking the Class Shit Log. The traditional Beating Song translates like this:
Shit log,
shit turrón (nougat),
hazelnuts and cottage cheese,
if you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with a stick,
shit log!
What I find most bizarre—recognizing that, in this case, “most bizarre” is high honor indeed—is the fact that families personify this log, paint a face upon it, treat it as a treasured guest, and then, two weeks later, come together to taunt and beat their wooden charge (severely enough that, according to legend, it not only loses control of its bowels but finally urinates) before setting it ablaze. And for what? Nougat, traditionally. Nougat!
When my brother and my mother return to the states next week, they will not be alone: with them will be our family’s Caga Tio. I am not sure I have the heart to participate in this particular tradition, especially given the pains I have taken to impress upon Simone that we never, ever hit our friends. What am I going to say? “Unless they might shit nougat?” I grant that it would likely be safe to add a nougat-feces exception, but it’s a slippery slope, and I’d be setting a dangerous precedent.
These are the kinds of parenting issues I am faced with at the holidays—whether or not to let my child participate in scatological celebratory beatings, given that she does already have a knitted finger puppet of a character holding a staff meant for festive seasonal child abuse. I don’t quite know what this says about me as a mother. I am not convinced I want to.
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Long and Overdue.
by Alexa on November 29, 2011
Do you ever do that thing, where you are just going to rest for a bit, maybe to help your preschooler fall asleep, and then you open your eyes and it is the next day?
Yeah. Sorry about that.
Anyhow, the appointment yesterday was fine. Weird, but fine. More on that in a few paragraphs.
I never got around to telling you about my FIRST ultrasound appointment, and I meant to, because it was An Experience. I was just over six weeks then, and walking into the perinatology clinic gave me a strange, uneasy feeling. I had been back twice since my last pregnancy, once to check on Ames’ autopsy while Simone was still in the NICU, and then later for testing and discussion of the autopsy results—a post-mortem post-mortem, you could say. Returning in the context of a new pregnancy was more difficult than I had expected. I felt jittery and sick. When I tried to check in, the receptionist told me that the ultrasound was still on, but my peri appointment had been canceled. A nurse came out to explain things to me, and I tried to explain to HER that I needed to start Lovenox, that I’d heard it should be started as close to conception as possible, and that was weeks ago, and to my absolute HORROR, I found myself crying. Which…I don’t even…I was as shocked as anyone, let me tell you. The nurse pulled up a chair (I was that patient) and reassured me that they could absolutely start my Lovenox without a full appointment, and that a doctor would see me for a minute after the ultrasound to get me set up with the prescription. I don’t know whether that nurse remembered me from my last pregnancy, but I’m sure she’ll remember me now, alas.
The heartbeat ultrasound itself went well, as you know, which was a massive relief—I didn’t realize until I saw the heartbeat how much I had been expecting NOT to see it. The tech was very sweet (perhaps she had been warned that I was unstable?) and afterward left to get the doctor. And guess who that doctor was?
HINT: you may remember him from such lines as “You can see here that Baby A is demised.”
It was…something. The adjective escapes me. Of all the ultrasound suites in all the perinatology clinics in the world, you know? I mean of course I knew it could be him, or I would have, had I thought about it. But I hadn’t, and it was a surprise.
He came in beaming and full of congratulations and I shook his hand feeling dazed. I don’t think I’d seen him since that awful day, though it’s not like that was the only time we’d met—he was also the doctor who told us we were having a boy and a girl, and I saw him in Labor & Delivery around 16 weeks. Needless to say, it is the 22 week visit that sticks in my mind.
He obviously remembered me, or at least had remembered upon reviewing my chart, and said he’d order the Lovenox and have a nurse meet me in an exam room to go over the details. I was shown to said exam room, and…it was the room in which the DEMISED ultrasound took place. They hadn’t even changed the artwork. That dreadful poster: faux-hand-colored, boy in Olde-Tymey hat and girl with a bow. The ultrasound machine and exam table, everything was in the spot it had been. I felt I might very well have been on a horribly morbid episode of Candid Camera.
The nurse didn’t come in right away, so I had some time to sit dumbly in the chair (the same chair I’d sat in to chat about the twins’ movements, and later to call Scott) and remember that day with a truly sickening level of clarity that was far less like remembering and far more like reliving than I would have wished. I decided, while I was waiting, that I would simply have to switch clinics, but exposing that decision to even the dimmest ray of logic forced the conclusion that switching clinics was a foolish and untenable idea.
So—that was the day of my heartbeat ultrasound.
Yesterday’s appointment was much better. It is already less unsettling to be back in the familiar office, and the nurses are truly lovely, as usual. It helped that I was in a different exam room this time (I have thought of requesting that I never be put in the other exam room again, but I am afraid that will make me seem even more unhinged that I doubtless do already). I won’t deny that the place still feels a bit grim and haunted, though. If you read Half Baked, you may remember the doctor I called McGleamy. I loved him so, and was sure he’d get a kick out of the book. Back when it came out I’d decided to send him a copy, and it was when I was looking for his address that I discovered he’d been killed by a car while crossing a street in front of the Los Angeles Airport, in 2009. There is a lovely plaque in the clinic, with his picture, and it makes me terribly sad. So yes. Grim, haunted. A little.
I did have the same doctor (I am trying very, very hard not to think of him as Doctor Demised, though this is a challenge). He told me that if ever I need reassurance, I can simply “drop by” and someone will give me a quick Live Baby Check. He was very kind, and in a way it isn’t such a bad thing that he was there for what happened before. Though, to be quite frank, he seems to regard it as largely irrelevant, and this is what made the appointment so odd. Quoth he: “this is a whole new pregnancy, and what happened last time…there is no reason to believe it will happen again.”
Which, okay, but is there a reason to believe it WON’T? I kept bringing it up, and he kept gently steering me away, reminding me that I am on both Lovenox and baby aspirin, and that we don’t know exactly why Ames died, and that there is no reason I shouldn’t just sashay on through this pregnancy like a Normal Lady. He’d say things like “You can stop the aspirin at 37 weeks,” and I’d laugh and mime writing it in my calendar, because COME ON, like “I’ll make a note of that, and also can you tell me about the clinic’s evacuation procedures in the event of a zombie apocalypse?” but he was serious. The nurse gave me a booklet with all three trimesters in it, and information about hospital preregistration and “birth” classes, and I accepted it all with a panicked smirk and some mumbled genuflections, and that was that.
I’m nine weeks tomorrow. It’s still early, blah blah blah, but early, late—will there be a time when I feel reasonably convinced that this is going to end in a baby? Honestly, why would there be? I suppose it’s as good a time as any to be hopeful, then. Right?
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Here I Am!
by Alexa on November 27, 2011
On Friday I was writing you an update post, the gist of which was “I’m Feeling Somewhat Better,” when what should interrupt me but a sudden urgent need to stumble to the bathroom and kneel before the toilet.
The next morning, determined to try again, I found my site entirely inaccessible. I’d exceeded my bandwidth (there is still someone out there, hotlinking something, but damned if I can find it). I am back up and running as of this afternoon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lightning bolt is about to take out a server, or me, so I’ll post a quick hello while I know I can. Hello! I am alive. More tomorrow, after my appointment. 8w5d, for those keeping track.
P.S. Because I wouldn’t want you to be deceived into unwarranted admiration of my mental fortitude (going so very long without a Live Baby Check), I should tell you that I actually had a quick pity ultrasound last week when I first began to feel like I might not die, after all. Appropriately-sized lump avec heartbeat was present and accounted for, and slight easing of nausea thus attributed to an improved med regimen and IV fluids—an explanation I had previously dismissed, feeling that embryonic demise was far more likely.
Hoping to be happily surprised again in the morning…
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I Hate Complaining, and Yet Here I Am.
by Alexa on November 15, 2011
Long before I’d begun thinking about children, I knew pregnancy would be rough on me in one specific way. Hormones and my stomach do not play well together. I had birth-control-induced hyperemesis twice. The first time, when I was about 14, my already spindly 93-pound frame was whittled to skeletal proportions—I believe I got down to 79 pounds—and the second time, some years later, I ended up hospitalized for three days due to dehydration. My first pregnancy with Scott was discovered before my period was even due to arrive, because I threw up, and I had a hard time functioning until about a week before I miscarried, when I felt better and knew something was wrong. During my last pregnancy, the nausea started when I was six weeks and change, and by about seven weeks or so, I couldn’t keep anything down at all. I’d already been taking the Unisom and B6 combo, but while that helped with the nausea, it did nothing once the vomiting began. Thus, Zofran. Zofran was a miracle drug for me. I still felt ill, but not terribly so, and I was well enough to go to work, to eat some, and most importantly, to DRINK. On Zofran, I threw up maybe a couple of times a day, sometimes not at all. Yes, I was on the maximum dose, and had to wake myself to take a tablet at 4am (the last dose wearing off functioned as a nausea alarm clock), and I did continue to throw up regularly until I delivered at 25 weeks. Still: Miracle Drug.
This time, I got sicker, sooner. I am already on my strict Zofran/Unisom/B6 schedule, but while the drugs are keeping me from actually puking, I always always feel like I am on the verge, and in general feel leagues worse than I did with Ames and Simone. Imagine the worst hangover you’ve ever had, or the worst motion sickness, a time when you felt like even moving your eyeballs might be too much for your perilous equilibrium. It’s like that.
It makes no sense, because, like I said, the Zofran IS keeping me vomit-free, as long as I am careful not to miss a dose, so it SEEMS like I should feel much BETTER than last time, or at the very least the same, right? Alas, no. (Last time I was on prednisone up until 17 weeks, so I suspect that has something to do with it.)
I haven’t been able to do much of anything. Most of the day I am curled on the couch, focusing all of my energy on Not Puking. I usually have a small window in the early afternoon when I am well-ish—I can read email, talk on the phone, take a shower, and act human. I try to get some food and liquids in me then. Today, though, I didn’t even get my window. I don’t think I am getting enough to drink, and I’ve lost a few pounds. The Zofran side effects have been awful (still working out the best Colace timing/dosage). I can only care for Simone if you broaden the definition of “care for” significantly, and forget work or cleaning around the apartment. Scott has been great, but I fret about the burden on him.
Wednesday marks seven weeks, and it terrifies me to know that this is where I am, even maxed out on my meds, and that it is likely to get much worse before it gets better. I feel guilty that I’m not enjoying this more. I’m afraid that I’m going to go in and find out that the heart has stopped, and that I won’t have it in me to try again. I want this to work so badly, and I know—I KNOW—how lucky, how extraordinarily lucky, I am to have gotten pregnant at all. I am counting the days until the second trimester, and feeling simultaneously scared that I won’t make it that far at all and scared that if I do, this sickness won’t end there, but instead will continue the whole way through, which seems unbearable to contemplate. I worry about taking all these drugs, and I’m angry that I have to, that I can’t be one of those serene natural pregnant women who blithely swallows a prenatal vitamin and CERTAINLY doesn’t have daily injections, suppositories, and seven different pill varieties on rotation. Pregnancy after infertility and loss is complicated enough, and this adds another layer of worry and guilt, and feeling ungrateful and broken.
So that is where I am. Yesterday I fell asleep before I could post anything, and this took me all day to type, so I can’t even promise that was a one-time lapse. Right now, “one day at a time” is the best I can do. It’s good enough. Today, I have no reason to think that this pregnancy is doomed. I have no reason to think that I won’t feel somewhat better at 12ish weeks, if I make it that far.
Simone has recently noticed the sun, or rather the lack of it in the evening, and I have to reassure her daily that it will come back up again, that it always does. I ought to listen to myself once in awhile.
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Day of Rest.
by Alexa on November 13, 2011
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There’s Not Even a Picture.
by Alexa on November 12, 2011
I know. I know. I thought about not posting at all, because Simone is sick, I am back on Zofran, and the best I can do today is, once again, awfully close to a blank page.
However, I am trying not to be too hard on myself about my lackluster foray into National Blog Posting Month. I am making new ears and a placenta and a heart that BEATS, you know. More to the point (and my current need for distraction aside), the hope of quashing perfectionism is one of the more compelling reasons to attempt something like this 30-days-of-posting rigamarole. When the month is over, I’d like to keep writing here most weekdays–every weekday, if I can swing it—and that’s never going to work if I get derailed by the same all-or-nothing mindset that has proven so destructive in the past. There will be days when I plan to post and don’t, or when I start writing something and can’t finish it, or when I want to share a few paragraphs of drivel without worrying that they don’t merit an entry. If I want this site to be what it used to—my diary, the precious real estate where I think and chatter and worry and confide in my friends—I’m going to have to get comfortable pressing that “Publish” button again.
So, since I have nothing for you, please go read this marvelous, marvelous post by Arwen. It’s about perfection and expectations and the dim lens through which we view our own accomplishments. I could have written it myself, and I’d imagine at least a few of you out there will relate to it as strongly.
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It’s Alive!
by Alexa on November 11, 2011
Heartbeat!
I’ve had quite the day, let me tell you. I will tell you, tomorrow, but for now I want to hurry up and get the news posted, blurry cellphone photo and all. HEARTBEAT!
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The Lamps of Paris.
by Alexa on November 10, 2011
1. Spiked, presumably for unsavory purposes (spearing the cake-fed babies of the aristocracy?)
2. Horse
_ _ _ _ _ _
Ultrasound is tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time.
If the news is good, it will be followed by a 1-hr glucose tolerance test, cervix hunt/routine exam, Let’s Keep This One Alive discussion, and “Lovenox injection teaching.”
If the news is bad, it will be followed by heavy drinking and a D&C. Or, more probably, the excruciating wait for a follow-up/confirmation ultrasound (during which I’ll continue to be ill, thanks to embryonic spite), AND THEN the aforementioned heavy drinking and D&C.
Let’s all hope for good news, shall we?
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This Took Me 20 Minutes to Type.
by Alexa on November 9, 2011
You know what goes well with a commitment to daily posting? Having to remain perfectly still, so as not to vomit.
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Perhaps That Would Be Too Dramatic.
by Alexa on November 8, 2011
In all the hullaballoo of the past months, I forgot to show you Simone’s Back to School photos, and you’ve no doubt been bitterly, brokenly disappointed by this omission, so here:
What is shocking about these pictures, taken a measly two months ago, is how different she already looks from them. She has gotten very tall all of the sudden, without any corresponding rise in girth, and is a spindly, bony little thing—she will be four in February, and weighs a whopping 29 pounds.
Simone was in the toddler group last year, but this year has started honest-to-goodness Preschool (there are two classes at her level, the Billy Goats and the Bunnies—given my well-documented love of goats, you can imagine my glee at finding my child placed in the former group). Three has been easily my favorite age thus far, and my daughter has become this talkative, singing, dancing, pretending wonder. We build elaborate block walls with windows in them and then lie flat to talk through the hole, a la Pyramus and Thisbe (okay, it is “a la Pyramus and Thisbe” to me. To Simone it is “a la two people talking through a hole”). We read (favorite book: the Halloween volume of Mercy Watson) and sing (favorite album: Revolver) and draw (mostly fish, snails, and indecipherable letters). We play catch and have dance parties and eat endless elaborate imaginary treats.
She has also become…willful. Not to our extended families, teachers, or strangers, understand—they all believe my daughter to be a sweet and docile child, affectionate, eager to entertain, and amenable to suggestion. And actually she is all of these things, often, but when she finds herself alone in the company of tiresome old Mom and/or Dad, she just as often decides to give her charm and sanity a rest. It’s like her Good China. You know, for company.
This is my oblique way of alluding to the fact that there have been at least two instances in the past two months that ended with me weeping in the bathroom and wondering whether I was, maybe, a terrible mother. In one, Simone had a total meltdown during a public group activity, and instead of giving up on the activity and calmly removing her from the situation (or handling it in some other reasoned fashion), I hissed into her ear to stop crying or I would give her a timeout, and on the way home basically shamed her by saying that she had made me Sad (I meant that I wasn’t angry! It just…didn’t come out as I’d intended). Another evening she was already in a timeout—because she’d refused to stop kicking me—and mid-timeout kept getting down from the chair. I kept putting her back, trying to be calm and firm, but I was so frustrated and upset that the last time I put her back I PLOPPED her onto the chair harder than I’d meant to. It didn’t hurt, but I was appalled by how angry I’d felt—toward a three-year-old.
I’ve been a fairly confident parent, and have generally made my decisions based mostly upon what feels right—and there was nearly always an answer that felt right. When I’m disappointed in myself as a mother, it’s usually because I’m failing to cleave to what I know is best. Dealing with disobedience has been an entirely different beast. My attempts at discipline have often left me feeling helpless and clueless, as if everything I am saying and doing is wrong in one way or another, and yet the right thing remains unclear. This how I came to spend part of an afternoon in a local bookstore, kneeling on the floor and scanning the shelves for something titled Possibly Without My Daughter, If She Doesn’t Stop Doing That or maybe The Will to Power: Taming Your Uberkinder. (I ended up with Positive Discipline, which I’ve just started but like so far.)
I did already own one parenting book—Louise Bates Ames’ Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy. I’d bought it around Simone’s 3rd birthday, after seeing it on Amazon and remembering that Julie had recommended the series. I finally read it a bit over a month ago, and for the most part, it was excellent. A bit representative of the tone of the whole is this: “Your child cannot fight with you about his eating if you absolutely refuse to be drawn into his arguments. If he can be made to appreciate that the whole matter is of only minimal interest to you, you will do best.” That second line delights me, and it’s good advice, too.
At the end of the book is a section of parent letters, in which various mothers write the authors with questions. The book was published in 1980, so I would like to point out that the three-year-olds discussed, be they friends or enemies, were my contemporaries. And their mothers were beset with difficulty:
“Dear Doctors,
In another month our daughter Janice will be Three, and she is going to be left-handed, I’m afraid. […] Should I make a real effort to change her, or is it too late, anyway? Is there any basis to the belief that left-handers see things backward, for instance, see the number 10 as 01, and that if you change them they are doomed to a mental crack-up?”
“Dear Doctors,
My Three-and-a-half-year-old son Donald is giving me a lot of anxiety. The thing which bothers me so much is that he is constantly pulling on his penis and acting very foolishly. […] Sometimes he talks about it, saying things like, ‘I don’t want to have this. I want to be a good man.’ When he says this, I tell him it would be funny for a boy not to have one.”
“Dear Doctors,
My problem is that I can’t stand my Three-year-old daughter. She drives me crazy. Always talking. Always moving around. Always wanting something.”
[The beginning of the authors’ response to this last is wonderfully dry:
“Ideally in high school (we judge that you may not be too far past high school age) you should have had at least a beginning course in child behavior. This would have helped you realize what young children are like.”]
The day I read the book, Julie and I had quite an enjoyable Twitter conversation about the parent queries (see this post, where she mentions the advice regarding security blankets), most of it centered around my very favorite query of all, which I shall reproduce for you here in its entirety—as a gift.
“BOY AFRAID OF TOY CLOWN
Dear Doctors,
I have a problem of fear in a usually fearless boy who is just Three. When he was about a year old, we gave him a clown that rolls back and forth, with a very realistic face and eyes that roll. At first he seemed a little afraid of it, but soon he seemed happy enough. In fact, for a time he liked it so much that he carried it around.
A few evenings ago we saw a TV program about a circus. There was some violence in the picture. A knife thrower was trying to kill some other man, and although he wasn’t dressed as a clown, there were clowns in the play.
I don’t know if that caused it, but the next evening our son said, ‘The clown is going to hurt me.’ His daddy told him no, that the clown was just like any other dolly. This morning the first thing he said was something about the clown.
I thought about burning the clown before his eyes, but perhaps that would be too dramatic. We are going to leave soon for a vacation with his grandma. Would it be best to take the clown along or to leave it at home?”
I don’t know what’s better, the shock of getting to the “I thought about burning the clown before his eyes” part, or later, when the authors respond to say that burning the clown would indeed be too dramatic, because “It might lead to a fear of fires as well as a fear of clowns.”
I reread this letter as needed, and remind myself that at least I have yet to set a clown ablaze in front of my young charge. (I am saving the next book, on four-year-olds, for a special occasion.)
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Z z z z z z z z z z z…
by Alexa on November 7, 2011
(This does too count as posting!)
(Good night.)
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Please Provide Your Own Eyeroll.
by Alexa on November 6, 2011
I am feeling decidedly less sanguine. Not that I was sanguine before, but I am FURTHER from sanguine now. I was doing so well with my not-getting-ahead-of-myself when the only evidence I had was encouraging, but I seem to give the bad considerably more weight than the good. To be fair, I am still not getting ahead of myself, really, as I am just fretting over the significance of what is already present. I have been painfully crampy all day, you see, and even though I know that this can be normal for someone who is 5-6 weeks…along, it seems like a potentially bad sign. I was crampy last time, but then last time I had OHSS, my ovaries Zeppelin-sized post IVF. Today I am crampy and bloaty and my uterus, or kind sack, to use the German (no) feels weirdly heavy. “Weirdly” because it can’t even be growing or stretching much yet, I wouldn’t think. I am slightly comforted by the fact that there is no bleeding whatsoever and that I have heard that sometimes those who’ve had a c-section have pains the next pregnancy because