Week 4: The real wait begins

(Apologies in advance to anyone reading these posts via RSS – I know you’ll get flooded with stuff from me you haven’t seen before, and you’ll wonder why. It’s because I had a bunch of stuff I needed to write but couldn’t publish for a while. Read on.)

Day 28.

Day 28 of what, you may ask?

Well, here’s a hint – it looks sort of like this:

The only reason I don’t say “exactly like” is that I actually took this stupid picture during the first pregnancy and reused it. I didn’t think I should make a habit of taking photographs of things that have been in contact with my own waste products. That’s sort of gross. And my sarcastic tone here is totally contrary to the secret fact that I am actually 1) not ashamed of it, and 2) actually excited. But that’s how I am, dontchaknow.

It looked exactly like this anyway this time – confusingly faint, but definitely there. And I’m late, so I’m sure. Also, I forget everything, have to use the bathroom all the damned time, am exhausted, and snapped at my mother on the phone for going into long, drawn-out, extensive detail about what she was learning about Internet safety in one of her education classes (sorry Mom, but it is one of my pet peeves). If my last brief experience with pregnancy is anything to go by, boys and girls, I am definitely pregnant. Let the random crying spells begin!

Anyway. So I’m pregnant again – yay!

And this time, I’m posting about it. I’m trying to be smart about it, posting in draft form and releasing them all if we see good stuff in the ultrasound next month (or maybe releasing them all after the birth) instead of just not expressing anything anywhere about it until we know for sure that there’s anything to be excited about. Right now, the baby is nothing but a little ball of cells that will hopefully by December be a small human being. It’s really hard to conceive of what’s there as anything babylike – last time, even by week eight (just before the ultrasound), it was hard to think of what was going on as a baby. There’s sort of this grand faith thing that keeps you eating oranges and broccoli and taking your prenatal vitamins instead of camping out with a vat of Ben and Jerry’s, but that’s about it. (Well, ok, last time, it was more than faith keeping me from the Ben and Jerry’s – it was an aversion to sweet things – but still…)

And so I can only hope and pray it goes better this time, or if it doesn’t, hope and pray that it’s as minimally devastating as it was last time. I suspect this time it’ll be somewhat harder for me if it happens – even though there’s a fair likelihood of a another miscarriage happening and us still being able to carry a pregnancy to term later, I don’t think my psyche will be able to push off the inevitable nonsense thought that I am somehow broken. At 35, with everything you hear about how hard it will be, how many things can go wrong, that thought is sometimes unavoidable.

So tomorrow I’ll be four weeks pregnant – that is, week five starts tomorrow – and we will have four more weeks to wait until the ultrasound. Of course, in reality, I will have only been pregnant for two weeks (doctors and most everyone else count from your last period instead of conception), but hey… it’s a start. But why am I writing this if there’s a possibility I’ll never post it? It’s an outlet, I suppose. And having a place to be excited about it and talk about what’s going on makes it feel a bit more real, since we’re not telling the outside world yet.

So, um…. ladies and gentlemen, we here at Haus Grothoff are expecting a third member of the family again. In December. A child whom I will not let my husband name Ghengis, no matter how many backrubs he gives me or how many times we eat at the Mongolian barbecue place. Prayers, fingers crossed, etc, are all welcome. (Sacrifices to the Great Khan are, however, discouraged.)