Seriously, with all the money you guys are making, you could do at least that much.

We’re all pretty sick. I’m the most obviously ill, but Christian’s been coughing horribly for weeks, and the baby got to visit the urgent care last night (although, to be fair, he isn’t apparently feeling all that bad – but he was breathing a little hard, so they wanted us to bring him in). I’m probably only so ill because I haven’t been sleeping, but it’s not good, because I can’t give Christan a break after a long week with the baby, and I can’t play with Torsten, which sucks, because I miss him. Terribly.

The course is going really well, though. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in the past three weeks, although given the intensity of the course, I’d hope I’d learned something. I love doing this. I really, really love it. I can’t wait to be in the classroom outside of the training environment, though I am going to miss our students here. They’re pretty fantastic. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to use this training yet, but I’m so pleased with having decided to do this.

The downside is that I’m never home right now. I simply cannot wait to be back home and spend time with my family. My baby is growing up without me! Now, granted, he and his papa do just fine, and I’m happy they’ve gotten to spend the time together, but I’ll be happy to have a few more hours a day of my own with my family again.

Hopefully this cold won’t kill me so I can get back home to enjoy them.

I’m sick. As in coming down with a bad, bad cold.

And I teach tomorrow.

And Thursday.

And I have a paper due Thursday morning.

Sick.

Grrrr.

I win.

There is nothing more sad and awful than a tiny baby with a cold, I’m absolutely convinced of it – he’s not old enough to really be able to breathe through his mouth unless he’s crying, so we spend a lot of time with the saline drops and the suction bulb, which he’s smart enough to see coming and scream at before they get anywhere near his poor little nose.

3 weeks of congested nights and counting – poor little Torsten!

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to bug him during the day, and he’s basically in a great mood all day, so I’m not complaining much. He gets some shots which are supposed to make him feel bad next week, though, so what do you bet the congestion goes away just in time for immunizations?

Poor Small Monster…

That’s how much Torsten weighed at the pediatrician today, and we are all happy, where by “we” I primarily mean “me”, since I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown what with all of the feeding nonsense.

Torsten is doing really well, very healthy, and has finally surpassed his birthweight. We’ve also finally worked out a way to deal with the feeding issues without pumping or Reglan. We just gave in to the idea of supplementation as a way to continue breastfeeding, since my breasts just aren’t planning to cooperate. The fenugreek has helped, I think, but after reading the side effects for Reglan (um… contraindicated for those with a history of depression, plus some horrible muscular condition? No thanks… and the pediatrician agreed…), there was no way in Hell I was going to risk my own health or the baby’s to take the stuff (directly or indirectly – Mama having some strange muscle problem that causes her to stiffen up and be unable to move while alone with the baby would be bad news, not to mention it gets passed along to the baby).

I never wanted to give my baby formula. Ever. And I am happy we’ve found a solution that will let me use my own breast milk for as long as I can. But after having talked to lactation consultants and doctors and reading books and as much as the Internets had to offer, I’ve had to make my peace with the fact that yes, Torsten will have some formula, but at least he’ll get the benefits of breastmilk for as long as I can provide it.

And hey, doing supplementation meant that my kid is finally gaining weight appropriately. So I’m not going to complain.

I feel pretty good for the first time in weeks.

Merry Christmas, one and all

Note: Ok, so this didn’t get finished until Torsten had been home almost a month, but given how much sleep I haven’t been getting, it’s a wonder it’s being posted at all

Dearest Torsten,

For a long time now, lots of your fans have been protesting the fact that we call you “Small Monster”, thinking that we must be declaring you some sort of abomination. While nothing could be further than the truth (we think monsters are snuggly and lovable and would, for example, invite Cookie Monster and Elmo over for a playdate, although we’d probably leave that whiny Telly Monster at home, and Barney, who is not strictly a monster but certainly is an abomination, is right out…), we are proud to tell you that you had a real name after all, one that your papa and I like very much: Torsten.

For those who are playing the home game (and the one person who rather randomly almost guessed it, knowing of my Thor fetish), Torsten means, literally, in various Germanic languages, “Thor’s stone”.

But it’s cooler than that, really… Old Norse/Icelandic, which is really very poetic (I had a blast studying it, but never really had the time to keep up with it or get far enough to cause much trouble), can use a phrase like “Thor’s stone” (Þorsteinn, in Icelandic) to mean a bunch of things. Not that I looked it up on Wikipedia before we chose it, but Wikipedia does mention that ‘it can be translated to “Thor’s stone”, “Thor’s hammer” or even “adamant as Thor”‘ – there’s also some old myth about a stone that Thor has rattling around in his head, so you can see that it can mean lots of things. Me, I just like the name. Also, it has “Thor” in it (and, let’s face it, it’s much nicer than the English equivalent, “Thurston”), and we know how I likes me some Thor. So whether it means Mjolnir or someone who has a really strong will, we like the name, Torsten, and we hope you do too. It seems to suit you, though I admit, you’re very sweet and I’m not letting some pagan god throw you into the sky to hit things and then fly back like a boomerang, even if it is Thor.

You have other names too, ones I won’t mention online for your privacy, but one is a family name and the other is in honor of a great friend of ours whom we really admire – we’re sure you would too.

But you’re still our Small Monster, and we mean that in the most loving way possible.

I thought I might steal an idea from Dooce (sorry, Dooce) and write you a little letter about you every month for a while, until you’re a little older anyway. And this letter, this letter is about how you came into the world, complete with some very bad pictures because Papa and the auto-focus don’t get along very well.

So Mama had a regular doctor’s appointment one afternoon to check on how you were doing in her belly. So far, you’d been doing fantastically – we’d even gotten to see some awesome pictures of you (which really do look like you when you sleep) – and Mama was just hoping we were getting closer to delivery. She hopped on the bus – for once, fortuitously, not taking 10,000 things with her – and went off to the doctor, hoping to have lunch after the 1 pm appointment.

In retrospect, she should have eaten first.

The appointment started off like every other appointment – listening to your beautiful heartbeat – and the doctor even pulled out the ultrasound to check on your size. Kiddo, those doctors were obsessed with how huge you were going to be, and boy, were they wrong. The doctor was thinking, on this particular day, that you were probably nine pounds, maybe ten, although he still deferred to the judgement of the perinatologist who didn’t think it was much to worry about when he saw you a couple of weeks ago.

Anyhow, then the doctor wanted to know if I wanted my cervix checked.

Now, in case someday you have yourself a pregnant wife, let me just say that no pregnant woman wants her cervix checked for fun – it’s uncomfortable – but we do want to know when we’re big and heavy and pregnant how things are rolling along. It doesn’t matter how many people on the pregnancy board tell us it serves no purpose, we want to know. Let me also say, though, that if we do make a brother or sister for you, next time around, they are going to stay the Hell away from my cervix until I’m in labor. Because this is how the exam went:

Doctor: <poking around with fingers> You’re three centimeters, and… sorry, I know this hurts…

Me: <breathing> It’s ok…

Doctor: <poking around more with fingers> and you’re… whoops.

Me: What?

Doctor: Well, dear, you’re being induced today…

Me: Um, huh?

Doctor: <flustered> I, uh, accidentally broke your water there. Never done that before, by accident, anyway… so you need to get your butt over to labor and delivery.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t entirely upset about this, because any day where you get to meet a Small Monster is a good day. But I also knew that being induced would at the very least lead to an induction, which often leads to a C-section, and no matter how pregnant I was, I wasn’t really wanting that.

So anyhow, I calmly called Papa and let him know what was going on, but that he didn’t need to be in a hurry. They checked me in to a labor room after making triply-sure I knew what being a confidential patient meant (“You do know that this will mean we pretend like you’re not here and we’ve never heard of you, don’t you?” – um, yes, fools, that was the idea…), and I got to change into a very stylish hospital gown and wait on the doctor to show up for a good while.

Meanwhile, I was leaving a message for your papa, trying to tell him what to bring from home, when the nurse actually did show up. At this point, all was a little unreal, and I still wasn’t entirely convinced we were going to bring a Small Monster into the world. You were happily rolling around in my tummy, and speaking of my tummy, at this point, I noticed that my room had a view of the Thai place and remembered that I had not had lunch yet.

I knew I wasn’t going to get any either, and since I hadn’t started having real contractions yet (though they claimed I was having them on the monitor), I wasn’t going to get any anytime soon.

So the nurses hooked me up to some monitors and then started an IV after royally screwing up on the first try (Mama had a huge bruise for days afterward) – one which the resident said really wasn’t necessary yet, and days later I wished I’d protested, since I’m now missing feeling in the wrist where they shoved the thing and left it for days – and Mama walked the halls for a bit in her stylish gown before realizing there really wasn’t any place to go. I went back to the room and danced around a bit there.

Bored bored bored.

Soon thereafter, Papa showed up, calm as Papa always is, and promptly got sent out to eat his own dinner (Thai!!!) and to head home to get some other things he didn’t know I needed when he’d stopped at home on the way to the hospital (note that all of this took him a while, since he took the bus, but it’s not like you were coming anytime soon…).

Meanwhile, various doctors and nurses stopped in and laughed at what the doctor had done – understand, this doctor, who I like very much, likes to give people a hard time I hear, and so I think they were looking forward to getting their own back, but nevertheless, this was my main form of entertainment for a while. The resident who was taking care of us, along with the HMO’s attending physician, stopped in to let us know that we were on a clock. I sort of knew this was going to happen, but basically, they were going to give us a few more hours before they decided to use Pitocin to induce labor. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry, and while C-sections were mentioned in passing, I really don’t think the attending was inclined to push one. Mostly we just talked about you being big. Which you were not.

Meanwhile, Mama decided to let some people know you were on your way. Via the Internet. Because Mama is a geek (click to embiggen):

But then there was a shift change, and another attending came on. Nice guy, but he was talking C-section from the beginning (with a trial of labor), and that made me a bit nervous. The clock expired and they put me on the Pitocin, which wasn’t initially such a big deal until I was informed that I wasn’t going to be allowed to get out of bed.

Now, in our childbirth classes, we’d been told we could get portable monitors and labor walking around, but the night nurses were having none of that. So I don’t think we had much of a chance to avoid the knife, to be frank.

Also, your Mama is a fool. I was going to try to do it without pain medications for as long as possible. And so they started the Pitocin, and kept increasing it, and I breathed and made it through the contractions pretty well for a long, long time. Of course, since I was lying in bed, those contractions had a pretty poor chance of doing much, and so after a long time, I’d only progressed to four centimeters. But still, that was progress, and I was thinking we’d still get to see you come out of an approved orifice.

Well.

They kept turning the Pitocin up, see. I guess there’s a scale of increments they go for, and the maximum they usually go to is 20 (though they can go higher), and they got Mama up to 20, and… holy cow. Most people will tell you Pitocin contractions are worse than normal contractions, and I can only hope so, because otherwise, I don’t understand how the human race can go on.

We went on with these contractions for a while, you and I, and the only good thing I can say about them is that you were hanging in there like a champ, doing just fine. And that, for the most part, is all I cared about.

(Well, that, and food, and food I wasn’t going to get, just apple and cranberry juice…)

But when they checked me some hours later and I was still at four (stupid lying in bed!), they decided to insert an internal contraction monitor to see if my contractions were strong enough to be making things progress. I could have answered that for them – those freaking hurt, and I suspect they could have gotten the Middle East peace process to progress – but anyway, it was clear they were getting antsy. Never a good sign.

Meanwhile, Papa and I watched episodes of The 4400 (yes, kiddo, your mother is such a geek that not only did she live-blog the start of labor for a few friends, but she also watched sci-fi while having evil contractions…), most of which I can’t remember because they were interrupted by me breathing and going “oh my God, oh my God…”.

We hates Pitocin.

Not long after this, Mama asked for pain medication. We decided we’d go for Fentanyl rather than an epidural, because all I wanted was a little rest, and you weren’t going to be coming all that soon anyhow. Plus, they can counteract the effects of Fentanyl pretty quickly in the baby if they need to, and I didn’t want anyone messing with my spine. But that’s just me.

And that first dose? That was the best thing ever. You seemed to be tolerating it fine, and me, I just felt tons better.

The nurse told me we could give me another dose every hour. Sounded good to me.

Of course, no one mentioned to me that after the first dose, it’d wear off after about half an hour. Or that if the baby was tolerating it, they could have given it to me every twenty minutes. So later in the night, I’d have about 30 minutes of moderate relief, and 30 minutes of breathing through horribly strong contractions.

It got to the point where I could tell when they were going to come. See, there was a machine next to me that pumped Pitocin into my IV, and it would click when it did so. Every other click, I would have one of those insane contractions, and it clicked pretty often. It got to the point where I wanted ear plugs just to avoid anticipating the click. Later, when we were recovering in our hospital room, the leg compression thingies they made me wear also clicked, and I had the Pavlovian response of cringing at every other one. You have a very odd Mama, kiddo.

But in spite of this all, all of the Pitocin and pain drugs and monitors, you were doing fine, little pumpkin, and that’s all that mattered.

About 6:30 the next morning, though, the doctor came in to have The Talk. I had known it was coming by then, especially when my contractions were certainly strong enough to have brought progress (I still am annoyed about having to labor in bed, though…) and I was only at four-and-a-half, and I was so tired from a night of Pitocin-induced pain that I really couldn’t complain. All night they kept saying, “Oh, good, the pain medication seems to be lasting you about an hour”, and I wanted to throttle them and say, “No, it lasts about 30 minutes, and sheer will power is lasting me the hour, damnit!”

But a Small Monster was coming, so what did any of that matter?

Well, anyhow, I’d had my trial of labor, and I was no more interested in subjecting you to whatever Pitocin does to little babies than I was to subjecting myself to the pain, and so after 13 hours of labor, all of a sudden, there were forms to be signed and discussions to be had and strange medications to be drunk, and a few nasty contractions later, we were in the operating room.

You were still, my pumpkin, doing great in there, and I am thankful.

I can’t say that I remember too much – it was very bright, and Papa was in there looking funny in his blue outfit. The spinal they gave me was really very bad, very uncomfortable. I had to sit on the edge of the table while they poked at my spine, and it really hurt. I kept thinking I was going to fall off the table, and let’s face it, no one wants anyone messing with her spinal cord area. Papa and a nurse kept Mama steady, though, and I’d felt the last contraction I’d feel that day.

All of a sudden, Mama was up on the operating table, a big sheet in front of her eyes (thank God – not that Mama didn’t want to see you born, but she really didn’t want to see her own internal organs…), with Papa sitting next to her being mostly soothing (except for mentioning the knife – bad Papa!).

In truth, the actual C-section wasn’t so bad.

Mostly, it felt like people poking me in the tummy, and it was clear everything was going fine. Most of this is kind of a blur to me now, but I do remember them all of a sudden waving a big blood-covered Torsten at me quickly before taking you over to check you out. Your Apgar scores were good (8 and 9, because we’re in Denver and it takes babies a little longer to get oxygenated), and I could hear Papa asking lots of questions.

Oh, and as for you being huge?

Not even eight pounds.

Bite me, modern medicine.

Anyhow, Papa took this lovely picture of you right after you were out (click to embiggen):

And then they brought you over to me – I think Papa was holding you – and, well, wow.

I have never been so in love in my whole life (sorry, Papa ). I have never seen such a beautiful little boy, big wide eyes and beautiful face and all, with perfect little hands and long fingers and lots and lots of brown hair. Mama was all covered with tubes and stuff and couldn’t touch you for a while, but that was ok – I got to lie there looking at your perfect little face and share the wonder of you coming into the world with Papa, and it was the most awesome thing ever.

Soon after, they rolled me onto the cart to take me into recovery, and I finally got to hold you and nurse you and cuddle you. (See picture, and yes, click to see full-size)

Mama was still a bit out of it from surgery and they kept having to take you away to bathe and weigh you, but it was so awesome finally having you out on the outside. Sure, all I had gotten to see were your face and hands, but you are still the most beautiful baby I’ve ever met.

(Sorry about this picture – remember what I said about Papa and the auto-focus? )

Not long afterward, we finally went off to the room where we’d spend the next several days. I have to say, Mama wasn’t really prepared for what it would be like to both be recovering from surgery and becoming a new mama, but in the hospital that was mostly manageable. Mama didn’t sleep much – she doesn’t like to sleep on her back – but you seemed to be fine and happy with the world and were cuddly and slept quite a bit.

We took a lot of pictures of you there, though mostly you’re swaddled, so I guess you’re kind of hard to see… sorry, kiddo

(Click to embiggen!)

Papa was great help in the evenings when he was there staying with us, and you and I tried very hard to learn how to nurse (the fact that the lactation consultant would never come when paged didn’t help…).

It was overwhelming and Mama wasn’t feeling too hot (although, for having a c-section, apparently I felt comparatively great), and sometimes we got lame nurses, and worst of all, there was always someone coming into the room at odd hours to poke you or poke me or check you or check me, but we were doing ok. You’d lost some weight and were turning a little yellow, but we were assured that both things were normal and nothing to worry about.

Finally, a few days later, we were about to leave, when suddenly it seemed as if the doctors noticed your weight and your color for the first time, and it made for a rough homecoming for us. Suddenly, the nurse practitioner who’d thought you were fine the day before was saying you’d lost more than 10% of your body weight (probably because Mama’s milk had just come in, and you’d not had any time to take advantage of it), and you were more jaundiced than they’d have liked (though not enough to treat), and then there were lots of people hovering around giving Mama instructions on how to feed you with supplements and what had been a fairly relaxed morning leading up to your homecoming was all of a sudden filled with worry. You got prodded and weighed again, and Mama was a mess as at the last minute someone tried to show her how to use a breast pump.

By the time we got you into your car seat to come home, you were crying and Mama was about to cry, and poor Papa was having to deal with both of us. We did both decide to stop before we left the room, though

Once we got you home, pumpkin, I admit it, it was tough, but that’s not because of you. You’re really a good baby – you cry when you’re wet or you’re hungry, as babies are wont to do, but the rest of the time, you’re usually just curious, staring around with those big beautiful eyes. The first nights at home were rough, as they always are, and were a bit rougher because Mama had to feed you, then pump, then give you a supplement, and as much as Papa helped, it meant very little time to enjoy you in the beginning, which is too bad, because you’re a very sweet, wonderful little boy. Mama loves to smell your sweet little baby smells and cuddle you and watch you make big eyes when you see a face, but mostly, you smell Mama’s milk and are more interested in my cow function than much else – this makes it a little hard to find playtime, especially if you’re hungry most of the time.

(And did I mention that your Papa is awesome and that you worship the thin ice he walks on? Click to embiggen…)

We’ll try to be better about that in the future – we’re working hard to get the feeding thing straightened out – but I promise you that no matter how tough these first few weeks are, I wouldn’t trade you for sleep or comfort now matter how appealing they are right now.

We love you very much, little pumpkin.

Welcome home!

Love,

Mama

I haven’t been writing much, although I’ve started a couple of posts and stopped.

I have a newborn at home. So sue me.

I still intend to write about Torsten’s birth, but unfortunately, I’ve been consumed by other things.

See, Torsten was born at 7 lbs, 12 oz. A respectable weight, though not huge by any means. However, he lost almost a pound in the hospital – we left the hospital on day 4, and only then did my milk come in, so he really didn’t have any chance to gain weight before we left. No one seemed worried – that is, until an hour before we were to check out from the hospital, when health care was basically transferring over from the hospital to our HMO. And then the freakout began, because it was more than 10% of his body weight (never mind that he’d only had colostrum for 3 days and had output a huge amount of meconium shortly after birth for the first several days), and that magic percentage sets off the magic red flashing lights.

Now, all newborns lose some weight after birth, and formula-fed infants gain back their weight quicker, but the doctors expect all infants to gain back their birth weight by 14 days. Given that infants are expected, on average, to gain an ounce a day, I suppose we were screwed from the start on this, since little guy only had 9 days to gain before his 2-week appointment, but nevertheless, the HMO nurse practitioner at the hospital and the home care nurses that came to visit us twice have made it a mission, and piling that stress on top of learning to breastfeed hasn’t been fun.

Add to that that instead of recognizing that my milk was just starting to come in as we left the hospital, they freaked and decided I had a supply problem, I was supposed to be pumping and supplementing after each feed. Given that newborns feed every 2-3 hours, and this little guy feeds for a long time, doing that on top of breastfeeding meant all I was doing for those first days home was feeding Torsten. Not sleeping, and, stupidly, not eating very well beyond what Christian fed me (and he did a great job, but I did need to eat more).

Oh, and did I mention I’m recovering from a c-section?

Yeah. Major abdominal surgery. It sucked.

Anyway, those first few days home were really bad – I was actually nearly passing out when I fed Torsten or pumped, and it was scaring me. Since I’m a little anemic from blood loss during surgery, we thought it was that, but experience has shown it was a combination of not having time to eat well and so much freaking feeding plus pumping.

Somebody should have mentioned to me that if my milk came in like gangbusters (which it did), the pumping was perhaps not a great idea.

But then again, given that I tried to get the lactation consultant to help me for two days in the hospital and she only showed the night before I left because the nurse dragged her ass into my room, why should I expect that anyone was actually paying attention?

So. Anyhow. We had home nurses come by to weigh Torsten, check him out, and check on his jaundice, as well as to check my incision. I do think that’s a pretty awesome thing my HMO does, but I should also mention that all it managed to do in the end was make me worry more about Torsten’s weight, never mind that he was still gaining. (Of course, we were supplementing with donor milk and some of what I’d pumped, but he was doing well…)

We still had no idea how he was doing weight-wise until we saw the pediatrician at his two-week appointment, though, and while he’s gained 9 ounces from his low weight leaving the hospital (an ounce a day, as desired), he’s still only up to 7 lbs, 5.2 oz, so I am still worried, because they are apparently still worried, even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be. Maybe it’s because the pediatrician wants to see him again next week for a weight check, I don’t know. But since we only supplement him maybe once a day now (and then only when he seems to be eating forever in the evening), I worry that my body somehow isn’t providing for him properly, and that’s getting me down.

Because what they say about children is true – once you have them, you don’t want to see anything bad happen to them ever, and you would do absolutely anything for them. (Note to the first person who breaks Torsten’s heart: your arse has my foot’s name all over it, so you’d better run now…) So the idea that I might somehow be undernourishing him or anything that might hurt him has been making me sick with worry.

The funny thing about the whole breast business is that I’m pretty sure my current problem is oversupply – for a while he was eating forever and extremely frequently, and one day he didn’t have a bowel movement all day (he’d been a textbook outputter up to then) until this green mess came out of him that evening – a textbook sign of getting too much foremilk and not enough hindmilk, from what I’ve been able to read, that that often happens with oversupply (also, he’s um… afraid of the torrent that he’s deluged with when he starts feeding, so I think that’s a pretty good guess). And too much foremilk (low in fat, high in sugars and protein, lower in calories) and not enough hindmilk (high fat) often leads to poor weight gain.

And so I’m frustrated. Maybe we don’t even have a problem and I’m just superparanoid because I’m a first-time mom and I love my baby and I’m so ticked off with our medical care (they’ve been so little help with breastfeeding – and, IMHO, a hindrance – that I sort of wonder if the formula companies are paying them…), but I really want our little guy to be ok. And he probably is – he looks fine, the jaundice liver test they ran on him yesterday came back negative and his bilirubin levels are nowhere near treatment levels, and he is gaining weight.

But I’m still stuck in this worried mood – I admit it, I’ve cried a lot – because when we left the hospital, they sprung this worry on me and every time we have contact with the medical establishment they reinforce it.

And it’s kind of keeping me from enjoying my wonderful, sweet, adorable little boy, and I really, really resent that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t adore and enjoy him – I do – but it’s made it harder to concentrate on that and that makes me pretty mad. He’s a cool little kid.

Anyway, a better post should come soon – it’s just that this has been seriously on my mind.

Baby is well otherwise, as are we.

Well, I may not have gotten much farther on my novel (ok, any farther) , but I’ll play catchup later this week. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on my German final which needs to be in by Thursday. I aim to finish it tonight (for obvious reasons which may or may not become more obvious soon), but there are three essays, and since I opted to do the two last ones in German (I had the option of writing them in English), it’s taking longer than expected. Part of the problem, of course, is that sometimes my thoughts are harder to organize in German than in English because I think about the subject from the start in German. While it might seem easier upfront to just outline it in English and then write it in German, the only time I’ve really done that in any of the languages I write in was in writing a very long joint letter, and that took much longer than it might have taken just to write it in the second language in the first place. I can’t even really easily take notes in English during German class unless the discussion switches to English because it’s just not the mindset I’m in at the time.

There comes a point when speaking a language when translation is far more work than just thinking in the language you intend to write in/speak. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy. However much my German may have advanced in the very few years I’ve been studying it (and I discovered the other day that I can finally now complete a thought in Dutch or German without the other language interfering!!! Progress!), it still doesn’t come all that easily when I’m trying to do something requiring analysis, and I worry that I’m more verbose than I need to be simply because I can’t always find the most concise way to say something. (Let’s not get into my verbosity in English, ok? )

I could of course always ask my husband, but I prefer to ask him after I’ve finished working through a thought, and then usually only for an abstraction or part of the idea to check my intuition. Actually, in this class, I don’t think I’ve asked him about German at all. But this is an exam, so I’m not discussing that stuff with him, even if I’m not going to be graded on my German (although I guess I am, indirectly – if I’m incomprehensible, obviously my German isn’t sufficient).

Anyhow. So I have a third of the German exam done, which may not sound like much, but since I had to watch a long movie (Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) to answer the question, and since I was so exhausted yesterday, I only got part of the essay written before I crashed.

Ok, so that’s progress point 1.

Progress point 2 is, um, something I won’t get into detail about. If you’re squeamish, let’s just say there are more signs of progress toward Small Monster coming, although they’re small and they could mean it’s going to be a while still. If you’re not squeamish (and don’t say I didn’t warn you if you look – I very specifically selected a link which didn’t have any identifying info in the URL for what happened), let’s just say that this has started to happen, gradually, but it was very obviously that this morning. Doesn’t mean much more than yesterday’s signs, but given the occasional cramping etc., we’re making progress. It may be progress toward three weeks from now (19 days until our due date!), but it’s progress nonetheless.

So progress on my exam will lead toward progress on relaxation and my novel and/or curtains and/or study organization, depending on what I feel up to. And progress on Small Monster is always welcome, no matter how it occurs.

So. Small Monster is fully-cooked. Let us rejoice!

(Yayyyyy…)

This, of course, means nothing. Just as finding out today at my OB’s appointment that I am 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced means nothing, because women walk around for weeks like that sometimes.

The fact that my cervix is open and I’ve been cramping some since yesterday, though, that may or may not mean something. (And I just realized how creepy me talking about my cervix openly probably is to my male friends, right up there with talking about breastfeeding from a personal point of view (something I know freaked my friend out at lunch the other day hehehe… go me!), but all I can do is apologize and say “get over it” )

Unfortunately, the baby isn’t quite low enough yet, so I’ve been given exercises to encourage him to, shall we say, ease on down the road, and she stripped my membranes (which she’ll do at both of my next appointments), because I think they really want to encourage this kid to get a move on. He’s not “too big” now, but she made it clear that we didn’t really want him to go past his due date because he’s right on the edge. I know people have a lot of feelings about stripping membranes (which is basically just, as Mrs. Mustard put it so eloquently the other day, “activity in [Small Monster's] domain”, only rather aggressively), but if this baby gets ready to go and some little things encourage it, I am not going to complain.

And if he turns out to be the Thanksgiving turkey, all the better. Unlikely, but hey, stranger things have happened.

Now, the bad news is I’m all uncomfortable. Cramps, pressure, you name it. It’s like a PMS preview for after the baby is born. I can live with it – labor is going to be much worse – but my pelvis is busy getting all stretched out and that isn’t terribly comfortable. Plus there are the cramps. I hate cramps. I guess I should get used to it.

The really bad news is that my blood pressure went back up – I think it was probably a fluke (I’d just walked a long way), and I don’t have any other symptoms, but they want to keep an eye on me for pre-eclampsia anyway. I don’t mind, really… better safe than sorry, and it means I get to see my OB on Monday instead of Wednesday next week (they worked to fit me in), so all good.

Anyhow. That’s this week’s report from Ob/Gyn wonderland. I’m off to take a nap. It’s been a long morning. I’m still a little behind on NaNo, but I got to within 756 words of catching up last night, and so after I finish this German take-home final (which requires watching movies online… whee!), I’ll get back to it.

Somehow, I don’t think Small Monster will let me make it to 50k, but hey, we can always hope (Actually, on second thought, maybe I should be hoping he doesn’t let me make it to 50k!)

So today was the perinatologist appointment.

And what do you know, Small Monster is yeah, ok, a little big (especially his head, full of brains!), but the doctor said that there was no reason to think this kid would need a C-section based on size and that everything looked very very good!

He’s not nearly as much more enormous than he should be as he seemed at 30 weeks (or at my appointments afterward), so it looks like we’re headed for the long, hard birth with not getting sliced open, if all else goes well!

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy!

And in bonus news, the kid is head-down, not posterior (but is instead turned to the side as he should be), and he’s down low.

All good signs

Yay Small Monster!

(In other news, the doctor isn’t worried about the abdominal thing, just wants me to take it easy. I have, and it’s been much less painful today!)