Wednesday, November 27, 2013

No one in this room is hungry

Ok, there is no one in this room but me. Insomnia on my part (a mixture of the daily 3am bathroom trip, followed by sneezing and wheezing for about an hour) and snoring on the part of a few other individuals (both furry and not), has resulted in me sleeping in the guestroom for weeks now. And usually my wake-up involves some snacking. Maybe some snacking followed by an antacid.

But in 2 1/2 hours I'm getting a glucose test done, due to my "advanced maternal age", which just means I'm going to be a really hungry, pregnant, 40 year old woman, drinking something like a cup of sugar mixed with a cup of water. Soon. But not soon enough.

I may not be cooking a Thanksgiving feast tomorrow, but pretty much all of America is, and they are all talking about it on Facebook. Which is where I spend a fair amount of insomnia time, on my phone, trying not to sit up and wake my body up more.

There is nothing extreme about my condition. Nothing life threatening. I'm just up every night for 1-2 hours, too tired to read or think all that seriously, wheezing just enough to keep coughing and not quite falling back asleep, or sneezing and blowing my nose. And deciding between trying to fall back asleep hungry or with acid reflux. It is just annoying.

I don't wish it away. I'm happy I'm pregnant.  I've just got more people looking to me to have a coherent thought this time than last time - no toddler, no meetings. So I mess up more often, because there is more to mess up. I snap at my kid when she wakes me up with a container of glitter she wants to play with at 7:30am because I still haven't finished cleaning up from her birthday weekend and I haven't asked her to help much. My husband is lucky if there is one day's worth of clean underwear and two eggs in the fridge. My dog probably wonders whether I even know she's there.

But the point of this post? I'm just trying to do something to pass the time this morning. To get to 8:30am at the doctor's office. The baby kicks. I turn over one more time, readjust the pillow, I cough, I turn and sneeze and reach for a tissue. My stomach gurgles. I wheeze a bit and wonder if I can use my inhaler before the test. Then I hope I fall asleep soon so I'm not feeling exhausted when I hear my daughter's voice as she wakes up. I consider flipping through a magazine, but feel just tired enough not to want to think. The sound of traffic starts to pick up and makes me a bit more anxious about falling asleep before the sky starts getting bright. Tick, tick, tick. I feel vaguely like I could just wake up and start the day but I know the sleep-monster is going to hit in the next hour, so I just keep waiting. Trying.

Somewhere in the future, the me with a new baby is yelling back to just enjoy, to read something just because I can, to store up these early morning hours, or for the love of pete, to do something with them so that there is something I can look back on when I'm exhausted and feeling useless as a new mom. Or bored and exhausted. But that's not the way it works, is it?

I keep waiting.

Happy Thanksgiving, though.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The daughter as engineer

This video of girls making a Rube Goldberg-type course through and around their house is currently making the rounds of Facebook, especially on some very strong women's and moms' feeds. There is a lot of support for the message - that girls can make and build. And that there is now an engineering construction set to empower them, called Goldie Blox.

What has caught me a little off guard is how big the response has been that "finally, something has come on the market to help empower our girls!"

Don't get me wrong - I think the toy is kind of cool - a set of engineering tasks based around a story. It is just that I may have underestimated the amount of support I already give my kid. (I'm hard enough on my own mothering that I get to give myself kuddos, too). Now, maybe she likes to fix and build more than some other girls, but I'm thinking that I just name it more often - as engineering, as fixing, as problem solving. In trying to come up with things to call her other than cute, and learn ways to talk about what she is doing instead of how pretty or cool it is, I find myself often telling her things about her playing.

And my girl of 4 does a lot of engineering. She wants this doll stroller to have that cup on it and that blanket to hang off the dog crate. And, sometimes together with parents and sometimes on her own (I often ask her how she thinks she could do it, encourage her to try again if it doesn't work as planned, acknowledge how frustrating it can be, and am there to help if she asks), it gets hacked. We have lots of scotch, masking and Japanese tape at her disposal. Kid scissors. Laundry clothespins. Paper and pens/pencils/crayons. Legos and these big cardboard blocks.

Last night, after trying to put a baby doll carrier on her baby doll stroller with a velcro strap that was too short, she found another place to fit it, down below the stroller, and continued on her way, beaming, some 12 stuffed animals accommodated in the process. And I told her what a creative engineer she was. Praised her effort.  And then I stood back and smiled with my husband, mostly in awe of this little person who can do so much already.

Just because it is done with a traditionally girls' toy, doesn't mean it isn't engineering. Or problem solving. Our kids are natural problem solvers, and maybe one of the first steps is to identify that for them so they can know it is one of their skills already.

So, in addition to Goldie Blox this holiday, time to start recognizing and naming the multitude of skills our kids show already (compassion, sharing, fixing, persisting, all manner of creating, problem solving, etc.). My daughter may not choose engineering as a career for a multitude of reasons, but it isn't going to be because she doesn't think it is something a girl can do.

What skills and abilities of your child's do you name?


Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Getting pissed off

Hmm. I should check old post titles - that one sounds kind of familiar. It wouldn't surprise me to find I'd written about anger before. Probably wouldn't surprise you, either.

Anger is such a strange issue. One side of our family hides it, stuffs it down deep inside and lets it out as passive aggression, and the other lets it just explode in your face at the most unexpected of times. And now, as parents, M and I are having to navigate what is appropriate with a child. For us (what does acceptable behavior look like when you're angry) and for A (how much is she allowed to vent and in what ways?).

I'm bumbling through this issue kind of blindly. My first instinct is that anger is bad - I was taught to think that - and so the point is never to get angry. Or, if you have gotten angry, to deny that you were and to say it was sadness or something else. But that's not how life works, so I'm having to redefine how I "do" anger. Don't think I've gotten far - I haven't, really. I'm at the "it is okay for me to be angry" self-affirmation stage, at which point my brain just kind of turns off. Crickets. Silence. I have no idea how to be angry next.

If I'm not okay with A hitting when she's angry, then obviously that's off the table for me, too. I don't actually get that far, but the point is that I'm totally at sea with this and even extreme boundary conditions are helpful. Okay, so no hitting.

Yelling? Also not great. We don't want her to yell, and yet we get to the point where we do it. But I get there every other time I'm furious. (I also tend to put my foot down earlier than M so that I don't actually get as furious in certain situations. Don't worry, in others I'm way more unreasonable than him).

Walking out? Hmm. That one is a tougher call because it feels either like defeat or surrender instead of taking time to cool down. But as I write this and think how would I like it if A walked out and cooled down every time she was angry, I realize I'd be pretty happy with that. So maybe that is a new way to think about that option.

What I'd love to be is the person who can express verbally what I'm angry about in a way that vents it but doesn't (and my kid has just messed up some tape she's playing with at this instant, started making upset sounds, and I'm wondering should I duck lest the tape dispenser come flying my way) hurt the feelings of another person. And in a way that gets it out of my system.

I guess that last part is the other problem I have with my anger. I don't purge it very quickly. If I don't get an apology I have a hard time letting things go.

There is no neat bow to tie up this post and end with some epiphany. Just something I was thinking about. What is anger good for?

Furry, furry, furry

It has now been, what, 5 or 6 months since I stopped shaving my legs (and toes - yes, they, too are a bit fluffy). And it is almost winter, and I soon won't be able to bend down that comfortably anyway, so they're going to stay hairy.

Do I finally think my legs are feminine even with the hair? Nope. Doesn't look feminine to me. Or pretty.

But what I find interesting is that it is the looking feminine that I am less concerned with now. I still wear dresses sometimes, jewelry and makeup, even. But the leg thing doesn't come in to play as often.

Now, this isn't to say that I find hairy legs and a knee-length skirt normal looking. I don't. I just don't pack a razor with me on trips anymore.

I might shave again next summer. And I'm still on the lookout for a well-fitting boy-short swimsuit (Target, the one I got from you had a seam that was 50 shades of wrong). But I'm not going to worry about it as much.

I just look at my legs now, in my pajamas at home, without thinking so much about them. That's been nice.


Friday, November 1, 2013

Testing for Down's Syndrome

It is early days yet, but there now exist a number of companies that can use a pregnant woman's blood to detect DNA from the fetus. For certain conditions, then, this means no more amniocentesis - which requires sticking a large needle into the actual amniotic fluid (anything that is being stuck into my stomach, by definition, is too big) and carries a slight (read: unacceptable if you're worried about the pregnancy in any way and there is another way to go) risk of miscarriage.

We chose to use a test like this, which would tell us a limited number of things about the baby in my womb. Specifically, it looked for trisomies, triple chromosomes, four of which can lead to viable babies. First, chromosome 21, in triplicate, means Down's Syndrome. Next, there are two less likely, more extreme trisomies, 13, and 18, in which many major organs are severely affected, and many babies don't live past a year or two. Finally, there are sex chromosome trisomies, that may or may not affect fertility, and since they test X's and Y's, you also find out the sex of the baby from this test.

First of all, we didn't really care about the X's and Y's - in any way that would affect our birth preparation. Next, if the baby had Down's Syndrome, we wanted to know now, to help us prepare (and yes, mourn now, the ideal of a baby without), instead of being caught by surprise at the birth. I wanted to be able to smile a full on smile at the birth. Then, trisomies 13 and 18. This one was harder.

The reason we chose the test in the first place is because of my "advanced maternal age" - I'm a grand dame of pregnant ladies now, and that puts me at a higher risk of a baby with any of these trisomies. And to be honest, I just didn't know what I would do if we found out a positive on 13 or 18. A baby whose organs are failing. I would have had to spend a lot of time in books and talking to doctors and on websites to figure out what to do. Yes, I am talking about abortion. But do not make the mistake to think I'm talking about it in any way lightly.

Ever since the first ultrasound with baby A, almost 5 years ago, I've realized that what was growing inside of me was its own being. I had no right to terminate that life. I don't speak for other pregnant women, just myself. I could tell that that was how I felt.

But a baby with so many health problems, severe ones, that could cause death soon after birth? This presents me with another issue.  I don't believe in a god that is directly working in my life, and I also think that nature is dispassionate. Evolution does not save human beings from pain and suffering. There is no "god will do what's best" excuse for an agnostic. And as a parent, even of an embryo, I think it is partly my responsibility (a huge one at that) to think about my own children's suffering. I don't get to pass on the guilt, worry, any of it to a god who knows all. If I'm grown up enough to have a child, I'd damn well better be grown up enough to tackle the most difficult questions that life has to throw at me.

I didn't have to make those tough decisions in the end, because the tests all came back negative.

In the process, I read (albeit on Wikipedia) that: "A 2002 literature review of elective abortion rates found that 91–93% of pregnancies in the United Kingdom and Europe with a diagnosis of Down syndrome were terminated." This shocked me. I was just still for some 30 seconds, trying to understand that statistic. (Some biology friends later explained that this was for people who had specifically tested for it, which means people who knew there was a risk but didn't test and kept the baby are not included, but still...).

I also found out the sex of the baby. At around 14 weeks of pregnancy. This was through a phone call - which probably shouldn't be the way the test results are announced, now that I think of it. But my OBGYN (the test was through a hospital and lab, not my doctor) was a bit surprised they told me the sex. Her surprise surprised me, until she explained that there is controversy over whether or not hearing earlier than around 20 weeks might allow for more gender selective abortions. It is earlier, you're not there seeing an image, with a doctor near you to discuss the outcome, etc. Interesting. For us, we were happy either way, so it did not make a difference. But it made me think more about the OBGYN/patient relationship.

So, in the end, we spent a lot of money (these new blood tests do not come cheap) on this journey, but it was a good use of the cash. And we are lucky to have been able to afford it. And I've yet again had time to be a bit more thoughtful about life, death, and babies. Never a bad thing.