lissmo . dot . com

...tooth! Caroline is not a great sleeper these days at the best of times, so her fussiness last night didn’t raise any immediate alarm bells. During this morning’s Fun With Gums time, though, the sharp little ridges in her bottom gum were unmistakeable. Upon investigation, there was a definite peep of little white tooth poking out.

She has been duly informed that the presence of teeth means that she must truly learn to eat now. She did not appear impressed at the logic, but we’ll see.

Because I am nothing if not lazy…or let’s call it efficient, a repurposed meme about my first baby:

1. Were you married at the time? Yes

2. What was your reaction when you found out you were pregnant?
I was absolutely ecstatic

3. How old were you? 34

4. How did you find out you were pregnant?
My husband told me. The doctor called with the news while I was downtown in a meeting, so Jonathan knew for hours before I did! (Story here)

5. Who did you tell first?
We waited until after our second blood test, then told my best friend. We told our parents after our first ultrasound a week later.

6. Did you want to find out the sex?
Oh yeah. I’m not big on surprises!

7. Due date? November 23, 2005

8. Did you deliver early or late? Five days late

9. Did you have morning sickness? Never, thankfully.

10. What did you crave? Fruit, especially watermelon.

11. What irritated you the most? Nothing, really. I loved being pregnant!

12. What was your first child’s sex? Girl

13. How many pounds did you gain throughout the pregnancy? Hah!

14. Did you have any complications during your pregnancy? Nope, except that my stubborn baby insisted on staying breech.

15. Where did you give birth? INOVA Loudoun

16. How many hours were you in labor? Three hours total, from first contraction and water breaking to delivery. (C-section, since she was still breech.)

17. Who drove you to the hospital? Jonathan

18. Did you take medicine to ease the pain? An unmedicated c-section wouldn’t go very well!

19. How much did your child weigh? 7 lb 15.8oz

20. What did you name him/her? Abigail Claire

21. How old is your first born today? Three years old, already!

22. Who does your child look like? She looks exactly like I did at her age.

23. Did you get mad at your husband during labor? Not at all - he was my rock from start to finish.

I figure if I write something here and get it posted tonight, I’ll have managed to update more this month in all of last year combined. Let’s hear it for accomplishing lofty goals! Right, okay…so three whole updates is not exactly a massive effort, but it’s better than nothing. It’s frustrating - every single day there’s something that I tell myself I won’t want to forget, but somehow finding the time to actually write it down ends up falling off the bottom of my to-do list before the day is over.

Abby is three, and it’s both the most frustrating, exasperating age yet and also really fun and amazing. She’s such a little personality now, and she makes me laugh every day with her creativity, her imagination, and her observations of the world. Example: tonight after bedtime stories she told me that she would grow bigger and bigger and bigger and then she can sit in the big chair and work on the big computer. I should grow smaller and smaller so I can sit on her lap. Then she will put her princess CD in the computer and we will “sing together happily and clap our hands.” Then I should get bigger and bigger and hold her again so she can be my tiny baby. I love that she comes up with these stories that give me just a little peek at what’s going on in her busy little head!

Caroline is almost four months old, and already I miss my squishy little baby. She’s full-on in “grab everything” mode right now, but in that maddening place where she grabs on but can’t figure out how to let go of something when she’s done. Instead she just screams until someone comes to rescue her from the awful fate of Continuing to Hold On. When she’s not busy grabbing everything in reach (or trying for what’s actually out of reach) she loves just looking around and studying the world. It’s so fun to watch her develop and start to see how she and her big sister are alike - and how they’re different. I’ll admit that I’m really glad that they don’t really look much alike at this stage - Abby is so blonde and fair, and Caroline has her father’s darker hair and coloring. If nothing else, it’s a subtle reminder to me that they are different and I can’t necessarily expect her to be just like her sister at every step of the game. Nothing like having expectations to give you a quick slap in the face as a parent!

It occurred to me just a bit ago that I really need to update that image up top there - the most recent photo in that group is from Christmas. Uh, Christmas 2006, that is. My big girl is TWICE as old as she was in that picture! And to not offend, of course, I should probably include some of the new baby girl, since she is also insanely cute. (That’s based on my completely objective observations, obviously.) (Wow, who knew there were so many words that start with “ob”?)

Making new masthead images don’t exactly fit into my schedule this weekend, though, so I will cheat and do this instead:

It’s totally cliché to say that I’ve been busy, but…well, I’ve been busy. I was working full-time, and also freelancing almost full-time. There was a vacation in there somewhere, and a lot of other busy-ness both boring and less boring. We moved - that was not boring, but not a picnic.

Oh, and then there was this:

Caroline Amelia
October 3, 2008

I won’t say “and now I’m back!” but hopefully I’ll be around a little bit more.

Some people wrap their positive pregnancy tests with pretty paper and ribbons and present them by way of announcement. Some save them for…well, not the baby book, I guess. Something. (How would you fit that in a book?) I know of some people with a half-dozen positive tests sitting in a drawer or cabinet just because it seems wrong to throw them out.

I, on the other hand, have never peed on a stick and had a positive result. Plenty of negative results, until I realized what a complete waste of time and money that was given my generally consistent thousand-day cycle, but not a positive test to be found.

Abby is an IVF success story, so our positive test was actually a blood test at the doctor’s office. I was downtown in a meeting when the nurse called with the results, but she didn’t leave a message. I knew I would be an emotional wreck no matter which way the results went, so I didn’t want to call until after we got back to our office. By then I figured I’d be a wreck driving home, so I might as well wait until I got home to call her back.

When I walked into the house I found my husband, who was working from home that day for whatever reason, with the most serious face. He told me that the nurse had called the house with the results of the pregnancy test, and I totally lost it. I was sure he’d be smiling if the test was positive, after all, not being so serious about it! It took me almost five minutes for the rest of his sentence to penetrate - that we were pregnant! He had known that I was pregnant for hours before I did, which I found strangely amusing (and still do).

(Swistle asked how we found out we were pregnant. Who am I to pass up blog fodder?)

I haven’t taken many pictures over the last week (why? I have no idea) but I am still madly in love with this one. I still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that I really do not have a baby anymore - I have an amazing little girl, instead. I thought I’d share this for Best Shot Monday.

Almost every parent thinks that their kid is the cutest ever. I’m sorry to tell you, though, that if you are not my husband and you think that…you are wrong. Because my kid is, in fact, the cutest kid ever. You need proof? Okay.

I’m sorry, did I say “cute”? I might not have been entirely correct there. Maybe the more accurate phrase would be “so gorgeous it might be illegal in some states”.

I was thinking today about the state of my life, trying to figure out whether I’m happier or less happy than I used to be. There are a lot of things in our world right now that are extremely frustrating and cause me not a little bit of stress. I try to manage it as best I can, but I’ve found myself lately reverting to my “old faithful” coping strategy - namely, ignore it and hope it goes away. That would be great, except I’m actually all grown up now and do in fact know that problems ignored do not tend to fade away painlessly.

All that aside, though, I realized that overall, I’m actually very happy. And it’s easy to see why - Abby. Every single day, she makes me smile and laugh like no one else can. When I’m sad, she looks at me with her little face all screwed up with concern and comes to sit on my lap and give me kisses and say “all better?” (It sounds more like “Ah Bettah” though.) She is such an earnest and serious child, all contemplation and examination - but she’s also an incredibly happy and funny person who loves nothing more than to do something silly just because she knows it will make me laugh.

She reminds me that no matter what problems I may think I have, I am actually fortunate and wealthy beyond what I could ever deserve. I could lose every material thing I have and I would still be one of the luckiest people around. She is perspective, personified.

Ugh, what a day. I haven’t talked about it much (at all?) here, but we are (have been) actively trying to make our baby

Abby a big sister. I was hoping that maybe actually having Abby would be some kind of miracle potion that fixed everything that’s wrong with me, but…apparently not.

When Abby was about twenty months old and had been fully weaned for almost six months and I still had seen no signs of fertility, we knew that we needed to get with the program and resume our contributions to our fertility practice’s swanky new digs. (I kid. Mostly. Not bitter at all. Much. But the new offices are really very nice. They seem expensive.)

So, blah blah stuff happens blah, we come to today when I am scheduled for a frozen embryo transfer (FET) of the one embryo left from the IVF that gave us Abby. They were supposed to call on Tuesday or yesterday to let me know what time I needed to be there (over an hour away) for the procedure. No one ever called, and - surprise! - now that I actually HAVE a kid, I am much less flexible. (There are babysitters to schedule and arrangements to make! Not so much with the spontaneous over here, people!) I called them and determined that our transfer was scheduled for today at 2:30pm.

All was going according to plan, babysitter (aka Grandma) had arrived, and we were almost ready to leave - early, to have a grownup lunch on the way - when one of the nurses called. Not my usual nurse, who was on vacation this week, but one of the other nurses. (Relevant? Who knows. She’s very nice, and I don’t blame her at all for anything that happened. Moving on.) She was calling to catch us before we left, to let us know that our embryo had not survived the thawing process so the transfer was cancelled.

Sad. Disappointed. No more shot at having “not twins” conceived together but born 2+ years apart. Money down the drain (infertility treatments make you somewhat immune to that pain, it turns out), more procedures needed. No amazing positive pregnancy test as the best Christmas present I could ask for this year. But…all things considered, my expectations had been pretty low, so it was okay.

Plus - hey! We have a babysitter, we already took the day off, let’s go to lunch. We were sitting at lunch when my cell phone rang:

So. Apparently they rescheduled my transfer? Without telling me? And…um. They had the right person, earlier, when the called to tell me the embryo didn’t survive…right? Because that would sort of suck if we had to rush all the way up there. Except it wouldn’t suck because yay! Undead embryo! Maybe I should call the nurse? To be sure?

I did, and they did have the right person (yes, that’s me with the shriveled useless embryo, thanks) and were rightfully pretty horrified about what happened. Thankfully (for me) they handled it was well as possible - the nurse took it seriously and talked to my doctor, who also took it seriously and called me directly to apologize and talk about what they could do to avoid problems like this in the future and to make it up to me in some way. Other than the part where I’m obviously not pregnant RIGHT NOW I’m as okay with the resolution as I can be.

And I get to spend the holiday season doing a fresh IVF cycle, which sounds SO FUN I can hardly describe it here. Those of you who have been there know exactly what I mean, and those of you who haven’t should just be glad of that.

This has not been the best day ever.