Terrifying and True

Walter: Baby Sally has no teeth?
Me: Actually, Baby Sally has TWO teeth, now.
Walter (incredibly alarmed): Baby Sally has teeth right now?!?

News from the Womb

We learned many things about our Scooter today:

• The Scooter is limber.  Baby spent the whole ultrasound with feet right up next to face, which is some kind of advanced yoga move, we think.  We have amended our prediction from "soccer scholarship" to "yoga scholarship."
• The Scooter is coordinated.  We watched in awe as Scooter did the most energetic thumb-sucking the world has ever seen.  So cool!
• The Scooter has two kidneys, a brain, a heart, a diaphragm, a stomach, an umbilical chord, two hands, two feet, and long-looking arms and legs.  Based on the amount of heartburn I'm getting, we're also thinking that Scooter has hair (the ultrasound did not reveal anything to do with this. The war between my Scandinavian genes and Sean's hairy genes wages on unseen.)
• The Scooter is terrifically uncooperative.  It turns out that impressive yoga positions are not the best for getting pictures and measurements of the spine.  We tried turning me over on one side, then the other.  Then some walking around, then some orange juice and graham crackers.  The solution ended up being the classic "dig the ultrasound wand into Mommy's belly as painfully as possible" maneuver. The radiology tech's comment: "Oh, the things we do for our children!"

While the Scooter's position was no good for spine-revealing, it was perfect for revealing other important parts of the body.  And, let's be honest, none of us were looking forward to this ultrasound and thinking, "I wonder what the baby's diaphragm will look like!"

The question of the day, truly, was this:

OR

The answer is known and shall indeed be revealed, but a couple of thoughts, first (I'm just trying to recreate for you the experience we had this morning, when the ultrasound tech did every other possible measurement before giving us a blessed glimpse between Scooter's legs.)

First, I'd like to reiterate that "Scooter" is an entirely sex/gender neutral nickname.  It was, in fact, one of my nicknames.  Video evidence exists: during the epic Easter Egg hunt of 1986 one of the clues read, in part, "To the computer/scamper, dear Scooter."  It's also been a favorite term of endearment used interchangeably between me and Sean (see Seinfeld, "shmoopy.")  You can clearly see our preference for the nickname in these photos from the Edison-Albright archives:

Jersey Shore; Wonderland Pier; Circa 2007

Park Ridge, IL; Jewel; Circa 2009

So, no matter what we saw on that ultrasound today, "Scooter" is a nickname we will continue to use proudly and often. (More family name trivia: Sean's mom was nicknamed "Skeeter" by her dad. And my grandpa was named Kermit.  So, a rich precedence for Muppet-related names on both sides.)

Second, keep in mind that the ultrasound revealed our baby's sex, but not our baby's gender. (For more on that, scroll down to part II of this post, and read the excellent comments, too.)

I'm trying to think of other ways to stall, but I'm all out.  So, if you're still curious about the sex of our baby ...

Project Delayed

Hi all. We've been sitting on this decision for a couple weeks, but putting this blog on hold isn't as easy as it was to start it up. For a whole bunch of reasons, we've decided to delay project: baby for a couple years. But it has not been for nought! Here's the recap:

• On the plus side, I am completely free of prescription drugs for the first time since 1989 (when I started prescription allergy meds.) I have had a drastic decrease in migraines--one or two a month instead of 3 or 4 a week.
• Unfortunately, my endometriosis symptoms are returning, a little bit worse each month. I can live with it for now, but may need to remedicate if it keeps getting worse.
• As much as we both know it's the right choice for us right now, we're sad. We've gotten to the point now, though, where we can talk about hypothetical baby without being sad, knowing that he/she is still in our future.

Thank you for reading, thank you for lurking and commenting. We'll take this up again when the time is right.

Cupcake therapy

We've gone a long time without posting. Unfortunately, it's not because we're holding our breath and waiting the appropriate time before announcing that we're having a baby. I'm not pregnant, and the whole project may be on hold for a bit. But backing up to why we haven't posted ...
Jason, a cousin I've adored my whole life, killed himself on June 19. My grandpa correctly called it a tragedy--Jason's sister pointed out that it's the only tragedy our generation has ever personally experienced. While my family is interesting and complicated enough to double as a genogram glossary, nothing really bad has happened since my dad's mom died young of breast cancer and my mom's dad died young of lung cancer (both before I was born.) My Umma (mom's mom) died when I was 11, but that was after a 17-month good-bye, before the real pain of cancer set in, and while she was still living independently. I still cry about it sometimes and will suddenly miss her like crazy, but I can recognize that it was pretty close to "the good death."
I don't think there's anything good about Jason being dead. That's not Pastor Anne talking, that's Jason's little cousin. Who is angry and really, really sad. I can intellectually appreciate the argument that he's not living in misery any more, but my body rejects that reasoning. I'm not worried at all about his soul--I just wish he wasn't dead.
The good came in the way our family came together, doing just what a family is supposed to do--taking turns taking care of each other, taking turns leaning on each other for comfort. I was reminded that I love them very, very much. The good is also in our memories of Jason, which we shared along with a huge number of pictures.
On the ride back to Connecticut from the funeral, my legs--which had been aching all week--began throbbing with pain and my feet swelled up. Sean and I sang for the last two hours of the trip to help distract me. Still in our funeral clothes, we drove straight to Student Health, thinking they'd give me a diuretic for the swelling. They sent us to the emergency room, and 8 hours later they'd ruled out kidney failure (whew!) and blood clots, but wanted me to follow up some abnormal blood flow they found on the ultrasound. I'm going to have a cardiology work up and an abdominal ultrasound to make sure everything's OK with the remnant tumor and my heart--although I'm pretty convinced that it was all from too much salt, standing, and dehydration. My legs are still achey, but the swelling is gone; I'm not worried. But, if there is something wrong, it's probably good that I'm not pregnant.
To work through all this I've been baking. I've made strawberry cupcakes with strawberry cream cheese frosting, Texas sheet cake, chocolate cupcakes with strawberry cream cheese frosting, buttermilk shortcakes and blueberry/lemon cupcakes with lemon cream cheese frosting. All were quite good and most of it went to my Greek class. I think I'm ready now, though, to be less productive in my sadness. I am grateful for the voices of my pastoral care profs that (in my head) tell me what I'm feeling is normal and OK. Knowing these things, having read those books, I still don't know what to do with this grief.

Will it be Dorothy or Theodore?

I wrote in the last post that I pretty much always think I'm pregnant. A monthly ritual that grew out of this in the past was me calling Sean and opening with a cheerful "I'm not pregnant!" It felt different to say it this month, but not so bad. We weren't expecting to get pregnant in the first month of trying, and I haven't been to a doc about the triptans yet, so it's not terrible news. I got a bad migraine Wednesday night and popped a triptan without any worry, which was nice. And it hasn't been so bad, endometriosis symptom-wise. It turns out the vitamin B-50 I take every day to prevent migraines is also good for preventing cramps. Excellent!

But yeah, it's still disappointing. So, based on my recent research, I think we made need "a touch of destiny" to jump start this project.

So, solemnly and according to the pirate code, I vow that if I get pregnant this summer, resultant baby will have a name derived from ancient Greek.

Speaking of Greek ... let's not speak of Greek right now. Certainly not in Greek, though I'm amazed at how much I've learned in four days. I'm going to go put my 100% quiz up on the refrigerator when I'm done writing this, but I'm putting in 8 hours of studying outside of class (which is four hours) every day. Getting pregnant under these conditions would definitely be a miracle--I haven't learned the word for that yet, but I bet I will soon.

Oh, so the subject line ... names help us as mnemonics for vocab words, like in the lesson we learned today there's a word that transliterates roughly to "dorahn" meaning gift ... Dorothy and Theodore both mean "Gift of God" because doro/dore=gift and thy/theo=God. Anyway, I'm keeping my eye on the Greek names.