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prayers, answered and un

One day, several months ago, as we sat in church listening to the sermon, I found myself looking out at some people in the congregation - a father with his son and daughter.  The father was wearing glasses, and the son was wearing his glasses (although I've also seen him without them), and the daughter didn't have glasses on. I tried to think whether I'd ever seen her in glasses or heard her mention contacts.  The mother of the two kids was not sitting with them - she was sitting with us in the choir - and I know she wears contacts.  We occasionally see her in glasses.  I only thought about this for a second (not nearly as long as it has taken me to type this). 

These thoughts led me to start thinking about genetics, and about how things like poor eyesight make their way from one generation to the next, and I wondered about the baby growing inside me, and whether she would need glasses.  Geoff wears glasses.  I have had glasses during two different periods of my life, but for eyestrain, not for vision.  I guess it remains to be seen whether Katie will need glasses. 

And then I started thinking about other members of mine and Geoff's families, and which of them have glasses, when suddenly, as clear as a photograph held right in front of me - no, as clear as a person sitting right in front of me - I had a vision of Stephanie, wearing her glasses, leaning toward me, beaming at me happily and maybe a little conspiratorially, the way she did so many times.  And as I saw her, I felt an urgent PLEASE rise up inside me, a plea for Stephanie to be alive, for her death to have been a dream (a nightmare), and for me to have a chance to see her smile at me like that again.  And even though I knew, of course, that my plea would not be answered, there was a part of me that kept hoping that somehow I had misunderstood, that even though all these months had passed, that she was really ok, and that her death had never happened.

On a different day, around the end of April, in the last month or so before Annabel was born, I was driving home from work on Lake Shore Drive when I realized that I couldn't remember feeling any major movements from the baby that day.  Usually there was a flurry of activity at some point every morning, and again every afternoon, that was so forceful that I couldn't help but stop whatever I was doing to focus completely on the baby in there, to wonder what she was doing, and to be grateful for her existence (but often also to wish that she wouldn't push quite so hard).  I couldn't remember any such flurry from that day.  There was no such movement right then, either.

I reached down to my belly to feel for her hard shape under my skin.  Just there, to the right of my belly button, I felt an expanse of babyness - maybe a back, or a butt, or a head.  I pushed on it gently.  It didn't push back. 

This was normal.  She slept, often, so the fact that she wasn't pushing back at me didn't mean anything was wrong.  I knew that she was probably just fine.  But still.  I had a nagging sense that maybe, just maybe, something was wrong. 

I pushed again.  Nothing.  "No."  I said.  I was alone in the car.  I said it out loud anyway.  "No.  No, no, no, no, no."  After a few minutes, I started to cry.  "No."

I kept driving, and I kept waiting for movement, and every so often I would push on my belly, and there would be no response (even though each time I could feel some part of her little body in there, under my skin).  Even though there was no real reason for it, I felt panic rising inside me.  I thought of the day, almost a year before, when we'd gone to the doctor and discovered that I was having a miscarriage; I thought of how the day had been sunny and clear and warm.  I thought of how up until that afternoon, there had been nothing to distinguish that day from any other day, no way to know about the grief that I was going to experience before the end of the day.  Nothing to warn me that I was going to spend the afternoon sobbing and the next few days despairing.  No clues. 

"Please," I said.  "Please," again, out loud.  "Please.  Please.  Please."   

I thought how easily this day could be another day like that day last May, how suddenly, with no warning, this day could turn from ordinary to unforgettable. I thought about how bad things so often do happen that way, coming out of nowhere, slamming you to the ground and knocking the wind out of you. I thought about how so many bad things happen not because we deserve them, but in spite of the fact that probably nobody deserves them.  I imagined getting home, telling Geoff, driving to the hospital, discovering that the baby had died, deciding where to go from there (I was eight months pregnant; there would have to be labor and delivery; there would be no miscarriage in the privacy of my own bathtub), and wondering whether I would ever find the strength to try again. 

And then, as I drove along, crying and praying and pleading, as I was preparing myself for disaster and despair (it couldn't really have been very long - maybe it was fifteen minutes, or maybe it was only five), she moved, gently, inside me.  And then she moved again.  And then again, more deliberately, and stronger. 

I gasped a huge sigh of relief.  "Oh, thank you," I said, still crying (maybe crying harder).  "Thank you.  Thank you, thank you, thank you." 

A little over a week ago, at the end of July, we were in Halifax, Nova Scotia, visiting Geoff's family while I was on maternity leave.  While we were there, we all drove out to Lawrencetown Beach, to scatter Stephanie's ashes in the ocean, from a beach she loved to visit.  There was fog everywhere, and the air was much colder than I'd realized it would be, so before we could walk over to the water, we had to spend a few minutes dressing Annabel more warmly, and putting a jacket on Katie.  Geoff strapped on the Baby Bjorn, and we put Annabel into it, and we all walked over to the rocky beach together.  As we stood there in the fog and wind, watching what was left of Stephanie's body fall into the water and blow through the air, I did not say "please."  I tried, really hard, to think about how glad I was to have known her, to be grateful to have had her as my sister in law and friend, and to feel lucky to have known her.  I tried, really hard, to pray "thank you," even though there will always be a part of me, I think, that can't help but say "no." 

In the car, driving back into Halifax after we left the beach, Katie (who had sobbed nearly hysterically at the beach) kept asking us to tell her about Stephanie and about how she had died.  We did the best we could to explain, again, what had happened, and why, and made sure to let her know that we didn't completely understand it ourselves.  Katie started to cry again.  "I don't remember her," she said, and cried as if she understood just how much of a loss that was. 

Annabel is two months old now, and except for a mild rash on her cheeks, she is completely healthy.  For the most part, she is a happy, alert, easily soothed baby, who makes me smile every day.  There is a woman at the church who wants to hold Annabel every time we see her. "A healthy baby," she says, "is like winning the lottery."  She smiles at us, and tells us how lucky we are.  We smile back, and nod, and say that she's right.

A Birth Story

 Written on 5/30/08 (four days after our daughter Annabel was born.  8 lb, 14 oz, 21 inches long.  She looks a lot like her big sister.

Ok, so I'll see how much I can type right now, two-handed, with Annabel in a sling, while it's just Annabel and me at home.

Sunday morning (May 25th) we went to church, and all of Geoff's choir from the 9:00 a.m. service was there - normally there are two services, at 9 and 11, but in the summer it switches to one 10 a.m. service, and this particular Sunday was the first of those. The only reason I mention this is that all of these folks in the early choir (who I don't know very well, but who know Geoff, so I'm sure they feel like they know me) kept coming up to me and annoying me. I can't tell you how many of them said, "Are you ready? You look ready!" I was thinking that "looking ready" was equivalent to looking really freaking tired and irritable - oh, and huge, of course. One woman also reached out and rubbed my belly when people were "passing the peace." And there was a LOT of "Oh, so Thursday is the big day!" as if my due date was some sort of guarantee. Also, see 9 months pregnant: I was definitely more irritable than they deserved.

After church, Katie and Geoff and I went for lunch, then came home and took naps. After we got up, Katie and I made chocolate chip cookie dough, and we started doing some more cleaning/straightening around the house. I was sweeping the rest of the living room (I'd started the day before), wearing one of my many Target maternity dresses, at about 6:30 or 6:45 in the evening, when suddenly I felt warm liquid running down my legs, and I knew that was it. I pointed out to Geoff that my water had broken.  He was pretty calm about it.  I went to get some dry underwear and a towel.

We spent the next couple of hours packing my suitcase for the hospital (I had at least made a list of essentials the week before, so I didn't have to really focus), Geoff called my parents and his parents, we took quite a few family portraits, me sitting on the couch on top of a towel. (I wouldn't have cared if we had actually done this, at that point, but I'd been talking about wanting to do it for weeks, so when Geoff set up the tripod and said we should go ahead, we did.)  I kept leaking fluid, which Katie was mildly grossed out by ("I don't like the fluit!"), and which the dog kept licking up if Geoff didn't get to it first (which I was a little grosssed out by, myself). Geoff made some calls to find someone who could come stay with Katie until my mom made it up here from her house, which is about 4 hours away. (Our friend Rebecca, who was our first choice, was out of town for Memorial Day weekend.)  I soaked a couple more pairs of underwear before I decided not to put any new ones on. I soaked a few towels. Eventually Geoff heard back from our old neighbors and friends Heather & Arek, who said they'd come get Katie at the hospital and bring her back to our place to wait for my mom.  (Thank you, Heather & Arek!)  We left for the hospital around 7:45 or so, I think, and got there around 8.

Katie had been born on a Sunday, and my current OB, Dr. Thorpe, had been on call that day, so we wondered if she'd be there this time.  It turned out she WAS the doctor on call from 8 a.m. Sunday through 8 a.m. Monday. So we were glad about that. We checked in, and I wasn't really haven't any major contractions.  Not a whole lot of fluid was leaking anymore compared to when we were at home. They immediately hooked me up to monitors and took my blood pressure, which was SCARY high at first. Scary to me, anyway - at first it was 157 or something over 95, and then it was 162 over 107. It's never been high like that, so they didn't panic too much, but were concerned enough to take some blood and run some tests and have the doctor come by sooner rather than later. The next time they took it, though, it was 135 over 84 or something, and the rest of the time it ranged between that and down to 113 over 62 or so, so it became a complete non-issue.

They checked my cervix, said the baby wasn't dropped all the way, that I was about 3 cm dilated, about 60% effaced. They hooked me up to monitors, which annoyed me, because I wanted to walk around, which we told them - they said as long as the doctor said it was ok, I could, but because my BP had been so high, I needed to stay put for now. The fetal heartbeat was great the whole time, galloping away in our hospital room.  Katie pointed out on her own that it sounded like a horse galloping.  I was SO uncomfortable in the stupid hospital bed - I know I wasn't really having much in the way of contractions, because the fact that my lumbar region was unsupported was bothering me much more than anything else. Somewhere in there, they put in an IV, in part for antibiotics.

At some point in there, our friends called Geoff's cell to say they were downstairs to get Katie, so he took her to them. She was pretty worried and scared and was trying to be brave - before she left, she kept giving me hugs and trying not to cry, but crying anyway. She wanted to stay with me, but at the same time was really worried that I might "make loud noises" and "there would be blood" (both things I had told her before just to give her information, not to scare her...oops).   After a few minutes of that, though, Geoff took her to them and came back, and then I got the ok to walk around, so we walked up and down the floor a little, but still nothing was really happening, contraction-wise.

It was some point after this that my OB came back and said we might want to consider pitocin.  The biggest downside she saw to pitocin was if I wanted to manage without pain relief, because the pitocin would make that really difficult to do. We said we'd think about it. I haven't talked about it here, but my hope was that I could manage without pain relief this time. Last time, with Katie, I had gone for about 16 hours without anything, and then finally, in desperation, crying, thinking I was not going to have the strength to give birth at all, I asked for an epidural. So this time I'd been hoping to handle things differently - do more walking around, letting gravity help, etc. But since my body wasn't doing anything, and we were already at the hospital - and since my water had broken, I wasn't going anywhere - I just decided. I said yes to the pitocin and decided we'd see how it went. They started the pitocin around midnight. For at least a couple of hours, still, not much was going on with contractions. Not regular, not very strong. I was getting really sleepy but didn't really want to sleep - I just wanted to get the show on the road.

Sometime around 2:30 the contractions started getting stronger, and around 3 I decided that I was ready to get an epidural. I didn't feel desperate. I didn't feel like I couldn't do it. I just suddenly felt like, All right, then. This is apparently what my body does - my water breaks, the uterus futzes around for a long time to get through the early stage of labor, and the last stage is pretty quick. And since this is where I am, and these are the tools I have, and since this time I no longer feel like I have to prove anything, I feel totally ok with getting an epidural. I kind of mused on it for awhile, testing to see if I was going to be disappointed in myself (I had been, a little bit, with Katie), and decided I wasn't going to be. So the next time the nurse came back I said I wanted the epidural.

It was almost 4 a.m. by the time they gave me the epidural. At that point the contractions were pretty strong. And I have to say, I HATE that stupid blood pressure cuff that goes off every 15 minutes while you are getting pitocin (and every 3 minutes when they are putting in the epidural).  Of course it was worse because the cuff had bad timing - it would go off during the strongest contractions, and was going off during a contraction AND when the anesthesiologist was about to put in the epidural. I told him it was the trifecta, and he laughed and said he'd wait until at least the cuff had stopped. The numbing shot hurt WAY more than I remembered it hurting with the epidural I got with Katie, and I started to cry a little. But other than that, it was fine. It gave me a lot of relief, and even the uncomfortable bed stopped bothering me. I could still feel all of the contractions, though, which again, was different than with Katie. Right before or after the epidural they checked me again and said I was 4-5 cm dilated, and about 80-90% effaced, and that the baby's head was "right there." So I at least felt like I had made some progress before getting the epidural. (I'd been thinking "open...open...open" to myself every time I had a contraction, and it was weird how much that helped me - I could really feel like I was dilating instead of tightening up.)

After the epidural, it was pretty quiet for awhile. I could feel the contractions, but barely, until an hour or so later, when they started getting STRONG again. Geoff came over and sat next to me and kept offering me his hand and telling me to "grip it and rip it" (which I also heard him saying to Annabel on the balcony in the sunshine yesterday, the weirdo), which made me laugh until the contractions got really strong again. I was feeling kind of down at this point, because I was thinking I was in for a long labor like with Katie, who wasn't born until 2:45 pm after getting to the hospital around 8 or 9 pm the night before. I was worried that the contractions felt so strong already, even with the epidural, so we had the anesthesiologist come back and adjust the epidural to give me some more relief - that was around 6:30, I think. Maybe 7.  I kept laboring, and the contractions were still REALLY strong to me - way more than I felt any of the contractions after getting my epidural with Katie - and around 8 my doctor came back and smiled and said she wished she could stay for the birth, but her own kids hadn't seen her in a little too long, and that Dr. Brennan would be there soon, etc. Then they checked my cervix, and the nurse looked at her, and Dr. Thorpe said, "she's complete?" And she said yes, maybe just a tiny lip of cervix in the way, but she's 10 cm and the baby's head is right there.

That's when I felt like crying more than at any other point, because I was so relieved, thinking that I was actually going to do this, that it was going to be soon, that this was mostly over, everything was going to be ok, and we were going to get a real baby out of this. I did cry some, and felt kind of hysterical. Dr. Thorpe told the nurse to call the OB on the way and tell her to go back home, because Dr. Thorpe would stay, since we were ready now. They asked me if I was feeling the urge to push, and I said not yet, but about 5 or 10 minutes later, I was feeling it (another thing that I did not feel at all with Katie), and told them so. They got everything ready, Dr. Thorpe asked me if I remembered from four whole years ago how to push, and I said I thought so, and they took me off of various monitors, helped push back my legs, told me to tell them when I was having a contraction.

During the first pushing contraction, the doctor said, "This baby is rocketing towards me!" And the nurse said, "Wow, she's a good pusher!" I felt very proud, which makes me laugh a little, but it's true. I pushed again during a second contraction, and this time after the contraction was over I could feel the baby's head down there even after I'd stopped pushing.

On the third contraction I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, and this whole entire tiny human being slipped out onto the bed in front of me, and she wasn't even very messy. It was 8:31 a.m.  She started crying almost immediately. They wiped her off a tiny bit, let Geoff cut the cord (there had been meconium in Katie's fluid, so he didn't get to cut hers), handed her to me to hold, and I just looked at her and cried a little and overall felt really happy. After a little while, they cleaned her up a little more, took her blood sugar (which was a little low the first time, but fine every time after that), weighed her (8 lb 14 oz, one oz heavier than Katie), measured her, and then gave her back to me to nurse her. I hardly felt when the placenta came out. Dr. Thorpe said I had two tiny tears - at first she only saw one - and put one stitch in each. It was all pretty quiet and serene - only 2 nurses, my OB, and me and Geoff. (With Katie there were a lot more people, maybe since it was the afternoon? It's a teaching hospital.) She latched on within a half an hour of being born, probably. She is, in general so far, sweet and calm and completely helpless, and I can't believe that it was only a few days ago that she was still inside me.  She looks a lot like her big sister did when she was born.

And there you go. The end of one thing, and the beginning of something even better.

Continuing pictures of Annabel & family are being posted here.

I can't wait

It's 1:50 in the morning, and I can't sleep.  My head is stuffed up, my right shoulder (which for some reason is the only side I can easily fall asleep on - even though once I've gone to sleep I can sleep on either side) is stiff and sore, my eyes are bleary.  Helloooooooo, last few weeks of pregnancy!

And hello out there to anybody who's still reading!  Since I'm up, I thought I'd let you know that I'm ok, I'm still pregnant, and the pregnancy is still going fine (very well, actually).  My due date is still May 29th (30th if you ask my doctor, but in my limited experience, they can't handle compensating for leap day, so they're a day off).  I've been feeling really good. Mobile, fairly well-rested, not too uncomfortable, not too bloated.  And then we hit the 38th week.  And now I'm getting really swollen.  I'm not sleeping well.  During a large portion of each day, I'm uncomfortable no matter how or where I sit.  I remember this from being pregnant with Katie - I guess the good part is that with Katie, I am pretty sure this started at least a few weeks earlier.  (Let's just hope I don't go a few weeks overdue this time.)  Also, the mysterious and incredibly painful RIPPING sensation that developed in my shin (and then shins) when I was about 6 months pregnant with Katie has recently recurred.  This means that getting around is even more awkward than it would be just with the huge belly, since kneeling causes me pretty severe pain. 

All of this said, don't be fooled into thinking I'm unhappy.  I'm actually not unhappy, not at all.  I'm irritable, I'm uncomfortable, and I'm exhausted.  I'm basically miserable.   But not unhappy!  A week and a half ago Geoff and I went on the half hour tour of the birth center at the hospital where this baby will be born (and where Katie was also born).  First of all, let me just say how strange it was to realize that I had very little memory of the actual details of the place; despite the fact that my time there was overall a few of the most memorable days of my life, I had no idea which room Katie had been born in, or where we stayed the next two nights.  A lot of this was because I hardly ever left either room, while we were there (Geoff remembered much more), but also it's possible that during the time I was there I was somewhat distracted by something more important.  Possible.

We went on the tour because it was short, and it's free, and to see if anything had changed in the four years since we were last there.  Not much appeared to have changed.  While we were there, we passed some people waiting to be admitted (the woman looking pretty huge and tired), and then a brand new mother being wheeled from labor & delivery to the "mother-baby unit" for the rest of her stay, and then, later, a woman and her brand new baby, in a wheelchair, waiting for her husband or partner or whoever was with her to pull the car around so that she could go home.  And when I looked at them - and when I think of them now - I got tears in my eyes, at how this happens.  It takes so long to get there (for some of us longer than others), and yet the actual transition from pregnant woman to mother & child is so short and amazing and monumental. 

It has taken us a long time to get to where we are.  We started trying to get pregnant in January 2006, almost 2.5 years ago now, and it's only in the past couple of months that I've started really believing (95% of the time, anyway) that we're going to come out the other side of all of this with a real live baby.  A baby!  I've wanted another baby so much for so long now.  Over the months (years) I've made myself miserable with the wanting, the hoping, the disappointment, the anxiety. I've felt like a failure and a cursed person, and I've felt guilty for feeling that way when I am as lucky as I am to have my sweet loving husband and my most amazing wonderful daughter.  I've tried to come to terms with the idea of only having one child, and I do know in my heart that if that's how things had happened, we would have been just fine.  But wow, did I ever want this baby.  Wow, do I still.  Do I ever. 

I haven't written any letters to the new baby the way I did to Katie, and my feelings about the new baby are wrapped up in a little bit of anxiety about how Katie will handle it.  I have faith that I will love this new baby just as much as I love Katie, but right now, with Katie on the outside and the baby in there?  I can't actually comprehend how that will happen.  On the other hand, I think that meeting and taking care of this newborn will be easier and more rewarding, in a lot of ways, than it was to first meet and take care of Katie, because I know firsthand what's in store.  That first year of Katie's life?  That was one of the best years of my life. 

And so, second child of mine, if you are reading this someday, I want you to know how much you were wanted.  How many tears I shed about the idea that I might not ever meet you.  How overwhelmed I am at the thought that I will meet you soon.  How happy your whole family is going to be to see your beautiful face for the first time.  How much I'm looking forward to being your mother, this DESPITE the fact that this time, I know what I'm in for (well, sort of - more than I did with Katie, anyway).  How certain I am that you are going to be my one of my very favorite people in the world, and how often looking at you is going to make my heart feel like bursting with how much I love you.  I do love you already, the same way I did Katie - but this time I know how much bigger this love will be when you're born than it is now.  This time I know that the best parts, by far, are yet to come. 

I plan to be on leave from work for the entire months of June and July, and part of August.  Geoff is finishing his doctorate and graduating in June, and then will only be working his part time job as music minister at a church (which only has one service in the summer, and only one night of choir practice each week).  We are taking Katie out of daycare a couple of weeks after the baby is born - in the fall, she will start half-day preschool.  The next few months are going to be a real family summer vacation for our brand new family of four, and I should tell you: I can't wait. 

Weekend update

Katie is having quiet time in her room right now (which perhaps may become a nap), and Geoff is taking a nap, and I am eating root beer float ice cream.  It is DELICIOUS.  This is the second gallon I've plowed through on my own...TODAY!  Ok, kidding, no.  In the past two or three weeks.  I am pretty sure I'm the only one eating it, though, and the second gallon is almost gone.  As I was just dipping myself this cup of ice cream next to me, I was thinking, "WHY didn't I just buy two gallons the last I was at the store?  That would have been so smart!"  But alas.

(I don't really have the energy or focus or skill set at this time to write an entry here that is polished and related to a single topic.  I'm just going to babble for a little while.)

I am reaching the end stage of pregnancy now, as far as how I feel.  Bending over is still not so bad, because I tend to squat instead of bending straight over, but getting up from a prone position has a tendency to make me feel like a turtle on its back.  And OH, my aching back, if I walk for any length of time, especially at the end of a long day.  Geoff and Katie have started walking to her daycare almost every weekday, now, and on Wednesdays, when I work from home, I've walked with them.  It's a little over a mile away (even longer since we usually try to stay away from the busiest streets, which would be the shortest rout).  For Katie, this means if she walks there and back, she's walking two miles in a day, which we figure is a lot for a four year old; perhaps not surprisingly, she has been accepting bedtime and sleeping through the night so much better the past couple of weeks.  But for Geoff - and for me, if I come along - this is over four miles in a day.  On Wednesday I was a little tired on our way home in the morning, but by evening, I was HURTING.  And yesterday I walked to the el in the morning, which is around three quarters of a mile, and that was fine.  But walking home from the station at the end of the day damn near felt like it was going to make me collapse.  When I got home, I walked up the stairs one step at a time; I just didn't have the energy to climb them any faster.  Today we walked to Ihop (and back) for brunch, and by the time we climbed the stairs at home, I was just about as tired, practically limping up the stairs. 

We had a nice Easter.  When I thought about Easter this year, I thought often about what I wrote here, back in 2001, about how often we live in a Good Friday kind of world, where dreams are crushed, and where despair triumphs over hope - where the worst possible outcome is the most common kind of outcome, and where hard work and a good heart don't seem to get you much of anywhere.  The past year or so has been that kind of year, and it put me in that frame of mind.  For awhile, I've been a pessimist, or at least much more than I ever was before.  But this year, as Easter rolled around, I realized how much better I have been feeling lately.  I am feeling good again, feeling once again like my future still holds promise, feeling both that I am blessed to live in this world and that the world is blessed to have me in it.  The pregnancy has helped with that, of course, and even though I'm still aware that huge things could still go wrong with that, I'm willing to bank on things going right. 

If you haven't, I wish you could meet my daughter, because she is seriously awesome.  She's smart and funny and imaginative and sweet.  She tells me out of nowhere that I am beautiful or "simply lovely."  She tells us stories and wants to play pretend with us.  She has started requesting a napkin at the start of dinner, if we've forgotten to give her one, instead of wiping her mouth on her sleeve.  She has stopped fighting bedtime lately - when I tuck her in and leave her room at night, she is often smiling at me.  She is really excited about being a big sister, although she does seem mildly concerned about what exactly is going to happen that will get the baby into our lives.  I've explained to her where the baby will emerge, but she keeps worrying that my belly is just going to burst open at some point. 

I sure hope not, but there have been some days lately when I've been a little worried about that myself.  This baby kicks and wriggles harder and more often than Katie did at this point in the pregnancy; Katie's movements, while frequent, never actually hurt me.  I can't say the same for this time around. 

So, overall.  A good week.  A good month, even.  I'm happy.

10 weekends until my due date. And counting.

To sum up the past almost three months: this pregnancy is kicking my ass. 

It's not that anything unusual or incredibly difficult is going on physically.  In fact, the past month or so has been really great in that respect; I'm no longer having daily headaches, feeling continous nausea, or suffering from extreme fatigue no matter how much sleep I get, and I'm not (quite) yet big enough that I have to have a debate with myself about whether or not it's worth it to try to pick something off the floor.  The cold and cough that lasted for over a month have been gone for at least a month by now.  And the baby in there kicks and punches and twists and turns many, many times each day, so often that even my newly cynical mind doesn't consider, morbidly, on a daily basis, whether or not she's possibly died in there.  (I was thinking that routinely for awhile, not because I expected it, but just because my frame of mind was very much along the lines of "anything bad can happen.) 

But I've been an emotional basketcase.  I think I've been better during the last week (although I probably shouldn't say that for fear of jinxing myself), but before that, wow.  Look out.  I don't have any way to test whether or not I'm more emotional and sensitive than I was when I was pregnant with Katie, but I know that I've been crying more often, feeling hopeless more often, wanting to throw things against the wall more often.  I blame, in large part, the awesome child I live with, who is just doing her part toward growing up - she's testing her boundaries.  Constantly.  I remember being weepy and sensitive when I was pregnant with Katie, but I don't remember feeling, over and over, like I was on the verge of a tantrum.  It's probably not a coincidence that when I was pregnant with her, nobody ever woke me up in the middle of the night.  There was nobody to stop me from going to bed as early as I wanted, or from falling asleep on the couch before dinner.  I didn't have to put anybody else to bed (negotiating with me every freaking step of the way) when all I wanted to do was to collapse in a chair in front of the tv.   

The two major issues we've been facing with Katie have been sleeping through the night - and going to bed on time - and pooping in the toilet.  The way things have shaken out, these end up in direct conflict with each other, because most days she will hold her poop all day, until after bedtime, and then she'll poop in her overnight diaper.  Sometimes it takes her 45 minutes or an hour to do that, and by then it's almost my bedtime. 

Work has also been incredibly frustrating lately.  I won't write much about that here, but I will say that the job itself, even on the best days, is full of possibilities for getting frustrated, since no one ever submits a claim unless and until something has gone wrong.  So by the time I talk to someone, they're usually already angry, and I am often the first person they can take it out on.  When you also take into account the suckage of the real estate industry these days, it means I'm doing spending more time doing more work which is more difficult for people who appreciate it less.  Despite that, we aren't getting any raises this year, and the corporate office adds new requirements on a near-weekly basis.  And this winter has been full of snow and ice and snow and ice and gray, dreary days with no sunshine.  Today it has already snowed at least 6 inches.

And on top of all of the other hard stuff, I find myself thinking often, lately, about my sister in law Stephanie, who in August 2002, three months before Geoff and I got married, asked me when we were going to make her an aunt.  Who came to visit more than once while I was pregnant with Katie, and who took me out to get manicures and pedicures about two months before my due date.  Who apparently bragged about Katie to everyone she knew, and who knew how much we wanted another baby.  Who told me often about how much she looked forward to having her own children.  I know she would have been excited for us, with this new baby on the way.  If she were alive, I bet she would be visiting sometime soon, to take me for a pedicure, to stock our freezer full of ice cream, and to offer to babysit for Katie while Geoff and I went out to a movie or dinner.  There aren't that many people who put their hands against my stomach and felt Katie kicking from the other side, over four years ago, but Stephanie was one of them, and facing the birth of this new daughter makes me think about her.  I miss her. 

And although I don't really grieve my miscarriage in an emotional way anymore, it has been on my mind lately, too.  It hasn't been quite a full year since I found out I was pregnant, but it seems like it, since I had my first positive pregnancy test that time on Good Friday 2007.  I found out that the fetus had died on May 31, 2007; this baby is due to be born on May 29, 2008, almost exactly a year later.  I certainly don't feel like the baby is cursed because of this; in fact, lately, when I think about it, it comforts me for some reason, as if this is all part of an intricate cylical plan. 

This is not how I planned this post to go.  This is where my head has been, a lot of the time, over the past few months.  But there have been plenty of good things, too.

We had a second trimester ultrasound, where we were told that the doctor was "98% sure" that we're having a girl. 

Katie started drawing pictures of our family holding hands.

And writing her own name.  (She can write all the letters of the alphabet now, nearly perfectly.)

My niece turned one.

Katie started participating in a new "liturgical dance troupe" at the church.  She's in a group with 2 or 3 other 4 year olds and one 5 year old.  She loves it.

As for that "other four year olds" part?  Katie turned four at the beginning of this month.  She is everything I was hoping I'd get when I wanted a child, and when I found out I was having a daughter - and lots more bonus things besides, and I told her so. 

Oh, and I've gotten a bunch of cute maternity clothes online from Target. 

At the beginning of the year, I decided to try to post one picture per day on Flickr.  I'm not exactly meeting my goal - I think I've missed 7 days already.  But it's still been satisfying - a tangible record of the past few months that pleases me to look back at, and reminds me in a very literal way that this year has not all been difficult and crazy-making.  Some of it has been downright wonderful. 

(Click on that photo to read the story behind it, because it's pretty awesome.)

It's just a little over two months before my due date, and we don't have a place for the baby to sleep.  (The old crib is broken and has pretty much had it.)  In order to create a place for the baby's bed to go in our room, we need to move the Ikea wardrobe in our bedroom out to the back porch.  But in order to move it to the back porch, we need to move lots of stuff back there down to the basement.  And it's possible that things in the basement will have to be moved around to find a place for what's coming down from the back porch.  Counting this weekend, we have 10 weekends until my due date, and I think we need to make them count.  Geoff also needs to complete his doctoral requirements no later than June (according to the school), and no later than we have a NEWBORN IN THE HOUSE (according to me).  I think it will be a busy spring.

But I also think it will be a good spring, and an even better summer.  The cynicism that's been surrounding me for the last four or five months seems to be lifting, and I feel like I am going back to my old self, able to see and appreciate my blessings even on bad days. 

I just wanted to let you know.

Pregnancy hormones are no joke

Things that have made me cry this week:

1) some Christmas commercial for a jewelry company that features a tween-age girl telling her dad what to get her mom for Christmas (jewelry, of course), not because of the content of the commercial, but because it made me think about what Katie will be like when she is 11 or 12, and then oh, my God, she will be so grown up! and then I'll miss my little girl! 

2) re-telling (out loud, to Geoff) the story that the chaplain on ER told Abby in this week's episode about the boy who tried to lift the rock and couldn't until he used all of his strength, which in his case meant asking for help, because sometimes using all your strength means you have to ask for help.

3) thinking about or talking about Stephanie.  (Ok, the fact that my sister in law died less than 2 months ago probably would have caused tears even if I weren't pregnant, but in the past few weeks it has been out of control and without limitation as to time or place.  Grocery store?  Sure!  My office?  Yes, of course!  While watching My Name Is Earl?  You betcha!)

4) the night we were out of diet Coke and I felt really tired and sorry for myself.

5) the evening I had to stand on the el platform in the cold and wait for 15 minutes before the el came, and the fact that when it came, I had to stand up the whole time.

6) thinking bad thoughts about what could happen with this pregnancy.  And, of course:

7) thinking good thoughts about this pregnancy.

This doesn't even include all of the tears caused by radio host commentary, commercials, children's tv shows, or by reading about or thinking about anybody else going through anything difficult or wonderful in their lives or the lives of those they know and love.  Happy or sad, it's cause for crying.  It's a festival of tears around here, basically, is what I'm saying.

mostly good

I am all right.  Mostly good, in fact. 

I know some of you have been a little concerned about me; maybe something I should have done awhile ago was to highlight the link to my Flickr photostream, because although I have lately been prone to go a month or more without posting here, I rarely go even a week without posting something new on Flickr.  There's been all kinds of news you'd have gleaned from Flickr (not all of it actually new) in the past month or so, while I've failed to post anything here, including: 1) Katie talks a lot; 2) the ultrasound went just fine (and I posted a scan of our ultrasound printout); 3) Katie really won't leave our cat Zellie alone; 4) Katie and I made homemade Christmas ornaments involving LOTS of glitter; 5) Katie knows how to flip her coat on all by herself, and is very proud; 6) my pregnancy is starting to show a little and I'm willing to take a picture of it (and our entryway mirror is really dirty); 7) we put up our tree, and Katie is very happy about it (also, she's experiencing a resurgence in her love of her tutu); 8) I cut several inches of Katie's hair off; 9) I cut a few inches of my hair off, too; 10) there's quite a bit of snow on the ground here in Chicago.  (I did put a little link over in the sidebar to my latest Flickr pictures, but I'll try to set up something better with thumbnail photos, since text is not the ideal way to link to a picture.  But at least there is a link there now.)

I am NOT going to do what I seem to have a never-ending need to do when I come back here after failing to post for a long time.  I'm not going to promise that I'm going to update more often, even if it's just little updates.  I'm not going to promise you that I'll post every day, or every week day, or every Wednesday.  I'm going to keep writing here, whether it's frequent or rare, for a long time, I will bet on that.  But beyond that, nope.  No promises here.  Just good intentions.  And we know what those pave.

So I'm here.  Work is kind of crazy.  One co-worker had a tumor in his spine this fall, had it removed, found it was benign, has been away for months and is now back part-time, going to physical therapy to learn how to use his left side fully again.  Another co-worker had a baby at the end of October and is on maternity leave until January.  Another co-worker's (this one is my friend Rebecca) father in law died last month, so she was gone awhile.  Another co-worker's mother passed away a few weeks ago.  We are all behind on work, and to top it off, although our company canceled its holiday party, it decided to give all of us in claims one "bonus day" for every week in the month of December.  This is in some ways nice, although as my friend Rebecca's husband pointed out, "Oh, that's just what your struggling department needs; mandatory time off!"  It's not actually mandatory, but I personally feel that since we're not getting bonuses or a holiday party or any other gifts from the company, that I will take these BONUS DAYS, by God. 

I took a bonus day yesterday, on Thursday, and Geoff and I did some Christmas shopping without having to deal with crowds.  We even braved and conquered Costco.  It was nice. 

I think of Stephanie often.  Probably every day.  My head still keeps trying to make plans to see her, and the other day when I told Geoff I thought something would be a nice Christmas gift for his sister, I had to stop and say, "I'm sorry you only have one sister." 

And then there's the pregnancy.  As far as I know, everything is ok.  In fact, the results we got back from the first trimester genetic screening were, in my OB's words, "excellent."  (The average risk of Downs when the mother is 37?  About 1/255.  My particular risk of this baby having Downs, as calculated by the screening?  About 1/3000.  I was especially impressed with this when I realized that the risk of Downs for a mother who is between the ages of 20 and 24 is about 1/1500.)  Every time I get a particular piece of good news, I get this feeling welling up inside me that I haven't really associated, so far, with this pregnancy.  I think it's something like joy.  A few days after the ultrasound or doctor's appointment (now with baby heartbeat), the joy leaves, and I'm back to this fatalistic sense that whatever is going to happen will happen, and there's nothing I can do about it.  My psyche's self-protection, I'm sure. 

Last night I thought, for a second, that I was feeling the baby move.  It's possible, though not likely, I guess.  I am 15 weeks pregnant now, which is early to feel movement, especially if you're carrying any extra weight around, which I am.  Still, I felt something, and I thought it might be the baby, and just the idea that it might be the baby gave me great joy, a huge uplifting of heart and spirit and mind, and a hope for the future of this pregnancy that I will feel more of this happiness as I feel more movement and begin to feel emotionally tied to this fetus in a way that I'm not so far. 

Every time the joy comes back, I think, ahhh.  This is what I felt, so much of the time, when I was pregnant with Katie.  I have missed it.  I miss it.  I want it back.

I remember how much I'd thought and written about the experience of being pregnant at this same point in my pregnancy with Katie, and I can't believe I've gotten this far this time with so little contemplation and expectation and planning.  But here I am.  And if there's a baby at the end of this road?  Well, then.  I will, I promise you, be filled with joy, as much joy (if not more) as I had with Katie. 

Katie, by the way, is a great kid (if I do say so myself).  I wrote this about her in my beloved PSV forum in a thread about our children's personalities:

Katie is super sensitive, like me. If she thinks you're actually mad at her? She'll burst into tears, and I can see the look on her face, and it's weird how I recognize it and KNOW that it is the exact way I used to feel when I was a kid and I was trying not to cry but ended up crying anyway.

She's also a talk talk talker, also from me, at least from me more than Geoff. She is more single-minded than I am, which I think she gets from Geoff. She and Geoff can be doing something and you can be YELLING their name, but if they're engaged enough in what they're doing? They won't even hear you.

I am just head over heels with her, really, so I'm another mother who is full of sap when I think about her and talk about her. Other than some brief sleep issues, she has been really easy from the time she was a newborn....  She was never a serious crier, never needed to be held all the time, was happy just to sit in a bouncy chair or swing or high chair and look around and watch us and "talk" with us. She is incredibly eager to please, which I think she also gets from me, and which I hope I can help her learn to deal with a little better than I've done. I see how desperate she is for approval sometimes, and it just kills me, how vulnerable that could make her when she's older (how vulnerable it occasionally makes her now). She is a total snuggler/ toucher/hugger. When we pick her up at daycare, she has to give hugs to all of her friends before she leaves, and she has a whole routine with us when she says goodbye or goes to bed (it's basically: hug, kiss, eskimo kiss, bump foreheads, hug, kiss).

She is also STUBBORN and clever (she is so good at figuring things out and remembering things and calling us on slip-ups) and interested in almost everything. Lately she is asking for the moon and everything else, literally, but she almost never makes these demands immediate - instead, she says, "Someday I could like to do..." or "I would like to have that sometime." The other day she said, "Someday I would like to go to the moon and eat it up. I think it tastes like chocolate chips."

Yesterday evening we changed the sheet on her mattress, and she insisted on coming over to help lift up the mattress (it's a toddler bed, so it's a crib mattress, not a full-sized twin) so that I could put the new sheet on.  She lifted one end up, all by herself, and looked at me.  "I'm strong," she said.  "I know you are," I said.  "I'm too strong," she said.  "I'm too strong for comfort."

She makes me laugh, and she amazes me, and she is everything I wanted to have when I wanted to have kids, and lots of things I didn't know I wanted.  I'm sure I don't have to justify this, but I'm going to say it anyway - I didn't want another baby because of any shortcoming in Katie; she made me want another baby, because of all of the blessings she's brought to my life.  Being her mom is hard, and the truth is that I'm a little freaked out about dealing with two kids, the stress that's going to create, the exhaustion that will be entailed.  But.  Being her mom is mostly good (mostly awesome, even), and even in my most tired and frustrated moments, it is not something I regret.

miracles and mistakes

My belly is growing, again, enough that today I thought about taking a picture and posting it on Flickr.  And then, no.  Just, no.  I remember my happy picture, posted at almost exactly the same point in the pregnancy where I am today, and I remember that despite how happy I looked (how happy I was), that eventually I learned that the truth was that on that very day, there was no longer anything living in my uterus.  I also note, in retrospect, what I didn't think much of at the time, that by that time I wasn't having much, if any, nausea any more.  No more furious acne on my face.  Not nearly as tired as I'd been, but having a lot of headaches.  I thought it was all caused by the end of the first trimester, and that I was just going to have an easier time of it than when I was pregnant with Katie.

Today, this week, I comfort myself with what would otherwise not be comforting things - I retched several times this morning.  My face and neck are breaking out painfully and horribly.  I am exhausted.  (Still, any day I have a headache I wonder if it's a sign of the end, of the days and days of headaches that I had at the end of and after the last pregnancy.) 

Still, I'm not ready to take or post the picture.  Maybe in another week and a day, after our ultrasound.  Maybe then.

I have reminded myself, repeatedly, that some of the feelings I have are ridiculous, but still, sometimes, I have them anyway.  When I found out I was pregnant again, I was hesitant to tell anybody, not because I didn't want them to know, but because I didn't want to get their hopes up "for nothing," again, like last time.  As if I were somehow to blame for what happened.  As if my own grief from the miscarriage paled in light of the way I had dashed other people's hopes.  As if I didn't deserve to tell anybody about it unless I could guarantee that this time, there would actually be a baby at the end of the road, instead of just a lot of blood and sadness.

So I haven't taken the picture, but I will admit that I am pleased to see the growing belly.  I am working from home today, and I have stood, more than once, sideways in front of the mirror in the dining room so that I can admire my profile.  Definite pregnant belly.  I even tried to suck it in, and I couldn't (a clear difference between the pregnant belly and the flabby belly of the past few years).  There it stayed, gently rounded, almost as far out as my breasts, daring me to look at it and think anything but good thoughts about the little creature that's housed inside (which recently, so I'm told, made the transition from embryo to fetus). 

My friend romanlily posted a photo on Flickr with a quote from Einstein that I've been thinking about a lot the past few days.  "There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle."  I know which of those ways I'd like to live my life.  And it's true, isn't it, that this whole crazy thing, this making of a human being from scratch - from two tiny cells - really is a miracle?  Although my miscarriage was a personal tragedy to me, well - perhaps the real miracle is that as many babies are made and born in as perfect condition as they are.  All the fingers and toes.  Beating heats and eyelashes.  Skin that feels, eyes that open and see, vocal cords that make noise, mouths that suck and throats that drink.  Brains that work.

There is no guarantee, of course, that I can give you, or give myself, that this pregnancy will result in a real live baby with all working parts.  But I'm going to believe in that miracle, as much as I can. 

Hope

I don't know where to start.  I didn't mean for so much time to pass before I posted again, but from the last time I posted until just recently, it has been a whirlwind of busyness, celebration, grief, recovery, exhaustion. 

On September 18th, the same day as my last post, I took a home pregnancy test that had a second line so faint I thought I might be imagining it.  On September 19th, I got a darker line.  A couple of days later, one that was even darker.  Since then, I've had bloodwork and an ultrasound and exam at the doctor's office.  I'm pregnant again.  About 10.5 weeks right now, with an estimated due date of May 29, 2008. 

On September 26th, we celebrated Geoff's 31st birthday.  The weekend before his birthday Katie and I visited my Mom.  The weekend after his birthday, Katie and I visited my dad & stepmom, and also my brother and his girlfriend and my niece. 

On October 4th, Geoff's parents arrived to visit, and to be here for his doctoral recital on the 7th.  His sister Kimberley arrived on the 5th.  My dad & stepmom and Josh & Frankie arrived on the 6th.  The recital was a big success, with lots of our friends attending, and with everyone impressed by and/or proud of Geoff and his talent and skill.  On October 9th, his father and girlfriend and Kimberley went home.  On October 10th, his mom went home. 

On October 10th, Geoff's brother Matthew, who was worried about his sister Stephanie, went to her condo and found her.  Stephanie had died that day of an accidental overdose (I hope it is not a violation of her family's trust to say that; I know much of her story is not mine to tell, and I won't try).  She was 28 years old.  It makes me cry to sit here and type that.

I went to work on the 11th and prepared to be gone the next week.  On Friday the 12th we spent most of the day downtown at the passport agency, getting Katie an emergency passport so that we could fly up to Halifax the next day.  After waiting in many lines, we got the passport.  On the 13th, we flew to Halifax, to be with the family, to grieve, to attend the visitation and the service.  The outpouring of love for Stephanie was overwhelming and wonderful and heartbreaking.

On the 18th, we flew back home very early in the morning and visited my obstetrician in the afternoon.  Everything looked good, she said.  There was a heartbeat, just like last time.  So far, so good.

On the 19th, Katie and I flew to Boston for a trip we'd had planned for months, to visit with a huge group of women and their families; we have been an amazing support group for each other since I joined the PSV online forum in January (and many of them have been an amazing support group for each other for years now).  We had a wonderful time.  On the 22nd, we flew home.

On the 23rd, I went back to work.  The rest of the week, I tried to catch up. 

Geoff found and bought Katie a Snow White costume at the church rummage sale for $2.  On Halloween, we went trick or treating. 

And now it's November.  Saturday was my mom's birthday, and she came up to visit.  We had a good visit with her.

I will write more about the most important events here, but right now this is what I can manage. 

I miss Stephanie.  Already.  She was not just my sister-in-law, she was also my friend, and I thought we'd have until we were old women to get closer to each other, to be part of each other's lives, to watch our children (when she had them) grow up.  She was going to be Katie's special aunt, she said, the one who took her travelling and took her out for a drink when she turned 21 (or maybe even before).  When she saw me or talked to me, she would shout out, "Sister!" as if that was the best thing in the world to be.  I am mad at her for letting this happen, for leaving us.  But most importantly, I loved her.  I love her still.

I have not really allowed myself to be thrilled about being pregnant.  I am happy.  I am cautiously optimistic.  There is no real reason to think that things won't be ok, except that sometimes, things aren't ok.  I am nauseous a lot, eating pretty healthily, sleeping a lot.  I have had at least three separate nightmares of having a miscarriage with this pregnancy.  I am scheduled to have an ultrasound on 11/15, at 12 weeks, and in my mind that is a benchmark, a time past which I can relax and not worry quite so much. 

I am sorry that I never got to tell Stephanie that I was pregnant.  And I am sorry that Katie will not have any real, solid memories of her Aunt Stephanie.

We are ok.  Or we will be.  It's been a pretty hard year, in a lot of ways, but I am hoping that the near future holds some wonderful things, and that we are able to let go of some parts of the past.  I hope that wherever Stephanie is, that she is at peace.  I don't know what else I can hope.

Pregnancy 2, Journal Entry 6 - May 24, 2007

So, here's what I look like right about now. 

You may just have to take my word for it (you try looking for full-body non-pregnant pictures of yourself, standing in profile, and see how many you find!), but my belly is not normally shaped like that.  I'm definitely showing already (the picture is from yesterday), at 10 weeks 5 days.  And I definitely was not showing like this when I was pregnant with Katie.

Speaking of Katie.  You know what I spend a lot of my time thinking about now, while I'm pregnant with my second child?  Yes.  My first child.  I think about how she is now, how she was when she was a baby, how long it was before we started to figure out her personality, how different she'll be by the time the baby is born.  I think about how she'll be as this pregnancy gets further along - what will she think or say when she can feel or see the baby kicking inside?  I think about how she'll be when the baby is born.  How long before she gives us fodder for one of those stories you always hear about, where the older child asks some variation of a question wondering how much longer we have to keep the new baby around?  How long before she gets genuinely upset or has her feelings hurt about me or Geoff not being able to hold her on our laps because we're already holding the baby? 

She loves both Geoff and me, there is no question.  She is very close to both of us and very affectionate with both of us.  But there is also no question that right now, she is her Mommy's girl.  She clings to me, wants to cuddle with me, wants me to be the last to tuck her in at night.  She says that her best friend is Mommy, and it's only when I make it clear that you don't have to have only one best friend (by telling her that I have two best friends - Daddy and Katie) that she has two best friends, too.  Mommy and Daddy.  It is going to hard for her, I think, when she has to share me with a new baby. 

Let me try to say that in more positive words: it is going to be an adjustment.  For all of us. 

I don't guess I've written about Katie that much lately.  Maybe you don't know what she's like. Here are some of the things she's said or done lately. 

One day last week I came home from work early, with a headache, and I lay down in our bedroom with the door shut.  Katie came in after a little while, said, "Are you feeling ok, Mommy?  Here, let me give you a hug."  While she was hugging me, she murmured, "You are my best girl in the whole world."  Then she left so I could go back to my nap. 

A little less than a month ago, she and I drove to Indiana to visit family.  She is an excellent traveller, really, playing happily with her toys, listening to music, or talking to me, for 3, 4, or 5 hours of driving.  At one point she said to me, "Mommy, do you know what love is?  Love is when you say 'Will you give me a hug?' 'Yes, I will!'  And love is also when you say, 'Will you do a puzzle with me?' 'Yes, I will!'"  Then later in the ride, we got into a small scuffle because she had pulled a huge booger out of her nose and didn't want to wipe it onto the Kleenex I was holding out to her, because she HAD TO wipe it on the inside of her shirt, just opposite her belly button.  (She won the scuffle.  I was driving, after all.)

She can be (and often is) bossy and obnoxious and demanding.  When the demands are things like, "come cuddle on the couch with me!" they're easier to accommodate, or at least less irritating.  When they are things like, "just let me poke you in the eye!" we're not quite so appreciative. 

She is also a sponge when it comes to learning (not that I think this is unusual for a three year old).  They are apparently teaching her lists of lots of things at daycare lately.  She sings a song that goes like this, "There are seven days, seven days, in a week!  Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday!"  When she sings this song, she holds up 7 fingers and sways back and forth from foot to foot.  She also just recently told us the months: January, February (often forgotten), March, April, May, June, July, Noggust, September, October, Don't 'member, December.  (We have not really done much to correct her on "Don't 'member," because it makes us laugh too much.)  The other day she must have chanted, fifty times in a row, "spring, summer, fall, winter."   

She loves music, and requests songs by name when we're in the car.  She told me the other day that "I have three songs.  They are MY songs.  They are A-B-C-D, Woohoo song, and I got my whole wide world."  (These songs translate to Elizabeth Mitchell's Alphabet Song, K.T. Tunstall's "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree", and Wreckless Eric's "Whole Wide World," from the soundtrack of Stranger than Fiction.)  We still sing the alphabet song with great regularity.  We also sing "Twinkle Twinkle," "Row Row Row Your Boat," and "Edelweiss" pretty much every day. 

She's a good sleeper, in general.  Our bedtime routine is still pretty fixed, although she doesn't have a bath every single night anymore.  But if there is a bath, then that's followed by PJ's and some tv watching, then we go to her room to read some books and eat a bedtime snack.  Then tooth brushing, then maybe another book or two, then off with the light.  Then we sing "Edelweiss," three times (each time faster than the last), then she gives us hugs (when she feels like it - she often declares she won't give us hugs, and often we tickle her instead), then she climbs into her tiny toddler bed and we turn out her Ikea flower light.  Once she's in bed, she wants me to "soft" her nose (which means to rub her nose softly) while singing two songs.  Almost every night, the two songs are A-B-C-D and Twinkle Twinkle.  Then I give her a hug, then I leave.  Or at least that's how that last part is supposed to work.  We frequently find ourselves saying, in our tired end-of-the-day state, "Ok, but this is the LAST HUG.  It is TIME FOR BED." 

So she sleeps well, but now that she's in a toddler bed, she doesn't sleep as long.  Her regular routine is to get out of bed, walk down the hallway to our room, open our door, and come in.  For awhile this was happening at 6:30, which wasn't too bad, since that's basically when I get up, anyway.  But lately it is happening at about 5:45, which is annoyingly early.  The upside to her coming in so early, though, is that she is usually still sleepy.  I hoist her into bed with us, drop her down in between us, pull the covers up over her, and put her head on my pillow.  And usually, most days, she sleeps.  One day, the other day, I kissed her on the forehead after settling her in; without opening her eyes, she lifted herself up on her arm, kissed me on my forehead, and laid her head back down.  Other days she chatters and pokes at me until I finally just get up.  My mood about all of the varies, depending on how tired I am, whether or not I have a cold (this year, the first year Katie's been in daycare, has been the Year of the Cold in our family), or whether or not I have a headache.  If I'm not too tired and I'm feeling ok, I actually do love having her there in bed with us, demanding to share my pillow, telling me "secrets" or "stories," patting my face. 

When I do get out of bed in the morning, as long as she is awake she will always come with me.  The first thing I have to do in the morning, of course, is pee.  She follows me in, waits for me to sit down, and then climbs up on my lap, facing me.  And so this is how my mornings begin, these days.  With my daughter lying on my chest, sitting on my lap, sucking her thumb, while I pee.  (This is actually ok, most of the time.)

She is extremely sensitive (I have NO idea where she got that).  One day she kept trying to comb my hair with a small comb, and I kept telling her to stop, and she wouldn't, and so finally I took the comb away from her and tossed it onto the desk.  She was so upset about me "throwing" the comb that she burst into tears and demanded to be held on my lap.  Because she's so sensitive, discipline is (relatively) easy.  If I yell "NO!" angrily, she always stops what she is doing, and usually starts to cry.  This has become my own challenge - how to get her to take me seriously (the 15 quieter, pleading 'no's' having gone happily ignored) without causing her to have a little breakdown.  When we give her a timeout (which has happened most often when we're trying to get her to brush her teeth before bed and she refuses), she stands in the corner of the dining room that is The Spot, and almost immediately, she starts to sob and holds out her arms for a hug.  I've told her that I will hug her while she's in timeout, but that she can't sit on my lap.  It is clear that just the very idea of being punished is what is at work here, because the punishment itself - three minutes of standing in a corner next to a window, hugging me - isn't really too painful. 

She loves to play with other kids; she just seems to love people, in general, in fact.  Her most frequent conflict at daycare is that she wants to give another child a hug goodbye when they don't want to hug her back.  When we come to pick her up at the end of the day, she'll run to all of her friends for hugs.  If their backs are to her, she'll run up, arms outstretched, and just stand behind them until they notice her (or until somebody else says, hey, Katie wants a hug). 

She has almost no interest in using anything other than a diaper unless we are in a restaurant, in which case she wants to go "try" to use the toilet over and over and over again.  Last Saturday we went out for breakfast, and we had to try three separate times, even though I don't think she ended up peeing at all.  Other times, we cajole, we plead, we ask, we ponder whether using the potty might be a nice thing to do, but so far the best response we get is polite interest.  When she is ready, we tell ourselves.  But I admit, I hope it is soon. 

Sometimes I find myself having what part of me recognizes is a CRAZY idea: that I am not going to have less free time with two children than I have with one.  I know this must be a crazy idea, but I think it is an illusion I must maintain for my own sanity, because the idea of having significantly less free time than I already have, if I think about it for two long, makes me start to hyperventilate just a little.

And yet, less free time or not, I know I will be happy.  I know we will be ok.  I realized today, again, that despite the problems and small unhappinesses I have in my life, that I would not trade.  I would not give you any of this for any of what you've got.  I would share what I have with you, if I could, if you'd like, if I love you.  But I would not give this away, this life, this husband, this child, the people they are, the person I am.

There is a song by Bruce Cockburn called "Wondering Where the Lions Are."  (Lyrics here.) My favorite parts are the first verse - "Sun's up, uh huh, looks okay/The world survives into another day/And I'm thinking about eternity/Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me" - and the chorus - "And I'm wondering where the lions are/I'm wondering where the lions are...".  On the way home to church, on Sunday, Katie and I listened to Bruce Cockburn in the car.  "Did he say 'wondering where the lions are,' Mommy?"  Yes, I told her.  He did.  "Like at the zoo?"  She laughed and sang the chorus with me, a little bit, and when it was over she asked me to play it again. 

And somewhere during the second time through, I started to cry a little bit, because I realized I have reached that place again.  Some kind of ecstasy's got a hold on me, and I'm wondering where the lions are.  The lions will show up at some point, I'm sure, but even if they do, maybe they won't be as scary as I think.  And even if they are, well, we will figure it out.  And they're going to come along, anyway, aren't they, whether I think about them or not?  I'm just going to try to let this ecstasy hold onto me awhile longer.  That's where I am.  That's how I am.