27 minutes

I’ve got my computer in the hospital with me but only intermittent Internet access; R and I are sharing a network card and he’s got it in Zurich with him now. Does it count for NaBloPoMo that I’m typing this on Tuesday and will post it Wednesday when I get my crack at the network card? (R skipped Zurich Monday, went Tuesday [today], will skip half of Wednesday and probably all of Thursday and then go back to Zurich on Friday. Probably. This works fine for me and the Boychen since we’re just hanging out in the hospital all week anyway; but Small Boy is getting shuttled between home and The Farm more than we had hoped would happen.)

So far Boychen is a sleeper but they always are the first day or two so we’ll see if that changes. And early babies tend to be big sleepers, too, although thanks to those 27 minutes past midnight he is not, technically, preterm. Monday, the day he was born, marked 37 weeks and 0 days – medically, the definition of a full-term pregnancy. Had Boychen arrived just an hour earlier – just before midnight instead of just after – he would have arrived in the 36th week of pregnancy and technically would have been considered pre-term. Clearly a matter of an hour is meaningless in terms of his physical development – the closer you get to the 37 week mark the more arbitrary a line it seems, really. In Boychen’s case – will he emerge just before or just after midnight? – it was a truly arbitrary marker but not one without meaning. Had he arrived just an hour earlier, had he arrived any time on Sunday, the hospital would have been obligated to classify him as a pre-term baby, which in turn would have obligated them to run a few additional tests on him and to monitor him more closely and more frequently during our hospital stay.

Those 27 minutes – which were completely meaningless in terms of in utero development – put him on the other side of the line and gets us out additional testing requirements.

Random, no?

And yeah, how huge is he for 37 weeks? Had we gone to 40 we’d have been looking at C-section for sure. As it was…well, I’ll attempt the labor and delivery story when I can face it. But let me just say for now that I’m a good mother, and I rock at breastfeeding, but apparently I just suck at labor and delivery.

HPSP: Day five...

... is over. That's all there is to say about today. Except that my boy is so cute in a snow-suit (but the one we have is too small). He is the most outdoors-y boy ever and I don't know how I'm going to manage that when it's zero degrees out and I've got a newborn.


Actually the newborn we can bundle just fine. I'm the one freezing my butt off out there.


One week of Heavily Pregnant Single Parenting down, one to go. I'm off to take a bath.

HPSP: Day four...

... kind of sucked.

But Small Boy loves the snow (we got just the tiniest bit of snow today) and watching him race across the snow-covered grass shouting "Wheeeeeeee!" sort of salvaged some of the day. Well, it salvaged rather a lot, actually.

HPSP: Day three...

... brought to you by my in-laws who have Small Boy for his regular Wednesday visit to The Farm.

I spent most of the afternoon hunched over the loom and have finally reached the actual weaving stage of weaving this baby blanket. I've always been slow at the mechanics of dressing my loom (warping the loom, threading the heddles, slaying the reed, and fine-tuning the tension) even without an enormous belly getting in my way, but boy the belly really slowed me down this time. Even under the best of circumstances, dressing the loom for a project of any size, say for example a 30"x30" baby blanket, will easily take me as long, if not longer, than actually weaving the project off. It's frustrating, and there must be more efficient ways to do what I do, or maybe I just don't weave often enough to develop a good fast repetative motion. At any rate, the grunt work is done and now I can move on to the rhythm of throwing the shuttle.

In baby news, I had an appointment with Dr. Fantabulous this morning - 36 weeks 2 days. Baby is continuing to grow, I have ample amniotic fluid, urine dip and blood pressure nothing to worry about, see you in two weeks. I need to think about if I want to be tested for Group B Strep (testing isn't standard here and we didn't do it in the Small Boy pregnancy) at my next appointment. Basically my chances of losing a baby to a GBS infection (in Switzerland it's 6 fatalities per 80,000 births though rates of non-fatal complications are of course higher) are about equal to my chances of going into anaphylactic shock - and thus endangering my life and the baby's - as a result of the IV penicillan I'd be given should a swab turn up positive. I have an allergy to erythromycin - this always confuses the heck out of my doctors because erythromycin is the drug of choice for people allergic to penicillan and they always think I've got it backwards - and although I've never experienced and allergic reaction to penicillan I also haven't taken penicillan in about 20 years. This would be a pretty sub-optimal time to discover that I've developed a cross-allergy/penicillan sensitivity in the intervening years. I didn't give not getting the test a second thought in the Small Boy pregnancy and I can't figure out why I'm less certain this time around.

Ach je! I hate making decisions like this.

Heavily pregnant single parenting: Day two...

...was longer. 'Cuz, you know, I actually had Small Boy today. And because I'd forgotten that I don't sleep particularly well when Small Boy shares a bed with me. And because last night at about 22:30 he woke up in tears, inconsolable, for reasons neither he nor I were ever able to understand. We called R in Zurich and after much "Choem hai! Choem hai!" from the Small Boy (come home! come home!) R was able to settle him down with a song (I ghörre äs Gloggli das lütet so nätt/Dr Tag isch vergange itz gang i ins Bett/Im Bett tuen i bäte und schlafe de i/Dr lieb Gott im Himmel wird ou bi mir si!)* He then came back to bed with me and slept the rest of the night, but he seemed restless.

I owe getting through the morning today to the kids' corner at our local bakery/cafe and open play time at Gymboree.

I owe getting through the afternoon to our secret unconventional way of tricking Small Boy into taking an afternoon nap (R, you know what I'm talking about. As for the rest of you it just might be too embarrassing to blog, even anonymously) and to the in-laws who are giving him dinner and a sleep-over.

I'm getting a lot of help these days. People who know me know how hard it is for me to ask for help, or to accept unsolicited offers of help. I'm almost feeling guilty over how much help I'm accepting but knowing how much Small Boy loves his grandparents makes it easier to put him on the train. That and I've noticed that since I've started accepting more help the frequency of my contractions has gone from "Uh, yeah, that's not good" to "Eh, whatever" and I haven't had another spotting incident. So I'm going to keep accepting help. Because 36-weekers do well, but 38-weekers do better.

* rough translation:

I hear a bell it chimes so sweet
The day is over now I'm going to bed
In bed I'll pray and then fall asleep
Dear God in heaven will watch over me.

Heavily pregnant single parenting: Day One...

...was not too bad. Mostly because Mondays are Tagesmutter days, so my day with Small Boy involved getting him to eat breakfast (which is actually turning into a bit of an issue around here - any breakfast ideas for a three-year old?), getting him dressed and out the door with M&M (the Tagesmutter and her daughter, who came here to pick him up. How good do I have it that I didn't even have to drop him off this morning?), then eight hours later giving him dinner (I'm going to confess it: IKEA meatballs. He loves those things, and he's not alone) and putting him to bed. (My bed, that is. When R is away it doesn't occur to Small Boy for a second that he's actually going to sleep in his own bed. We go through the bed-time routine as usual; I get him into his PJs; and then for story time he walks to his bookshelf, grabs two books, and shuffles confidently down the hall to MamaDadaBed. Whatever. At this point, with two weeks of Heavily Pregnant Single Parenting ahead I'm definitely taking the path of least resistance on sleep-related matters. When he doesn't sleep enough, Small Boy is supremely cranky. When I don't sleep enough I'm a short-tempered shrew. The two of us sleep-deprived at the same time is a DEF-CON 1 situation best avoided. So I'm thinking he's going to be sleeping with me this week.)

I used the intervening eight hours to dress the loom, heat up some of my home-made minnestrone soup for lunch, flip through my splurge purchase of Martha Stewart Living (and when I say splurge, I mean splurge: 14 Francs 40!! That's $12.78 for a magazine!!), have a leisurely latte with a decadant brownie, and think about doing some writing. Not a bad day.

One down, four to go.

We have a plan but I have a question

Well, tomorrow R heads off to his two-week course in Zurich and I enter week 36 of the pregnancy. We've got a plan for the first week ("plan" making it sound wildly more thought out than it is, it's more like just rolling with the punches). R will be staying in Zurich the entire time, leaving Monday morning and returning Friday evening. Small Boy goes to the Tagesmutter on Monday like always and the Farm on Wednesday like always, but he'll go over there Tuesday for dinner and to sleep over. From Wednesday dinner to Friday dinner it's just the two of us at home. I don't expect to go into labor next week, but if I do if it's daytime the in-laws will come and get Small Boy and take him to the Farm and if it's the middle of the night they'll come here and sleep on the guest bed and be here when Small Boy wakes up.

Anybody have any input on, if I do eventually have to go to the hospital at 3am one day, we should wake Small Boy up and say good bye and tell him I'm going to have the baby now? I'm thinking yes, even though it means he probably will cry and not be able to go to sleep again and the poor grandparents will have to cope with that. (Having him present during labor is out of the question - this is a boy who bursts into tears if he thinks I'm in pain. Stubbing my toe and saying "Ow!" makes him come running calling "Mama! You okay?!")

What arrangements did you make for your older child/ren when you gave birth the second (third, etc) time around?

Baby blanket blues

Actually, there would be two reasons to ask Dr. Fantabulous about the sex of the baby. In addition to the whole male name drama, there's the baby blanket situation. I wove this baby blanket for the Small Boy

and I want to weave a blanket for this baby as well. But it's been very difficult find a yarn to work with. I'm not a terribly advanced weaver and I only have a four-shaft loom; what this means is that the patterns I'm capable of working with - as a result of limitations of both skill and technology - are quite basic. I rely on color and texture to produce interesting work. Small Boy's blanket uses the most basic of all weave structures, a plain weave, but by working with a nubby yarn in multiple colors I was able to put together a blanket that's far more interesting than the underlying weave structure could ever be.

I've had a heck of a time finding a good yarn this time around. There's not a lot textured out there - a good nubby popcorn yarn can make almost anything interesting - or I can't find the right combination of gender-neutral colors, or both. I thought I found a nice yarn to work with (it's the one called Pearl on this page), but when I put it on the loom to weave a sample, three of my warp threads broke under tension and as a result of friction from the beater; I know there is a fix to this problem (probably involving fewer ends per inch), but I don't really have the time or inclination to find it just now. Another interesting yarn (the mohair at the very bottom of this page) turns out to look far too fragile and etherial for a baby blanket (and might be scratchy for the little one), though it would make a lovely scarf for me.

I decided to go back to a yarn I've worked with before (it's the one called Zoom); I know exactly how it behaves on the loom so I only need to make the smallest of samples to see how the colors work together (I am running out of time on this, after all). There are some nice colors available and by scouring this book I was able to find a pattern that appears complex but can still be woven on a four-shaft loom. I picked my gender-neutral colors, wove my sample, drew up my final pattern draft, did my warp and weft calculations, and went to buy the yarn.

And there's not enough of one of the colors I need, one of the colors that I really need, and it could take up to four weeks to order it (that would put me at week 38 before I could even start the thing, for those of you not keeping track at home). I can't deal with picking out an entirely different yarn at this point; I'd have to recalculate the sett and weave a real sample to see how the yarn behaves on the loom and I really don't feel like doing that; hunching over a loom threading heddles with this bulging belly is no fun and I'd like to do it as little as possible. There are, however, three shades of blue in the Zoom that would make a splendid blanket for a boy. (There are not, however, three equally splendid stereotypical girl colors; in fact, in the absence of the purple I really need I'm having a hard time finding three gender-neutral colors I want to work with.) If it's a boy, I could make a really really nice baby blanket. If it's a boy.

This is not a good reason to call Dr. Fantabulous's office and ask for the sex, is it?

The name game

Although I wore this shirt to my last appointment with Dr. Fantabulous, I didn't actually ask the question. I'm 35 weeks today and my next appointment is a week from Wednesday (36w2d), so at this late date it's pretty pointless to ask about the baby's sex. I'm amazed I resisted the temptation, frankly, especially when it became clear that choosing a name for a boy was going to be a lot harder this time around than last - and it was hard enough last time. A girl's name was easy - basically I told R what I wanted and he recognized the futility of resistance - but boys? I don't know why it was so hard, but we just put off the boy's name during the Small Boy pregnancy. Then at 34 weeks I almost went into labor (part of the curse of New Year's Eve) and realized we have no name if it's a boy. After a few days in the hospital Dr. Fantabulous sent me home and I insisted that we come up with a boy name ASAP.

We made lists. R made an excel worksheet with our choices, where we overlapped, how we each ranked the name, and the meaning (because he's a computer geek like that). In the end we had ten boys' names to choose from. We picked a first and middle name for Small Boy (and may I say we chose a fabulous combination) and good thing, seeing as how he turned out to be a small boy and all.

Fast forward to this pregnancy and once again we have the girl's name (the same one) and are struggling with the boy. I found the lists we made when trying to name Small Boy, the one with the eight other names that we in theory liked and agreed on and of the eight? Yeah, I don't like them anymore. Which makes sense as my heart knows they are names I turned down once. So we're back to the drawing board picking boy names. We're making some headway, but I don't know why we have such trouble with male names.

I think most parents put a lot of thought and energy into choosing names; it's a big deal after all. And it's hard to come to terms: your favorite name reminds him of the guy who stole his milk money every day in the forth grade, his favorite name is your brother's name, your sister gives birth and uses the name you picked out (the hazards of keeping these things secret). You just don't like it, he just thinks it's funny. You want to name her after your grandmother, he wants to name her after his. The first name has to work with the last name; if there are older children the names should sound nice together. There's a lot of negotiating.

On top of the standard naming issues, R and I have an additional consideration: the name has to work in English and German pronunciations and in US and Swiss cultures at a bare minimum. (It's bad enough that R's last name uses an umlaut, which the US social security administration cannot accomodate so his name and Small Boy's are spelled differently on US and Swiss documents; I never changed my name when we got married, in some small part because of that pesky umlaut.) Although our current plans and R's career trajectory see us living in Switzerland well into Small Boy's school years, and probably this Player-to-be-Named-Later's as well, we've never ruled out moving if the conditions were right; moving to the US or moving to an interesting third country. So names that translate, names that are at least recognizable in multiple cultures, names that don't change genders when you cross borders (Jan, anyone?) are important to us. This leaves us with some really nice classic names, but it also rules out a lot.

For example, one of my favorite Swiss names for a boy is Beat - and all my English-speaking readers who just rhymed that with "feet" in their heads have demonstrated why that name won't work for somebody who will be living half of his life in English. It's pronounced "Bay-aht" in Switzerland. R and I happen to know a Beat who, as luck would have it, is married to an American woman, and he pretty much spends his life correcting the mispronunciation of his name. For an adult it's an annoyance (for that matter, R's name is no piece of cake in the US either - it's very Swiss) but can you imagine if we move to the US just in time for a son of ours named Beat to enter, say, the fifth grade? Fun times on the playground for sure.

Then there are the names that just sound funny when pronounced in German or are too Swiss - see above, Beat - for the US. Or too American for Switzerland. And then there is the nick-name issue. The Swiss, they loooove the nicknames. If your name is Jane, the Swiss will find a way to give you a diminuative. Jacob becomes Kobi; Sebastian becomes Sebu; Christian becomes Chrigu; Konrad becomes Konu; Thomas becomes Thomu. As an adult it's possible to get people to use your full name, but you couldn't get a Swiss teacher to call a seven year old boy "Sebastian" for love or money. He would be a Sebu. I like some of the nicknames - personally, I like Chrigu well enough - and dislike others. I love the name Sebastian - Sebu, not so much. Konrad, yes; Konu, eh. Every time I think of a boy's name, I ask R for the nick-name (and there is always a nick-name). And half the time it leads to scratching another name off the list. If there had been one reason to ask Dr. Fantabulous to tell us the baby's sex, it would have been on the off chance we'd get to avoid the whole boy name issue. It's taking up rather a lot of mental energy that I don't really have to spare.

All that having been said, however, if I gave birth to a boy tonight we could name the baby. It's quite a relief.

(But a blog pseudonym I still don't have...)

Looking for advice

Can anybody with two little ones tell me anything about this stroller?

34 Weeks

At 34 weeks, I'm huge. I believe the proper medical term is "ginormous." Small Boy can't sit on my lap (what lap?) for bed-time stories anymore; we lay on the rug together. Clothes that got me to the end of the Small Boy pregnancy have long ago been consigned to the back of the closet, I can only wear slip-on clogs (because I can't bend to tie laces), and I had to buy a new winter maternity jacket over the weekend because it's cold here and unzipped just wasn't cutting it anymore. I'm profoundly annoyed at spending real money on a down maternity jacket in the final month of the pregnancy, but I figure after the baby is born I can wear the baby and zip the jacket so I can stretch some extra use out of it. Then I just have to hope that at some point in the future a friend is heavily pregnant in the winter so I can loan out the coat to her and get the satisfaction of seeing somebody use it.

At 34 weeks I'm also now allowed to give birth in my hospital of choice, which is a low-key birthing hospital (though they are equiped to perform C-sections) lacking a NICU or an intensive care station for adults. Therefore, as a precaution, Dr. Fantabulous won't let his patients deliver there before 34 weeks. After 34 weeks it becomes a possibility, though of course it would depend on the particular circumstances of any given pregnancy/labor. If it's "just" early without any indications of trauma or distress or danger to me or the baby, Dr. Fantabulous will let me deliver there; a friend of mine delivered there at 35 weeks and she and her son went home after 4 days. This is a big relief to me for two reasons: 1) I really like the hospital and had a very good experience there with Small Boy and 2) if I delivered at the university hospital with the NICU, Dr. Fantabulous probably would not be the one to attend the birth, and I'm rather attached to Dr. Fantabulous.

At 34 weeks I'm also almost ready to not ask Dr. Fantabulous to tell me the baby's sex. Every appointment is an exercise in self-control; we've managed not to ask so far and at this point I figure we've made it 34 weeks without asking, we can make it the final six (though I have to confess I'm hoping this baby, like Small Boy, comes a bit early; not scary early, just a little early). I might just be able to let it go now.

At 34 weeks I'm ready to say hello to the baby, and a little sad to say goodbye to this special time alone with Small Boy. I'm confident that we're ready, and scared for things to change. I'm so done being pregnant, and just now realizing that I'll never be pregnant again. It changes from day to day, like this season; sometimes pure autumn, sometimes I can taste winter on the air. On the cusp. But moving inexorably forward.

Hey, we have a chest of drawers after all

R found them in our back-up grocery store, of all places. Carrefour, for those of you who know Switzerland. Seriously. Carrefour. Go figure.

The Swiss do love their bureaucracy

In addition to finally trying to get the baby's room together - and one reason why I haven't felt a great sense of urgency about this is because we already know the baby will be sleeping with us for the first several months, we already have a changing table, a bouncy chair, a Stubenwagon (that's not ours, it's just an example of what a Stubenwagon is), and there are clothes in the house - I've also pulled together all the documents I'll need to bring to the hospital and put them in a bright yellow folder labeled "Dox to bring to Spital" (I guess Small Boy is not the only one who mixes languages) placed prominently on my desk.

Interested in what documentation you need to provide when you give birth in Switzerland? Read on! (I wrote about many of these documents in this post.)

All patients must bring:

• your blood group card (you get this from your OB after your first pre-natal appointment)


• completed naming card for the child (we've got a girl's name picked out but boys' names are killing us. We used the best two names on Small Boy!)

In addition to the above, married patients must provide:

• your Familienbüchlein - this literally translates as "little family book" and the less literal translation would be the family record book. It serves as your identification when you interact with all sorts of civil authorities and must be kept updated.*
  
• the Niederlassungsbewilligung for both partners - I still don't have a proper translation for this. It confirms that you live where you say you live and must be kept updated. (When we moved next door, R needed to get a new Niederlassungsbewilligung - as an Ausländerin I don't have one of these, I have an Ausländerausweis [visa] instead).

Single patients, on the other had, must provide:

• the Niederlassungsbewilligung of the mother


• recognition of the father, when known (I believe this is in compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)

Foreign patients (that's me!) must bring (in addition to the blood group and naming cards):

• Ausländerausweis (i.e. your visa/permission to reside in Switzerland)


• both passports (I think they assume all foreigners are married to other foreigners, because I'm pretty sure they weren't interested in R's passport when Small Boy was born)


• a copy of your marriage certificate (again, I think they're assuming I'm married to another foreigner because the Familienbüchlein should cover this)**

I'm working on the cover all your bases system and bringing everything we have that's on that list - meaning the Familienbüchlein and R's Niederlassungbewilligung and his passport and our marriage certificate (we were married in the US) and my passport and my Ausländerausweis. That really should cover it.

On the other hand, if anything happens to that folder R and I will, in the eyes of the state, have ceased to exist. Small Boy's passports, US social security card, Consular Report of Birth, and Swiss national ID card are someplace else, so I guess he would continue to exist. On the other hand, he's attached to R's Niederlassungbewilligung, so maybe he wouldn't. Or maybe in the US but not in Switzerland?

* For example, births must be registered with the appropriate civil authorities within three days (the hospital does this, which is why they need all this information) and deaths within two days.

** This list of documents required to give birth in a Swiss hospital is one of the reasons I always thought "Natascha's" mother was undocumented. Let me rephrase that - I'm sure if you showed up with no papers the hospital would still treat you and care for the newborn but I suspect they would be obligated to report the patients' undocumented status. But I'm not sure about that. Something to research in all of my free time.

Nesting. Or panicking.

It suddenly dawned on me that I'm almost 34 weeks pregnant and the baby's room is still essentially being used as a storage closet. Keeping the door closed has proven to be a remarkably effective avoidance strategy, but I'll be 34 weeks on Monday and let's not forget that my goal was to have everything in order before R heads off for his two-week course in Zurich. That starts two weeks from Monday, people, and right now the baby's room is holding R's military equipment, my loom, a broken chair, several ceiling lights that we have not yet mounted (we're slow on the lighting, remember?), three bags of books I plan on donating to...somebody, the ironing board, some pictures we haven't hung, a lot of my pre-pregnacy clothes, and some other random stuff.

Lots of stuff. None of it is actually baby-related, of course, but there's lots of stuff in there.

So today I devoted the better part of the afternoon to organizing the easy stuff (as in no heavy lifting), including washing Small Boy's old size 50's and 56's (of course, I don't have a chest of drawers to put the clothes in, but at least the baby has some clean stuff in the house). This meant going through the box labelled "[Small Boy] - old." I found the little mittens knitted by R's grandmother, the outfit Small Boy wore home from the hospital, the emergency onesies R bought when I called his cell in a panic to report that Small Boy had just peed all over his last clean outfit (it turns out infant boys pee all over themselves, and you, and the floor and the wall and ceiling if you're not careful). His little red suit where the shirt and the pants are from slightly different dye lots. Little socks, such little socks (or as Small Boy calls them "liiiiniii socks"*) that I can't believe his feet were ever that small, that he was ever such a wee little bundle.

Small Boy will be three in January. How did that happen? How did he go from the boy who wore those tiny socks, those little knitted booties, to this boy who can pull on his rubber boots all by himself - and even get them on the right feet? Who shuffles through the dry leaves and collects acorns? Who can steer an electric bumper-car all by himself? Who loves all things Feuerwehr (fire department)? Who eats steak, for goodness sake. Steak! Just yesterday he had no teeth and I met all his needs and now he eats steak and the whole world is barely big enough for him.

Little socks, little booties all left so far behind.

When?

PJs then and now.

* Another half Swiss-half English utterance - "little" in Swiss would be chli or chlini; Small Boy drops the initial ch and just says li or lini.

Marchbefehl rescinded

Perhaps somebody in the Swiss Army reads my blog? R just got word that his December military service has been cancelled.

That's one fewer thing to worry about.

In which I rave about Dr. Fantabulous once again

I had an appointment with Dr. Fantabulous yesterday; everything is going great - from the baby's perspective, anyway. At 28 weeks 4 days, baby is measuring 28w6d and weighs 1350 grams (2.9 pounds)*, is nicely head down (Small Boy went head down early too), and has plenty of amniotic fluid to swim around in. We got a close-up of baby's face with the 4D ultrasound and if I had to guess based on the facial features of a 28 week old fetus as revealed by ultrasound - a sure bet if ever there was one, right? - I'd say this kid is a boy. It looks exactly like Small Boy. I think it's got hair already, which according to some "old-wives' tales" would account for the Mt. Etna-like heartburn I've been enduring since, oh I don't know, let's call it the dawn of time.


So baby's got it good. I, on the other hand, pretty much want to die every day between 8 pm and 2 am. Every pregnancy symptom in the book comes crashing down on me - heartburn that has me on my hands and knees gasping for air, headaches, backache, hot-flashes, Braxton-Hicks-a-palooza, and, as you can imagine, a resulting inability to sleep. All day long I'm fine - the baby rolls around a lot, now and then a lady-like little burp escapes me, maybe I'll get a little contraction now and then - but without fail night falls and Bam! Misery. There's nothing wrong; it's just a rough pregnancy. Dr. Fantabulous is not at all worried about me (he's obviously not pleased I'm so miserable, and is prescribing me any and every pregnancy-safe medication he can to alliviate my misery, but he's not concerned about my underlying health) or the baby or the health of the pregnancy. It's just rough going.


My next appointment is in four weeks and that doesn't seem like such a long time. Just four weeks until Dr. Fantabulous tells me again that everything is going great. I have to say, it's slightly embarrassing how reassuring I find Dr. Fantabulous's mere presence. Seriously, it's like he's doused in Stress-be-Gone or something. He walks back to the waiting room, calls my name and shakes my hand and whoosh go any worries I might have been harboring. I know how lucky I am to have stumbled upon him - to think, when I first started going to him his main qualification was that he speaks English! Now I can't imagine anybody else delivering my babies. As long as he's in the room, everything will be fine. He's my petronus.


* I find it a bit astounding - can something be just a bit astounding? - that it took baby 28 weeks (okay, 26) to gain 1300 grams - a nice healthy weight which puts it smack in the middle of the growth curve for 28 weeks - but it's supposed to gain another 2000-plus (that's 4.4 pounds) in just 10 to 12 weeks. Yikes.

Ooops, he did it again

R has a pesky habit of having military service in the days right before my due date. Small Boy's due date was February 9; R was in the military January 24th to February 4. For the average Swiss, "in the military" means at a site someplace in Switzerland (you're expected to remain there overnight during the week but are generally allowed to go home over the weekends) so this is not, in the grand scheme of things, a giant tragedy. It's not as if he was off in Iraq while I was giving birth to a child he wouldn't see for months. I'm well aware of that. It's annoying at worst. Nevertheless, it is annoying to be home alone in your 39th week. We were still in Small Village back then, and although we have a car and a good train connection to the city, it can feel fairly isolated when you're speeding towards your due date. I had a friend stay over several nights while R was away, and he came home over the weekend. And he wasn't scheduled for military service in the week of my actual due date, so we were pretty well covered.

Need I say Small Boy arrived early? At least he had the great good sense to jump start my labor on the middle Sunday of R's service, meaning R was at home with me when my water broke in the middle of the night. Small Boy was born Sunday night, and R was graciously granted leave on Monday, but Tuesday he had to go back into service. He was stationed about 2 hours away and was allowed to leave overnight for the remainder of the week, so he drove two hours home in the evenings, saw us in the hospital late at night and then early the next morning before the two hour drive back. It wasn't ideal, but it worked out okay since I stayed in the hospital all that week anyway. If we'd been in the States, where they send you home after a day or two, it would have been awful to go home to an empty house with a newborn. As it was, I stayed my standard five days and we all went home together on the following Saturday.

The one thing that went awry was that we didn't have enough baby clothes at home. At some point we stopped shopping because Small Boy was starting to get a bit huge in utero and the size 50's (for 50 cm long) were starting to look a wee bit small. We figured we'd wait until the baby was born, see how big it was, and R could finish shopping while I was still in the hospital. Since as it turned out R was in the military while I was in the hospital that didn't happen and he had to buy some panic onesies on Saturday afternoon. They were overpriced, but remain among the cuter onesies Small Boy ever had.

Well. This baby is due December 10 and R has military service December 3 through December 7. And during weeks 36 and 37 he'll be attending courses in Zurich where he will, in all likelihood, stay overnight during the week. Okay, Zurich is only an hour or so away, but still. That's an awful lot of away time in the final four weeks. Needless to say this time the plan is to have all of our rubber duckies in a row before that Zurich course begins.

And the cab company's phone number on speed dial.

Dealing with stress the Swissmiss way

I'm feeling better about Friday's appointment. I over-reacted to the news, especially about the placenta, which is really not a big deal. That's what I do: I over-react, though generally for a short period of time. It's my stress coping mechanism: take a piece of news that could perfectly well be harmless and instead embrace the worst case scenario. That way I get the major worry out of the way up front. Once I get out of worst-case scenario land (a visit of two or three days ususally does it) I find I can face the facts as they are much more reasonably. Skipping over the harmless and going straight to worry level DEF-CON 1 also seems to keep me from living for weeks with low levels of white noise worry in the background.

I seem to respond better (or at least less badly) to a whopping dose of stress for a short period of time than to longer exposure to reduced stress, probably because my number one physical response to stress is insomnia. I do badly after a few days of four-hour nights. I am without a doubt the most unpleasant person on earth after a week of them. (Seriously. Ask R. And Small Boy. They'll agree whole-heartedly.) I had a housemate once who could go for months and months on five hours of sleep a night; she was just one of those people. I would love to be one of those people. I could live a whole extra lifetime if I were one of those people but I'm not. I am textbook non-functional on a lack of proper sleep. Because stress equals insomnia and for me insomnia equals living death, it's best to just freak completely out and get it out of my system.

Which I seem to have done. Get the major worry out of my system, I mean. I do not have preeclampsia. I had one errant urine dip. Dr. Fantabulous would never have sent me on my way without an observation plan if he had any reason to believe I needed one. And sure, all sorts of things can spring up very fast in a pregnancy but I could also get hit by a bus this afternoon, couldn't I? And yet I manage to live my life believing I won't. It's the same faith I wrote about here; or perhaps it is not faith but a willful naivete. But it's how I get through the day. I think it's how most people get through the day. We know in our heads all the horrible lightning bolts that could strike us but most of us in our hearts don't really believe that they will. Of course preeclampsia could strike me, but I don't honestly believe that it will. Even though I know these things happen to ordinary people - people do get preeclampsia, after all, people do lose babies and pregnanices do go south - to people like me who probably, like me, never believed that particular lightning bolt would strike, I chose to believe it's not going to happen to me.

And if it does, I'll do what any good daughter of a US Marine would do: improvise, adapt and overcome. But until then I'm done borrowing trouble.

Thing one and thing two

I had a regular appointment with Dr. Fantabulous today (I'll be 23 weeks on Monday) and all in all things are going fine (well, kind of - keep reading). After all the nerves and uncertainties of the Small Boy pregnancy (what was that pull? what was that twinge? is that leukorrhea or an infection? is that normal?), I've been quite pleased that I've managed to make it to 23 weeks without finding something to worry about (aside from the whole this is going to change everything thing, that is) and haven't called for a single non-scheduled appointment. So I'm trying not to worry about two little Things that came up today.

Thing one was some protein in my urine. Protein in the urine may be one early indicator of preeclampsia (also called pregnancy induced hypertension), which in the short version, if you don't want to click the links, is something you really don't want to develop. And it is something you really really don't want to see progress. Really. Dr. Fantabulous is not concerned at this point; my weight gain has been slow and steady with no notable swelling, my blood pressure has never wavered, I have adequate amniotic fluid, and via ultrasound Dr. Fantabulous assures me that I have very good blood flow through the umbilical cord (or Nabelschnur, one of my preferred German pregnancy terms). He told me flat out that this is not preeclampsia, though I noticed he wants my next appointment in three weeks rather than the regular four. He gave me a list of symptoms to watch for, and then reassured me that this is not something to worry about. So I'm trying not to worry. But come on. Protein in the urine at 23 weeks? That's up there with blood on the toilet paper on the list of Things you don't want to see.

Thing two is that I appear to have a low-laying placenta. It is not covering any part of the cervix and at this point is not considered placenta previa. If the placenta stays where it is and everything looks like this at the time I'd be ready to deliver, vaginal delivery is completely possible. (I have a strong preference for vaginal delivery if everybody's health permits it.) But, of course, there will be continued monitoring, especially after 36 weeks (assuming thing one, aka protein in urine, doesn't turn into anything that makes getting to 36 weeks impossible or impractical). What I didn't think to ask Dr. Fantabulous until just now is whether he noticed this at the Level II ultrasound and didn't mention it, or didn't notice it (which I find impossible to believe, the man experience personified), or, the ugly possibility, my placenta actually moved downward in the past three weeks. It's not uncommon for a low-laying placenta to move up during the second and third trimesters; I don't know whether a previously well placed placenta can drop*. That would be troubling, I imagine.

Now if both of these Things were to turn into actual issues, I'd kind of be screwed. You see, ultimately the only treatment for serious preeclampsia or eclampsia is delivery right. now. or better yet five minutes ago; and the thinking on low-laying placenta is that since the placenta might shift up as the pregnancy progesses you want to try to go to term.

Um, yeah.

Oh, and I have a yeast infection. At least that's something we can treat.

* I could google that, I imagine, but I don't want to. Besides, my medical degree from Google University pales in comparison to Dr. Fantabulous's credentials.

The fetus made me do it!

I just walked to McDonald's for an M&M McFlurry. It was really good.