We've been a five member family for 21mo now. LB and I have been together going on our seventh year, being married for the last 3 years. I came into the relationship with four-legged B1. A month after our wedding, we took in B2, another four-legged fur baby. Nine months after that, there was something strange afoot. Something about my clockwork was off. Could it be? Indeed, it was! There was much to be done and we were far, far away from family and friends. I was getting ready to finish grad school and go on to postdoctoral work, and LB had to find work in the new city. December came, we moved to the Northwest and had our first kid, NMTB, in March 2009. It was quite the adventure from there on out, including a move back to Southern California because LB couldn't find work and we needed to cut costs, so moving back in to our house was an obvious solution. I found another postdoc job close to the house and we hoped LB would find work given his industry connections down here. He did, but thanks to state budgets being approved and him being the last hired, he was the first fired. So Thanksgiving went by with some down emotions, but still with plenty of hope. December rolled in and we made time for family on the weekends, despite the tremendous demands at work, because without a healthy family, work sucks more than it already does. NMTB's second Christmas, but first in which he participated, was great! He has enjoyed every present he has gotten and we are thankful for wonderful family and friends that make a day like this so memorable and enjoyable. We even took him ice skating thanks to super-discounted tickets from groupon! He loved it, but tired easily, so thank heavens for cheap tickets. We made a trip to the mountains and, although there was little sled-able snow, we had a fun time out. Another hectic, pressure-filled work week rolled in too quickly and rolled out too slowly before NYE.
But something was awry, something was missing. I checked the calendar and indeed, the clockwork was off. This wasn't wholly unusual since NMTB's entry to the world, so I thought little of it. Until another day went by. And another. And another. Lo and behold, on 29. December, I saw a faint little line on the test strip. I called LB over to verify I wasn't nuts or hallucinating. "What? What am I supposed to look for ... Oh, yeah, there's something faint. Does that mean you're ... you're ... you're pregnant?" Off to google I went to check future dates and now we're looking to welcome another little one to the mix in September 2011. (I can only hope it is not 9/11/11.) LB is excited and panicked: excited at having another little kid, panicked because he still doesn't have work and how it's going to be when we have two kids under 3. People manage this all the time and I have tremendous faith that he will land a job in the coming weeks. It's a hunch, a feeling, that it'll pan out sooner rather than later ... and all I can do now is hope that my gut is right. I am excited as well, but worry has set in. I wasn't totally prepared, physically, to be pregnant again so soon. I feel sluggish and stressed about work. My train to the road of post-partum health had been derailed by this on-going stress and anxiety. And I realized on NYE that I have very little memory of what it was that I did during the first pregnancy that made it so seemingly easy and healthy (except for the pain in the ass sciatica and round ligament pain and the PIH that set during the week after NMTB's due date). I feel like I need to go workout, to get better physically and to relieve the stress. But my ankle, especially, is killing me. One week after I met LB, I had such a major ankle dislocation that the orthos couldn't put it back together and said I'd have to depend on the scar tissue to hold it in place. It's been a burden, but has seemingly gotten worse in the last 4-6mo. I've also been terribly exhausted by the lack of sleep, since NMTB has a very dry, hoarse cough going for several weeks now. Although we run the humidifier and the heater, he still sounds pretty bad and wakes us up with bad coughing a few times a night. So I find myself at the computer thinking, "Jeez, what in the world did I do to make sure in utero NMTB was going to be ultra healthy?" Now I'm back at the drawing board, remembering things like whole food prenatals, supplements like folic acid, fish oil, chromium/vanadium, silver, iodine, iron, glucosamine/chondroitin, acv, etc. The problem is, I don't know how good/bad any of these are for pregnancy ... I know FA and FO are ok, I've read that ACV is fine ... but what about iodine and G/C? Am I overloading on iron? I feel breathless a lot, despite the iron supplement and iron-rich foods I'm concentrating on taking in. In other words, I have a lot of research to catch up on, since this was not an explicitly planned pregnancy. But I'm excited and looking forward to finding out what this kid is, what name we will choose, and I can't wait to meet it.
For now, I'm going to try to be vigilante about recording the things I do so that if there's another kid after this one in our future, I'll have a nice reference guide. :)
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