Pregnancy, take two

I’m currently about 27 weeks into my second pregnancy. It’s interesting how similar both my pregnancies have been so far. There hasn’t been a lot of difference between the two. Just a warning for the weak: this post talks about menstrual cycles and some of the joys of pregnancy that could gross you out. You know, if you’re male.

I had been taking birth control in pill form since 2001 because of irregular periods. They would be between 35 and 80 days long. It turns out putting you on birth control is the best modern medicine has figured out to regulate this. It does have the nice side effect of being able to have sex without worrying too much about getting pregnant. Because of the history of irregular periods I had thought it would be very difficult if not impossible to get pregnant. I had been let go from my job a few months before Sam and I got married, and therefore also lost my health insurance and, since I had Kaiser, also lost my doctor and pharmacy. We wanted to have kids so I figured I wouldn’t get pregnant in the few months before the wedding since it was going to be hard to get pregnant anyway, right? Wrong. Three months after taking the last birth control pill, less than a month before the wedding, and likely the first time we ever engaged in activity that could result in pregnancy without some kind of birth control, I got pregnant.

So most women have some kind of symptoms in the first month or so of pregnancy. I didn’t, other than the obvious one of not having a period. But that wasn’t unusual to me. After almost two months I decided to take a pregnancy test just in case. It was positive. Ever wondered why pregnancy tests come in packs of two? It’s because you often don’t believe the first one. Yep, the second one was also positive. I never did have any of the nausea type symptoms in the first trimester. Please don’t hate me, I had nothing to do with it. I only puked once the entire 9 months. In fact, the entire pregnancy was (for the most part) ridiculously easy. The only problem I really had was when the muscles in my abdomen called round muscles started stretching out at about 18 weeks. It felt like menstrual cramps but about five times worse. If you remember, I didn’t have health insurance. I ended up going to a county hospital emergency room because I was a bit worried. It was a touch embarrassing for the diagnosis to be: You’re pregnant, silly. However, something good did come out of it. I learned there is a low cost cash payment program for county residents. The prenatal care there turned out to be amazing, I’m currently going there for this pregnancy as well.

This pregnancy was pretty much the same story. We decided to start trying to have another kid and I stopped taking birth control. A few months later I was pregnant. So far, no puking. There have been differences, however. Last time all I wanted to eat was spicy food. I would chop up a whole serrano chile, seeds and all, into my morning eggs. For anyone unfamiliar, those are pretty spicy. My husband likes spicy food, usually more so than me, and there were a few times that I made things too spicy for him. This time, I really have no food cravings so far. This time I also don’t have the crippling fear that I won’t know what to do when the kid is born. I still wonder how I’m going to manage to take care of two at once. But the first pregnancy was easy and the kid is easy as well. This pregnancy so far as been pretty easy (more updates on that later) so I’m hoping that results in another easy baby.

But really, ten fingers and ten toes and all the other parts in the right place. That’s all I can really ask for. I’ll figure out the rest as I go along.

Name that baby!

Naming a baby is one of the most fun things about being a parent. There are literally endless possibilities. I have two rules: I won’t name a kid after a non-dead relative and first names should use standard spellings. Both of these rules save a lot of heartache. The first for your family members that might feel slighted and the second for your kid having to constantly explain and correct people. But I, as well as my husband, love the idea of using names from our families.

So about a week after I found out I was pregnant the first time, we were driving to Las Vegas to visit some friends of ours. It’s about a four hour drive from Los Angeles. I thought this would be a good time to talk about baby names to give us something to talk about on the drive. The whole conversation took all of 2 minutes. Maybe less.

Me: We should think about names for the baby.

Sam: I want to name a boy Edward after my grandfather.

Me: Ok, sounds good. I want to name a girl Jean after my mom.

Sam: Ok, sounds good.

Me: How about middle names? Edward Russell, after my grandfather?

Sam: Russell is a little weird, but ok.

Me: Yeah, but it’s a middle name.

Sam: How about Caryl for a girl’s middle name after my grandmother?

Me: Sure. So Edward Russell for a boy and Jean Caryl for a girl?

Sam: Yeah, sounds good.

I don’t remember what we talked about during the other three hours and 58 minutes.

So now I am pregnant again. The names for the new baby weren’t as easy or obvious. Well, the girl’s name was since we didn’t use it. If we have a girl it will be Jean Caryl. But for a boy’s name? My other grandfather was named Otis and Sam’s other grandfather is Sylvester. Sylvester is ok for a middle name and I don’t like Otis at all. Neither did my grandfather, he went by Bob. If you go farther back, my family is nothing but James and John (for generations they had no originality AT ALL). Both of those names violate my “no non-dead relatives names”. Sam’s dad is John and my dad is James. The rest of Sam’s family has VERY German names that didn’t excite me at all. Yes, including Adolf. We talked about other names but didn’t come up with one that we could both agree on.

My uncle has done quite a bit of genealogical research of our family and put it all on line in a searchable database (check it out here). I was playing around with it and started going back through my direct line and eventually got to the first family that came over from Scotland around 1770. The first one of my family that was born on what became American soil was born in 1771 and named Benjamin. I love it. It’s a Biblical name and a family name.

So if we have a boy it will be Benjamin Sylvester and a girl will be Jean Caryl. The difference in the length of the two names cracks me up. We don’t know the gender of the baby to be yet, but we are prepared either way.

It’s nice to have one thing I’m not clueless about.

I Miss My Mom

One of the reasons I am clueless in this parenting journey is I no longer have a mom to ask all my stupid questions to and ask her what I was like as a baby. I’m not looking for sympathy, it’s just a fact of life.

I’m an only child. Well, sort of. I have a sister who was born four years before me and died at age 3. I never knew her. I was born almost exactly a year later. Yes, that makes me a replacement baby. In 2000, my mom, dad, and I went up to Santa Rosa to my aunt’s wedding. Her fourth one, as a matter of fact. Thank goodness she finally figured it out and married the right guy. The day after the wedding we were driving the back roads of Sonoma County to visit a few wineries we liked and get a bottle or two from each. It was quite a pleasant day. Right up until the car crash that changed my life forever. My dad was fairly seriously injured and didn’t get out of the hospital until a month later. My mom was killed instantly. I had a bump on the head. Yes, a bump on the head. That was it. Not even a concussion. I walked out of the car to the amazement of the paramedics.

So I always knew that it was going to be difficult if I had kids because the only family I have anywhere near me is my dad. He’s great, but not for advice on baby care and definitely not for babysitting newborns. My mother-in-law lives in Michigan (blessing? curse? both?) so that’s not  lot of help. I don’t have any siblings. I have quite a few cousins, but none nearby. The one I’m closest to is a 7 hour car ride away. Most live out of state. If you are a parent and have your parents or siblings living nearby and they help you out all the time - don’t ever, ever take it for granted. Even if they drive you crazy some of the time. Or all of the time. I am lucky enough to have a few friends that are like family that are almost always willing to babysit and help if need be, but it’s just not the same as family. I don’t feel weird about asking family, but with friends it’s a whole other story. Bottom line - none of them are my mom. There is just a different connection you have with your mom than you have with anyone else, especially after you have become a mom yourself.

After the accident I missed my mom terribly. But when Eddie was born it was a whole new level of intensity. No one to call at midnight to ask stupid first-time parent questions. No one to come over at the drop of a hat because I couldn’t take the pressure. No one to ask what I was like when I was a baby. My dad, in typical male fashion, kept telling me over and over that he didn’t remember me when I was a newborn. Gee, thanks Dad. Just because you’re thinking it doesn’t mean you have to come out and say it point blank. It is hard to have kids, but it even harder, SUPER hard if you don’t have the family support near you. And even if they aren’t near you, just knowing that they would be on the other end of a phone in a matter of seconds is comforting. I know that as Eddie and Baby TBD get older my dad will be willing and able to take them for the day or possibly more, but those first few weeks you bring a newborn home that are so intense and scary... that’s when I missed my mom the most. And I know there will be new hurdles once the kids get older and they won't have grandma around. I don't know what that's going to be like for either me or them, but I bet it's going to be hard.

But, you get through it. There is a saying that God never gives you more than you can handle. I don’t think that’s exactly right. God just knows he made us so resilient that we can handle just about anything that’s put before us because we have to. We don’t always have a choice. Of course, God did give my husband and me the world’s most awesome baby. I mean, he slept through the night for the first time at two weeks old. That did make getting through it easier. After a while you realize you can't screw it up too badly and start to relax. Every decision is not a life or death one. Not everything you fear is going to happen. Being clueless is actually ok.

But I still miss my mom.  A lot.

Commence blogging... GO!

So I have to confess. I know next to nothing about blogging, computers/Internet, or parenting. I'm hoping to learn as I go with the first two as I have so far with the last one. First, a little about my family. I married my high school sweetheart Sam after knowing him for 20 years. Yeah, I know, that's a bit odd. We have an 18 month old boy named Edward, or Eddie, who is the light of my life. Seriously, this kid is the happiest kid on the planet. It's not just me who thinks so. I have strangers stop me all the time and tell me this. He makes it incredibly fun and easy to be a stay at home mom. We sure got lucky with this one. I mean, yes, he does get cranky and sometimes throws a fit, but for the most part he is embarrassingly well behaved. Flirty, even. Sam and I are expecting kid number 2 in 4 months (July 1). Hopefully the second child is half as good as the first, although everyone tells me I'm bound to have a devil child to make up for how awesome Eddie is. Our family is rounded out by a cat Jada. Eddie loves Jada. Jada tolerates Eddie. Their relationship is quite cute.

Besides being a mom, which takes up a surprising amount of time, I'm also into car rallying and have been since... well... forever. Literally. My parents were rallying when I was born. No, not at the moment I was born, but I spent a good amount of my childhood in the back seat of a car driving back roads. So what is rallying? A time-speed-distance car rally is not anything like racing. It's on public streets with regular every day cars. The basic idea is you get a set of instructions of where to turn and what speeds to average between certain points. Occasionally you come across checkpoints that record your arrival time and give you at departure time. Your time between these checkpoints is compared to a mathematically calculated time and you receive points depending on how off you are. Like golf, low score wins. Like golf, when you're doing good it's great and when you're doing badly, it's torture. But it's always enjoyable, a nearly perfect mix of math and fun driving. Eddie is going to grow up as I did spending a lot of time in the back of a car driving around on car rallies. I wrote an 8 hour car rally when Eddie was 2 months old. It took three days and he was a perfect angel the entire time. Well, until about the last 40 minutes, he just wanted to get out and feel the wind on his face.

I'm active in my church and teach Sunday School and play in our bell choir. Teaching Sunday School is something I just kind of fell into (it seems like most if not all of the parents get sucked into volunteering at one point or another) and I'm as clueless at that as I am at everything else. Music, on the other hand, is a passion I'm had all my life. I grew up playing the violin until I realized I really didn't like it, then played trumpet and trombone. But it's no fun playing an instrument unless you have the opportunity to play with other people. That's what makes bell choir so amazing. You can't do it without every single member of the choir. When one person is missing, you can hear the hole that is left. It's really fun to be a part of something that becomes larger than the sum of it's parts. Plus it's nice to get out of the house without the kid and interact with adults at least once a week.

I also like to read, although I don't seem to get nearly enough time these days to do so. Well, let me take that back. I read a ton, but all the books have a pictures and a limited amount of words. And I often read the same book over and over and over and over and over. And then read it again.

So this blog is mostly a journal for me so I can look back with my kids when they are annoying teenagers and remember what they were like when they were cute and adorable. But if you'd like to come along for the ride, please do. I'm sure it will be a lot of bragging about my kids. Or complaining about my kids. Or random stuff I'm into. Or rants about life in general. After all, I am clueless and making this up as I go along.