7 Quick Takes – Oh Boy Redux Edition

1. Two weeks ago, we found out our expected girl was really a boy.

He was born on Monday, ten days earlier than his planned arrival (which was itself a good week earlier than his due date). It wasn't strictly an emergency c-section, but it was about as urgent as it gets without being an actual 'someone is dying' emergency.

Raphael Cirilo – 7 pounds 9 ounces, 20.25″ long. Infuriated by his eviction.

2. So here's what happened…

On the previous Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights I was waking up in the witching hour because my hands and feet, specifically my palms and soles, were itching like mad. And what else am I going to do during bouts of weird, itchy insomnia but google “pregnant with itchy hands and feet”?

My googling turned up intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. Cholestasis is when, for whatever reason, the flow of bile from the liver to the small intestine slows or stops. The bile salts build up in the blood and cause the intense itching. Uncomfortable for the mother, but very dangerous for the baby. Due to the immaturity of the fetal liver, the condition essentially poisons the baby with the bile salts and can lead to stillbirth.

So I spent the weekend waffling over whether I was just being hysterical after all the stress of this pregnancy. I really didn't think having this was at all probable, but after three consecutive nights, I decided to let my OB know the symptom and have her make the call. She ordered labs and set a late afternoon appointment.

At the appointment, she told me my liver enzymes were elevated and I was having the baby that evening. Women with this condition are apparently routinely delivered as soon as they reach 37 weeks, and I was already four days past that.

I had nothing packed. I had almost nothing washed. We hadn't even opened the carseat yet, much less have it installed. We still weren't exactly sure about a name. Oh, and my cell phone was dead because I forgot the charging cable at home that morning.

I did have a list, which I paired down on the fly to bare necessities I could help Himself find over the phone. Borrowed the office phone to make my necessary calls and luckily caught Himself five minutes from home. He packed bags for me, GeekBaby, NinjaBaby, and himself, stuffed the carseat in the car, dropped GeekBaby's bag off at my mom's and made it downtown to the hospital in what must be record time.

In the meantime, FlyCat came to sit with me in the ante partum unit. I have the best friends.

By 8, I was in surgery. By 9:30 I was in recovery, working diligently on wiggling my feet. And by 11, I had my baby.

3. It amazes me how completely better I felt as soon as NinjaBaby was delivered. My heartburn vanished. The itching was gone. My dry skin and hair are reversing themselves. I was hungry again for the first time in months, and pestered my night nurse relentlessly over whether I could have a real breakfast.

The cholestasis is also gone. We seem to have caught it early enough that my bile salts weren't even elevated yet. (Serum bile salts take awhile to come back.) My doctor will repeat the metabolic panel at my first postpartum appointment to make sure everything is back to normal, but the itching was gone by the time I got my hands on NinjaBaby.

On the other hand, cholestasis reoccurs in 45-70% of subsequent pregnancies. Just what I needed, one more possibly fatal medical facet to worry about.

4. I maintain, the worst part of all this is getting the anesthesia. I can lie there and take an injection in my eye with relative self control, but getting a spinal this time was even worse than the epidural I had with GeekBaby. I will admit to being semi hysterical. There are two main elements that I hate here.

First, I can't watch. Therefore I can't supervise. This makes me crazy.

Second, they always start with lidocaine. I hate lidocaine. It doesn't work well on me, and the effects of the lidocaine itself hurts. For days. My back only stopped aching today.

5. My OB was as good as her word, and let me go home after 48 hours. Thank goodness. The food at this hospital was especially bad, and they were unreliable about delivering the meals I actually selected. The last one was so bad that even Himself couldn't eat it, he went out and brought us back chicken tenders. Maybe they were no better nutritionally, but at least they weren't revolting.

I don't understand why they feed us so badly while simultaneously mouthing concern about our lower GI function returning to normal.

6. GeekBaby has never looked so shy as when my parents brought him into the hospital room to meet his new brother. My cyborg hand (of IV saline lock and wrapped up, taped up, disconnected O2 sensor) didn't help. He was charmed by his new brother and jept climbing up on my bed to kiss him or pat his head. but he got bored with visiting pretty fast. And now that we're home, he's having a little trouble adapting. Which I guess isnt surprismg since he's been our sole focus for so long. On one hand, he's super helpful – on the other, sulky when he's reminded not to be boisterousness near the baby, or doesn't get something he wants because we're busy with the baby. We'll see how it goes.

7. This whole business has been highly disorienting. Two weeks ago, I had just found out we were having a boy, not a girl. Today that boy is four days old and snoozing on my arm. We're having trouble remembering his name, and keep calling him by his brother's name. Or his cousin's. Poor NinjaBaby. That's what happens when you're this sneaky.

I've been trying to write this all day and I'm just rambling. So I'll just end it here. Visit Jen @ Conversion Diary for more, better focused Quick Takes.

 

7 Quick Takes – Return of Misc. Edition

1. I'm not exactly on bed rest. But the general pain caused by ordinary, gentle walking around has become so much for me that I've imposed “sit quietly and don't move around unnecessarily” on myself.

…The inactivity is driving me up the wall crazy.

2. I did spend an hour or so in the pool last weekend at my first goddaughter's birthday party. The water was really cold, and the day wasn't quite hot enough to make such cold water enjoyable. But you know kids – they'll swim till they're blue in the face and shivering and still complain when you haul them out to prevent hypothermia. But GeekBaby wanted to go in, and someone had to go with him. And it actually felt pretty good if you eased in relatively gently. I was one of the only adults in the pool though, which meant I was also playing chaperone/life guard to ~20 six year olds. Fortunately I'm especially buoyant at the moment.

The next day, I had almost no pelvic pain at all. Getting all that weight off my pelvis for a little while worked wonders. Clearly, next pregnancy, I need steady access to about 4 feet of water.

3. To combat the sitting still crazies, I've started my postpartum knitting project early… and am ripping along so well that I'm beginning to worry I won't have any of it left for actual postpartum.

A Cardigan for Arwen has been sitting in my Ravelry projects queue for four and a half years now. Isn't it lovely? But I've never knit a sweater, and so was hesitant to start it. Also there were reasonable concerns over whether I would ever finish it – I'm not known for finishing projects. But now I think it's time.

I'm knitting it from KnitPicks Wool of the Andes in Noble Heather, which is a lovely shadowy evergreen shade heathered with silver and charcoal. The combination of the tight little cables and the lovely green make Eowyn a more appropriate name for this cardi, but someone has already foolishly (and in defiance of all heraldry) scooped up that name with their variation containing a cabled tree of Gondor on the back panel. *sigh*

There may be a lot of knitting blogging appearing here soon.

4. The felted yarn join is a thing of almost perfect beauty.

5. So… boy names. We've pretty much settled on Rafael (which has a nice symmetry with NinjaBaby!) but we're stuck on middle names now. Himself has vetoed Danger and any variation of names that produces J.R.R. (spoilsport), so I'm stuck. Place your suggestions in the comments.

(Don't suggest Angel, it's already been vetoed. Long story.)

6. I've finally worked out an extremely reliable and safe vigil lamp wick-holding system. We started with cork floats, but those have a disturbing tendency toward indiscretion (i.e. they eventually catch fire). Then we moved to a wire that hooked over the edges of the glass and held the wick at a steady level. In this set up, the cotton string we were using for a wick didn't carry the oil far enough for a stationary wick holder, so we switched to 1 ply cotton mop string. This worked very well. Too well. The wire coil we used to keep the flame sequestered from the rest of the wick collected carbon and oil in its grooves and tended towards indiscretions as well.

What works: 3/16th of an inch diameter brass craft tubing. Clip off a piece about half an inch long, and twist some brass wire around that little tube tightly enough to hold it in place. Run those twists long enough to hook over the edge of your glass and thread a piece of oil soaked wicking up through it so a quarter of an inch shows at the top. Fill the glass with oil until just below the bottom of the brass tube.

I find this setup burns long and well with a small, steady flame. If it burns too long without attention, it just goes out, either from lack of oil or from needing the wick trimmed. The wire near the glass never gets so hot that I can't pick it up with my bare fingers to adjust the wick, although I wouldn't tough the brass tubing itself and use a pair of tweezers to slide the wick up from the bottom. And it doesn't require frequent cleaning, like the coil of wire did.

7. Two weeks from now, I will have a new baby. Wow.

But for now, I have to go run errands. Four years ago I loaned my 0-3 month boy clothes to a coworker of Himself's who had a boy when she was expecting a girl. I've been trying to retrieve them for three years now. That I kind of need them back now does not influence her one little bit. Thus you find me, nine months and not pleased to be walking, headed to the Carter's outlet armed with a 25% off coupon… and maybe a purse flask.

…I loath shopping.

For more quick takes, visit Jen @ Conversion Diary.

Update: that trip to the Carter's outlet was a waste of gas. How can they have NO 3 month onesies? Also, lady when I say 3 month, I'm aware they're for 8-12 pound babies. David was 9 when he was born and I have no reason to believe this one is any smaller. So I'm using my coupon online instead.

Also, I could take Jen, Calah, Grace and all other comers in a complainathon. Just because I (usually) don't swear (online) doesn't mean I can't. >:-)

7 Quick Takes – Oh Boy Edition

1. So… that baby girl who was supposed to be here in three weeks? She is really a he.

We only even found out because my OB couldn't get a good bead on her his heart rate this visit, so she ordered a quick ultrasound and some time on the monitor. And the next thing I know I the ultrasound tech is saying “wait, didn't I tell you you were having a girl??”

Definitely NOT a girl.

I tried to tell her it wasn't her fault, but she's too embarrassed to even look at me right now. But I read the anatomy ultrasound – both anatomy ultrasounds since we has two, two weeks apart – myself, independent from my tech, and I concurred that this baby was a girl.

We are so thoroughly flabbergasted that we don't know what to do now.

I feel like I need a good cathartic cry. Only I'm not actually sad at all. The baby is active and healthy. That's all that's really important. But I still feel all tense and wound up in a way that I know crying will relax… but I can't.

2. For the time being, I dub this baby NinjaBaby. Since he's apparently a super stealthy master of disguise.

3. We don't know what to do for a name, though. We never even had a contender for a boy's name and we've already had one nasty fight over it. And this baby has been Elanor and Ellie for 18 weeks.

4. Tindòmiel translates to morning star. Her real name was going to be Elanor Aurora. Elanor was lifted whole cloth from The Lord of the Rings and Aurora is my mother in law's name. But there's no point in keeping it shrouded in mystery now.

5. At this rate, maybe he'll even be twins. Hey, I can always hope (in defiance of all reasonable medical observation), right? And I swear sometimes he feels like two babies, not one.

6. A lot of what's distressing me right now is that, while absolutely nothing has changed (except in my head), I feel like I have to get entirely reacquainted with this baby.

7. And I just ordered yarn to knit a Baby Valkyrie hat. Now I'm going to have to order more yarn in brown to knit another Baby Viking hat too.

I say too, not instead, because at this point I'm just going to the hospital packed for any possibility.

More Quick Takes @ Jen's, et cetera…

7 Quick Takes – Curmudgeon Edition

1. See, I knew I wouldn't feel like doing anything after Easter. Apparently that even included blogging. The last trimester always (hah, I say that like I have vast experience) is always especially brutal. I don't have the crushing ribcage pain like last time, instead I have some extremely sore and strained muscles trying to support the bottom of my belly. Which I might have aggravated a little yesterday by doing a bunch of walking around the Medical Center… then trotting to catch my train (with a heavy load of baby shower gifts, no less.)

I'm terrible at being pregnant.

2. (TMI alert)

The general lethargy, it turns out, was probably the only symptom of an otherwise invisible, symptomless UTI. Goodness knows how long I'd had it. Maybe since right after my last OB appointment. I'm already starting to feel better, but it's made me think: I've never had a UTI. Is that because I'm not prone to them, or is it because when I do have them, they're not identifiable w/o a culture? I have plenty of episodes of “feeling mildly cruddy and intermittently feverish.”

It's been especially creeping me out since an antibiotic resistant UTI is what killed that expectant mother in Ireland.

3. It's been a weird week. On Wednesday a pair of mysterious diamond earrings showed up from Amazon alongside a few baby gifts of known provenance. There was no shipping list, no one I know bought them, Amazon itself did not know from whence they came!

I don't know what to DO with them. Amazon is all “…huh. Hey, free earrings!” Me, I feel like I'm about to become embroiled in either a spy flick or a muppet movie.

4. Speaking of baby gifts, one workplace shower is over. Thank goodness. I hate baby showers and tried to beg off, since this is my second baby and we don't really need much. But work would not let me off (any excuse for the lab to party, after all) but thankfully they did mostly attend to my two pleas of “I don't really need much, except girl clothes” and “please don't give me disposable diapers.”

But there's always one that doesn't. So we also received an ugly Pooh blanket with disturbing arms and legs that looks like it must awake in the witching hour and prowl around the house looking for new victims to smother. A pack of Huggies. A basket of diapering paraphernalia that we can't use because they'll damage our cloth diapers. And no gift receipt.

This is why I hate showers so much. You get nagged for weeks beforehand about “what do you still need?”, and when you put together an entirely modest list just to make it stop, the nagger looks at the list, apparently thinks “well, all that crap is boring”, and goes and spends 2-3x the money on some extraneous tchotchke.

Perhaps I wouldn't be quite so crabby if I hadn't spent the last three to four months trying to reduce the ridiculous amount of stuff in our house. There's a reason our third bedroom is called the Room of Doom.

Also, now I have to write thank you notes. *whimper*

On the other hand, we don't even know if Himself's department is going to throw a shower. Himself has lobbied against it, but I have an ugly feeling his department head is going to try a surprise shower, which I'm tolerably certain my nerves can't handle at this late date. Even if I don't have to go, I will still have to scramble to wash clothes, return things, and find more places to store other oddities. I have enough to finish up on the five weeks remaining to me.

5. I finally updated my Google+ profile with a picture. Tada!

Now I just need to update my Gravatar and I'm done with pictures for the next four years.

6. It's begun. GeekBaby came home from CCE on Wednesday to proclaim “the activities were boring. But I had fun playing!”

We've been seriously thinking about homeschooling him. It's barely been three weeks since I observed to Himself “His behavior will be fine in kindergarten even if he's bored, because he gets access to fresh toys and playtime. But from first grade on, he's going to be bored and thus in trouble all the time.” It's a little disturbing to see evidence my analysis was accurate so soon.

7. My c-section is scheduled for May 30th. She's getting Joan of Arc for a patron saint, which given her personality (and probable Amazonian stature) seems extremely appropriate to me. Also this ought to get us out of the hospital and home safe before Himself has to deal with administering finals and end of the year paperwork.

I'm still a little bitter over needing a c-section, but I swallowed my pride and scheduled it. And I suppose there are advantages, like knowing the hard deadline for when she'll be getting here, so I can't procrastinate too much.

For more Quick Takes, visit Jen @ Conversion Diary.

 

7 Quick Takes – Communion Edition

Publication delayed due to difficulty in obtaining the hat picture, which was (finally) taken at my parent's house on Sunday. Also because it was a long and tiring week.

1. I'm starting to write these sitting at the phlebotomist's office waiting the requisite hour for my second blood glucose screen. I *ahem* may have kinda forgotten to do it last week, and this week I've mostly been in the Valley. This isn't really an optimum time for this test, as I've just spent four days traveling in a mostly sedentary state with a diet fit to give a nutritionist a fit of apoplexy. So I guess we'll just have to see how my metabolism takes it.

Wow that orange stuff is nasty. It isn't nearly so nasty when it's still half frozen and slushy.

2. We have a pope again! Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio, Pope Francis (in case anyone's been living under a rock.) I burned most of my remaining data plan to watch the live feed from a bench in the outlet mall at Mercedes, but it was entirely worth it.

I thought he looked rather shell shocked to be standing up there on the balcony, to be honest. I loved his awkward little wave, but didn't really know what to think of him otherwise. I couldn't remember ever hearing a thing about him before. But he's already delighted me twice, with his bus trip and by slipping off to Santa Maria Maggiore the next morning to pray. I think he's going to give everyone a good, proper shaking up, Saint Francis-style.

I'm having a hard time organizing what I think so far about 'Papa Pancho', but I can sum part of it up thus: I have a deeply amused impulse to get some popcorn and watch the various tribes have their spittle flecked nutty because the Pope is Catholic. More later, if I can get mentally organized.

3. So about a month ago, I took Internet social awkwardness to new heights and invited one of my local commenters and her husband over for dinner.

I've done it before (including a couple of times waaaay back in 2001, when such things were just not done), but it always feels weird to meet in person someone you've only known over the Internet. But I've been thinking lately, and what else is the Internet for? Some of my commenters are people from my life, past and present. But I'll be supremely lucky if I get to meet Melanie, or FoxFier, or any of my other distantly located commenters once in our lives. I don't even see the commenters I do know enough for it to satisfy. And that makes not having dinner with Elizabeth and the Baron Von Korf, who live not even on the other side of the city, well, stupid. Even vaguely heterodox.

Anyway, I was delightful to meet them. Himself and I had a good time. So did GeekBaby, because at the end of the evening he decided he'd forgotten to tell them something and chased their car halfway down our street before I caught him. Ow. Apparently I've reached the stage of pregnancy where even light running is painful.

(Maybe someday they'll even forgive the mediocre dinner that I produced.)

4. The next day (Monday) we headed to the Valley because it was Himself's Spring Break. This will be my last long trip till August, and i think the 13 hour round trip in the car may have already been too much for me. And I had to work when I got back. It's taken me a while to recover. (Thus the late 7QT.)

5. We went to the stock show in Mercedes while we were there. Calves have scratchy tongues, but wow are they cute!

6. Hats. I'm afraid I've finally crossed the Tiber Red.

But I must admit, it is pretty good at both shading my eyes and keeping the whispies out of my face.

7. So Google is shuttering Reader in July? I can't even begin to grasp the rationale behind this asshattery. I use Reader every single day. Not just to see what's new, but to keep track of what's old and worth further thought. It's a reasonably adequate archival tool, could be made better, but it was already better than its rivals. It didn't need to be fancy, it just needed to work. And it did. And now it's gone, come July.

I've been playing around with some alternates. Feedly, so far, is the best… but even then it's a distant second to Reader. It goes too much for style over function, and for social media function over the real function of an RSS aggregator, which is to collect, arrange, and store information.

The Feedly iOS app is especially atrocious. What kind of RSS reader doesn't work without an Internet connection? Reading offline is most of the point of having an app!

I'll review every service and app I try, so be prepared for a deluge. If you have any recommendations, leave them in the comments.

Bonus Monday Take: Himself's grandmother is 94 today! And now, in her honor, an Öma story:

Öma gave up driving a few years ago, after a couple of injuries/infections when she started requiring a walker. She was near to, or past ninety at this point, had driven stick all her life (she positively refused to drive automatic) and had only ever been involved in one accident – and even then it took a youngster in the midst of a domestic dispute backing into her blazer while she was stopped at a red light to cause it. Öma was furious, not at the damage to her vehicle, but at the ruination of a perfect driving record of 70+ years. Before then she'd never had so much as a speeding ticket. She was, and is, a sharp and feisty lady.

But she recently decided she didn't need her drivers license anymore and to exchange it for a Texas ID. She wanted the ID for various other necessities of life. Voting. Banking. Visiting the liquor store.

Turns out, you can't just roll over your TXDL into a TXID. You need to apply. With your birth certificate. And Öma doesn't have one. She's 94. The county she was born in didn't even issue birth certificates back then. Her social security card wasn't enough, even in conjunction with her existing ID. But she could renew her drivers license without any problem at all. How messed up is that? (It turns out that this is a common problem in that county.)

MOMIL was close to tears by the end of this bureaucratic runaround, but Öma was just plain mad. I can just see her, leaving the courthouse with her walker, swearing profusely in Spanish in what she thinks is under her breathe but is really entirely audible.

Happy Birthday, Öma. May God grant you four and ninety more.