Haiku of the Day

He's 6!

six years ago now
snuggling fresh furry ears
seems like yesterday

The wee one turned six today. Six! I can hardly believe it. He's a regular full-on dynamo of a kid and I still try to buy him toddler sized clothes.

He had a super party today. It was crazy, and full of screaming six-year-olds, and at one point I kind of wanted to have a nervous breakdown, but all-in-all, it went really well.

I spent all day yesterday making him a castle cake. It was good therapy for someone who's been couch-bound. I just sat at the kitchen table and fussed over the cake for hours. It was a ton of fun and the wee one gave me the best (heart-breaking) compliment when he said it made him sad to have to eat the cake.

There's still so much mess and chaos, but I am not moving from the sofa tonight. What a fun, exhausting day.

How can he be six? Really. How?

way more than you want to know

the doctor/artist
should sell frames in his office
or maybe xanax

OK. So here's the trouble, courtesy of my doctor:

Note the placenta on the left, the clot on the right, and my poor cervix getting clobbered in the middle by both of them. The arrows shooting out of the baby's head indicate fetal movement whacking into everything and causing bleeding. The outside arrows indicate my movement whacking into everything and causing bleeding. The whole thing indicates me, on the couch, brooding to the new She & Him album (fantastically awesome, by the way. I am now in love with Zooey Deschanel) for ever and ever.

So there you have it. Everything's all jacked up in my lady parts. The marginal previa will hopefully fix itself within the next four weeks or so and the clot will hopefully reabsorb. My doctor said - and I quote - "I think everything will be fine. There's a strong heartbeat." This is not the 100% glowing, confidant statement I would like to hear, but I guess I'll take it.

We saw lots of baby ribs in the ultrasound today. Ribs!

blogging on the go

Am at the doctor blogging from my new phone.

Fancy!

I don't have anything to say though, except I apparently did too much yesterday. Best put away that supergirl cape for now.

preparations have begun

went out of the house
tempt fate or go flat insane
these are the choices

Today I went to a cake supply store. This may not seem like a big deal, but after sitting on my ass on the couch for days on end, it was a very big deal. I'm not even that good at decorating cakes, but my couch time has resulted in an obsession with the Ace of Cakes show on the Food Network and so now I am going to get a flaming whisk tattoo and speak only with words like "fondant" and "gumpaste."

So I came home with icing bags and decorating nibs and icing that comes out of the can like spray paint, and pre-colored rolls of fondant and a bunch of other stuff. The wee one wants a castle cake for his party on Saturday and dammit, I'm going to make a kick ass castle cake for him. I'm not going to cover the whole cake in fondant, though, because I haven't tried that before and I'm pretty sure that's the kind of thing that needs practice, especially when you're someone like me - a person who can barely fold a towel the wrong way. The idea of draping a thin layer of perfectly smooth icing over a cake, while enticing, seems almost completely impossible. The fondant is to make flags for the turrets! And maybe a drawbridge (though I think a hershey bar would make a good drawbridge, too).

Anyway, I still have to go out for more doodads (gotta get ice cream cones for the turrets and stuff like that) so I'm excited. Don't worry, though, I won't overdo it. I promise. I am still taking it easy. And my mom is here, preventing me from doing any heavy lifting or stair-climbing or triathalons or bungee-jumping.

A castle cake is going to be so fun to make. The wee one has had a giraffe cake, a barn cake, a rocketship cake, a robot cake (and a porcupine cake for school), and a Buster cake (from Mythbusters). They never turn out perfect, but my lack of craftiness sets the bar low, so everyone's happy.

I have a secret plan for making a moat. I really hope it works, and I can't wait to brag about it!

where do they come up with this stuff?

I accidentally stepped on a lego spaceship the wee one had just built. I apologized profusely, but he just looked at me with steely eyes.

"Tell it to the judge, Mommy," He said grimly. "Tell it to the judge."

Electrifying news

lightning is pretty
but not inside your bedroom
then, it is scary

So. The night before last we had a short thunderstorm. Nothing worse than usual, and certainly nothing like the one that ripped out trees and blew out windows and tore up cars all through Austin a few weeks ago.

However.

At 4:50am there was a blinding flash outside of my bedroom window. At the exact same time there was a blinding flash INSIDE my bedroom! A whirling ball of static/lightning shot out of the idle TV into the center of the room! Holy shit! I jumped about 14 feet when I saw it. And the zzzzzzaaaap boom of the lightning and thunder was kind of scary, too. My husband slept through the whole thing.

The crazy thing is that the power never went off and the house didn't catch on fire and the alarm clock that was plugged into the same "surge protector" as the TV wasn't hurt at all. Also, the downstairs TV, which is connected to the stricken TV by the same cable cord via a splitter, wasn't hurt either. The zapped TV, however, is toast. It has gone to TV heaven to cavort with other electrocuted televisions.

Now we have a 20", 7,000 lb. paperweight on our dresser. I am actually very happy it's fried, because as much as I love TV, I hate having one in my bedroom. But my husband is very sad. He is going to have to take time to mourn. Then he is going to try and talk me into moving the downstairs TV upstairs and getting a fancy hang-on-the-wall TV for downstairs. If this couch time persists for me, though, he may not have to worry. I will just buy some TVs online and we will be all set.

Anyway, how about that? Lightning INSIDE the house! What else can happen to make this week exciting? I'm almost afraid to ask.

chronicling

I just wanted to make a note. Today was momentous for either good, or nefarious reasons.

Today was the first day since becoming pregnant that I did not have to take a nap. Even now, at 6:42, I don't feel exhausted. This either means that at 14 weeks, things are starting to get better. Or it means, at 14 weeks, things are going south quickly. I worry about that whole "loss of symptoms" thing. I've had that before and it was the precursor to bad, bad things. But, since I'm technically in my second trimester now, maybe this is not as doomsday as I worry that it is.

This pregnancy is jacked up, isn't it? I am ready for it to be fun. I want to be a cute olive on a stick, not an OCD nutjob. Ah, well.

No, spot, no. Stop, spot, stop.

"taking it easy"
much easier to do this
before The Google

Still trapped on couch. Spotting started back up this morning. I'm not sure how I can say this eloquently, but:

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

So I am coping with worry by going into debt. I just bought an iPhone. Hahahaha. For real. I did it. On the AT&T site. It's a refurb, so I did save a little bit. And my current contract is up in 4 days, and I need to be able to blog from the next inevitable hospital visit. Right? Of course right! Minute-by-minute. Blow-by-blow. Liveblogging the chaos. Twittering the panic. Taking pictures of the ER docs who are Extremely Well Groomed. I see this all happening in my future - in your future. All thanks to bedrest and the insanity it produces.

Also, I bought three shirts on the Anthropologie site (on sale!).

Someone should probably take this computer away from me. But at least buying things prevents me from googling "bleeding 14 weeks" which is, if you didn't already know, very inadvisable.

Hmmm. What else can I do? Work? Download TV shows? Buy a fetal heart monitor for $443? The choices are endless.

101!

haven't been outside
trapped on couch, hands on belly
I guess that's good thing

It figures that this summer would be the summer we'd hit triple digits super early. But seeing as how I am still trapped on the couch, I can't complain. Well, I can complain about being trapped on the couch, but not about the weather.

Tomorrow I am leaving the house. It will be officially 48 hours since the bleeding stopped and I will be officially allowed to move around. Nothing crazy, of course. I feel like I did when I was a kid and we were going to Disneyworld the next day. I cannot wait to get out of this house. Having some distractions so that I'm not just laying here, feeling my belly, and trying to imagine what chaos is going in there will be a good thing.

I just hope my bank account is ready, because I feel like I might go shopping and just freak out.

hanging out, doing nothing, still falling asleep

finally quiet
finally out of the house
with trepidation

Things seem to be almost back to normal around here. Well, we're still having a parade of relatives come by to stay with us so that I can keep taking it easy, but really, things are much better (knock on wood).

I'd say I'm getting cabin fever, but last week, we spent four of the seven days at various doctor's offices. The pharmacist at Target now knows us by name - and sight. The wee-er one has been smacked with a killer ear infection, poor baby. We don't get a lot of ear infections around here, so we're new to the numbing ear drops. Holy shit those things seem to really work. She had some drops at 10:30 and is still asleep three hours later. I'm actually starting to worry because she NEVER naps for this long. She's going to be hongry when she wakes up.

We're also planning the wee one's 6th birthday party, so I got a trip out of the house yesterday to go to the toy store. Hooray!

Wanna know something else exciting? I have a sneak peek of the cover art for my book, due out next May. As soon as my editor gives me the OK, I'll post it. It. Is. So. Cool.

Thanks for all your continued good thoughts and everything. What a spectacularly horrible week last week was. I can only hope things get better for real.

It's ba-ack...

don't let your guard down
but stop blaming yourself, too
it's hard to gestate

The short story is: the bleeding is back. But the doc says everything is a-OK and Mystery Baby is doing just fine.

The long story is: WTF? I was minding my own business, getting the wee-er one to take a nap when WHUSH, a tsunami of blood ushers forth instant panic and a really big mess. The really Twilight Zone part of it all is that I was wearing the same outfit I had on the first time this happened. Not only that, but the morning had been eerily similar. Nothing, of course, that I can really attribute to the bleeding. I mean, I didn't spend both days lifting cars and pulling semi-trucks with a harness. But still. A little creepy.

So there's the WHUSH. And this time was not like last time. This time was like a horror show murder scene. Like Holy Shit I'm hemorrhaging All Over My Bathroom Floor While My Baby Cries In Her Room, What Is This, A Fucking Lifetime Movie? kind of scene. At one point, the nurse I was talking to on the phone was conferring with a passel of other nurses about whether or not I could wait the 30 minutes for my husband to rush home and take me to the ER, or if I should call an ambulance. They were leaning towards ambulance, but I waited.

He got home, we took the wee-er one to a friend's house (my friend also ended up picking the wee one up from school - his reaction? "This is not an ordinary day!") and then we went to the ER. In a very serendipitous event, one of the triage nurses, also named Kari (but spelled differently) was 16 weeks pregnant and had just gone through this exact same thing two weeks earlier. So she sped us back there and gave me a room really fast.

Then, IV, tests, doppler, ultrasound... everything looked and sounded perfect. There was absolutely no evidence of any reason for the bleeding. Complete mystery why my bathroom floor looks like someone was shot in there.

So I was sent home, with instructions to come back if it got worse. That's when the cramps started. Big, mean, wraparound contraction-y cramps. So I took some albuterol (which helped, even if it was a placebo thing), and sweated out the night.

This morning I went in to see my regular OB and, again, everything is hunky dory, other than the fact that I still haven't stopped bleeding. His theory, confirmed by the ultrasound, is that the placenta is covering just a bit of my cervix. So he says any "moderate movement" jostles the shit out of that ornery thing and causes bleeding. Seriously, though, the only moderate movement I do is walking upstairs and carrying the wee-er one. Ugh. But that's the best anyone can guess as to what's the what with this stupid, terrifying, awful bleeding mess.

So my mom is here. And I am in my chair. And I am reading Un Lun Dun (by China Meiville - very excellent). And I am trying not to panic or otherwise freak out. It seems like whenever I am ready to shop for minivans or dig out my maternity clothes something like this happens to remind me that maybe I shouldn't plan too far ahead. It's scary and I don't like it.

This was the longest post ever, but it makes me feel better to throw it out to the interwebs, let the Universe gobble it up, and greedily covet the warm wishes of others. It really is strangely comforting to do those things. And it also takes up time so that I am not tempted to watch Dr. Phil.

Elephants. They are sitting on my face.

pressure release valve
not behind ear or up my nose
implosion begins

I am sitting here possibly dying of a one-two sucker punch made up of bronchitis and a sinus thing. It's only been since Wednesday night that I've felt like crap, but it seems to be getting worse. So I am on the couch, deliriously watching NASCAR for the first time and indiscriminately cursing under my breath every time I cough. For every hack I have, new parts of me hurt. How does coughing make the backs of your knees hurt? I don't know, but it does.

Also, I am not taking my medicine, so I should probably stop complaining. But here is what the doctor said when she prescribed the Amoxicillan: This probably won't work. You might need something stronger, but because you're pregnant, let's not upset your stomach anymore than it is already.

I appreciate her honesty. However, I wonder if any drugs would help. I mean, there weren't any tests done to see if this is viral or bacterial - and the handout she gave me said bronchitis can be either one. And since I'm not spewing anything green, I'm figuring this is something I'm just going to have to wait out, as fun as that sounds.

When I was pregnant with the wee-er one I had some similar ailment and I took the abx like a good girl. You know what I got in return? A yeast infection ON MY TONGUE. Yes. It's just as horrible as it sounds.

So I am sick and complain-y and blogging about gross things and I am sorry. There are lots of crashes in the NASCAR race, though, and that makes me kind of happy.

honk, honk, toot, toot

I'm featured on Livemom! And I have a mustache!

pause

railroad spikes in ears
carving out my eye with spoon
more fun than Star Trek

I would like to take a moment to pause from my usual whining about feeling sick and panicking about Mystery Baby and general freaking out about how the wee-er one treats me like an abusive boyfriend treats his girlfriend (thanks to Tina Fey for that analogy).

I want to pause so that I can tell you how much, how incredibly, palpably much I HATE STAR TREK ENTERPRISE. The other Star Treks? Eh, I could take 'em or leave 'em. The Next Generation wasn't too bad and I've been known to watch Janeway kick some ass late at night. But holy shit, Enterprise? With Scott Bakula? IT MAKES ME CRAZY. It is SO BAD. I mean, it's so bad you can't even make fun of it. It's so bad it offends me that the Star Trek creators thought they could get away with it. It's so bad that the idea that the Star Trek creators DID get away with it makes me want to hunt them down and strap them to chairs and force them to watch this poopy crap non-stop until they admit they took advantage of hapless Trekkies everywhere.

My husband, of course, loves this show. He watches it all the time. It is all over the TiVo, like a plague of sores that won't heal.

Now, I am not a person to attack TV. I love TV. Even bad TV. Farmer Wants a Wife? Stupid, kind of offensive, great fodder for The Soup, and whatever. Tila Tequila, or whoever she is? Don't care. But this shit? This Enterprise show? It makes me hate people. It makes me (gasp!) hate TV.

Couldn't. Hate. It. More.

And it's on right now. So I am listening to the Dead Milkmen and grimacing and wondering how my husband can stand this show. How can he stand it? HOW? It is a mystery. A mystery wrapped in an enigma, swallowed by a giant space horse and crapped out all over my TV screen.

filling them in....

happiness all round
let's hope the sentiment lasts
these kids are so great

Yesterday, we told the kids about Mystery Baby. The wee one was very excited, though he pretended to be put out. "You mean there's going to be one more baby I have to watch while you go to the bathroom?!" He asked in mock exasperation. Then he gave a little dance and asked why we had to wait and why couldn't the baby come out right now and why don't we call the baby Junie B. I told him that I would LOVE to expedite the next six months, but the Mystery Baby needs lots more time to cook and grow.

The wee-er one is still pretty little so she's not 100% sure what's going on. She did say, "Baby? Nap!" when she saw the sonogram. I asked her the other day what she would do with a baby and she pushed her doll off the bed and said, "Drop." So that seems promising.

I have felt terrible today, but I can tell you that, in general I have been feeling much better. No more baby postcards knock on wood. I think my problem today is a cold that's kicking my ass. Is this just so boring? You don't care about my cold.

Here's a picture of the kids and their spill the beans t-shirts (that I made with the expert help of my friend Average Jane Crafter and my other friend, Mama Librarian [BLOG TO BE LINKED TO AS SOON AS SHE DECIDES ON BACKGROUND COLORS AND KICKS SOME STYLESHEET ASS AND TELLS ME IT'S OK TO GO CRAZY WITH THE LINKING].)

The shirts say "Little sister, Big sister, Best of Both Worlds" and "Knock, Knock, Who's there? Ya. Ya Who? What are you getting so excited about? I'm excited about getting another sibling!" (The wee one loves these long ridiculous jokes.)

11w 5d

am hunkering down
first trimester onslaught done?
a girl can hope, right?

Worst haiku ever. But I need some slack because I'm tired and sicky feeling. You know what, though? My second trimester starts on Sunday! And though this may not sound exciting to anyone, and may actually seem like the most boring post ever, I just wanted to say it out loud.

Reasonably, I know not to expect bright shining happiness and no more nausea and no more starvation and no more exhaustion all on Sunday morning. But at least I know it will end soon. Hopefully.

Now I am off to Target. To buy things. Things that I "need." Like an ice pack for my throbbing head and some trail mix for my evil stomach.

Also interesting news? The due date has been pushed up to 11/15. So no more Thanksgiving baby. My dates were all jacked up, I guess. In fact, they still could be jacked up. It is very fitting for the Mystery Baby to have a Mystery Due Date, though. I kind of like the suspense.