During the work week, it’s not THAT bad, particularly now that we’ve stopped letting daycare put him down for a nap – he’s asleep by 8:30pm which is a HUGE improvement over the 10:30 bedtimes we were dealing with. But the weekends are a bit rough, particularly because I haven’t been feeling that well since Jeff gave me whatever mysterious illness he was harboring before he hopped on the plane (thanks babe!)

Keep in mind too that everything I’m about to complain about is compounded by the fact that Jasper does not listen to a word I say so that EVERY task, no matter how small and mundane becomes a battle of epic proportions. Sometimes just getting him to GET IN HIS CARSEAT can send me over the edge. In fact, I’m quite sure that our neighbors will be calling CPS to investigate us at any moment based on the fact that I am constantly yelling at him to GET IN THE CAR NOW as he stops to turn on a map light, pick up whatever random toy he threw on the car floor the day before, pretend “fall” and yet a million other stall tactics designed to drive me insane during this task that we have to repeat at least 5 times a day.

I think this pictures pretty much sums up the stage he’s in at the moment:

Also add to the backdrop of it all the fact that he asks me “Mommy can you play with me?” every second of every day. Literally, I could be getting dressed, shirt over my head, in the bathroom brushing my teeth, in the kitchen cooking breakfast- any one of a multitude of tasks which quite obviously make it impossible for me to in fact stop what I am doing and play.  And yes I know that it’s SO sweet that he’s at an age where he actually desperately wants to spend time with me – but damn it would be nice if he could entertain himself for more than .5 seconds! And then there’s the guilt too that comes with saying no, I can NOT play with you right now all the time.

So the stage has been set, here is just a little recap of the actual events of the weekend:

Yesterday I had a sales session in the morning that my parents thankfully babysat for, but  didn’t really have much planned for the rest of the day (we had a playdate that got canceled) so I took him to Target to shop for the three birthday parties we have coming up this week.  I know you are shaking your head wondering what I was thinking bringing the 3 year old with me to buy toys for OTHER children, but remember I didn’t really have the option of leaving him home (see the husband is away bit!)

I ALMOST managed to put the toys in the cart without him quite realizing what was going on, but, because he insisted on sitting in the basket part of the cart I had the toys sort of leaning on the handle bars so of course he spotted the Play doh ice cream set and his eyes got HUGE and he said “Mommy is that for ME???!” in a voice so genuinely excited and full of anticipation that I could not NOT get him one of his own. Sigh.

Oh well, at least a new toy would provide some much needed distraction.  I also picked up a robe for him because that’s his other new thing – even though our old drafty house is FREEZING to all other normal humanoids, somehow Jasper finds the constant need to take his sweaters and socks off.

Channeling Hugh and demonstrating his new and oft used sulky face:

Playing with his new guilt-gift play doh set:

After play-doh he wanted to watch a movie but he needed a bath, cue the “I don’t want to get into the bath / I won’t get OUT of the bath” routine:

At some point that night I developed a migraine-like nausea inducing headache, and then this morning I woke up with a stomach ache that lasted all day.  Had Jeff been here I would have definitely sent him with the kid and the present to the birthday party we had scheduled at 10:30, but instead I dragged my ass into the shower, fed the child (no, I don’t WANT scrambled eggs!) wrapped the gift (melt down because I didn’t let him do the actual wrapping) and headed off to Wee Play.

But not before I grabbed Jasper and quietly and purposefully held his hand, looked him in the eye and told him that mommy really wasn’t feeling well and that I needed him to PLEASE help me by listening, getting his coat on without a fight and into the carseat without giving me a hard time.   This approach used to work, but aparantly not anymore because literally seconds after our little “conversation” he was playing a game he made up that consisted of him refusing to put his arms into his jacket (wow, FUN!)

Finally we make it to wee-play and it’s a much needed time-killer. He has a blast on the big kid giant climber and made it to the truck at the tippy top with no fear:

But apparently the giant corkscrew tube slide was too dark and scary because I had to climb up it three times to rescue him.

I’ve only ever been to Wee play when it was PACKED, teaming with kids, but I guess I’d never been there before at naptime because by 1pm it was a ghost town.. apparently I’m the only one lucky enough to have a child who is impervious to the need for sleep.  We stuck around until about 3 before we headed home because I was feeling so bad I thought I was going to die. I counted the minutes until my parents got home from their errands and we could go over there for dinner. I had hoped that dinner was going to be more than just us literally eating (we can do that at home, it’s really a break that I need!) but they didn’t get home until after 6pm and I really want him in bed reading books by 8pm on nights when he doesn’t nap. It was a quick visit but Jasper did manage to get in a little bit of playtime with Pop-pop before we left:

So we finally get home, I throw a load of laundry in, get his milk and water ready for bedtime and am about to come upstairs when Jasper tells me that Sammy (our 17 year old deaf, blind and incontinent dog) is falling down the stairs.

I put everything I’m carrying down and pick her up to put her outside and she literally PEES ALL OVER ME as well as a good deal of the stairs, carpet and wood floor that I put her down on once I realized what was happening.

At this point, something just snapped inside my brain and I let out a strangled sounding scream of frustration, which apparently really freaked Jasper out because he started bawling. So now, I’m covered in pee, the floor is covered in pee, my child is wailing, I’m feeling like the world’s worst mom and it’s now almost 8:30 and we haven’t even STARTED the whole bedtime process.

The scary thing is that the REAL fun hasn’t even begun yet: I go off the pill tonight to start our IVF cycle, so at some point this week I get to start the whole trying to get to the fertility clinic in time for monitoring routine.  And if it works? I’ll have these wonderful business trips of Jeff’s to look forward to with TWO babies and an incontinent geriatric dog to care for on my own.. yippee!!!

My best guess is that there was a bit of extra traffic from the link to Becoming-Mom from the bump’s feature on Pregnancy fears to which I contribued and it pushed my site over the edge into the too many resources zone.

But I’ve had similar instances with Lunarpages and too many resources and normally they move your site to a production server and you work with them until you figure what is causing it and then they move your site back, but normally your site stays running.  In this case, there was some sort of configuration error that they caused that even the techs that helped me on the phone couldn’t figure out, and I had to wait for a high level tech to respond to my ticket which took FOREVER.  This is why I’m so pissed at Lunarpages, their normal response time to a support ticket is 24 hours. That’s ridiculously long when your site is down, so they agreed to “expedite” my ticket by placing a priority flag on it.   12 HOURS LATER they finally responded and restored the site. 

I tell you this not to bitch about lunarpages, even though I could go on for pages about how much I hate them right now but because this sort of clusterfuck confluence of events is vintage mercury retrograde.

So for those of you that aren’t astrologically inclined, Mercury goes “retrograde” about 3 times a year for about 2-3 weeks at a time.  What affect does this have?  Here is a good explanation from Susan Miller’s website:

What happens when Mercury retrogrades? You miss appointments, your computer equipment crashes, checks get lost, you find the car you just purchased during Mercury retrograde is a lemon. (Or, you hate your haircut, the lamp you bought shorts out, your sister hates her birthday gift.) There will be countless delays, cancellations and postponements..All machinery and things with moving parts–such as computers, VCRs, camera equipment, garbage disposals, and so forth, will reveal any weak links now. It is critical that you back up your data system and be more careful and vigilant than ever. Projects will demand more time and money than anticipated this month… When traveling, leave early and allow for extra travel time. Have all bags double-taped closed, count your belongings, double-check addresses and reconfirm appointments. Things get lost when Mercury messes us up. Take NOTHING for granted.

So in other words, anything computer, communcation, contract or travel related GOES TO SHIT (volcanic ash anyone?)

Now, I’ve posted before that I am a big believer in birth chart astrology, but I don’t pay much attention to general astrology as in what planet is where at a given time, and I don’t even mark my calendar for mercury retrograde periods (even though I probably should) because I don’t even NEED to check in advance – when Mercury is in retrograde I KNOW it without even looking because everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

But even my site going down wasn’t enough to make me think about Mercury.. what really sealed the deal was the fiasco I had with trying to rent a lens for the first time through Borrowlenses.com.

I have two shoots this weekend that were the perfect excuse to try the 70-200L 2.8 IS. It’s a hefty investment if I do buy it eventually, so I thought it was worth the $90 or so rental fee to make sure I LOVE it.   I placed my order Wednesday in order for it to get here on Friday via their normal 2 day shipping.  I read on their site that if your shipping address is different than your CC billing address you need to call your CC company and place your alternate shipping address on file, which I did.  So I order the lens thinking that all is well and I realize the next day that I haven’t gotten a shipping notice from them..

So I call their customer service and I’m informed that they were unable to ship the lens because they couldn’t verify my shipping address and “didn’t I get the email asking for the phone number of my credit card so they could call and verify?” Well, no, no I did not get the email.. and I never got an order confirmation email from them either!   So basically, for no reason at all (I don’t even have a spam filter on that email so it wasn’t in my junk mail or anything) I just didn’t receive two emails from them.  And I know they have my correct email address because I DID get the automated cancellation email when I had to cancel the order because I didn’t want to pay for overnight shipping. 

Yet again, VINTAGE mercury retrograde.

Oh, and back to the site outage, I wasn’t even aware they had taken down my site until about 5 hours later because they had my email address wrong in their system.  Mercury strikes again.

So you may not think you believe in astrology, but I swear to you if you start to pay attention to when life’s little details all go to crap you will find that in all liklihood mercury is in retrograde!

Now, if you’ve made it this far in my little mercury sermon, I’d love to solicit advice from any of you techie inclined folks.. I need a good webhost.

 Lunarpages has screwed me over one too many times at this point adn their insanely long wait time for tech support is totally unacceptable to me.  In fact, I’m not even that annoyed they took my site down for excess resources (any shared hosting plan would do the same thing) it’s that they took over 24 hours to do anything about it that I take issue with.

So I need a webhost that has outstanding technical support (preferably 24/7 PHONE support) and something more than a basic shared hosting plan like I have but not as insanely expensive as a dedicated server hosting plan which runs about $99 a month. 

If anyone has any recommendations please let me know!

PS: Mercury goes out of retrograde May 18th, so if you are planning on buying any expensive lenses, signing a contract of any kind, making travel plans,  etc. do yourself a favor and wait if you can.  You’ll save yourself a whole lot of headaches in the end!

I bought them a little over two months ago and Jasper has worn them nearly every day since then.  So the other day Jeff noticed that they were SUPER tight on Jasper, his poor little toes were completely squished. I was surprised because they used to be really big (we bought the XL size, 18-24 months) and Jasper NEVER grows out of things before the age range due to his small height and weight percetile rankings.  But I chalked it up to his recent insane growth spurt and just resolved to find him new boots.

Fast forward a day or two and I take a closer look at the boots lying next to each other and notice this:

WTF?

I inspect the little tiny size tags and see that one is an XL (18-24 months) but the other is a M – 6-9 months!! My poor little guy’s left foot has been squished into a shoe that is several sizes too small for two months now and I can’t believe I only just noticed this.. not to mention Jeff, my parents, his daycare providers who have all put these shoes on him and taken them off again numerous times.  Credit being overtired, overworked or just distracted, but somehow this just went under my mommy radar.

My first thought was how much I LOVE these boots and that I would be really upset if they were no longer available, so I was relieved to find that they do still have his size online. My second thought was that since I was going to Target anyway that day that I would return them to the store and get a credit so I could order the correct size online.

Imagine my surprise when I got to my local Target and Jean the “customer service” manager flat out REFUSED to take them back.

“They are used, there is nothing we can do with them” he insisted.

He treated it not like it was Target’s mistake for selling me two mismatched shoes in the first place, but as if I were returning them as a whim, like I had just decided after wearing them for a while that I wanted to return them because I didn’t like the color or something.

He took NO responsibility for them being packaged wrong (a manufacturer default if I ever heard of one) and completely brushed me off.

I was PISSED, and I still am. What sort of customer service is that? Had he run my license he would have seen I am not some sort of serial returner of used Target products, I am a busy mom, a frequent target shopper who was sold a defective product. All I wanted was a replacement product, not even my money back.

Screw them.

Ok, rant over.   I feel better just having gotten that off my chest.

Hope you all had a great Valentine’s day. Jasper and I were sick the whole weekend (now there’s a shocker).  In fact the whole Target trip was instigated by the fact that I ran out of Puff’s plus tissues -  and at the rate I was going through tissues (about 1 a minute!) that was a dire situation.  I had actually run out the night before and my poor nose had the chapped red soreness to prove it.  I was searching around for some sort of lotion to apply so as to tide me over until I could refill on Puffs when I spotted Jasper’s Weleda Diaper Care….

RELIEF!

Yes people, I put diaper cream on my nose.  Don’t knock it until you try it! :)

Is this too much to ask for???

Ok, so I knew I was no Martha Stewart when I decided I wanted to bake a monkey cake for Jasper’s party. But it’s not like I’ve NEVER baked in my whole life. I mean I vaguely know my way around the kitchen, I have a stand mixer (Thank you scott and Sara!) and other accouterments of baking – even if I DID have to buy a rolling pin, sifter and borrow the cake pans from my mom.  But c’mon, mothers have been baking cakes for their children’s birthday parties for decades, even BEFORE “from scratch” became more of a novelty than say Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker.

How hard could it possibly be?

Honestly, the fact that I couldn’t bake a proper cake didn’t even cross my mind – it was the decorating of said cake and making fondant for the first time that I focused my attention on.  Having an actual cake to decorate was something I had just assumed was a matter of just baking the damn thing.

But that was BEFORE I tried on two separate occasions to make a simple two layer 9″ round cake, the first time a yellow cake, the second time a white cake (having switched recipes in a panic after the first failure. ) But both suffered from “failure to rise”  (att least I think they did,  I’m not even sure how to properly diagnose what happened to my cakes!)

My first effort yielded two layers approximately .75 inches high.. essentially two very large pancakes.

Could it have been my baking powder (it was new though)? Or that my eggs weren’t warm enough? Or was it that I mixed the butter with the eggs instead of sugar? Was it because I combined my baking powder with flour the night before? Or was it just a faulty recipe?

Not wanting to take any chances, I switched up recipes, made sure my butter and eggs were fully room temperature, mixed everything according to instructions and tried again.  My second try yielded two more (albeit slightly taller 1″) pancakes.

Or maybe each layer is supposed to be that flat? I really have no idea, I searched google to no avail for the proper height of a nine inch layer cake and came up with nothing. I do know that the designs I wanted to emulate were definitely taller (though perhaps less wide?) and I had planned on decorating the sides with circles which I don’t have enough of a canvas to do now.

So I’m at a total loss.. days behind schedule (I’m supposed to be working on the fondant part!) and wondering where one can order a cute monkey cake at the last minute.

Being that the first cake TASTED good I probably should have just layered all four and called it a day but I had already sampled one layer (hey, it was supposed to be my practice cake!) and Jeff tore into the other when I had my back turned so those two layers are already in the trash.

The prospect of baking yet again tonight sounds about as appealing as a lobotomy. And as you can imagine, it’s not like I have nothing else to do to prepare for the party!!

Kimberly has already been channeling her inner martha stewart and trouble shooting with me, but if any one else has any advice to offer I am all ears..

Yep, as of my appointment yesterday I am still fingertip dilated, 50% effaced, cervix posterior i.e. not a lick of progress since last week. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

This, my friends, is why people say not to get internals. Not only are they incredibly uncomfortable, but they can be so damn discouraging.

It also doesn’t help when I visit the nest 3rd trimester boards and everyone is dilated and effaced more than me even if they are a few weeks behind me. And then there are those due a few weeks after me who have already had their babies. Stop cutting the line people! :)

I guess there is nothing surprising about the fact that my body didn’t know how to GET pregnant without help, so why would it know how to get UNpregnant?

Friday I have a Biophysical Profile (BPP) ultrasound scheduled to check growth, amniotic fluid levels etc. Hopefully those are all normal because I really really want to avoid an induction. I’m not even a good candidate for induction given that my cervix is being all Fort Knox.

I’m trying to focus on the positive, like the fact that I have time for one more pedicure before baby, one more time the house will get cleaned etc. But it’s hard. All I really want is to meet my little boy!

Ok, rant over. Thanks for listening :)

I had been going weekly to see a super expensive fertility accupuncturist ($125 a session!) so I thought I was being on the conservative side electing to put aside $125 a month into the FSA.  That would only cover one appointment a month so there was no way I’d LOSE that money? Right?

Of course I’d much rather be pregnant than lose my FSA money, but I really didn’t think it would be an issue.. wouldn’t things like breast pumps, maternity classes etc be FSA eligible expenses?

The answer is yes and no.  But more NO.

For pumps, it needs to be considered “medically necessary” and can not be just for the “convenience” of the mother. OH PLEASE! Like there aren’t a bazillion studies that show that Breast feeding is healthier for baby and therefor pumps, or any other accoutrement that assists in BF should be a necessary medical expense.

I’ve heard that people had their OBs write them a script for pumps. I guess I can ask my midwives, but I think they’ll be baffled because they are used to working with women who have no insurance, let alone FSA accounts.

I had the brilliant idea that maybe a Doula would be covered.. that would be excellent because I could use up all my FSA money AND get a Doula!

But researching it further, the Doula has to be a “licensed medical professional and being a member of DONA doesn’t count. Plus, it’s such a grey area that you wouldn’t really know if it would be covered until AFTER you gave birth and submitted the expense, and that’s a big one with typical Doula fees being $1000-$1200 in my area.

Birthing classes are also not covered unless they specifically deal with breathing techniques like Lamaze.  I think our birthing class should be covered, but what about the breast feeding class I want to take?

The thing that makes me really angry is that things like contact lens solution and condoms are covered.

Yes, they are medical things, but aren’t contacts technically “for the convenience” of the person? I mean, they COULD wear glasses, just as “easily” as a working mom could “not pump”.

And yes, condoms prevent disease, we all know that. But so does breastfeeding.

I just can’t help but wonder if breastfeeding and childbirth were things that men and not women had to do,  would these laws be different?

Luckily with the birth of a child I can change my benefit elections so I won’t have to contribute starting the month Jasper is born until the end of 2008.  But I’ll still have about $1000 racked up.  My hospital copay for delivery will be $250, so that leaves me with $750. What to buy,  a lifetime supply of bandaids??

If you contribute to your FSA, will you have any leftover? If so, how do you plan on spending it?

Bitch OB: Just take some iron twice a day.

Me: ok, any specific dosage?

Bitch OB: nope, just take it twice a day.

Me: Huhhh??

Bitch OB: Yeah well, there are so many different kinds and formulations that it’s impossible for me to say how much you should take.

Thanks for nothing lady! Could you be any LESS helpful??? How bout a recommendation, or a scrip for god’s sake? The irony of her saying to stay off the internet when she dispenses so freely of NON information.

The good news is that I switched my next appointment (May 14) from her to the one OB I like, the first one I saw at that practice who seems like the only through one. I’ll ask her about the repeat blood tests and also why she thinks my liver functions were so elevated.

God these people are taking years off my life!

On to happier things, like my friend Sara’s shower this weekend..

I got to hang with my two favorite little girls:

Baby Gemma with Mom Tracey

Baby Daphne on Auntie Amy’s lap

I must say that just GETTING to the shower was a huge struggle. I was the designated gift buyer for the gifts that me, Sarah and Tracey went in on because I live in suburbia, have a car, don’t yet have a baby and also get 10% off at Babies R Us.

My trip to BRU was rather eye opening. We bought Sara a diaper bag, a bumbo seat and a boppy off her registry. NONE of which could be wrapped in a reasonable way. The Bumbo seat came in an octagonal box. Have you ever tried to wrap anything that comes in an octagonal box?? I didn’t think so. The boppy is half moon shaped, soft and also very large. BRU didn’t have a gift box big enough for the diaper bag, so it was just a big PITA. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I just was buying one gift, because then I would have gotten one gift bag, but the large gift bags they have there are $6. I didn’t want to spend close to $20 on gift bags alone!

Oh, and did I mention that they don’t have baby shower cards at my BRU? WTF?

Then, I hit a ton of traffic heading into NYC. Then, I had a hard time parking near St. Marks (no surprise there) and finally finally found a spot with two hour meter parking, but it was .25 for 10 minutes. I have a ton of quarters in my car, but had taken Jeff’s car in, so had to put in the ones I had and walk in to the shower and declare “I need everyone’s quarters! (oh, and sorry I’m late)”

Wow, it seems like I can’t stop ranting lately. Sorry.

The good news is that we started painting the nursery Sunday! Hopefully we’ll finish up this week and I can post pics. Though it won’t be so exciting because the only nursery item we have is the glider. More on nursery items later..

About 2-3 weeks ago, I had a really bad sore throat.  I thought I was getting the flu and was grateful that I wasn’t in my first trimester when a temparature can be really bad for baby..

Strangely though, unlike the usual sore throat > sneezing > stuffy nose> congestion > cough progression that I have always had for any cold or flu, the soreness completely disappeared two days later. The only symptom I was left with was fatigue that hasn’t gone away.

Fast forward to a week ago when I feel that I have a slightly swollen gland on the left side of my neck.  I didn’t think much of it until it got so big and so sore that you can see it bulging if I just tilt my head a bit and so sore that it hurts when I turn my head.

Due to all of the moving around and switching of health plans we’ve done in the past couple of years I don’t really have a primary care doc. (I had one picked out who’s name was on my insurance card, but I’ve never seen him. )

Last Saturday, the gland became large enough that I realized I really need medical attention in case it is some sort of infection. I called the primary listed on my card – he’s not accepting new Aetna patients. I had an appointment scheduled to see my OB on Wednesday, but didn’t want to wait that long. Knowing that my OB appointments are like 2 minutes long, I thought maybe they could squeeze me in Monday instead of Wednesday…

I call the receptionist and she says “swollen gland? That’s not pregnancy related. Call your primary care doc or go to a clinic.”

Bitch.

So I call Aetna, the only urgent care clinic that accepts Aetna is in NJ.  Off to Jersey I go. A negative rapid strepp test later the doc tells me to start antibiotics (just in case even though he thinks its probably viral.) He says hell call with the results of a more thourough throat culture (which turned out to also be negative.)

Two days later on Wednesday, I have my OB appointment. The doc says “wow, that’s big” and that he’s not worried about the baby, but that I really needed follow up care because “that thing is the size of a golf ball.”  To his credit, he did offer to help me get an appointment with a primary if I couldn’t find one to see me soon.

I did end up being able to get an appointment at the office of a doctor I’d seen once about 10 years ago. Other than being a little wacky, he at least took the issue seriously and ordered a CBC, thyroid tests, mono and CMV titer. I went to quest this morning and had the blood drawn.

My dad calls me this afternoon and says he thinks I probably have CMV, its super common and I’ve had all the symptoms.  He said he was sure the baby was protected though because isn’t that what the “umbilical cord” is there for? (Dad, I think you mean placenta.)

I of course google CMV during pregnancy. Wow, I wish I hadn’t.

According to CDC, CMV infection occurs in about 1 in 150 babies born in the United States, some of whom develop hearing or vision loss, mental disability or other problems. It is the leading infectious cause of birth defects and developmental disabilities in the United States, according to the CDC.

1 in 150! And yet, I bet your OB never talked to you about CMV (according to MSNBC, 40% of OBs don’t). Even though its probably 10 times more likely than say Downs, which is something they routinely recommend screenings for.

Needless to say, I am terrified.

I called the doctor that ordered the bloodtest and asked the receptionist how long the results would take. She said usually about a week for bloodwork from quest. A week of sleepless nights.. so I called my OBs office, a little ticked off that the OB never told me (even though I had the symptoms) that there was a potential (however small) of having something that could be bad for my baby to see if maybe they would re order the test stat.

I start crying on the phone with the receptionist, so she puts the doctor on call on (who I’ve never seen.)

In a pretty bitchy way she tells me that it’s so rare that I shouldn’t worry about it because there is no treatment for it anyway and that I should just stay off the internet. Funny, because everything I’ve read says its NOT really that rare and that OBs are the ones that maybe should get ON the internet. Besides which, telling an expectant mom not to worry about her unborn child is really quite futile, and in my opinion, shows a complete lack of compassion and sense of reality. Thanks for nothing.

Defeated but willing to give it one more try to get the order changed to stat I call the primary care docs office again. This time, I ask to speak to the doctor who I saw yesterday. They take down my name and number and say the doctor on call will call me back.

Some other person calls who can’t even spell CMV (clearly not a doc, but I can hear the doc in the background).  I guess she mistakenly tells the doc its mono I want stat? Because the doc (I think it was the doc) gets on the phone and says don’t worry, I don’t think of mono when I think of mental disabilities and babies. No, NOT mono, CMV! Oh she says, I mean yes CMV. Ok, clearly she hasn’t done her homework either.  She does tell me that the results can’t be ordered stat because its a culture anyway, and that it should be around 3 days or so.  Again I get the “don’t worry about a disease you probably don’t have” lecture. Its too beautiful a weekend she says.

Clearly she’s never been a mom, or pregnant. Or if she has, she has amnesia.

If you are still with me, you may be wondering why I’m posting this.  It’s partly because

A) I am upset and hormonal and needed to get that off my chest

B) I am half hoping that if I write about it, the test won’t come back positive for primary exposure

C) Because if you interact with children on a regular basis (daycare worker, or mom!) and are pregnant, you really need to know about CMV and its dangers and take extra precautions. Because if your OB is anything like mine, you won’t hear it from them.

Links:

http://www.wearsthebaby.com/cmv.htm

http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancycomplications/cytomegalovirusinfection.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22827257/

Here is a description of what they are looking for:

“Do you know a woman who is obsessed with becoming a mom? Have you seen and heard her struggle for years, felt her unvoiced jealously and seen her desperation first hand? Have you watched silently for too long as she gets her hopes up only to be disappointed and heartbroken when she can’t conceive? Has she tried extreme methods and spent a lot of money to get pregnant with no luck? Do you want to finally tell her she needs to stop the emotional and physical stress on her body and seriously consider adoption or a surrogate alternative? If you know a woman who is obsessed with becoming a mom and getting pregnant, then SUBMIT BELOW. “

What a nice and compassionate way of describing the 1 in 6 women/couples struggling with infertility. Desperate, Obsessed, Jealous. The decision to move on to adoption or surrogacy is a very private one that should only be made by a woman and her partner. I don’t know about you, but any friend that thinks she has the right to tell me what, when or how I should feel about my infertility is NO friend of mine.

Why must they take such the low road when approaching this subject when there are thousands of angles to this same subject that could be educational and eye-opening and millions of stories that are heartbreaking and millions that are heartwarming. Instead they choose to look for the trashy drama.

I guess I can’t say I’m surprised, but certainly I am disappointed.

Normally I’m on the other side of that equation, but in this case, Alexis has been waiting 2+ years for Scott to propose and had jokingly started telling me the day after our wedding that I’d better not get pregnant before her wedding. She knows about our infertility issues and has of course been very supportive (she even offered me her eggs!) but I’m a little worried to tell her that its going to hurt her that she thought for SURE she’d be engaged by the time I got pregnant.. and I know she definitely wasn’t expecting that I would give birth before she even has her wedding. But apparently her boyfriend is a very cautious man. I really really like Scott, but I wish he would get on with it already because even though they both don’t realize it now, if she wants to have children her time is running out.

In another odd twist another friend of ours from High School Evan is coming up with his wife Jen tomorrow night to visit with Scott, Alexis and me and Jeff. He and Jen knew about our treatments and how long we’ve been trying and he called two nights ago to tell me Jen was pregnant. Even though I hadn’t planned on telling them until we see them in person tomorrow I said “Really? So am I!”

He was incredibly relieved because he told me he had been AGONIZING for days and planning with Alexis the best way to tell me because he was so worried about how I would take the news.

Much like my experience at Sarah’s shower, this is another “Thank God”I’m pregnant situation because yes, even though I would have been extremely happy for them, I would have been so depressed for me because guess what? They got pregnant their first month of trying.

The weird thing was that I could tell that Evan was a little freaked out it happened so fast. At one point in the conversation I mentioned how terrified I was. He said “me too!” and I knew he meant of parenthood, when I meant of miscarriage!

So there is at least one gift infertility has given me, which is that I haven’t once second guessed my decision to become a mom. After all I’ve done to get here there can be no doubt that I wanted this and that I wanted it now.

I often wonder if I would have felt differently if I was the girl that got pregnant the first month of trying.. would I have been scared of motherhood? Scared of giving up our independence, scared that the timing wasn’t right, scared of how it might effect us financially?

Dealing with infertility takes all of those fears away from you because your only fear is of NOT having children.. not the other way around.