Backyard

Even though the patio isn’t done, I am tired of waiting to show you what we’ve done so far to our back yard.  

Okay this is the only picture I could find that showed our out of control weeds last summer. Thank goodness Andy was taking pictures of his bike otherwise you might not believe me when I say they were really bad. The dogs loved it of course because it was like running through a forest, but the City wasn’t all that thrilled. So if you can see past the bright orange motorcycle, you can see our before picture.

Spring, after raking, bagging and tilling the whole yard. Then we sprayed it with Round Up. Then we leveled the patio area. I wish you could see the hard work in the photos but you can’t.

The stone and fill arrives!

Laying out the geotextile fabric.

After laying out all the stone so we could see each one.

There was no need to move these pieces, you can see them. By the way when you order 4 tons of flagstone, that means eventually you are going to lift 4 tons worth of stone with your arms…..no they don’t make extra light flagstone. But I wish they did.

Resting after laying it all out….Not sure why Lincoln is yawning, he just supervised from his sleeping position on the ground.

The initial layout….before we took many of the pieces out and started again. Andy loved that part.

50% done laying it out. It is like a giant puzzle….except the pieces are 50-200lbs.

Slightly closer look at the puzzle.

Putting in the edging.

As we were putting in the metal edging it was thundering and lightening. Andy asked if we should be testing our luck. I told him I used to play outside during lightening storms all the time as a kid and I survived. He said I had terrible parents. About two seconds after we finished it started hailing.

 July, the second tilling/raking & picking up more rocks.

The last time it will look like this.

Ooo did I mention I found a glider and rocker on Craigslist? There they are. Andy is going to paint them red and white for me. But they are perfect.

Grass! Buffalo grass to be exact. Once it is established we can water once every 6 weeks, or less. 3 pallets ended up being more than we expected. It was supposed to be around 1000 square feet, but ended up covering the entire back yard, which I measured to be around 1300 square feet. Now we’re watering like crazy and we still need to finish the patio, but this feels like a totally different back yard already.

Without Further Ado – Nugget!

It’s official, there is a seamonster in my uterus. See it there just clinging on like we wouldn’t notice it? But who cares because nugget has a heartbeat! a crazy fast yet adorable heartbeat! As awkward as it was to be stuffed into a postage stamp sized room with my mother-in-law 8 inches away from my hoo-haa and knowing she saw the wand the doctor was holding and knowing she knew where it was going, in the end it mattered so little. Because there it was the little nugget I was imagining. Well luckily I couldn’t see all the features perfectly because I was imagining a tail and crazy looking wrinkly head. And I don’t know what I was thinking the heartbeat would look like on screen. I think I was imagining to see a giant zoomed in picture of the heart, but all we saw was a little alien bean and in the middle a little flicker of light. Then doctor-talks-too-fast-to-have-any-time-to-respond turned on the doppler and loud and clear, nugget’s heartbeat was there in the room with us. The doc said ‘it sounds really fast because it is about twice as fast as yours’ then Andy chimes in ‘it is probably scared shitless of that giant stick you are poking it with’. hahaha. I love that guy. It felt like there was no time. No time to spend looking at nugget and really letting it sink in that all was well. Before I knew it, he/she was off the screen. Never thought I would have wanted to have some stranger keep a foreign object in my v-jay-jay, but I found myself wishing it had been just a few minutes longer.
Okay here’s a rundown of funny things that were said:

When Andy and MIL got in the room, Andy saw the “probe” and asked : does that go inside you?
MIL: yep
Andy: How much of it goes in?
MIL: enough
laughter all around.
While the doc was entering my name into the machine Andy looks up at the screen and says: Is that your vagina?
Me: No the wand isn’t inside me yet.
Andy: Oh I was going to say it is really dark in there.
more laughter all around.

Oops I almost forget. Nugget measured at 8 weeks and 3 days, which means Fertility Friend was right the first time. This changes all my stats by 3 days (for those TTC it means my home test was really on 11dpo and not 8dpo like I originally thought). Due date is now March 7th. To me this is kind of exciting because that means nugget should arrive right before Andy goes on Spring Break. Not a great time for him since I am sure he’ll have a ton of work to do right before, but then he’ll have a week home with us. Some family time together. It will be great!

2 months

Have I said anything about how the “week” system annoys the crap out of me? Well it does and it always has. Like when I would walk up to a parent and ask ‘how old is your baby?’ and I would get the response ‘oh 64 1/7 weeks’. Okay that has never happened, but if it did, I would be annoyed. I like math, but like in a school nerd kind of way. As in, I like to work equations, physically with a pencil and paper and handy calculator. I don’t like having mental math sprung on me. It is like an assault on the senses. Like going to a Yankee Candle Store. I equally loathed the term “Trying to Conceive”, yet I quickly found myself at a loss for any other statement that described what we were doing. A few times I would say ‘we’re having lots of unprotected sex in an organized type manner’, but that was a lot to say/write. After a while the cute little acronym TTC just made life easier. So here I am in the midst of that annoying week system, but F-it I am fighting the man. Today is 2 months, not 8 weeks or 56 days, but 2 months. Hell months kind of annoy me too. Let’s call it 1/6th year. That sounds super nerdy and I love it.
Basically this whole nerdy illiteration is a means to distract myself (and you) during my lunch hour because in a couple of hours Andy is picking me up for my first ultrasound. Yes, the lovely vaginal ultrasound which I invited my mother-in-law to. Still don’t know what I was thinking, but I have a feeling it will cause lots of laughter, which let’s face it, makes it a fun process. Let’s not think about the fact that this is a fairly critical appointment. I’m not going to mention my fears and worries and all that business. Because I am denying all of them right now. I am going in there today to see nugget’s heartbeat and it will be there. So here’s the Baby Center update. Nugget is the size of a kidney bean. Does this seam like a backstep from last week? Last week nugget was a blueberry and that seems bigger than a kidney bean to me. It is probably because I was imagining a really huge blueberry. Anyhoo, this next week nugget starts growing webbed fingers and his tail almost completely disappears. Seems like he would be a more efficient swimmer if he kept the tail while his fingers were still webbed. As far as how I am feeling, it is about the same. Nausea and exhaustion are the norm for me. Oranges, Jolly Ranchers and string cheese are my staples. I have officially started counting down to my second trimester. I can’t wait to feel like eating again. I like food and I miss the things I used to eat. I have this hankering for a salmon avocado roll from Hapa Sushi. I don’t think I could handle it right now, but I am hoping in a few weeks I will be ready.

To continue with my distraction, let me tell you I have had some insane dreams lately. My favorite to date relates to my ultrasound appointment. So this seems like the time to share. In my dream it was the Zombie Apocolypse, you know that thing everyone is always preparing themselves for? What do you mean you’re not preparing for it? Well Andy and his friends are and apparently their conversations have poisoned my dreams. So yeah, Zombies everywhere and we were fighting our way to my appointment. We had to kill hundreds of Zombies and sneak through large dark and dank buildings to get there. We descend this creepy staircase, open a door and all of a sudden we’re in a pristine doctor’s office waiting room. This is when I realize we were on our way to the appointment. Then the ultrasound chick walks up and says ‘um I am just going to step out for a few minutes to run an errand, I will be right back’. I was like ‘f no, you’re not going anywhere, you will be eaten by zombies if you step out that door and you can’t be eaten by zombies until after I get my ultrasound’. Then I woke up. This dream definitely signifies that my brain is taking Andy too seriously and that I will most likely stop at nothing to get my ultrasound today. I am like the chick from Shaun of the Dead.

Mourning Someone Else’s Loss

It has been an emotional few days. I never thought I would get to this point….this pregnant point, and feel anything but elation and excitement and be wanting to sing and dance around. What? I like musicals, don’t judge me. Right now I am experiencing something I never thought I would experience, I am mourning other women’s losses. I know in part it is because I am just crazy emotional in general right now. Example one: on Friday night I repeatedly asked Andy why he was fighting with me and being so mean. We had just finished watering the dirt that would soon become our lawn (post to come) and I was unloading the fertilizer from my trunk. He said ‘why don’t we get it in the morning?’. And I said ‘because there is going to be so much work tomorrow I am just trying to make it easier tonight’. Then he said ‘but what if it rains and it is sitting out in the back yard?’ then I said ‘why are you fighting with me? I am just trying to eliminate steps for tomorrow. Why are you being so mean?’. Okay so I see that he wasn’t actually being mean, he was just being him. But sometimes it comes off harsher in my head. So I realize I am extra sensitive these days. But it is more than just that. I am really connected to the women that I have met through this process. I didn’t really want to talk about my infertility issues on my blog and at first I really avoided it. But the more I found and read about other women’s struggles the more I realized that I wasn’t alone. I wanted them to know they weren’t alone. So I went ahead and let it out. Well kind of. I still didn’t really go into the painful parts. The struggle with month after month of disappointment. The constant feeling of not being a woman, of not working right, of wanting to crawl into a hole to die. I tried not to convey that here. I tried to keep a semi-up-beat perspective about what was going on, but some of it snuck through. Some of you saw the cracks and you supported me through them. And even when I couldn’t tell you what was going on, your blogs pulled me through. Your joy and hope, even your heartache and disappointment, showed me that I wasn’t the only one feeling these things. We were in it together. The moment I found out I was pregnant it seemed like so many of the other woman were on the upslope too. I was flying at the idea that all our dreams would come true at the same time. They just had to. We had all struggled for so long and been through so much that it would just be perfect for every one of us to get our dream at once. I actually thought that could happen. But then the clouds rolled in. One by one I found these women, MY women, at the beginning and facing the darkness. This wasn’t supposed to happen. We were supposed to get our dreams together. We were all supposed to forget our pain and heartache together and move into the happy new stages of pregnancy. We were suppose to swap stories about trying not to vomit on the table in front of our inlaws when the waitress brought out their dinner. We were supposed to laugh about saying the most ridiculous things imaginable and falling asleep during conference calls.  
It isn’t that I am not happy, that I am not absolutely appreciative that it finally happened for us, but I genuinely feel like these woman should be here too. I don’t deserve it more than them. In fact, in some cases, I think they deserve it more than me. These are wonderful, beautiful women, who will be some of the best mothers on the planet. When I saw a woman on the train last week yell at her toddler, tell him he is stupid and curse at him for his book falling on the ground. I wanted to beat the crap out of her. I wanted to make her feel as small and insignificant as she was making her son feel. I wanted to tell her she was a horrible person and didn’t deserve the gift of this child. I thought of my women. The women who would do anything to be her right now. Who would just laugh and smile if their son dropped a book or got out of his seat to come sit next to her. They wouldn’t tell him ‘go sit the fuck down!’. Their hearts would swell if their child wanted to be closer to them because this is what we all want. We want to be mothers. Probably more than anything we’ve ever wanted in the whole world. It is just so heartbreaking to me that they aren’t here too. I am not giving up hope. In fact I will hope even harder for them from now on. Maybe I wasn’t really applying myself last time. I am going to be there for them just like they were here for me. But right now, at least for today, I am just in the mood to mourn for them. I want to crawl up into a ball, let the tears flow, and feel the loss these women are feeling.   

7 weeks

Oops I am supposed to be better about this stuff. I blame the combination of baby brain, sleepiness and nausea. Excuse the day-lateness, but yesterday nugget and I hit 7 weeks. Or I guess I should be more accurate and say: what I think is 7 weeks. Next Thursday the doctor will tell us whether or not we have the time frame right, but until then, let’s assume 7 weeks. Nugget is the size of a blueberry. Since I am pretty tall, I am imagining the largest blueberry in the carton. You know those real giant juicy ones. That’s my nugget. Despite the fact that I obviously love this little blueberry sized creature, can I admit something to you? I am kind of freaked out by what it supposedly looks like in there. First off it has this crazy bulgy head which is all forward rotated. Plus it has a tail. I am excited over the next week nugget starts getting a little more recongnizable as a human because right now he looks like a freaky alien tadpole to me. This week he grows little paddles for arms and legs, he gets slits for eyelids, and his eyes start to get color. When I told Andy this he said ‘so could they tell what color his eyes are?’. Pretty sure we’re not there yet babe. Plus, am I sleepily mistaken, or aren’t most babies born with blue eyes? Why do I feel like I have heard that from a lot of people?

In human-baking news I am still working out the kinks of my sleeping position. I thought, since I am a tummy sleeper, I should start trying to condition myself on my left side now. This is much more difficult than I originally imagined. The night before last I rolled into some strange position, I woke up at around 2am and my whole right side was asleep. I was trying to put myself back on my left side, but my floppy limp right arm was not cooperating at all. I remember deliriously giggling as I used my left hand to move my right arm around. The other down-side of tummy sleeping is it puts added pressure on your bladder. I made sure I went to the bathroom 5 times between 6 and 10pm, but I still woke up this morning on my belly feeling like I would burst if I didn’t get up. Since I am in the “no amount is ever enough sleep” phase, I found myself considering peeing the bed this morning. It would be wet and uncomfortable after it cooled off, but I would get a little more sleep. It was pretty tempting. Now that I am awake and more rational I have thought of another solution. I can voluntarily catheterize myself. Just hook myself up to a bag and sleep to my heart’s content. Of course the issue with that, is I still seem to roll around a ton every night, so that poses an issue with ripping out the tubes. The only thing I can think of is to take Baby Center’s advice of limiting liquids after 6pm or I can start wearing depends. I am already drinking Ensure to try to get some nutrients in my body. Might as well go all out and break out the depends while I am at it. Man I am so sexy it is ridiculous!

Food seems like it will be an issue for a while. We met Andy’s parent’s for dinner last night and I spent a good portion of the evening trying not to hork on the table in front of them. Smells you once thought were delicious can hit you like a ton of bricks. I opted for the baked potato soup but it came out with bacon and green onions on the top. Most people would say ‘yum’. But I accidentally caught a bit of both and thought that would be the end of me being allowed out in public. I tried to scrape out the bits I could get too, but after a few bites, my tummy was done allowing food inside. I feel like a little bird with my eating habbits. I usually start out the day with a trusty orange. Then a couple hours later I get the Ensure down, thank god chocolate isn’t revolting to me! An hour or so after that it is string cheese time. Then maybe I can get half of my PB&J down at lunch. An hour later another orange, two hours after that another string cheese. Then I peel and eat my 3rd orange on the walk to the train going home. For dinner I try to get in a salad and some carrots although dressing tastes wrong to me now. Then I will polish the evening off with a soft pretzel. This method of putting something in my stomach every few hours seems to really help with the nausea. I still feel pretty sick most of the day, but it isn’t as bad as it was the first few days when I was just eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Katie suggested hard candy in between snacks. That does seem to help some too. But of course I feel guilty for letting my dentist down each time I unwrap a jolly rancher. I guess I will go get some sugar free candies to solve that problem.

Being pregnant is very similar to what I imagine being Sherlock Holmes is like. You spend a great deal of time trying to carefully investigate what you can and can’t do to yourself anymore. I can’t wait for next Thursday. I just know that little flutter of a heartbeat will make all my doubts go away. Go little blueberry go!

How to Interrogate your Birth Professional

For those of you at all interested here are some of the things I asked the midwife during our interview:

• Tell us about your education, background, and credentials
• Do you have a back-up? She does, he is a doctor in Brighton who’s wife had both their kids at home. So he is supportive of home birth and willing to back her up if needed. We will go to him if I develop any complications before I go into labor. Obviously if there are complications during or after labor we go to the emergency room.
• Do you work with a partner or apprentice? Our midwife will have an additional midwife to assist and an apprentice. My midwife will be in charge of me, the other one will be in charge of the baby and the apprentice will do whatever they need her to.
• What prenatal tests do you use?
• What is the plan if someone else is in labor when I am?
• Do you carry an oxygen tank to births? FYI the answer to this should be yes.
• Do you have certification in neonatal resuscitation? As if I need to say it, but this should be a yes too.
• What happens if transport to the hospital becomes necessary? This should be a complex question. There are many scenarios. If it isn’t an emergency and there is time, our midwife will take us to the birthing center at Boulder Health, if it is an emergency we will go to North Suburban which is 5 blocks from our house. There are scenarios where there is more time than others, so she might call an ambulence, or she might drive me there herself. Basically this question lets you know what all this woman can do to ensure that your baby and you will be alright no matter what happens.
• How long will you stay with us after the baby is born? The whole team will stay for about three hours. They will clean everything up, start the laundry, make us a meal, and tuck the three of us in bed. She said the only sign that they were ever there will be that there will be a kitchen trash bag of trash, a load of laundry in the washing machine, and of course there will be a baby there.
• How often will you make postpartum visits? She will come on day 1, day 3, day 7, 3 weeks, and 6 weeks. Basically I better make her a key.
• What will be done with the placenta? PLACENTA WATER! hahaha, had to sneak that one in there for Bret. See if she is paying attention. There is a lot you can do with a placenta. She said it is up to us. We can throw it away, we can plant it in the yard, or she can have it dried and put into capsuls which apparently helps you to recover from birth more quickly. Decisions decisions. I was happy to find out that she not only advocates delayed cord cutting, but she has an even better approach. She said the biggest reason babies are transferred to the NICU is that the cord was cut prematurely. Some doctors will let you wait until the cord stops pulsing, which is about 7 minutes, but studies show that nutrients and blood is still being transferred to the baby even after the cord stops pulsing. She will deliver the placenta, wrap it up and put it in a plastic bag (I am imagining a ziplock) then she will tuck it in with the baby. She said it will stay connected for about an hour. I have to be honest, it kind of grosses me out that my kid will spend an hour with the placenta attached, but I agree with her.
• How many babies have you delivered? How many were water births? How many have required to be transported to the hospital? I won’t go into everything she told me, but her transfer rate is 17%. Most of those were transfers before 36 weeks. The women developed complications and so they moved to her doctor friend. She has had very few emergency transfers. So that makes me feel good.
• Tell us what will happen during a typical prenatal appointment? First we will all get in a drum circle…just kidding. They are pretty normal, except that they are around 2 hour visits. We will go over everything from diet and exercise to how I am feeling, she’ll take urine samples, blood samples for tests if needed, etc.
• At what point in labor should we call you?
• Tell us about the birth kit and any other tools/equipment/medications that you will be bringing with you.
• What problems are you prepared to deal with at home and which ones require hospital transfer?
• Under what circumstances do you recommend inducing?
• How do you handle slowly progressing labors?
• Do you monitor the baby’s heart rate during labor?
• What are the disadvantages of homebirth?
• Can you accompany us to the hospital if we need to transfer?
• What prenatal tests do you order?
• What equipment do we need to provide?
• Do you check for tears (vaginal, urethral, rectal)? Are you trained to repair them?
• How do you prevent/treat excessive postpartum bleeding?
• What are your guidelines for a “normal” vs. “high-risk” pregnancy?
• What is her recommendation for the use of ultrasound? She advocates them and isn’t one of those midwives who thinks they have hidden dangers. She recommends using them and find the 20 week ultrasound very important.
• How is the filing of the birth certificate handled?
• What services are not included in your fee?
• When do you want the full fee paid?
• Are there some things we should be doing to our house now in preparation for the birth?
• What things should I avoid during pregnancy? Turns out there isn’t much that is off limits as many baby websites will make you believe. The reason pregnant women have an extremely sensitive sense of smell is because it is a safety indicator. If it smells okay to you and you can get it down, then it is probably okay to have it. When I said “I know sushi is off limits” she said that it wasn’t. She said with sushi and lunchmeat I should use my decretion. Obviously I should avoid the larger ocean fish that have shown to have higher levels of mercury, but if I am going to a high quality place there is no reason to avoid raw fish. Not that I have plans to go eat sushi now, considering I have a hard time getting anything down that isn’t an orange or string cheese, but I am excited at the possibility if I ever feel up for it again.
• What kinds of exercise are okay and which should I avoid? Swimming and Walking are the best. She is all for me continuing to cycle as long as I don’t fall. Turns out skiing is not something I have to avoid either. Even with ski season starting close to the end of my second trimester, she said if I am a good skiier and don’t hit trees, then it isn’t a problem. Hitting trees is generally something I avoid every ski season, but with changing center of gravity I will be sure to take it easier than normal. I think I will stick with downhill and hang up the telemarking skiis for a season, just to be extra cautious. I might be too tired to ski, but if I am up for it, I have the green light! She has had people skiing in their 36th week and longer. Basically after the last two questions, what I got from her is that I know my body better than anyone else. If I listen to what’s going on and take care not to push too hard, I can use my decretion. Oh but derby is still out. I can roller skate though!
• Should I continue with this OB-GYN for the ultrasounds? Again it is up to me, she can order them, or I can stay with this doctor through 20 weeks.
• Do you have any issues with me using hypnobirthing techniques? She doesn’t. She likes their methods, but recommends we also attend other “nuts and bolts” birthing classes if we would like.
• Do we need to arrange for a pool? For $35 I can get one with big thick sides and a fish on it. Score!
• I asked her about filing for short-term disability and if this will be something that has to go through a doctor.
• I asked her about flying for work. I am okay up to 30 weeks, maybe 34 depending on how things are going, but then I will need to stop flying because of the increased risks for clots, and added pressure from less oxygen, and all that business. Great soon it will be time to tell the boss about this stuff.

Okay I am pretty sure that is most of them. Some of them led into others which I didn’t have written down. But we spent over two hours with her asking her questions and getting to know her. Anyhoodles, now you know.

Here Are The Keys to My Vagina.

Well we found her. The woman who I will allow to see and touch parts of me that no one but my husband gets regular access to. I kind of cringe to think what this woman will know about me. I can count on one hand the amount of medical professionals who have had the elite priviledge of giving me my annuals and that is after living in three different states and 7 different cities over the past 10 years. I am a loyal customer, what can I say. I would and have driven over two hours round trip, for a 20 minute appointment with the doctor who has been my pediatrician since I can remember. She knows my parts, I trust her with them. Needless to say, pregnancy is going to be an interesting transition for me. I’ve had friends who have told me ‘when the time comes, you don’t care who is down there, as long as they get the baby out before the come back up’. I am sure I will feel the same. I am sure when that day(s) come where I am helpless and scared, I will turn to this woman and maybe say some things, which we all know are in my vocabulary, but that a lady wouldn’t say to another lady. But one of the reasons that she is the one is I know she can handle it.
On our way to interview this midwife, Andy and I both thought back to images of Ina May Gaskin with her salt and pepper hair in two long braids or up in Princess Leia buns. Andy asked “what if she smells like patchouli?….(then panic washed across his face) what if she wants to hug me?”. Oh Andy, how I love this man. When we entered the suburban neighborhood and made the few turns toward her house Andy said “look for the subaru in the driveway….she has to have a subaru” (he said as we pulled up in my subaru, your fault for not seeing the signs earlier buddy). Sure enough, when we parked in front of the non-descript house with beautiful landscaping, a subaru sat in the driveway. But it was a Baja so he just looked at it and said ‘hmm that’s cool it has quite a bit of capacity back there’. What a dork. We walked up to the house and braced ourselves for a thin elderly woman in a long silk skirt, maybe barefoot with an ankle bracelet with bells. But who comes to the door, a cute soccer-mom type with sassy blonde hair with red highlights. She welcomed us in and introduced us to her two boys who were playing a board game on the living room floor. I didn’t know children learned to play board games anymore. We followed her upstairs to her exam room where she motioned me into a glider and sat at her desk chair. The exam table looked just like a bed. Fluffy with a comforter and pillows. I could have crawled in and taken a nap right there. I pulled out my list of pertinant dates: when I got of BC, when I went to the OB and had hormone tests done, when I started acupuncture, when I think I ovulated. She wrote it all down and said ‘wow so you were basically anovulatory’. She worried over my progesterone levels and was glad I had them tested right away, she encouraged me to continue acupuncture because she has found it highly successful at hormone regulation. We went over the insurance procedures and about whether I should continue to see the OB in conjunction with her up until 20 weeks. She has left that up to me; I’m still undecided in case you were wondering, I’ll probably write about this later.
Then she opened the floor to my inquisitive ass. I pulled out my 1 inch thick stack of questions and had at her. Wouldn’t ya know I loved all her responses. Well except when she brought up two tidbits of factual evidence. When I asked her “Under what circumstances do you recommend inducing labor?” eventually our conversation meandered over to the fact that at 42 weeks she will take me to the doctor if I am showing no signs (FYI after 42 weeks the probability of serious badness happening goes up if they don’t get that sucker out of ya). Then she said this ‘but I will tell you, the average for first-time moms is to start labor at 41 weeks and 2 days’. Great I am going to be pregnant forever. But I guess the good thing is I can be prepared for it and not be too antsy when 40 weeks comes and goes. Believe me I will be waddling my ass up and down the street everyday and doing all the things people tell you to do to try to start labor. My midwife said sex three times a day seems to do the trick. I like this woman, she is saucy!
The next tidbit came out shortly after when I asked at what point I call her during labor and when she will come over. Answer to that is I call when labor starts, since I am a first time mom, it will probably be at the first signs of anything, and she said she will tell me ‘great, go to bed, or cook dinner, or take a walk. First-time mom’s usually labor around 24 hours’. She said that it isn’t intense for a long time, but that she will be telling me not to focus on it and continue my usual day. Once you start focusing on it, you will wear yourself down and 24 hours of labor will be very draining. So on the one hand, shit! That is a long time to labor, on the other hand, I feel that having her around and being armed with the knowledge of what to expect, when it is all said and done, I can do it. She did tell me ‘look I am going to be honest with you, you are probably going to feel a lot of pain, and it is probably going to be very hard for you, but I will also tell you that you can do it’. Shit yeah I can. I asked her a ton of questions and maybe I should write them out in a separate entry for anyone interested. But needless to say I feel insanely comfortable with this woman. There are a lot of unknowns between now and birth. There is a chance that I won’t be able to have a home birth, that I could develop preeclampsia or have an incompetent cervix (bitch better not be incompetent!) or one of another number of things. But I trust this woman to look out for me. She will know absolutely everything about me and my pregnancy and if we have to go to the hospital, she will be the best person to have there. Basically, the girl has my back. So I gave her a fist bump and handed over the keys to my vagina.

Flags of Our Mothers

It should come as no surprise to anyone on the planet that approximately 24 seconds after taking my home test I was already compiling a list of things I needed to get started with. The top of the list was finding the midwife, but equally imperative were figuring out the insurance coverage. Despite the fact that on average the total cost for a home birth midwife are around $4,000, and despite the fact that their fees usually include ALL of the prenatal and postpartum care in addition the the actual birth, insurance companies are not exactly on board with it. You’re right in thinking this makes absolutely no sense. Isn’t the whole goal of insurance companies to try to pay as little as possible for your care? Well I went onto my insurance website and submitted an online inquiry about covering homebirth costs. Their response was of course “this is not covered by your policy”. Good thing I am my mother’s daughter and won’t be taking that shit.
See back in 2000 when my mom was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, which is basically the stage where it is everywhere and there is little hope, it was determined that a stem cell transplant was her only chance. For those unfamiliar with the procedure, a stem cell transplant is very similar to a bone marrow transplant, only you are your own donor. They pump you full of stimulants that make you overproduce stem cells, then they go in and harvest your cells. You are put in isolation and given high dose chemotherapy to kill off everything. They give you your stem cells back and you start growing new cells. It is kind of crazy really. Anyway when the doctor’s recommended this treatment for my mom, she was quickly denied by her insurance company. I am not sure the total cost for the treatment, but the hospital portion alone was estimated at $300,000. Since it was a new technology, insurance companies considered stem cell transplants highly experimental and they refused to cover anything that didn’t have survival results 20 years after treatment. There were no 20 year survivors because it was maybe a 5 year old procedure. Mom couldn’t be stopped though. She petitioned the insurance company, got support from all of her doctors, found survival information and compiled all this into a hefty defense. She spent several sessions in front of a panel of doctors making her case and she won. I will be forever grateful for her persistence because it gave us 5 more years together. Obviously not as long as we all would have liked, but that little extra time was worth millions.
So here I am 10 years later gearing up to do the same thing. Only in my case it doesn’t make any sense. We’re talking about something that will save the insurance company money. This would be around 1/3 of the cost of a regular healthy birth at a hospital. It is ridiculous for them to deny this, but of course they are going to try. After receiving the denial I contacted my H.R. rep and let her know I wanted to petition the insurance company and how should I do that. All of a sudden amazing things started to happen. She responded that not only could I fight my insurance company, but that she would help me. Good news, right. Wait for it, it gets better.
So I found a midwife, thanks to Katie, who will do a homebirth. Her and I set up an appointment (more to come on this soon) and exchanged a few e-mails. A few days before our appointment my HR rep e-mailed me to see if the midwife would be able to provide some service codes as examples of things she would provide. Wanting to give the midwife ample time to put something together, if it was something that takes a long time, I sent her an e-mail. Then the next amazing thing happened! The midwife responded that she works with a billing company who is the shiznit. Okay my words not hers. And they can take care of all this stuff for me. Say What? The billing company will do a verification of benefits where they talk directly with your insurance company and figure out what is covered under their “out of network” services. They bill the insurance company directly using all the fancy dancey service codes and then I get reimbursed. She said the insurance company doesn’t even recognize it as a “homebirth” because the bill looks pretty much identical to that of a doctor. The only indication is that it is significantly smaller. Here I was ready to go Annie Oakley on the insurance company’s ass and it turns out I can just sit my sleepy pregnant ass down and relax.
I thought back to my mom’s fight and how much anguish and worry that process caused us all. I thought about all the un-named women who came before me and pushed for home births. These women made this possible for me. Before 1993, in Colorado, it was illegal for a midwife or anyone other than a doctor to assist in the delivery of a baby. My friend Pickles was born at home in 1983 and his older brother was born in 1980. His mom, assisted illegally by a midwife, muffled all her screams for fear that the neighbors would call the police. After Pickles was born, their midwife was arrested when another mother was forced by authorities to report her. The police threatened to take the woman’s children if she didn’t reveal who had assisted in her birth. What was she to do? You and I wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter either. Isn’t it amazing how different the world is now? We have a choice. Not only can we decide for ourselves what we would like from our births (at least when safe and medically feasible), but now there are ways to get coverage from your insurance company. I just can’t help looking around and thinking ‘someone out there is looking out for me’.

Blue skies, smiling at me, nothing but blue skies, do I see.

Celebrate My Mom

Today would have been my mom’s 53rd Birthday. Despite fighting a constant stream of nausea, this little nugget is definitely helping to heal the holes in my heart. I can actually feel my heart swelling at the thought of my mom and how excited she would be about this little freaky tad-pole looking thingy. I can hear her in the back of my head saying ‘don’t worry, just take it one day at a time’. Perhaps I feel even closer to her after spending yesterday laying on the basement floor and crawling around on all fours to get to the kitchen and bathroom. I can actually see my mom doing these same things when she was dealing with Butter and my pregnancies. It may sound really odd, but as sick as I feel, I am so happy. This is part of my rite of passage. This is just another test of devotion to this little person. And knowing my mom went through this for Butter and me, just makes me so grateful to her. Happy Birthday Momma!

Butter bun in the oven

Welcome to the World Butter

Hey, there’s me.

Snuggles with Mom

Then you realize you know way too much about this man’s balls

Have you run into those people who like to over-share information? I am sure you have because I seem to know a ton. The first time I was caught off guard was when our landlord in NY repeatedly told me, in detail, about his colonoscopy. After my meeting last week, the kindly gentleman, who is technically our client, took me over to his office for a soda and a brownie while we killed time before my flight back. We were standing outside eating said brownies and we were talking about his boss’s family, also our client, and he said something along the lines of ‘it’s great to be able to spoil your grandkids’. So then I said ‘oh, do you have grandkids?’.

This is where things made a turn for the worse. I thought I was just asking an innocent question to what seemed like something he was familiar with. “No” he says, “my wife and I weren’t able to have children”. He could have stopped here. He could have, but of course he didn’t. He proceded to tell me that they were married pretty young, she was 18, he was 19 and after 7 years of nothing happening, they realized something must be wrong. So they went to the doctor and “they tested me first, because it was easier. It came back that I had a low sperm count.” This was my first indication that things were quickly going wrong.

“So the doctor did this operation where they open the tubes up from your testicles” Whoa! What just happened. This is my client, I am pretty sure I am not supposed to know about his testicles. But I was trying not to act shocked, I didn’t want him to be embarrassed when he realized. So I gave him the understanding nod that says ‘sure, I hear about other men’s balls all the time in my line of work’. He finished telling me about the surgery and how afterward they tried for another three years, but still nothing. The doctor told him ‘well your count is low, but you should still be able to get pregnant’. So they went back in to check his wife out. The doctor said she wouldn’t be able to conceive. Thank god he didn’t go into detail on that, although that part wouldn’t have made me uncomfortable.

From there he transitioned into how they went through the steps to try and adopt, but it was such a long process that they gave up. So they just decided that was it for them. I figure by then they had been married for 12 years or so, and were probably tired of all the stress from it all. Then he explained how they don’t regret not being able to have kids. It has allowed them to have lots of other hobbies, like having a plane for one thing, and being able to fly over to a nearby city for dinner whenever they want. And going on a motorcycle road trip every year up. I was happy to hear that his life was still so full despite the sadness of them not being able to have children. But even a week later, I am still really bothered by the fact that I know way too much about his balls!