People. If you are not reading Cake Wrecks, you are missing the funniest thing on the Internet.
Go now. But pee first.
Holy nine years, batman! August 29, 2008
We celebrated nine years of marriage yesterday with a day at the MOMA, wandering around SoHo, dinner and a night at a hotel. (Hey, one benefit of getting my period so early was that it was over by our anniversary.) It was a perfect day and night.
If we are not en route to a second child this time next year (and if the dollar improves), we’re planning a repeat of our honeymoon in and around Barcelona. We’d most likely bring the kiddo, though, so it wouldn’t be exactly like our honeymoon.
The tyranny of the stick August 22, 2008
I once read in People that Trista (you know? of Ryan and Trista from The Bachelorette? I totally picked Ryan from the first episode, by the way, and not just because I have a thing for firemen) peed on 99 HPTs before she conceived. The way they put it, it was like HPTs were a fertility treatment or something. Like it was the hard work of peeing on 99 HPTs that enabled Trista to conceive or something.
Silly, but I think subconsciously I’ve thought of HPTs in the same way. I always start testing around ten DPO, which is the earliest the FREDs (I’m really going TTC acronym crazy tonight!) can work, even though I’ve never gotten a positive before the twelfth day. I felt like if I was pregnant, and it was possible to know sooner, I wanted to know. But really I think it gave me some sense of control. I think some part of me has always felt that peeing on a stick will make me pregnant.
Today is 11 DPO and I have yet to pee on a stick. I don’t feel even the tiniest bit pregnant. Tomorrow is the day when I typically get my period while peeing on a stick, so I’m not going to waste my psychic energy or my six bucks or space in the landfills with yet another piece of useless plastic. And I’m going to try to feel empowered by that.
Preschool August 21, 2008
Gatito is starting preschool in a few weeks. This will be the first time in his life that he will not be receiving one on one care from a parent or nanny or grandparent.
He knows he is going to school, knows the name of his teacher and that she is nice, and has been having playdates with several if his classmates fir months.
I have told him several times, without making a big thing about it that Tata will take him there (mommy on the first day) and pick him up when school is over, but I don’t think he really understands. I don’t want to create anxiety where there currently is none, but nor do I want him to be surprised on the first day.
Suggestions?
Sleep over August 17, 2008
My parents offered to turn their babysitting gig into a sleepover at their house last night. Both A and I were reluctant. Not because we thought he wouldn’t have fun, but because we have apparently become the type of parents who, in nearly three years, has never spent a night away from our kid. (We’ve both done some *very* limited travel for business, but we’ve never both been away at the same time.) But my parents convinced us that it would be a good dry run for the night we’re planning in the city for our anniversary.
It was weird coming home from dinner and a movie to an empty house. Weird not having to tiptoe and whisper in our open plan, hardwood-floored, small house. Weird to be able to open the closet to put my clothes away, instead of piling them on the bookshelf out of fear of waking him up.
Of course, we didn’t get to sleep in because the damned cat woke us up by knocking my bottle of lotion off the bedside table in a bid for attention at 6:30 a.m., but it was nice to to read the Sunday paper (okay, okay, the style section) in bed. Ultimately, though, I think we both felt lonely and aimless until we picked Gatito up at 9:00. It’s hard to remember what it is, exactly, we used to do on the weekends in our pre-Gatito years.
***
I stopped thinking about the bag after a few days, so I guess I don’t want it that badly. Instead, I got my whole Fall wardrobe at my favorite new boutique (which only gives store credit for returns, incidentally). Three shirts, a wrap dress, a pair of work pants and a pair of jeans. I usually have such a hard time finding clothes I like that look good on me, but everything I bought is gorgeous and I can’t wait to wear it. I guarantee you I’ll get to wear it for quite some time. I can tell already that this is not the month.
Online photography class August 15, 2008
I’d like to take a class to help me use my DSLR camera better. My exposures are funky and the resolution is odd and it’s taking away from my enjoyment. Everything I know (or, more accurately, everything I’ve forgotten) about photography I learned in black and white film classes in high school and college.
Does anyone have an online course to recommend?
Keep on keepin’ on August 11, 2008
There are five years between my sister and me because my mom could not decide whether or not to have another child. The reason for her ambivalence was the opposite of mine: She found parenting a young child difficult and boring and had neither the support of my father, who was the typical uninvolved workaholic father, nor much of a social network. For me, I’m more afraid of disrupting what is a pretty easy, pretty perfect life, all things considered.
What my mom found was that she could never put it to rest when she “decided” to have only one child, but as soon as she decided to have a second, she felt sure of the decision. She conceived in the first and second month of trying both times, so she never had to re-visit that decision, as I have for the past four months. But I suspect where we’re similar is that I doubt I’ll make peace with a decision to stop trying for a second without some external force.
I don’t know why I feel like there is something wrong, and I don’t know what I think is wrong. It was only seven months ago that I conceived spontaneously, almost accidentally, so I have no reason to believe that A or I have a fertility problem. I clearly have a progesterone problem/borderline luteal phase defect, but that didn’t stop me from carrying Gatito successfully, with the help of supplementation, so no reason to believe that will be a factor here. The problem that is statistically the most likely– repeat ectopic pregnancy– is the one I think about the least lately, for some reason.
I’m trying not to spend too much time on what steps I would or wouldn’t be willing to take because I’m not there yet, and I don’t think that anyone can really know what they will or will not do when they’re actually faced with a particular situation. I’ll just say that right now I’m leaning towards less, not more, for a variety of reasons.
As I begin the two week wait, I’ve promised myself not to test early, but to wait it out and see what happens. I have only one test left over from last month, and the plan right now is to save it for the 14th day, if I get that far. The truth is, though it may be hard to tell from what I write here, I’m not angst-ridden most of the time. I’m just living my life. And it’s a good one.
Stay tuned.
They should have called it Numero Dos August 11, 2008
I don’t know what possesed me to peer inside a pot of soup at Whole Foods labeled Numero Uno this weekend, but I still haven’t recovered from what I saw.
This again? August 4, 2008
I think the most exhausting part about trying to conceive this time around is that every single month at about this time, I start to feel ambivalent about whether or not I even want a second child. Then I have to go through all the soul-searching and decide, still a bit ambivalently, to try as ovulation approaches. For the next week plus, I’m basically complacent. As the two week wait comes to an end, I get antsy enough to invent symptoms. When I get my period, I’m sad, even a little depressed for a couple of days. Then, for the next two weeks, I mostly forget about everything and live my life until days before ovulation, when I begin again.
I sort of thought that after last month, I was sure enough about what I wanted to eliminate the soul-searching part of the cycle, but apparently not. These past few days I’ve been so conscious of how much I enjoy my relationship with Gatito, and how worn out moms of more than one kid seem, and how we’re just on the cusp of being able to do things like go skiing with him this winter– something that would be set back several years by having another child– or perhaps forever, based on the financial constraints inherent in a second child. Then I think that parenting Gatito is such a delight that I want only to extend my years of parenting young children by having a second.
Or maybe it’s just that I fell in love with this bag over the weekend and promised it to myself as a consolation prize if I do not get pregnant this month. It is a gorgeous plum color in person and I hear plum is really in for Fall.
Is this my part of my usual self-protection or could I really want a bag more than I want another child?
