Plans « Waking Early

the world around me stops, when it’s time to blog

November 8, 2007 at 7:17 am | In Doctor Visits, Expectant, First Trimester, General, Plans, symptoms | 5 Comments

Is that how it is for you? There are shoes on the floor in the kitchen, the highchair tray needs to be cleaned off and dishes unloaded from the dishwasher. The bed that I stripped earlier needs to be made, and it’s comforter put in the dryer. It’ll take me at least an hour to complete all the little things that need to be done before I pray and close my eyes to the world. But first, I must blog.

So…

today’s topic: OB visit number 1. 10 Weeks gestation!

My appointment was at 9:30. The bus picked me up at 8:40 and had me to the hospital by 8:55. The OB/GYN office is really close by the hospital so I decided to pass the time in the hospitals cafeteria, maybe find something good to read. I had a muffin and a nice hot drink. It only cost me a dollar and twenty cents! There weren’t any newspapers or magazines laying around so I just read the hospital information packet.

It’s really not a bad hospital, very family friendly…it doesn’t have a starchy clean feel to it, like big efficient hospitals. As I sat there waiting for time to pass my thoughts helplessly fell back on the hot summer days surround Diederick’s entry into the world. The food from the hospital’s kitchen is quite delicious and I got to have three meals a day for free while there for our four day stay, it was so great. And in the birthing center they had a refrigerator stocked full of upset tummy settling treats available for devouring between meal hours. No outside hospital food allowed in. Oh and the room was so nice too, being half conscious at best I was thankful to have such a friendly helpful staff. All the same, I did wish my mom was there.

Shaking myself out of memory lane I headed over to the OB office. I checked in five minutes before my appointment and settled down with a magazine. I think read the better part of four mags before my name got called.

I’m so happy to be ten weeks! Ten weeks means the outside of the baby looks like a baby, a baby hardly over an inch long, but one all the same. A baby that has earlobes and finger tips, a baby that will have it’s first bowel movement in just one week.

Good news on the cramps, well encouraging thoughts anyway.

The midwife who I saw today, Raine, said that it could be a type of morning sickness. Instead of the internal upset and sensitivity to smells and tastes being manifest in nausea my body is reacting with periodic abdominal spasms. I’m not quite sure if there’s scientific research that says that the two are interchangeable, I know I hadn’t heard anything like that before. However, it was nice to see Raine so confident that I’m OK. She said that I’ve been doing the right thing to take it easy when I feel pain, but not to worry myself about it. If there’s blood then I have permission to worry–fair enough.

We just filled out paperwork. She did it really quickly, like some kind of machine without neglecting to talk as she did it. I appreciated that she was so efficient with it, especially since she’d been half an hour late to the appointment. You know, come to think of it…the same thing happened on my first visit with her when I was pregnant with Deeder. “I got an emergency call from the hospital” Hmm…Oh well, I digress. I’m not saying that she’s lying, she just must meet up with loads of emergencies.

Raine gave me a lab slip for some blood work and had me schedule an appointment to come back in 3 weeks for my physical. As I scheduled the appointment I recalled that that was the appointment I missed in August. The day before my physical I miscarried, that was August 15th. A shiver ran down my back as I cleared my throat and took the appointment card from the receptionist. She said, “Well, we’ll hope to see you then.” I said that I hoped so too. I think everyone’s holding off on the congratulations for another 30 weeks.

I met with the outdoor 40 degree weather just in time for the bus. What a relief to not have to stand out in the cold!!! The bus ride home took forever and a half, or that’s how it seemed to me…probably because I was anxious about Deeder and his mystery illness. The bus driver needed to fuel up the bus (he forgot to that morning!) so everyone had to get off. Then he took his lunch break, thankfully for that we were all able to stay on the bus where it was warm. Now that’s something you wouldn’t find in a big town–a bus driver who takes lunch during a route.

Raine said that at our next meeting I’ll get to hear this baby’s heartbeat. So I have an appointment card and a lab slip, and the hope of a heartbeat in three weeks.

I got another lab sheet in the mail today from Karen Gilbert my nurse practitioner at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical center, she’s my neurologist for less! We’ve only met the actual neurologist once, she doesn’t do office visits. I’ll have my Lamictal level drawn and my OB blood work at the same time, it’s always great to save a trip.

That’s all for tonight. Can you tell I’m bummed about not getting to hear the heartbeat? Well I am! Really though, if there’s a heartbeat today there will be one in three weeks, right? I can wait.

moving plans, updated.

October 26, 2007 at 2:11 am | In Expectant, General, Plans | 2 Comments

Updated because they change so much, I do realize that I’ve never written about them on here before.

We seem to have many different Plan A and Plan B’s, all of which inadvertently switch which category they are in. One minute we have a nicely lined up stack of Plan A and a responsible Plan B backup, try to reiterate or sort through the stack and all of the sudden whatever was keeping them apart turns to nothingness and falls away, then they have to be re-identified. So so far we still live in Brattleboro Vermont, and we’re having another baby. My attic is full of boxes and totes full labeled and stacked in a way that makes sense to me, not because we’re moving, just because I have an attic and the stairs have mouse poopies on them! I want to know exactly what I’m looking for and rush out of there as soon as possible before a mousie comes into my housie. Unfortunatly, mousies do come down and must be caught in traps which really icks me out!!

Eh hem.

OK.

Plan A:

Goal: To move before the baby is born.

We talk to our land lady and tell her that we would like to be let out of our lease. Darren quits his job in the middle of March. We take two weeks to pack. We hire a big UHaul truck. They give you three days to load the truck, for this Darren’ll get a couple guys from his work to help. We leave April 1st. We drive in Darren’s truck with his car on a trailer behind it to Jamestown, ND and spend a week with his ma and pa then stop in Billings Montana to stay a couple nights with his sister, Roxanne. The moving truck arrives in Bellingham. Some nice person there unloads it in some apartment that Darren has pre-rented where we will arrive shortly. (Alternative to this plans, as told by Darren: All of our stuff is unloaded into a storage unit somewhere in Bellingham, we arrive and set up camp at my folks’ place for a month until we find our own place and a job. I think Darren’s thinking of Heidi in this scenario, he wants time to look for a place that allows dogs, just don’t tell him I said that!)

OK the tricky part of this Set-A-Date-To-Move-And-We-Just-Do-It plan is the need for insurance dilemma. My meds are expensive and the move will at least cost six thousand dollars :O Yes, Darren is blessed to be in a profession where he’s needed everywhere, but going without a job does seem terribly irresponsible.

OK so that’s a whole in Plan A, but let me continue.

So we get there. Darren sets out with his picture perfect resume and goes and talks to everyone who hires nurses. He takes the best paying one and becomes perfectly happy and content with it knowing that’s where God wants him to be!

I have the rest of my prenatal care taken over by Judy Edmunds, my mom’s midwife and have a wonderful home delivery AT MY PARENTS! Eeek!

The sad part about hte job thing is that there really isn’t any psychiatric nursing job in Bellingham. Darren hates hospitals and he hates nurses, he says that the busy-ness of it could make anyone crazy and that the nurses are just out to make themselves look good to their bosses.

Plan B:

Goal: Move shortly after the baby is born.

Our lease ends in June. The baby is due June 2nd. We pack and move our things to another apartment where we stay until September. September would provide ample driving weather and give me a couple months to recoup. Darren says he would have everything nicely set up so that when I was out of the hospital I could just arrive at the new apartment and not have to be stressed a bit. I see the reality of this as something awful! He’d want to get a place that allows pets and those are of slim pickens and in more often than not in terrible shape. And for someone to let a renter stay only a couple months? We’d have to move make to our first place up in the woods to get that kind of leniency. How we would actually make the move never settles. Darren wants to have a bonding father son time with nearly two year old Deeder by driving across the country without mommy! Mommy would be put on a plane for Seattle with baby to meet Daddy and Deeder in Bellingham. Mommy doesn’t want to be separated from Deeder! But it’s very important to Daddy that driving be done because he wants his car and truck, and of course, his doggie.

Somewhere inbetween Plan A and Plan B Heidi gets left on the farm that was her first home. She joined the farm as a two month old puppy in 1991 after being sorely mistreated by the people who owned her momma. Anyway all those years she’s been Daddy’s best friend and he would very much like for that first place she called home to be her final resting place. He tells a store of how one hot summer she dug a deep tunnel behind the barn and birthed a dozen perfect puppies there, if it weren’t for her smartness they would have died in the exceptionally hot summer heat. He’d like to bury her in that hole.

Anyway, as you can tell from reading this, that German Shepard has made many of our moving decisions, Darren says she’s protecting us.