Category Archives: ZOMG!!! BABIES

Mamazines

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The nesting has begun, in the form of wanting to blow $15 to get 5-10 mamazines. The ‘mamazine’ genre is a zine written about pregnancy, birth, or kiddos.

Despite knowing the genre name for years, I was surprised to not find a good bibliography of mamazines out there. So, I did what any self-respecting librarian would do – I first consulted Jenna Freedman, then I started a bibliography.

It’s going to need some work, and I will eventually post what I put together to a more public space, namely zinelibraries.info.

I plan on buying a bunch of these, so if anyone wants to borrow them, let me know!

You’re only pregnant if you’re knitting booties

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So, because I had done the research and data collection to know when I was ovulating, I started peeing on sticks mere days after, uh, conception. (Talking about sex in general is easy for me – talking about a specific instance is somehow embarrassing. Funny.)

My friend Dr. Kim explained that she bought just the replacement sticks, online, because they’re super cheap. She even gave me her leftovers, after she made her own bundle of joy (baby photos here). I bought more, from the same place (early-pregnancy-tests.com, although the site seems to be down) since they were so super cheap.*

Having cheap and plentiful pregnancy tests meant I could test obsessively. I tried my best not to. I learned that the test looks for a hormone that is produced after the fertilized egg attaches to your uterus (before that, it’s there, but free floating), which can take a while. I kept the stick peeing to a minimum, maybe once every two days.

I now know that the first sign of pregnancy I had was sore breasts, which is unfortunately also a sign of oncoming menstruation. So, totally unhelpful.

The first not-normal thing that I noticed to me was the crazy-intense cramping I started having. Usually at night, only on my left side, it was a stabbing pain low in my abdomen that would last about 10 minutes at a time and occur maybe four times a day. As someone who’s never really had bad cramps, I assumed this was not normal. I gave it a couple of days, but on the third night, when a bout lasted a half hour, I woke Jason up sobbing “this is not OK, I want to go to the doctor tomorrow”. He was alarmed, probably due to the waking-up-to-your-wife-sobbing-at-you factor, and agreed readily.

In the morning, I called my doctor. (I love my doctor, by the way. If you live in the greater Boston area, she’s Dr. Nancy Akbari.) She wondered if it was “GI related”, which I mentally translated as “fart related”, because it was lower abdomen, on the left side. I assured her that it was unrelated to gas. I told her that I was maybe, possibly pregnant, and she decided I should come in. Lower abdomen pain on one side can mean ectopic pregnancy, which is dangerous. (She was doubtful of this too, because you start getting the pain from an ectopic pregnancy later than I thought I was pregnant, but didn’t want to chance it.) I peed on a stick before I left, hoping that a positive test would mean there wasn’t something wrong with me. No luck.

I went in to the office. She said that they’d do a pregnancy pee test. If it was positive, it was probably just normal pregnancy pain. If it was negative, they’d do a pregnancy blood test, just to make sure. If both were negative, then she’s start to worry about ovarian cysts and such.

So, what I learned that day is the pregnancy test they have at my doctor’s office is more sensitive than the ones I was peeing on at home. It’s funny to say, because it’s so clichéd, but I made the nurse repeat herself when she said it was positive.

Then I had an immediate adrenaline rush. I felt my face flush red, a rarity. So, that was that. Nothing was wrong, I was just pregnantohmygod.

It was a gorgeous day, and as I walked back to the train station, I called both my parents at work. I’m not a very good secret keeper, and I was just too excited, overjoyed, and full of adrenaline to not share. My mom made an eeeeeeeee noise. It was very cute.

Long before, Jason had joked that the only way he wanted to know if I was ever pregnant was to come home to find me knitting booties. As I couldn’t wait until he came home (six hours is a long time when you made a baby with someone), I once again turned to technology. I sat down in front of my MacBook Pro, and shot a quick video of me slowly turning around in my chair, to reveal a baby booty on needles. I sent it to his email, with a subject like OMG OPEN THIS RIGHT NOW.

So, that’s how I discovered I was pregnant. The stabby thing happened once or twice more, then went away for good.

Next, I’ll tell you all about pregnancy nausea, otherwise known as “morning sickness”, but should be known as “all day sickness”.

*I still have some pregnancy sticks. If anyone wants them, email me.

How it started

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It first started with a conversation with Steph McN. I think she had a newborn at the time, and we were talking about the timing of having a baby at a certain point in the year. Somehow, we came to the conclusion that May is the best month to have a baby. This was before Jason and I had decided for sure that we wanted to have any offspring, but I was well on my way to being convinced.

So, a few years later, when Jason and I started talking I started bringing up babies, Jason and I went through the same list of timing. Being hugely pregnant in the dead of summer or winter means being overly hot, or unwieldy on ice. Having a newborn in the middle of winter seemed hard, to keep them warm enough when bathing their tiny bodies.

Really, if one could just manage to start pregnancy in August, you’d not be huge until spring, the baby would be born in May, and you’d have all summer to forget to put socks on them.

My friend Kelly lent me the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which is both a How To, but also a How Not To Make Babies book. At the time, I was interested in the Not Babies part, but the whole point is that you can generally pinpoint when you’re ovulating (charting your morning temperature is part of this), so you can either avoid it or aim for it. I am an embracer of technology, and also a librarian. This means that I immediately downloaded an app for my iPhone that let me chart my temp every morning (ah, data collection) and showed it to me on a graph.

Son of a vondruke, it worked. My temp would spike. So, I kept data from January-August. It was fun (for a librarian), and by the time we hit August, I was fairly sure I knew when it was baby-making time.

So that’s what we aimed for. I remember telling my brother about the baby plan, and after his initial reaction of ‘ooh, gross’ he mused that most animals have their babies in spring, so the logic was sound to him.

So, that’s how we ended up pregnant exactly when we wanted to. This is how I will explain to my child where babies come from: logic, technology, and two people who love each other very,very much.

Also sex.

Unwarned belly patting: don’t do it (unless its me)

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I’m almost 14 weeks pregnant, and I’ve only really been showing for the past two. Already, there have been three accounts of people patting or rubbing my abdomen without asking. From what I hear, this is common. Strangers on the train will put their hands on my expanded middle.

For me, this is not a big deal. It’s not that I don’t have personal space, it’s that my bubble includes everyone else.

For others, I can imagine this would be startling at the very least, and bring on atavistic rage at the most.

I do find this incredibly interesting, from a sociological perspective. Our culture seems to celebrate pregnant women, which I assume is a celebration that we haven’t become inept at procreation. Pregnancy is also a temporary state, so unless you troll maternity wards, you don’t tend to have a steady stream of pregnant women in your life. It’s powerful that growing a baby is something gives everyone else the go-ahead to cross the don’t-touch-strangers-in-the-midsection boundary.

Just so you know, I’m totally willing to let anyone touch my belly. I wonder if that will change as the baby (and I) get larger, and I start to get that mama animal, primal thing. I’ll let you know.

Another tacky announcement! My blog wants to tell you I’m pregnant.

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Following in the tradition of marriage and moving, there’s no better way to tell a group of people you’re (insert pregnancy euphemism here).

I figure you’re all as excited as we are, so I’ll skip the blathering and just give you the goods:

  • We’re expecting a human baby around May 20th, 2010.
  • That makes me almost 14 weeks pregnant.
  • Yes, I had first-trimester nausea.
  • No, I didn’t ever actually puke.
  • Yes, I plan on blogging all about it.
  • That makes this a mostly knitting and pregnancy blog at this point.
  • As I am an open person, you are going to hear about controversial, weird and potentially gross stuff. Consider yourself warned.

7 weeks 13 Weeks

(That’s 7 weeks and 14 weeks.)

Next to come: sonogram headshot of what we’re referring to as The Soybean, results of genetic testing, ruminations on the first three months, and more.