Round About Week 15

Hiya, friends. Sorry for the silence.

Not much to report around here except for the IF equivalent of first-world problems: feeling blue about feeling fat; feeling terrified at the prospect of an actual baby in our actual apartment; feeling like stabbing someone in Old Navy while attempting to buy maternity clothes and settling for having a melt-down in H&M instead. Fascinating stuff.

I have an OB appointment tomorrow, so perhaps there will be more to report then. I'm hoping it will at least help with the fat-freakout -- I know it's moronic, and it isn't as if I was skinny before this, but it turns out I'm having a bit of trouble ignoring the past 30 years of societal conditioning on the subject. With luck, said OB (The Russian, OB 3 of 4. Haven't met her yet.) will not tell me I am gaining too fast, eating too much, etc. With further luck, that will help my brain get off this hamster wheel. If she *does* say I'm gaining too fast, batten down the hatches, 'cause we'll all be in for a stormy ride. (In point of fact, I *am* eating more than "they" say to, because I'm freakin' HUNGRY. There is no reasoning a stomach into peacefulness at 4 in the morning, and there is no going back to sleep for me while said stomach is restless.)

Enough ado! Here is your photographic evidence of my state at 14w6d (their count) or 15w1d (mine), in an Old Navy tank top wrested from roiling Herald Square this weekend and a very stretchy skirt of Sugar's (double-wardrobe is one of the great benefits of the Homosexual Agenda):

ETA: Oh, gawd. I just realized that this turned into one of those "I'm so fat (now tell me I'm skinny)" posts. Yuck. Not the (conscious) intent, really. Please just take it as evidence of the crazy I referred to above -- I swear I have regressed to my 15 year-old self vis-a-vis body image, and frankly, that was not the best or most interesting aspect of her personality.

The Dating Game

A few people have commented on the timequake that struck my ticker recently. If you thought it went backwards for a few days, you're not wrong.

When I first made the ticker, I was using the EDD I'd gotten from an IVF website. After all, I thought, no need to bring my LMP into this when I know *exactly* when I conceived, right? Egg Retrieval was CD 13 for me -- the closest I've had to a "normal" cycle since I started charting -- but the protocol says it's CD 14 for all date-figuring purposes, so I went with that.

And then I joined up with the OB practice. And they only wanted to hear about when my last period started. (Let's not even get into how the dang thing had the spottiest start ever and I wasn't even sure when to start stims and I ended up calling the Baby Factory in a tizzy, 'kay?) And they decided my EDD should be 3 days later than what I'd been thinking.

After some dithering, I've decided to go with their date. The word on the street from the lezzie-mamas and others who know for darn sure what day they conceived, thank you very much, not as if we're just casually throwing spunk up in our business, is that having a date that's a little later than you know is right is better than having an early date -- that way, you buy a few days' breathing room before people start pushing pitocin on you for being overdue. (I was doing all this reasoning before the specter of pre-term labor was raised at the nuchal, understand.)

So I've adjusted my ticker accordingly, even though it feels wrong to see the week number turn over on the wrong day of the week. (Those who know me from the IVP may notice that I left that ticker alone as a compromise to my view of truth.) I put off changing it for weeks, because I didn't want to lose ground in the struggle to get past the time of highest miscarriage risk with my sanity intact. But I'm gradually forcing myself to practice belief that this bunny-bean will stick around, whether or not I remember every superstition I've invented.

Buttons Of Our Lives

It's been far too hot in the past several months to think about wearing jeans, but Cali's Photo Friday suggestion got me curious.

Most of my summer clothes are big and loose; I had no idea it had come to this.

Here is the other exciting button in our lives these days:

This darling little doppler was lent to us by a splendiferous blogger, with the help of another pair of magnificents (all of whom I'm happy to name if they'd like -- You Know Who You Are). We love it and are so happy to have it visit us, especially knowing its storied history, listening in on the early moments of some very fine babies.

Before getting pregnant, I was very smug on the topic of dopplers. New-fangled nonsense, nothing a person with any faith would need, ultimately meaningless -- not being able to find a heartbeat at home doesn't mean there isn't one, nor does finding one today mean one will be present tomorrow -- and so on. Then came the Days of Bleeding. By bleeding, I mostly only mean spotting, but by days, I mean over a month, every day*. No matter how many times I told myself that the extra scans I had showed nothing wrong, that my cervices are famously testy, that none of it meant DOOM, it was DOOM I thought of at every bathroom trip, nonetheless.

The big argument against dopplers goes something like: You will one day fail to find a heartbeat, because you aren't trained at this and these wee little machines aren't perfect. And then you will panic, when you wouldn't have panicked if you'd never had the means to try to eavesdrop beyond your uterine walls. And there's something to all that, for sure.

But you know what? The first night of red bleeding, I PANICKED. Not having a doppler didn't save me. I think if I'd had a doppler then, one of two things would have happened: We would have found a heartbeat and possibly felt a bit better; or we wouldn't have found it and possibly felt worse. But I'm not so sure we had so very much worse to feel, in the absence of medical confirmation of our fears.

All of that is a very long-winded way of saying we're glad to have the doppler. (THANK YOU, lovely people.) Sugar is good at finding the heartbeat, probably in part because she's more patient than I am -- she really seems to believe there's something in there. I failed to find it the one time I tried alone, but strangely, it didn't scare me that much. Sugar found it that evening.

If she weren't pottering about, cleaning, I'd have her look for it now and try to record it for you. Just as well. All the books say these poetic things like, "your baby's heartbeat sounds like a galloping horse," but our baby? Our baby sounds more like a blue-tick hound on a porch somewhere, panting away the summer.

(Check out the other button-y pictures at Creating Motherhood.)

*I'm chicken to say this out loud, but there's been nothing since Sunday. (!)