The Big Let-Down

This spring I was hired into my local district as a half-time multi-categorical special education teacher. It was just what I wanted. I didn't have my own classroom because of very limited space, but I still loved it. (This fall I would have been moved to a different school and actually had my own designated space -- no more carrying bins of materials from one classroom to the next.)

I was hired after we started trying to get pregnant but before I was actually pregnant. I should have known that as soon as I landed the perfect job with the perfect, consistent number of hours that I wanted that I would get pregnant and have to leave. (Remember, I was diagnosed with PCOS and thought it would take months and months for us to conceive. I'm not complaining about the timing, but we honestly didn't expect it to happen as soon as it did.)

And I've always, always known that once I had a baby I wouldn't work anymore. I just didn't know I'd have to quit five months before the baby is even here.

Stupid me -- I thought it would be all fine and dandy to let the district know that I'm expecting a baby in January and wouldn't return after Christmas break. Well, that's not how district contracts work. You either sign up for the entire school year or you don't.

And I want to be a stay-at-home mom from the moment that baby comes out of me.

So I didn't sign the contract.


I have spent most of the afternoon and evening crying. This half time position would have been the ultimate, perfect job to have while pregnant. It was an afternoon assignment, meaning that after sleepless nights caused by pregnancy insomnia I could have a bit of a rest before I went into work. I would be at the same place, working with the same students, MY students, in MY classroom, every day, for no more than twenty-five hours a week -- CONSISTENCY -- and I'd make the same amount of money as if I were subbing all day, every day.

Well, when you don't get to teach, you get to sub. None of those luxuries come with subbing, in fact it's almost always a shot in the dark. You have to find classrooms in weird buildings and answer the question "Where's Mrs. ______?" fifty times. Subbing in kindergarten one day and seventh grade the next means two days of the same mess of misbehavior and children lying to your face. I suppose the main difference is that I have yet to be flipped off and called a b**** by a kindergarten student.

Some people love subbing! Unfortunately, I do not in the least enjoy the "adventure" of subbing. I don't like having to manage students I don't know day after day, having to figure out each teacher's different routine and usually realizing too late how things are actually supposed to go. I don't like having to be that sub who has to call the office because a student is having a meltdown and throwing chairs or because three students mysteriously disappeared to the bathroom and never came back. Being a sub means I am taken advantage of every day by students who know I don't know what to expect from them. It means I have to scream simply to be heard. It means I'm either the meanest person alive or I am a complete doormat. Every. Day.

To put it [unprofessionally] bluntly, subbing sucks, and I wasn't planning on doing that this fall. Now it's my only choice, and I'm feeling admittedly bitter about it. I would much rather have a job I'm sad to leave than have to count down each long, unpredictable day until I can finally just have the baby.

I wanted to have my own students. My own classroom. Even just from August to December. This was my last shot at having that experience. It hurts, badly, that I had to turn it down. I know it will be worth it once the baby is here, but this is very, very hard on me and I am actually having a very real grieving process over this. I don't know that I will ever have that opportunity again.

You had better feel loved, little baby. I'm doing this because I already do.

Baby Download 38% Complete

Today marks fifteen weeks I've been pregnant, and according to www.thebump.com, the baby is the length of a navel orange, has fully developed fingernails, and weighs three ounces.  Six weeks until I get to see him or her again via ultrasound!

We will not be finding out the sex and you can actually blame my husband for that.  The man who, in all other cases, carefully lines up each of his ducks, wants a surprise!  I fought him on it for a while, but then gave in once I concluded that I have no preference of having a boy or a girl, and that getting gender neutral baby things would be a smart idea anyway. (I'm not promising a surprise next time around.)

Three Thoughts from Today

1) I park in the designated "New and Expecting Mothers" parking spot at HyVee (midwestern grocery chain).  It is admittedly fun to know I can technically park there. I'm not showing and am starting to feel better, so I feel a bit bad for it, especially when I notice suspicious glares from passersby. But there are four or five of these spots in the parking lot, usually all unoccupied, while the rest of the parking lot is nearly chocked full.  On the other hand, what if a new mother with a freshly birthed baby would have taken that spot? It's quite the internal struggle for me, really!

2) My current "thing" is pasta salad. My husband hates pasta salad, so when he perked up and asked what I was making as I put some water on the stove, I felt a little bashful with my answer. He is disappointed, poor guy. But, really, how can you go wrong with creamy ranch sprinkled with delicious bacon bits and tiny vegetables in small enough amounts to go unnoticed?

3) Maybe I'm crunchy, but -- mainly to save money, and because I know there's only one kid coming out of this pregnancy -- I'm very seriously looking into cloth diapering.  Before you freak out and say "ewwww," just hear me out!  Cloth diapering has come a LONG WAY from leaky plastic pants, dishcloths, and pins. And, call me crazy, but after obsessively researching, watching literally dozens of YouTube videos, and visiting countless CD blogs... I think I might be able to handle it... yes, really, you CAN call me crazy! :)

My First Trimester in Memes

As of this coming Friday, I will be fifteen weeks pregnant.

The following images are a review of my pregnancy thus far:

Weeks 4-7

Week 5

I was SO hungry it was scary.

Weeks 7-Current

 Weeks 8-10

Weeks 8-Current

Weeks 10-Current

Yeah, except I only had 1/2 a PBJ sandwich and I'm STILL HUNGRY but if I eat anything else I will THROW UP.

I seem to be slowly getting over the whole morning sickness part of this. Sort of.  It used to be that I felt sick all day.  Eventually I got to where I was okay until lunch or early afternoon.  Now I seem to be okay until some point in the late afternoon or early evening.  So this has to keep getting better, right?  I can't keep puking every night, right?  Don't answer that.

At seven weeks, I had my first ultrasound.  The baby was essentially a little line with a flashing heartbeat on a black and white cone-shaped screen.  I have a couple of pictures from the ultrasound but, given that it looks nothing like a baby, I'll wait to share images until after the twenty week ultrasound in September. :)

At ten weeks, I heard in the examination room via a fetal doppler the "WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH" of my baby's heartbeat. What a feeling! <3

A big worry I had this pregnancy was flying out to California to take care of my grandpa for two weeks (weeks 10-12 of my pregnancy) while my aunt and uncle, his primary caretakers, took some much-needed vacation. I was terrified I would be too sick to properly take care of him, even with the Zofran my doctor gave me, which, by the way, DID help noticeably with the nausea, but also made me feel like this:

And nothing helped. NOTHING. Even after I stopped taking Zofran, it took two weeks for me not to nearly give myself a hernia or give early birth every time I had to go number two.

Anyway -- even with Zofran as my friend (sorta), I worried I wouldn't be able to do the job.  So the morning I left for the airport, I asked my husband for a priesthood blessing.  In the blessing I was promised that I would have less nausea and I would be able to give my grandfather the care he needed, and that is exactly what I needed to hear.  I love having the priesthood in my home!

So guess when my nausea started getting pushed back into the early afternoons instead of ALL DAY LONG?  My first day in California.  I even forgot to take my Zofran because of the whole change of routine and living out of my suitcase.

I find this meme quite fitting because I was in the car when I realized I had forgotten my Zofran, and then realized that I was doing okay without it!

Not having morning sickness in, well, the mornings, was extremely helpful.  My grandfather has diabetes, kidney disease, and poor eyesight.  Part of his health care is needing kidney dialysis three times a week and, due to his poor eyesight, cannot drive himself to these appointments.  Dialysis was three days a week at 9:00 AM, so I was able to get him there and then back by about 1:00 PM and not feel too ill until after we got home.  We actually empathized each other quite well!  Both of us were familiar with nausea, occasional throwing up, needed lots of naps, and we both did a lot of sitting around when NOT napping.

We watched a lot of American Ninja Warrior, Judge Judy, America's Got Talent, and Family Feud in his sitting room.  So a lot of the time, this was us:

I was usually accompanied by a knitting loom (to knit baby stuff), a soda (to help me burp and thereby briefly relieve indigestion), and a bowl of popcorn (to help me poop).

I really enjoyed time with my grandpa!  It was nice to be able to talk with him about his childhood and about my mom, aunts, and uncles when they were kids.  Given that I did not think I'd have the opportunity to see him again in this life, it was a blessing to go out and see him.

(I even got to have brunch with my cousin -- who lives about an hour from my aunt -- while I was out there!)

During my last few days in California, my parents came up with my two youngest siblings to see us and help out with Grandpa's care. It was really wonderful getting to see everyone and talk about pregnancy issues and joys with my mom.  We spent some time just hanging out in my aunt's pool and also took a day trip to Big Trees and to see my cousin again.  I didn't feel the best during this whole trip, but I'm so glad I was able to go out west and see members of my family.  This experience was truly a blessing!

Since I've been back, I've mostly had sickness in the late afternoon and evening, and am keeping my fingers crossed that I'll feel significantly better by the time school starts again in August.

I think that about catches us up to right now. Future blogs will be shorter and likely contain more humor similar to what you saw in this post.  Here's to growing a baby!

Trading in Tango

In April, sometime between the appointment with my family practitioner and the actual OBGYN, my dog Tango got a UTI of some sort. She seemed to get one every two or three months, and they were always treated with antibiotics and went away. So I collected a sample of her red-tinged urine and took it in.

Tango had been in my life since I was twelve years old and my mom brought her as a puppy into the house. She moved from Texas to Dubuque with us in 2003, and when my parents moved in the summer of 2012 to southern Nevada they left her with me, given that she was getting quite old and arthritic and hated being in the car. They feared she may fall into the pool and not make it out, and knew that in general she would be happier in a house out in the country, which is where I live with my husband. So we had adopted Tango into our family, and she and Sadie the pug tolerated each other pretty well. K loved her, too, even though he rarely admitted it.

This was the third UTI she had and the doctor wanted me to bring her in for some blood tests. So a few days after it was confirmed she had a UTI and had been put on antibiotics, I brought her in, shivering and shedding, to get a blood draw.

Results came back a few days later as kidney disease -- and Tango was in stage three kidney failure. I felt down about it but not overly surprised. Tango did not show immediate signs of slowing down, either. She still wriggled around on her back when she wanted to play and romped around the house stiffly when I played with her. She was still herself, so aside from switching her to all distilled water and a homemade renal diet that she rather despised, I didn't make many changes for her. Even with her diet I eventually became pretty lenient -- she may as well enjoy her food while she was around.

 Tango, waiting for K to come home one night.

Both dogs insisted on hanging out in the bathroom in the mornings with us. Tango always followed K into the bathroom as soon as he got up and sat near him while he got ready for the day.

I frequently came home to find Tango asleep like this.

Tango, seemingly asking me if I'm serious about wanting her to eat the entire homemade renal dish I put in front of her. (And Sadie silently offering to consume all of it within five seconds.)

My husband and I obeyed the OBGYN's orders regarding the Clomid and the two week wait for testing began.

It was during this time that Tango began to slow down. It was harder to wake her up from naps when I came home, and she began eating and drinking less water. I went entirely back to her old food that she preferred in hopes she would eat more.

May came, and Mother's Day weekend -- the weekend I would start testing -- approached. I had set a tentative schedule in mid May to have Tango euthanized because I knew she wasn't happy anymore.

Friday, May 10 was the first day I felt comfortable testing. That second pink line was barely visible, and I questioned whether I was seeing things, but it was there.

That night, I knew Tango was in bad shape. She could barely walk, absolutely refused to eat or drink, and was throwing up bile. She trembled miserably and looked terribly sad. I wondered if she would even make it through the night, and called my mom in tears. We agreed to take her into the vet the next morning to let her go. I tucked Tango into her bed in the kitchen and camped out next to her while I called the vet to let him know I needed to do it tomorrow.

Everyone camped out on the floor with Tango that night.

She was clearly miserable and sat like this for most of the night. I stroked her head gently and talked to her quietly. Neither of us slept much.

I don't remember if I tested the next morning. We got up early and took her into the vet, carrying her on her bed stretcher-style -- as she could not walk -- to say goodbye.

Even Sadie knew Tango was sick.

After it was all over, we wrapped Tango up in her blanket, brought her back home and buried her in the backyard.

It was such a hard day, one of the hardest days in my life. Tango was the first dog I was fully responsible for regarding her health care decisions, diet, and other aspects. It was terrible to say goodbye, but it was the right thing to do.

It was hard to be excited that I might be pregnant. Even with a more definite positive pregnancy test on Mother's Day, I had a hard time pushing aside my sadness to make room for excitement. That would come later.

Looking back, I count that weekend as one of God's ultimate tender mercies. The weekend He invited my baby Tango back home was the same weekend I got the promise that, soon, I would be able to have another baby -- my very own baby!

A Problem Unmasked

This entry addresses some minor feminine health issues I had to deal with whilst trying to conceive.  It is not graphic or highly descriptive, but I have given some general descriptions of the symptoms I experienced. This is a rather personal entry, and while I wouldn't deem it inappropriate for anyone to read, I ask not to be judged based on any health decisions I have made. (And, honestly, this is probably going to be the most boring entry.  If you want to know what happened in the end, read the last two paragraphs. :P)

The new year rolled around and we started trying.  I had joined an online pregnancy forum and had started my own thread in the "Trying to Conceive" posting section. A lot of the ladies on there were really helpful and made some fertility book recommendations. I picked up one of those books from the library and realized how ignorant of the whole conception process I really was. It gave me a nice little education! The problem was that my body doesn't go by the book; rather, it does its own thing.

As a teenager, I never, ever had regular cycles -- just five to seven a year, and they were always accompanied by migraines and vicious cramps, cramps that traveled down my legs and to my ankles as well as down my arms to my wrists. Once I was eighteen and they weren't any better, my mom made a doctor's appointment to see what could be done to address this issue.

The female doctor who performed my exam had an abstinence-themed poster in the examination room. She suggested use of the Pill for regulation and then lectured me on the risks of having sex even while on the pill, and then when, being a good Mormon girl, I assured her that I wasn't interested in using it as birth control, she didn't seem to believe me. Nevertheless, she put me on it and from that time until my husband and I had been married for three years and decided we were ready to try for a baby, I was on it. The Pill all but eliminated my horrible cramps and irregular cycles, but when the time came to stop taking it I knew that there must be a problem it hadn't addressed, only masked.

At the end of 2013 I stopped the pill and had the usual "withdrawal" period in early January. The month passed without another cycle starting. February and March passed. Nothing. I was not pregnant -- I had been testing every couple of weeks to make sure, even though I knew I wasn't. I made an appointment with my family doctor, and he referred me to an OBGYN, whom I visited in April. By then I had still not had a real period, and I was still definitely not pregnant.  Though I had hoped it wouldn't, I had seen this coming and worried what was wrong with me. This wasn't just a problem caused by being on the Pill for six years -- it had been a problem before, and it remained undiagnosed and unresolved.

I had done some research and determined the problem was likely either Endometriosis or Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) based on my symptoms. Treatment for the former would potentially involve surgery to remove excess tissue from outside the uterus. The latter is one of the most common feminine health issues that affect fertility and is easier to address. The OBGYN agreed that it was likely one of the two, said I wasn't ovulating on my own, and wrote up a prescription that would induce a period. She told me to let her know whether or not it was painful and had me schedule an appointment to come back in several days.

The prescription worked and I had very little pain, which is how it always was while I was on the Pill. At my next appointment, the OBGYN had me go in for an ultrasound.

The ultrasound room was dark. It was interesting seeing the cone-shaped screen with my uterus on it. I thought to myself how wonderful it would be to someday see a little person in there. Then the technician adjusted the wand and I saw, one at a time, both of my ovaries appear on the screen. They were both covered in black splotches, and I knew in my gut what that indicated.

Sure enough, my OBGYN informed me that I had PCOS, which was why I was not ovulating on my own. She prescribed me to a generic form of Clomid, which causes the body to ovulate, and gave me a window of dates that Kevin and I should actively try to conceive.

Prompting the Journey

It was Thanksgiving Day of 2013.  K and I had prepared a nice Thanksgiving meal and invited his parents and a friend over for dinner.  K's parents are divorced -- his mom lives alone in town and his dad is a half-paralyzed stroke victim residing in a local nursing home.  (K had been his dad's WONDERFUL personal caregiver for nine years, but once we had been married for a year and a half and had completed college, we couldn't manage it any longer.)

K's dad had been hoping to avoid coming over that day because he does not like having to be out in cold weather, even for the most brief period of time.  K had been on the phone with him rolling his eyes.

"Oh, you don't feel well?" I heard him say as he looked at me knowingly.  "Well, you're coming over for Thanksgiving, Dad. I'm coming to get you tomorrow."

The same occurred on Thanksgiving afternoon. "Well, Dad, I'm on my way to come get you, so have them get you your coat."

He left to pick up his dad.  It seemed like he was gone for a long time, even in the event of picking up his dad to bring him over.  Both of our other dinner guests were seated and I was dumping cream cheese and butter into the mashed potatoes on the stove when the phone rang.

His dad had been throwing up roughly every fifteen minutes for most of the day and was being taken to the emergency room.  In other words, this time he wasn't just lying about being sick so he wouldn't have to come over.  A slice of guilt pie for the both of us.

By evening he had been transfered to Mercy Hospital.  Over the next two weeks we would have different kinds of scares--pushy nurses abruptly asking us about my father-in-law's DNR status, saying he had a perforated bowel.  The doctor trying to push off a narrowly avoided surgery because of how weak Dad's heart was.  K's dad refusing to talk about whether or not he wanted a DNR. Having to pin his good hand down while we shoved a tube down his throat to empty his digestive tract due to an obstruction, which was the final diagnosis, in his intestine.

It was a scary time, and two or three times we thought we were going to potentially say goodbye.  The initial diagnosis of a perforated bowel meant certain death, and twice Dad barely escaped absolutely last-resort surgery that he very likely would not have survived.  I took some pictures of K with his dad, unsure of whether I would have the opportunity to take more in the future.

For the two weeks K's dad was there we lived out of the hospital cafeteria and Kevin used up a lot of PTO.

After several days of living this hospital lifestyle, K and I spent some time wandering around the hospital corridors.  Being a Catholic facility, Mercy has small a chapel.  One night, K went in there with me and asked to talk about something.

We had decided (albeit rather begrudgingly on my part) earlier in the year that we would wait until 2015 to try for a baby -- try to get more student loans paid off and more money built up in our savings first. However, the situation with K's dad seemed to prod him into considering to start trying in 2014.  He asked me to please pray about it and said that he would, too.  We prayed together first, and then both spent some time in the chapel pondering this silently without speaking with each other.

The chapel was a dark place at night, with just some lights at the front altar to provide a glow.  Some quiet hymns played from somewhere as we prayed individually, silently.  I sat there, knowing the answer was yes, wondering how long it would take my husband to reach the same conclusion -- he's always been more careful, more thorough about thinking things through than I have been, which is both a blessing and a bother. ;)

After some time, he asked me how I felt about it.  We both agreed that we had a calm feeling of peace.  We said a prayer together promising the Lord that we would try for a baby in 2014.

And that was the start of our baby journey.  My husband's dad passed the obstruction and was discharged after two weeks of being in the hospital.  I started taking prenatals and gauged when I would finish my last pack of birth control.