Love, Erika

Last day of being pregnant

The anticipation and excitement is growing around here. Tomorrow is the big day!!  I have so much to be excited about, but I also feel like I'm going to puke. LOL. I'm very nervous. I just can't wait to see him, I hope he comes out screaming! I want to hear those lungs working. Dave is about to burst with excitement, and his enthusiasm keeps me in perspective.

Here is one of the last pictures of my enormous belly for your viewing curiosity. I even resisted the urge to erase those stretchmarks, and decided to leave them. I can't believe the girth of this thing, it is about 44-45 inches in circumference. It's amazing what the body can do.

Updated Wed evening:  We had a pre-op appointment at the hospital this afternoon where I had to sign some more papers, have blood drawn, and a nurse went over what to expect, what's going to happen, etc. Yikes!  I will be so glad when all this is over, and we're back in our room recovering and just having time to hold and look at our baby. :) Then it will be happy times from there.  I even already have my wrist ID bracelets on and everything, so we are ready to rock. 12 hours and counting.....

A tour of the baby's nursery

We've graduated

Today marked an exciting milestone: it was our last doctor appointment!  No more twice weekly visits, no more routine scale, blood pressure, urine samples, measuring, nonstress tests, etc etc. Woohoo!  Actually at this point they even stopped measuring me altogether, and never even checked my cervix at all. Which is pretty nice because there's no need to. Today all we did was sign the consent form for the surgery on Thursday. It's all cut and dry from here.... all over but the shouting!

And THANK GOD too, because I'm so beyond uncomfortable I can hardly stand it anymore. I can't wait to trade one discomfort for another, and get rid of this gigantic belly which is freakishly low. I think the baby is actually now lying sideways in there, sprawled out in his own little hammock. Let's just say that the sideways thing just doesn't FIT.

We're getting our bags packed for the hospital and trying not to forget anything. Obviously there's the clothes for myself, Dave and baby, but there's also the other stuff like camera equipment and lenses and chargers, and Dave's stuff to keep him busy like a laptop and various other gizmos. Even if we forget anything it's not like Dave can't zip home and grab it... we're only 10 minutes away.  I may be bedridden, but he won't be!

Other than that I'm just chilling out, and relaxing with my feet up. It's nice to be out of work and not have to worry about mustering the endurance to be awake and semi-productive for eight hours a day. I'm glad that source of stress and exhaustion is gone. From now on, the only time I'm getting up at 4:30am is if the baby is hungry. LOL.

Who will Drew look like?

Up until today I had never seen a baby picture of Dave! His mother was able to locate some old photos of him which is fun for us because now we can compare and contrast and see what Drew may or may not look like. Who knows! But it's fun to speculate. Dave was always a towhead and I had dark hair.

Also, my pregnancy scrapbook can be seen here (yes, I do scrapbook sometimes!)

This is Dave at 3 weeks old

This is me, not sure how old, but I look pretty new

FMLA leave

It's funny about what kinds of leave a pregnant woman can take these days. I was reminded to talk about this by Laura's comment yesterday, thanks Laura!  One older lady at work says she remembers back in the day when a woman was expected to stop work in her 7th month, and even stop driving at that point too.

These days it's not so easy. FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) is a federal law that protects a person's job for up to 12 weeks following the birth of a baby. For my purposes here I'm only talking about the birth part of the law, although there are other reasons why you can qualify for FMLA. All businesses are required to allow a woman to have leave for up to 12 weeks if she wants it, and hold her job for her.

Now the part about getting paid during that leave.... that part is not required by law. It's up to the individual company or business to determine if they will pay a woman while she's out on FMLA, and how much. Sadly, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world besides Australia to not provide a law about wages during family leave. So it's not required by law and you're at the mercy of your company.

Conglom-O will pay your wages for the first 6 weeks of the leave only. And it's not even actually 6 weeks, it's more like 5 weeks, because you don't get paid during that very first week unless you have your own PTO time saved up, and it comes out of that. Nice, huh? Then for the rest of the 6 weeks you are paid at 60% of your wages unless you bought an extra benefit during open enrollment which will increase your short term disability to 80%.  Then, for the remaining 6 weeks you are unpaid.

So this is why so many women work right up until they deliver.  When you only get (up to) 12 weeks off, you want to spend as much time with the baby afterwards as you can and not waste it on the front end before the baby even comes. In my case, my last day is tomorrow, which is 1 week before I deliver. In this case it's nice to have a scheduled day so I know I won't be waiting around to go into labor. :)

Now it's official

Now there will be no more wondering, or guessing, or speculation.... the c-section has been scheduled for June 14th at 7:30am. That's 2 weeks from yesterday!  I'm still having moments of panic and breakdowns about the scariness of surgery (I don't do well with stuff like this) but at the same time I'm also starting to get my head around it. So maybe in 2 weeks I'll be okay mentally. Most importantly, we finally get to meet this little baby! We're so excited about that.

Also in exciting life-changing news, a big congratulations goes out to Dave's father on his retirement today! That must be exciting. We're not sure yet what his long term retirement plans are, but in the short term I hear he's got a pretty big honeydew list. ;)

The countdown is on

Funny to be counting down, but y'all I have 5 and a half days of work left!!!  That's not including whatever other doctor appointments happen to crop up between now and then.  I really can't get it through my head that I will have 12 weeks off, I can't even imagine it. It's like a real summer vacation again.  I have one last piece of documentation to fax into Conglom-O's "Total Absence Management" department (I love that name) so they can approve my leave. Although whether or not they "approve" it is beyond my care.... this baby is coming whether they grant me their blessing or not. 

At work tomorrow there is a baby shower for another girl on my team who is also in her 3rd trimester. I have a little gift for her, but I'm debating whether to re-use one of my many baby gift bags from my own showers. Is that shameful?? But I figure why not when I have a stack a mile high and most of them are in fine condition, albeit mostly blue. But I think I can find a gender neutral one since she is having a girl. :)

We had another ultrasound on Tuesday, unexpectedly. But it was cool because this time we got to see that he has hair!! Yes, you can actually make out some fuzzy stuff around the head and the technician said that was hair. Also we saw his little mouth wiggling around. Poor kid looks all squished up with his hands and feet all crowded around his face. Poor little dude. We'll get you out of there soon!

Trying to turn a breech baby

Drew, as his first act of defying his parents, is still breech today after giving it Western medicine's best attempt to turn him around: the External Cephalic Version, or ECV. 

We spent a long time in the hospital today to try this procedure,  which ultimately didn't work. Basically the doctor presses really hard on my belly and forcibly tries to rotate the baby in the uterus, pushing and pulling him around in the direction he needs to go. Drew did not want any part of it. He started to move, but snapped right back.  Yeah, it was painful and is not without its risks of fetal distress, but I just had to give it an honest try. Too bad it didn't work. It only has a 50% success rate anyway.

What's next? A c-section will be scheduled for a couple of weeks from now (probably @ 39 weeks) unless by some miracle he turns on his own between now and then.

After the version was done, I just had to lay there in the hopital bed for a couple of hours, hooked up to the monitor to make sure his heart rate was good and he wasn't showing any signs of stress. It was just like my usual nonstress tests that I do twice a week, except it was a really looooong one. I was sleepy for a while, and Dave and I just kind of dozed and hung out. Eventually after they decided I wasn't going to spontaneously go into labor, they let me order up a lunch. My first hospital food! It wasn't too bad. :)  It was a turkey and swiss wrap, fruit cup, and cookies. After it had been so many hours since breakfast, I was starved.

Finally, some pictures

I've been more than a little slack lately about posting pictures, so finally here are some that Dave took today. Should I be offended by this? I have such a SHELF these days that the cat thinks he can climb up on it.

Also, Dave made a wise and astute comment today, something about self-perception and how we look nothing like what we think we look like. I had no idea I was this huge until I saw these pictures. The way I feel, and even the way I see myself in the mirror is nothing like this mega-belly that I've got in real life, apparently. Good grief. As you can see, clothing no longer contains this thing. I gave up on that a long time ago.

I noticed today that I am past the point of strangers cooing and telling me how beautiful I look. Nowadays the general reaction from strangers is a bug-eyed chuckle like "I'm sooooo glad I'm not you." 

And yes, I do wear other clothes besides these pajamas.

The lost weekend?

Dave and I spent the weekend in childbirth education classes. Rather than doing the 5-week session at 2 hours a pop, we decided to get it all over with in one weekend, 5 hours each day. We were both kind of dreading this whole thing, and some of us were more vocal about it than others (ahem), but I have to say it exceeded our expectations and was much better than we thought it would be. The other future parents in the group all seemed like nice, normal, responsible adults with good senses of humor and they all showed a lot of love towards their partners which was nice to see. I'm not sure what we were expecting, but I don't think a roomful of single teenage girls would have surprised us. I'm glad we were wrong!

Our instructor was a doula with 25 years of experience and she was so wonderful. It's such a different experience dealing with a midwife or a doula rather than a MD which is all we've had up to this point. I wish I didn't have a medical condition that necessitates an MD's care, I wish I could have gone with a midwife.

After touring the hospital's maternity floor (which is soooo posh like a hotel!) and learning about their philosphy and practices, we are both excited to have this baby. You get to choose what room you want from whatever is available, and so I was such a dork scouting out which hallway and side of the building has the best light. Taking mental notes so we know which ones to request when we get there.

I'm actually excited about giving birth naturally.... I know it will be hard, but I really want that experience. However we're both pulling out our hair at the moment worrying about the breech position which will require a c-section. I really want to avoid that at all costs. And we're running out of time for this baby to turn himself around. We have another doctor appointment tomorrow so maybe they can check again to see where he is (although every time I've had an internal or clinical exam they always say he's head-down and yet the ultrasound shows that he's not). I'm not having a lot of faith in the doctors' abilities to manually poke around and determine a head vs. a butt.

I've been hanging upside down on hands and knees for 20 minutes a day, with a bag of frozen diced peppers on top of my belly and a heating pad at the bottom. They say this actually works, but I don't know. I don't know how to tell which end he has up. I feel kicks all over the place, no rhyme or reason to it.

Also, a few things I'm happy about in the entertainment world:

• The Food Network is now in high-def!
• Pirates of the Caribbean starts on Friday!
• New Marilyn Manson album coming out on June 5!