That was ...fun...

We made our first trip to Labour & Delivery last night. This isn't the first scare we've obviously had with the pregnancy, but most of them have managed to be during daylight, office hours.

It's been approximately 11 million degrees up until yesterday and Hieronymus, like she does randomly, was not terribly active yesterday after a very busy couple days. I started feeling lousy in the afternoon and developed diarrhea shortly after 9. This, of course, had some very exciting cramping involved because, duh, diarrhea and by 1, when it had not abated, even after drinking more water and laying down, I turned to my friend, Dr. Google.

Honestly, here's some advice: Don't google things at 1 in the morning. You will be sorry. You'll probably be sorry you googled things at any point, but especially in the middle of the night.

Dr. Google tells me PRETERM LABOUR!!! I'm at risk for that with the placenta previa anyway, so I do what any woman having her first baby would do and panic. I wake Steven up. We call the afterhours line at my OB's office.

To their credit, they called back. I missed the call because I was pooping and no one could get to the phone quick enough. I was told 20 minutes, so honestly I didn't think to take the phone with me since I was panicking.

Here is where I am less than pleased: no one from my doctor's office was on call. I get a very terse message from the on-call doctor telling me she doesn't know what she's going to do for me with diarrhea AT TWO IN THE MORNING, but *sigh* if I still think it's an emergency to call back.

When I called, I told the answering service all my pertinent information, including the previa. I also mentioned that this was not just a little soft poop, it had been going on for several hours, tried laying down and drinking, and had decreased fetal movement. Maybe this didn't get passed on, but you know what? You're an OB and you're on call. It's been hot as hell. You should expect nervous calls from pregnant women and not be frakking bitchy about it. Trust me, it disturbed MY sleep too.

I called back, was told the same thing about getting a call in 20 minutes. Half an hour later, nothing, so Steven calls and is told that someone went into labour and they'll call back when they call back. We debate for a couple minutes and decide to just go to Women and Infants. We got settled in, hooked up to a monitor for contractions, and waited.

Hieronymus is fine. She spent the whole time we were hooked up kicking at the monitors. Typical kid, shows up once she realizes she's in trouble. She looked fine on the ultrasound, even if she is still bum to the wind and hid her face the whole time. She is still definitely a girl.  What was actually happening was a crummy intestinal bug that they've see a lot of women coming in with, since it mimics some of the preterm labour symptoms, a baby who was chilling out low, behind the placenta, hence why I felt her less, and her kicking the same few spots, which is like poking a bruise. We left there at 5am.

I'm glad I'm home and I'm glad it turned out to be nothing, even if I am kind of pissed at the on call doctor.

And she needs how many names?

After finding out what variety of genitalia Hieronymus possessed, my husband and I were able to cross our chosen boy's name off the list. This is probably a good thing, since we literally barely agreed on it and it was a pretty good chance that we were just going to call the baby No Name if we'd come up with boy bits. The girl name we've had for a while, so it was good to go.

I made the mistake of mentioning awesome, now we don't need to plan a bris or have a few good rounds of debate on circumcision since the lack of a penis kind of precludes that. Then he's all ...oh yea, but she needs a Hebrew name. Oh, okay.

Here's what I know about Judaism: they wandered around in the desert for a while, wrote the original half of the Bible, and apparently produce a lot of great entertainers. You can't eat bacon cheeseburgers. My husband is probably going to hell because of that. Their mourning rituals make a lot of sense. And someone, for the benefit of idiots like me, wrote jewfaq.com

Before I get accused of being insensitive, I know approximately the same amount about Catholicism and I was raised Catholic. I did not convert when Steven I got married because a) it was disingenuous to do it JUST because he was and b) I'm a shitty Catholic. I would not be a better Jew.

All of this means I am totally the right person to say "Hey, our baby needs a Hebrew name." I have awesome google-fu; why not? How hard can this be? I suggested we use my husband's Hebrew name since it's unisex, I like the sound of it, and it means happy.

Except you can't use the name of someone living. Which I didn't know because as we established above, I know NOTHING.

All right, how about using his nana's name? That would be fine, except he doesn't know it and my MIL guards it like a state secret. That leads me to believe she doesn't know it either. No go there. We could use Esther, his grandma's, but I'm kind of meh about that. Back to Google, at which point he tells me he's kind of burnt out on names. I'm hoping that means I can just pick one and go with it.

At least if we baptize her, we can just give her my baptismal name. The standard for Catholics is pick a saint, there are a million, and they all died horribly, so you can't go wrong.

That kind of leads me into I have no idea quite how you go about the whole naming tradition. I understand the bris, we have friends who have been there and done that, and my stepson had one when he was born. But there doesn't seem to be a clear cut ritual for girls. Our friends' advice was to talk to a rabbi, but that brings up another issue. We don't belong to a temple; how do you find a rabbi?

Of course, we're sort of in the same boat about having her baptized since we don't exactly belong to a church, either. To be honest, I'm not about to join any kind of religious edifice just to have Hieronymus blessed. I think the plan was to have the awesome reverend who married us (in a lovely, non-denominational chapel, by the way) bless her. 

Oh well. I'm sure jewfaq.com will rescue my proverbial ass again. Thank God for that.

Gotcha!

I'm officially 18 weeks pregnant now and the one thing that I have gotten from the last, oh, 12 weeks, is that pregnancy is nature's big gotcha. You enjoy sex, once you get the hang of it, you experiment and it just gets better, then your body starts whispering "...baby...baby..." and shorts the rational part of your brain out, leaving you thinking that if sex is that awesome, pregnancy must be amazing.

GOTCHA!

You get knocked up and everything everyone ever told you about how great pregnancy is turns into a dirty, rotten liar. There's gas and nausea and weight gain in places like your elbows and oh, don't forgot the random black hairs. The image of pregnancy is to real life what a tampon ad is to a real period.

The real sucker punch is the pregnancy amnesia after that allows you to tell people how amazing it was and for you to repeat the process again. That's the killer.

We went for our Level II scan this week, our first since the one I had for bleeding at 7 weeks. I guess the good news is little Hieronymus no longer rocks the vestigial tail. Or looks like a demented seahorse. Or apparently has even a modicum of modesty. First view, Hieronymus was upside down with legs wide open. I am sure that there is a position in pole dancing that would perfectly illustrate what we saw. What we also saw is that, without any doubt, our little parasite is in possession and apparently enamoured of a set of ladybits. That's my little princess, right there, taking after Mama.

The truth of this is that I expected something very different from pregnancy. I grew up hearing about how my mother had a wonderful, complication free pregnancy. She skiied til she was 7 months and that was only because she couldn't do up her boots. She was playing tennis the week she had me. Yes, she had a tough delivery and I was late, but her pregnancy was fine.

I expected that and, in a way, I feel gypped that I am having the pregnancy I'm having. Honestly, though, I should have realized this was my own experience and not to judge based on other people's. I also know there are women who are far worse than me, for whom my issue would be just a little drop in the bucket.

The lost of control over my body is hard to accept for me. Early on, there was a subchorionic haemotoma that put my at risk for miscarriage. Then, my sacroiliac joint is out of whack, cutting down on my mobility: no twisting, limited movement, sit when possible. This Monday, it's placenta previa and all the modified rest that goes along with it. I'm basically left with watching movies, reading/internet, and swimming for at least the next 10 weeks. It's frustrating.

I know this all sounds sour grapes. I did choose this, I wanted a baby, but I wanted to enjoy the time gestating as well. All the problems make me feel detached from the experience. Having an anterior placenta doesn't help either; it means I feel her kicks more like vague wiggles.

I wanted this to be more upbeat, but I'm feeling very achy and disenfranchised right now.