Salt and Pickles

So, I’m (as mentioned before) no longer employed.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. I’ve had a lot of grandiose plans.. from hanging out with friends who are also at home, to organizing and cleaning the house (lots of declutter) in preparation for the baby, crafting, cooking healthy meals and maybe even packing hans some yummy lunches in our Mr. Bento.

But now that I”m at home, I’m finding myself online a lot. I look around our truly messy and cluttery (which i kept putting off because.. hey, i’d be home soon and be able to have true time to devote to tackling it) house. It’s really cluttery and really messy and has piles here and there and everywhere. and it’s actually just pissing me off and overwhelming me so i don’t get much of anything done at all. and then i’m in a bad mood.
and i’m not doing any crafting or cooking because I want the house in a reasonable state first.

argh. I wish i just knew how to get started. (i know the answer is “just start”)

So we have 80% odds of a girl, so of course that means that I’ve already bought one dress and a few girly onesies. Also, as i build my cloth diaper stash.. a few of those diapers sure are flowery. Thankfully, I have no issues with being gender-confusing and dressing my son (if those 20% odds win out) in flowery onesies or pink cherry blossom diapers. 

I love Christensen Creations Diapers and can’t stop myself from buying them. I think I have 5 now and another 10 on the way. Luckily they have good resale value!

We spent Fathers Day in a sunny kiddy park with other parents-to-be and already-parents. It was nice.. a potluck with socializing and hanging out with little ones and realizing that it’s possible.  I feel a little sunsoaked and sleepy now though.

Yesterday was also spent with new parents (5 week old) and that reminded me that tiny babies are wonderful and also a little boring. sleep, cry, sleep, cry, eat .. ok eat some more. more boob! ok cry a little. rock back and forth in swing, wiggle arms around, be bounced in arms ..It’s not bad boring. Just reminded me that being a stay at home mom is going to have a lot of … long moments. Aside from cuddling the newborn, there was also bbq and some geekery. because the geeky nerdy boys that we love so are going to play D&D. That’s right. .. many-sided dice, bugbear beasts, hob goblins and other outright nerdtopia. in their 30’s and reliving the glory.

If i weren’t going out to dinner with family I would so be asleep right now. also, now that i’m no longer getting sick… I really love being pregnant. Every time that little squiggle kicks and bounces around, I am blissed. I imagine as i get bigger it will be less blissful, but right now every movement just is glee.

Do you think they’ll let me do a shot of tequila in the hospital once the baby is out? I joke. i swear.  

Yesterday we went to Rodeo Beach at the marin headlands. 

It’s a pretty beach, but you don’t really realize how much so til you get up close and personal. The sand is a reddish gray color (or that’s how I am remembering it today) and farther away from the water it is fine and granular like regular sand. As you get closer to the water it becomes more like tiny small pebbles. Like the size of a seed bead, if you ever work with beading. some are bigger than that (nearer to the top of the sand) but mostly they are tiny. but definitely larger than grains of sand. They aren’t granular, they’re tiny tiny pebbles.

We walked down the beach some. and after the last-post-mentioned almost-puke, we found a little cut out area of the cliffs that was free from wind. We sat down and as we looked at the tiny pebbles under us, we noticed they were made up of shades of green and orange and red and of course, requisite grey/black/brown sand-colors.
We lay on our bellies picking out greens & oranges and realized that that beach is made up of tiny pebbles of jade and carnelian. (H already knew about the carnelian, as he’d been there with his geologist group from his office. he’s a civil engineer)
we brought home a small bag of tiny jade & carnelian pebbles. who knows what I’ll do with them, but it was so lovely to have our face down near the ground and see all these wet shades of blue, green, orange and red.. which when you were looking from a height (say standing) just melded into a reddish gray color so you had no idea the beautiful range of colors in front of you.

This morning I got up to go to brunch with a friend, and as I was sitting on the couch I suddenly gagged and grabbed a napkin (pardon me, this is gross) and puked a very small amount into it.
The thing about my recent gagginess is that if there had actually been something that wanted out, I don’t think I ever would have made it to a bathroom. Do most people have MS this way, where it just suddenly is THERE .. and if so, how do they deal with meetings at work if it hits? yikes.

I came home from brunch and napped the afternoon away. I really should get out of bed now.

I’m still not fully believing that this last cycle worked. Today H and I were at the shopping center to pick up some kitty litter & food. We get these giant refillable tubs of litter, and they’re very heavy. When we were putting it in the truck, i tried to take it from H and put it on the floor by where my feet would be. H said “no way, you can’t pick this up. out of the way” I said “why not, hand it over” and he said “You’re pregnant” and i started dancing in the parking lot right there. Because, somehow… even though I think about it every single second of every day, I still manage to somehow not know/forget that i’m pregnant. I think it’s only sunk in about 20%. I can logically talk about it, but i can’t feel it yet. Part of that is because I don’t have the belief yet that something can work out for me relating to IF.  

While we were out we bought the kitty some treats. We got him one of those cardboard corrugated floor scratchers and we sprinkled it with catnip. He is now rolling around on it, scratching at it.. and drooling on it. It’s covered in wet marks from his prolific drool. My cat is a dog. (really. he growls when people ring the doorbell too)  

Last night I dreamed that we had twin girls and we named them our top girl name and the other name was Coraline. (nn Cora). Coraline is a book I just read and not a name on our list at all. I woke up convinced we were naming our kid Coraline. By 4pm that feeling had faded and it didn’t have that special dream portent to it anymore.

Last night we went to a “say goodbye to my boobies” party for a friend who is having a reduction. There were lots of girls in cleavage shirts, boobie cupcakes, a boob cake & even the dip was made to look like boobs. good times.  

I think I slept 12 hours last night. huzzah.  

I have to admit that every day that I go to the bathroom and see nothing on the toilet paper feels like some sort of win. 

also, i don’t have a lot of symptoms. I have mild crampy/twinginess.. and my boobs hurt a bit. The thing is my boobs don’t hurt the way i was expecgting them to. I thought they would hurt in a “ow you touched my boob and it really hurt!” sort of way, but rather they hurt when they’re not being touched. in an achey ‘wow, it’s really cold and my nipples could cut glass from feeling frozen’ sort of way

That second line keeps getting darker. After last time, this is a huge relief. Even if it doesn’t end up meaning anything, it’s giving me great pleasure and a sense of relaxation to watch the second line darkening with every day.

and to make things even better, today my Kindle arrives from amazon! In fact I only came to work because I can’t wait another day for it. I have a cold, and will probably go home once it’s here. H was very sweet last night and went to our neighborhood thai place to bring me home Tom Ka Gai, which is a yummy delicious lemongrass chicken soup. He bought me the kindle a few weeks ago and the expected timeline for kindles has been 4-6 weeks, so having it arrive exactly on valentine’s day is pretty awesome.

I sound like a frog and i keep hacking nastiness from my lungs. The soup place near work looks at me weird when i ask for the chicken soup but with no stuff, just broth.. but it feels so good on my throat. I think it’s the chicken fat. mmm chicken fat.

I just have to put this question out there: What if it’s twins?!

Tahoe is quite the balm for the itchy brain. I was able to play with a 2 year old and 5 month old. play board games (actually I didn’t do much of that, but I watched others) .. roast 3 chickens (there were 10 of us) … make grilled cheese & soups for lunches. and just all around relax with some of my favorite people. My tribe. It was great and I’m totally in love with the 2 year old. She’s a sunny force of personality.

The house we stayed at was gorgeous. huge. although it had really poor taste in art. The main painting in the living room was aproximately 10 feet by 10 feet . Huge. It was of two people in a boat on a lake in the moonlght with a huge torch in the prow of the row boat. They were rowing towards a small cove. It was remniscent of hobbits, bootleggers & an early century prison break… all at the same time.

So now I’m in the second week of the two week wait. Let’s see how many days I can go without giving in to the siren call of the pee stick.

Also, can I just share this. I found it very powerful and it made me cry. Granted, i’m all hopped up on hormones, but I think I would have cried anyway.

So I took today off from work and got to sleep in a little. Hans would have happily taken the day off with me, but it seems so silly for him to take the day off just to ferry me around and hold my hand. I’ve done so many IUI appts on my own, that transer doesnt’ feel so different.
I require him on retrieval day, but not so much on transfer. especially since I go to acupuncture first and he’d just have to sit and wait for an hour through that.

I didn’t sleep in acu, which is a first. I felt relaxed, but i guess not as relaxed as i usually am.
transfer went well.. they thawed the 5 embies I had and only 2 made it. but one of those was a 9/10 cell ‘excellent’ embryo and the other was a 5 cell ‘good’ embryo

hans picked me up from BART (that was the one thing i didn’t want to do. wait for a bus) and brought me home. I ate organic chicken soup that i made yesterday & a cheese sandwich. then i slept for about 3 hours. loooovely.

I think i’ve been pretty good at taking it easy today.. so here’s to hoping one or both of those little guys burrows in and decides to make a home for 9 months.

I realize, looking over this journal.. or just listening to my own dialogue. It hasn’t occurred to me that I wont’ have a baby at the end of this. I mean, sure it’s come into my brain as a possibility but it’s not something i believe. I believe we will have a baby at the end of this.

I don’t know if this will make it all the more heartbreaking if we don’t .

We have discussed what we’d do if there were no baby at the end. I think we’ve decided not to adopt. Another long wait full of hope just sounds like more than we could take.

We decided I’d still quit my job.. take some time off, and find a new path. And we’d try to travel once or twice a year. Hans originally suggested that we take a big chunk that maybe would have been a college fund and travel for a year or so, but when i looked skeptical and mentioned how much he loved his job. well..that was amended. (Although I’m guessing he could take a few months off as sabbatical) So.. travel a few times a year, more skiing.. None of these would truly make up for not having a kid, but it would make our lives full. I would also work on creating things. Jewelry, take sewing classes, maybe glass blowing/bead making classes.

but again, the not adopting isn’t in stone. If IVF doesn’t work out, we may be right at the beginning and planning from scratch. I don’t know.

Speaking of IVF. dude. I’ve got two estrogen patches on my belly … and in two days, i’ll have 4. Having this much estrogen roiling around in my body is making me a sourpuss. I’m groucherrific and when Hans touches me or hangs out near me in a way I don’t like, i seriously throw a toddler-like tantrum.

today is acupuncture. or as i like to call it - my weekly nap. I usually take a long time to fall asleep if i’m taking a daytime nap, but in acupuncture I’m asleep within 5 minutes. It’s awesome.

Today on BART there was a woman sitting in seats diagonally across from me. She was wearing a beautifully tailored suit, a red and yellow scarf fashionably tossed around her neck, gold glinting glasses and sparkling jewelry. She was quite lovely and polished. She was working on some spreadsheets, bent over with concentration. I tend to people watch a lot on trains. I forget that people can see me watching them. very solipsistic of me. anyway.. as i was watching her, i noticed that her jaw was working overtime. She was chewing and chewing and chewing at a piece of gum. It made my jaws watch just to watch her.

I hate gum. It is ugly. it makes people look stupid .. their jaw working up and down over and over and over.
ugh. i hate gum. i hate the sound of the chewing. I hate the look of the chewing. hate. This is something I should probably deal with, since most kids like bubble gum. (maybe i can avoid their ever even finding out about the existence of gum?)

People who wait until a train comes and then just go straight to the door, completely ignoring the fact that there was a queue.

on a larger scale, I’ve realized my mother raised me into a conflicted snob. My mom was a luddite my entire years growing up. She spent her time thusly: teaching english, hiking/backpacking/rock climbing/running, cooking very wholesome from-scratch meals, gardening, reading literature (never bubblegum books for her), sewing me handmade stuffed animals and occasionally clothes, keeping a very clean house, taking me to ballet/puppet shows/festivals/etc, taking baths, always waking up early, living life fully.

We had one small black & white tv that I was allowed to watch a few hours a week on. They watched MASH and that was about it. As i grew older I was allowed a little more TV but not much. I bought my first computer in 1994 when I was 24.

So, this is the issue now. I find that I have a negative view of any time suck/passing that is not industrious/productive/creative/active or literary. My husband loves video games, and I (underneath somewhere) struggle with this sometimes because I see it as a negative time suck. (I don’t struggle with them because of loss of time with him. He’s very good at spending time with me and balancing all that … although we’ll fall into habits where we will spend less time together due to our interests, but if i ask.. he’s right there). I curl my lip. I inwardly scoff. This is bad enough. snobby and snotty.

But I also look down on myself. I read a lot of literature, ,but I also like trashier books (hell, sometimes i even like a good bodice ripper). We haven’t watched TV in a few years, but I want it back and when we have it I know i’ll watch it. I take lots of baths. I surf the internet A LOT. I avoid being creative, and I only cook a few times a week. I spend much of my outside-of-work (and probably inside-of-work) time doing very superficial time sucks. Things that are easy and occupy my attention so that I don’t have to do anything.
The thing is, I know inside that this is ok, but at the same time i don’t FEEL that it is ok. To be a successful worthy human, I seem to feel that people need to be like my mother. This seems to be a deeply ingrained belief. DEEPLY. i can never convince myself fully that it’s wrong. I’m not sure how to deal with that, when I like the internet. I like watching 7 seasons of Buffy in 2 months. I like drinking red wine, singing karaoke with friends, and reading a trashy book.

I do know that If i get old and what i look back on in my life is a lot of tv watching, internet surfing and bath taking.. I will be sad. So, on some level I’m right. I need to make sure that I’m creating a life that I’m proud of. But at the same time, it’s not bad that my husband likes to exert his energy and creativity in video games. and this is something I’m going to have to approach with myself when we have kids. Kids like to do fun simple things like play video games or watch the occasional tv show.

but as is obvious by many of the links on my blogroll, I also want to be the sort of mama who has that simple industrious waldorfy lifestyle for her kids.

and i want to stop being such a snob about the things people do (including me) to fill their time.
My mother now, i realize.. is addicted to being busy. She runs every day, she does lesson plans all night, she never (or rarely) takes a few hours for herself to just fill her time with lazy time. with mindless fun. She’s not actually the bastion of health that I have revered her to be.

ah. it all comes back to that thing they call ‘balance’. the biggest struggle of my life.

Nothing IVF related in this entry because: blah blah blah waiting waiting. two estrogen patches instead of one, but still. blah blah.

Last night in bed, Hans and I came up with my new title for when I quit working and stay at home. I will be one of the following: DOE (Domestic Operations Engineer), CDO (Chief of Domestic Operations), DOM (Domestic Operations Manager) , DDO (Director of Domestic Operations). which one do you think has the most pizazz?

I have other plans for that time besides, you know.. domestic operatioins. (like potentially being a Doula and starting a very small event planning biz for those looking for a non-cookie cutter event.) but I think I’ll feel less resentful if i have a fancy title, when the crappy stuff comes up. I wonder when I get to hire my first employee?

well, I took a few weeks to eat stinky cheeses. go to karaoke and get drunk and sing at the top of my lungs. I have taken uncountable hot baths .. and now I feel like myself again.
I don’t feel so deep down hurt, but I’m not very good at wallowing and only once have I ever been.

Tonight I’m having a lovely date with myself. Hans is away on business.
The first night alone, I had my two favorite girls over and we ate Cioppino that I made (with scallops & mussels & halibut. crab in mine only , since they have contact allergies) .. with crusty bread & salad and crisp white wine.

tonight I have been eating these bright green olives that are amazing, artichoke hearts, a creamy wonderful cheeese with acme bread, champagne, and slices of salami
meanwhile I’m indulging in a fabulous Jane Austen bender. That bender is coming to a close (after watching 4 jane austen movies and reading 2 novels in one week) and i’m continuing with more BBC miniseries (North and South next)
I’m having a wonderful date with myself.

I do miss my boy, though. especially when I wake up sleeping diagonally on the bed, hugging and smelling his pillow in my sleep.

I actually had some other intention when i started this blog post. I’m not sure what it was. I think I had something I wanted to say, but I can’t remember it for the life of me.

One thing I love about watching and reading too much Jane Austen is that I have found that it has a profound effect on my language. As a girl who indulges in way too much vernacular, this is a good and silly thing.

The hippie dance jam is going on behind the loft right now. It’s tempting to go join in.

We’re going on a ski trip to Whistler in a few weeks as I had to find a time consuming thing that would make up for not being pregnant. I figured, I should do something that I won’t do when I *am* pregnant. so skiing it was.

Next IVF (frozen embryo transfer) should be sometime in January.

I love having a date night in my house. This house is so beautiful that I’m always aware of a low level happiness just being here doing nothing.

especially in this room: