Light and Momentary

Almost 30

Weeks, that is. Pregnancy is going well -- baby is quite active but not yet big enough to do the simultaneous ribs-cervix punches that make a person wince. I keep comparing this pregnancy to my pregnancy with Alex because the due dates are so close together. Despite my being 26 then and 38 now, I'm much more comfortable this time around: no back pain (12 years of toting around various small children can do good things for a person's upper body strength), no tender veins in my legs. I am finally (FINALLY!) free of nausea, or at least close enough that I'll take it. Seriously, if you had told me in April that I would be throwing up into my third trimester, I would not have been a happy camper. But even a couple of weeks ago I had to be very careful about when I took my vitamins or they would attempt to make their way back up to the light of day.

My one minor complaint, probably related to the nausea, is anemia. For two weeks I walked around in a state of dog-tired bone-tired plumb-worn-out exhaustion. I was not surprised, though I was annoyed, to hear that my hemoglobin had fallen out of the normal range. It's always borderline (I've heard that's a common redhead complaint), and so I had been careful about iron starting in the second trimester. I had not been so careful about taking my multivitamin, figuring that it didn't do me much good if I threw it back up, and I am hypothesizing that I needed more folic acid and B6 to make all those new red blood cells. This could be, let me stress, a completely bogus hypothesis, but I am already feeling better.

Yesterday was the feast of St. Francis, one of my favorite saints, and I was trying to think of a good way to mark it as a family. You can't really celebrate his feast day with a fancy dinner since he was all about loving Lady Poverty. So instead we had a simple but special dinner, with homemade pasta. This is my 8yo cranking the pasta machine, and a bonus belly shot from the middle of week 30.

A Knitting Post

This is the post where I tell you about the knitting I've been doing for the past couple of months, an undertaking that may be unappealing to those of you who do not knit. But here goes anyway.

The Good Thing About Pregnancy Insomnia

Petely and Joe slept on the pull-out couch last night (so much more fun than going to bed in the usual spot), but Petely woke up confused and calling me at 4:00 or so. I couldn't get back to sleep after I got him settled, so I stayed up and finished my draft of chapter two. It is emphatically a draft, because my advisor and I haven't spent a ton of time hammering out the details of the measures I will use and because I have a lot to learn about multilevel modeling between now and the time I try to persuade my committee to pass me, but hey! it's submitted!

The boys all woke up around 7 and we piled into a heap on the pulled out couch to read Pippi Longstocking. After a while they scattered and I turned on the stereo -- first "As Cool As I Am" on loud repeat (nothing sends cobwebs scuttling away in terror like a nice loud didgeridoo), and then "The Joy of the Lord" on equally loud repeat, which is a weird pairing but it works for me -- so I could clean. The boys did a pretty good job on the bathrooms while I played Attila Scourge of Dustbunnies. I cannot conquer the Caucasus but by God I can vanquish dirt.

Today I should also vanquish some piles of paper and pummel the checkbook into submission, and perhaps I will squeeze in a nap somewhere because 4am is really danged early. Don't know if that will work (no rest for the scourgely) but we'll see. I have three posts in my draft folder that I'm hoping to finish up now that both my chapters are drafted -- those last thoughts about the wacky caseworker, why I'm not willing to shrug off the locker room nastiness, and a reflection on our friend, the confidence interval (stop laughing! confidence intervals are too our friends!). I am sure I will have a truckload of revising to do in the weeks to come, but regardless -- both the chapters I need for my preliminary exam are drafted!

Foggy

I had the most amazingly productive day yesterday, and I was looking forward to a repeat today. But Pete woke up at 3:30 this morning and somehow we never really settled down again. Joe crawled into bed with us about an hour later after a nightmare, and an hour after that I decided attempting to get back to sleep was futile. In my non-pregnant state I never have trouble sleeping. Maybe two or three times a year it will take me half an hour to fall asleep, but that's it. Not so in pregnancy, when the least disruption will keep me awake for an hour or more. Pete is sleeping now and I am (was, I guess) trying, fuzzily, to write about a syntactic measure that I don't really understand.

I am also trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I hold four professional credentials at the moment: one from my professional organization, one from the state licensing board, one from the state early intervention office, and one from the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners. The trouble is the time and money required to maintain them. Is it worth it? Am I going to be able to find an academic job that works for my family, or do I need to keep the door open so I can work in a clinical setting? The first two credentials I will keep up for the foreseeable future, but the other two will need to be renewed next summer/fall.

My EI job is finished now; the last little one on my caseload aged out earlier this month (and did not qualify for school services, which is a travesty but also another story). I'm glad I had that job for eighteen months, but it clarified for me that I don't want to be doing clinical work for the long haul. I talked to the EI people today about my options -- is there an inactive status? What happens if I don't renew? They told me, and I asked the woman to clarify so many times that she checked with someone else to confirm that her understanding was correct, that it should be straightforward for me to renew after a few years if I let the credential lapse. This is in such stark contrast to renewing a lapsed state license (a mistake I will never make again) that I couldn't quite believe it. But in general the EI office has been much easier to work with than the state licensing office, so maybe it's even true. I think I'll probably let that one go for now.

That leaves the LC credential, which I am probably proudest of but which does not earn me a dime at the moment. Should I pay to maintain it? Still have to decide. I should add that to my monster list of things to do, to submit a portfolio to IBLCE for review so I can count my PhD coursework and research toward my continuing education requirement.

Sleep deprivation makes me rambly and boring, I'm afraid, but I'm going to hit publish anyway. Career advice welcome. :-)

Oops

Last night I put up a post about a conversation with my oldest son. This morning it smacked me in the face that it was inconsistent to say I wanted to protect his privacy at school even as I posted his story on the web. When I wrote the post, I was trying to think through my own role in an awkward exchange and what I needed to do next. Thanks to everybody who responded helpfully overnight.

I think a nutshell question is probably reasonable, though: is there anything useful I can do about really nasty locker-room misogyny, without opening up my son to any flak along the lines of "Dude, I can't believe you talked to your mom about that"? I'm not talking about sensitivity training for junior-high boys. I just want an adult nearby to say, "Hey, watch that language," but I don't have a great feeling about the (female) PE teacher. Is locker-room nastiness inevitable?

Paging Dr. Freud

I have lived with this brain of mine for a long time -- 38 years, to be precise -- and I was pretty sure that my anxiety of late was just jangling neurotransmitters, and not anything more serious. (Can neurotransmitters jangle? a teeny tiny tintinnabulation?) I was already feeling better by yesterday evening, and so I was blaming it on the caffeine. (I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine. I am informed that my reaction to a cup of coffee when I've been off of it for a while is funny stuff.) But I woke up this morning to a dream that suggests it's not just the caffeine.

In my dream I was pregnant. Twice. Somehow I had conceived again, just a few weeks from the end of this current pregnancy, so that I was carrying one big eight-month baby and one tiny two-week embryo. (I learned about superfetation this summer, after I'd spent nine years as an NFP instructor telling people that progesterone suppresses additional ovulations. I'll have to add a "virtually always" to that spiel in the future. NB: there are no reported cases of women conceiving at 36 weeks, but my unconscious wasn't going to let details stand in its way.) In my dream, I knew that I would be delivering this baby shortly, but that I would have to stay pregnant until August with the new baby. Then I would have two babies, eight months apart. How was I going to manage that? Seventeen months of pregnancy and then a newborn arriving right when the older one was crawling well? In my dream I was striving valiantly to have a good attitude but I felt so overwhelmed. It wasn't one of those dreams where you're kind of aware it's a dream, and whatever is happening may be annoying but you know it's just temporary. This was reality: I was having twins. Weird not-really twins.

I can't tell you how relieved I was to wake up. It's absurd, I know, but it took me all day to laugh about it.

Stressball

I have been over-the-top anxious lately, but in a weird way. I am not stressed about the work that's actually in front of me, but about the future. I am confident about getting a draft of chapter two to my advisor by the end of the month, but I am worried about getting the revisions finished by December. (No! Ack! Late November, to give my committee two weeks to read the document before my preliminary exam.) I am worried about getting five children to adulthood intact, but not about anything that's a problem at the moment. I am worried about world financial collapse, worried about Christmas, worried about how I will fulfill the terms of my fellowship next summer -- just constantly jittery about things that are in the future. Or things that might not even be in the future.

Anxiety is a chronic issue for me. Sometimes it's better than others; right now it's worse. I am going to wean myself off caffeine (a little today, less tomorrow, none on Thursday) and try to spend some time walking in the sunshine today. I think I may resubscribe to FlyLady so things are more orderly around here (it just occurred to me that I could filter all the testimonials right to trash). I might up my fish oil a little, because baby is working hard to build a brain right now and maybe there aren't enough EFAs to go around with my current intake. Maybe.

One of my favorite things about the Proverbs 31 woman is that she laughs at the future. I might stick that up on the wall over the computer, as a reminder. In this exact state of mind, actually, that might feel more like a rebuke than an encouragement. Maybe I'll get to that in a few days.

Submitted

I just sent off a draft of chapter one to my advisor. Lots more work to do, lots and lots and lots and lots, but it's a start.

Seven

I didn't remember, at first, that it was the anniversary of 9/11. September 11, I thought; the Discover payment is due today. September 11, in between the birth of Mary and the feast of St. John Chrysostom.

Then it hit me.

Keeping Me Humble

Some things about me you can't tell from this blog. One of them is that I have crazy hair. If left to its own devices, it would stage a takeover of the free world -- it's that crazy. I have a serious gel habit. I have put lanolin on my hair because I was so sick of the frizz. But in July I set aside my book snobbery long enough to buy a copy of Curly Girl, and I've been happier with my hair ever since. This is me on my birthday, mostly frizz-free: 

Today I was planning to run for the first time in a while (actually, since right before all that CPS garbage started), so I didn't take a shower this morning. My attempt at a run was abortive: one ankle was complaining loudly about carting 17 extra pounds around, and then my round ligament started aching. I didn't get very far. Still unshowered, I went to pick up Pete from preschool. He and I and my hellbent-on-hegemony hair (it's been rainy in the Midwest and my hair gets huge in the rain) went to the new natural foods store in town.

Pete had a lot of fun scooping rolled oats and flaxmeal out of their bins and into our bags. We browsed through the aisles, and I was just about to head for the register when a woman approached me. "Would you be willing to be in a commercial for the new store?" she asked me.

I agreed. We cruised the cereal aisle for the camera, talking about the options and chucking one box in the cart. I signed a waiver allowing them to use the footage. We left the store and I realized I had just given permission for them to put me on television with hair that looked kind of like this.

Oops.