Ten Times Crazier

This was sitting in my drafts.  I wrote it over a year ago when Mel prompted her readers to write letters to their bodies.  I had intended to go back in and flesh this out, but I wrote it at the beginning of the 2ww wherein I got pregnant with my boys, so I ended up being very distracted for a long time.  Anyway, I figured I shouldn’t just let it go to waste, and, in retrospect, it’s kinda funny.  So here it is:

Date: 3/3/2008
To: Body
From: Megan
Subject: Acquisition of Property in Mommyville

Dear Body,

We have been partners for almost 30 years now.  There are so many great services you provide me outside of the compulsory life functions. You grow hair that is shiny and healthy, and I love that it’s not red but people sometimes call me a redhead. I really appreciate that you grew me taller than average but still just shorter than my not-so-tall husband. I mean, I could’ve lived without the growth spurt leg cramps, but I’m glad for the result. I love that you have kept me in the same 10-pound range of weight since high school no matter what I’ve fed you. I love how you deposit fat in the right places so that almost all jeans look good on me. I could stand for you to put just a little bit more of that fat on my boobs, but I’d much rather have them a little too little than a little too big. I love that you have a high tolerance for pain and that you are a lot stronger than you look even though I don’t exercise you as much as I ought to.

However, I feel that our partnership has become strained.  Is this because of the poison ivy? I swear I didn’t know what it was when I sent you in there.  I want you to know I don’t blame you for all the setbacks we experienced in the kidney department or for last year’s failure to acquire the Mommyville property (now known as the Miscarriage Project).  I hope we can set the past behind us and move boldly into our future.

My husband sent a bunch of sperm to the fallopian tubes department. I hope you got them and put them to good use in time. If you did and were able to come up with a nice zygote or two, please take good care of it/them for me.  We need it/them to grow in order to have the capital to acquire that property in Mommyville that we missed out on last year.  I think it will be a good move for our partnership.  At the very least, you should get more of that exercise you’ve been wanting.

Sincerely,

Megan
Partner
Megan, PLLC

Notice how I said “a zygote or two”?  Man, I didn’t know what I was in for.

So as you can probably guess, Link’s surgery (back in the beginning of February) went fine (no news is good news, right?).  The procedure took about an hour and was without complications.  I spent most of that hour hand expressing breast milk into a bottle (a genius scheme I came up with after, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t find the formula that my husband had packed in the diaper bag (as I think I’ve mentioned before, for a number of reasons the guys never breastfed)).  I’m glad I had that to preoccupy me, though, because it cut down on the worrying I was able to do.

When they brought him to me afterward, he was crying, and it was a hoarse little cry since he’d had tubes down his throat.  It was simultaneously so sad and so cute.  I had expected him to be crying because he was hungry because he had to fast since the night before, but it wasn’t his usual hungry cry, and when I tried to feed him, he wouldn’t eat, so I told the nurse I thought he was in pain.  She said it was possible that his pain medicine hadn’t kicked in yet, so she gave him some fast-acting pain medicine through his IV.  He calmed right down (which made me feel like such a competent mother for being able to correctly discern his different cries) and ate but only just a little before sleep overcame him.  This is a picture I took of him with my phone camera while he slept in my arms in the recovery room.

Linky
He slept pretty much the entire day (it was an outpatient surgery, so I took him home after a few hours in recovery).  Every few hours he would stir, and we would wake him to eat and take his medicine.  On day two, he was pretty much back to normal except for that he got fussy a few hours after each dose of medicine, but by the end of the day he was on regular Tylen0l.  On day three, you’d never know anything had happened to him besides the fact that his voice was still a little bit scratchy.

He changed a bit after the surgery in mostly good ways.  He used to have bouts of fussiness which we thought were due to his hernia, and those disappeared (I guess that means we were right).  Good.  He used to never let us cuddle him chest to chest, and now he does.  Good.  Before the surgery he was a little chatterbox, but after it for several weeks he stopped his baby-talking.  Bad.  Thankfully he got over that one and has resumed his gabbiness.  Also, leading up to his surgery and for a while after, we didn’t force tummy time on him because we were afraid it hurt him, so his head lifting abilities took a hit.  Bad.  But he is rapidly catching back up to his brother, so no harm done, I think.

A few weeks later his surgeon gave him a clean bill of health, and said he could resume all his normal activities (the jumperoo missed him!).  He took off the little strips holding the incision together and we got our first look at Link’s scar.  I was happy to see that it is so tiny.  It’s just a little half inch line with no visible scar tissue, and the surgeon said even that will fade over time.

So it wasn’t so bad, but I hope I never have to do it again.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a disease that affects how the chloride pumps in cell walls function.  What this translates to is that people with CF have unusually thick mucus.  The mucus in their lungs leads to lung infections and pneumonia.  The thick secretions from their pancreas cause problems with digestion, diabetes, and poor growth.  More relevant to this blog, thick cervical mucus often causes fertility issues in women with CF.  My friend Katie has had personal experience with this.  She conceived her adorable little man, Cullen, about a year ago with IUI.

I also have a sister with CF (Katie asked how she’s doing, which was the impetus for this post).  She got married almost two years ago and has been TTC for more than a year.  It was starting to wear on her (those who have struggled with IF know this weariness all too well).  She was a little hesitant to come visit me in November after the boys were born because she was afraid it would hurt to much to be around new babies that weren’t hers (most IFers know this pain as well).  But come she did, and she was so sweet with my guys.  We talked a lot about IF while she was here.  I recommended blogs and sites for IF questions and tracking BBTs and told her about what to expect when she started working with her doctor on it, which she was planning to do in the next couple of months.

Then in January she called me all giddy, “I’m pregnant!!!”  I wasn’t surprised.  I just knew it was her time.  Before her appointment arrived to start working with her doctor on the issue, she had decided to take an HPT.  One can always hope, right?  And hope panned out this time.  When she went in for her first prenatal appointment, she found out she was already in her 2nd trimester (she had bleeding during the first trimester and thought it was her period).  So she is due in August, and it’s a boy!

A tiny part of me thinks it’s not fair that it came more easily for her than it did for me (The pains of a struggle with IF dig in deep, eh?), but mostly I’m just so happy for her, and I’m excited that my guys will have another cousin close to their age.

So I guess I only feel compelled to make time for blogging when I’m feeling upset (which, by the way, means things have been going well lately).  I’m going to work on that.  In the meantime, here is a buttload of recent pictures of my guys.

Bathtime

Hanging out in the back yard

Link was unimpressed by the Jumperoo the first time we put him in it.
JJ spends a lot of time staring at that frog in the foreground.

This was their first time in the high chairs (notice that they had to be propped up with blankets).




This was our first road trip with the boys.  We drove 15 hours to CO to visit my brother’s family.  These pictures were taken during a roadside diaper change about halfway into the trip.

A friend of mine from work got them these camouflage outfits.

Rooting for Daddy’s alma mater

The guys’ first solid foods

The guys are getting better at sitting up every day.

James is trying to get Link’s attention.
Got it.

Aaaaaaaaahhh.  I have my house back! The sun has come out to shine on my once gloomy home (both figuratively and literally — when they left for the airport, it was raining, but by the time I woke up for the boys’ next feeding there wasn’t a cloud in the sky).

The MIL left yesterday morning, and the morning afterward went so calmly and happily. The boys ate well and then napped soundly in their bouncy seats while Jeff and I made ourselves breakfast and gave the kitchen a good cleaning and reordering. The afternoon and evening was not quite so awesome, but I don’t think there was much avoiding that; we took the boys to their two-month checkup.

The boys had just eaten when we went to the doctor, so they were alert, calm, and happy.  They had all of the nurses fawning over them. They are mostly well. All of their growth graphs were almost vertical because they are growing so quickly, and they have hit all of their developmental milestones. But I had noticed a little asymmetry on the bottom of Link’s tummy recently. I thought maybe it was just the way he was holding himself, and it didn’t seem to be bothering him, so I put it on my list of things to ask the doctor about at our appointment. Turns out it is a hernia. The poor little guy is going to have to have surgery to fix it. It breaks my heart just to think about it. We have an appointment with a surgeon in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, we just have to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn’t get hard or turn purple.

Then came the last part of the appointment: vaccinations. They did really well considering that they had just been poked and prodded and set on hard surfaces while naked (they HATE being naked) only to have it all followed up with being stabbed multiple times in their legs. They screamed themselves purple while the shots were happening, but just seconds later they both were calm. It was such a relief since I was expecting screaming for a while (the doctor had recommended getting them dressed all but their pants before their shots because they would be freaking out afterward), but they were calm as could be all the way home even with a stop at the store to pick up some fenugreek (for lactation issues which I will probably blog about later).

We didn’t get away that easy, though. Once their medicine wore off (I was hoping to avoid re-medicating them all night long), they were beside themselves screaming about their sore little legs. At that point we gave them more medicine, but we could not get them to calm down enough to eat, so we just ended up giving them baths (Link fell asleep in the tub, and JJ stared at me wide-eyed the whole time with his mouth in a tight little pucker). They both settled down after that, but it was a long night of frequent waking and not eating much, and today, a day later, they still won’t quite eat what they usually do, and they’ve been sleeping a lot.

I am not looking forward to doing this again in two months (although the post-vaccination drama, as draining as it was, was still less stressful than having the MIL here), and REALLY not looking forward to recovering a baby from surgery.

MIL (picking up James from his vibrating bouncy seat): Does this seat vibrate?
Jeff: No.
MIL: But when you touch it, it feels like it’s vibrating.

Jeff and I  wait, giving her a little while to realize that he was being sarcastic.

MIL: Come over here and feel it.
Me: Of course, it’s vibrating. He was just giving you a hard time.

Our house is normally a very fun place to be with lots of joking and laughter and noise and activity, but since she’s been here our house has been gloomy. We can’t have normal conversations or joke around with each other without having to explain everything to her. It sucks all the fun right out of it, so we just avoid it altogether, or we have to go hide in our room to have a little normal time.

I don’t want to work on any of the things I want to because they also require extensive, not to mention annoying, explanatory conversations. Jeff can’t work on his dissertation the way he would like to because he works best in the hours just before we go to bed, but she is sleeping in the office and goes to bed early.

I can’t eat the things I want to eat because she doesn’t approve of them, and we will have to have a conversation about that.  e.g. “Why are you eating cereal in the middle of the day? I can make you some food. Should I make something?” By the way, I usually don’t like her cooking, which is pretty much the only help she offers besides taking the babies away from us. This means I either have to eat food I don’t want to eat or construct situations to avoid it, which requires a lot of time and energy I don’t have.

I can’t wait until she gets out of my house so it can be a happy place again.

We have about 12 hours to go, and I will not be getting up in the morning to see her off (I will say goodbye tonight before she goes to bed), so I have to feel the effects of her being here for only about 8 more hours.

I think I just might make it.

Update: It is after midnight, and she’s hovering. She didn’t go to bed early like she usually does (even though she has to leave here at 5:30 tomorrow morning), and it appears she is waiting around to torture feed one of my babies one last time before she goes. Grr!

MIL (to Lincoln): Are you laughing or crying?

WTF? This speaks to why I can’t stand to let her care for my babies. If she can’t even tell if they are laughing or crying, how is she supposed to pick up on subtler cues like when they need to burp or when they’re tired or don’t like how she’s holding them?  Let me tell you: she doesn’t.

First of all, he was crying, of course (she was holding him). Secondly, neither of the babies has really laughed yet besides a happy little grunt here and there, and she expects that the first laugh would be for her in he midst of fussing. That just pisses me off. She thinks that they’ll do things for her that 1. they won’t do for us, which is insulting, and 2. that they aren’t even developmentally able to do yet, which is just annoying.

Last night, I let her hold James while I bathed Lincoln.  When Lincoln was all clean, I brought him to her to swap babies, and she told me she taught James to talk. Apparently she taught him to say “oh.” Um, it’s called cooing, lady, and he’s been doing it for a while. Anyway, she was so proud of herself that she told Jeff all about it later (and then he and I rolled our eyes at each other). And she tries to get them to hold their bottles… Sigh.

About 33 hours to go.

P.S. - She asked again today about the trash in the bathroom.  She never did take it out.

Jeff: Mom, we’re going to Borders.  Do you want to come with us?
MIL: The one by Macy’s?
Jeff: Yeah.  That’s the only one around.
MIL: Oh.  Is there a Macy’s there?
Jeff: Um, when you ask if it’s the one by Macy’s and I say, “Yeah,” that means that there is a Macy’s.
MIL: Oh.

This may make it sound like she’s going senile or something, but she’s not. She just lets her mouth run without thinking about it, and she is a very crappy listener. She’ll ask a question and then talk over you while you’re answering and then ask the question again a few minutes later. It’s really frustrating.

Less than three days to go.

And now I leave you with something more pleasant:

MIL: Do you want me to take out the trash in the bathroom?
(This is the bathroom that is being used exclusively by her.)
Jeff: Don’t worry about it.
MIL: But it’s pretty full.
Jeff: Ooookay. Take it out then.

Was she asking permission to take out the trash? Trying to make sure we noticed she did it? Trying to hint that she wanted us to do it?

When my mom was here, she kept the bottles and my breast pump equipment clean all the time (I had to ask the MIL to stop cleaning my breast pump stuff because she couldn’t get the pieces apart, and in trying to do so got them really stuck together), she vacuumed, cooked, went grocery shopping, mowed the lawn, cleaned the oven (which she made sure to do before the boys came home from the hospital so they wouldn’t be subjected to fumes), dusted, cleaned bathrooms, etc. etc., all without being asked or requiring any direction besides occasionally asking where she could find things.  It was awesome.  But the MIL can’t even do things that obviously need to be done (and in this case, it was even her own mess) without having an annoying conversation about it. Sigh.

Less than four days to go.

First off, let me say that I know I am a horrible, horrible person. That said, I need to vent, and my venting session will show you what a horrible, horrible person I am.

Not once but twice now over the course of my life I have seriously contemplated living out of my car.  The first time was back in 2000.  I had just moved to Austin, TX, on less than a week’s notice to start a new job teaching at a French-speaking Montessori school.  I had very little in the way of liquid assets and couldn’t afford a hotel for more than a night or two before I wouldn’t have enough cash for food and gas let alone for a deposit on an apartment, so on the thirty hour drive there, I devised a plan for how I could live out of my car until I found a place to live.  I ended up not needing the plan after all because I found a place my second day there (which burned down a week later, but that is a story for another day).

The second time I decided I needed to live out of my car was about two weeks ago — a day or so after my MIL arrived for her SECOND visit since the babies were born (the first visit was for a week and a half in mid November). I was so stressed out that I decided, in all seriousness, that I should just pack up my boys and a day’s worth of food and diapers and drive away with them to a park or something, and we could fold down the seats and hang out in the back of the van all day.  It just occurred to me that I never came up with a plan of how I would go to the bathroom, but I guess I could just not drink much and wait until I came back home at night.

I also considered the following:

• Hopping a flight to my parents’ house with the boys
• Buying her a plane ticket and sending her back home early
• Locking myself and the boys in my room all day (Seriously, I would have to lock the door.  She comes in without knocking.)
• Running away to a friend’s house (This would actually be quite easy since we are cat sitting for some friends who live nearby.)

Sounds a little unreasonable, right?  I totally know it, but I have never been so stressed out in all my life as I have been trying to take care of my sweet little guys these first two months (I do not handle sleep deprivation well), and when I am stressed out, my tolerance for being annoyed pretty much disappears, and I just want to be left alone.  And boy does this lady ever annoy me…

I am not one for chit chat — I have never been good at it and have never enjoyed it — but it is pretty much the only conversation she is capable of.  I can’t take hearing about how beef stroganoff is famous (she is very hung up on whether or not things are “famous”) or about the good deal her friend got on onesies. It makes me want to take an ice pick to my ear. So I either have to be bored to death and annoyed to have to participate in such inane conversation, which totally sucks, or I have to avoid talking to her altogether, which is awkward and, therefore, sucks.

She is a little woman and kind of old (almost 70); the combination of the two makes her downright awkward when handling my babies.  As far as I can tell, it doesn’t hurt them, but it stresses them out and makes them fussy, and she just isn’t capable of holding them in the positions that make them the most comfortable.  I can hand one of them to her at a time when they are at their most calm, like right after a bath when normally they just drift off to sleep without a peep, and in no time they’ll be whining.  It is so frustrating.

When she’s feeding them and makes them fussy because she doesn’t handle them well, she makes the situation grate on my nerves even more by squeaking, “OK! OK! OK!” over and over in rapid succession. I started counting how many times she said it during a feeding yesterday and quit at 50 after less than five minutes. Another rapid fire word she uses is “Open! Open! Open!”  This occurs when she is trying to shove the bottle in when the baby she has needs to burp and doesn’t want the bottle.  It is usually my cue to tell her, AGAIN, that when they do that it means they need to be burped.

Right now she is out in my living room whistling at Link — not whistling a song, just the same high-pitched note over and over.  I don’t know why she does it, but it makes me want to tape her mouth shut or at least give poor Lincoln some earplugs. Pretty much all of her baby talk and all of the noises she makes at them are obnoxious.

My nerves are worn so thin that even tiny things are bugging me. Like I wince every time she asks to hold a baby primarily because I know they would be more comfortable if Jeff or I held them but also because she doesn’t pronounce her Ls, so it comes out, “Can I hode him?” Hearing that in my head just now has me clenching my jaw.

She is constantly asking if she can help me.  Sounds nice, right?  I hate it.  She asks if she can do things which I would prefer to do myself, like hold my babies or serve my food, all while there are a bunch of bottles in the sink that need to be washed which I keep suggesting she do if she wants to help (most things I suggest that she could do don’t get done). This puts me in the postion of always having to reject her help, which hurts her feelings, or let her do it and be annoyed. Plus, she requires a lot of direction, so much so that it’s easier for me to just do things mysef than to have her do them.

She hovers like nobody’s business. She’ll stand there and watch over my shoulder while I change a diaper or play with a baby, and it drives me crazy. I can’t establish a routine because she insists on being a part of every little thing I do with the guys, and that always keeps things — whether it be a bath or putting kids to bed or feeding or whatever — from going smoothly.

There are so many more things. She said that the babies were ugly the first time she visited. She told us we shouldn’t have had them now because the situation was not ideal (is it ever?). She gives advice passive-aggressively by saying it to the babies rather than to us (e.g. “You don’t want that pacifier, do you?” or “You’re ready to go to sleep now, aren’t you?”). She never understands sarcasm. She always butts into conversations that obviously are not meant to include her. Her hands are creepy… and so many other things. Believe me, I know I am being petty with a lot of this, but what it comes down to is this: I can’t take proper care of my family with her here. All of the other stuff just makes it that much more upsetting.

Here is word of unsolicited advice. Taking care a new baby is hard.  Taking care of two new babies is even harder. As difficult as it is, though, not all offers of help are helpful.  The time Jeff’s mom has been here has been much more stressful than the time we have been on our own. At the time that she offered to come “help” I didn’t know how stressful it would be to have someone around during this time that normally I am merely able to tolerate pretty well.  Don’t let anyone come stay with you to help you out that you do not absolutely LOOOOOVE to have around and that you are totally comfortable with. Be as honest as you tactfully can (e.g. “Thank you so much for being willing to help, but a few days is long enough.  We need to be able to establish our own routine and bond as a family.”), but stand up for your sanity.  It will be worth it. I wish, in retrospect, that I had limited her visits to only one visit, and that visit should have been less than a week.  I mean, even that would’ve been too much, but I do understand that she wants to spend time with her new grandchildren, and I’m not about to deny her that, but a few days is enough.

In any case, it was nice to vent. I only have to make it through five more days. Bleh.

Happy new year!