September 2008 Archives
One week till we have our ultrasound and (hopefully) find out if we're having a girl Muppet or a boy Muppet. Consensus lately seems to center around the intuition that we're having a girl. Therefore I'm assuming we'll have a boy because reality seems to be contrary like that.
Things have been a bit nuts lately. Life has been a nonstop flurry of activity. Lots of family events lately and a fair amount of family-related angst. Working on the house. We've finally finished painting the bathroom and it's usable again, though we still need to acquire a new medicine cabinet and towel-hanging option. We're moving on to the basement this week, which we have to revamp in order to move all of our computer and crafting stuff there so that we have an empty room to transform into a baby's room. Turns out we didn't plan ahead very far when we moved into the house, since we weren't sure if kids would be in our future. Now that a kid is in our future, the majority of stuff in our house has to be moved somewhere else, which is turning out to be a lot of work, none of which is very exciting to write about in a blog.
I've also been hosting the 'Ploob (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can learn about the 'Ploob here) and have taken it on three excursions but have yet to write about any of them on the official BITWRATHPLOOB World Tour Blog (don't worry, 'Ploob followers, stories will be coming very, very soon).
I'm now at 20 weeks, which is officially halfway through with the pregnancy, though of course it's impossible to know exactly when this little critter will make its debut. It's starting to hit home that this is really happening -- and soon. Summer coming to a close is driving that reality home a little more. We still have a lot of work to do, and the baby isn't letting me forget it's there. Its kicks and punches are getting stronger and stronger every day. I'm getting used to the feeling, but it's still pretty awe-inspiring.
The weekend before last, we took a short road trip to Wisconsin to visit Brad's grandparents for his grandfather's 88th birthday. The family was all very excited to see us and to talk about the upcoming baby, but what surprised me the most were all the questions about our Ireland photos. "Why haven't we seen any Ireland photos yet" was the question of the day.
My standard answer to that question is, "yeah, I know. I really need to get those sorted through. I just took so many photos, I'm overwhelmed."
But that weekend the family brought up a really good point. If I don't do something about those photos before the baby's born, nobody will ever see them.
So I give you photos from our April trip to Ireland.
Day 1. I already posted these photos to Flickr (and there's a little bit more commentary about each photo in Flickr), but I don't think I'd linked to them in the blog:
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Day 1 we flew into Dublin. We arrived early in the morning (7:30am) after an all-night flight (after a layover in New York). I slept a tiny bit on the plane, but we were tired. Due to our scheduling snafoo, we'd paid for our room for the night before (darn time zones), but it worked out to our advantage. Our hostess insisted we eat the breakfast we'd paid for as soon as we arrived and, stomachs full, we collapsed into the bed we'd paid for and slept off a bit of the jet lag.
After our midmorning nap, we took a stroll through Dublin. We were staying within walking distance of all these places we photographed. Our B&B was near the spire and we very quickly began to think of the neighborhood as our home in Dublin.
We visited Trinity College and looked at the Book of Kells and the beautiful library there (unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures of either of those places). There was a rousing game of cricket going on at Trinity College. I had no idea what they were doing, but it all looked terribly civilized. We also walked to St. Stephen's Green and appreciated the fantastic tulips and daffodils that were in full bloom. A few trees were blooming as well, but spring had just barely begun and we didn't get to experience the quintessential green of Ireland.
After wandering around some of the shops near Trinity College, we began to get tired and cold (we hadn't yet learned about Irish weather) and headed back to our neighborhood, where we stopped at the bus depot and bought our ticket to Galway for the next day.
Day 2 of our Ireland trip...
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
On the second day of our trip, Brad and I took a bus across the country from Dublin on the east coast to Galway on the west coast. Galway is a lovely city on the sea, a city with a very different feel to it than Dublin. The bus ride took a few hours, but I didn't mind since I was still taking in the newness of the landscape and the novelty of being on a different continent. I noticed the little differences between Ireland and home: slate roofs, piles of ancient stones making walls criscrossing the landscape, more sheep than people. As we approached the west coast, the landscape became more rocky and rugged.
Our B&B was on the outskirts of the city, near the resort town of Salthill, but within decent walking distance of Galway city. About an hour's walk along the beautiful promenade. We walked that way more times than my legs could quite deal with during our few days in Galway, and ended up taking cabs a few times towards the end of our stay. The day we arrived was alternately beautiful and sunny, then hailing, then beautiful and sunny again, then rainy. Typical Ireland weather, from what we heard. We walked into town and took lots of pictures of the famous Galway swans. My dad is always trying to photograph elusive swans in Minnesota, so I found it pretty surprising that these ones acted more like the ducks of the lakes back home.
We walked through Shop Street and High Street, buzzing with activity and pubgoers and street musicians and stopped at a pub called the King's Head for our first real Irish Guinness. I tried mushy peas, which tasted better than they sound. We didn't do anything very exciting on our first day in Galway, just enjoyed being in a new city in a new country on a new continent.
That's all the photos I have for now. I'll try to get to day 3 pretty soon...
[11/21/08: Sorry, I had to disable comments on this entry because there was too much comment spamming going on.]
I haven't had a lot to say lately. I think my Mom has explained it the best on our other blog, Pink Argyle. It's hard to find things to talk about when you're dealing with the idea that your dad has cancer. Up until my mom posted her thoughts about it on Pink Argyle, I wasn't sure it was appropriate to talk about here - nor did I really want to, to tell you the truth.
Lately, I've been focusing almost all my energy on fixing up our house. It's good to be productive and it helps me cope. When I haven't been focusing on that, I've been knitting for the Muppet. Another coping mechanism.
Today I felt so satisfied after I stepped out of my shower in my newly redone bathroom. I was tired and clean and felt like I'd really earned that shower. The bathroom is almost finished now. This morning we bought and put up our new bathroom mirror, went online and bought a medicine cabinet, and even did a little electrical work to replace old yellowy-looking light switches with fresh new white ones. We also put a second coat of paint on an accent wall in the family room, so it'll be ready for wall shelves to go up. We need a lot more storage elsewhere in the house to make room for baby stuff, and this will help a lot.
I believe deep down that my dad will come through this cancer okay, and that makes it easier to deal with all of this. Still, it's good to have one or two coping mechanisms handy. Luckily for me, my coping mechanisms are pretty harmless... except on the wallet, I guess.
Tomorrow morning Brad and I go in for our 20-week ultrasound (I'm actually at 21 weeks, but who's counting) and we're going to tell the ultrasound technician that we definitely want to know the sex of the baby. I'd also like to know some other things, like whether he/she/it has all of its other parts in all of the correct places, but the exciting news is of course whether we're having a boy or a girl.
I know we'll be happy either way, but I'm mostly excited for one more piece of the puzzle fitting together. And then we'll be able to refer to the baby using a pronoun other than "it". Unless I'm mad at it for keeping me up at night with its kicking, in which case I plan to refer to it as "it" just to be spiteful.
The only bad part about going in for an ultrasound is drinking all that water and then having to hold it. When I went in for the other ultrasound, at 8 weeks, I was supposed to be finished drinking 32 ounces of water an hour before the appointment. Since my bladder has less room now, I only have to drink 24 ounces, but I'm sure it will be just as miserable.
So far a few people in my life have made predictions about what we're having. As far as I can remember, six people have predicted a girl, and two have predicted a boy. I don't have a feeling one way or the other, but I've been saying that if everyone thinks it's going to be a girl, then it will end up being a boy.
According to the unassailably scientific information collected at babygenderprediction.com, here are my chances of having a girl or a boy (at least according to the "tests" that didn't require me to actually do anything:
- Chinese Gender Chart says: GIRL
- Old Wives Tales Gender Predictor says: 50/50
Now let's just hope they can get a good look at the baby's bits so our curiosity will be sated.
Also, let me just take the chance to say that boy or girl, we will NOT be going crazy with blue stuff or pink stuff.
Even though there's no real way to intuit whether someone is having a boy or a girl, it was sort of uncanny how many people guessed correctly.
And here are some of my favorite pictures that we got of our girl today:
I don't know if I'm recognizing some of the baby's movements better now that I could see her moving on the screen and equate that with what I'm feeling, but I have been feeling almost constant movement from her today, which is unusual. All of this is really making everything seem so much more imminent and real. Brad and I even started seriously talking about names today.
This is going to take some getting used to. I still keep reflexively calling her "it".
I guess I should be glad it's only taken this long for something random and spammy to show up on the Flickr photo on the left sidebar there. I just really hope it doesn't keep happening.
Anybody want to help me out and tag some other nicer photo with "smattery" to get rid of this weirdness? I don't want to tag a photo of my own, as that would go against the entire point of that part of my website.
In other news, I'm tired and cranky today. Oh wait, that's not really new.
Three days before my Dad's surgery to remove a stage 1 (possibly early stage 2) malignant colorectal tumor, I make the mistake of picking up Newsweek in the lobby of the chiropractor's office and reading this article: We Fought Cancer... And Cancer Won.
We tell you about Mayberry because his case sheds light on why cancer is on track to kill 565,650 people in the United States this year--more than 1,500 a day, equivalent to three jumbo jets crashing and killing everyone aboard 365 days a year. First, it shows the disconnect between the bench and the bedside, between what science has discovered about cancer and how doctors treat it. Biologists have known for at least two decades that it is the rare cancer that can be completely cured through surgery. Nevertheless, countless proud surgeons keep assuring countless anxious patients that they "got it all." In Mayberry's case, says Kim, "my gut feeling is that [cells from the original lung tumor] were smoldering in other places the whole time, at levels so low not even a whole-body scan would have revealed them." Yet after surgery and, for some cancers, radiation or chemotherapy, patients are still sent back into the world with no regimen to keep those smoldering cells from igniting into a full-blown metastatic cancer or recurrence of the original cancer.
And...
Even in the 1970s there was clear evidence--in people--f the deadly role played by cells that break off from the original tumor: women given chemo to mop up any invisible malignant cells left behind after breast surgery survived longer without the cancer's showing up in their bones or other organs, and longer, period, than women who did not receive such "adjuvant" therapy, scientists reported in 1975. "Every study of adjuvant therapy shows it works because it kills metastatic cells even when it appears the tumor is only in the breast or in the first level of lymph nodes," says the ACS's Brawley. By the mid-1990s studies had shown similar results for colon cancer: even when surgeons said they'd "got it all," patients who received chemo lived longer and their cancer did not return for more years.
I'm trying not to become a quivering ball of nerves lately and most of the time, I think I'm feeling remarkably upbeat. If you go purely by statistics, "Stage I cancers have a survival rate of 80-95 percent. Stage II tumors have survival rates ranging from 55 to 80 percent." (source) We've been told that chemo or radiation probably won't be necessary, but this article is making me think twice about that and want to do some research. After seeing what Brad's Dad went through in chemo and radiation, all I wanted for my Dad was for him to not have to go through that hell.
Add to that my monthly pre-OB-checkup jitters (checkup is tomorrow) and my stress-induced eye twitch is working overtime today. (Preemptive reassurance for everyone out there: I'm okay. Don't worry. I just have a lot to think about right now.)
Yesterday was a weird day. It was a day when past, present and future all seemed to exist at the same time in my reality.
Dad had his surgery at Abbott Northwestern, the same hospital where we waited for hours and hours and hours while Brad's Dad had surgery for his pancreatic cancer four years ago. His cancer was also detected early, but if you go on pure statistics alone, he never had anywhere near the kind of chances my dad has. So the mood yesterday was a lot different - more upbeat - but Brad and I still had a few moments of deja vu.
It was hard not to think at times yesterday about all that has happened in the last few years and the changes to come. The baby was moving a lot all day, and I spent a good part of the day knitting her a sweater. I took breaks a couple of times to wander through the hospital and hunt down a cell signal to update my sister on what was happening. She wasn't able to come home for the surgery.
Ultimately, the surgery went well and there were no nasty surprises, so we continue with the upbeat attitude we've been going with so far. My Dad was in great spirits when we saw him after he finally arrived in his hospital room. By then we'd been at the hospital for 11 hours and I was pretty much asleep on my feet, after having slept badly the night before and being prone to pregnancy-induced exhaustion anyway.
On the way home, we drove over the new 35W bridge, which happened to open yesterday. We weren't too interested in all the hype about it; it was just the most direct route home. I thought about how it was just a little over a year ago that my mom and I were driving my sister out to Boston the day the bridge fell. During the long drive, she and I talked a lot about where our lives were headed. She was embarking on an exciting, scary, new phase of her live - graduate school in a city across the country. I felt like I was doing nothing new or interesting with my life. She wondered if she'd ever get to the point in her life where I was - married, with a stable career and a house all that sort of thing. I think we both felt a little bit envious of each other at that moment.
She told me that if she were in my shoes, she'd be thinking about having a baby. That was something I'd thought about a little bit by then, but didn't think Brad or I would be ready for it for quite some time. I didn't expect that a year later, I'd have already made that decision and followed through with it.
All this stuff was swirling through my mind yesterday, along with wishes that my Dad will fare well with this cancer. How strange the trajectories of our lives are and how quickly they can change. I have a bad habit of wishing for the future rather than living in the present. But I think I'm slowly learning how to slow down and stop rushing life. It goes by too fast as it is.
I wish there was a way to suspend any feelings of optimism or pessimism and simply get through an event. I could experience all my feelings in retrospect. Possibly.
We got the news yesterday that three of my Dad's lymph nodes tested positive for cancer. This puts him at Stage 3. Radiation and chemo are the plan, though exactly when and how they will be administered is still being determined. Right now he just has to heal enough to leave the hospital and finish his recovery at home.
There are so many ways to speculate about this right now and I'm too exhausted to really follow any of them down the paths to their logical conclusions. It could go well. It could go badly. All it really means right now is that this roller coaster ride is much farther from being finished than I thought it was a few days ago.
In other news, I'll be six months pregnant (!) in a week. We got the future baby's room emptied out (thanks, Mike, Tracy and Mike for all your help!), crib is ordered, and we've finished a lot of the other home improvements that have been on our list. Brad and I are more comfortable in our home than we have been since we moved in, and that's actually a really nice help right now in maintaining sanity.
Just to demonstrate how I've lived a sheltered life (despite my urban upbringing), I'll tell you a little story about last night.
Last night was the first time I've ever spoken with anyone about her baby daddies. I know this is a phrase that actual real people use in a non-ironic way, but up until now, I've not met those people.
Brad, my mom and I were walking back to the hospital in the dark, after eating dinner a few blocks away and giving my Dad a chance to rest. Apparently, we were walking much more slowly than a group of three people who were behind us, so as they passed us, the woman in the group said, "someone with a wooden leg could walk faster than you guys!" I thought she was just trying to be clever, but she actually did have a wooden leg, which she proceeded to show us.
We thought they were going to be on their merry way, which was fine with me because they were really loud and we were pretty tired and stressed out anyway -- and one of the guys was sipping out of a bottle hidden in a paper bag; based on the look in his eyes, he was pretty wasted.
But then the woman noticed I was pregnant. So, like about a hundred other random people lately, she asked when I was due. I've noticed that my condition inspires people in interesting ways. People talk to me who never normally would. It's like they feel like they can instantly relate to me on some intimate level, and one glance at my belly triggers a cascade of memories, questions, and stories, which they all assume I will want to hear about/talk about because I must be feeling this instant bond as well.
For the record, I don't mind when this happens, generally. I find it fascinating in sort of an anthropological way, and it's often endearing how happy it can make someone just to see and talk to a pregnant woman. Plus nobody has ever crossed my personal space boundary or made me feel threatened.
So anyway, for the next 10 minutes or so, as we walked back to the hospital, they walked with us and she went on and on, often repeating the same thing many times, about what a joy it is to have a baby and how all the pain and suffering will be worth it the moment I see my baby. We smiled and nodded and let her talk. She talked about how the father was basically nothing more than a sperm donor and that my body is making this baby's eyes and limbs and organs and everything and that I'm a strong woman and should be proud of myself. She talked about how she's had four kids in the last ten years and every one of her baby daddies ("I have three," she said) watched their babies being born, "and none of them will ever fucking forget it. And my brother here, he's only 24 and he has seven babies--" "including twins!" he interjected -- "and he'll never forget it either." (Her brother was the one with the paper bag).
Eventually we came to our turn off to the hospital and smiled at them and told them to have a good night, and when we were barely out of earshot, my mom turned to us and said, "well, that was tedious."
