The Morning Sickness Cometh

I've been having these waves of something that isn't quite nausea but isn't quite heartburn. I've gotten used to them and I seem to be able to fix them by eating something small right away. I was hoping that this was the worst it was going to get, but, nope, not so much.

I woke up this morning at 6am(my alarm is at 9am) with a really deep sense of nausea sitting deep in my stomach. It felt like the worst heartburn ever and I couldn't fall asleep again and no position was comfortable. I thought it might be bathroom related so I stumbled down the hall, waking up the kitten as I turned on the bathroom light (for some reason she was sleeping on a pile of dirty clothes on the bathroom floor). The bathroom visit not having resolved the issue, I staggered slightly blind in the early morning dark to my purse where I vaguely remembered having left some peanuts. Peanuts recovered I went back to the bed, spent two minutes shoving peanuts down my throat and then was able to collapse back on my pillow and sleep another three hours. So, apparently protein with salt is my morning sickness solution, at least for the moment. I hope this doesn't get worse.

The Circling Sharks are Howling at the Door

I feel bad that I seem to have stopped posting in the last week. A lot of it is that I'm REALLY busy at work and I'm so tired that I'm having to take several naps a day and go to bed early. But there is a little bit of me that is kind of scared to write about being pregnant, because then it will get taken away.

So instead, I will take a moment and talk about my co-workers. I have a wonderful group of co-workers who I enjoy working with and have good personal relationships with most of them. They have been pretty involved with the TTC process, including one co-worker who had the day that I was testing this past weekend on her calendar in the office. (Yes, we are all the entwined in each others lives.) Em and I have agreed to tell a very limited number of people IRL about this pregnancy until we get to April and except for my immediate boss, that means that my co-workers are now waiting with no info and a LOT of questions.

Hence the metaphor of the circling sharks howling at the door. Three of my co-workers have flat out asked me what the test said. And I've replied, as per Emily's instructions: "I have no comment at this time." Which they are totally (and rightly) taking as a YES. I really don't know how I'm going to navigate this next two months of them theoretically not knowing, while I go to the bathroom constantly and look ill every time someone makes coffee.

So, any thoughts on how to pull this off?

Photo Friday: Stop and Eat the Roses

We have a problem with bringing fresh flowers into the house. That problem's name is Wicket. She has a disturbing habit of deciding that, where ever we put those flowers, we clearly intended a cat to be there, because the only purpose that flowers could have would be as a cat snack.

She also feels this way about houseplants.

And leftover Thai food plates.

And water glasses.

So, whenever my lovely wife does something romantic and sweet like finding me fire and ice roses (yes, we have 'our flower,' and I don't care that it makes me a big sissy dork) for Valentine's Day, I get about ten minutes of cooing and burbling about them, and then three days of "WicketgetthefuckoffthediningroomtableIseeyoutheregoddamnit." And when we leave the room, we have to lock the flowers in their own room so we won't come back to shattered glass, electricuted electronics, and one very happy cat with vaguely rose-scented breath.

In fact, she's sitting on the couch staring at them right now.

William The Transsexual Parakeet: A Story (With An Important Payoff)

Kate and I do this thing. She makes me tell her stories for her. Not just things that happened that we both know about: she makes me tell her childhood stories, her college stories, all of them. I'm the storyteller, which is hilarious if you consider that she's the one who wants us to blog every damn thing. Wants me to blog every damn thing, more like.

But anyway, today I'm the storyteller. And this is her story, but I'm telling it for my own purposes. So make of that what you want.

Anyway, when Kate was seven or so, a shed got delivered to her house. And in that shed was a tiny little parakeet. She and her mother and her little brother (who was about four) spent a good deal of time trying to catch that parakeet. Actually, Kate's mom did most of the work, aided by the ever-well-behaved Kate, and disturbed by the less-well-behaved brother, who desperately wanted to pet the pretty birdy. But, in the end, the bird was captured and brought inside. Kate's mom refused to let the kids name the bird for about six months or so, until she had exhausted every possible avenue for finding its original home. After all hope was lost, the kids named him William.

Several years down the road, William became sick. So he was taken to the vet, for the first time ever. At the vet, it was revealed that William was, in Kate's words, Williamette: they had a lady bird on their hands. William/ette's condition did not improve substantially, and about six months later s/he Flew To The Great Shed In The Sky, so to speak.

So, it is in honor of this bird, who managed to live for a time in both genders, who appeared without warning and shocked everyone by sticking around, that we christen the Non-Hysteri-Keet.

Blogosphere, meet Willa. Willa, meet Blogosphere.

Why Willa, and not William? Well, because we've basically decided that it's too hard to play the gender-neutral pronoun game all the time, and that our personal default pronoun is female, so she should have a vaguely female name. However, we picked Willa in part because it references the chromozonal question mark: Willa might be William might be Williamette, and all is well. We'll know when we know, or we won't, and it's fine.

(Oh, and alternative sources for the name include this and this. Look, the one walked the line between genders and wrote one of my favorite novels, and the other is a mysterious production of parents who shouldn't have been able to procreate AND had magical powers as an infant. Either way, it's good.)

What, you want a real story of yesterday morning's positive? Well, maybe I'll tell you. But not today. Willa's mama is demanding dinner, and her mom has some Guy Debord to read. The world continues turning, but it's one Keet heavier round these parts.

Valentine's Day Massacre (Kind Of)

Since Em tagged me to talk about the enormous NOT PREGNANT we got Thursday morning on the CBE digital test, I suppose I should actually talk about it.

We knew at 9DPO that it was too early, but wouldn't it have been so cool to find out we were pregnant on Valentine's Day? Oh well, not to be. I make it sound so matter of fact. In actual truth, I went a little nutty for a few hours. I sat on the couch and almost cried and felt like sitting in the corner and not going to work. However, work is crazy and I pretty much can't take days off at the moment and if I take a day off every time a piece of technology tells me I'm not pregnant, I worry I will soon run out of sick days.

Work was also not very pleasant. I called Emily ever hour and told her how I didn't feel well and she was very nice to me. Later in the day, my hysterical symptoms picked up again, which is leading me to wonder if in fact we did just test way too early. We have decided to wait two days and test again on Saturday. So I guess we shall soon see.

Happy Freakin' Valentine's Day

To quote the renowned C.G.B. Spender:

"Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left is a... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers."

--From "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," Episode 4x07, The X-Files

I'd just like to say I bought a good box of chocolates. Mostly caramels and turtles and truffles. Kate appears to be enjoying it.

Oh, and that test this morning? A negative, which at 9 dpo is not shocking. And so drama-causing that I'm tagging the wife to tell y'all about it.

The Hysteri-Keet

We're calling her the Hysteri-Keet.

HK for short.

No, we don't know yet if Kate's pregnant. We won't know until tomorrow at the earliest; she'll be taking an early pregancy test just because it is the first possible day, and it's Valentine's Day, and how amazing would it be to find out we're having a baby on Valentine's Day? Most likely, we won't know until next week.

But her symptoms have been so pronounced that we've been joking about her hysterical pregnancy since last week. This is an example of the traffic game: we can't talk about her pregnancy, about an actual embryo, until we know we actually have one. So it's a hysterical pregnancy we've got here, and we wanted to be able to talk about it by name.

So we named her. She'll get a new name once we know if she's real or hysterical. Kate's thinking of calling her Gabby or Zoey, after her childhood parakeets.

What have we learned about the Hysteri-Keet in the past week? She likes salads. And pasta. And spice cake. She makes her mama feel positively evil around 9PM every day. She demands naps. And every night, we snuggle up in our bed, which is the one place where we've agreed we won't play the traffic game, and I wrap my arms around my wife and our little hysterical daughter and say goodnight.

I have no brain, so Title Goes Here

It seems like forever since I last posted. It's actually been a week. I don't have any reason, except I've just been feeling really weird. As Emily note a few days ago, I've been having A LOT of phantom symptoms. The ones that seem to be staying with me are bloating, heartburn and crying jags. I'm having noticeable cramping today, although until today it had been four days or so. I'm 6 or 7 DPO depending on how one counts it, so I don't know what's up with me. Some women may cry at tissue commercials (Em is one), but I'm a bit of a stoic. I don't usually cry until pushed beyond my limits by something actually deeply sad. And here I am, feeling suddenly as if weeping is the only thing to do and then an hour later making jokes about the crazy lady who is clearly taking me over. It's just so odd.

From the beginning, Em has been against POAS before I've missed my period, but today when I was doing one of our many daily phone check-ins, she asked me when the earliest I could test was. We bought a 3-pack on CBE Digital tests from Costco.com when we were ordering our next batch of OPK's, so the first day those early response tests might work is Thursday. Thursday is also Valentine's Day. We don't put much stock in the Hallmark holiday, but it kind of makes me want to go wild and use one just for fun. I guess we shall see.

My closing question: Has anyone else had this many crazy symptoms all at once? Em is starting to get concerned. I'm just bemused.

Photo Friday: Our Commune- An Organization

Our Commune- An Organization

From the Photo Friday site:

or·gan·i·za·tion

1.
c. A structure through which individuals cooperate systematically to conduct business.
d. The administrative personnel of such a structure.

4. A group of persons organized for a particular purpose; an association: a benevolent organization.

5.
a. A structure through which individuals cooperate systematically to conduct business.
b. The administrative personnel of such a structure.

We may not be organized. But we sure as hell are an organization. We have both cats AND hot shirtless boys. Come on. What more do you want?

Originally uploaded by brooklyn.kittens

Symptoms My Wife Has Had In The Last 3 Days

• Nausea
• Dizziness
• Heartburn
• Bloating
• Warm Stomach
• Diarrhea
• Mood Swings
• Cramps

She would like to say that she realizes she's insane.

It Begins

I came home yesterday, tired. My exam had finished up at 6 on Monday; I had immediately shared celebratory shots of Absolut Citron with Uncle, which did a good job of counteracting the caffeine-and-all-nighter high I was running on. I took a nap, was awakened around 9:45 to knock up the wife, watched some X-Files, went back to sleep. Woke up in the morning around 11, watched more X-Files, rescheduled my chiropractor appointment so I could vote, went to therapy, went to my class (taught by a pleasant, easily distractable old man who really doesn't do anything to direct the discussion), got out early and went to that chiropractor appointment, got dinner at my favorite Mexican place, went to what I thought was the first Arabic class of the semester only to discover that, last week while I was cramming for the exam, they had all met without me. Got out of class at 10, walked exhaustedly to the subway, listed to my Lupe Fiasco/Shakira/Jay-Z playlist of the moment six times (or however many, I didn't pay attention except for mentally choreographing the trailer to the X-Files movie about colonization they're never going to make to the sounds of Hello Goodbye--there's lots of Dana Scully with AK-47s), wandered in the door, dropped my shit, and said hello to my wife.

Who promptly burst into tears.

She didn't feel well. She was having cramps. Her stomach hurt. Everything hurt. She didn't know why she was crying. She didn't know anything. She was just crying.

And as I sat there, holding her hand, saying everything was ok, petting her hair, telling her to call her mother if she wants to, and all of that, I thought: oh, shit. She can't be more than 24 hours pregnant. Honestly, at most there's a little fertilized egg in there trying to figure out whether it wants to implant. And that's if she's pregnant at all. And she's hysterical already.

And all of a sudden I'm realizing precisely what I meant when I told my therapist that I was going to have to deal with her hysterical pregnancies two weeks out of the month from here forward.

She calmed down. I held her and petted her and we laughed about the mood swings and I told her everything was OK. She's still crampy and bloated today, and I swear to God she looks fatter. (My wife, she is the opposite of fat.) Who knows? Maybe these are the best signs every and she's totally pregnant. Maybe her body is reacting to encountering sperm for the first time by screaming in horror. Maybe it's a psychosomatic reaction. But this is how it's going to be from here forward.

I think I'm ready. I hope so, at least.

Calling the Child

The sperm was finally delivered at 3:45pm on Saturday, after a phone call to FEDEX, being put on hold for ten minutes while they tracked the package down, being told that it was in Erie, NY (7 Hours from our house) and then having it arrive ten minutes later with no explanation to how that was possible or why it was almost four hours late. Sigh.

Having gotten negatives on the two OPK's I took on Saturday, I kept on testing on Sunday. Towards the end of the evening, all my signs were lining up and Em and I agreed we would do the first insemination at midnight after I peed on one last stick. That stick had a very faint line, but we decided to go ahead with the insem because the book I've been reading for months said that the worst thing you can do is wait too long, waiting for an OPK to read positive.

I had readied myself for this first time to be comical and badly done and a complete miss, so I was quite happy to discover that we appear to be good at this. We filled the bedroom with the candles in vases that we had used for the centerpieces for our wedding, brought our Quaker marriage certificate into the room, to represent the loving family and community that we were calling our baby into to and starting the thawing of the spermies. It went well, Emily was really skilled at using the syringe and I rotated like a turkey for an hour afterwards. After the first thirty minutes or so, we opened the bedroom door and let the cats in and told Jesus that he should come visit. And it felt so right, our little commune, the queers and the cats, all together, calling this baby to us.

I was slightly concerned that we had done the first insemination too early but when I tested at 2pm today I got a very strong positive, so I think we got the timing down pretty well. We're going to do our second insemination around 10pm and then we will officially be in our first ever TWW!

Waiting

Waiting is really the hardest part of ttc at times. At the moment I am waiting for two things. I am waiting to pee. I have to wait until 2pm in order to get an accurate reading on my CBE OPK. This is the first stick of this cycle, this cycle being the first time that isn't practice! The excitement is mounting.

I am also waiting for FEDEX. We paid a lot of money for Saturday delivery before 12pm. And it's 1:45pm and I am sitting here waiting for my box 'o sperm, and reloading the tracking site every few minutes. According to FEDEX, my box has been in a truck in Brooklyn since 9:11am. So where the #@$% is my delivery? Not that I'm obsessing or anything.

Photo Friday: Black & White

The Girls
Originally uploaded by brooklyn.kittens

This is my first Photo Friday. My girls are black and white to begin with, but I like the added touch of black and white cats in black and white.