Saturday, June 6, 2015

To test or not to test


I want to go and get a pregnancy test and do it early just to see, if maybe there is something happening. My app (see "there's an app for that") is telling me wait 5 days or the result is more likely to be a false negative. I know this, I know how the test works and that time is needed to let the hormone build up. It’s quite late and I would have to drive to a chemist to get a test, but I have considered getting out of my pyjamas and going for a drive to buy a test (I just asked the Husband and his response started with "we talked about this...")

I’m a little impatient at times. Like at Christmas when I badger the Husband for weeks for hints about my present, and then I wake up earlier than my kids on Christmas day, giddy with excitement. Not about my presents (which are usually delightfully quirky and thoughtfully chosen by the Husband) but about the Bright Spark and the Little Prince finding Santa’s surprises under the tree. I was beaten out of bed last Christmas by the Bright Spark who I recall having a 4 am start (it being summer the sun was not too far behind him), but every other year I have been laying away in bed waiting to hear the pitter-patter of little feet through the house.

Patience is something I have had to practice as I have gotten older; Patience with my students, definitely patience with my children. For me patience is part of compassion. To show compassion towards my children I am patient with them, even when in my head I am screaming “hurry up” or “no you can’t …”. That inner voice is sometimes hard to keep inside and when it is let out I become “grumpy mummy”. The Bright Spark is now at an age where he can identify the presence of grumpy mummy and when he realises he deploys grumpy mummy deflection devices like “quiet” and “best behaviour”. This happened on our regular Sunday morning outing last week to our local farmers market. The Husband had been sick and I was a bit over my two delightful children (which is usually related to the amount of sleep I have not managed to get or the level of distraction of the Bright Spark) with whom I’d been spending lots of quantity time as the Husband spent time in bed. Anyway, as the Bright Spark dawdled his way into the car and through the process of putting his seatbelt on grumpy mummy appeared and shouted at him to put his seatbelt on. Before we got to the second corner of our journey he was telling the Little Prince to keep quiet so grumpy mummy wouldn’t shout. This was a time when I should have been a little more patient. But as I am a fantastic mum, and not a perfect one I can forgive myself for this small slip in my patience.

But the thing I am impatient about now is getting pregnant. And the stupid thing about it is this; this is our first month of trying. But I am in that final week of my cycle when it too early to test and I read every little creak and niggle of my uterus as a sign; A sign of an oncoming period or maybe implantation. And I’m not even sure if it was a good idea to start trying this cycle. We’ve got our first family holiday as a family of four planned for next month. This would most likely coincide with the beginning of morning sickness (as it has with my other pregnancies), and the idea of being in a car for 12 hours each way, with the three people I love the most in the world, while nauseous every waking hour of the day is not really my idea of fun. And (a little selfishly, I know) if I do conceive this cycle there is a very real chance I will have to share my birthday month with a much wanted child. My birthday is really the last thing that is mine. I share most things in my life (often including a shower and my food) and I would like my birthday to stay my own. So there will be silver linings to not really getting started this month. It will also mean I will not be spending the last term of teaching my year 12 students exhausted and felling like I might need to vomit at any time, which would also make life a little easier.

But knowing if this is the start of a new journey is what I am impatient for. I want to know whether I am on the count down to that intoxicating day when I get to bring a new person in to the world and meet them for the first time. That fresh newborn smell and those perfect little features. I want to see the faces on my boys when they meet the newest member of their family for the first time. I want to see the Husband bursting with pride (and probably anxiety) at the tiny little package that is half him and half me. Waiting to find out is like waiting to read the next chapter of the story that is my family and my life.

So I have to wait and not be too impatient. A little like putting down a good book so I can go to sleep (also something I have trouble with) I need to be patient and show some self-compassion – the hardest kind I think.

Monday, June 1, 2015

there's an app for that


So we’ve started the whole trying for a baby thing. Again. When we started trying for the Bright Spark the Husband was in the middle of a health crisis and suggested we wait for a few months for him to get further into his treatment. A few weeks later we were pregnant. We’re not rabbits by any sense of the imagination. It only took once and there we were with two pink lines and worrying about birth with no idea how much our lives were going to change. 

With the Little Prince we’d been waiting to start after I’d had surgery to remove a tempestuous gall bladder full of stones. When we had the post-surgery all clear I began doing basal temperatures, checking cervical mucus, counting days to ovulation and all the other wacky things a clucky woman does to occupy the time. This was all kept in my bedside journal and new details of intercourse and mood were pencilled on a regular basis. It was probably a wee bit obsessive, but as previous posts have mentioned I like to be organised and this was all that I could control. The Husband was quietly patient about the whole thing. He didn’t need much convincing to jump when I said “jump”. It took us a few months to get things started then I miscarried early in the pregnancy (see "from tragedy I grew a garden"). Within one cycle I was pregnant again with the Little Prince. Again, one shot wonder. 

So I have high expectations that we can again get things going by simply declaring to the universe that we’re having unprotected sex and bring on another baby. But quite frankly I don’t have the time or energy to monitor whether my cervix fells firm like my nose or soft like my lips, but the simple cycle monitoring I’ve been doing in our family calendar didn’t really seem like enough. So yesterday morning I found myself in the app store searching for “ovulation”. And up popped about a dozen different trackers making claims about how much faster than the national average time I would conceive if I used their app. I quickly reviewed and selected one to download. So now I have this app on my phone which contains all the intimate details of my menstrual cycle and when I have sex with the Husband, and tells me how fertile I am on any given day of my cycle and when I should expect “aunty Flo” to visit next. Also how many days I need to wait until I can pee on a stick and scare the living daylights out of the Husband again by presenting it to him randomly during his morning shower. I was quite comfortable knowing there was something allowing me to track these details in the mobile age when the thing I carry everywhere has an app for most things I need.

Then this morning I was checking my email and there in my inbox was a message telling my how fertile I am today. And the thing is I already knew this. Because last week when I was in my fertile stage even just the sight of the Husband was enough to get me thinking about baby making activities (and subsequently running late for a morning meeting), and today I was much more interested in folding washing and making banana bread. Not to mention the Husband has been nursing a rather unattractive sore throat and head cold this weekend and was much less uninterested in baby making than he was last week.

My body knows when it’s fertile; I love that my monthly cycle has that period where my husband is the sexist man on earth and I must have him now. It’s one of the reasons I have not gone back to hormonal contraceptives after the Little Prince was born. I spent over a decade taking the contraceptive pill in my teens and 20’s and it was a revelation to come off it before I tried to conceive the Bright Spark. When I teach my students about the ovarian cycle I tell the boys to watch out for the girls when they were short skirts and more make-up at this is probably their fertile period and they’re quite literally on the prowl for lov’n. Our bodies are so well adapted for reproduction if you can tune in to the nuances of your cycle you don’t need a fertility tracker – but that won’t make money, so there’s an app which will do it for you and also help you keep a record of your lifestyle and diet choices.

So went back into the app and found my way to the settings where I turned off the daily fertility reports. You see our first two kids were conceived out of heat of the moment, hormone fuelled, “I must have you now” passion, not “the ovulation test I just peed on suggested we’re coming into my fertile window so are you feeling lucky?” type sex. I think I prefer it this way; it makes for better stories and why would I want to rush from the fun of baby making sex to the exhaustion and nausea of the first trimester (I really do but that is a whole other post).


P.S. I also put a password lock on the app – you don’t want that information falling into the wrong hands (not sure whose hands that would be as some app development company is already getting the intimate details of my sex life…).

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Shhh, don't tell. It's a secret!

We're trying for number 3. The Little Prince is sleeping through the night and the Bright Spark is in full-time school. We seem to have the fine balance of work and life sorted out (this week anyway). So we've decided to throw a spanner in the works and have our third child.

And it feels like one of those presents you give yourself, that is for no one else. Everybody is excited when the first one is on it's way; grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles. Friends tell you stories about their births and give you "useful" (and mostly unsolicited) advice. When you have number two it was a given that you would give the first one a sibling. When I told my head of learning area I was expecting my second child he told me this story about a friend of his whose only child had had to play alone in the dirt because he didn't have a sibling - and then he died and his parents were left childless.

But number 3 is not expected. In fact, in the climate of economic down turn and sustainable living, it seems like an extravagance. We are not just replacing ourself in this planet, but adding to the burden (although the two unmarried brothers who will probably remain childless make us feel like this is less of a burden). And how will we pay for this one? We're still getting over the financial hit of the second one.

And the clock is ticking. It was mentioned in passing by my obstetrician after the Little Prince was born that I shouldn't leave such a big gap before the next one, that having a baby on the "wrong side" of 35 is something to avoid. At the ancient age of 36 my ovaries are shrivelling and my eggs are developing random chromosomal abnormalities and the chance of having a child with a chromosomal fault increases massively. Not. The odds are still very much in my favour of having a perfectly healthy child. I have friends whose perfectly healthy children were conceived when thy were well into their late 30's to give me confidence I will also have a perfectly healthy child.

But really we have wanted a third for a while. When discussions were had between the Husband and I when he was still the Boyfriend, he wanted three, I wanted two. It was stated that negotiations would be had at a later date - maybe he could get pregnant with the third one? But over the years I've come around to the idea. I come from a family of four kids. There was always someone else to play with, to talk to. When my parents separated we were a pack, supporting each other and sharing the childhood burden of our parents broken marriage. Although we're not particularly close as adults, we still see each other regularly and are a part of each others lives and we are there for each other. The Husband has one brother. He suffers from debilitating mental health issues, partly caused by the death of his mother. The Husband also has chronic depression stemming from the death of his mother, and carries the burden of worry for his brother. There is no other sibling to share this burden with. He doesn't have a pack.

So we finally decided to jump off the cliff together and leave the condoms in the box. Life has gotten a little easier this year and the kids are getting more independent. We have decide to use the public health system instead of paying to go private; this is the birth the government pays for. We made it through the last lot of maternity leave without going bankrupt so I'm sure we can do it again. I'm more secure about our finances, we seemed to do ok with the first two and we will go into debt when I'm on leave but we will pay it off when I go back to work.

Now I just have to keep it a secret. A secret that we are trying for our little extravagance. I get to wander around with that "I'm trying to make a little human and having lots of sex" smile that makes me look like I'm just having a good day.