The Duchess

Testing.Testing.

Are you reading this Internet? Typepad ate my last three posts, namely the birth story and one about my so called post-partum cycles and a Wordless Wednesday. While I try and find three hours to re-create my memories I leave with this little bit that my friend M. stuck on F-book. I wish one of my friends in particular could understand this.

 

I miss you

I want to write. I want to tell you everything, I want to find a routine...how did you all do it? There doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day. How in the world was I a nanny for 6 kids (four under the age of two when I started, two sets of twins 23 months apart)? Am I doing this right? Am I normal?

Two months already, man this goes fast.

32 Weeks (Yesterday)

I am cranky.

I am sick of people in general. I am uncomfortable and I am excited. I am having a baby shower this weekend, I still marvel every time those words come out of my mouth. I am having a second shower the following weekend - in total there will end up being more people at my showers than at my wedding. I guess it is safe to safe that people around me are excited too.

I keep writing posts in my head but then feel far to restless to sit and put them into the computer. There is so much I have to say but right now as I sit here I can't think of a thing. I am feeling anxious, restless, happy, scared, tired, itchy, out of place, right in place. I am my own personal game of emotional tug-of-war.

We have picked a name, built a crib, painted a room, bought a car seat. Each of these feeling like a small but defining victory and almost like a taunt to that bitch Hope. See I can be just like everyone else who has a baby, buying things and not worrying that I won't ever get to use them - except sometimes (and not very often at all anymore) I allow that small what-if to keep into my head. What-if something goes wrong. What-if I don't make it, she doesn't make it, Duke gets hit by a bus and then I try to gently remind my self that even if any of those things happen there is nothing I can do about it. I hear it is some what normal to have a fatalist attitude toward the end but it makes me feel as though I am wasting the small time left I have with this experience. It also makes me feel as though I am inviting trouble where trouble is not needed nor welcome.

On the flip side I am enjoying every kick and (almost) every comment from well meaning people. I am so thankful to be so close to something I have wanted for so long. Thank you to everyone for your support and kindness during this journey.

Boobs and Bounce

(written Friday afternoon...Duke has now moved my camera somewhere and we can't find it)

I am trying to get the post I promised with pictures of the new and old house up but my damn camera died and yada yada yada I figured that while I wait for the battery to charge so that I can take a picture of the Kingdom I will entertain you with a story about my boobs.

I have boobs, two of them to be exact and they are a mighty bountiful twosome at that. I have been busty since the tender age of 14 when I woke one day to find my 34 C's bursting out of my jockey trainer...literally overnight. As the years passed and small children grew so did my bosom. By the time I hit 25 I was wearing a 34 DDD and now at the ripe age of 28 I seem to have settled into a 36G as in Good Golly are those real?!? Yes, sadly they are real, I would never pay to have myself subjected to the kind of attention they garner. they are large and uncomfortable and in the way when I want to golf, run, buy a button down shirt, you get the picture. However they are mine and yes I have dreamed thought of having them reduced but when I went for the consultation I was 23 and decided to wait until after I had kids...and you know how well that has gone for me. For now they are stuck to my chest. I will say that I have been lucky to have found a great sports bra that allows me to run(when not swollen with child) and that I found a very nice bra boutique in Portland that keeps my breasts adorned in the latest rebar and tenting material.

That being said I no longer live in Portland and it is not convenient to drive four hours when I need a bra. I have gotten around this so far by buying in bulk once or twice a year...except for this year. After years of reading story after story of what pregnancy does to your breasts I have to be honest that my biggest fear of actually getting pregnant was not the eventual birth but what might happen to the laddies. We had somehow reached a sort of peace treaty in which I would continue to house, feed and support them if they refused to grow anymore. It was a nice agreement and as days turned to weeks turned to months I had felt lucky (not lucky enough to say it out loud but definitely to think it in a very quiet way) that my breasts really had not changed much, sure things were getting a bit snug but that didn't happen until a week or so ago.

Today I called on my trusty friend google to find me a bra store in Southern Oregon. It came back with one option. One. So i called them and asked if they carried the brand, style and size I am looking for and if they had sizes in the surrounding numbers. I even went so far as to give her the style number from my bra. She assured me that not only did they have what I was seeking but that they had a fairly wide selection of stock. As quick as Kris Kringle I hopped to my car (and burned my ass on the leather seat since it is still 90+ here)and speed down the freeway a short twenty minutes later I was naked in the dressing room being measured. It appears that I am right in between a G and a GG. No problem she assured she would be right back with the bra I had called on.

I should know that nothing is ever that easy.

She returned with six bras that resembled NOTHING like the one I had called about. "Oh that style, no we don't have it in That Exact style but these are similar." to which I wanted to say look bitch I would not have driven all the way across town while in the middle of trying to move and pack for a work trip and gestating life had you been HONEST and told me that you didn't have what I needed. Instead I said I would give them a go. The first three were all lacy and frankly they sucked. I like a nice firm bra (See rebar and tenting..I don't care if it is pretty, the jig is up, Duke knows what is going on under there) with great support, I truly believe that is the reason i do not have back pain or shoulder grooves, common complaints made by my big busted buddies. I tried on another two with the same lack of support and while I was trying to explain to her why they didn't work for me she interrupted me and said this:

Bra Bitch: I feel that because you are pregnant you have unrealistic expectations of what a bra can do for you.

she went on to say something about breast tissue but I was too busy mental taking her apart to listen.

Duchess: Withering look

BB: yada yada yada

Duchess: I am sorry that you feel I, The Customer, have an Unrealistic Expectation of the product you are presenting me. Indeed if you consider a bra that allows my breasts to move from my clavicle all the way to my belly button when i walk or a bra with a band that does not lay flat on my torso at a cost of $70.00 a pop to be acceptable and Realistic then I feel as though I have failed to communicate what I am looking for.

BB: Oh I think we are talking about two different things.

D: It would appear to be that way. Do you have anything (holding up bra I just arrived in) that is this style and manufacturer.

BB: I believe I do hold on.

In the end I bought one bra because I really needed it for the upcoming trip it is pretty close to the one I wanted but is not seamless. Then I marched home called my favorite bra store in Portland and was helped immediately. A plan was hatched and when I am in Portland during September all will be righted with my chest.

I was Gilmored.

I am a huge fan of the TV show Gilmore Girls. Some might say, "Hey Duchess, be a fan not a fanatic." but they just don't get it. Gilmore Girls has been my go-to show for mood elevation and relaxing since I was 20. If I need to veg out or I am sick or stressed I head there. I even keep an episode or two in my DVR so if I have a really bad nightmare I can get my mind off of it. In the early days of this pregnancy when I was super puking and bleeding and scared I would sit and watch for hours. Hell when I had my ectopic and they were getting me set up for my emergency surgery I managed to find an episode on TV. Lest you think all I do is sit on my butt in front of the boob-tube all day I used to read constantly and run and in general be an active member of society but during my first-trimester I could no longer concentrate on anything.

Anyway I think you get the point. I love the Gilmore Girls.

After my appointment yesterday Duke and I walked out of the building and just sort of stood on the sidewalk staring at each other. This morning I realized that it reminded me of an episode in Season 6(I had to look this up - I'm not a total freak show) where Lorelai and Rory go for dinner at the grandparents house and they are all fighting (in actuality they are doing some good work on their family issues) and when the ladies leave to go home they just sort of stand on the front porch looking drained and spacey. That was Duke and I yesterday, first we were so up and then so down and then up and down and Hey! When did we get dropped off at Magic Mountain?!?!

In hindsight I think I handled it pretty well, I came home, made some phone calls, ate cereal, took a three hour nap and then went to the Snoop Dogg and Warren G. concert last night. What? Isn't it normal to have a day where you are up and then down and then for fun you hit a gangsta rap show?

Today I am feeling decidedly upbeat and optimistic. Whether this baby is a boy or a girl - it is tough as nails and precious as can be. And if there is a pesky hole in the Cub's heart Duke already came up with a plan of action.

We, together, will fill it with love.

Alive and maybe kicking

Sorry for my lack of posting, things have been rolling right along around here. I am 14w1d, I am showing now and some of the vomiting has started to subside, the nausea is still here but manageable when combined with phenergan. I had my second OB appointment on Monday and everything looks good I was down another two pounds bringing the total loss to 15 pounds but fear not I have gained six inches in my waist. Real pants are a thing of the past.

I have several things I want to write about; my Nanna and Poppa, the 10th anniversary of the day I was attacked, a new career move, and marriage. However at the moment I need to catch up on my goggle reader which has 174 new items, I have been a very bad clicker (sorry Mel!) and must catch up. After that I promise to return to dazzle you with my wit and charm.

I'm on my last leg and Beta #1

I am sick, not quite deathbed dramatic yet but sick enough to lay in said bed all weekend watching the Closer. Sick enough to call in to work for like the first time ever. Sick enough to let the doctor stick one of those wood tongue depressors into my mouth. Sick enough to man up and go get my beta this morning so I Can Take The Good Drugs.

Also so I can have margaritas on my birthday tomorrow. Blood work should be back this afternoon, if you would not mind entertaining telling me, how long did you wait to have your beta?

Officially off the deep end

Thank you so much to the lurker who emailed me - my freak out is now over. This person was very nice in their email to me and I will now resume business as usual.

I want to fire my clinic like yesterday, they are a chick clinic that deals with all matters, and it is a satellite office of a very highly respected fertility clinic in Portland. The doctor I have there is wonderful, competent, kind and saved my life when I had the ectopic. I love being in her care, she is not the problem, the staff at this clinic sucks. It is clear to me that they are not used to dealing with infertility and the questions, concerns and procedures surrounding the whole process.

As I mentioned the other day I feel like I am coming down with something. I rarely get sick but when I do it is B.A.D. I have had pneumonia seven times in the last ten years and each time it seems to be worse. So anyway my clinic called me to confirm my u/s for Wednesday and I had the audacity to ask if I could even have an IUI if I was sick and if I am sick and it does turn into pneumonia will there be antibiotics that I can take - perhaps others will find this to be a stupid question but it is my question nonetheless. Not only did this bitch person seem annoyed that I wanted to talk to the nurse but then she chewed my ass for not already having scheduled my IUI. For the fucking love, if I could schedule it don't you think I would? Do they think I enjoy calling my husband and asking him to wank it at a mere moments notice so that I can rush over to their office in traffic before the "sample" expires? I asked again, nicely I might add, to leave a message with my apparently over the top stupid question for Dr. King’s nurse and after a huffy sigh the dumb skank lady said she would pass it along.

Remember the woman (A.) I wrote about a week or so ago the six cycle lady, yeah well she and I went to coffee a few days after that dinner and the kid thing came up again. Turns out she has PCOS (too pissed to link but feel free to Google) and they used Clomid, Metformin and IUI to achieve pregnancy - good thing I didn't toss that rock what with my glass house being fragile and all. So I owned up to what Duke and I are doing and she asked what doctor I was seeing to which I was shocked as I had only found two physicians in town who handle infertility and one of them was dead. Apparently there is one other guy, a super dude if you will, who has one administrative person, one nurse practitioner and himself. A. was raving about how great it all was and how attentive and professional it all was and she encouraged me to contact them to see if he was taking new patients.

So after that huffy bitch at my clinic cut me off and I was sitting here on the couch with questions, questions, questions I picked up the phone and dialed the office where a kind woman answered, listened to me and then in the midst of my rambling rant replied, "Of course you can do an IUI if you are sick, poor dear, let's set you up with a consultation."

About six hours after I made that phone call Dr. King called me back personally (I have decided her nurse hates me, whatever) and answered my question about being sick, told me not to take ibuprofen and asked me if I thought I knew when I would be ready for the IUI and that she is not on-call this weekend but she guessed she would just have to come in (insert her huffy sigh here). No joke it took everything in my power not to scream into the phone that unless the fucking clouds were going to spell it out I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE, for the fucking love as soon as I know you will know.

Sorry this is disjointed, I am pissed. My ultrasound is tomorrow at 8am followed by my consultation with the new miracle man at 9am. I will finish this cycle out, see what the other doctor has to say and then make my choice.

Call Out

So I have site meter and the joy of that is that I can see referring addresses. Someone has regularly been visiting my site from Spruce Grove, Alberta. Not to call your ass out or anything but if you could email me that would be great. I used to live in Edmonton and still have family/friends there. If you fall into one of these two categories I would love to know that you found my ass out and are visiting regularly. I hate to seem so needy but one of the things I love best about this here blog is the anonymity that it provides and if you do know me in real life I would like to know.

On the other hand if you just live in Spruce Grove and have no freaking clue who I am, please just ignore me and carry on - I am very hormonal after all.

Tomorrow I promise a full update and the explanation for wanting to fire my clinic 2 days before my IUI.

Of Shadows and Connections

Spacemom had a great post today that got me thinking about my own family. Right before my thirteenth birthday my father passed away (I can't remember if I have written this story before or not so please stick with me if I have) shortly after that someone asked me if I believed in the afterlife, people watching over me and ghosts. My quick initial reply was yes to the first and no to the last two. The thought of my forty-eight year-old father's ghost watching over my thirteen year old activities really freaked me out and the thought of waking up in the middle of the night to his presence sitting at the foot of the bed led me to sleep with the light on for the next three months.

Slowly as I adjusted to life without my father and began to develop my own beliefs in faith, I started to hope that maybe he was watching over me, maybe we are all really connected by something bigger than ourselves (still not on board with seeing ghosts, spirits and what-not, no problem with people who have these "gifts" just not my thing, for some reason the notion totally freaks me out), However, never having had any sort of sign from my father I just continued to grieve in silence and work my way through high school.

During the summer before my junior year of high school I decided that I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend (maybe TMI, but hang in this really is all going somewhere). He being the good Catholic boy that he was needed a bit of convincing that we were not going straight to hell (we were both very inexperienced when we started dating and after a year and a half of making out, I had had enough) I didn't plan my seduction very carefully, we went to dinner and a movie and then back to my house which by some very weird stoke of luck was empty and I jumped him. No less than forty-five seconds after it was over the phone rang; it was near my curfew so I figured it was just my Mom calling to make sure I had made it home. It ended up being my sister who only a week or so before had come home from Nicaragua where she had been on a medical mission for Doctors without Borders. She sounded half asleep and in a much panicked voice she wanted to know what I was doing. I told her I had just gotten home and I was getting ready for bed. "Oh, I just called because I had the most vivid dream that you were having sex and I wanted to know if you have had sex yet or not" Of course I said no, and she seemed appeased and I made the mistake of telling the boyfriend and then he really thought we were going to hell. I did finally tell her the story right before my wedding and she asked if I remembered what I had worn that night and if yes did it include a red sweater, I did remember and it was very pretty mohair deep scarlet sweater - from the gap where I worked at the time, but I digress. I had the very strange feeling of connection with my sister. We have had other instances of things like this since then but none so clear. I finally had proof of connection, creepy as this proof was, I secretly hoped it was possible that my father was watching over my life, maybe not all the parts but checking in occasionally.

Fast forward again to 2001, I had come home from school and September 11th had just happened and I couldn't get my student visa renewed (I went to school in Canada). I was working as a waitress at a place I hated and just making ends meet, I had tons of stupid debt and was quickly becoming panicked at how to pay for all of it and school and the cost to now have all of my courses transferred. I had just reconnected with Duke and I hated that I worked nights and he worked regular hours but I also knew I didn't want to sit at a desk all day. I met a couple who sat in my section one afternoon with their three week old twin girls, how sweet, I mentioned I had been a nanny and they mentioned they were looking for one but there was a catch as they had another set of twins that were just turning two and a seven and nine year old to boot. SIX KIDS!!! Let me not forget the small fact that I would be alone as they both worked full time and were not into the full time parenting (the stories I could tell). I met the kids and took the job and fell in love with that crazy family and they fell in love with me and I got them through the next three-and-a-half years. I digress...again, one day the father's (T.) parents came to visit Portland from Idaho. T's Dad was not his biological father but had adopted him when he was very young. T's Dad came into the kitchen to meet me and stopped dead in his tracks, looked at me and said, "If I didn't know better I would say you are the daughter of a guy I went to school with." I replied that it couldn't be as my father was from Great Britain and then attended high school in Spokane, Washington. "That's where I went to school too! Was his name P.H.?" I almost passed out on the spot. This guy who happened to know my father from a hundred million years ago ends up parenting the guy who gave me a job when I was on the brink of young financial ruin. This job was my lighthouse in a very scary dark time, it gave me financial security and allowed me the opportunity to go to school, have a lovely home and not feel so lost after not being able to return to school. It also taught me volumes on parenting and gave me the knowledge that I really, really wanted to have a crazy family of my own. I have told this story to skeptics who determined it was just a big coincidence and after reading this you may feel the same but to me it will always be my father looking out for me the only way he could.

Are you wondering yet about why the middle bit with my sister might be relevant? It is because she phoned me the other night to tell me of a sequence of dreams she has been having. The cancer has not been responding to treatments and she has been a little down and very tired. She told me that the dreams started with her at a physic who was reading tea leaves and told her that someone close to her was trying to build a family, she told the woman yes, her sister and the woman looked her dead in the face and said sometimes for a soul to enter the earth first one must leave, she woke herself up but the next night she went right back in and was at my baby shower, she said I was huge and happy and shiny and it was such a fresh light moment, it was very peaceful but then the Medium showed up with at the house with a reminder that we can't always have it all. The last dream she had in this series was of me in the hospital starting to push to deliver twins and she was having chest pain (my sister was there when my other sister gave birth and the doctor let her "catch" the baby as she is able to deliver but is not licensed in the US) and then the dream just ended.

Another connection or just crazy dreams brought on by fear and anti-nausea medicine? I hope it is the latter but either way I believe this is another time that my father will step in and help us find our ways.