Spring?????

OK, I jinxed our spring by posting about it. Since then it has snowed every single day, some days just a little, but also one day with half a foot of snow! My garden is gone again, covered in snow, and I haven't seen any robins yet either! Not that I can blame them for keeping far away from here! LOL

At least it motivated me to really clean and declutter our kitchen counters. It was about time. I did it when Sander was home, so he could do his part of the scrubbing and cleaning :-) I think he was happy to go back to work today, instead of helping me doing stuff like that. I also have started a bit on the book case in the computer room, but you can't even see that anything has happened to it, it needs a lot more work.

Today we baked one of the cakes from my new Cake Bible. Tim helped me and did all the decorating. He really enjoyed doing it, and all the kids loved having a cake for dessert. Apart from Jane, who preferred a bagel :-)

I have been doing tons of research on vaginal birth after myomectomy and I am convinced that the rupture risk is actually very low. It even seems that all the ruptures I have found in the literature after myomectomy, are late 2nd, early 3rd trimester, not during labor. And where the docs want to me to have continuous EFM (Electronic Fetal Monitoring) during labor, there has been no one who has proposed to commit me to the hospital from week 28 to week 34 to have EFM during this 'higher risk for rupture' period.

Of course, the thing is that there aren't big studies out there, and most of the people in the studies end up with a c-section, but I found a few hundred vaginal births after myomectomy anyway. Still working on getting the full text of the articles I need to know exactly how many there were in the studies.

There were 3 uterine ruptures in those births, but none during trial of labor, all in that 28-34 weeks time frame. So it's not like a planned c-sec would have prevented those ruptures. And it also seems that once I make it to labor, I will be fine. that the 'high risk' part is that time frame in pregnancy when the uterus is growing really fast.

When I started out this pregnancy, I thought for sure it would be better to go to the hospital 'just in case' which such a high rupture risk (my ob quoted 8 - 10 % back then). And also the fact that my scar is at the fundus, where there are more muscles / blood, so a rupture could be more problematic.
But after doing all this research I am starting to wonder. Do I really want to go to the hospital?

Happy Birthday to Me!

It's my birthday today! So now I am even more advanced in my maternal age LOL. The kids were a lot more excited about the whole birthday than I am. Got lots of presents this morning. New binoculars, The Cake Bible, chocolate (yum!), a pocket knife, and a bunch of books (including a new Terry Pratchett one)

A good friend came over with yet another present, a nice set of note cards to write letters, which I have really been into this last year. And two other good friends called me from the Netherlands, I was amazed that they remembered that today was my birthday!

We always have the birthday person pick their cake, and Erik had told me that I had to pick a bunny cake. I still had a bunny cake pan from last year Easter, so that was an easy one to do. I know it's a bit silly to have a bunny cake for your 38yo birthday, but nobody seemed to mind LOL. I made a devil's food cake with buttercream frosting. And found out that my artistic skills in drawing the bunny contours on the cake still need a lot of improvement :-)

He also had asked for 'sticky bunbuns', so I figured I would make them too. This is his word for cinnamon buns with fondant glaze, which are indeed quite sticky :-) Tara and Jane decided that they rather had normal sandwiches though, oh well :-)

The girls made party hats for all of us, so I was stuck wearing a party hat while opening my presents :-) They had made a paper crown for when we were eating the cake.

All in all we had a great day, I spent a lot of time drooling over The Cake Bible. Tara and Tim already picked their birthday cakes, and Erik has picked at least 3 of them for his birthday... LOL.
But of course, the best birthday present of all, is our miracle baby. I am just so thrilled that things finally are working out! Couldn't have asked for anything better for my birthday!

Yet Another Prenatal

Had another prenatal today, everything is going well. I am getting 'fat' though, 160 lbs, which sounded like a lot to me till she looked up what I was with Erik at this time in pregnancy and it was 159 lbs. That's pretty close. I was spilling some sugar in my urine, but that was most likely the mango I had for lunch. Later I remember that I had trail mix too, with dried fruits and some chocolate chips, so that wouldn't have helped either.

The baby's heart beat via the fetoscope was very, very clear. Heart rate was 136 bpm. Baby's position was breech, but that's not something to worry about at this point, he is all over the place anyway. I measured 29.5 cm, which is close enough to the 30 weeks I am. Still amazed that I am the homestretch now, ¾ of the pregnancy is behind me already!

We talked more about the whole birthing issue, I have an appointment set up with the 'ob who wants a c-section' on April 12th. Will have to convince him of the error of his ways. I feel very relaxed about the whole 'high risk' birth now, or maybe I should say that I fully do not believe that this is a high risk birth, notwithstanding the myomectomy. Now I just need to convince the ob of the same... I need to get some full texts of journal articles, since pubmed charges a $30 per article fee if I want the full text. I need 3 articles, and I just am not willing to spend $90 on this, so trying to find an alternative way of getting them.

Spring is gone again, back to snow and blizzards. Actually, this morning it still felt and looked like spring, even heard my first cardinal for the year. This afternoon, we had a blizzard. Gotta love March in New England :-) Luckily there wasn't any real accumulation, but it was cold, cold, cold!

Not much exciting going on, I look at my house, think about what needs to be decluttered and then totally ignore it :-) I did buy a cute baby outfit at the thrift store this week though, I am really believing in the baby now. And a friend gave me some more cloth diapers, I just love looking at them and visualizing my new baby using them.

One really exciting thing though is that I finished my LLL leader applicant process, so I am an official leader now! Will lead my first meeting in April, not sure whether I am looking forward to it or dreading it, a bit of both I think :-)

Spring!!!

Early for New England, but spring definitely is in the air! The snow is melting, the kids have been biking, I have been walking, life is good! I even can see part of my vegetable garden again! My hands are itching to start something in it, but I think it's a tad early still :-) I did pick up gardening stuff that I ordered today though, tons of seeds, and all kinds of other goodies, like hoops and drip irrigation system. Haven't seen any robins yet though, once I see those, I will know it really is spring!

I went swimming today, after a few weeks of not getting around to it. It was fun, although I thought I would never be able to make it my normal 40 lengths. Did it anyway! I felt really good afterwards, and celebrated by having a simple lunch outside at our health foody supermarket. All by myself, well I guess not totally by myself, but with my little passenger on board :-)

Yesterday, Tara and I spent some time making baby wipes. She was so happy to help me and so proud of what we did. Just simple wipes, baby blanket with doggies print on one side, terry cloth on the other, and a dense zig zag stitch around (I wish I had a serger, but I don't) We made eight of them, they look really cute. Looking forward to using them for this precious baby.

I made cashew macaroni for a friend last week, she just had a baby and this was my turn to make her a meal. Not only did I enjoy cooking for her, but I also got to hold her tiny newborn! So small, so light, so cute!!! Made me look forward even more to holding our own baby a few months from now.

Took the kids swimming today, they had fun, but Tara had a lot of ear pain when we came home. I first thought that she had gotten some water in her ear, but then she told me that it had been hurting for a few days already, so now I am wondering whether she has an ear infection. Hope she feels better tomorrow! We also went to the playground, for the very first time this year, just ignored the ice and snow that was still on the ground there :-)

Yesterday, a good friend called me to ask whether I wanted to go to an Irish music concert with her. Of course my reply was YES!!! and so we went, just the two of us. It was fun, very good musicians and the baby really enjoyed the music too. Oh, on the way back home it was snowing, so much for spring... At least it didn't stick and today was nice anyway.

Our Anniversary

Last Sunday was our anniversary. Been married for 13 years now! It seems much longer, hmmm, maybe I really am getting old? LOL I wanted to do something special, so I made cream puffs and a special cake. Since it was Washington's birthday, I wanted to try a special Washington pie.

I started with baking 2 round vanilla cakes, and cutting them in two layers, so I had a total of four layers. The cake was built with cake layer, chocolate pie filling layer, cake layer, homemade strawberry jam layer, cake, pie filling, and last cake layer. This all was topped with hot fudge sauce, and then I put strawberries and whipped cream on top. Decadent! I did find out that whipped cream does melt on hot fudge sauce though, live and learn :-) Next time I guess I should let that layer cool down before adding the whipped cream. But we all were hungry, so we just lived with 'not totally perfect looking, but tasting wonderful!'.

Of course, it did keep me awake till 4am or so with heartburn, but I have to say 'It was worth it!!!' :-) But I guess it's not something I would want to eat every day.

Kate and Erik are sick yet again, coughing, coughing, coughing. We haven't had much sleep, I hope they will feel better soon. I got a new, alternative medicine, Ivy Calm, which we are trying now, hope it will work and get us all some sleep. Did I mention that I am sooooooooooooooo ready for summer????

Today I baked almond shortbread, it came out really well. Very almond'y! I served some at my LLL Leader Applicant meeting this morning, and took the rest to a friend's house tonight. Every body liked it. Well, apart from my kids of course LOL. The only ones who were even willing to try it were Erik and Kate, and Kate didn't like it. Erik took at least 2 bites and didn't even complain :-)

Baby is still kicking away, I am so happy about all the activity! I will actually get to hold this little one!!!! So excited!

Reflections

... on getting older. Two things this week that made me think about this, most of the time I don't really give it much of a second thought, it just happens anyway, whether I think about it or not.

First thing that happened, was when we had one of Tara's friends over, and we were talking about this new baby and maybe even more babies. She thought about it for a bit, and then said 'Taking care of more than seven kids would be hard, maybe you better wait until these kids are grown up!' I smiled, and thought that it would be nice if fertility would stay around for that long, but I realize that it is pretty unlikely that I still will be able to have babies once our current kids are grown up. On the one hand I will be a bit sad about that, on the other hand, it will be nice in a way to move on to the next stage of my life. But for now I am not ready to give up fertility yet, I hope to have at least a few more babies after this one! So I better not get old too fast! LOL

Second thing was today, when Kate asked me 'Do you know what an old lady is? You are not an old lady yet, because an old lady is very, very old, and she walks with a stick.' Hmmm, I think that will most likely be pretty far off for me unless some accident or so happens. But it really did remind me of my grand grand mother, who was close to 100 years old, and still very active, and then fell and hurt her hip, so she couldn't walk as well anymore and had to use a walking stick. She was not happy about it and refused to go outside with it 'People will think that I am OLD!' I relished in the bond between generations, that my daughter and my grand grand mother both associated being old with using a stick, as if that's the only measurement of age.

Haven't done much more sewing, but plan to work on the baby wipes soon. Today was a baking day, baked 24 blue berry muffins, and 24 banana chocolate chip muffins. Going to bake a few loaves of bread too, and maybe some granola bars, to take to a baby shower tomorrow. It's another food shower, I really like the idea of those. I made tofu fried rice and mushroom kasha. Of course, I ended up buying a diaper cover for her too, couldn't resist :-)

Eating our way through the freezer, had a great tomato soup tonight, with home made bread of course. I want to 'get rid' of all the old stuff before this year's gardening season, and before I start making freezer meals for after the baby. We made an inventory last weekend, so it's a lot easier now that I actually KNOW what's in there :-)

Baby still is kicking, kicking, and kicking, often even before I get up in the morning. Makes me feel so much better about this pregnancy, especially at my 'advanced maternal age' LOL.

Sewing!

Started sewing on Saturday. I haven't done any sewing in ages, so happy to get back on track again. For now I am making post partum pads, because I can use a bunch more, and they are easy. On Saturday it took me about half a day to sew the first one... The sewing machine was NOT cooperating. Cleaned it, kept rethreading it, but it kept acting up. Finally found some sewing machine oil and we oiled it and that seemed to have done the trick. It finally was working again!!!! The next pad took a lot less time now that the machine was actually working LOL

I ended up making four pads that day. Today I made another seven of them, so have a stack of eleven brand new post partum pads waiting for this baby! Now I'll either make some wipes, or maybe another batch of pads, so that I can cross off the pads item from my 'things to do' list. The girls have been enjoying my sewing, 'helping' me while I am doing it, and having all kinds of questions. Tara is excited about helping me with the wipes 'Then the baby can use something that I helped make!'

Yesterday, I worked on getting the desk in the living room decluttered. This is one of those desks that mail and other stuff get stacked on, so after ignoring it for a while, there are stacks and stacks of papers on it. Every time you try to find something, at least two of those stacks fall over.. Very frustrating. But we got the biggest stack reduced to less than half size, so things are improving. It will take another few days of decluttering to make the whole desk look nice though.

Baby is still kicking up a storm, I love feeling him. It was a long wait before he finally started kicking, but it was worth it. Happy to feel him so much. Looking forward to holding him in my arms in May or June!

My Prenatal

Had a great prenatal today. A friend offered to watch the kids, so it was just me and Sander with the midwife, amazing! I took my 'vaginal birth after myomectomy' research and we talked a lot about it. She showed me where I could improve info and the presentation to make it even more impressive to the obs.

We also went over my food diary, she said it was mostly fine, just to try to add some more protein. And then after 40 minutes or so, we got around to doing the physical stuff. I had some ketones in my urine, but she didn't worry about that when she heard I hadn't had lunch yet (just grabbed a few crackers and cheese before running out of the door). My blood pressure was great, and we were able to hear the baby's heart beat with the fetoscope again. Not that I worried about her, since she has been kicking so much. But it was nice to hear it anyway, her heart rate was 144 bpm today. She was laying king of transverse, her head up high next to my belly button, her butt next to my pubic bone. My fundus measured 25.5 cm.

She said I could set up an appt with the obs, since most likely it will take a few weeks anyway to get one. During that time I can finish up the research and send it to them, so they will have it before we talk.

She made a copy of my fibroids surgery report for me, so I could pour over all the info in there today. Interesting to see how it all developed and detoriated during the surgery.

Made brownies today, which reminded me of my pregnancy with Erik, when I had major brownie cravings. Didn't happen this pregnancy, which I guess is A Good Thing, since I seem to be gaining weight fast enough anyway :-) I am baking two cakes now, a square one, and a circle one, so I can put them together to make a heart shaped Valentine's Day cake tomorrow. Tara was asking for one, and I wanted to practice my cake decorating skills, so thought that this would be a fun project.

Working on financial stuff tonight, only about four more years till we will have gotten rid of the mortgage! I can't wait. Also working on keeping track of net worth, it's nice to see it go up with the mortgage going down and the house value going up. Maybe some day we'll be rich :-) Or maybe not :-)

Diaper Fun!

I am slowly starting to believe more and more that things will work out this time (the baby kicking me a lot has helped), and I even have started buying some stuff for this new little one. I can't really justify buying any more diapers, even although there are so many cute ones out there. But I decided that I for sure can justify to buy some more covers :-) It's amazing how many you need with a new baby, right? :-) OK, maybe I can't really justify it either, but a lot better than buying diapers, especially for night time covers.

As a result of this decision, I have been shopping and drooling. So many cute diaper covers, so little money. It's hard to choose, but for now I am concentrating on WAHM fleece covers. I had a good excuse anyway, with a baby shower last week, and another one coming up next week. I got two Stacinator Deluxe Two-layer Fleece Covers. I chose the Wild Things print, since it was on sale, and because I liked it. One of them is for my new baby, and the other one was for last week's baby shower.

I also got Liz's Overnighter Cover, some Cozy Time Babies ones, and a Starbunz Woolup. I am going to give one of the Cozy Time Babies ones to my friend who is having her baby shower next week. It's yet another food shower (2nd baby), but I really want to give her a cute diaper cover too.

I want to make something for this baby, so I got some cute flannel night gown in the thrift store today, and I will make wipes out of this (together with some terry cloth). I also want to make some more post partum pads. I haven't done any sewing in ages, very excited to get started again.

We went to a local motorcycle store yesterday, because I needed to get something for my brother, who is a motorcycle fanatic. My 3yo was all excited. 'Can you buy a motor cycle for me???? Please? Please??? Please?????') I regretfully notified him that he couldn't have a motor cycle. 'But I won't crash into anything, mama!!! I really promise!!!' LOLOL. He still didn't get one :-)

Baby is doing great, making his presence known often enough that I feel a lot better about it all. I will have a prenatal tomorrow, the one that was rescheduled from last week. I will take my research about uterine rupture after myomectomy, to show her that my risks are very very low. I will put this information on a web page soon, to help other people who face this decision.

The Prenatal That Wasn't

I was supposed to have a prenatal last Wednesday, but we had a snow storm instead... I spent the morning shoveling instead of going to the midwife. Oh well...

I was going to update my blog after that prenatal. So that never happened either. I considered waiting till after my prenatal anyway, but it was rescheduled for next Friday, so decided not to have you all wait that long :-)

I did talk to my midwife, and they said that my former backup obs are reconsidering, because they feel bad about turning people away from their care. I was happy to hear that, since they would be much better than our local teaching hospital. I am compiling all the research showing that I am not as much at risk as they fear me to be. I plan on putting it up on a web page once I have compiled it all, so that other people can use it too. There isn't that much out there about birthing options after myomectomy. Heck, most web pages say 'VBACs are not allowed if you have had a myomectomy'. This is NOT supported at all by current research, it just seems to be 'fear of litigation' medicine.

Good news, my paperwhites are blooming! Every time I see them, I smile, and think about my angel babies. The amaryllis isn't doing much yet, it will be a while before that one blooms. The 'old' amaryllis has sent up another stalk though, and I have four flowers blooming on there. Two more are unfolding.Very beautiful!

I did lots of baking today. 24 blueberry muffins, 17 banana chocolate chip ones, and 8 scallion biscuits. I think there are exactly 2 muffins and 2 biscuits leftover... I made split pea soup, to eat tonight, and to freeze some for a friend who has a baby shower tomorrow. It's a food shower, we are supposed to bring a frozen meal. I also bought a very cute diaper cover for her, couldn't resist :-)

The baby is kicking a lot now, I just love love love it. I am so looking forward to meeting this little one! Although he's due in the middle of planting season, so I guess going overdue would be a good thing, but that doesn't seem to be a problem here. Never have had any baby arrive before the due date :-)