Be Careful What You Wish For...You Might Get Pregnant

This post is the latest in my "Way-Back Wednesday" series (on the third Wednesday of each month, I revisit one of my favorite posts from the past). Enjoy!

I realized yesterday, thanks to a handy iphone pregnancy app, that I am now 38 weeks pregnant. This came as a bit of a shock, because, of course, it means that technically I could have this baby at any time. Like, even tomorrow. TOMORROW.

(OK, yes. I admit it: I am kind of a bad mom for needing a pregnancy app to tell me how far along I am. With my two previous pregnancies I knew to the day where I was in my gestation. What can I say? I'm older this time around, and I have a 3-year-old and 5-year-old to keep track of. Not my fault. Well, mostly not my fault.)

So. The baby could come at any time. I should be worried, because we are not ready. AT ALL. I haven't retrieved our bassinet from my friend who has been using it, the crib mattress is currently on the floor ready to catch my 3-year-old the next time he falls out of his bed, and I haven't boiled the
nipples for any of our bottles. (And before you get snippy about the fact that this baby will probably be fed formula from early on in his/her life, read THIS.)

So, yeah, if the baby were born tomorrow, we'd have some scrambling to do.

However, I'm not worried. My oldest son came at 41 weeks, and my younger son took even longer than that to be fully cooked. Odds are we have three more weeks. PLENTY of time to get that infant car seat installed. LOTS of time to pick a name. SCADS of time to replace all the newborn clothes I gave away three years ago. No problem! And after all, this is my last pregnancy (for REALS this time) and I want to enjoy it for as long as I can.

On the other hand...I haven't been enjoying it quite so much this time.

While this pregnancy has been easy compared to some women's pregnancies, it's been a rough-ish few months for me. It started when I got shingles, which I really thought was an old person's disease. (It's not.) Then the baby was breech for a while and my dreams of a natural, probably-unmedicated birth were put on hold until he/she got with the program and turned around. Recently, I spent a week with a terrible cold, and just when it started to clear up...I got pink eye, which I really thought was a young person's disease. (It's not.)

I figured the worst was over until I experienced something I'd never heard of before: an ocular migraine. Basically, your vision gets all screwy for 30 minutes or so, and your kids get to watch extra tv while you panic and call Labor and Delivery because you're certain you have a tumor or a stroke or something. If you're lucky like me, you get a wonderful midwife on the phone who explains what's happening and as if by magic your vision returns to normal pretty much instantly. So. Much. Fun.

But, despite those discomforts, I'm pretty excited to meet our baby. I'm excited to start calling it "him" or "her" instead of "it." I'm excited to start learning his/her personality. (Though I just know already that he/she will be a good sleeper. I SAID, I KNOW IT.) I'm excited to see my 3-year-old become a big brother. I know there are sleepless nights and poop-soaked days ahead of me, but I'm ready. I still have doubts about how I will handle being a mom of three, but I figure we'll all muddle through it somehow. It won't be perfect, and at times it will probably be a big ole mess, but we'll figure it out.

So, given all that, I thought this month I'd revisit the blog post that started it all...

Dead Womb Walking?

I wrote it back before I got pregnant, when I was still trying to figure out if we should have a 3rd baby. Enjoy it!

I'm Pregnant and Nesting...Sort Of

This post is the latest in my "Way-Back Wednesday" series (on the third Wednesday of each month, I revisit one of my favorite posts from the past). Enjoy!

It's been a long 34 weeks...

It occurred to me recently that I never officially announced my pregnancy here on my blog. So, let's get that out of the way:

I'M PREGNANT!!

But before you start oohing and aahing and wishing me a happy and healthy nine months, you should know something. I'm not just pregnant. I'm SUPER pregnant. Like, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel, can't-see-my-feet, 34-weeks-along pregnant. I just kind of forgot to announce it before now. Blame it on hormones.

Anyway, like a waddling, heavy-breathing, not-really-all-that-effective ninja, I've sneaked along to that point in pregnancy where the nesting instinct starts to kick in. I want to dig out the bottles and the baby clothes and set up the all-important baby swing. I want to install the infant car seat and get the Boppy out of storage. I want to set up the baby's room so it actually looks a little like a baby's room and less like the play room that it currently is.

But I can't. I just can't get it done.

Sure, there are the usual deterrents. My two young boys, for one, who will go from happily playing together to trying to kill each other the minute they see me engage in any activity that doesn't involve them. My current physical state doesn't help, either. I'm big, I'm tired, and I spend a lot of time limping around holding on to my butt thanks to what I'm told is a pinched sciatic nerve.

And sometimes this happens.

But the biggest obstacle to me getting everything ready for our new little one is an even more daunting problem: Our house is a godawful mess. It's not that it's dirty, exactly, (as long as you don't look inside the microwave) it's just, well, cluttered. We have a lot of stuff, and no matter how often I put it away it ends up all over. All over the dining room table, all over the living room floor, even all over the tiny counter next to the bathroom sink (WHY do I find Hot Wheels there every morning? WHY?)

So, this time around my nesting process includes what I'm calling "pre-nesting:" the sorting, organizing, and purging I have to do so I can actually nest. Since I'm actually at the "pre-pre-nesting" phase (the one where you look around and think about everything that has to be done then sit down and check facebook), I've been reminded of this post a lot lately:

I Don't Think We Could Charge For Admission...

Enjoy! And step carefully on your way out!

Dead Womb Walking?

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my uterus.

For most of my life I have taken my uterus for granted and haven’t thought about it much at all. During my two pregnancies I thought about it A LOT, of course, but once my babies joined us on this side of my cervix, I kind of forgot about it again. But now I feel bad, like I haven’t appreciated it enough. It grew two healthy babies and helped usher them into this world just as it should. (And one of those babies was 9 pounds, 10 ounces and almost two weeks late—that’s above and beyond the call of duty, uterus-wise.) If uterus-having were an Olympic sport, I’d at least qualify for the finals, I think. (No medal, though—those would go to the Super Uteruses, like the ones in surrogate mothers and Michelle Duggar.)

So why am I now suddenly all, “How great is my uterus?”

See, I had a birthday recently. The First Annual Celebration of My 39^th Birthday, to be precise.  And as the big 4-0 looms ever larger, I can’t help but wonder if my uterus’s time is up.

If it’s not just a dead womb walking.

I have always said that I want to be done having kids by age 40. I’m not sure why I drew the line at 40—I guess it was all the talk about how your fertility decreases around then, at the same time that your chances of having problems with your pregnancy increase. For whatever reason, for me and many of my friends who put off having kids until our 30s, 40 is the big cutoff date. Last call at the fertility saloon, if you will.

Well, 40 is just one year away. And if you do the math, given a nine-month pregnancy (HA!), that means we have just 3 more months to decide if I’m retiring the old uterus or calling it back into baby-making action one last time.

And I just don’t know.

There are some days when I KNOW, unequivocally, that my two darling boys are enough for me. It’s not just the days when they fight like rabid badgers, though that certainly helps. But it’s also the days when they are just wonderful; when we are lying in a heap on the couch reading a book together, or sitting on the floor at the airport eating a McDonald’s picnic and watching planes take off as we wait out a 2-hour delay. And I think, “How can I ask for more than this? Why rock this happy little boat?”

But, then… Then I remember being pregnant. Feeling those first kicks and hiccups and even the right hooks to the bladder. Somehow the balloon ankles, sciatica, and crippling nighttime carpal tunnel pain are forgotten. Instead I think about that delicious anticipation that comes before you meet your newest little one, the nine months of wondering what he or she will be like, and then the slow process of getting to know the precious little human you helped create.

(If a mom with a new baby happens to walk by as I’m having all these thoughts, there’s a good chance my ovaries will just explode.)

Ovaries exploding in 3, 2, 1...

It doesn’t help that every time I turn around or log onto facebook someone in my real or online life is announcing their third pregnancy. I can’t even read my favorite celebrity gossip magazine without hearing about Jennifer Garner’s new (third) baby or Tori Spelling getting pregnant just one month after her second baby with her current husband was born. (By the way, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post, am I right? ONE MONTH? We all know what that means, and that is completely cray cray. Good lord, give your poor lady parts a break, Tori!)

Of course, everyone assumes that if we tried for a third, I’d want a girl. And sure, there are times when I think, “Wow, everyone in this family farts a whole lot,” and then I think it might be nice to have a daughter to hide in the corner with, fanning ourselves and spraying Febreze at anyone who gets close. And, I have to admit I kind of want to see what would happen if my husband ever had to deal with little-girl hair. THAT would make for some entertaining facebook photos, I’m sure.

But truthfully, when I think about having another child, I don’t secretly wish for a certain gender. I just think about holding a squishy little newborn and smelling his or her wonderful little head. (What is it about newborns’ heads that make them smell so good?) I think about another round of first smiles, first steps, first words. I think about the amazing, addictive, indescribable feeling of love I have for my sons.

But still, I just don’t know.

I wish that the decision to have a third child were as cut-and-dried as the decision to have a first or second. With our first baby, the question my husband and I had was relatively easy to answer: Did we want kids or not? The answer was yes, the timing was right, so we moved on to the fun part. Sure we were a little scared and not entirely sure what to expect from parenthood, but we forged ahead anyway. The decision to have a second child was also easy. We asked ourselves,  “Do we want our child to have a sibling?” The answer again was yes, and though it was a little more difficult to find time for the fun part with a toddler in the house, we managed to make it happen.

It's Ryan Gosling holding a baby. *Drool*

But, a third? Not so easy. Right now, we are so lucky. My two boys are healthy. They are active, happy, little beasts who, sure, tend to break things and whine a lot and refuse to eat most vegetables, but who also, for the most part, get along with others and follow most social norms (you know, just not the ones involving nudity). They are by no means perfect, but they are perfect for US. How do I know if we are meant to have another?

So. My husband and I have some thinking to do in the next month or so. There’s a lot to consider—even more than what I’ve laid out here. My uterus is looking for answers, and I can’t keep her waiting much longer. (Uteruses are female, right? It would be weird otherwise, I think.)

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you—how did you know when you were done having children? And how did you know how many you wanted to have?