Month: April 2008

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Chug a chug a choo choo, we hear you

We had our 12-week appointment with the midwife on Tuesday and were able to hear the baby’s heartbeat with the Doppler. Colum said it sounds like “Chug a chug a choo choo”. That’s not an altogether inaccurate description, either, but I hope he’s not expecting a baby train. I’m already starting to show and my uterus is a bit bigger than my midwife would expect at this stage. She assures us that this is likely because everything grows more readily in second pregnancies. Since we are pretty sure about our date, the only other explanation would be more than one baby, but nobody’s buying that. Twin pregnancies are often accompanied by pretty extreme first trimester symptoms, but I had only the slightest queasiness here and there and typical fatigue. And there are no twins in my family. We’ll find out for sure at our 18 to 20 week ultrasound, but, like I said, we’re not really worried. Really, hardly at all.

There’s lots to say about midwives versus OBs and I hope to find the time to delve into some of that. I’ve given my notice at the restaurant for the end of May, so I’ve been picking up extra shifts while I can. This will be my last week of extra work, though, and I’ll just cruise through my last month working one shift a week.

Lastly, Colum’s at the stage where his internal dialogue is still external and it can be so funny. I just heard him in the hallway saying, “I going to ask Mom for another one cracker.” And then seconds later he comes charging through the door, “I have another one cracker, Mom?” Don’t you wish we could all be so transparent?

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Health Canada Declares Bisphenol A Dangerous

Health Canada broke new ground today when they officially declared bisphenol A a dangerous substance. I wrote about the potential dangers of this common chemical in this post a few weeks ago. Or link to the Globe and Mail for their news brief about Health Canada’s pioneering decision. Canada is the first country to recognize the dangerous affects of bisphenol A and will hopefully act as a trailblazer for the US and EU. This is the first step toward regulating sales and production of compounds that contain this chemical, and I, for one, am quite pleased.

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Daycare Despair

“What do you do for childcare?” This is a seemingly innocent question that can really get under my skin. The true answer is that we care for our child ourselves. I’m home (and often out and about) with Young C from Monday to Friday and Ed picks up Saturdays while I work. That leaves Sunday for family time. Still, I tend to babble in circles. “I work from home, you see … uh, yeah, freelancing … well, no, I’m not very productive, I guess … he’s on a wait list for part-time care … I do work Saturdays …” The problem is partly that while I did not want to work a full-time job and have to hire someone else to care for my child, I also had no visions of becoming a stay-at-home mom. There was no love lost for the tele-help job I’d held before Young C was born, either, and I thought I would be able to pursue a part-time career as a writer while I stayed at home. I have done a teensy bit of writing, but I finally have had to face up to the truth that I’m just pretty drained after putting in a 12 hour day as a mom. I wound up having to pick up one or two waitressing shifts over the weekend to make ends meet, which, of course, leaves even less time and energy for doing the work I want to do. It hasn’t been a horrible set-up considering that I get to take care of Young C all week and then can make pretty good money in just a couple nights. Until now. The fast pace and long shifts and crowded dance floor of the restaurant cum live music venue where I work means I won’t want to be there for the second half of this pregnancy.

The other part of the problem is that I have been trying to get child care. At 18 months, I decided that Young C would probably do well in a daycare setting on a part-time basis and set out to register him somewhere. But this is Toronto and unless you’re willing to let the retired lady around the corner watch your kid, you have to wait. (And we’re not even looking for a subsidized spot — that’s a whole other story.) Now I know there are great agencies that assist with finding a regulated home care spot, and I’m sure that many of those women do a wonderful job. But I wanted Young C to have interactions with his peers and be cared for by fully trained Early Childhood Educators. I wanted a daycare centre, yes, but I wasn’t particularly picky beyond that. I wasn’t worried about getting him into a Montessori program, for example, particularly after learning about their TWO YEAR wait list. So we toured the local High Park Jr. YMCA and spent $40 to get Young C’s name on an estimated four month wait list for any two days a week. Five months later, I’m told that a spot has opened up but they no longer support part-time care. What?!? We had all our eggs in this basket, assuming that our flexibility would make it fairly easy to find a match. Hell, we could even do one or three days a week if we had to. I was told that they would double check the policy and call me back.

So, plan B. Novus Day nursery is around the corner and offers half-day care, which is even better than two or three full days for us, and they start at two years old. So we make an appointment and are told that Young C would be able to start within a couple weeks. Even though he’s not quite two, they are impressed with his language and independence. Great. Tick, tick, tick … I call back a month later to find out exactly when Young C can start and now the story has changed. They have space, but are only licensed to care for two children between the ages of two and two and a half. So we have to wait until the end of June. The difference between having him in for six months before baby number two arrives and we likely have to pull him and four months seems huge. Starting him now would have meant a few weeks of financial cover while I worked at writing during the week and kept my restaurant gig on the weekends. There will be no such cover in July. The cost will be even harder to justify since my father and teenage brother will be available for occasional child care during their summer vacations. So we’ll see how it goes. I’ll try to drum up some work in the meantime and maybe we can enroll him for just three mornings a week.

So, what do I do for childcare? I’m still figuring it out, and something tells me that there’s really no long term solution when it comes to kids. We’ll do what we can for now, and when there’s two babes in the picture, we’ll figure something else out.

Image courtesy of sideshowtoy.com.

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When to Tell … Fatigue … Pickles & Ice Cream

One of the first decisions you have to make upon finding out that you’re pregnant is who you should tell and when. There are two basic camps: spread the joy right away or wait about 12 weeks. The rationale for waiting is that you won’t have to later spread the word that you are not expecting after all in the case of a miscarriage. With Colum, Ed and I decided to tell our parents and siblings right away, but to wait until the end of the first trimester before letting the rest of the world in. One problem with that approach is that the news is bound to leak, which was okay. More troubling, perhaps, is making excited new grandparents keep such a big secret for nearly two months. This time around, then, we decided to just tell everyone right away and cross the miscarriage bridge if we came to it. I did keep it a secret at my Saturday night job for a good 10 weeks, though, just to be sure. The truth is that I’m just not very good at keeping big news to myself. I’ll keep someone else’s confidence, no problem, and love to keep secrets (like the sex of the baby) from myself, but I can’t imagine not telling my close friends and family about a pregnancy. With my first pregnancy (and baby) I really did think there was a single best way to do things. With enough reading and critical thinking I was sure I could figure out what that best approach was. Now I realize that rules like “Wait 12 weeks before telling” are not for everybody. Don’t get me wrong, though, I still have some strong opinions about what is best for my baby. I’m just a little more open to being proven wrong.

I thought for sure I’d be blogging about this pregnancy non-stop. (That was another reason to share the news right away.) But I was so completely immersed in a fog of fatigue and, let’s face it, stupidity, that it’s been a record-setting six weeks since I’ve posted here. I don’t remember feeling this tired with Colum and I probably wasn’t. For one, I would sleep in as late as I wanted during the first trimester. (I was working nights as a bartender.) And I was drinking caffeine! Colum’s pregnancy was a surprise, so I had to pretty radically change my lifestyle in a hurry. I wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker, but after quitting smoking cold turkey and then dealing with a bar full of drunk university students at 2:30 am, I really did miss those couple of drinks. So when I read that a moderate amount of caffeine had no demonstrable harm on the fetus, I decided that I’d sacrificed enough thank you very much. This time, though, I came across a new study that links caffeine to an increased risk of miscarriage. Add that to my mother’s conviction that coffee caused one of her two miscarriages, and her uncanny ability to be way ahead of the rest of us, and I thought I’d better skip the joe this time around. The haze is finally starting to lift from my frontal lobes, though, and I feel like myself again. Here are some tips for anyone still looking to beat that pregnancy fatigue, but I really think you just have to wait it out in the end. It’s time to gear up for an ultra productive second trimester to make up for lost time and the impending sluggishness of the third trimester.

My other symptoms have been pretty subtle. A bit of queasiness when I forget to eat and some breast tenderness. I’m actually in a bit of awe again at the dramatic breast changes that happen during pregnancy. Last time, I had stretch marks on both breasts after three months and went from a pre-pregnancy 32 B to a 36 DD when my milk came in. I put on a good deal of weight in general, but still. This time there was only a three month window between weaning Colum completely at 18.5 months and getting pregnant again. So I guess I thought all the duct work would still be in place and ready to go. Guess again. Having just nearly returned to my pre-pregnancy size, my breasts are quickly swelling up again with all the weird tugging and tingling sensations that entails. Also, my right nipple is extremely itchy and I haven’t read about that symptom anywhere. My belly is also quickly adopting the pregnant look now that all those pesky abdominal muscles that kept it reigned in for so long last time are nice and loose. I have had some constipation and seem to want to eat a lot of fresh fruit and veggies. I’ve also had hankering for salty cured meat, and ice cream, and pickles. But not together. I must say, though, that Colum has really come around to enjoy a “spicy” (as he calls it) dill pickle as well.