Author: Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

Rebecca Cuneo Keenan is a writer who lives in Toronto with her husband and three children.

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Playtex Infant First L’il Gripper Review

A couple months ago the good people at Playtex sent me their new Infant First L’il Gripper sippy cup to try out.  I then promptly spent the next several weeks collapsing on the couch at the end of the day in a fit of exhaustion. I’m finally well into my 2nd trimester now, though, and my hypothyroidism has been properly medicated. So let’s see about that sippy cup.

It’s a squeezable (BPA-free) plastic cup with two handles and a straw, designed to be used from age four months and up. Now four months is pretty firmly still in nipple (breast or bottle) territory, if you ask me. And even at six or seven months, when I did start introducing my kids to a sippy cup, the idea was to get them swallowing from a cup, not using a straw. That can come later.

I do, however, love a cup with a soft, bendable straw that tucks away when we’re on the go. And that’s what this cup is perfect for. Long summer walks with the stroller coming up? This cup would do the trick nicely for any babe aged 6 to 18 months. It’s spill and leak-proof and at a suggested retail price of $5.49, it’s not going to break the bank when baby tosses it overboard either. My two year old is actually a little bit in love with it too, right now. Something about a straw that you can play peek-a-boo with,  I guess.

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Mother’s Day and More

It says: "Mommy," at the top and that teensy picture is me. Then it says, "I love you."

This was the best Mother’s Day so far, mostly because Colum was so incredibly jazzed about it. He worked on a special surprise card for two days at school and kept talking about breakfast in bed all week. (Do you know how hard it is to eat cereal and sip coffee in bed with two kids bouncing around on it? Yes, of course you do.)

Here is the card:

It says: "Mommy," at the top and that teensy picture is me. Then it says, "I love you."
"... because you let me watch tv." As pictured.

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This was apparently a popular reason for loving your mom in Colum’s JK class. At least I didn’t get, “because you let me play video games.” Mean anti-video game position vindicated!

And as long as I’m uploading pictures … here’s a solid month’s worth.

My friend Helena suggested I do a compare and contrast, reconstruction kind of thing with old pictures of Irene’s pregnancy. I thought it was a good idea and took a couple shots at 17.5 weeks. I am now 19.5 weeks, but better late than never, right?

Colum and I about three years ago.
Here we are at 17.5 weeks now.

And more shots from that same day:


And because it’s feast or famine with photos here at Playground Confidential, here are some random shots of us at the beach yesterday evening.

And, finally, with all due respect to Charlie Sheen, THIS smile means winning.

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The Politics of Parenting

“On no!” He was down on his knees on the sidewalk, holding his head in despair.

“What? What is it, Colum?”

“Not Peggy Nash! It’s another Peggy Nash sign.”

I quickly look around to make sure nobody is hearing this. “What do you mean, Colum? What’s wrong with Peggy Nash?”

“But Mom, you told me we were rooting for the Liberals.”

***

It must have been the very first day of the federal election campaign, just as signs were starting to appear, when Colum asked me who I was voting for. I think I mumbled something like, “Oh probably the Liberals, sweetie, but we’ll see.” And that was that.

But as the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey season drew to a close, clearly the boy needed something to root for with all the die-hard loyalty of a sports fan. This has taken the rather embarrassing form of loudly cheering for the Parkdale/High Park Liberal candidate and booing the riding’s NDP candidate. (Sorry, Ms. Nash.) (Never mind that we technically live across the border in another riding — those are the signs he sees.) I’ve tried to explain that I actually think that both are good candidates (which I do) and that he shouldn’t get too carried away in the sign race.

The truth is that I’m not  politically partisan and it pained me to see my son so eager to don the colours of one party or another. (Not that it’s easy for a 5-year-old to participate in any other way.) My political views have probably mellowed out as I’ve gotten older and no longer carry the Communist Manifesto with me everywhere. (Kidding. That was just for the one class.) They’ve also become more pragmatic. A party or candidate’s ideological position on the political spectrum doesn’t necessarily carry more weight than their views on child care and maternity benefits, education or funding for extracurricular programs.

But I also care about issues that are less obviously linked to my role as a parent. Federal funding for public transportation and the arts, and policies about health care and immigration affect our lives as a whole. My views on these also reflect the kind of options I want my children to have in the city where I live. I fully expect my kids to be use public transportation to go downtown to soak up some culture in a multicultural city. The good I want for them isn’t really any different from the good I want for the nation as a whole.

My politics, therefore, are going to be a lot different from those of many other parents. Of course they are. There are families who live in the country or the suburbs and for whom public transportation is a non-issue. There are people who believe the arts are a frill and that immigrants will be competing with their children for jobs. There are as many different political views among parents as there are among anyone. This is all just to say that there’s not going to be a magical “mommy platform” that’s going to win a party the support of a whole demographic. That’s just not the way it works.

But as much as I decide how best to direct my family’s spending at the grocery store, I also shape the way my kids see the world. Is socialism a good or bad word? Is politics? The best way to raise engaged citizens is to act like ones ourselves.

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My Soon-to-be Middle Child

We walked her big brother to the school bus,

And then she ran all the way home,

Her blond curls the tightest-ever from the rain,

Her little pink sneakers a blur.

If ever there was a girl who could withstand the slights of middle-childhood,

She is it.

Always demanding love and attention,

Never to be left out.

* * *

And here’s a random belly pic.

14+ weeks
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13 Weeks (and 4 days)

And we have a heartbeat!

I figured I should probably just cut to the chase since I’ve left you all hanging for four days after finally hearing the heartbeat. I blame my husband; you should too. (WINKING! Totally winking here. The guy’s been working his butt off lately which just means less time and energy for me to do what really matters: blogging.)

After much waffling and foot shuffling, I finally decided that I should pop in for another listen. Hearing that several women I know have had missed miscarriages late in their first trimester was definitely an influencing factor. So was a friend just saying,”Go!” So I dropped the kids off with my parents last Thursday morning, figuring I’d probably have to wait around for a while and then I’d go in for my monthly blood draw at the lab.

Instead, my midwife saw me right away and found a crystal clear heartbeat in less than 30 seconds. It took longer to walk from the car. (Mostly because I refuse to pay for parking, but still.) What a relief! Now I no longer have to wonder if every tummy rumble and gas bubble is the baby moving or if I’m simply losing my mind. I can relax and let that first definite movement be a wonderful surprise.

I’ve also taken to squeezing into my regular jeans for as long as I can, which seems to make me feel less huge. So I’m not stressing about twins any more. We’ll find out eventually, but there’s really no good reason to worry. So all’s well and good in the pregnancy department, despite my tricky hip and lowered bladder capacity.

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Obsess Much?

Ok, I’m starting to obsess.

I thought I was alright until last night when I sat down to finish an hour or two’s worth of work after putting the kids to bed at 8:30. Cue 11pm and I still have yet to write a sentence because I’m too busy googling “no heartbeat with doppler at 12 weeks” and “missed miscarriages.” Did you know that it’s possible for your baby’s heart to stop and not have any symptoms of a miscarriage for weeks? Then I started to wonder if I even feel pregnant anymore. I mean, I do feel better. But then again, that’s what the second trimester does for you anyway.

I was pretty much just planning on waiting until my 16 week appointment to hear the heartbeat. I already waited all this time, right? What’s the difference? I certainly look pregnant. Of course, given that this is my third pregnancy, the chances are pretty good that I’ll be able to feel the baby move by then anyway. So the heartbeat will be no big deal. So … do I continue to obsess for another couple weeks or do I drag my ass back to my midwife to try again on Thursday morning? And if I don’t hear it again? It’s still early, so I continue to obsess for another week or two. Ugh.

(Yes, I could have scheduled a 12 week ultrasound, but I decided just to do the one at 20 weeks instead and you need to book these things weeks in advance. If, by 16 weeks, there’s still no heartbeat with the doppler then I’d be sent to an emergency ultrasound clinic.)

And did I mention that I’m huge? I’ve always shown my pregnancies fairly early and carried all my weight right up front in my belly, so that’ s not really anything new. When I was about six months along with Irene an elderly woman who lived in the apartment building I was working at stopped to argue with me about my due date. I simply could not have another three months to go; that was impossible; I was too big. Unless, that is, I was carrying twins.

Twins. Yep. I also filled up my Google search bar with queries like, “early signs of twins,” “12 week twin belly pics,” and “no heartbeat 12 weeks twin pregnancy.” Now, let’s get this straight: I’m not having twins. No way, no how, unh-uh. First of all, I’m always big. Maybe not quite this big, but I went into this pregnancy with a few extra pounds to begin with and, hello, it’s my third freaking pregnancy. I also have no history of twins in my family whatsoever which lowers the odds of naturally conceiving fraternal twins. And identical twins are really quite rare. (Thanks, Google.) But everywhere I turn people are talking about twins.

First, the med student at my endocrinology and pregnancy clinic wanted to confirm how many babies I was expecting. Huh? I was eight weeks pregnant, how could I know? Then Rebecca Woolf from Girls Gone Child who just announced her third pregnancy found out that she was indeed expecting twins. People started misspelling “baby’s” as “babies” and suddenly half the people I talked to seemed to have twins. Out of the friggin blue my husband and my mother-in-law separately told me that it would be nice to have twins. Then Colum comes padding into my bedroom the other morning talking about Jojo and Robin. Who? Jojo, I knew, is the name he’s given the baby, but Robin was new because he decided it was going to be twins. And did I mention just how big I am?

***

I didn’t get a chance to finish this post earlier today and I must say that I feel somewhat less crazy and obsessed. I might pop in for another stab at the heartbeat Thursday, or I might not. I’ll see how I feel. The odds of my having twins (and not being able to hear either baby’s heartbeat!) is astronomically small. I’m pretty sure I’m still pregnant according to my sticky right hip, the massive zit on my chin, my ginormous belly and even bigger appetite. And I almost started crying just watching Irene watch TV earlier today.

Anyway, I’ve found a new obsession to fuel my procrastination yet. Gardening! (Like I may plant some basil and rhubarb, maybe.)

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12 Week Check Up

I had my 12 week appointment with my midwife today and she couldn’t find the heartbeat with the doppler.  She warned me that it was hit and miss at this age, that the fetus is small enough to find places to hide. She said some women opt to not even try at this stage because they don’t want to worry. But I wanted to try.

She thought she maybe heard the heartbeat fleetingly at first, but couldn’t find it again. She also thinks my placenta is probably at the front which makes it even more difficult.  My uterus is growing appropriately, though, as is my belly, so chances are that everything is fine. Still, it’s just nice to hear that heartbeat for the first time, you know?

I opted to skip the 12 week ultrasound and just do the anatomical scan at 20 weeks which means the next scheduled stab at finding a heartbeat is in a month — at 16 weeks. My midwife said that if it’s eating at me, then I can stop by any Thursday morning when she has office hours and she’ll try again. God I love the quality of care you get with midwifery. They always make time for you. I’m not sure that I’ll need to take her up on it, but it’s good to know that I can drop in if anything doesn’t feel right.

I also wanted to follow up on something the endocrinologist said; she was surprised I hadn’t had thyroid issues with my previous two pregnancies. I asked my midwife if my thyroid levels were even tested before since this time around I had routine blood work done at the same time as my prenatal and I didn’t know which test detected the hypoactive thyroid. She told me that thyroid levels aren’t tested for in standard prenatal blood work and then looked back in my charts.  Sure enough, they hadn’t tested my thyroid levels during either pregnancy.

So what does that mean? It means how long I’ve been hypo is anyone’s guess. I know I thought I felt fine before this pregnancy, but I also know that I haven’t been able to shake the extra 20 pounds I’ve been carrying around since Irene was born. Within a year and a half of having Colum, after gaining 50 pounds during his pregnancy, I was down within five pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight. I had chalked it up to not being quite as active this time around and being a couple years older, but who knows? Maybe it was my thyroid all along.

Gotta love those appointments that raise more questions than they answer.

On the bright side, Colum has dubbed the new baby Jo Jo, which I actually kind of like for an unborn baby nickname. It’s sexually ambiguous, cute and ridiculous enough that you won’t be tempted to actually use it.

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Ill Conceived

Ah, maternity jeans. (What? You don't keep your only full-length mirror in the playroom?)

I did it!

For the first time ever I managed to keep a pregnancy a secret for the entire first trimester. As of this Thursday I will be exactly 12 weeks pregnant with my third child due on September 30th. Do you know what this means? It means I can finally let the cat out of the bag and let my belly out of my jeans. Because by the third go around, there’s not a lot left besides a denim waistband to hold my uterus in place.

Ah, maternity jeans. (What? You don't keep your only full-length mirror in the playroom?)

Why wait now? The main reason is because this time I have a near five-year old’s feelings to consider. I didn’t want to tell the kids about the new baby (or worse, have them overhear us talking to other adults about it) and then have to disappoint them in the event of a miscarriage. This time I would play the odds and wait. Also, did I mention this is my third pregnancy? It’s not the life-changing and overwhelmingly exciting event that my first and second were.

Except, of course, that it is life changing. I mean, I can barely keep up with the two kids I already have,  my sub-par housekeeping standards and my two-hour-a-day job as is. What am I thinking throwing a newborn into the mix? We haven’t even finished the third bedroom of this house yet. This could be a bad idea, so bad it’s funny, I thought. And then, the same way every indie musician is constantly coming up with new band names, I thought that a humour blog about a third pregnancy named “Ill Conceived” would be perfect. Not that I actually found the time to pitch the idea to anyone or anything. (Email me if you need a pregnancy blogger!)

Then the other shoe dropped. And by shoe I actually mean blood test and by dropped I mean less than stellar results came in. I went to my family doctor at around 5.5 weeks after getting a positive pee stick result. (The generic brand still rocks my world for $5 and change!) I told her that I hadn’t actually bothered getting the routine blood work she’d requisitioned months earlier done, so could she just write me a new one with a pregnancy test and the standard prenatal work added to it? I know the ropes by now and I also know that a blood lab is likely to have better luck finding my puny little veins than my midwife. I was wrong. The lab tech had to draw all six viles of blood from my hand. Ouch.

The doctor’s office calls me a week later to say that the lab had mislabeled half my blood work and that they would mail me a requisition to get it taken again. Yippee. This time it was a new lab and a new tech and she found my vein. At least there was that. Because the next week I came home to find a message from the doctor’s office saying she needed to see me the next day to discuss my results and I had an appointment at noon. No real choice in the matter. Gulp.

It turns out that my thyroid levels were not so hot. They were pretty low, in fact, when they’re supposed to go up during pregnancy. It also turns out that thyroid hormones are pretty essential to the neurological and cognitive development of the fetus, much of which takes place during the first trimester. So my doctor wrote me a prescription for synthetic hormones that I needed to start taking that day and said she would book me into an endocrinologist and I would likely need blood drawn every six weeks during pregnancy to monitor my hormone levels and regular appointments with the specialist on top of the standard prenatal care I’d get from my midwife. Oh, and there’s a good chance that this could be a chronic condition.

Ill conceived all right. It works on so many levels. Dammit.

I don’t know how long I’ve had a hypoactive thyroid. I do know that I felt fine until I got pregnant. Then I felt tired. It was normal first trimester fatigue, I assumed, except it was crazy intense. I could barely get through the days and it felt like I was moving through a fog, a brain fog. Writing more than the bare essential was impossible and I can’t vouch for the quality of any writing I did do during that time. Within a few days of starting the medication I felt better. (Except for the back-to-back bouts of cold and flu.) And now, a month later, I basically feel like my old self.

The good news is that this condition is easily treatable with medication. The slightly disconcerting news is that I didn’t start treatment until I was 8 weeks along. From what I read on the internet *smirk* and what the med student at my endocrinology and pregnancy clinic told me, there’s not much to worry about. The important thing is that I’m getting treated now and the chances of any adverse affects are quite slim. (The adverse affects would simply be a less smart kid.) So I’m not going to worry, I’ve decided, and I’m actually doing a pretty good job of it.

Don’t you worry either, but please do catch up with me here as I blog about daily life and this pregnancy.

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Not Winning Here, Losing

My Friday night plans: sit back with a hot cup of tea and my dad’s new book which is dedicated to me and which I haven’t read any part of. This is the first time since I was a child that I haven’t read, re-read and proofread the entire manuscript multiple times. Something to do with a toddler and a newborn, I’d imagine. And here I had an entire evening set aside just to read the book.

I can’t find it. I can’t find the blasted book. No, I don’t remember where I put it and yes, I’ve looked everywhere. Ed last saw Irene carting it around, so I ran up to her cribside just as she was falling asleep to ask where it was. “On the floor,” she answered. “Where on the floor?” “In our kitchen.”

Of course, a book is not likely to stay on the kitchen floor for any length of time. But I do remember seeing it pushed up against the bottom of the cabinets. I think I picked it up and … and … put it somewhere? I would have been preparing some sort of meal, so I might not have actually put it anywhere that makes sense. I might have just tossed it onto the dining room table. In which case, the kids may have gotten to it again. It is their grandfather’s book, you know. What better to shove into one of the half dozen bags you’re currently stuffing with all your worldly possessions and dragging all over the house? I mean, ahem, packing for a camping trip or a sleepover or going shopping with.

So I looked on all the available book-stashing surfaces that I could have laid it on. It’s not on the fridge, the washer, the dryer, in the kitchen drawers, in the pantry. It’s not on the buffet or in the buffet. It’s not on any of the bookshelves or on my bedside table or even in the bathrooms. Next up, the kids. The book is not, I repeat, in any drawer or in any shopping bag or child’s suitcase. It’s not on their bookshelves or in the toy stove. It’s not under either couch or armchair, behind the TV or in their bedroom. It’s not anywhere is the problem, you see.

But it must be, it must be! It’s too late to make much headway into the book now, in any case, so I’ll let it go. Tomorrow I’ll pick Colum’s brain and hope for better results. And if worst comes to worst, I’ll clean.

Here’s what it looks like. Just in case you’ve seen it around:

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Travels and Travails

I had a 9am downtown doctor’s appointment yesterday morning and I was almost looking forward to it. Waking up before my kids for once, I was able to dress and get ready in peace. I packed my son’s school snack and laid out their clothes. Quickly dressing them, I explained that we had to head straight out to the car and they’d have breakfast at my parent’s place. I dropped them off and headed to the subway station. Bounding down the stairs with no strollers or little hands to grip felt like the ultimate freedom. I’d pick up one of those free newspapers and catch up on the headlines while traveling peacefully underground.

Instead, I heard a train coming and decades old instinct took over. I dashed past the newspaper stand and flew down the stairs just in time to duck into the subway car before the doors closed behind me. Yes, I still had it. No seats left at this time of day and no newspaper, but a nice spot by the unused doors and a novel in my purse were close seconds. Until, two stops later, my train went out of service. Now I jostled for position at the platform edge with a throng of other people who had to be downtown at exactly 9am. I did squeeze onto the next train, but then had to spend the next eight stops sandwiched between a couple hundred of my fellow citizens, unable to even hold up my book.

It was all starting to come back to me now. How had I managed to romanticize the rush hour subway commute?

Returning at mid-day, I was sure that now I’d get my relaxing train ride. I settled into a seat armed with two papers and my book. Two stops later, the train went out of service and we all filed out onto the platform.

Chalk one up for the work-from-home team.