rivka

I got my GRANT!!!!

Wow! Words just cannot express how happy I am right now! Yay! Grant!

(More coherence later. Right now I am just too HAPPY to say anything other than OMG OMG OMG!!!)

It's been a long slog of a weekend (and I should be packing right now, not posting to LJ) but we've made fantastic progress. It's quite satisfying to watch everything come together - to look around a room and think, "Well, there's not much more I can actually pack in here."

We got the keys to the new house on Friday afternoon. Friday evening I ceremoniously carried the first box over (Christmas ornaments - light, but bulky and fragile and incredibly in the way) and put it in the basement. We've loaded some other things directly into the basement, moved some of Alex's toys so she'd have something to play with when we're at the new house, and put a dozen boxes of books onto the built-in shelves in the master bedroom. A few hundred books sure make a room look lived-in, even when it doesn't have any furniture in it.

Astounding progress on the Old Home front: we (mostly Michael) totally cleared out our crawlspace storage area, which had been packed to the gills. We've thrown out ungodly amounts of junk. Another carload of stuff went to Goodwill and to The Book Thing, a free-book giveaway. Michael recycled a huge pile of ancient computer components. We disassembled the bed and wardrobe in the guest room. And box after box has been packed: baby toys and blankets, framed photos, booze (cartons 1 and 2), piano music, manuals for all our electronics, candles and candleholders.

It's kind of amazing that we've given or thrown so much away, and still have so much stuff left over. SO MUCH stuff. Even after we've packed the rational collections of possessions into boxes, there is so much left that's just... misc.

Alex is the healthiest sick kid I've ever seen. She's clingy, and congested, but not notably ill-appearing. We have still chosen to follow our normal sick-kid rule of unlimited TV, because it makes moving much more convenient and because we are bad parents.

It's hilarious to watch her try to game the rules. She's ostentatiously sick when she wants to watch videos or have her pacifier at sometime other than bedtime.[1] On the other hand, she isn't sick when she wants to help cook dinner and get her germy hands all over our food. She got her signals crossed yesterday and insisted at length that she wasn't sick in order to get a glass of milk... which I would've given her just for the asking, given that her stomach isn't affected this time. I guess she remembers that milk was prohibited when she had that stomach bug.

She's taking the move really well. She likes going over to the new house, and helped me unpack some books and scrub down the pantry shelves. (Either the new landlord decided not to send a cleaning crew because time was short and we really wanted to get in there, or he needs to fire his cleaners.) She doesn't seem at all concerned about leaving some of her toys there. We'll see how she takes the actual transfer of all our possessions, and the part where she actually has to sleep in her new room.

Me, I'm so excited about sleeping in my new room. As long as the curtains I ordered get here before Thursday, which is moving day. Yaaaaaay, new house!

[1] I know, I know, she should've given up the paci long ago. See "bad parents," above.

Alex continues to have a cold, and last night we stretched her bedtime a little later than was optimal. At first she seemed to go right down, but after about half an hour she woke and cried. I went upstairs to settle her. A few minutes after that, she woke and cried again. She seemed exhausted, but unable to stay asleep.

I decided that maybe her congestion was worse lying down, and that perhaps a dose of cold medicine (antihistimine + cough suppressant) would relieve the symptoms enough to allow her to fall into a deeper sleep. So I gave her a dose, and rocked her for a few minutes, and put her back into bed.

The next five hours were a nightmare.

Alex would sleep for 10-30 minutes. Then she'd start to whimper fretfully, quickly escalating to crying and... what I can only describe as howling: intense repeated vocalizations of "waah! waah!" - as a word, not actual sobs. We'd go into her room and her eyes would be shut. She'd thrash her arms or, in the worst episodes, roll her body vigorously back and forth. She wouldn't respond when we spoke to her. She couldn't say what she needed. Touch seemed to help, especially holding her in the rocking chair. When we'd do that, she'd slowly calm down and fall into a deeper sleep, without ever waking up all the way and being lucid.

I slept in her room so I could attend to her. Eventually, after 1:30am, she fell into a deep sleep, waking only one more time at 4am to use the potty. This morning she remembered none of it.

The only thing I can think of is that she had a weird adverse reaction to the cold medicine. Somewhere out there her pediatrician is saying "I told you so." The last time we saw him, he said that we shouldn't be using cold medicines because they're not proven to work in children and the risks outweigh the benefits... but we've still sometimes used an antihistamine at night to help relieve her symptoms so she can sleep. Um. I guess that didn't work, huh?

We got into the new house today to take pictures and measurements. Our new landlord showed us around, and then kindly told us we could drop the key through the mail slot when we were done. So we had plenty of time to do the job thoroughly.

The house is even nicer than I remembered. Wow, is it nice. This is a nice house.



( Read more, plus 14 small pictures )

Decluttering is so exhiliarating. I just bagged up three-quarters of the contents of our linen closet to give to Goodwill.

We don't need a dozen sets of double bed sheets when the only double bed in the house is the rarely-used guest bed. We don't need sixteen adult-sized bath towels, half of which are too ratty to use. We don't need a massive plastic baby bathtub which, despite its gargantuan size, babies outgrow in about four months. We don't need six afghans. We don't need an electric blanket controller for an electric blanket we no longer own.

We. Don't. Need.

I can't believe it, but it's my day at home and Alex is actually napping. She never naps. I hope she isn't getting sick.

I'd love to say that I was celebrating her unexpected nap with some peaceful relaxation - but given that we're moving in two and a half weeks, there's not a chance. We're a little bit behind with the packing - and we're going into church budget season now, which consumes all of Michael's time. So I'm using her naptime to solicit estimates from moving companies, clean out and pack up the linen closet, run some statistics for Lydia, and cycle through a few loads of laundry.

Oh, and post to LJ. What would naptime be without LJ posts? I've almost forgotten, it's been so long.

We did, incidentally, get the lovely house next door to our current house. I'm very excited. All three of us are. They're doing some renovation work over there right now, so we haven't been able to get in, but I am gloating over all the lovely details in my mind's eye. The ones I remember, anyway. I'm finding that my memory is hazy on things like closet space.

Decluttering for the move is going well. We've taken two full carloads of stuff to Goodwill and thrown much more away, and I'm feeling resolute about not moving things we don't need. On the recommendation of fairoriana and juno I read It's All Too Much by Peter Walsh, and had a lightbulb moment: We shouldn't try to figure out where to put all of our things in the new house, we should try to figure out how we want to use each room of the new house, and then only move in the things that actually serve those purposes. Totally different emphasis.

I'm also realizing how much the clutter gets in the way of actual cleaning. I've always made a distinction between a messy house and a dirty house, but really it's the case that one leads to the other. You can't keep surfaces clean when they have piles of stuff on them.

( moving to-do list )

Seventeen days after my D&C, the pathology report is still not back. That's the bad news.

Fortunately, though, that's the only bad news. Based on the way my HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin, a.k.a. "pregnancy hormone") levels have been dropping like a stone, taken in context with the immediate experience of the D&C, my midwife is certain that what I had was a "blighted ovum" - a fertilized egg so messed-up that it made a placenta but wasn't able to grow or sustain an embryo.

My HCG level as of Friday was a stunning 33, down from 190 the Friday before. (I don't know what it was the night of the D&C.) We have high hopes that it will hit zero sometime this week. Then my body can go about the business of returning to its normal rhythms.

An exam showed that everything is getting back to normal: uterus and ovaries feel normal, cervix is closed, and there's physical evidence that the hormones are normalizing.

We can start trying to conceive again as soon as I've had a couple of normal cycles. If I get pregnant again, we'll monitor the pregnancy more intensely: HCG levels beginning at the positive test, progesterone levels, an ultrasound at 7 or 8 weeks. But there's no reason to believe that this would happen again. It was one of those random chances.

Needless to say, I'm still very very sad. (Wow was it hard to be back in my midwives' office.) But it's a big relief to know that there isn't anything horrible hanging over my head. There's no physical aftermath to a blighted ovum pregnancy. No long and frightening period of monitoring. We can just focus on the long, long job of picking up the pieces, emotionally.

So: sad, but thankful.

On Wednesday, someone from Mercy Hospital (where I had my D&C) called and left a message. She said that if I wanted to talk about my experience, she was there to listen. Yesterday's mail brought a sympathy card from the same person, who appears to be a nurse working in the pastoral care department. The card said that she was sorry for my loss and praying for me and my family daily. She hoped I was being kind to myself, and that I was being helped by support from family, friends, and God. She enclosed a little religious poem. (Not my flavor of religion (it's a Catholic hospital), but not offensive to me.)

It was nicely timed, I thought: two weeks after my miscarriage, a point at which an experienced counselor should be able to identify which patients are having a normal grief reaction and which ones are in real trouble. Also a likely point for someone with inadequate support to be feeling as if everyone's forgotten her loss.

Years ago I read a book about a woman who had a late second-trimester miscarriage. Afterward, none of the hospital staff - including her own OB - were willing to talk to her about what happened. They deflected her questions, avoided her eyes, refused to let her see the body. And my mother recently told me two stories. When she was a young married woman, my grandmother told her that she should never tell anyone she was pregnant until four months had passed - because that way, if it didn't work out and there was a miscarriage, no one would ever have to know. And a colleague of my mother's who also did maternal/child nursing once staffed a table on pregnancy loss at a community health fair. An 80-year-old woman came up and told my mother's colleague all the details of a miscarriage she'd had 60 years before. It was the first time she had ever told anyone at all. Sixty years later she was still burdened by her secret grief.

I am so grateful that it's not that way now.

Throughout this awful process I have been sustained by an incredible outpouring of love, support, and kindness. I've been stunned by the number of women who have quietly taken me aside to say that they too had a miscarriage, and that they know how terrible it is, and that I have their love and support. Instead of feeling alone, I've felt encircled by a large community of women, kind and gentle with me because they've shared this grief. Some of them are my age. Some of them are grandmothers or great-grandmothers. All of them survived, but none of them ever forgot.

I've also been sustained and upheld by all of you. It's touched me more than I can say to receive loving sympathy from my friends who are committedly childfree, as well as the ones who know what it's like to desperately want a child. To have people who barely know me refuse to walk away from the raw pain dripping all over my journal. To have repeated assurances of concern and support pour in again and again when even I have begun to be exhausted by my own neediness. To get presents in the mail: cookies, chocolates, more chocolates, an unpublished novel draft, a mix CD, cards with messages of love. It's been so much. It's helped so much.

I still feel sad and fragile, and I expect that I will for quite some time. But I also feel loved and cared-for. I'm pretty sure I'll be okay. For which: thank you.

I just got an e-mail through Flickr, which purports to be from an employee of the Flemish Ministry for Education and Training. In Belgium.

Dear Ms,

I'm asking you this question on behalf of the Ministry of
Education and Training, in Flanders, Belgium, Europe.

Could I use one of the photo's you posted on flickr.com -
e.g.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rivka/540584772/

or a similar photo - on our nursery education website at

www.onderwijs.vlaanderen.be/jaarvandekleuter ?

Many thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Luc Stoops
Flemish Ministry for Education and Training
Brussels,Belgium, Europe
luc.stoops@ond.vlaanderen.be

Huh.

Any reason why I shouldn't give my okay? I can't imagine a more innocuous, share-able picture.

Grief is kicking my ass today.

We went grocery shopping for the first time in two weeks. At the milk cooler, Alex was hopping around being helpful.

"Mom, do you need your yellow milk?" (Milk in the yellow carton is low-fat. She drinks whole milk, in the red carton.)

"No, I'm not going to buy any." I hate milk. I only consume it when I'm pregnant and need the extra calcium.

"But you don't have any yellow milk at home."

"I know. I'm not going to have any milk for a while."

We turn away from the case. She's still not done. "Mom, you drink special milk, right?"

Yes. When I was pregnant, I drank "special" low-fat milk that was just for me, not for underweight toddlers. I'm not pregnant now. I won't be buying any more low-fat milk unless I get pregnant again. Okay? We're not buying milk in the yellow carton BECAUSE THE BABY DIED.

I didn't say any of that. I just sent her off to the deli with Michael. And had the two of them play Letter Searchers in the check-out line so she wouldn't notice me crying.

OMG grief is just kicking my ass today.