Tag Archives: anxiety

Baby 2.0 Prep

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Lately, I’ve been feeling like maybe the Lexapro is finally starting to kick in. Everything in my life is starting to feel calmer and more relaxed. Sort of like, OK, I know this baby is coming and it’s going to bring chaos into our lives (because that’s what babies do), but we’ll just put on our seat belts and go along for the ride. It feels manageable, where it absolutely did not feel that way a month ago. So that’s good.

And since I’m feeling calmer, I’m starting to focus more on what needs to be done before this kid arrives. I realize, of course, since this isn’t my first baby, that I don’t need to do that much. It’s funny, I had this ridiculously long to-do list before Catie was born, and this time, it’s more like:

* The infant car seat needs to be installed.
* Wash some newborn-size clothes.
* Have some burp cloths, bibs, and receiving blankets on hand, in case she’s a puker.

That’s really about it. And I’ve done all that stuff, so now I get to chill out and focus on the other non-essential stuff. Dave painted the baby’s room and set up the crib (even though she’ll be in the Pack ‘n’ Play in our room for at least the first several weeks). I got a new, super-cute diaper bag from my sister. I’m thinking about what type of bottles I want to buy, since our old ones were before that whole BPA thing was a known issue, and I’ve since thrown them all out. I have some cute wall stickers to put up in her room. But it all feels like bonus stuff at this point, nothing urgent or mandatory.

Of course, nevermind the fact that this this poor kid doesn’t even have a name yet, because Dave and I can’t make up our minds, but I’m not really stressed about that. Either we’ll figure it out when she gets here, or I’ll wait until Dave isn’t paying attention and put down the name that I want on her birth certificate. (Ha! Just kidding, Dave!) (Mostly.)

And it’s weird, I have had a sneaking suspicion throughout this entire pregnancy that this baby might come a little bit early. I don’t know why, but way back when I was first given my May 31st due date, I thought, “Nope, it’ll be sooner than that.” Of course, I don’t want her to come dangerously early or anything, but this is just a weird gut feeling I’ve had all along. Catie was born a week early (her due date was February 2nd, she showed up on January 27th), so I have no real basis to think that anything different would happen this time around. But for some reason, I can’t get that thought out of my head.

So, you know, if I’m looking at this kid showing up within the next month, instead of six weeks from now? At least it’s nice to know that I feel somewhat prepared.

Baby 2.0, 30-week update

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I had back-to-back doctor’s appointments yesterday. First with my regular OB’s office, then with the special high-risk ultrasound center that I get to use because of that big ol’ Advanced Maternal Age flag on my chart.

So, first up: the obstetrician. Baby 2.0’s heartbeat is good, my weight is on track (I’m up 14 pounds at 30 weeks, no complaints there), and my stomach is measuring on target. That’s all the physical stuff.

The emotional stuff? I told my OB about all of my anxiety problems I’ve been having lately, and how it was really very sweet of them to call in xanax for me last week, and I do appreciate it (I probably enjoy the way that xanax makes me feel a little too much, considering that it’s highly addictive), but I also need to be realistic: I can’t take xanax all the time. I need to be able to drive, do my job, and take care of my kid. And I can’t do any of those things if I’m all loopy on sedatives. So I really need something that won’t turn me into a zombie, and that’ll help me keep my anxiety in check at the same time.

They gave me a prescription for Lexapro, and I took the first one last night. I feel horrible and groggy today, but that could be because I had to get up at 6 a.m. to drive my mom to the airport, and we stayed up late to watch “Dancing with the Stars.” So, I can’t blame it entirely on the meds, is what I’m saying. I’ll have to wait and see how I feel after a couple of weeks.

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After my OB visit, I went home to pick up my mom, and we went to the ultrasound center, so she could see her second grandbaby live and in person.

Baby 2.0 at 30 weeks

Baby 2.0 (who, yes, is definitely still a she) was not very agreeable about letting us get a good picture, and this was about the best one we could get. You can sort of see part of her profile and a little hand at the top. I think she was throwing an elbow to get that ultrasound wand off of her “house.”

She’s a little on the small side, measuring in the 30th percentile. But Catie was somewhere in the 10th percentile when she was born, and God knows she made up for it later, so I’m not worried. I’m honestly relieved to know that I likely won’t be giving birth to a ten-pounder. An average-sized healthy baby is ideal, as far as I’m concerned.

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My mom flew home this morning, and Catie and I are both sad about it. For the sake of logistics, I had to drop Catie off at daycare before taking my mom to the airport (the airport is about 4 miles from my office, daycare is 12 miles), so they had to say good-bye at daycare. We were afraid there would be tears, but my mom had “going-away toys” for Catie this morning. Tiny little things she got at Rite-Aid for a couple of bucks, nothing major, but enough to make it ok that Mimi was leaving. That plus a lot of kisses, and promises that Mimi would be back soon (well, in a couple of months, anyway), and Catie seemed ok when we left.

Of course, I’m fully expecting her to have a meltdown later. She’s also been crying a lot about missing Daddy lately, poor kid. The last couple of weeks have been rough on both of us.

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In related news: Dave will be back one week from today. I can’t wait.

the three-hour tour

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A couple of days ago when I wrote that post about anxiety (and y’all are awesome for the comments there, seriously, thank you), I was driving home from work and still feeling pretty jittery and stressed out.

Then my cell phone rang, and I saw that it was my OB’s office. That’s never a good sign, is it?

So I answered (yes, sometimes I talk on my cell phone while I’m driving, they haven’t passed a law here saying that I can’t yet, so shut it), and the nurse informed me that I failed my glucose test last week. Like, spectacularly. I believe she said that the typical blood sugar is supposed to be 65-80 and mine was like 145 or something. So, yeah, that’s pretty bad. Even though I’m mostly blaming it on the fact that they scheduled my test at 2 p.m., so it was right after lunch, and it just so happened that I’d gone to Waffle House for lunch that day. (I didn’t have anything with syrup on it – just eggs, bacon & toast – but it was probably still too carb-heavy.)

Anyway, the fact that I failed means that I need to go back for the 3-hour gestational diabetes test. Which, oh BTW, is a fasting test, which means you have to get there at 7:30 a.m.

And you know, in the grand scheme of things, this is not that big a deal, right? Obviously my health and Baby 2.0’s health trumps any minor inconvenience. I know that, I really do. But at that moment, when she told me that, I… god, let’s just say that I owe this nurse an apology at my next appointment, because I basically turned into a petulant child.

“But… but… I don’t wanna! No!”

And then I almost burst into tears. I had to work really hard to hold back the floodgates.

Now, leaving aside the fact that the test itself sounds like pure hell (and it does, the one-hour test was bad enough), there’s also the issue of scheduling. And the fact that Catie doesn’t even wake up until after 7:30. And did I mention that Dave is about to leave town for three weeks so I’ll be on solo parent duty?

Oh, right, I haven’t blogged about that yet: Dave is going to England for 3 weeks. And I am 100% supportive of this, because I know he’s been homesick for a while and I think it’ll be good for him to spend some time with his family and friends over there. And this is probably the last chance he’ll have to go before Baby 2.0 makes her arrival. So, it’s FINE that he’s going, it really is. It just throws a major wrench in the works, as far as things like scheduling early morning doctor’s appointments.

I told the nurse I’d have to call her back because I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’m sure she thought I was insane.

I got home, and I worried and fretted for hours. I talked to my mom, then I started to calm down a little. I looked at Dave’s itinerary: he’s leaving on a red-eye flight Tuesday night. (For some reason I thought he was leaving on Monday morning, hence my panic.) So the next morning, I called the nurse back and said that I could do the test on Monday or Tuesday morning if they could manage to squeeze me into the schedule, but after that? I’m screwed as far as childcare arrangements.

And God bless her, she found a way to get me in on Monday morning. The lab they normally use is booked, so she found somewhere else I could go instead. (It’ll be at the actual hospital where I’ll deliver Baby 2.0 someday.) I don’t care so much where it gets done as long as we get this over with as quickly as possible.

So, if anyone’s done this three-hour test and can tell me that it’s not all that bad? I’d really appreciate it. (Also, WTF am I supposed to do for 3 hours? I think I’m renting a movie online and borrowing Dave’s iPad to watch it while I sit & wait. But other ideas are certainly welcome.)

pregnancy anxiety stuff

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More often than not, I seem to be feeling really anxious and tense these days. There are a lot of contributing factors here, but I think it’s mostly pregnancy-related. I feel like I barely have a handle on the whole “working mom” thing right now, and the one kid I have is fairly self-sufficient. The idea of throwing a baby into the mix is… well, really freaking scary, to be quite honest. Babies are really needy (uh, in case you weren’t aware of that), and I’m just not sure how I’m going to balance it all when I don’t feel like I have a good handle on life as it is.

I think a lot of this is that I don’t exactly have fond memories of the first few months of Catie’s life. Looking back, I probably should’ve gotten on some kind of medication for post-partum depression, but I didn’t because I thought my feelings were normal. Now, I’m not so sure. I don’t think it’s exactly normal to feel like your life is a black hole of despair, no? I was just so exhausted that I couldn’t see that things would ever improve. And of course, they did improve, and relatively quickly at that. Sometime after the two- or three-month point, Catie started sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time, and I slowly (slooooowly) started to feel more sane.

Still, the idea of enduring that again isn’t exactly something I’m looking forward to. Which is probably why it took me so long to come around to the idea of having a second baby, when it seems like a lot of my friends had their second babies ages ago. But it makes me feel like the Worst Mother Ever. What kind of pregnant lady isn’t excited about her upcoming arrival? I mean, of course I’m excited to meet this little person. I just wish there was a fast-forward button for that initial newborn phase. Is that awful? It feels awful.

And yeah, I talk about this stuff with my therapist. I don’t know if I also need medication or not at this point, I’m still trying to figure that out. Mostly, I just think how nice it would be if I could drink something fruity with vodka in it. But that won’t happen for probably at least three more months. Dammit.

a little Monday whining

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I feel really “off” lately. I can’t quite put my finger on it, it’s not quite a full-blown depression or anything that severe, but there are a lot of small things that are adding up to make me feel like I’m not myself. Like:

1. I’ve hit the point of pregnancy where I can no longer sleep comfortably for long periods (examples: I have to pee, the baby is kicking, my hip hurts, whatever), so I’m really freaking exhausted all the time.

2. Pregnancy hormones are making me a weepy and grouchy mess, which I hate. I spend way too much time either completely irritable, or on the verge of tears. I like to be in control of my feelings, so I’m not a fan of this.

3. Related to the hormone mess: I feel puffy and fat, and even my skin feels stretched tight, like it doesn’t know what to do with these changes. I don’t feel like a glowing pregnant Earth Mother type. I feel ugly, and I feel dry and itchy all over. I don’t feel like I “own” my body, if that makes sense. It’s like my body has been hijacked by some mysterious creature and I just have to put up with it for several more months while things get progressively more miserable.

4. I miss Dave. We live together and work at the same company, but it feels like we don’t see other very much. Weird, right? Well, case in point: he had a massive deadline that was due today, so he worked all weekend. And I mean, like, he worked: he drank coffee and didn’t sleep for 2 days. (He took a two-hour nap on Sunday afternoon. That was the only sleep he had between Saturday morning and Monday morning.) I know it was stuff that he needed to finish, but it makes me worry about his health when he pulls all-nighters like that. We basically barely spoke to each other all weekend because I wanted to leave him alone to get his work done, and I spent a lot of time corralling Catie to keep her quiet so she wouldn’t disturb him either. It sucked.

5. The anxiety of “holy crap, this 2nd baby is really on her way, and how on earth am I going to juggle two kids and a full-time job?” is starting to sink in. Plus all of the stereotypical stuff that goes with that – the fear that I’ll be “less” of a mom to Catie once the baby is here, that I’ve maxed out my capacity for love and won’t bond with this new baby, etc. Stupid stuff that I know – I KNOW – isn’t true. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying about it now.

I had an OB appointment this morning, and I talked about a lot of this stuff with my doctor. I told him that I think that the majority of my issues are environmental and not physiological. I’m pretty sure most of it can be filed under, “This too shall pass.” He said that it’s good that I’m aware of it and talking about it, and he wants me to let him know if it starts to feel like something we need to address more seriously.

I don’t want anybody reading this to worry about me. I’ll be ok, and if it feels like things aren’t getting better, then I absolutely will discuss it with my doctor and take it from there. I’m not naive, and I know enough about depression to know when to ask for help.

Today, though, I just needed to vent. Thanks for listening.

overcoming fears

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A year ago (less than that, even), Catie had all of these quirky little behaviors that absolutely baffled me. Little things, stuff that you’d think most kids would enjoy, totally terrified her. It used to worry me. But recently, Catie’s been proving that she’s not afraid of very much anymore. Like…

1. The tricycle. She got this tricycle on her 2nd birthday. She was ok with sitting on it (while I pushed it) when she first got it, but then something changed and she would howl and cry if I suggested she sit on it. It seemed to correlate to her fear of “motion that she’s not 100% in control of.” These days, not so much.

Catie on her tricycle

Apparently there are some tricycles on the playground at her daycare, and she’s recently been trying them out. She came home bragging about how she “rode a bike” at school. I thought that was odd, so I brought out her old tricycle (which had been growing cobwebs in the corner of the garage) to see if she wanted to take it for a spin. She did. And she loved it. She still won’t use the pedals, she just scoots herself along with her feet, but I think she’ll figure out that part on her own time.

2. The playground. She still doesn’t like swings, but she OWNS the slides. When she first started going down the slide this past spring, she would only go down the baby slide, and only if I held her hands.

She goes down the big slide on the playground by herself now

Now, though, she goes down the big slides, all by herself. And likes to show off her static-cling hair when she lands.

Static-hair after the slide

That’s pretty awesome. She’s also decided that her stroller is for babies, so she walks all the way to the neighborhood playground and back, and doesn’t even whine for me to carry her. (It would be about a 10-minute walk if I did it by myself. With a slow-poke 3 year-old, it’s more like 25 minutes, each way. But it’s hilly, so I’m impressed that she walks it.)

3. Water. Apparently this kid of mine has decided that she’s half-fish. After battling her pool phobia this summer, yesterday she tried out something new: the slip & slide. I bought it for her months ago as a surprise gift ($4 at Target, yay!), and she took one look at the picture on the box, and said, “I don’t like that.” We never got around to setting it up until yesterday.

Loving the slip & slide in the backyard

I think she liked it.

Of course, I had to show her what to do the first time. Related note: 34 year-olds are not supposed to use slip & slides. Ouch.

I’m just so proud of her, it’s like she woke up one day and decided she was a big kid and needed to act accordingly. I don’t know how it all seemed to happen at once, but I love it.

Unrelated side note: I think she might be watching too many Disney Princess movies. Last night when I was kissing her goodnight & saying our “I love you”s, she said, “In the morning, after the sun’s up, we can be together again.” Way to make bedtime dramatic, kiddo.

I’m telling you, three year-olds are a freaking riot.

learning curve

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Our previous baby-sitter, Nicole, emailed me over the weekend to ask if Catie could come play in the morning one day this week. Catie was good friends with Nicole’s daughter Kiersten, and I know they’ve missed each other these past couple of months, so I thought sure, why not. We decided that Catie could go play on Wednesday morning, since that worked for both Nicole’s and my schedules.

On Tuesday, when I picked Catie up from daycare, the director stopped me and asked if I had five minutes to talk. I said ok, and my stomach immediately knotted up. Why is that? It was like some residual “getting called into the principal’s office” fear that came out of nowhere. The woman is only a few years older than me. Why am I intimidated? Bizarre.

She wanted to know what I thought about moving Catie up to the preschool class. The class Catie’s in now is called the “Upper Twos,” which means it’s kids that range from 2 1/2 years old to kids that just recently turned 3. The preschool class is all 3 year-olds. I thought that being fully potty-trained was a prerequisite for the preschool class, but the director said no, there are a few kids in that room who are still in Pull-Ups. (For the record, Catie has probably a 90-95% success rate with peeing in the potty. It’s just the poop. I cannot get her to poop in the potty to save my freaking life.) The main difference between the rooms is the curriculum. She had noticed that Catie knows all of her letters and the sounds they make (which I take absolutely no credit for, it was totally because of this) and she can count to 20, so she’s probably getting bored by the Upper Twos class, since they’re still working on that stuff there.

So we were talking about my Special Little Snowflake and how brilliant she is (naturally), and I was thinking about Catie’s upcoming playdate at Nicole’s house and how much it threw me when Nicole suspected that Catie had SPD, and the thing I wrote yesterday about her going down the slide… And I just blurted out and asked her if she had noticed if Catie ever displayed any signs of Sensory Processing Disorder. She looked a bit surprised, but she said that she’d spent quite a bit of time in that classroom (filling in when one of the other teachers was out sick), and that she’d never noticed anything remotely abnormal about her.

I said, “Well, you know, she is scared of swings and she only recently decided that the slide was ok, but she still hates her tricycle…”

She said, “Yeah. But, she’s THREE. It’s not the same as it would be if she was scared of those things at 5 or 6 years old.”

I admit it, I sort of breathed a sigh of relief. (And no, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with kids who have SPD, or that it’s bad, or whatever. Some random person showed up the last time I wrote about it and completely took what I was saying out of context & was offended, so I’d like to just state that up front. I am not blasting your kid. I’m just talking about my own.)

Of course, when I talked about changing classes with Catie herself, she was dead set against it. They’re going to ease her in and let her spend a couple of hours in the preschool class here and there, and let her gradually make the shift. I think it’ll be really good for her.

And for the record, the playdate at Nicole’s house this morning was fine. She and Kiersten hugged both when we first got there, and again when it was time to leave. I love that it seems easy for her to make friends. I already knew she adored her cousin. It’s nice to see those friendships develop with non-family members too.

I picked her up from Nicole’s house around 11, and she got upset when I said that I was going to take her to daycare. My gut instinct knew that she wanted to spend time with me, not just get shuttled from one place to the other. So I decided that work could wait for a little while, and I took my favorite girl out for lunch.

Lunch break with Mommy

Mommy Time FTW! The chicken nuggets and french fries didn’t hurt either.