Truth Hurts

I picked Sega up and held her face close to mine last night before bed. This is the conversation that I had with my little kitten:

Me: Do you love me?
Sega: *blank stare*
Me: Okay, do you like me?
Sega: *blank stare*
Me: Um...do you tolerate me?
Sega: *blank stare*
Me: Are you planning to kill me?
Sega: *eagerly licks my nose as if to say You bet! and then bounces cheerfully away*

I suppose I should appreciate her honesty.


In other news, we currently have four cats living with us right now. We're catsitting for a friend while he's out of town for the week, and the poor girl is inexplicably injured (we didn't do it, my friend came home and found her limping yesterday). She's sad, misses her daddy (she spends her day curled up in one of his shirts), and is going to be furious when I have to stick her in the cat carrier and subject her to the vet's poking and prodding tonight. I really hope that I don't get bit, but I can't be too mad at her if I do; I'm a stranger to her, after all, and she's frightened and in pain.

I'm hoping to befriend the new cat sometime during the next week, though. I'll need all the protection I can get from my devious kitten and her nefarious plots.

Four Months

I have a deceptively young face, such that when I showed up at my local polling place to cast my ballot, the election judges asked me if I was old enough to vote. Strangers regularly assume that I'm still in college, or even in high school. And I can forget about buying drinks or seeing an R-rated movie without my ID. (The looks and snide comments I get from strangers when buying pregnancy tests is no thrill ride either.) As a result of this, I'm actually really really bad at guessing the age of others. I can't assume that anyone is as young as they look, because others can't make that assumption about me.

Not so with children. I know children. I grew up with a lot of kids, thanks to the daycare my parents ran in our home, and I've helped care for dozens of children of various ages for over a decade. I can accurately estimate the age of an infant, toddler, or young child with a glance, and I'm familiar with the developmental milestones that kids typically reach as they age. I can easily recognize developmental outliers ("Wow, she's TALL for six months!"). I just know kids.

If I'd given birth in August, we would now have a child almost four months old. It may sound odd to have a favorite developmental period, but I do. And it starts at four months. I've found the time between four and eighteen months to be the most fun, the most exciting, and among the most adventerous (for us, the parents; not necessarily for the child). It's not like the fun and excitement of being a parent suddenly stops once a child approaches two; but it does change to a different brand of fun. I simply adore kids at that age and I have always looked forward to sharing that time with my own child.

The holidays are going to be rough on me this year. This time last year, I was pregnant and didn't know it yet. I spent Thanksgiving with my family, gorged on turkey, and joked with my cousins and aunts, completely unaware of what was going on inside me. I'd hoped that this Thanksgiving would be different, that I would have a new baby to introduce to them. And even after the loss, I thought that I would be pregnant again by now, but we don't even have that news to share. I thought that this holiday would be particularly special, in that the family that I only see once a year would finally welcome me as a mother, as my cousins were before me, and that they would welcome my son as one of their own, as I was before him.

I've started to cry, and that's no good since I'm at work right now, so I'm just going to end this entry now. Sorry for the abruptness, friends.

TTC: Cycle 6

Verdict: Failure.
Future Prospects: SUCK.

As you can see in the chart below, I gave up early on in the cycle. We had sex a couple of times during my fertile phase (if I had a fertile phase), but I didn't bother recording it. My growing sense of futility is not such a great motivator to chart diligently, as it turns out.

This past cycle was particularly unfair, in that my period was a couple of days late, but the tests still came up negative. The last time my period was late (an entire year ago, now), I was pregnant. This time...not so much.

In the meantime, Fertility Friend is throwing a fit because my subscription is about to expire. I don't intend to renew it for now. Doctor D wants to see me if the next couple cycles are a bust, so I'm going to take break from charting for the next two months. It's just such a pain in the ass to deal with the temping and all that, just to see every damn cycle to come to the same disappointing end.

How To Soothe A Crying Infant In 5 Easy Steps

Doctor Harvey Karp, pediatrician and author of The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer (damn, what an obnoxiously long book title!), claims to have discovered how to activate a calming reflex in infants. My first instinct, as usual, is to think that it's simply too good to be true, but the video is pretty interesting:



Now, the shushing really really doesn't sound like anything I would consider to be "soothing" for a baby, but Doc Karp remarks that the sound of a woman's blood flowing through her veins sounds about as loud as a vacuum cleaner to the growing fetus. I'm not sure if that's true (a cursory Google search didn't turn up anything), but there are a lot of mothers in one of my pregnancy forums who swear by this method - basically, every one who of them who has tried it says that once they figured out the right formula for their kid (some kids were more responsive to one particular step than others), it worked like a charm.

Has anyone out there ever tried this or heard of it? Would any of you with infants be willing to give it a shot and share the results with us? Y' know...for science?

Sometimes It Just Sucks To Be Pregnant

Health officials in North Dakota are now recommending that pregnant women and children under 6 abstain from eating meat from animals that were killed using lead bullets. This recommendation comes on the heels of a study which found that people who eat wild game killed with lead bullets had higher levels of lead in their blood. So I guess that means we can add venison to the long, long list of things that pregnant ladies can't have. (I wonder what this means for low-income rural families whose primary source of food is what they've hunted themselves?)

Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found that the incidence of employment discrimination against pregnant women is still going strong, even thirty years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

Obviously, there are financial reasons why a firm might not want to hire a pregnant woman: her health insurance will be more expensive and she'll have to take some leave in the foreseeable future. Even so, if it can be proved that that's the only reason she wasn't hired, that firm could be facing the EEOC. "You can imagine the slippery slope," says Frye. "First it's, 'Don't hire a pregnant woman.' Then it becomes, 'Don't hire a woman at all, because she could get pregnant and is likely to be the primary caregiver.'"

Then there are the studies that suggest that pregnant women just plain gross some people out. In one, people who viewed videotapes of non-pregnant women and visibly pregnant women doing the same task judged the pregnant women more negatively (and no, the activity was not smoking. Or sit-ups.)

That bias may stem from an urge to give pregnant women lesser duties. "People may feel they're doing the right thing," suggests Frye. "But they're not."

The emphasis above is mine. I'll be looking into these pregnancy gross-out studies later.

I feel like I should apologize for my recent lack of posts. In all honesty, I get sort of bummed out sometimes reading and writing so much about pregnancy, all while we continue to struggle to conceive. It just starts so feel very, very masochistic after a while.

Okay, I Surrender!

I'm giving up on this cycle. My temps don't indicate a thermal shift and my microscope also says that I have not ovulated. I'm really just getting tired of it all.

You see the look on Charlie's face? That is how I feel about this cycle.



In other news, I officially joined the curling league today. Dodgeball season ends in two weeks and I need something to keep myself occupied (and to make sure I leave the house and socialize with others!) until we finally catch an egg.

Now I'm off to tend to my pulled groin! (Note to self, stretch before curling.)