There’s lots of little milestones happening round here.  Today is the day that, in my last pregnancy, I had the Ultrasound of Doom.  8w4d at this hour was not a happy place.  This was the day that, while I hadn’t started spotting yet, I knew that I would not be having a baby in 31w3d. Instead of dwelling on nervousness and sadness and stuff like that, instead I contacted the uni childcare center to get on the waiting list.

I don’t know that we’ll need daycare, or what things will be like when this all goes down, but I am going to have an income (sadly, I dreamed last night that there was a textbook company in town that I’d never heard of, but was always hiring people to create web based multimedia supplements, and you worked from home, and I was excited, and also flummoxed — why had I never heard of them? Especially in my field?) and that may require childcare.  Infant daycare is hard to find here as well, the uni has a good list on their site for nontrads, and there were three that would take infants.  The uni one, the one I subbed at a few years ago that made me panic about childcare for the future, and one that is owned by a super conservative christian legislator who is always working to criminalize homosexuals, and I’ll be damned if HE will get my kid, or my cash.  Waiting lists are long, so you have to get on them ASAP (some people on the list at the place I worked at hadn’t even conceived yet) or you’re screwed.  Students and staff get priority at the uni, and I’m going to have to take summer classes anyway, so maybe I can zoom in under that provision.  Either way, I figure it’s better to be on the list now, and opt out later, than to be scrambling later and screwed.  And who knows, maybe I’ll be able to finagle an on-campus job after my degree (they ARE moving to 1:1 next year, so it’s not that farfetched) and be able to be fairly close to my kid’s daycare.

Whatever. I emailed the director, and she’s inter-officing the application forms, and I’ll be on a waiting list for childcare. Ho Lee Shit.

Anyway, the next milestones are as follows:

Friday, 10/7 — 9w, or, officially more pregnant than before (knock on wood) since I started spotting at 8w6d last time

Friday, 10/14 — 10w, or my embryo is now a fetus!

Thursday, 10/20 — 10w6d, ultrasound, where we should see a FETUS and not a gray blob of beating heart. This will also make it official, and we can tell people.

Sigh. What a good weekend — I spent two nights in Portland with Amy and her family, which was really nice.  I hadn’t been down since, maybe July? And it’s always cool to hang out with the munchkins. Amy made me a necklace with a fertility goddess, which was cool, and we spent Saturday shopping, which was also cool. Especially since I got to go to Maine’s only Babies R Us, and really feel real about it this time.  I’d been once before, last time, when I was half as pregnant as I am now, and that didn’t seem as real or whatever.

My symptoms are ebbing and flowing, and Friday they ebbed a lot, and I panicked, inside, a little bit.  By the time I got to Amy’s though, my boobs had resumed hurting, I peed in the night, and by Saturday, oh yeah, I was back to the ick.  I guess B6 works, then? 

The worst was at Macaroni Grill, when I LOOKED for something with mushrooms, because I LOVE MUSHROOMS, and ended up ordering Chicken Marsala, and when it arrived, looking at the mound of food absoultely hit me like a ton of bricks.  I scooped a little onto my bread plate, to try to reduce the visual impact, and then I took a bite of a portabello mushroom and thought I would die, it tasted so…. fungal.  I had to leave the table, go to the restroom and pee and take a minute to catch my breath, and as it is, I ate about 3 bites, total, in the restaurant, and took the rest home.  Even Amy said my face was flushed when I looked at the food. Later that night, I was able to eat most of it, but hoo boy, not in the restaurant.  I ate a lot of bread (of course) and most of my salad, but damn, that mushroomy mushroomness was threatening the rest of my day by it’s sheer presence. So, yeah, feeling good by feeling bad.

While I was gone, Dave found out that the guy across the street* and his wife are expecting, about 3 weeks before us.  It was the first person Dave has told, and he and Dan had a long conversation about the things they find themselves worrying about now.  For Dave, it’s that he realized after weatherproofing the windows that the silicone had a label reading "known to cause reproductive harm in CA," which led to an hour on the internet being reassured that if I didn’t install it, and it had dried, I was going to be okay.  For Dan, it was that he needed to put a rail on the stairs going to the porch, which then made Dave think "OH MY GOD! I never even thought of that!"  he told me this last night, and this morning I realized that he would probably end up at Home Depot, so i called him in the morning to say that we didn’t need a railing as much as we needed the steps reinforced (they are fairly long, and only have risers on the ends,so they bow in the middle — especially when wet) and by the time I got home today, the steps had been removed, reinforced, and reinstalled.  He hopes to get a rail up by next weekend. Heh.

Also from Dave:
"I was watching TV,
and this ad came on about Disney releasing Cinderella for the first
time in 50 years, and it was only a limited release, and my first
thought was ‘maybe we need toget that! what if the baby wants
Cinderella and it’s not available!"

It’s all good.  I have my first appointment tomorrow, just to get all the propaganda and probably another diaper bag and stuff, not an actualy medical visit, and then I’m going to spend the day planting bulbs and cleaning up and stuff.  Right now, oy, I’m tired.

*He doesn’t live there, his mom does, but he’s by all the time to take care of the dog, or mow the lawn, or whatever.  Dave used to work with him, years ago, so they often strike up conversation if they are both outside, and he talks to him more than any other neighbor on the street (save for Richie, who lives next door) so I’ll just call him this for now.