We Found An Apartment

Okay, so it is neither of the apartments that I had posted about before.  It is located on Hinsdale Street right near Cobbs Hill Park, and just a few blocks from Upper Monroe.  Here are some pictures:

The front of the house (we are the second floor apartment).  There is a secondary entrance from the driveway on the side of the house that enters into the kitchen.

The kitchen:

The dining room (with lots of windows) and the living room (with a decorative fireplace):

The enclosed sun room, taken from the dining room looking through the living room, and then from the living room:

There is also a bathroom and three bedrooms, and a basement with a washer and dryer.  It has all hardwood floors and off-street parking in the driveway (they do snow removal).  The rent is $725/month.

One major thing off the list, thanks to Kelly’s decisiveness.

We also got our car back today, $1,507.40 later.  At least it runs!  Kelly did the amazing job of actually going to the mechanic and making them explain everything in detail to his satisfaction.  And we got a one-year warranty on all the parts they replaced, which ended up being a huge part of the engine.  So actually, that’s two things off the list.  Yay Kelly!

I went to the doctor yesterday to check out this crotch rash that hadn’t been going away.  I’d been treating it with antifungal powder my midwife prescribed, since I have had itchiness there due to fungus before.  It turns out that this is a bacterial infection called folliculitis (because the hair follicles get infected) and now I am treating it with an antibiotic cream.  I hope it goes away soon.

I have a midwife appointment tonight.

Ultrasound results

I got my final ultrasound today to make sure the baby isn’t too small.  Well, apparently the baby’s weight is currently in the 68th percentile and the baby weighs about 7 pounds, 4 ounces.  Not to worry – it’s gonna be a big baby!

This means that of the 23 pounds I have gained during pregnancy, over 7 are baby.  That’s 30% of my total gain!

Couple of appointments

This week has been very busy.  Tuesday night Kelly and I went to the Birth Center orientation for people who know they plan to give birth at the birth center.  It was poorly organized and the packet of information they gave out was missing a number of pages.  Whoops.  We got to tour the full birth center (last time we only got to see 1 of the 3 birth suites since a woman was using one of the others) and to tour the hospital’s maternity ward, which made me feel much better about the possibility of transfer.  The labor & delivery rooms were very swank – much nicer than some hotels we have stayed in.  Plus, the view over Cambridge and Boston was magnificent!  We were there just as the sun was setting and the moon was rising over the skyline.  Beautiful.

Yesterday I interviewed a pediatrician.  Very, very nice guy.  Dr. Osler at Somerville Pediatrics is very nice and supportive, although of course we will only be seeing him for 2 weeks.  At least we have someone lined up to do the 24 hour baby checkup.

Then, last night we went to my weekly midwife appointment.  I will have an appointment every Wednesday between now and when I give birth.  Lots of good news: I am cleared to give birth at the birth center pending one last ultrasound tomorrow to make sure the baby is growing normally.  I weight 140 pounds, which means I have gained 23 pounds since I got pregnant – a decent number.  I am no longer anemic, I don’t have group B strep, and (surprise) I don’t have syphilis!  Even my fundal height is catching up – I am only 3 cm small now, as opposed to 4 cm last time.

I have a dentist appointment today which I am completely psyched about since my gums are totally rotting.  Stupid pregnancy gingivitis.  And I am so obsessive about the dental hygiene!  I don’t deserve to be punished like this.

I contacted the other mohel to get his information.  Now we have a list of numbers to call just in case.  We had talked about renting space in the Temple for the brit milah, but then Kelly called and found out it costs like $325.  So much for that.

Tonight we are going to Molly’s baby shower.  Much fun will be had by all.

Oh, also the car is dying.  We took it in today and the mechanic was like, your car has major issues.  I’m like, I KNOW – this is the third time I have brought it in for the same problem, so why didn’t you find these issues before?  I am going to ask for a discount if they tell me that these issues existed less than a month ago (June 24) when I brought it in.  All they found then was a baffle loose in the muffler, and the mechanic said it was not something I needed to worry about fixing.  Now they are like, OH F@*# YOUR CAR IS DYING.

Kelly’s going to a New Dad class this weekend which will teach him how to change diapers, bathe the baby, etc.  Cool beans.  He’s also preaching on Sunday.  Oh, also his name change came through and he has already submitted the papers to get a new Social Security card assigned, which should arrive in the mail in a week and a half.  Then he can get a new license.  Then he will be so legit!

Also, my boss said that I could leave work a few hours early every day, in the hopes that that will allow me to work longer.  Which is good, cuz I need more time to space out, sleep, and relax.

I slept! Reviewing the budget!

I actually slept all the way through the night last night (by which I mean, I fell back asleep quickly each time after getting up to pee twice).  The alarm woke me up at 7:15 and I am sooo happy that Friday is a holiday.  Tonight I have a midwife appointment.  At this appointment they are going to draw my blood and do the swab for group B strep, a type of bacterial infection that can be passed to the baby during delivery.

We went grocery shopping last night since it was the new month so our budget finally kicked over.  This system is really working for us.  In the last 3 months (April, May and June) we brought in $12,886, spent $7,669, and put $5,005 into savings.  Pats on the back all around!  What’s really made the difference is using the 3-basket “envelope” system – setting aside savings and monthly fixed expenses and then having the remaining amount of money to spend on food and any other expenses we choose – and not a penny more.  Of course, we usually end up within about $20 of the number either direction, which is fine.  We’ve also created a buffer for ourselves by saving in a separate account for large, one-time expenses like travel, car maintenance, and our tax bill.  I would say that our three-month review of this system finds it a big success.

We’ve got to get our butts in gear on finding infant CPR classes, a pediatrician, a mohel, and a pediatrician in Rochester who takes the insurance Kelly will have through his new job.  Now that it’s a new month, I also want to buy The New Jewish Baby Book, a birth ball, and a few other things.  And I can’t wait to spend our Target/Babies’R'Us credit on the infant car seat and all the itty-bitty baby grooming things like tiny nail clippers.  And we totally need a “Baby on Board” sign!  We’re going to be those people!

Midwife appointment, Heat, Ultrasound

Last Wednesday (June 4) I had an appointment with Tiffany, my midwife.  The appointment went well.  I had a few questions for her, which were answered to my satisfaction.  How can you tell what position the baby is in?  (It’s too early to tell – the baby is still moving around a lot at this point.)  Will my anemia affect my ability to give birth in the birth center?  (Probably not – only very severe cases of anemia are transferred to the hospital.  Even though I am taking Floradix twice daily, I will probably get a bit more anemic as the pregnancy goes on because my blood volume will continue to expand and red blood cells take months to manufacture.  However, this should not be a problem.)  Tiffany filled out the forms for my FMLA maternity leave from Tufts, and I filled out a form to get my medical records released so I could take a copy of them with me to Seattle just in case.

As usual, I peed in a cup and got weighed and had my fundal height measured.  My fundal height was less than would be expected for my gestational age, so Tiffany ordered an ultrasound for me to make sure that the baby was developing normally.  Because babies vary so much in size, only babies who measure below the 10th percentile or above the 90th percentile in size are considered abnormal.  I was worried all week about it.  What if my baby wasn’t growing right?  There could be many possible reasons for this, including malfunctioning placenta and malnutrition.  All “mal” – bad!  On the other hand, the constant movement in my belly was very reassuring and the baby certainly feels big!

I had the ultrasound yesterday, and all is well.  I could not be more “normal” – my baby is in the 49th percentile in terms of size.  Exactly in the middle of the curve.  The ultrasound machine estimated his or her current height at just over 18 cm and current weight at over 4 and a half pounds.  Very reassuring!!  The only lame part about this ultrasound was getting jabbed really hard by the tech, who wanted to get a good shot of the skull circumference.  The baby (once again) was in a not-ideal position, with its head tucked down under my public bone.  It felt like the tech was trying to pry my pubic bone up with the wand.  Fun.  And for the rest of the day, the baby was grumpy, full of activity and wiggling.  I am sure it got a headache from all the pressure!

The other big pregnancy happening was the horrible heat this week.  The heat index got up to 105 degrees with the humidity on Tuesday, and the heat and humidity combined have been brutal.  Not only am I not sleeping well, but my feet have been swelling.  The weather is back down to 80 today though, which means my swelling is gone.  We have window unit A/Cs in our apartment, but they only cool the temperature to about 15 degrees below outside, so if it’s 100 outside it is still 85 in the apartment and too hot to sleep.  I am hoping that this whole summer will not be like that.  The trip to Seattle tomorrow sounds great, and I am really looking forward to the shower.

I keep logging on to TheThingsIWant.com to add more items to my list, but it is very overwhelming.  I think I need to actually go to some stores to see what they have.  It’s hard to tell, for instance, which stroller handle will be more comfortable in terms of angle, grip, and height without actually holding them.  Similarly, which crib is sturdiest and is the right height to bend over the rails.  I am going to try to add a few more things today, though.  Consumer Reports recommends the Chicco Key Fit as the best infant car seat, and that seems like the kind of thing you don’t want to skimp on.

Alex just emailed the baby shower menu, which sounds yummy enough that I am going to post it here.

Edamame dip with rice crackers, jicama, raw vegetables, etc.

Mango salsa wontons

Tofu and walnut stuffed mushrooms

Mini pizzas

Fruit cornucopia

Cupcakes, various sweets from Flying Apron vegan bakery

I am so excited to see my family and friends!!  And just for your information, I do like it when people put a hand on or rub my tummy.  I think people hesitate to do that, and I would be totally weirded out if a stranger did it, but I love it when my friends or family get to feel King Kong monkey around in there.  I recently discovered that my little munchkin (Mischieverina is our current nickname) loves to be rubbed as well.  If I rub or put hands on my sides, she or he moves so that she can get the attention, which is pretty uncomfortable for me!  If I just rub or put hands on the middle part of my belly and rub up and down rather than side to side, he will move into a much more comfortable vertical position.  Now I only rub in the middle up and down, and I think we’re both happier.  This kid is going to love getting massages!

New books I think I need: books on breastfeeding, infant massage, the first year of life, and infant health and care.  We’re going to take an infant CPR class, but I’m not sure I also need the breastfeeding class or the newborn essentials class.  Each class costs money!  I’ve looked into Rochester mommies groups, and there are a lot of them.  I am planning on hooking up with at least one group to make some friends when we move there.

I can’t wait to be in Sea-town!  Got to go buy those maternity compression hose for the plane today.

May Midwife Appointment

Kelly and I went to see Tiffany (my midwife) on Wednesday, and had a good appointment.  I brought a copy of the birth plan that I wrote up, and she looked it over and then added it to my medical files.  I had to take the routine gestational diabetes test, which involves drinking this horrible sugary drink and then having your blood drawn an hour later.  The results were back yesterday morning – I do not have diabetes, but I am anemic.  I have been sporadically taking an iron supplement, but now I will get more serious about it.

Kelly did laundry last night, so first the first time since we bought it last weekend I could use my body pillow (we had to wash the pillowcase).  It was great!  I slept much better than the previous couple of nights.  However, the pillow we got was cheap ($9 at Target) and I can tell that with a few months of use it will get flatter where I wrap my legs around it.  My plan is to fluff it every day and hope that it survives until August, when I will finally be able to sleep on my back again (after giving birth).

Here is the best news: I have gained 16 pounds so far!  Since I was of an average weight prior to pregnancy, I should gain somewhere in the range of 25-35 pounds.  I’ve never been a real gainer and a vegan diet is not that calorically dense, so I was a bit worried about putting on the pounds.  No need to fear, apparently.  My weight gain curve is very encouraging.

Lots of strong moving and kicking from the belly.

Allergy season has begun in force.  I had an allergy attack that was so bad yesterday that I got a nosebleed after sneezing uncontrollably.  Kelly ran out last night to get me the antihistamine recommended by the ACAAI and the AAFP, chlorpheniramine (Chlor-Trimeton).  Taking this before bed is the other reason that I slept so well.  Like Benadryl, it has a sedative effect.  I could take Zyrtec or Claratin, which are both Category B, but obviously they are new enough to the market that effects on fetal health are unknown (there is no controlled human pregnancy drug testing for obvious reasons).  I unfortunately cannot take Patanol eye drops, which I am usually all about (they are Category C), so I will have to clean my eyes with baby shampoo and use hot compresses liberally until the season ends.

I bellydanced again last night.

Third Trimester

I hit 27 weeks this morning, the official start of the third trimester!

This month’s appointment

I just had my April meeting with my midwife, in which I asked a TON of questions and took up a lot more of her time than I think she had planned to give me.

Here are some answers:

• Kicking more on one side than another is normal.
• Having loose stools is normal.
• Feeling a fluttering inside your vagina like the baby is kicking there means that it is.
• I am gaining enough weight.
• The Cambridge Birth Center has a standard birth plan that the midwife fills out with the mother, but I am welcome to write my own birth plan to talk over with Tiffany.  She said that that might be useful so that she can tell me what will fly and what will not.  In her experience, medical providers do not sign birth plans saying that they have read and understand them (books I have read recommend that you have your doctor/midwife do this, although not have them say that they agree).
• If everything is going well at the birth center, they perform the following standard procedures:
  • vaginal exams with fingers to check dilation
  • intermittent heartbeat monitoring with a doppler monitor
  • if it hasn’t broken by 8 cm dilation, the midwives break the water to see if there is any meconium in it.
• If there is meconium in the amniotic fluid, you get immediately transferred to the hospital.  (In the industrialized world, meconium in the amniotic fluid can be detected in 8-25% of all births after 34 weeks’ gestation. Of those newborns with meconium-stained amniotic fluid, approximately 10% develop Meconium Aspiration Syndrome.)
• If you get transferred to the hospital, you get a routine IV and continuous electronic fetal monitoring.
• In terms of informed consent in hospitals, while medical providers should be able to give their rationale for a certain intervention or procedure, I am not likely to receive either a summary of evidence or a list of risks and benefits that includes specific numbers or percentages.  If I refuse a procedure a medical provider has recommended, I will probably have to sign a refusal of care form.
• Tiffany mentioned that the two cases where she believes I would have the most reason to inquire about the benefits and risks of an intervention are vacuum or forceps extraction and non-emergent C-section.  Other than this, I should trust the judgment of my medical providers.
• Breech vaginal births are not offered anywhere in the Boston area, to her knowledge.  Breech babies are always birthed by C-section.
• I asked Tiffany why she thought there was such a discrepancy in the percentage of cesareans for first-time mothers and for mothers who had had previous vaginal births.  She answered that moms who have had a previous vaginal birth have the confidence to know that they can give birth vaginally, know their pelvis will be big enough, and have looser muscles and tendons than the first time around, so overall everything about birth goes easier and faster.

I guess what I got out of all of that is that it is up to the pregnant lay woman to do her own research and become informed about the various interventions, routines, and procedures that medical centers provide and what the appropriate indications are for them.  I am also getting the sense that I am a homebirthing type of person, which may be the case for baby number two.

Any advice on how to help the first birth go smoothly?

Tummy ache

Well, I was going to write earlier this week, but during my opportunity WordPress wasn’t working for some reason – the server would just time out when I tried to go to the site. Bummer.

I saw my midwife Tiffany last Wednesday, and she is really really awesome. I look forward to working with her. During our conversation, I found out something interesting – Massachusetts is not a very midwife-friendly state. If you are a Certified Nurse-Midwife, you can’t keep your license and attend home births, so midwives who attend home births have a different credential – they are mostly Certified Professional Midwives.

Last Thursday or Friday, I got that twinge that signals an oncoming urinary tract infection, so Kelly and I ran out to Whole Foods and got a ton of unsweetened cranberry juice. I cleared the infection and am now symptom-free! Yay.

New things I have cooked in the last week: bean and veggie crumble, “hamburger helper” vegan style, raspberry muffins. Plans for upcoming cooking: sugar cookies with frosting, Pennsylvania German apple dumplings, spicy curry lentil-potato casserole. Also, a ton of kale, which it turns out is very easy to cook.

Kelly and I have been very romantic lately, doing lots of “hanky panky” of various sorts, as Zach would say. And I have finally been getting hungry and not been nauseous. This is what I imagined pregnancy would be like: having energy, bring horny, and being hungry. It’s great!

I went to a Country Western Line Dance class on Tuesday night, but I was disappointed that the class was very casual, and they didn’t dance the whole time. As soon as I would begin to get my heart rate up, the song would be over and everyone would sit down to chat for 10 minutes. Ugh! Got to find another way to exercise. I am going to take another dance class this weekend through the MIT ballroom dance club. I am also going to go to the Tufts gym next Tuesday and do some running on the elliptical. Got to buy some tennis shoes!

I sure am tired. I have not been sleepy at my normal bedtime, and then I wake up early, making it so I am overall getting about an hour less of sleep a night (and Kelly, too!). I guess this is to prepare us for life with baby, but being tired makes me feel spaced out and distracted.

Oh, and I had a tummy ache last night that I woke up with this morning, hence the post title, but it is gone now.

Good news, everyone

I haven’t written this week because looking at my computer screen increases my nausea. However, I do have good news to report: I switched midwives at the birth center, and I really like the new midwife I am working with, named Tiffany. In addition to the Cambridge Birth Center, she also sees patients at a location that is much closer to work/home (the Somerville hospital), so I can reduce the amount of time I am out the office. My next appointment with her is February 13.

I also saw a different midwife, Lorrie, for an urgent appointment on Wednesday about my yeast/bv. Lorrie recommended I take Terazol for the yeast. There was a whole deal where the terconazole cream contains propylene glycol as an inactive ingredient, which I am super sensitive to (it stings like a bitch). Eventually, with the help of two different pharmacists at compounding pharmacies who went way out of their way to help me find a solution, I figured out that Terazol also comes in a suppository form suspended in a vegetable oil base without any of the petroleum-based additives present in many vaginal creams. I got the prescription today, so I am set on that front, too.

At my urgent appointment with Lorrie, I also got to hear the heartbeat of my fetus. Yay! It sounds really fast, kind of like a beat machine. A great moment, but I wish Kelly could have been there.

I have one more upcoming appointment (the morning of January 28th), for the “ultrascreen” prenatal testing. This is a combination ultrasound and blood test that screens for the probability of chromosomal abnormalities and neural tube defects. Because I was not taking an adequate source of folic acid during the first few weeks of my pregnancy before I realized I was pregnant, Kelly and I decided that we would go ahead and get the screening. What I think is that the testing will confirm we have little to worry about, but it would be nice to know early if, for instance, our fetus had anencephaly. Kelly and I have talked about “what would we do if…” and for me, it would be much, much harder to terminate the pregnancy past the point of quickening even if it turned out that it like had no brain or something. I’m already pretty deeply attached to the pregnancy.

I thought that the point of “quickening,” or when the mother can first feel movement from the fetus, was significant in Judaism, but the internet seems unable to enlighten me on this point. Can anyone else find info on this or knows what I am talking about?

I appreciate all the comments I’ve been getting lately, everything from support to eating tips to the medical perspective (thanks, Stace). As Laura suggested, I have been eating a lot of calorie-dense foods like olives and avocados, which unfortunately is expensive in the winter. Thank goodness for the global agricultural economy, right? (No, wait…)  Anyway, your comments mean a lot to me.  Thanks for reading.

The weather is beautiful today, but there is a severe cold warning in effect for the weekend. Bummer.  I think tonight Kelly and I are going to go to Grasshopper Restaurant again, and then to services at Temple Sinai.