13/12/2008

The Elephant in the Corner

So I'm finally ready to reveal the reason for my recent lack of posting - there has been an elephant standing in the corner of the room that I haven't wanted to mention. The only way to avoid mentioning that elephant was to not say anything at all. Behold the Bean:

Yep that's right, I have a passenger on board. My passenger is a 10 week old foetus (i.e. I'm 12 weeks pregnant) that we saw on ultrasound (for the second time) on Friday. It has a little beating heart, a stomach, an umbilical cord that attaches at all the right places, and a low risk for Downs Syndrome and the other chromosomal abnormalities they test for with the NT plus scan.

For those who don't know me IRL we had a few hassles getting to Asher - we had two miscarriages, one chemical pregnancy, a hemorrhage and then, when we conceived Asher I was finally diagnosed with anti-cardiolipin antibodies, an auto-immune disorder that creates clots in the placenta, and can be a cause of recurrent miscarriage (as well as intra-uterine growth retardation and stillbirth). I was on low-dose Aspirin (100mg) from the very beginning of my pregnancy until about 32 weeks, and this time they have re-tested me and I have the same levels so I'm on Aspirin again. I've just been Googling for some appropriate links for anyone who wants to know more, but I'm finding it difficult to find pages that provide enough detail but that are written for non-health-professionals. This is about the best I can do. I am a 'low positive' and also have a relatively low platelet count, so I suspect I'm less at risk of some of the other really nasty complications (like strokes). I'll have to talk to my doctor more about all that...

So anyhow, here we are, getting to the end of the first trimester and starting to believe that we really might end up with a baby. We didn't plan this timing, in fact, we had decided to start trying for number two around Christmas. I was hoping for a *very* festive Christmas season, with lots of alcohol and loving, but instead I will be seeing in the new year sober and probably slightly cranky (and it will be 100% worth it for our little family if we end up with a little person who we love as much as we love Asher!).

05/12/2008

Santa

There really is a plethora of Christmas posts around here, isn't there. It's funny 'coz it's really not playing that big a part in my mental life right now, but the other things that are going on are boring and involve making babysitting arrangements for Christmas parties, my work, Sanjay's work, and the minutea of daily life with a toddler. Will he go to bed OK tonight? Will there be tantrums today? Is he going to yell a perfectly enunciated 'fuck!' repeatedly in public? Will I be able to have a shower by myself today? ...and if that stuff is boring for me, then it's going to be absolutely punishing for anyone else.

So, anyway, back to my Santa story. Each Christmas so far we have had a photo taken with Santa. At 6 months old Asher was happily held by the strange guy in the freshly dry cleaned red polyester suit. Last year, at 18 months, there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that Asher would sit anywhere near the weird guy whose face was obscured by thick spectacles and a creepy white polyester beard. In that photo I'm sitting next to Santa, holding a wriggling Asher on my lap while trying to smile appropriately. This year we talked a lot about Santa for the few days before we actually went, and Asher's mate A actually had several 'dry runs' where she was bribed to sit with Santa to desensitize her to the inherent creepiness of the situation (creepy to a toddler, mortifying embarrassing to a tweenager and, I'm finding, strangely compulsive to a mother).


To get Asher to sit with Santa we went early in the morning, as soon as David Jones opened. We promised a babycino and a trip to Wizzy World after the photo and we had treats for the kids to try and get them smiling. In the end Asher also ended up with my camera, first taking photos of Santa and then, when he was sitting next to Santa, Asher took a (terrible) photo of me, pointing to the camera:


Finally, after much negotiating, we got a picture I was happy with (I don't have a scanner, so please excuse the poor 'photo of a photo' quality:

So there was not really much point to that post. Perhaps I could end on a question: do you think I should get Asher a kids digital camera for Christmas? It could buy me much peace and quiet (and Christmas should be about peace, right?).