I had a sonogram this week, too! It’s so much bigger! Beautiful. EDD: 28th of October. HR: 180 BPM. Gender: Unknown, as yet. Anout 75% of people are swearing a girl, but I think most are just saying that because I already have a boy!

I’ve got the nausea and some of the vomiting. Gum works well for me.

I want two new baby products this time around: a Moby wrap and a high chair. I want the Moby wrap because this time around, I’ve GOT to have use of my arms! A sling caused my back to go into spasms, and this is supposed to be better. I love baby-wearing. It’s the easiest and least troublesome way of taking care of a baby. It keeps baby happy, and happy babies don’t cry. *g* I want the high chair because there’s no way I’m letting a baby eat at the good dining room table, and the kitchen table got moved to the covered porch because there isn’t room in the new house. (Downsizing!)

My whacko, granola-crunching thing to try this time around? Infant potty training, AKA elimination communication. Yeah. So you’ll all be laughing your heads off at me as I’m holding my newborn over a toilet and going “Pssss!” in the vain hope that it will do something other than blink at me in confusion. But I shall not be ashamed! If it makes me miss the knock-down, drag-out potty training fight the Bear and I had (which involved defiance-peeing, I kid you not), it’ll be worth it. Never mind the months of changing diapers long after the kid was perfectly able to use the potty if he so chose…. (He had–well, has–a phobia of plumbing, which made it worse. That’s right. My kid’s scared of plumbing. Other kids are scared of monsters, but no, not mine. First time I let the water out in the tub while he was in it, he began screaming in terror. It went on from there.)

I am, however, obscenely busy. I finished line edits, I’m finishing another non-LJ book, I’m working on the next LJ book, and….we’re homeschooling fulltime. Tada!

The Bear is reading his first 6th-grade-level chapter book right now. Too cool! The Lexile Level is 920L. The mid-year interquartile range (that is, actual reading levels of students in the 25th to 75th %ile) for 10th grade in the US is 905L to 1195L. Even though some of it is over his head, he’s stumbling over only 1-3 words a page. So that means my 5-year, 2-month old can read better than a good quarter of 10th graders at Christmas, in grade level if not reading speed. (He real reading ability level is probably even with the dead middle of sixth graders at Christmas, or more compatible with texts at a late 5th grade/early 6th grade level.)

That really is terrifying because he truly can’t read all that well, abysmal speed aside. What the heck are we doing to kids in school? The funny thing is that in actual literacy levels, the US does quite well internationally in both the 4th and 8th grade. In alliteracy, though, we’re appalling.

If DH would rent another RPG, his reading level would jump up at least another grade level. Sad, but true. The Bear is addicted to watching DH play RPGs. He watched most of Mass Effect (except for two particular scenes in which he was whisked from the room, *ahem*), and he loves reading the subtitles to all the speech. DH plays as a good guy 98% of the time, so there’s not much of the naughty stuff to see, anyway–the Bear wouldn’t tolerate him being mean, anyhow!

Reading speed is still agony here. It’s not just the words per minute that’s killing me. No, it’s actually mainly the total time he takes to read a given passage, including discussing things and drinks of water and the like. With this book, we’re sitting around 20 WPM as a gross rate. That is please-kill-me-now-and-end-the-agony slow. His rate depends upon font size and reading difficulty. It can be well over 100–more like 130–for a super easy book with large font that he’s reading for his own entertainment. It’s the pauses, though, that get me the most. He stops dead, goes silent, and looks at the page–typically not the part he’s supposed to be reading–before picking up again. And I still can’t get him to reliably see small words, especially when there are many together. He tends to miss them entirely. Ah, the joys of dyslexia. I wish I could help him more, but all I can really think to do is more practice. *sighs* But improvement is so slow. The kind of ability that the Bear has to read complicated words at first sight, and then his problems with seeing *word divisions,* for goodness sake…the combinations of strength and weakness somehow seem just wrong! But we shall persevere, and all that. After this hard book, we’ll hit picture books for a while (of varying levels) and then try some super-easy chapter books in quick succession and see if we can’t get the fluency up at the harder levels. Right now, working on his spelling will, I think, help him “see” all the letters quite a bit better, too, as he’s started to ask me questions about the differences in spelling between similar words.

(And yes, of course we’ve always done phonics instruction!)

This month, there will be a feature on SHADOWS on their site. It will have an excerpt, an interview, and a guest blog on March 10th.

Too cool!

Yes, we have a great yolk sac, length, and heartbeat!

(I’ll add pics as soon as I’m back at home.)

…because morning sickness–morning! HA!–is bad.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad–I had almost no pregnancy symptoms with the babies I lost. But it makes it hard to do anything. Yesterday when I felt better, I did some frantic cooking, but I don’t know whether cooking’s going to be in my future for a while here.

I’m going to see the perinatologist again in two hours. Let’s hope for good news. I’m optimistic because I’m miserable!

What have I found online this week?

Well, the first thing wasn’t online. It was, in fact, in the grocery store: canned bread. Apparently, this is an odd New England thing. It sounds interesting enough that I think I’m going to try a recipe of it, but there’s no way I’m paying $3 a can for it, which is what it is here. It’s not gruesome (like chitterlings–properly pronounced chitlins, you know), but it is…WEIRD.

The second is spray-on condoms. Those Germans. They are so…German. In the heat of the moment, imagine your DH/SO whipping out an AEROSOL CAN, sticking his erection inside, and pressing a button to get sprayed from every direction for TWENTY SECONDS.

Oh, and it comes in colors.

Yes. It is mine.

So on Friday the 15th of February, I’m looking at my stomach in the shower and going, “Hmmm. You know, this is distinctly…poofy. I don’t get poofy before a period. Maybe…maybe something’s up.”

So on Saturday while grocery shopping, I pick up a home pregnancy test. I get a two-pack because, of course, I’m almost certainly not pregnant. I’ve had three miscarriages in the nearly five years now I’ve been trying to get pregnant, and only one of those even stuck around long enough for me to pee on a stick and get a line.

But this one…this one is positive. More positive even than the one for the baby I lost in Nov. 2004. Positive.

Oh, shit.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited. I’m also scared out of my mind and am a complete bouncing nutcase at this point and will be until A) I lose this baby, too, or B) I hit 12 weeks. A betting man would choose the former, based on my obstetrical history. Hence my current lunacy.

Sooo, I did a very optimistic calculation and guessed I away maybe five…call it six weeks along at that point. (Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease let me be that far along….) I wanted to be that far along because the farther along I am, the safer I am, see?

I slathered myself in progesterone cream. Progesterone cream does NOT prevent most miscarriages. But if you have a luteal phase defect like me, it does. Basically, my body is one big freaking RU486 pill. RU486 is a progesterone antagonist. It kills progesterone, making you have a miscarriage whether or not they baby’s fine. My body just doesn’t react to or produce the right levels of progesterone after ovulation, so it throws out a pregnancy at the end of the month like five-day-old trash. Yeah. Fun stuff.

I made an appointment on Monday. Saw a nurse-midwife on Thursday–I have a high-risk pregnancy but, if I make it, will have a normal risk birth. Gently dissuaded her from sending me to the homeopath (who also specializes in healing touch!) and insisted instead on getting a referral to a perinatalogist, AKA a real doctor who actually specializing in high-risk pregnancies.

I saw him on Tuesday of this week and had an ultrasound. I slept all of 15 minutes the night before. And damn. I was hoping I was 7 weeks along by this point. But the U/S showed a perfectly healthy five-week pregnancy.

Five weeks. Am I five weeks? A more realistic calculation than my wildly optimistic initial hope (which would mean 7 weeks on Tuesday) would lead to Tuesday being exactly six weeks. (I have a long cycle that’s only ever regular within about three days, so the usual chiry “what was the first day of your last period?” doesn’t mean jack with me.) Five and a half weeks wasn’t at all unlikely. In fact, even four and a half could distantly be possible.

Five weeks. So I am either five weeks pregnant as of Tuesday, or I have a blighted ovum. I am choosing to believe, until my next appointment next week for another ultrasound, that I am five weeks.

God bless the perinatologist–he was originally going to have me come back after two weeks, but looking at my obstetrical history, he’s having me come in early so that I don’t have a psychotic break. Four and a half years trying to have a baby is a long time. And three losses hurt. A lot. It was very, very hard to fill out my paperwork. Number of pregnancies, including this one? 5. Term births? 0. Pre-term births? 1.

Ouch. What a whole lot of failure in those little numbers.

Perinatalogists only deal with high-risks births, so that means that there’s something wrong with every woman in the office. They also do post-multiple-miscarriage workups, but all the rest of the women in the room were obviously pregnant. (How can that be so inspiring and discouraging at once?) So there’s a macabre part of my mind that I’m trying to ignore that is matching the women to possible risk factors. Ah, so you’re clearly Advanced Maternal Age. You? I’m betting on warning signs of pre-eclampsia. Hmmm. Young. Fit. Placenta previa? Nah, not this early. You must be incompetent cervix!

Ugh. It’s like a train wreck…

Here is my vow for the next week:

I will get some sleep at night. And if I vomit, it will be from actual morning sickness, not from sheer terror. (Morning sickness, WHERE ARE YOU? I’ve been queasy now and again, but I can’t tell if I’m actually sick from being pregnant or simply going insane. Could be either one. Could be both.)

I will breathe. I will work. I will spend time with the Bear. I will try to be normal.