Piggelin

Nausea is keeping me from doing much now a days, such as blogging. I survive with the help of Piggelin popsicles - the only thing that seem to help, momentarily.

You give up a lot of things when you're a mother (to be). Such as birthdays.

My 33d birthday came and went. I spent it locked in our rental car in Rome, with the aircondition on full blast. Wifey wanted to see the Colosseum. Baby wanted to see the celing of the car and the inside of my eyelids. Baby won.
Besides being over heated, hungry, nauseous, exhausted, terrified that the cramps in my lower abdomen was an early sign of misscarriage, I still had the best birthday ever.
Married to the love of my life, pregnant and not having to show up for work. What more could one wish for?

Still, never go on vacation when you're newly pregnant. It's a total waste of money. All you manage to do is lay in bed and cry, wish you were home and could eat what you're craving, and obsess about misscarriages.
I was so miserable wifey started to remind me daily we were in Italy - not a third world country. Then she discovered a scorpion the size of a plum on our livingroom wall and agreed we should def. go home early.

We celebrated my birthday last night instead. I got a semi free pass from nausea most of the evening.
Wifey took me out for carrot cake and an authors night with Erica Jong. I dressed up, almost forgot I was nauseous and miserable and had a lovely, happy, evening.

Wifey also got me a Marimekko Pitekemäkko. A striped night gown I fell in love with on the ferry to Finland in my youth and dreamed I would sport as and old, rich, pregnant woman. ( In those days I imagine you needed to be rich to pay that much for a night gown. Now that I'm older and wiser, I know it's just about marrying the right woman).
And since wifey makes all my dreams come true, she took out her Ipod GPS and navigated to the Marimekko store.

So you see, I got all I wished for and more. I read (on the internet, where else?) that it can be difficult to be happy about your pregnancy when you're in the first trimester, tired, cranky and nauseous. Amen!

But sometimes, with a popsicle shoved in my mouth, and wifey rubbing my back, I'm the happiest I've ever been.

Raspberry baby in grapefruit womb...

Yes, that's right. According to the experts (google) my womb is now the size of a grapefruit. Do you people realize how big a grapefruit is? Try shoving it down your pants the next time you're in the grocery store. It's HUGE. (Yes, I actually tried it myself, not in the store but later at the house).

I had a miscarriage crises a week ago, but have calmed down now. Baby seems to be doing just fine. I feel constantly sick. "Morning" sickness is obviously just a phrase invented to lure women into pregnancy. It should really be referred to as 24/7 sickness, which would more properly describe it.
I can't even remember what it felt like not to be constantly nauseous.
How am I to function like a normal human being, feeling like this? Ok, I forgot. I'm not normal anymore. I'm somebody's mother.

Another noveau experience is violent nightmares. I scared wife half to death by screaming bloody murder and throwing myself on the floor w all the bedding approx. 15 min after I went to sleep the other night. Wifey got me back in to bed, still asleep I darted out of it again ( like a bat out of hell, Meatloaf might say). Wifey then tried to tuck me in tight to keep me off the floor, which made me half-way wake up and hiss at her " don't touch me! I feel nauseous!".
Wifey said she felt comforted by me acting like myself again and let me be.
Me? I don't remember a thing. For all I know I had a peaceful and restful night's sleep. Me and my raspberry.

I can hear the bells!

Tomorrow I'm a married woman and Klumpis will no longer be a bastard but a child born within a marriage.
Not a cilvil partnership, not a gay marriage but a proper marriage. Since Sweden came to her senses and made marriage gender neutral.

There is a lot of stress going into a wedding of course. But I'm mostly floating around in my own little bubble.
My body is whispering to me. I have baby growing inside me. How can I be bothered by life's petty details? All that matter is that Klumpis keeps growing, that wifey shows up tomorrow and that we survive until we're on our way to our honeymoon.

The weather is awful, we were hoping for an outdoor wedding. There is still hope I suppose. But I'm glad we got heaters for the tents.

Klumpis is now approx 3 weeks old. 5 weeks if you count the medical way. I think I'm gonna celebrate her 3 week conception-day w a nap.

Let the craziness begin!

I came home from my last day of work before my vacation starts. (Tomorrow we have a conference, so that really doesn't count as working).
I laid down on my sofa, opened the window to let some fresh air in. All of the sudden my appartment was buzzing with wasps.
I totally paniced, ran to the bathroom, locked myself in, put a towel against the opening on the bottom of the door and a piece of toilet paper in the keyhole. In case they were after me and wanted to get in!

Does that sound normal to you?

I then called wifey about a zillion times to ask when she was getting home to save me. She didn't answer.
However, a collegue from work rang and I told her the above. She recomended I get a weapon, e.g. hairspray and a towel, and faced my fear.
I asked her (she's a doctor) if you can act this crazy when you're pregnant. She said you can.

My anxiety sank a bit and I made it out of the bathroom. I successfully nuked 2 wasps before I ran out of hairspray. (I now have hairspray on most of my furniture and curtains). I still have a wasp semi-sprayed in my hall lamp, making the odd buzz sound.
I'm hunkering down in my sofa, one eye wildly fixed on the lamp.

Seems like I have developed a phobia for wasps. Or I'm just over worked, exhausted from the wedding planning, the IUI, pregnancy and now on top of it all; a stubborn cold. If that wasp would just be so kind as to die, I could get back to my napping.

Also just realized that being pregnant gives you a free pass for all kinds of crazy behavior. One should def. be pregnant more often.

Disbelief...

... is probably my strongest feeling right now. And shock. I can't really grasp that I'm pregnant. Am I really? And am I really going to be allowed to keep this baby?
The disbelief is protecting me from starting to obsess about a possible misscarriage.

But somehow the getting pregnant part always felt like the hardest piece of the puzzel. Quite miraculous actually. Conception is always a miracle, of course. But conception after importing frozen sperm from another country, time your ovulation, listen to your body, listen to the midwives and reading books all saying different things and deciding what to trust; then travle to a third country, defrost the little swimmers and actually have a conception take place? Does it sound do-able to you?

So now that I -unbelievably enough - somehow AM pregnant I just have a feeling our tiny fetus is an Amazone and will stay with us.

The night before Sunday I dreamed I got two positive pregnancy tests. Then I woke up. I'm afraid I still might do that. Wake up. And find it was all just a dream.

The plan now is just to get married, get on the plane to our honeymoon destination and relax in the sun and let it slowly, slowly sink in.

According to my google search Klumpis (as me and wifey call her) is now somewhere between the size of a sesame seed and a grain of rice. Her tiny heart beats approx. 200 beats per minute. She is all heart. Our little heart.

She is also very picky when it comes to her diet. I already discovered she likes proper food and has a strong distaste for candy, cakes or anything sugary. I had to try the wedding cake yesterday and felt like I was motionsick afterwards. Klumpis does NOT want sugar. She does want sushi.
Next she will want to go shopping in NYC, or she'll make me motionsick again.
I run it by wifey to see what she thinks...

Sunday the 29th of August 2010, 6.30 in the morning...

...and we're up again doing stick tricks.
I'm gonna let the picture speak for itself. Or help those of you foreign to sticks by 3 words; WE.ARE.PREGNANT!!!


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I awoke at 5.30...

...and discovered I'm bleeding. F--K!!! Or F-N!!! as we say in Swedish.
Not that I was hoping (but really, you know I was).
This bleeding could be my period. If you wanna go wild with it, you can imagine it's a so called nidation bleeding. Or that I'm one of the milli-percent of women who bleed through pregnancy. (They apparently exist. I've read about them on a not-so-high-quality site called Familjeliv).
I think it's just my period.
Perhaps the egg brushed by my uterus lining, causing the pos pregnancy test before deciding to make it's exit. Perhaps there was something wrong with the test.

Wifey has a friend who got her child via IVF, and she had a bleeding the day of her expected period. I thought my day of expected period was yesterday. But I don't know anything anymore.
Who's to know? Who's to tell? And even though I have tried so hard not to get sucked into this and start obsessing again; how can I help not to?

At least I have no cramps yet. But perhaps my body has shifted from having cramps during my period to having cramps all through the month except for my period?
I don't know how to read my body anymore.
"I try to read your portrait, but I'm helpless as a rich man's child". - Bob Dylan