Protected: And now you are three

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

A very small wish

About three months ago E. started talking about his birthday. He was interested in learning all the months of the year and how they fit together and whose birthday is in which month and which month was coming next.

“I want a fire truck for my birthday,” he told me.

“A fire truck?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Because I love their sirens so much.”

“But E.,” I said, “You already have a fire truck. You have a little wooden fire truck, and the big ride-on fire truck/dump truck Granny gave you for Christmas two years ago.”

“I don’t want a fire truck like that,” E. told me. “I want one like my garbage truck and my flatbed dump truck.”

He meant his Bruder trucks. They are beautifully made, and so true to life, and E. adores them, but they are not small trucks.

I really didn’t want to add another truck to our household.

I’d e-mailed his relatives with ideas for his birthday. I specifically asked them not to buy him any more trucks.

The subject of the conversation changed, and although E. told me for a few more weeks that he wanted a fire truck, eventually he stopped mentioning it. I looked for one in the store where they can be found for a heavily discounted price (because German engineering doesn’t come cheap), but I never found it.

Time passed. I ordered E. some garden tools, since he loves working with us in the garden, and these were real tools, not toys, that he would be able to use for years.  After discussing it with Q., we also ordered him a couple of Mighty Machine DVDs, because he adores them, and I was getting tired of trying to remember to return them to the library on time and assuaging disappointment when the library’s copy didn’t work (probably because too many other toddlers had been so excited to watch it).  One of the DVDs had the episode with the fire trucks in it.

Done, I thought.

Last weekend, out of nowhere and for the first time in well over a month (if not longer), E. piped up while we were sorting laundry.

“I’m going to get a fire truck for my birthday.”

Q. and I both tried to gently suggest that maybe there wouldn’t be a fire truck, and maybe this would be ok, and there would be other good things, and didn’t he already have lots of lovely trucks, and wasn’t his parking garage full, so there wouldn’t be room for another one.

The tears welled up in E.’s eyes.

He wiped at them with one hand while gasping out in a tiny voice, “But I want a fire truck. I love the sirens so much.”

The look on his face was one of betrayal and crushing disappointment, but I could see that he was trying (trying so hard) to control his emotions, to not get too upset by this devastating news.

Q. and I looked at each other.

“Well, we’ll see what happens on your birthday,” Q. told him.

“But you know, E.,” I added. “If you do get a fire truck for your birthday, I think that would be the last truck. You have so many trucks now and we really don’t have any more room to park them. What do you think?”

E. considered this very seriously. “I think that would be ok, Mummy,” he said. “I would be ok with it being the last truck. I promise.”

“I saw the fire truck in the local toy store,” I told Q. later that morning, when E. was playing with his trains.

Q. nodded. “I guess you’d better go and get it.”

All that morning, I debated our decision. Were we being manipulated? Were we giving in to our toddler’s demands? Were we going to spoil him? Was I being that stereotypical mother who bought my child things because I felt guilty about not spending enough time with him? Was it a snap reaction to the miscarriage and all the money we have spent on a mythical second child, money that could have gone into his education fund, or paid for a family vacation? Was it a reaction to my realization that E. is struggling with anxiety? Did I somehow think I could make him less worried about his life (and his nursery school) with a fire truck? I worried he would somehow come to equate getting stuff with love.  I worried that I somehow equated buying him things with love.

I realized in the end that I didn’t really have a good reason for him NOT to have a fire truck.

I didn’t want another truck in the house, especially one with battery-powered sirens.

I didn’t think he NEEDED another truck, especially not one made by Bruder.

We’d already bought him some lovely presents, that we knew he would use and enjoy.

The trouble is, they weren’t what he’d asked for. WE decided they would be a good idea.

I had lots of reasons, but they weren’t compelling ones.  They were my problems, not his.

What finally convinced me, and allowed me to buy the fire truck (for rather more than I would have liked) without a guilty conscience was this:

Almost everything E. has said to us about his birthday has been negative.

He told us he didn’t want any friends to come.

He told us he didn’t want to have a party.

He told us he didn’t want anyone to sing “Happy Birthday” to him.

In all of our discussions about his upcoming birthday, E. has asked for precisely two things:

An orange cake with chocolate icing.

And a fire truck.

It would never have occurred to me to even consider not fulfilling the first request.

There was no good reason for me to reject the second.

There will be plenty of moments of disappointment in E.’s life. There will be presents he will ask for that we simply won’t be prepared to buy. There will be things he wants to do that are unfeasible. We will say no to him, many times, and we will mean it.

We didn’t have to say no this time.

We didn’t have to disappoint our son on his birthday.

So we bought the fire truck.

And the smile on his face when he unwraps it on Thursday will tell us we did the right thing.

What I would write about (if I only had the time)

I have six BILLION things I want to write about.

Some are good things, like how I found out yesterday I’m going to get paid this summer, about as much per month as I was being paid this academic year, which is beyond exciting as I spent most of this academic year believing I had no right to any funding at all for the summer. So the new roof looks less stressful, and our cottage vacation seems less frivolous, and I guess we’ll have the money for the FET when we decide it makes sense to do that.

Some are bad things, like how I was involved last week in a deeply distressing e-mail exchange where I was bullied by a big-shot professor in the U.S. to the point that I seriously considered pulling the paper I’m giving at a conference in a few weeks just so I wouldn’t have to deal with her any further.

Some are things I don’t have any answers to, but just wish I had the time to write about, like how we had this wonderful dinner out the other week and we were walking home, with E. holding both our hands and swinging between us, and I had this moment of realizing, really realizing, that if this is our life, we will be ok. And how I can think that one second and then struggle to breathe the next when I understand that, deep down, I don’t believe we’re going to be able to add to our family again, and I am not ok, so very much not ok with that reality.

Some are things that make me frustrated, like how I am STILL sick, more than three weeks after it started, and how I just can’t quite seem to shake it, and how I am so tired of being tired, and I still have all this work to do, and Q. is so stressed as well, and it’s just overwhelming if I look at it all at once. And how my face is a disaster zone (again) and I have no idea why, but the birth control pills, which I thought were helping, don’t seem to be anymore.

Some are funny things, like how E. is into the “Why?” questions in a big way, and how he talks non-stop in these hugely complicated sentences with four or five clauses, and how people now smile and laugh and give me knowing looks on streetcars as they, too, listen to E.’s constant questions. At dinner the other night we had this lengthy conversation where E. explained that he was keeping his poo across the street, in a poo tree in the neighbour’s yard, and how the fire trucks on his pyjamas were poo fire trucks, so they would come and get the poo and deliver it, but before that would happen the front-end loaders had to come and FLING the poo out from the tree, and it went on and on and on with Q. and I just grinning at each other. And the next day E. decided he was a giant python, so we’ve had several days of “Can you carry me up the stairs, Mummy? Because I’m a giant python and I don’t have any legs” and “When I see something I want to eat, I’m going to give it a big hug and such a big squeeze and then I’m going to eat it all up” and “Do you think the other kids at nursery school will be surprised to see that I’m a python? Maybe they are afraid of snakes. You could warn them so they wouldn’t be scared.”

Some are things that keep me up at night, like the fact that E.’s nursery school teacher thinks he had an anxiety/panic attack during circle time a week and a half ago. I have known for a while now that E. is very sensitive, and feels things very acutely, and has a very strong imagination, and tends to worry about anything and everything, but I am now starting to suspect that he is struggling with anxiety, real anxiety, not just normal toddler fears. This breaks my heart. I am working on not blaming myself.

But I have no time to write anything meaningful. So instead, I will leave you with this, the printed version of which I gave to my supervisor yesterday.

E. at 33, 34, and 35 months

I have been remiss at writing one of these and thought I had better get it in before he turns three!

What he’s doing:

Walking all over the neighbourhood. He is a superb walker. We started getting into the habit of walking to the library after I picked him up from nursery school on Monday afternoons because there’s a bakery right across the street and he quite liked the idea of having afternoon snack there. After we’d done this a few times, I decided to look our route up online and discovered that it was 1.5 km! And then he was doing close to another kilometre to get home again from the library, all without complaint. He loves balancing on the angled paving stones on some of the yards in the neighbourhood (to prevent erosion from the lawns). Now that we’re (finally) getting some slightly warmer weather he’s been enjoying walking in his shoes. He was heartily sick of the snow and the ice and the wind and the cold. I thinked he walked to nursery school every day this winter except for one, when it was so cold with the windchill he would have been in danger of frostbite. That day we took the stroller. He’s also enjoying playing in the parks again, and getting out consistently at nursery school. I lost count of the number of days this winter where we would walk there and then discover that it was an indoor day because it was too cold for them to go outside!

He’s also really, really, into the mail right now. He became so disappointed that there was never anything for him that I wrote to all of his relatives and asked them to consider sending him something. That’s resulted in him receiving mail two or three times a week for the last few weeks, which has thrilled him no end. It’s also prompted him to get interested in letters. The other day we were walking back from the library and he asked me why the cats never got any mail and I said without thinking, “Oh, well the cats can’t read. There’s no point in getting mail if you can’t read because you won’t know what it says.” The next day he brought a book over to Q. and said, “I want you to learn me my letters so I can read.” He’s probably got 12 or 14 of them now, and he never fails to recognize when one of the envelopes that arrives at the house has an E. on it!

Speaking of the cats, he bosses them around constantly. It’s almost like having a younger sibling (I imagine) as he shouts at them, “No, no Yiyi! Don’t touch my trains! Shoo! Don’t sit there! Go away!” He absolutely hates it if one of them sits on a puzzle that he’s working on, or tries to sniff his toys. If one of them is in my lap he’ll sidle over and lean on them until they move (if he’s being subtle) or just shove them away (if he’s not). They’ve both taken to hanging out in his room in the mornings to take advantage of the morning sun, which he thinks is hilarious, especially if one of them has gone into his room and jumped onto his change table before he’s even woken up.

He has become very interested in time and numbers. He can count to twenty-nine, and can go higher if you help him out with “thirty” and “forty” (otherwise he’ll say “twenty-ten, twenty-eleven” etc.).  He is trying to figure out how the months of the year and the seasons and the days of the week all fit together. He knows who has a birthday in which month. He also experiments with saying things to me like, “I’m going to go and visit the Bears in half an hour”. We’ve been talking about his new room and he’s told me he wants a clock in there “so I will know what time it is when I wake up”. I read in Your Two Year Old: Terrible or Tender that this sort of interest is really common around this age, which made me feel a bit better. I’m completely incapable of not being obsessed with time and punctuality (army brat), and I was worried I was burdening him with the same rigidity. But it seems it’s just normal development and I’m sure I’ll be pulling out my hair waiting for him to get up when he’s a teenager.

I do sometimes feel like pulling out my hair when we’re trying to get out the door in the morning, or at bedtime. I’ve realized that we have very little conflict in our day if we observe his timeline. It’s when I have to pressure him to do something faster than he wants to do- because I need to run errands before lunch, or I need him to get in bed so he won’t be overtired the next day- that he pushes back and starts resisting and getting silly and running away from me. And if I push back, then we get a meltdown. I am trying very hard to leave enough time to let him do everything he can do himself- put his pants and shirt on, put his boots on, take all winter gear off, etc., but some days I end up taking over and doing it (usually with him screaming and writhing in protest) because we have to be somewhere else. It’s a hard balance to meet.

He still really likes to help me out around the house. He doesn’t enjoy helping with the vacuum, as it’s too loud, but he cleans the toilets when I do the bathrooms, and does quite a good job of it too (I do around the edges, but he uses the brush to clean the bowl). He still loves baking and did 85% of the work for the cookies we made for my students on the last day of classes. He doesn’t help as much with dinner prep as he used to- I think we got out of the habit in the U.K. because the kitchen there wasn’t toddler friendly and it’s been hard to restart. He matches socks when I do the laundry, and puts cutlery out to set the table.

One thing he doesn’t seem to be doing a lot of is growing. His feet are in the same shoes I bought a year ago (8s). I’m sure he is getting taller because his head is above the countertops in the kitchen now, but all his clothes still fit and he’s showing no sign at all of needing to move into 3T. We’re going to have to move the carseat around the next time we need to drive somewhere as he no longer has the inch of shell above his head that is the requirement for rear-facing. This is deeply frustrating for me, as the carseat is weighted for rear-facing to 40 pounds, and he is nowhere near that. He’s put on some weight (finally- it’s been a real struggle with him being ill in the fall and then again in December and again in January) and is currently a whopping 28 pounds. I seriously think he might be off the weight percentiles altogether if he doesn’t put on a couple of more in the next month. I am having trouble not stressing about this. He looks healthy and has lots of energy, but it seems odd to me that I might have an average-sized son rather than a tall one, given all of my male relatives are over 6′. Q. is average-sized, so it appears his genes might be winning out. E. is a total beanpole. Even with all the weight he’s put on you can still see his ribs and his pants all slip down below his waist.

He does have a good appetite, although it is wildly variable. Every morning he likes to ask me what the breakfast options are, even though they’re pretty much always the same. I never notice how little his eating troubles me until we have grandparents visiting. They invariably end up pushing him to eat more, or they report back to me exactly what he ate if they were looking after him. My mum finally relaxed one day after watching him eat four bowls of oatmeal at breakfast. I had told her and told her that he ate when he was hungry and dinner wasn’t usually a good meal, but she had still been fretting. Q. and I have started to push him a little bit more with food now that he’s almost three. We don’t push him to eat more, but if he’s eaten everything he liked, or drunk all his milk, and he wants more of the same, we’ve started asking him to try the things on his plate he hasn’t touched. So far this hasn’t led to any battles (I think because food has never been a battle), and it means he’s getting exposed to more things, as he is still a real toddler stereotype in what he prefers to eat. If he doesn’t like what he’s tried, he’s allowed to spit it out. He really dislikes seafood right now, which is funny given one of my favourite memories from his first year is watching him eat everyone’s scallops at dinner the weekend of his first birthday party. Scallops are one of my Dad’s favourite foods, and he just handed them over, entranced at the sight of this pint-sized almost toddler wolfing them down. We had scallops again the other night when he was visiting and E. took the one bite we’d requested of him and then immediately spat it out gagging. Oh well.

What he’s playing with:

These last few months have really been about imaginative play. We spent MONTHS playing Berenstain Bears. We would line up all of the dining room chairs to make a streetcar that we would ride to go and visit the Bears, and then we’d sit on the couch and pretend that it was going to be Christmas, or that we were going to have a picnic with them, or that they were moving out of their treehouse and needed our help. When we set up the trains, the trains would inevitably be transporting things that belonged to the Bears. He would get upset with me at quiet time or bedtime if I told him anything other than, “Have a nice visit with the Bears”, because that’s what he would sit up there doing for the entire quiet time, or until he fell asleep at night. Once he skipped quiet time because Grannie and Grandpa were visiting and he told me at supper, “I’m looking forward to bedtime because I can visit the Bears. I didn’t get to see them this afternoon.” Yep. This child tells me on a regular basis that he has “no friends” at nursery school because “the other children are too yowd”, so I’m glad he’s made friends with someone, even imaginary ones.

When the Bear obsession finally waned, he became fixated instead on Peter Rabbit. He has a stuffed Peter, as well as another bunny (this one a lop) which he has ignored for his entire life. Suddenly they were both treasured companions, and Peter and Mop the Lop (and I) spent days going “gooseberry netting” which consisted of the bunnies eating breakfast, then E. driving his dump truck over to the part of the couch where the gooseberries were that day, and then Peter would refuse to help Mop pick the berries, or Mop would spend the whole time jumping into the truck and Peter had to pull him back out again (depending on which bunny E. was in charge of that day). When the truck was eventually filled, he would get a book from his shelves to be the lid, and then he’d drive it off, dump it out somewhere, and we’d start all over again. The bunnies also come out at night when we sing Sleeping Bunnies before he goes upstairs to start the bedtime routine. He made Q. and I laugh so hard the first time he made them join in, because after the first round of the song, he lay down again, and he made Mop lie down, but then he made Peter keep hopping and refuse to lie down (because Peter, after all, is a very naughty rabbit).

In between the Bears and the bunnies, he became very attached to his stuffed cougar and, by association, my stuffed cougar, which was my most treasured stuffed animal when I was small (and not-so-small- he came with me on all my moves overseas). My mum made his cougar a cape, so now she’s Super Caramel and he spends a lot of time flying her around making a whooshing sound. He’s also continually engaged in a campaign to keep my cougar in his crib. I’m resisting, because as much as I love my son, I can’t relinquish my cougar, but he might wear me down.

He’s really not interested in crafts right now. We get art from nursery school perhaps twice a month, and he almost never colours at home. He does like stickers and sticking them in all sorts of strange places. Trains are still very popular, as is the IKEA tent he got for Christmas. We set it up in the living room and then the bunnies or the cougars will go inside and all sorts of antics will ensue. He’s in the habit now of watching a short (thirty minutes or less) video each day, which is more television than I’d like him to be watching, but since he doesn’t nap at all anymore and his tolerance for quiet time ends at about the hour mark, it’s a useful sanity saver. We tend to borrow DVDs from the library, usually Mighty Machines or Berenstain Bears. The Mighty Machines are 25 minutes long, so he can choose one of those, or three of the Berenstain Bear episodes (they’re 12 minutes and each DVD has five different ones). Mighty Machines has been a great discovery. It’s Canadian, educational, and apparently enthralling to almost-three-year-old boys. I know I’ve learned something from every episode.

He has a wonderful imagination but also incredibly firm ideas about how the game will go. I’ve had to tell him more than once that I won’t play with him if he keep screaming at me because he doesn’t like what I’m doing: “NO! WE’RE NOT PICKING THE GOOSE BERRIES FROM THERE! NO, I DON’T WANT PETER TO DO THAT! NO THANKS! NO THANKS!” I know he gets to control very little in his day, so I try to let him take the lead when I play with him, but I’m also cognizant that I do him no favors allowing him to be a tyrant when playing with someone else.

What he’s reading:

It was basically one Berenstain Bear book or another for two and a half months in this house. I think at one point we had 27 of them out at the library…and he had them all memorized and would correct you if you missed a single word. He didn’t have any strong favourites, although he was quite taken with Moving Day and Go Out to Eat. It was a great relief when the obsession eased in the last couple of weeks, not least because I had used up all the renewals on the library books and had to start taking them back. I think we’ve only got five or six out at the moment. He’s recently moved on to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, which has become a firm favourite (I think partly because it’s short enough that I’ll agree to read it twice at night, which I wouldn’t do with any of the Berenstain Bears).

What he’s saying:

I think I probably say this every time I write one of these posts, but his language really does change in leaps and bounds these days. He has such a wide vocabulary- we realized the other day (after a lot of wrong guesses) that he was trying to say “ricocheting”. The biggest change, right around 34 months, was he figured out the first person and stopped calling himself “you”. It was really interesting- he woke up one day and was clearly starting to experiment with it. The next day he had it 85% of the time, and the day after that he was pretty much letter perfect with ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘my’. For a long time he was saying “Yep” or “Nope” but lately he’s been using “Yeah?” with this huge upward shift in pitch at the end. He also shouts “No thanks, no thanks, I think that’s a terrible idea” when he disagrees with us. He’s started getting us to come with him by saying, “Ok, come on Mummy, let’s go and play with the trains”, while holding out his hand, which makes me laugh every time. He’s also understanding the idea of sitting together at the dinner table and talking, as he’ll ask, “How is your day, Daddy?” listen to the response and then, if we’re not fast enough, he’ll add, “I want someone to ask me how my day is!”

Here are a few of his conversations:

At lunch (33 months).
E.: “You was hungry! And thirsty!”
Me: “You were! Are you all done? Did you want to get down?”
E.: “No. You want to sit at the table and chat with Mummy for a little while.”
Me: “Sure! What do you want to tell me?”
E.: “Want to tell Mummy about what happened at [nursery school] on Wednesday.”
And he did.

At lunch (34 months).
E.: “I’m going to visit the Berenstain Bears at quiet time.”
Me: “That’s nice. Are you going to see them in their treehouse?”
E.: “Yes. And each day I’m there will be Christmas.”
Me: “Every day will be Christmas?”
E.: “Yes. Because I love Christmas.”
Me: “You do, sweetheart.”
E.: “And each Christmas I will get a big truck. Because I love trucks.”

In the bath (34 months).
E.: “I don’t want to use the potty or the toilet because I’m two.”
Me: “Oh. Does that mean you will want to use them when you’re three?”
E.: *giving me a deep, suspicious stare* “I will use them when I am bigger. Like an adult bigger.”

At breakfast (34 1/2 months).
E.: “Daddy, you and I are going to do the roof.”
Q.: “We’re going to redo the roof in the spring?”
E.: “Yes.”
Q.: “Where are we going to get the supplies we need?”
E.: “We will get the sprinkles (shingles) from Canadian Tire.”

Upon checking the mail and realizing that there are two pieces of mail for him and none for me (34 1/2 months).
E.: “I got two mails today! Two!” *shakes his head* “You did not get any mail again. You must be so disappointed.”

What I’ve noticed:

When we have good days, we have GREAT days. He is so funny, so insightful, so curious. He figured out ‘why’ questions in early February, and we often spend much of the walk to nursery school discussing one thing or another. Q. and I both end up shaking our heads sometimes at the things he tells us. He is genuinely good company. We have real conversations at the dinner table now.

When we have bad days, they are very difficult. He is so quick to start shouting or crying or both as soon as he dislikes something. When he’s having a bit of trouble doing something, he’ll start shouting, “Help! Help!” in this really high-pitched voice. Half the time he’s shouting it as he does whatever it is he’s claiming he can’t do. I have to admit I find the high-pitched whine/shout really hard to cope with. Nothing erases my patience faster.

He’s obviously worried about growing up too quickly. He’ll make big strides in doing something and then suddenly start wanting us to do it for him again, as if he’s realized he’s more independent. Bedtime is becoming a progressively larger issue. We put a nightlight in his room about six weeks ago because he was starting to show signs of being afraid of the dark. That worked well, but in the last week or so we’re back to him wanting the bathroom light left on as well and his door left wide open. We also have to check on him multiple times, and we’ve only just managed to curb a bad habit of having to go back in and take him back out of the crib for another cuddle on the futon. The routine also takes forever these days, now that we have to do two rounds of Sleeping Bunnies, and then he wants to run laps of our hall upstairs (usually 20 or so), and then there is the inordinate amount of time it takes him to put on his pjs, and then teeth brushing and hair combing and then there are stories, and then cuddles, and then we have to check on him three times, and then we still often have to go back in again to stop a meltdown. Partly this is a result of him occasionally napping at nursery school. He gave up napping over Christmas. Since then he’s napped maybe a handful of times- three of them at nursery school in the last week or so (which might mean a growth spurt). It’s so clear that he doesn’t need a nap now- it just destroys bedtime. But I also think part of it is he’s developing more sophisticated fears. He woke up from a bad dream the other night and told Q. that he had been lost and he understands the idea of being lonely too. Right now Q. and I are pretty clear on our lines in the sand and we’re not budging. I have to admit I’m glad he’s still in the crib- it would be far worse if he could be popping out of bed whenever he pleased. We were planning on moving him to his new room later this month but the timings are just going to be too hectic, so we’ll wait until we’re back from Oz in July.

Other than the battles at bedtime, his sleep right now is truly amazing. He’ll go to bed happily at 7:30 (8:00 at the latest) and sleep through for twelve or thirteen hours. Once he slept in until 9:00! The other huge change is we can get up in the morning without waking him up (even with our terrible floorboards). Occasionally Q.’s even showered upstairs without hearing a peep from the other side of the wall. And we can check on him at night when we go to sleep. I remember reading about Serenity being able to check on her O. when he was sleeping when E. was so little and so terrible at sleeping and thinking, “That sounds amazing. That will NEVER be us.” Yet here we are. A year ago at this point E. was waking up for the day at 5 a.m. or earlier. Two years ago he was waking up when we went to bed, even with the white noise machine in his room, and if I didn’t nurse him, he’d just scream for an hour or more, even though he’d fed less than three hours before. And now I can walk into his room before I go to bed and smooth his hair and check to see if he is wearing his bunny as a hat, or if he is cuddling a cougar. I can listen to his breathing (or put my hand on my chest if I can’t hear it). I can see how he sleeps. I love being able to do this.

His best bunny isn’t as popular anymore. Since she only has a bunny head and a blanket body she’s not as interesting as the cougars or the other bunnies, so she doesn’t tend to come out of the crib much these days. For a while he wasn’t even sleeping with her. It made me so sad to think he didn’t need her anymore- it was this reminder I just wasn’t expecting that he is growing up. And then I noticed that when he was asleep she was usually nearby, or tucked under his arm or his belly, and the last few times we’ve had a huge meltdown, I’ve been able to get him to calm down and fall asleep by getting him to cuddle her. He was even wearing her like a hat as he slept two nights ago, which I haven’t seen him do in months. I’m glad he hasn’t outgrown her quite yet.

He is still so physically cautious. We started going to playgrounds again, and when he first sat in a swing he didn’t want to be pushed very high at all, and the first time he went on a climbing structure he actually crawled across the little bridge spanning two sections (a bridge that was made of metal and wasn’t going to move). When I told him it would be ok to walk across, he did it, but he kept a death grip on the railing. In some ways this is a good thing, as he’s very sensible and it means I don’t have to worry about any daredevil antics. At the same time, however, I don’t want his excessive caution to slow him down. He became much braver in the playgrounds after a couple of visits, thank goodness. I think he just needed to remember how to play there.

He’s starting to develop some empathy. He spends a lot of time telling us that he misses us, asking about our days, giving us big hugs and cuddles, etc. When he knows we’re upset, he brings us kleenex so we can wipe our tears and feel better. He wanted to buy Q. flowers when he finished teaching for the year because “Daddy will love the colours and they will make him so happy”. He has also finally, finally, stopped rejecting his father. I am still doing 99% of the bedtimes, because if I’m home E. will make a huge fuss and it’s just been too stressful a semester to push that, but if I’m out Q. puts him down with no trouble at all. More importantly, E. has stopped yelling at his father to leave as soon as he walks in the door and he no longer shrieks and throws a fit if Q. gets him breakfast or changes his diaper. I had to leave for work before E. woke up a few times in the last couple of months, and Q. didn’t have to call me to get me to talk to a hysterical little guy. E. gives Q. lots of hugs and kisses now. They giggle together when they’re being Sleeping Bunnies. He seeks out his father for stories after supper. It makes my heart happy to watch them together.

Watching E. process the loss of the baby was heartbreaking. For weeks I’d be ambushed out of nowhere with questions: “Tell me again why there’s going to be no baby in September.” “Is you still sad about the baby?” E. told me that he missed the baby and that he was sad it wasn’t going to get to come out. His interest in the months of the year was sparked by his wanting to know exactly when September was. He knew that we weren’t supposed to going to Oz this summer- when we were talking about it, weeks after it had happened, he piped up with wanting to know why there wasn’t going to be a baby again. The other night I was telling him that he’s my best medium-sized guy (because he doesn’t want to get big, but he’s not little like a baby either), and he thought about it for a while and then said, “Mummy, I’m your only medium sized guy.”

He gets me through the day. Even on the days where he’s driving me absolutely up the wall and I don’t know whether to cry or scream and I’m afraid I’m going to do both, he gets me through.

Other thoughts

Thank you for all of your comments on my post from last night.  It is deeply helpful to know that I am not alone. For the same reason, I don’t think I can quit my birth club, even though I agree that perhaps it would be helpful to do so in the short-term. They are my friends. They sent us food and gave us a ridiculously large gift-card to Costco and found an Italian coin with Ceres on it and sent it with a card with a quotation from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. They are good, kind women. It is not their fault some of them are pregnant. It is not their fault I am not.

***

The last time I was in at the clinic, when I wanted them to make sure there hadn’t been anything left behind,  I looked through my chart.

Of the two embryos they transferred, one was a 2BC (1AA being my clinic’s highest grade) and the other was still a morula but obviously so close to being a blast they knew it would make it (I can’t read the embryologist’s writing well enough to decipher the exact term he used).

The frozen one is a 1BB.

It’s a better quality embryo than either of the two we transferred.

I suppose that’s something.

***

I realized a little while ago that I’m not sure I made them monitor my thyroid during the FETs last fall.

Post-birth control, absolutely. During the IVF, for sure.

But I don’t know that I did anything during the FETs. FETs when I was taking six Estrace a day. Estrace that would throw out the thyroid.

Fuck.

I might have sabotaged those FETs.

Some days I really wish I could 100% trust that my f/s and my endocrinologist would stay on top of things.

That’s just not the way it is.

***

Something really weird happened at my endocrinologist appointment. I’ve been going there for six years now. He gets one of his medical student assistants to take my pulse, check my blood pressure, weigh me, and write down my medications at every visit. I have always weighed about four pounds more on his scale than I have at home.

I weighed myself at home the morning of the appointment. The result wasn’t pretty

At the appointment, his scale showed me as weighing six pounds LESS than I did on my scale at home.

According to his scale, I’ve lost two pounds since the last time I was in, when I was five weeks pregnant.

According to my scale, I’ve gained seven pounds in that time.

Given his scale is one of those giant ones with the weights and the sliding bar, I’m inclined to think that my scale is the problem. Which would be nice, obviously, but I just don’t feel that light, especially when I’m trying to do up my work pants after I’ve washed them.

***

We have more grandparents visiting us this weekend, and Q. came back from his conference in Europe very ill, and I am just feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything right now and would love a weekend where I could sit in my pjs and read and hide and just decompress.

Oh wait. I have a toddler. I don’t have those weekends anymore.

Anyway, I am not good with Male Illness because I do not have enough sympathy. I do not disagree that Q. is really unwell. I just don’t cope well with the moping. So I was getting grumpy because I was stressed about my class today and I’d cleaned the whole house yesterday and now I was going to have to do the grocery shopping too and do all the cooking this weekend when we had guests over, and then I took a moment and remembered that for some women, probably a lot of women, this is their NORMAL life. Their husbands don’t cook, or clean, or do grocery shopping.  So I tried to stop being a grumple, but I couldn’t stop feeling like my head was going to explode with anxiety. I felt jittery, buggy, like I was souped up on caffeine or had eaten too much sugar.

And then I realized that my thyroid has probably gone into hyper-territory since I’m still on the same dose I was on six weeks ago, when I was pregnant and it was starting to drift into hypo-territory again. It’s two pills higher than my normal dose. Stands to reason my body would start to want a more normal dose right around now. I have a prescription for the new dose and will get it filled this weekend. That will hopefully help me calm down.

***

The spotting appears to have stopped.

I haven’t started the birth control pills yet, because I had to get through my endocrinologist’s appointment first, as it would have wrecked the blood tests if I’d started the pill a week before. But it appears that maybe, just maybe, my body has finally decided to be done with it all. It stopped on Tuesday, so this is the longest it’s gone thus far without starting again.

I’ll start the pill this weekend too. We’ve adjusted my thyroid so it should stay in line even on the pill.

My f/s gave me a prescription that will let me stay on the pill until we get back from Oz in mid-July, at which point we might do that last FET depending on the status of my dissertation.

I think I might just stay on the pill.

We’re not going to get pregnant on our own. Not ever.

And maybe a few months on the pill will help sort out my face.

***

Things are getting sorted with E.’s new room. We have the duvet cover (which is a much brighter true red than it appears on the website- it looks almost wine-coloured to me on the computer), and I’ve picked the fabric for curtains (my Mum is going to make them for me, and I’ve decided I don’t care how much it costs, I’m getting the fabric shipped over from the U.K. which may well be the only place I can find it). We have most of the furniture. I’m still undecided on paint. I need some time to go and get some samples and paint a few test patches on the walls to really see what looks best. I’m getting the mattress from one of two places and just need to figure out which one will be the best deal (as one will require a car rental to go and get it).

The downside to all of this organizing is I can’t spend hours trolling Etsy and Pinterest anymore, and I think that’s one reason I’m clenching my jaw so tightly it’s sore pretty much all the time. I need another distraction. Organizing the house is only getting me so far- I’ve already done my clothes, the linen closet, the cupboards and drawers in the basement, and my books. There’s still a lot more I could do, but I can only stand to do it in short bursts of frenzied activity.

I’m a little afraid of how empty I’m going to feel inside when we get E.’s room set up in April.

 

This week

Today I had a dentist appointment.

The last time I was there my usual hygienist wasn’t there because she was doing an IVF transfer.

I’m not going to lie. I eyed her up the moment I saw her, wondering if it had worked.

It hadn’t.

I told her about the IVF cycle. About the losses.

We talked for a long time about things.  She is feeling really beaten down. It’s her second round of IVF.  Her clinic does some things really differently, so we compared notes.

She has snowbabies, so I am hopeful something will come of that. She reminds me of me, circa late 2009. I told her how I’d given up before we did the IVF cycle that brought us E. I told her that if it worked, the pain and the heartache would be worth it.

If it worked.

Eventually she cleaned my teeth. I was due for x-rays and a check from the dentist. He said I’m clenching my teeth and recommended a night guard.

I am not remotely surprised by this. I am still holding so much tension in my jaw. I’m trying to work on it during the day, but I can’t control what I do while sleeping.

***

I went back into the clinic on Wednesday. It completely blew my one full day of work in the week, but the bleeding still hadn’t stopped and I wanted to be sure.

Two ultrasound techs did a scan and then my doctor did another. Eventually they decided that my uterus looked clean.

We did a blood draw and my beta came back at 18, so it is falling as it should be.

My f/s gave me a pack of birth control pills that I’ll start next week after I talk to my endocrinologist about my thyroid dose (I’m still on the elevated dose from when I was pregnant). We agreed that my body was unlikely to get its hormones sorted out without help.

I’m tempted to just stay on birth control pills until July now. We’re not going to do the FET until after we get back from Oz, and it’s not like we’re going to get pregnant on our own as a surprise. Maybe a couple months of bcps will help my poor face get sorted out.

***

My mother and stepfather are here. They’re helping me with E. as Q. left on Wednesday to go to Europe for a conference. (As an aside, I know I shouldn’t like Amazon because they destroy independent booksellers and they hide offshore so they don’t pay enough tax, but when your husband manages to leave his computer cable in his home city’s airport, it is really nice to have a website where you can order the right cable, ship it to his hotel, and have it arrive there before noon the day after he first called in a panic. Also I am superwife.)

Thursday my Mum played with E. all morning while my stepfather and I went to the wonderful land of flat-packed Swedish furniture. I bought E’s bed frame and his storage shelving unit and his mirror and his summer duvet and his little armchair and a step-stool for the kitchen, and I splurged on a $20 night table that matched his bed frame. But what made me stop dead in the store and do a happy dance is that the duvet cover that looks blood/wine red online is actually fire engine/brick red in real life, and it is PERFECT. Perfect and $25.

E. is having a nice time but is a little bit worried about all the changes. He misses his father, which is so nice to see after the ever-s0-long phase of Daddy rejection.

***

I am getting some decent work done on the dissertation. There is maybe a light at the end of the tunnel of my crisis of confidence. My supervisor has agreed to a timeline that requires him to read the entire thing in three weeks. If we both keep our ends of the bargain (and he should as my timeline works extremely well with his other commitments), I should be able to send the entire thing, revised to take his comments into account, to the full committee before we go to Oz.

It might really get done.

A room of his own

Yesterday I finally had to admit to myself something that I’ve been suspecting for a week or so now.

I’m displacing all of the anxiety I’m feeling about the loss of the baby onto my plans for E’s new room.

I have been, you see, obsessed with E’s new room. Obsessed to the point that I am spending WAY too much time on the internet looking at rugs and curtains and duvet covers and worrying whether something is too grey or too red or too plain or too busy.

Obsessed to the point that I am also rapidly becoming paralyzed by my obsession, incapable of actually making a decision, of committing to something, because it might turn out to be the WRONG decision and I won’t love it.

I want to love it.

I want to love every single thing about this room.

It’s as though if I can manage to make this room perfect and exactly what I’ve imagined and exactly what I know E. will love and will suit him now and will grow with him later, that will somehow help to gloss over the fact that the other room, the nursery, will be a study again, when we thought it was going to be occupied with something so much more important than books.

Yesterday I found what I thought would be the perfect duvet cover, and I loved it immediately, and I was SO happy. And then I realized it was a comforter and not a duvet cover and that the pattern didn’t come in a duvet cover at all. And I cried. I was that upset. Over a stupid non-duvet cover.

I feel this overpowering need to do something special for the child that I do have.

We never did much with the nursery. Q. painted it, and I put a lot of time and effort into choosing the crib (because I wanted solid wood) and the mattress (because I didn’t want one filled with off gassing nastiness). But all the rest of the furniture was mismatched hand-me-downs, and we just put some random things on the wall, and called it finished.

E’s new room is different. It’s not going to have a theme or anything- I’m not really a theme sort of person- but it matters to me that I spend some time on it. The nursery was always going to be temporary. This is a room he will be in for a long time- possibly until he moves out if we never have another child, as if we don’t we’ll have absolutely no reason to rationalize leaving our current house.

Plus, I know who he is now. I want his room to reflect that. So I have found a double decker bus wall decal and a red letter pillow.  The walls will be grey.  His duvet cover will be red.  There will be a reading chair and (hopefully) horizontal bookshelves.

His room should matter.

But it shouldn’t matter as much as it does right now.

Q., in his usual perceptive way, has said to me, “E. is a toddler. As long as there is some red in there he’ll be happy.” and “E. is a toddler. Don’t get anything too nice because he’ll just wreck it.”

He’s ceded control of the room over to me entirely. He is happy not to have one more thing to think about. I am happy to be able to control its design, because I cannot control so many other things in my life, and you know, you KNOW beloved readers, how badly I cope with this. Life lesson that Turia just will not learn.

The worst part is I keep having conversations with myself along the lines of, “Well, you shouldn’t spend x on y because we’ll be doing the last FET in the summer and we need to keep money set aside for that.”

And then I get angry. Angry that my living son won’t have something that I know would be perfect for him because I’m still thinking about the child-that-might-never-come-to-be. E. won’t think he’s being neglected. But I feel like he is, like he’s being sacrificed, again, for the sake of this elusive dream.

It would be easier, too, if I knew what would be happening next year. If I knew I’d have an income, I’d feel more comfortable splurging a little bit more now, even if I still wouldn’t be able to rationalize a custom duvet cover AND custom curtains from Etsy AND a rug from Pottery Barn. (You have no idea how much I am coveting this rug.)

I’m not quite sure how to let it go.

The other outlet for my anxiety has been organizing the house. I’ve been seized by an overwhelming need to clean and organize the entire house from top to bottom. Two weekends ago I sorted through my clothes and purged all the ones I don’t wear anymore, and yesterday E. and I pulled everything out of our (very large) linen closet and we set aside a ton of things we don’t use to bring to the Goodwill. There’s still a lot to do: the two big storage closets in our basement (one of which is basically full of outgrown baby clothes, and baby toys, and baby books, and baby things, all of which I thought we were going to be using in September), the cabinets in our basement, and, especially, my study, since I’ll be moving to a much smaller room. I’m planning on chipping away at it over the next few months and hopefully by the time we can paint E.’s new room and set it up (after semester finishes in April), most of the house will be under control.

It gives me something to do.

It keeps my mind off of things.

But it’s a poor consolation prize.

Little pitchers have big ears

Maybe we shouldn’t have told E.

He has been confused.

Puzzled.

Questioning.

He talks less about the baby now, but we have yet to have had a day where he doesn’t mention it, doesn’t ask me to “explain again why there isn’t going to be a baby in September anymore”.

But.

We have been going through a very very difficult time with E. over the last few months. I haven’t written much about it on here, because it has just been so hard.

E. completely rejected his father.

He would order his father to go back out of the house as soon as Q. got in from work.

He would shriek “No, no, no!” if Q. asked him a question, but answer it without any fuss if I asked.

He would Lose.His.Mind. if Q. tried to do anything for him if I was in the house.

If he woke up- from a nap, in the middle of the night, in the morning- and Q. went in instead of me, E. would immediately become hysterical, screaming for his father to get out of his room.

Some nights he wouldn’t even kiss him good night before I took him up to bed.

And don’t even talk to me about bedtime.

I posted about it on my birth club, and with my infertility friends, and the general consensus was that we just had to push on through and teach E. that he couldn’t always expect Mummy to do everything.

But then it got so bad that bedtimes, if Q. was doing them, were a fifty minute (or longer) ordeal with E. screaming his head off and fighting his father, every single step of the way, to the point that I would be sobbing downstairs listening to them.

We tried sharing the bedtime, where I did bath and pjs and then Q. did stories, songs and goodnight, but it wasn’t any better. E. would be fine with me, and then lose his shit as soon as Q. took over.

E. was so frantic, so miserable, so hysterical, that Q. and I talked about it and decided to just go with it. He obviously needed something, and he needed it from me. And it was breaking Q.’s heart every single time he tried to do something with E. and E. rejected him.

The fighting at bedtime was damaging their relationship.

So we stopped pushing E., and I took over and did almost everything E.-related from mid-December onwards.

It started in the fall, so we originally thought it was related to the disruptions from moving back. Then we thought it might be related to E. starting at nursery school- that he was clinging even harder to me on days when I was around because of the days where he was away from me.

We figured it was, like everything, a phase. A truly horrible phase, to be sure, but a phase nonetheless. One that would end eventually.

Here’s the thing: from the moment we told E. about the pregnancy, his attitude towards his father began to thaw. And this past weekend, it was like the last few months never happened.

Thursday night, after it happened, Q. put E. to bed while I lay on the couch downstairs.

E. didn’t fuss about this at all.

When he woke up (after a huge sleep) on Saturday, he called out, “Mummy, Daddy, Mummy, Daddy, Mummy, Daddy. I’m ready to get up  now.”

Q. went to get him.

E. gave him a big smile.

Yesterday, Q. and E. spent a happy hour and a half building paper airplanes and flying them around the kitchen and building paper boats and sailing them in the bathtub while I lay on the couch and read.

E. now interrupts our  nightly routine of two rounds of Sleeping Bunnies at least three times a night to run and kiss Q., who is in the kitchen doing the dishes.

This is a complete reversal of how he was behaving all through the fall, and especially in December, when things got so much worse.

It might be coincidence.

It could be that it was just something developmental and he’s worked his way through it, in the same way as he’s suddenly started using “I” and “me” to refer to himself rather than “you”.

But, in retrospect, it’s entirely possible that his rejection of his father stemmed from displacement anxiety about my frequent visits to the doctor. This especially makes sense with how much worse it got in December, when he wasn’t in nursery school most of the time, and when Q. was around more often too. It should have got better in December, not worse.

Except we did the IVF in December.

If, if I am right, and his rejection of his father was tied to his fears about why I was at the doctor so often, telling him about the pregnancy- giving him a reason, a good reason, for me being at the doctor- was the best thing we could have done.

And that makes it worth the untelling.

7w3d and all is well

We had the same ultrasound tech as last time. She was wonderful- put in the probe, took one look at the screen and then immediately turned to us and said, “I see baby’s heartbeat. Baby is growing. It’s a good baby.” She took a more careful look around, confirmed that the baby was still there and growing and then started taking measurements.

Baby measured 7w2d, so still a day behind, but s/he’s grown a week since the last scan which is right on track. The heart was nice and strong – 154 bpm. There was a very noticeable yolk sac- I don’t remember it looking that obvious with E. Maybe it has something to do with where it attaches. Baby was definitely bigger but still pretty blob like. I remember E. being in a ‘peanut’ stage with this ultrasound, but this one still looks more like a blob.

The circle is the yolk sac. The blob is the baby.

The empty second sac is still there, and so is the blood clot/SCH. The SCH has actually grown significantly since last week (it’s doubled in size if I read my chart correctly). I saw a different doctor today (mine wasn’t in) and she didn’t seem too concerned about things. She told me to stop the Fragmin as of today (HURRAY!) and to now start weaning off the prednisone. I started weaning off the prednisone at this point during E.’s pregnancy but it took a lot longer to stop since I was on a triple dose because of the hives.

Everything looked so good she told me not to come back for two weeks. When I said I had to be back in next Thursday for another intralipid infusion she agreed I might as well have another scan at that point too since I’ll be at the clinic. I’m happy with that- I feel sick the morning of an ultrasound, but the reassurance is worth the pre-appointment anxiety.

There was certainly no discussion of me taking more time off work. I don’t know if she’s less cautious than my doctor or if he just felt that last week was a really critical one. Regardless, I’m happy to be able to start getting things back into order as I am really behind with teaching prep (to say nothing of the dissertation).

When I got home, I had a proper conversation with E. where I told him that I was growing a baby in my body. Q. and I had agreed we’d tell E. if this scan was all right as it’s not fair the way we’re always talking around him, and I know he worries about why I’m always going to the doctor. So we talked about how I’m going to the doctor so much because they’re making sure that everything is ok with the baby, and that I’m not sick myself. E. seemed moderately interested. He said he wanted a baby sister just like in the Berenstain Bears’ New Baby but then was most interested in pointing out how when the baby was born “it would play with baby toys” and wouldn’t be big enough to play with his own toys. I’m not entirely sure he gets it yet, but it’s a start.

Pregnancy-wise, I am having much more trouble with food than I was at this point with E., although I suspect partly that’s due to the fact that I’m not on a triple dose of prednisone this time around. I get a lot of low level nausea throughout the day. It’s not serious, but it can be enough to put me off my appetite. I still mostly want to eat salt and potatoes. Dinner is the hardest meal as it seems the nausea gets worse throughout the day. Q. cooked a lovely meal last night and I could barely touch the pork, ignored the salad completely and ate almost all the fries.

I also had a completely insane dream two nights ago. Every single part of it was insane, but weirdly I looped back to the first element when I neared the end, so when I woke up it took me that much longer to realize that all of it had been a dream. I found myself lying in bed thinking, “Ok, so the bit where we were all running in the downtown core of a big city while some sci-fi droid things shot at us wasn’t real, and the bit where I signed up for prenatal classes at eight weeks and there were girls there I went to high school with wasn’t real, and the bit with the medieval/dragon boat racing festival wasn’t real, but what about the bit with the mall and my sister’s birthday? Did I actually miss her party because the mall was closing and I couldn’t find the right present?” Eventually I determined none of it had been real, but I felt exhausted that whole day- I think because I’d been so busy in my dreams!

6w5d- how to guarantee you won’t have time to worry about the ultrasound

Life is never dull chez Turia.

I got back from the clinic on Thursday mid-morning.

“E. says he’s feeling sick,” said Auntie C. “But he also keeps saying he wants to watch a video.”

“Right,” I said. “He says that most days.”

That afternoon E. actually took a nap during quiet time. This has become such a rare occurrence that quiet time now consists of him sitting in his crib with toys and books with the light on for as long as he’ll tolerate.

He woke up and I was reminded that sometimes when you take a nap when you don’t really need one any longer the results are not good.

About an hour later he finally calmed down enough to be willing to go downstairs and have a snack.

I made him crackers with cream cheese. I ate some of the cream cheese too. I think this will later become quite relevant.

E. ate quite a big snack (the crackers, some apple, some nuts).

“You feel sick,” he said. “You want to watch a video.”

“If you want to watch a video, E., you don’t have to say that you’re sick,” I told him. “You can just ask to watch a video.”

So we watched twenty minutes of side-loading garbage trucks on YouTube (side-loading because E. has decided he doesn’t like garbage truck videos with front-loading and rear-loading ones).

At dinner E. refused to even come to the table.

“You too sick to eat dinner,” he said. “You going to lie on the floor instead until it is bedtime.”

So he lay on the floor next to my chair.

Q. and I raised eyebrows at each other.

I put him to bed around 7:15.

Before 8 p.m. he was up, crying.

“You’ve been sick!” he called.

Q. went up to look. E. had done what could have been just a very wet burp. We changed his sheets; I calmed him down. Q. and I debated whether this counted under the “no vomiting for 24 hours before attending” nursery school policy.

We went back downstairs.

About fifteen minutes later, E. was hysterical. I ran up the stairs and got there just as the second or third round of projectile vomiting started. It was everywhere. We got him out of the crib, and pulled out all the linens and any stuffed animals that had been vomited on (his best bunny got hit again). I stripped the toddler and cleaned him up while Q. gathered up the washing.

By now E. was truly hysterical. “You can’t seep in your crib! You was sick in it!”

We were out of sheets and mattress covers and sleep sacks.

We pulled the single futon mattress into our room, put towels and sheets on it, and then I lay down on our bed while E. fell asleep (which he did remarkably quickly). Meanwhile Q. called Auntie C. to see if she could possibly come over yet again as he had to teach my class on Friday and I was due in at the clinic for an overdue intralipid infusion. Auntie C. got our message later that evening and, being a saint, altered her work arrangements to come over. (Seriously. She is a saint. She has saved us more times than I can count this fall. If we bring a baby home in September it will be in no small part thanks to her.)

At 10:30 the laundry had finished, so we remade E.’s crib, transferred him over, and got ready for bed. I didn’t have to do a Fragmin shot since my doctor had told me to switch to every other day. I was excited about this and told Q. I set up the progesterone. Q. jabbed me.

“There’s something wrong with the plunger on this one.”

We had to redo the entire thing and Q. had to jab me again on the other side. I should never have said anything about the freedom from Fragmin.

Finally, at nearly 11 p.m., we were able to go to sleep.

1 a.m. E. woke up. I stumbled in to check on him and soothed him back to sleep. I then rapidly realized that I was about to be sick myself.

I have not been that sick in I don’t know how long. I was very ill one night while pregnant with E., but I think this was worse. I was sick at least ten times between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. After about the sixth time, when I realized I had nothing left in my stomach but was just continually retching, I gave up on getting out of bed and just used a bowl.

I think it was food poisoning and not the flu. The timing and the onset for both of us was suspicious. And I think it was the cream cheese- it’s about the only thing we both ate that Q. didn’t, and it had been in the fridge for a while.

At 5 a.m. I was planning how I would rebook the intralipid, but by 6 a.m., after not having thrown up for an hour, I felt cautiously better. E. slept until 8:15, so I was able to shower, and I kept down some dry toast and some water.

E. was not at all pleased to have the plans change and was not at all pleased to see Auntie C. He was so upset that when he demanded his usual Friday breakfast of “toast with peanut butter and honey” I, against my better judgment, gave it to him. This guaranteed that he started vomiting right when I was about to get a cab to the clinic.

Poor Auntie C.

I got to the clinic. They didn’t have a cubicle for me. A patient in for a transfer had arrived early and they hadn’t paid attention to the number of rooms.

“It’s really busy today,” said the head nurse. “Can you go home and come back later?”

“No,” I said flatly. “I’ve left my vomiting toddler at home. My sister is taking time off work to look after him. I have to do this this morning.”

They moved the transfer patient to somewhere else (possibly into an ultrasound room) and set me up in the cubicle. While they were getting the IV started my sister texted me. “Is it normal for him to just lie on the floor not saying anything?” she asked.

“Yes, he does that when he’s feeling unwell,” I sent back.

She texted again five minutes later. “He’s fallen asleep.” She sent a picture. E., on his hands and knees, with his head on the carpet, was asleep on the living room floor.

This is E. we’re talking about. The child who never, ever, sleeps anywhere else but in his crib.

I called her. “He must be really feeling ill. He needs the sleep. Keep an eye on his breathing and just let him sleep as long as he needs to.”

She sent me another picture a few minutes later. “He’s rolled on his side and I’ve put the sleepsack on him like a blanket,” she texted.

Meanwhile, I was in a comfortable chair with the feet up and the back down, covered in two blankets, and with the light turned off. I didn’t fall asleep, but it was a peaceful ninety minutes or so lying there. The IV did me a world of good and probably got more nutrients into me than I could have managed at home.

It was a madhouse- they were trying to get a whole bunch of procedures done before the weekend. Three other people were there who had the same first name as I do- says something about the demographics of the clinic and the popularity of the name (which peaked in the late 70s and early 80s). It was also a day to be grateful for what we have. They did three D&Cs while I was there, and an egg retrieval where they only got one egg. They were hoping to get two, but the other one was already gone. When I was getting ready to leave the couple was discussing with the doctor whether or not they could do an IUI as well to try and catch that other egg. I thought of E. at home, and the baby in my uterus, and was grateful, even with how sick I felt.

In the cab on the way home, C. texted me. “Are you in the cab yet? E’s just woken up and he’s not the happiest.”

I got home. I calmed E. down. When C. left, I was lying on the couch and E. was lying on top of me.

He took two more naps that afternoon- just kept passing out on the couch. He threw up once more, but then he started to improve. I decided he might have been running a bit of a temperature, so dosed him with Advil, and that perked him up a little. He also managed to keep down some food (plain toast, Cheerios, plain crackers). He refused (again) to have anything to do with dinner (“You too sick to eat dinner”), including the french fries Q. had picked up thinking they might tempt him (or me- and I was so excited as I had been thinking they would be such a good idea), but he held things together long enough for a bath, and then slept really well last night.

Today we spent the morning watching truck videos on YouTube (including one four minute video with a song about excavators which I now have in my head), before he decided what he really wanted to do was lie on the floor in his sleepsack with a blanket over him. So he’s clearly not over it yet, but he’s keeping food and water down. I’m feeling much much better and only realize I’m still sick if I try to get up and do too many things at once.

The silver lining is it’s made it very easy to spend much of the last two days on the couch. I just have to hope that my body reacted as violently as it did because it was protecting the pregnancy and that the baby in the uterus is still happily growing, blissfully unaware of what we’ve all been through.