Update

First of all, I want to thank you for all of your prayers and kind thoughts. When I get discouraged, I remember all of the people who are praying for me, my baby, and my family and it encourages me to know that so many people are surrounding us with their care.

I've waited to write anything more in hopes that I might have something more to share, but I'm afraid that life on the ante partum unit is not unlike life anywhere else. No news is good news. I'm still pregnant and the baby seems healthy. We can only wait and see where this is going. There is nothing I can do to help the situation other than to lie very, very still. All day. Every day. As much as I pity Peter's burden in all of this, I can bet you that he doesn't envy me a jot. I had been thinking of this as a version of Mommy Jail, but it occurred to me that even prisoners have recreation programs and physical fitness hours. I do have internet access, however, and someone to bring me water. I wager that the food is about the same, though.

So, here I am, trying to keep my spirits up and not spend too much time worrying about the baby or how things are going at home. Luckily, I know the kids are being well cared for by family and friends. They have been able to be with people they know and with whom they are comfortable. We are trying to keep them home most of the time, so that they can have some stability and structure to their lives. The person making them the peanut butter sandwich might change, but at least they will be home.

The great irony in this, of course, is that our kitchen is still set to be demolished on July 28th. So, even though they will be home, our house is going to change a great deal. At least they will be there to see the changes happen as the work progresses. It won't be too great a shock if they are there to watch and understand what is happening. I'm afraid that for me it will be more like falling asleep in the car and not knowing where I am when I wake up when I finally am able to go home again.

The Post With a Hundred Titles

During the last two days I have come up with at least a couple of dozen titles for this post I'm going to write, but none of them seemed very fitting.  The last couple of days have ranked among the worst I've ever lived through and there's just no way to sum it up into a leading title.

I'm not quite 24 weeks pregnant yet and on Monday my water broke.  Not even my Irish gallows humor was able to stand up to the seriousness of the situation as Peter and I went to the hospital to have the situation assessed.  It was obvious that my water had broken--I had a ruptured membrane with Thomas at 31 weeks (though he didn't deliver until 32) and my water broke with Anna at 37 weeks.  But this was so entirely unexpected that I didn't know what to make of it at first.  My water broke?  really?  We drove to the hospital and I knew that there was really nothing they could do.  I'd been down this road before with Thomas--the early delivery, the weeks in the NICU, learning to care for a premature baby.  I knew what was involved with babies born at 32 weeks and I had a very good idea of what the NICU experience would look like for a baby born earlier, if the baby lived at all.

I lay on the bed as the nurse hooked me up to the fetal monitors.  I couldn't breathe and all I could think was "What are we going to tell the kids?"  I was so mad at my stupid, broken body.  Why couldn't I grow a membrane like other women?  Why do my pregnancies always have to be like this?  I was about to loose a perfectly good, healthy baby because my body didn't know how to carry babies.

I don't remember what happened next, but I was wheeled down the hall into a labor & delivery room they use to stabilize their pre-term labor patients.  They did the tests they do in situations like this and hooked me up to antibiotics in case of infection and magnesium sulfate in case of contractions.  They hooked up the fetal monitors and called in the specialists.  They wheeled in an ultrasound machine and they poked and prodded and then the neonatal specialists came in.  There were IVs and so many things happening that it still makes my head spin.  A doctor gave me run-down of what I could expect if I delivered at 24 weeks and then he talked about how that improved with every week the baby spent in the womb.  One of the super-duper specialists came in, did the ultrasound, and very optimistically said that she expected me to keep the baby in for another 3-4 weeks, at least.  I started being able to breath again.  A very little.

The next day another specialist came in and gave an even more optimistic assessment when she informed me that they keep many women in my situation for months before delivering and that it wouldn't be unrealistic to expect me to be able to carry this baby to 32, even 34 weeks gestation.  Rosy pictures, indeed.

All of this, of course, is barring any infections I might get with my water broken.  I'm still not 24 weeks along yet and it is still so, so early.  The survival rates at this point are 60-70%, which is good, but the difference between here and, say, 28 weeks, is the difference between our baby surviving and our baby doing well.  And it is a long, long road between where I am tonight, sitting alone in a hospital room, and taking home a nearly full-term baby.  I won't even think of all of the milestones I need to hit along the way--26 wks, 27 wks, 28 wks, 30 wks, 32 wks--all of which would still leave my baby in a very challenging position, if not as precarious as I had originally thought when I walked in the hospital doors.

Part of me is curled up inside, thinking of how powerfully difficult it was to care for a premature baby before, how I prayed to God to never let it happen again because I just didn't have the strength to go through it one more time.  Then Anna came, beautifully full-term and as peaceful as a rose.  We'll ignore the trauma of her emergency c-section for now because I thought that the NICU was far, far behind me.  It was almost like I was healed.

Now here I am again, with the real possibility that it could not only happen again, but this time it could be much, much worse.  My logic and reason is fried.  I cannot make sense of this.  But I do remember the grace I found in the middle of Thomas's situation.  I remember how glad I was that he was born so strong and healthy, even if he was premature.  I remember how the doctors and nurses warned me that he might not cry when he was born because his lungs might be weak and underdeveloped, but that when he was born he did cry, loud and mad.  I remember how quickly he matured in the NICU and how he came home a whole week before anyone though he'd be able to.  I remember the grace that was there.  But it was grace in the middle of a horrible storm, certainly not a storm anyone would want to face twice.

And this situation, the extreme prematurity aside, has challenges I've only contemplated in the abstract. What would Peter do with the children if I weren't there?  What would their lives look like without me to care for them?  I'm the only one I want mothering my children, but now I can't do the simplest things for them.  I am so far removed from their daily routine that I couldn't tell you what they ate for breakfast or lunch.  Anna fell down and scraped her leg yesterday and I didn't get to put a Band-aid on her knee.  These are small, trivial things, but so much of motherhood is made up of the small, care-taking tasks that I am at loose ends imagining what I can be to these small children without them.  I worry that they will forget what it is like to have me caring for them; what it is like to have me around as a part of their lives.  They come for short visits once a day, though tomorrow they won't make it to the hospital at all.  They stay for an hour, maybe two if we watch some TV.  We curl up in bed together and they run around the hospital room and make a ruckus.  And then they're gone.

The boredom of bed rest is a challenge, to be sure.  The physical difficulty of remaining in bed is going to be more and more apparent as the days and weeks (God be merciful!) roll on.  But the thing I find hardest to bear is being away from my children, away from my family, and away from my home.  I'm grieving the loss of what this pregnancy should have been as I try to come to terms with how my relationship to my kids will change as I miss these (hopefully!) months from their daily lives.  I am slowly giving those months up as I reach for the hope that this baby I'm carrying will hang out a while longer in my womb.  Much longer.  I have no idea what the next few weeks will bring for me or my family, but I'm trying to be hopeful for the best outcome.  I know that eventually, the children will adjust both to me being gone and to me returning home.  I'm just praying with all the faith I have that God will hold back any infection so that He can finish knitting this baby together in my womb, where he or she is meant to be.

Wish me luck, and please pray with me.  My bottom may forever resemble the bend of a hospital bed, but I'd gladly take that shape in order to have a healthy, strong 34 week baby and a short stay in the NICU.  I'm just looking forward to the day when I can go home again and our family can be together.

Strawberry Shortcake

The last two weekends have been a lot of fun.  We took the kids strawberry-picking and look at what we got:

Nearly 20 lbs of fresh, organic strawberries.  How lucky am I?  I don't know how many pounds of strawberries the kids ate in the field, but I do know they weren't very hungry for a while afterwards.  I brought the berries home and spent some time cleaning and freezing them so, hurray!  Strawberries in November!

As if this weren't enough, we went back last weekend with my parents and picked, oh, yes, another 10 lbs of strawberries.  This time I froze some, but with the others my mom and I made this:

Two batches of strawberry jam.  One for her, one for me.  And it tastes as good as it looks.  I pretty much want to roll around on top of a giant waffle covered with fresh jam.  If I go pick some more berries, I may be able to.

I think Anna may want to join me.

Here's Thomas, contemplating The Berry:

I'll be sad when strawberry season is over.  But since I don't have any more money to give the people who own the strawberry field, it might not matter much anyway.  It's just nice to know that the berries are out there, just waiting to be made into jam.

Mid-Point

So, here I am again at the Mid-Point of pregnancy.  May I introduce you to Baby Number 3?

This baby is about 22-23 weeks along and seems to be doing very well.  I look at this little picture and think that I am incredibly lucky and that I am so happy to be waiting for this wee one to be born.  I'm still nervous about how a third baby will change the dynamics of our family, but I'm feeling more confident that things will be ok after we've adjusted to a new person in our home.

Baby Nuevo looks so peaceful.  The baby's just resting there, playing his or her own games in peace.  I'm listening to the rabble going on upstairs right now and I want to tell him or her to enjoy it while it lasts.  There's little quiet time to be had in THIS house!

We don't know the gender yet--the anticipation builds--but I've still been doing a huge amount of knitting for the Wee Baby.  I have three pairs of soakers (mostly) knit and a pair of Picky Pants waiting for elastic and another pair of Picky Pants on the needles.  I've been trying out Peace Fleece for the first time and I like it a lot.  I wish it had about 25 more yards per skein, but it has enough for me to be satisfied.  I just wish there were a store nearby that sold it.  The shipping on it is considerable.  

I confess I bought a skein of green called Anna's Grasshopper.  When it came in the mail, I saw the name printed on the label and I just about cried.  If I were to have 100 children, would I always feel a little sad for the youngest child as I waited for the next to be born?  Or am I just hopped up on pregnancy hormones to the point where even something like this would make me teary?

I'll leave you with a funny story from this morning.  I went to the clinic this morning to get a shot [boring medical details omitted] and the nurse giving me my shot asked if we were going to be having more children.  I told her that this was our last planned child and she remarked that I was a "baby making machine".  I was so surprised!  I think of the families I know who have 5, 6, 7 or more children and I wanted to say, "Lady, when it comes to baby making, I am totally an underachiever!"  People never stop cracking me up!

Mountains of Dusty Books

I love books.  Old books, new books, books with hard covers, books bound with paper.  I went to school and got a degree in English Literature and afterwards began a long and varied obsession with accumulating books.  

Did I say "accumulating"?  Perhaps "amassing" would be a better word.  I gathered copies of books around me like Fahrenheit 451 may actually come to pass and the only thing standing between me and a  life without Pride and Prejudice would be the six copies I had stashed in the living room cupboard.  There wasn't a library sale I missed from the Twin Cities to Duluth.  I have two large bookshelves in my living room full up of books--Did I just hear you say you wanted to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles?  You can borrow my copy!-- plus half a cupboard and please don't even ask to see my bedroom!  I loved to read and spent many hours with a variety of authors.

And then I had babies.

It's amazing how children will change your life.  I never imagined myself as a non-reader, which functionally so many people are, and I'm not.  It's just that the amount and subject of my materials has changed so dramatically.  I don't have the time or patience for the classics anymore.  I don't enjoy them in the same way and I'm starting to question whether or not I ever did.  Boswell's Life of Johnson?  Really?  I read it, but I don't remember enjoying it.  I am certainly not going to read it again.  Charles Dickens?  There are people who read through his books like wildfire, but I have never been one of them.  I've never met a man so intent on beating his audience over the head with a Moral Lesson and until I learn to enjoy a good thrashing I am sure I won't like him, either.

So, today has been something of a culmination of what has been happening to me in the four and a half years since I had my first baby.  Peter and I went through our entire house and collected seven dusty boxes of books to take over to the Library.  I am still Keeper of Volumes--you can tell because he didn't have to rent a small truck to get my collection out of the house--but the number has been dramatically reduced.  And you know what?  It feels good!  I had three or four old dictionaries, one of which belonged to my grandpa.  I kept his and sent off the three that didn't.  I said good-bye to Dickens, to DeFoe, to Plato and Locke.  I was able to acknowledge that I still wanted to read A Letter Concerning Toleration VERY much, but that perhaps this isn't the year.  When it is, I will buy it new.  I'll enjoy it more than the 1958 edition I had, anyway.  It feels so good to let go of who I was and turn to accept the person I am today.  I am looking forward to seeing what I will be reading when the kids are a little older.

So, in the meantime, you'll find me chasing the kids and reading books when I can.  But they won't likely be about systems of government or the ways of human error.  Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters can stay--even Anne-- but today's reading is more likely to be about knitting, cooking, and suspicious looking deaths.

Lunch

I know that nobody cares what I had for lunch today, but this was to the point of being so indigestible that it reminded me of college.  When I was in college, I would often open a huge can of baked beans and eat nothing but baked beans with bread.  Some days, I'd make a pan of white rice and eat it mixed with butter, salt, and parmesan cheese.  But the best days were when I would get up in the morning, open a half gallon of ice cream and eat nothing but that all day long.  You can NEVER get sick of chocolate ice cream.  Until you do.

So, today, while the kids ate their peanut butter and honey sandwiches I had a mashed avocado and Miracle Whip Light sandwich with a side of baked beans (hence the college reminiscing).  Pregnant or not, I am SHOCKED that I kept that down.

How Does Your Garden Grow

Today we got our first harvest from our new garden.  Radishes.  Thomas and Anna were so excited to be able to pick some real vegetables, even though Thomas doesn't like "spicy food".  I pulled the radishes and handed them over our rabbit fence to Thomas who pulled off the tops for the compost.  Anna walked around the yard chomping the radishes like apples.  Who knew they came with a core?  Personally, I'm just thrilled to see that I can grow things after all.  I'm like a real farmer.

In other news, see what came in the mail for the new baby?

It's a beautiful, organic cotton baby hat that will be just right for a fuzzy baby head this winter.  It came from Kristina over at Yarnsticks!  It makes me glad that I live in such a snowy state.  Knitted warmth would be much less satisfying if I lived in Texas.  Thank you, Kristina!  I am pretty excited about this pretty little hat.