Thanks but no thanks

So, I spoke to the diaper service today when they called to set up the delivery of my pre-pack.  They also sell diaper covers, and because they get them in bulk they sell them for less than retail price. The brand they use/sell is Mother-Ease. Does anyone have experience with this brand? I don’t like the look of them as much as the Bummis I’ve seen (love the froggy pond and the super-brights!) but look is hardly the main priority here!

In other news, I turned down a job today. Not sure if I did the right thing. It was a temporary reception position which fit my timeline perfectly. I took the bus down there (it was in Vancouver proper, a good hour and 20 minute commute by transit) and met with the vet there. The clinic is brand-new, and committed to high quality care, and the wages were decent. But it didn’t feel right. He talked a lot about being professional with the clients, and while I am strongly committed to being professional, I got the feeling that chatting with the clients would not be welcomed, and he wanted me to “dial down” my veterinary knowledge while working reception.  More importantly, the vet was vague about how many hours would be available. It seemed to hinge on how much they liked me, but Saturday and Monday were guaranteed. Monday is the only day I have off with Perfect Husband, because he’s involved in a play and Sunday is an all-day rehearsal.

So I called him back when I got home and told him no. Perfect Husband has been telling me over and over that we’re fine for money, that I should enjoy my pregnancy, and only take this job if I really wanted it. I don’t really want it, so I turned it down.

But it felt really weird. Who says NO to money? I really am a kept woman now.

At least the poo will come in an adorably fluffy package

Tags

cloth diapers, diaper service, disposable diapers, feces, happy nappy, parenting

Photo credit to Happy Nappy Diaper Service

I have officially signed up for our diaper service!

For some reason I had been lulled into believing that as a relatively crunchy future mom I would be fairly into the mainstream in Vancouver of all places. I have been disillusioned of this, now. When we mention that we’re going to use cloth diapers, we often get raised eyebrows and an uncomfortable glance to the side, the way you might react if you met someone who informed you that they plan to use an outhouse instead of indoor plumbing.

You can tell they are thinking, “I bet they last a week”, and Perfect Husband has even received “pooper scooper” jokes.

One friend couldn’t get over the idea that the diapers would be brought to me only once a week.

“What if you run out?” she said. “You’ll run out for sure.”

We reassured her that the service is probably accustomed to providing a week’s supply of diapers at a time and most weeks should be able to correctly gauge how many we will need, based on the age of our baby and so on. We recieved a look of pity.

“You don’t understand how many diapers babies go through. My son had diarrhea once and went through ten diapers in six hours!”

I can see running out on a rare occasion, when our family’s Oregon Trail brings us the odd case of dysentary. But in the event of such a crisis, I’m pretty sure we could either run out to the store for some disposables or – stay with me here – wash some ourselves.

Maybe cloth diapers won’t work for us. But I find disposable diapers so disgusting that I am strongly motivated to make cloth diapering work. Besides, I got committed to getting a diaper service when I was 17 years old. Our Family Studies class compared the pros and cons of cloth vs disposables, including cost comparisons. I’ve spent the last decade assuming I would use a diaper service some day, so somehow in my head it became normal and I am now beginning to realize that it really isn’t, to most people.

I don’t really see what the big deal is. The diaper service doesn’t even require us to do any kind of pre-rinsing of the diapers. We take ’em off, fold ’em up, and dump them in the 14 gallon carbon-filtered diaper pail they will bring us. Is that so different from folding them up and dumping them in the garbage pail? But these diapers will be softer, better for baby’s skin, and way better for the environment, not to mention the public waste disposal costs of the government.

I also like that I know how much money we will spend on diapers over babby’s lifetime. Give or take the occasional purchase of disposables for travelling purposes, we can work out that we will spend approximately $3,000 on diapers. Since most diaper services offer their services free if your baby isn’t toilet trained by a certain age (our service’s cut-off is 30 months), diapers will become free after that point, even if we still need them. So, no pressure on Babby to toilet train – Mommy and Daddy want their money’s worth :-p

Then again, it helps that I have no fear of feces. Many mothers I have spoken to feel the need to impress on me just how surprising the amount and degree of feces was to them.  But after what I have done for a living, I really feel that while I will certainly have miserable moments, I won’t be shocked by them. My poo-shock factor has entirely been destroyed by previously traumatic episodes. So that’s a point in our favour for our attempt at cloth diapering.

Anyway, the really aggravating thing is trying to register for your baby shower when you’re the kind of person who plans on cloth-diapering her child. You know what we need, more than bouncy chairs or gift baskets filled with creams? Diaper covers. Oh, and swim diapers, because I want to take babby swimming. But Babies R Us has all of ONE selection for infant diaper covers, and I don’t even mean one brand. I mean one pattern. But we have to register somewhere fairly universal because so many of our loved ones may want to buy us things from afar. We’ll just have to hope it passes by word of mouth that we also would like diaper covers and other crunchy gifts which most stores don’t even carry.

In other news, Perfect Husband feels I neglected my duties in my previous post, because while I mentioned that we had a name for our son, and our name for our daughter, I completely forgot to mention our “scary neuter baby born without junk”. That’s right – the name-choosing has carried into what to call a hermaphroditic or otherwise gender-indeterminate child. We have all gender options covered.

How about Greeblorg?

Tags

baby names, marriage, pregnancy, relationships

“Oh, it’s a boy? Congratulations! I guess now you can start narrowing down names, eh?”

I’ve heard this several times, and I laugh. Because we had our first son and first daughter named before Perfect Husband was even a Perfect Fiance. We worked it out in our first year of dating.

I forget how it started – some idle remark in conversation – but once it did, we couldn’t stop. We’d come out with it at the oddest times. Driving home from dinner with his folks, walking down the street with grocery bags in our hands, or from the bed in the silence and the dark of night, one of us would say “Brian?” or “Alice?” and the other would respond. Watching the credits after a movie, we’d ask each other,

“Gigi?”

“Julio?”

“Seriously – Owen?”

I vetoed a couple of his top favourites, and he vetoed some of mine. I thought his suggestion was too popular – I knew way too many people with that name – and he thought mine was too old-fashioned, and sounded like an old lady’s name. I didn’t like any of the nicknames that came with another suggestion, because if a name CAN be shortened, people WILL shorten it (ask my father’s family, who actually thought they could name their son Lawrence and have him go through life not being called “Larry”). He didn’t have good associations with my next suggestion. There were a couple of names we were both lukewarm on, but not enthusiastic about.

But there was one boy’s name on my list that PH liked and approved of, and one of my top girl’s names sounded right to him, so we settled on their names and they became real to us, as named people. We would talk about our future son and daughter by name frequently.

It was so much fun, though, that we never really stopped. We still sit through the end of the credits of the movies, saying stuff like

“Geefwee. Let’s totally name our son Geefwee.”

and “Burt! Can we name our kid Burt?”

“Okay, but only if it’s  a girl.”

“Sold.”

When I hear about couples who can’t decide on a name until days or even weeks after the birth, I’m baffled. It’s so much fun to talk about, and I think we both felt that it was important to decide such things before we took a step as big as marriage. After all, what if we had gotten married, only to discover that one of us wanted to name our son “Shaggy” and our daughter “Velma” or our son “Chivalry” and our daughter “Chastity”*

I mean, that could be a deal-breaker right there.

*Apologies out there who have kids named after Scooby Doo characters or obsolete virtues. It’s just not our personal style.

That’s great.

Tags

argh, bosses, record of employment, service canada, unemployment, work

Sooo…. after a month of waiting, my EI money arrived today. In the amount of 44 dollars.

Called Service Canada.

Service Canada told me that I only get 44 dollars because my work paid out my accrued vacation time when I left, so clearly I am rolling in dough and don’t need money.

I told them that I had used all my accrued vacation time and then some by the time I left, and that I’d actually had to work an extra day to pay off UNaccrued vacation paid to me.

They said my Record of Employment states otherwise.

I checked. Under the column for vacation pay owing at the end of employment, it says 548 dollars.

I was not given a check for 548 dollars, because that money wasn’t owing.

Service Canada says that’s not their problem – they have to go by what the ROE says and it says I have 548 bucks so I only get 44 from EI.

I called my employer.

The dyslexic boss wasn’t there, and the women who does the money doesn’t actually know HOW to do ROEs, so she can’t fix it for me.

Why do they leave the ROEs to the dyslexic?

So I have to wait for next week for this to be fixed.

Service Canada says that after three weeks of processing, they’ll be able to rectify the mistake and pay me the money they won’t pay me right now.

Fantastic.

Profiting off of the worry of others

Tags

pregnancy

Is it wrong for me to google premature babies to get an idea of what my Babby looks like right now?

What, already??

Tags

doctors, dreams, nursery, pregnancy, preparation

Monday was my 30 week OB appointment. There was a different doctor there that day. Instead of the usual Monday doctor, a friendly and somewhat hazy lady who tends to wander off on tangents a lot while we nod and smile, there was a brusque Chinese (one of those many Chinese names that means “penis” in English slang) doctor man. He came in and had me lie on the table while he whipped out a tape measure, stuck one end of it down my pants onto my vagina, and the other end up between my boobs while prodding vigorously at my belly. Then he bounced my uterus enthusiastically like a kid trying out a new basketball, to get an idea of how the baby was lying. He was running behind (we were the first appointment after lunch but he started us half an hour late because he’d been off delivering a baby) so you could tell he wanted to get through us quickly. Everything he did was swift and hurried.

You’d think I’d hate him, but I actually liked him.

While he was in a hurry, he didn’t hurry us. He asked if we’d had any concerns the last two weeks, and when I told him that my rash was getting worse, instead of better, on the new steroid cream they had given me, he asked to see and then showed great sympathy, noting in my chart that it was “clearly demarcated” and “very prominent” and advising me to discontinue the cream and try an anti-fungal cream instead.

When he measured my uterus, he did something Dr. Hazy never had – he told me the measurement (31 inches). When he bounced my babby like a ball, he told me where he felt hands and feet, and grabbed my hands and put them on my lower abdomen, telling me where exactly to feel the head. Then he flipped through my chart and noticed they hadn’t done a urine culture and sensitivity, or a TSH test yet. Then he asked if we had any questions, and when I asked how overdue I would be allowed to go before they induced me, he told me seven days and then worked out the date – the 6th of September. Then he explained WHY the limit was seven days, while writing out requisition forms for the tests they’d missed.

So really, rushed and rough as he was, he was actually better in some ways than kind Dr. Hazy.

So I’m 30 weeks along, with a uterus 31 cm long, a head-down baby , a possibly fungal rash, and my baby will be born by September 6th.

Where did the time go? I only have 10 more weeks until the baby is born. The nursery isn’t even close to prepared – it’s still a pile of miscellany on and around a bare futon and a rickety wooden shelf that could give you splinters just looking at it, and it smells like my cat’s litter box. We have a pile of donated baby clothes, but they are in cardboard boxes in our living room. We have no dresser for me to put them in. We have no change pad for said dresser. We have no car seat. If it weren’t for Perfect Girlfriend sending me receiving blankets, baby socks, and breast pads when I was 12 weeks along, we wouldn’t even have those vital things.

We’re waiting for the government to actually approve my EI claim and start sending us money. We’ve been on a single income all month, and while Perfect Husband says we’re okay, I just KNOW we’re eating into savings – savings that should be used on baby dressers and car seats and paying that house assessment in October. The nursery is waiting on one of my friends, an incredibly talented person who is planning increasingly elaborate things for our nursery, but who works full time. She’s going to take some time off, probably next month, and come over here and paint but in the meantime the nursery remains Gulag Grey and filled with junk.

I can feel myself growing increasingly more edgy. I’m starting to lose sleep. Suddenly that moment in Marley and Me, where Jen makes John go out in the middle of the night for baby socks because she can’t sleep thinking about the baby’s naked toes being cold, even though she’s only seven months along… doesn’t seem funny to me any more.

10 more weeks – and we still haven’t set up a regular read-to-the-fetus time every night, the way that I thought we would have done back at the five month mark. I’m not really eating right. In fact, I’m ashamed to tell you how often I forget to even take a prenatal vitamin. It’s like that dream I had last year. I think we’ve been floating through in a vague sense of denial, or possibly we’re just afraid to really acknowledge the baby’s reality with dressers or scheduled reading times or videos of my kicking belly, because we’re afraid something will go wrong and we’ll be left with a decorated nursery and no child to put in it. I don’t know.

All I know is my pregnancy is slipping away, and I’m starting to panic.

Two

Tags

anniversary, Perfect Husband

We celebrated the end of our second year as husband and wife, and our last year as a twosome, by doing what everyone keeps assuring us we will never be able to do again – staying in bed.

We had to get dressed and leave the house for an OB appointment, but we hastily returned, closed all the curtains, and returned to bed. We lounged. We relaxed. We talked. We read old love letters to each other. We ate strawberries covered in chocolate, and french bread (sometimes also covered in chocolate). We watched a couple episodes of Glee on my little Netbook. We read. We cuddled.

It was perfect.

The Luckiest

Tags

anniversary, love, marriage, Perfect Husband

Two years. Is it really two years? Not two hundred years? Not two minutes? Because it feels like both.

We met nine years ago. We were best friends eight years ago. I finally gave you a chance four years ago.

We’ve only been married two?

You’re the man of my dreams. You have the chivalry of Fitzwilliam Darcy, without the stiff politeness. You have the passion of Edward Rochester, without the arrogance. You have the devotion of Noah Calhoun, and the perseverance of Orpheus. You are all the lovers in all the books, and none of them, because you are better than any of them.

I am, truly, the luckiest.

What does this say about our relationship?

Tags

appreciation, love, Perfect Husband, relationships

Me (coming downstairs): “I love you.”

PH: “What? I’m sorry. What did I do? I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”

In actuality, I was just appreciating him after having read this.

End Year One

Tags

anxiety, babies, depression, pregnancy

My first post on If By Yes was one year ago today, I just realized.

In the last 365 days I feel that nothing, and everything, have changed.

I have struggled with depression, changed doctors, ended up in the emergency room, revelled in the miracle that is Wellbutrin, gone through CBT  for my anxiety, and come out the other side. I’m not fixed, but I’m better.

I have bought a house, even if it still feels like a work in progress.

I have longed for a baby, got pregnant, and now alternate between happy and holy-frig-what-have-I-done.

I have been laid off from a job I thought I would have for the rest of my life, but in such a hullabaloo of questionable events that I ended up feeling relieved about it.

My dog is still Beloved, my cat still Inexplicably Loved. My husband continues to be put up with me and actually love me on top of it.

Funny how life never turns out the way you thought it would, but still somehow does eventually turn out okay.

Thank you all for being with me on this journey, and please hold my hand for whatever comes next.