The Whirlwind - Post Partum

  Life is in a complete whirlwind for Adam, Stanley, and I; the delivery of The Great and Wonderful Stanley Isadore Muszkiewicz, my decision to find a new job, and our incredibly sudden need to move. It is becoming harder and harder to believe how easy and uncomplicated our lives were before October 2014, and I am genuinely happy (and proud) that we decided to wait until now to have a baby; whirlwind or not, fate gave us the most amazing little man we could have ever asked for.

  Truthfully, being pregnant had been “the worst” (I’m exaggerating… a little), but more importantly I’d do it again for another beautiful baby like Stanley. It is incredibly hard to do anything but stare at his soft face, smell his sweet baby head, and cuddle or play the day away. Describing the feeling of motherhood is impossible; it is easier just to say that the 9-10 months of hell on earth it took to form and mold this perfect child was supreme and wholly worth it.

  On the job front; I wanted and needed a change of pace, a new challenge, and most importantly to be able to “milk myself” (Breastfeeding is OUR thing, me and Stan, and I would be remiss and crestfallen if I could not continue to enjoy that natural bonding experience). Sadly, I had to rush back to work shortly after my 6 week appointment due to dwindling savings, mostly from early unforeseen car complications. But to my surprise, Manpower picked me up for a job before I had even completed filling out my information on their website. My confidence has been spiked since laboring the werecub, which made the interviews generally painless and fundamentally fruitful.

  The job itself is fine. I am a Manpower Contractor – UofM Hospital’s Labor and Delivery Floor - Birthing Center Clerk which is pretty cool when there are babies being born. When babies are not being born there is Absolutely. Nothing. Going. On. The growing pet peeve from this job is the numerous people that believe a “good night” is when nothing is going on, come on! I have never and will never understand this prevailing laziness in the workforce. I suppose when the bulk of your cash comes from the consumers you are directly serving, you get a different perspective of how the world should work.

  I really miss the moving and grooving of a bartenders life. I miss all my friends, and a good chunk of my regulars, too. I miss having food delivered from other restaurants; either because we were too busy to eat during kitchen hours or because the cooks were being jerks or just plain sucked at their job. I miss making 10 perfectly poured shots and the consecutive pleasure from someone saying something about it. I miss dancing around the empty bar after a good night. I miss cutting people off, asking them to leave, and even barring them. I miss counting the money I made after a few days of work. I miss having a cop bring me donuts. Sigh.

  Due to an unfortunate spike in rent, and a less unfortunate need/want for quiet, away from that bustling Ypsilanti downtown, we are in the process of moving… with a 2-3 month old baby. This is the biggest, most terribly inconvenient life change that has happened to me in a long time. A string of nearly coherent swearwords couldn’t begin to express the fuck that is happening to my life because of it. I have been working 5 days a week, making $10 an hour training to do a job that is so unbelievably boring most of the time, just to get home, pack, and move boxes/furniture around. Not to mention trying to sleep with a wiggly, gassy, has just learned how to roll over baby boy.

  I will say that our landlord of 6 years has been really patient with us about moving out and I am terrified when we get the prorated bill for taking so long to move out. He has been a good landlord, so if anyone is looking for a downtown 2 bedroom, I will put in a good word. The new place is smaller and cheaper but has more closet space, in apt. laundry, and a dishwasher. I was giddy at the prospect of washing dishes and doing laundry, it was cute. The carpet is super nice too, with the baby, we can now roll around and play on the floor without hurting our old bodies. Ooo, and we have a back patio area where a grill could be placed! The one thing I worry about the most with this place is the heating bill we now have to pay, this place is drafty. Adam and I have grand plans to buy a house in the near future and I am really hoping we don’t lose those savings on DTE.

  Now I get into the real cherry on top; my stupid vehicle. There are so many problems with it, I do not even know where to start. Electrical, Coolant, Engine, you name it I probably have some kind of issue with it. It stalls out, usually twice, within the first 5 minutes of driving and if you wait for it to warm up it will stall out more, with trouble restarting it. It overheats within 15 miles or so, unless you put in water/coolant every other day. I can’t get the knob for the heating to move any higher so I am pretty much freezing for most of my journey, unless it overheats, then it is slightly warmer but not moving anywhere. My front passenger window is broken and slides down. My front driver-side blinker needs replacing. AND I have been fiercely attacked (wild exaggeration) by some gnarly looking spiders, several times over the last few weeks! I am absolutely terrified of spiders!

  So there we have it, a whole lot of crazy life madness, all completely centered around one absolutely amazing and wonderful little baby boy named Stan.

P.S.

Adam is an amazing father and I'm very grateful that I have such an intelligent, clever, fun, fantastic man to call my husband/baby's daddy. I love you.7. 

37 days and counting

You know it's a good day when...

So, today I'm happy to say that after a few hours of errand running: my feet are not swollen, I didn't cough or sneeze so hard that I peed a little, and I didn't have to sit on any display tables because of fatigue or braxton hicks contractions. Hooray! 

Oh, and Stan hasn't kicked me in the ribs all day!

Being pregnant is pretty brutal, so I've included here a wonderful scene from Metalocolypse that seems to pop up in my brain fairly often these days. Enjoy!

3rd Trimester

60 more days! I'm very excited to get most of my body back, woohoo! 

There have been a few crap things; 3 hour glucose test at 8am, surprise vaginal ultrasound to check placenta, extra appointments to check mom's blood pressure (which was probably up due to dad's driving, lol).  But mostly we've enjoyed the strange and unusual things; being tickled on my sides from the inside, Stan's hilarious butt protrusions (he will have his daddy's bottom), and his crazy dance parties at all hours of the day and night. We tell Stan most often to stop beating up his mother and will rub his butt, feet, thighs and hands when he pushes them out really far.  We listen to music quite often and Stan seems to enjoy that. We are fairly sure that he has already started training to be a ninja; sometimes his movements are crazy fast or super steady.

Work is still fairly normal with the additional repetitive questions/answers about Stan the Mighty Werecub; "are you pregnant?" "when are you due?" "do you know the sex?" "have you picked out names?" etc.  It's tough answering them with the same happy smiling face 10 times over, although there have been plenty of other questions like this over the years, so it is not anything new.

My final day at Tap Room will be June 13th! I've been working there for over 6 years and it has been amazing, I'm going to miss everyone very much. The stress this job puts on my body while pregnant is stifling and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I'm very excited to start the nesting process for our little man! The biggest stress for me will be storage space; we live in a very "lived in" apartment with lots of stuff from over the years. We are looking for a house but haven't found the perfect starter home just yet. I'm just hoping and praying we don't get a ton of diaper boxes (I know we will need them but we just don't have the space right now). 

The shower will be at Wurst bar in Ypsilanti! June 14th. We chose this place for many reasons; location, delicious food, friendly staff. I really think we will have a great time there and I'm super excited to share the experience with all my friends and family. We are working on the invitations this weekend and hope to have them out mid next week. Many of the local invites will be handed out personally (because I'll see you at Tap or around downtown). 

The baby shower will also be a little bit of a going away party for me from Tap Room so, I hope, some of the regulars might pop in for a moment and see me.  Oh! and this shower is open house style! So popping in is exactly what we want! We will be there from 2-5pm and will have bratwurst platters as snacks, little fun activity tables, and for those who wish to buy a drink or more food the bar has a full menu.

20 Weeks

IT'S A BOY!  We are very excited knowing what we are having and that now we can call him by his name: Stanley Isidore Muszkiewicz or as I've been referring to him as Izzy.  He is 10 ounces so far.

The ultrasound appointment was on Thursday and we got to experience the first real interactions with our little man.  Our nurse said "this is the butt and in between these legs we have..." and Izzy put his hand in the way! It was so great.  I'm not totally sure if he is just modest or if he is already smart enough to try and grab for what is poking him in the behind. 

Everything went well, he looks healthy and strong, the only thing they made mention of is that our placenta hasn't raised yet. With the placenta still quite low I wonder if that is the cause of intense discomfort in my pelvic girdle. After a long night of standing, squatting, and running around at work it starts to feel like someone wearing a steel-toe boot has kicked me right in the 'vagina bones'.  

I called the doctors office about it and talked to a nurse who said "all I can tell you is to take Tylenol and maybe try a support brace."  "Ok!" I replied "a support brace could be really helpful!"  

No, the whole experience was awful; I wasted almost an hour waiting for the prescription, the insurance company to approve the sale, and to actually see the brace.  The prenatal cradle was a large piece of elastic that is meant to hold up your baby belly, giving your lower back some relief (not useful in this situation). The other option was a glorified lady jockstrap which might have worked had my insurance covered it and had I'd been willing to sacrifice tips on a lumpy butt.  

In my first trimester my breasts hurt, they grew a bit, for obvious reasons.  Now it is just my nipples that are super sensitive, which is really freaking bothersome.  It is winter, it gets down below zero at night and peoples nipples get cold and hard on a regular basis here. Brr, ouch. Can someone make my a bra that is warm and comfortable when your nipples are hard, please?!

He moves around in there and I'm pretty sure I can reconcile the feelings between normal body things (like gas and such) and Izzy's adorable little squirming. I ask myself "is this feeling different than usual?" It is very hard to express the many different ways I think I feel him moving around in there; Sometimes is a swirling, slightly pinching feeling like he is rolling around. Other times it is a faint cramp-like feeling as if he is stretching his limbs all the way out.  Occasionally I think it is him when I feel suddenly an urgent need to poop but when I get to restroom the feeling goes away almost completely. Wry little Werecub.

It is true, I do get aggravated when he steals my food. Eating is a chore these days.  In the first few months he made me throw up, took away my appetite, and made me sick to my stomach just for thinking about food.  Now I eat almost every two hours or else I get hunger hiccups. 

Hunger hiccups; from what I understand when a woman is pregnant her body produces some kind of special relaxant for your mid-section. This also can relax your stomach/esophagus opening, giving the acids an escape window. If I don't keep those acids busy breaking down food they venture up my esophagus giving me indigestion hiccups.  This happens no matter what I eat or don't eat.  It is a good but annoying alarm telling me that it is time to feed the child.  By the way; my prenatal vitamins are horse pills! I'm a human, carrying a werechild, that is being turned into a horse.  Strangest time of my life.

Well, I'm blanking on any other fun, gross, interesting things to say so thanks for reading and I'll try to get around to writing again soon.

Snow, Heartbeats, Squirming And You

Today, we had our second set of ultrasounds done. These were the ones where they start looking for problems with the baby like too thick of a neck (which means an increased likelihood of Down's Syndrome) and the absence of a nose bone (which means an increased likelihood of something else that I can't remember). The pic above is from ultrasound #1 on 1/2/15, so don't let it fool you. It's really just here for context, but that's not the point of this post.

First, our appointment was at 8am on a crazy cold January morning at a time that Katie & I normally reserve for sleeping. Other folks may think of 7am as "morning," but for us, especially in January, 7am is still "night." As always, we were running slightly behind, so rather than wait for Katie to come with me, I jumped right in, started up the truck (so it'd be warm; see, folks? I'm thinking!) and dug it out from beneath all of the snow that had fallen last night (not that much by Michigan standards). Adrenaline kept us awake through the drive and first attempt at an ultrasound (for which you were not very helpful, Werecub), but I was soon coming close to passing out on a couch as we waited for a consultation. Long story short: it was really early, it was really cold, there was lots of snow.

Second, we got to witness two extraordinary things. We heard this kid's heartbeat.  Last Friday, when we saw the Werecub on the ultrasound for the first time (and failed to blog about it, somehow), it was really neat to see the kid, to see it as a human being and to know it was healthy and growing fast. Today, hearing that heartbeat was not just evidence of life, but an auditory link to that tiny little life. We could watch the heart pulse, hear it pump. Man, that was cool. It's almost like we were in there with you, Werecub! (Which would have been exceedingly strange for Katie, since she's who you're inside of in the first place, but we won't worry too much about causality and physics and such when we're being sentimental.)

The other extraordinary thing was seeing you squirm on camera, Werecub. And by camera, I mean ultrasound. And by squirm, I actually mean squirm. You see, you weren't cooperating with the ultrasound tech, not showing her the parts of your anatomy she needed to see, and so she had to coerce you to move. Turns out that this is done by jiggling you. Up and down. When your mom has to pee (because they need her to have a full bladder when they ultrasound her & you). Which apparently you like about as much as your mom does. Just like you will probably do when I do the same thing to you after you're born (folks, that's jiggling, not shaking; I'm pretty sure that everyone out there who's ever gotten to spend time with a baby has, at one point or another, jiggled it). With your response to said jiggling (the squirming! Oh, the squirming!), I'm pretty sure you're going to give your mom a lively third trimester.

I think we're in the clear on OBGYN appointments for a few weeks, so until I have something to report, I'll try to keep track of all my impending future baby thoughts and share them here.

Attack of the Were-Dad

It took awhile for Katie to realize that it was a Werecub she was having. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense, but it's not the sort of thing you expect, right?

She knew that I'm obviously some sort of werewolf (or were-something) given my strange allergy to silver. She wasn't expecting that her impending baby would be a were-something, though, or that the were-baby (or, more properly, Werecub) would start affecting her own senses, lending her a bit of the ol' were-sniffer. That was unexpected, and has made certain smellier tasks tricky for her. I'm really hoping that the were-schnoz will wear off by the time Werecub is actually born or I'll be on full-time diaper duty (despite my own were-sniffer, making the task doubly onerous).

Sure, dealing with a month of sick pregnant wife was difficult, but not as bad as one might assume. In fact, I noticed that there are a few perks that I hadn't realized that come with the territory of being the Weredad. For example, she's not supposed to eat much red meat, particularly stuff that's high in sodium. Suddenly, I have no competition for any sausage around the house. Further, the Werecub seems to have robbed Katie (Weremom?) of her urge to consume some of her favorite foods like popcorn; I expected that eating popcorn around her would earn me some spite and ire, but when I did, all the response I got was "Ugh, keep it away from me."

The other bit of good news is that I get to acquire tools now for the sheer point of having them. I'm pretty sure that's part of being a dad.

Dear Diary

I slept in today. It was glorious and well needed.  Little Werecub has liked to talk my bladder into waking me up at daybreak; my jerk bladder always listens.  I'm pretty sure they were fast friends, best friends even, because I have to pee every 2 hours.  Werecub and my bladder; pranking mom all day.

I'm nearly over this horrific sinus cold, and I'm confused and angry that no one has made a proper cold medicine for pregnant women.  Never again will I serve my first term in winter.  Sadly I didn't have a family doctor to tell me it was OK to take Tylenol Cold for the first cold and subsequent sinusitis.  I can't get those days off of work back, little Werecub, no toys for the first 2 months!

My fangs and fur will come, just you wait.

The Werecub growing inside me has lent me its glorious sense of smell; I'm pretty sure I can smell everything within a mile.  This gift has its consequences though, some things do not smell as good as they used too.  For some reason Werecub does not like popcorn, taco seasoning and eating late at night, for some reason, makes Werecub upset enough to say gross things to my stomach making me vomit.

Also, why hasn't anyone made a local delivery only restaurant for pregnant women? Preparing food is the suck, I seem to fluctuate between starving and not hungry pretty regularly and I just don't have time to cook something healthy.

Werecub the Pranker; making mom hungry, really hungry and then taking her appetite away mid meal.  Or; making mom not hungry, especially when food is readily available.  Or my personal favorite; making mom hungry but the thought of eating makes her sick.