A Sip off the Ole Block

As succumbed to temptation and indulged in my ONE guilty pleasure this afternoon - a nice cold Coca-cola* - I discovered that Harpo loves him some Coke, too! He is dancing up a storm in there!

As our friend Giggle Girl would say, "He's just like he's mommy!"

*Yes, yes, I know about the risks of caffeine. I feel guilty. But dammit, I'm doing everything else right that I can.

Giving Thanks for Bellies...

Ebry and Harpo went toe to toe (belly to belly?) this past weekend:

Happy Thanksgiving!

10 Things I'm Grateful For:

1) That so far so good all looks wondeful with Harpo and that with any luck we may bring home the baby we want so much
2) CAIT, especially for putting up with my pregnancy-heightened crankiness
3) My family. They may drive me mad, but boy can they make me laugh.
4) everyone I've gotten to know (or know better) online - you're all great!
5) Coffee Haagen Dasz, even though I haven't had any in a long time (see? you guys rank ABOVE CHD!!)
6) CAIT
7) our community
8) we both have good jobs that we enjoy with pay and benefits that allow us to live a pretty damn good life
9) Snow! It snowed a teeny bit last night and it was pretty.
10) CAIT - all the rest of this would be crap without her

and a gratuitous 11) Thanks to Shelli & Estelle for encouraging this one!

I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving! We're off to Detroit NOW.

Sir Harpo the Half-Baked

Harpo is officially halfway cooked today. In celebration, we took him/her for a level 2 ultrasound. (OK, so we were gonna do it anyway, but don't tell him/her, alright?). Other than the tech asking if I was Jen's daughter, everything went fine. The tech clicked away, and we got to see all of Harpo's parts (except THOSE parts--though we were so nervous we forgot to tell her that we didn't want to see them. Luckily she asked). She commented here and there on what she was measuring, but it was pretty much just business for her.

When the doctor came in, however, he pronounced Harpo "great," and looked a little more. He held the wand still, and we got to watch the kid wiggling and arching and kicking all over the place. Apparently Harpo has a future as a swimmer of butterfly. Luckily, that's something this mama can help with.

Phew. One more milestone. One more inch of trust.

Here's Harpo at 20 weeks, weighing in at approximately 13 ounces:

The Internet Rocks

And then there was a ray of hope.

Before I get to the ray itself, I want to thank everyone for your support and creative suggestions. Many people had great ideas but Talia Devane, in particular, gets credit for the possibility which may ultimately give us more options. She suggested that we might be able to request an exception from our insurance company exactly BECAUSE midwifery care is no longer available in our area. Cait spent a long time and a lot of patience on the phone this afternoon trying to do just that (being disconnected and reconnected and repeating the same thing again and again) and was ultimately able to file the appeal. We should have an answer within a few weeks.

So a HUGE thanks to Talia Devane!!! (If this works out we owe you big time!!!)

AND the billing guy from BirthCare just called to tell us to try the exception strategy (and that they have someone with our coverage who GOT an exception, so there really is hope) but I got to tell him that we'd already done it, thanks to our friends in the computer. You rock!

Interesting thing we learned in this process: yet ANOTHER birth center in the DC area has gone out of business in the past year or two. For those keeping track: once upon a time there were four. Now there are two and the third is down to one lonely midwife. And nearly, if not all of the independent midwives are out of business.

Oh, and...

... we've got flickers! :) The full moon apparently got Harpo excited and I have definitely felt some flutters and tickles. And Cait, glued to my abdomen. I feel that a lot now. :) Yay!

No Midwife for You!

Well, the word is in, and the amazing midwives at BirthCare are NOT on our insurance. Not only that, but the center in DC is practically out of business - they only have one, single, solitary mw in the practice at this point. (And she's still not on our plan, but I'm more distressed about the general state of midwifery in the DC area.)

Anyway, unless we can front the entire cost and then be reimbursed at 80% (of what our charming insurance deems [cough] "reasonable"), we can't have midwives, a birth center, or a home birth for this pregnancy. And after our exorbitant medical expenses this year (molar pregnancy, sperm & conception costs, and Lyme disease), that ain't happening.

We do have one other possibility - if we switch to Kais*r, the birth at the birth center would be totally covered. And that's really tempting. But we'd lose all of our other doctors. For me, that would be inconvenient and sad, since I love my GP and my allergist. For Cait, that could be DISASTROUS, as her Lyme doc is most defiinitely not part of Kais*r. So that's really not an option. But I'm still interested in your Kais*r stories, if you care to share.

So, I plan to embark on a righteous and cranky letter writing campaign to work for birthing options in the DC area. If you care to join me, I'll share addresses and info on the blog as I find them. Unfortunately, it won't do anything to help THIS delivery. But maybe other women can have options in the future.

Hip-hip-hoo*&!$@#&%?!?!?!?

Midwife appointment today was great. Harpo's heart was beating away at about 150 bpm (wooshwooshwoosh). Our rapidly-becoming-favorite midwife had done some research (and promised to do more and call us within the next few days) about how we could set up a non-Virginian hospital as our backup, even though that's not typically done. We went through all the first appointment things, and got a referral for our level 2 ultrasound.

Then we went downstairs to check in with the billing guy. We just wanted to be sure that our insurance would cover a home birth. Turns out our insurance won't cover their practice at all. Even though we were told that they did when we called to check it out. The (very nice) billing guy is going to look into it and get back to us. However, our hopes are not high on this one.

So, our only birth option is hospital with OB. I'm glad that we get to have this dilemma. Much better than last year's "so how long is it going to take for the betas to go down and how long before we should start worrying about the whole cancer risk thing" dilemma. Still, it's pretty crankifying. Why is our health care system so stupid and &*^%^&*ing lawsuit driven? Why is it so hard to have the type of prenatal care and birth that we want?

But the heart is still beating and a week from today we get to see our kid in detail. Until then, I'm just trying to avoid the panicked thoughts about missing organs or lack of limbs. Happy 19 weeks, Harpo.

Psycho Redux

Shrieking was heard from the shower this morning:

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I have my mother's boobs!"

Look Ma, No Hands!

We are really lucky to have a bunch of friends with toddlers and preschoolers who are MORE than happy to hand off old maternity clothes and baby stuff to us. Last night we went and sorted through a bunch of baby clothes and picked out some to put in storage. Since we don't know if it's a boy or a girl, we're mostly picking unisex stuff (meaning yellow, green, and blue, because if you exclude blue there's virtually nothing. Besides 50% of OUR clothing is blue, so why not the kid, too?) but occasionally we get struck by the cuteness of some girly thing and take it, too. However, my favorite find from last night is this:

Yup, a baby straightjacket. Including the fasten-behind-the-back feature AND hand restraints coverings. Love it! Of course we took it. And knowing even 50% of our kid's genes... it will probably come in handy! :)

Poor Maggie

Best googling of our site to date? I definitely have to hand it to "Maggie a problem of Nestle". ?!?!?

(Though if we'd been a bit smarter, we'd never have named a post "Sp*rm Sha*k"... I can't tell you the number of hits we get from pervs!)

BabyPalooza

For baby-obsessed people, the recent months of pregnancy and Lyme exhaustion have been remarkably devoid of small people. We more than made up for it this weekend!

Friday night we had dinner with Liza and Jill, fellow bloggers we'd never met in person, who were in town for their baby shower. We ate at Coppi's and upped both Liza's and my fruit and vegable counts with yummy squash and braised grapes (two different dishes).

We haven't spent much time with our friend Giggle Girl or her baby sister (we'll call her Charlie Chaplin - she's the silent type) but their mom is getting ready for a big exam so we hung out with them for most of the day Saturday. We had fun pretending to be a big lesbian family getting ready for #3! Then Conchita and Josie joined us and Josie had her first ice cream cone ever...

This morning we went to brunch with friends where I got my first ever "You're HOW far?!?!" comments, repeatedly (though it was the same two people who kept repeating it). We got to meet little Levi (one of whose moms used to do karate with Jen... the funny thing is, I only heard he was born through Liza's blog!). I got to spend some quality infant time with him and swap hospital stories with his moms, in preparation for BabyPalooza part 4, the hospital tour.

We were both reasonably impressed with the hospital. We had expected that they would be far less flexible, but their basic policies aren't as stringent as we feared. They don't put in precautionary IVs, they do intermittent fetal monitoring, and they don't take the baby away, ever, unless you request it. Ooops - I almost forgot the best part. When asked whether food and drink were permitted during labor, the tour guide cheerily assured us, "You can have ALL the ice chips you want!" Hospital birth still isn't going to be our first choice, but we'd be quite happy using this hospital as back-up. (Stay tuned for the hurdles we have to go through to make it our back-up, but that's another story.)

To wrap everything up, we made our first trip to a baby mega store, Buy Buy Baby (better known as Spend Spend Baby, according to our friends). Basically, we were overwhelmed. But it was fun to look at all the stuff and think, hey, we could be having one of these baby things, and "needing" to get all these other baby-related things!

And now we're totally exhausted again, so we're getting a head start on the newborn sleep deprivation thing....

The Non-Bio Mom's Lament

Overheard as Cait talked to her mom on the phone today:

"We're going to a brunch today and trying to find clothes that Jen looks cute in. Nobody gave ME boxes and boxes of clothes. It's so much more fun to help her get dressed."

My favorite part of this conversation? That Cait's mom - one of the early lesbian non-bio mom pioneers - could truly commisserate. "Yeah, nobody gave me clothes when Catherine was pregnant either."

To Sleep, Perchance not to Post

Thanks for all of your supportive comments about the picture and my bod in general. There's a LOOOOOONG post rattling around in my head about feminism and body image and our culture and pregnancy, but I'm having a hard time getting it out. I'm still battling pretty significant fatigue (hello! 17 weeks! I thought I was supposed to be all glowy and shit now!) and there's a long list of things I should be doing (ahem, bills!) before I even think about a long, thoughtful, introspective yet political post.

But if you care to try and read my mind until it appears, go right ahead.