November 24, 2008
by marfmom
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Showered With Love

I’ve had a wonderful weekend! I am truly blessed with amazing friends. I don’t think I can ever articulate the support I’ve gotten during this time that Mark and I are apart and how much that means to me. I had two perfect baby showers this weekend, thrown by great friends.

Saturday I spent a couple of hours visiting some of my extended Figueiredo family, who I haven’t seen in quite awhile, and then headed to the first baby shower. Ginny and Yevgenia threw “Baby Pedro” and me a little shower with our APO friends + Susan & Holly. It was great! Yevgenia had it at her new apartment and her fiancee Adam was gracious enough to put up with a bunch of giggling girls for several hours. :-p The shower was ducky themed. Ginny baked a ducky cake and the favors were M&Ms in little ducky boxes.

We played the dirty diaper game, where diff. kinds of chocolate get mashed up and microwaved in a diaper to look like poo and we have to guess the type of chocolate.

Sarah tried to guess the contents by smell.

Tasty!!!

The girls also tried to guess the size of my belly using string. Katie was closest and most girls cut waaaaaay too much string. It made me feel better about last year when I mis-guessed at Anne’ss shower :-p

Finally, there was the water chugging contest using baby bottles. Classic!

Chloe and Sarah sucking away! Chloe ended up winning.

Marinda placed a close 2nd.

Also? I had a surprise visitor. Amber showed up all the way from Atlanta! Well, technically it was all the way from Michigan since she’d had a med school interview there on Thursday, but still. It was so great to see her!!! 😀

The two hostesses and myself: Ginny loves to poke “Baby Pedro.”

The lovely Cleveland ladies

Yesterday my friends Abbie and Janelle threw me a shower for the girls in our public health division: health behavior, health promotion. The shower was Dr. Seuss themed and they went ALL OUT. Abbie made treats straight out of the Dr. Seuss books, for instance. For example, green eggs and ham were cupcakes with the tops decorated like green eggs.

Lindsey was excited to win the diaper game!

Then we played the Price is Right game (complete with the music!) where we had to figure out if the real price for an item was higher or lower than the price Janelle initially presented.

Abbie revealed the real prices. Janelle sure was clever…she made it very difficult! I only got 30% right haha.

Abbie and Janelle (future professional party planners?)

So again, thanks to all my friends who made this weekend great 😀

November 19, 2008
by marfmom
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Crazy People (aka women who get glee out of freaking out pregnant women)

Ok, first of all, I passed out asleep in class for the first time in AGES. I sat down, opened up the powerpoint, and promptly fell asleep with my computer in my lap. Classy! But, this all worked out b/c today’s class was all about child hazards. And really, who needs to freak out about everything bad that can happen to kids before the baby is even born?

Me, apparently.

After class, this woman comes up to me and asks when I’m due. I tell her and she laughs and says “That’s what you think!” So I replied that yes, it *is* what I think because I am going to induce if the baby makes it to his/her due date. She then feels the need to tell me that it’s unhealthy to induce a full-term baby! I said “Oh well I want my husband there for the birth and besides, I was late and a meconium birth and seeing as I almost died from that, I would never let a child of mine go very much past his/her due date.”

(I did not explain about me being high-risk because I could just see her saying it would be better I die than use an epidural or something crazy like that.)

Her response? “Ugh. It’s so sad when one little bad experience makes a woman scared to do the right thing.” Ummmm? Just guessing here, but I doubt my mom would classify that as a “little bad experience.”

The whole conversation wouldn’t have been too bad if she’d stopped there, but she didn’t. She went on to first lecture about how the longer the baby is in the womb the better: always. “In fact,” she told me, “pretty much all the babies in my family baked for TEN months!” I was so close to telling her that ANY full term baby “bakes” for 10 months b/c 40 weeks = 10 months, but I just wanted the conversation to be over. From there, she decided it was her duty to tell me all about bad birth stories. She delivered her 2nd child in the bathtub alone, for instance, because her doctor and (now ex) husband didn’t believe she was in labor. Another woman her midwife knew had a one minute labor, and so on and so forth.

I finally had to turn my back on her and walk away while she was talking and just wave goodbye over my shoulder because she would NOT quit talking or take a hint.

What is it with women that they 1) think it’s OK to criticize another woman’s birth plan to her face and 2) tell a first time pregnant woman all her horror stories? Ayiyiyi!

Anyone else want to share the crazy things crazy people told them?

November 14, 2008
by marfmom
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Happy Thoughts #3

Some more things that make me happy:

1) My OBGYN. Sure, there is a certain level of care that we can expect from our doctors, because that’s their job and we pay them to do it. However, every once in awhile I’d had a doc who has really made an extra effort. For instance, I was still a little nervous about how little Baby Z moves as compared to my friends’ babies. I told my OB that I had felt the baby give maybe 3 or so kicks that morning but that was it. A quick ultrasound showed the baby’s heart was beating. I wasn’t worried about the baby being alive, but I guess more that my heart meds were causing a reaction or that the baby needed more of a specific vitamin or whatever. I expected my OB to just shrug it off, but he insisted I do a quick non-stress test to check “how happy Baby is.” He didn’t make me feel silly about it, and he told the nurse administering the test it was b/c of his concern, not mine. Also, at the end of my appt. I mentioned a friend of mine in another state who also has Marfan, and explained her doctor doesn’t understand anything about the disorder and wants her to terminate the pregnancy. My OB offered to do a literature search and send me the results to help convince this doctor about the best course of treatment for my friend. He definitely didn’t have to do that, but I think it’s awesome!

2) My baby. Everything came out OK with the non-stress test, although my doc could only speculate as to why Baby Z is pretty chill. At least it doesn’t seem like I’m doing anything wrong. However, I also got some good news as a result of the test. Apparently non-stress tests are only kind of effective before 32 weeks, because at 32 weeks babies have fully developed nervous systems and therefore have reactive heart rates (their heart rate goes up when they kick) and that makes the test most useful. The nurse said that Baby Z was showing a reactive heart rate at 27 weeks, meaning his or her nervous system developed early. While I doubt this is actually as cool as the nurse made it out to be (she was probably trying to make me feel better about having a lazy baby), it was still nice to hear. I feel like we’ve worried a lot about the pregnancy and the baby so any good news is automatically great news!

3) My Grampa Brown. As many of you know, Matt and I flew out to Utah in August to say goodbye to him. He has terminal cancer; I helped get Hospice care set up in June so Gramma would have some help taking care of him. These past couple of weeks, Grampa has been talking on the phone with me: something he hasn’t been able to do in a very long time. Last night we probably talked for 7 or 8 minutes! Grampa knew who I was and was really positive throughout the entire conversation. He said he is getting stronger and stronger every day and he looks forward to me bringing the baby to come see him. I don’t know how long Grampa will be here on earth with us but I am eternally grateful for this time that I have to talk with him, to enjoy his positive attitude, and to see how excited he is about this great-grandchild (even though he already has many great-grandchildren).

(a picture Mark took of them back in early 2007)

4) My new haircut.

5) Running into old friends. Today I ran into one of the regulars from Victoria’s Parlor (the sandwich and ice cream shop where I worked for several years) while at the IGA in Granville. I also stopped by the Pataskala library to see if any of the people I used to work with were there. It’s been almost 10 years since I left, but the librarians were more or less the same and they remembered me. It was great catching up with them!

6) Pinata tortillas, which I what I was getting at the IGA because Giant Eagle doesn’t sell them. They’re the best!

7) Finding old pictures! My husband was wonderful and ordered me a new cord for my camera, so that I could FINALLY download old pictures. I didn’t even realize I still had these on my camera! They are from Easter dinner 2008, when Mark and I hosted Scott & Megan Lewis and Nate & Leslee Wood.