Review: Buying a Maternity Formal from JJsHouse

When I mentioned to my SIL that I would need a maternity formal for our other SIL’s wedding on June 1st, she recommended I try JJsHouse. I looked through their maternity formals and found a dress that I really liked:

What I Wanted

What really attracted me to the dress were those cute gathers in the front of the dress. I thought, “Those will look so adorable over my 24-week baby bump.”

My SIL’s wedding colors are cobalt blue and yellow, and I can’t do yellow, so I ordered the dress in royal blue. I also thought that a full-length gown would be a little overpowering for a sunny June wedding, so I had it tailored to be knee-length, I had myself measured by a professional tailor prior to ordering the dress, and found that most of my measurements fit their size 12 measurements (which is my normal dress size anyways), so I went ahead and ordered a size 12. I paid extra to customize the hem to a shorter length. Between customization, S&H, and foreign transaction fees, I paid a total of $159.62 for this dress. And if the dress had been tailored the way I wanted, I would have considered that a good deal.

What I Got

This is what arrived in the mail yesterday. Notice anything missing?

21.5-week Anomaly Scan

Nothing new to report. No sign of birth defects. I am still team yellow.

The images were better and clearer at the 15.5-week scan than at this one. Baby is still measuring almost a week ahead. If they were going by the ultrasounds, they would put the due date at Sept. 14. However, since I am sure of my LMP and ovulation dates, I refuse to budge from my Sept. 20 due date.

Five Movies Featuring Pregnant Characters That I Love

Would you mess with a pregnant woman with this look in her eyes? Oh, hell no you wouldn’t. If you did, you would die. Vidya Balan as the pregnant Vidya Bagchi in the Indian thriller *Kahaani* (2012)

Seeing pregnant women portrayed in film and television usually makes me cringe. If the woman isn’t dying in childbirth, she’s having an evil baby, or maybe an alien baby. Pregnant women in film and television also have the tendency of having unbelievably fast labors, water that breaks in a dramatic gush, of being forced to give birth in cars or in stuck elevators, etc. It’s unrealistic, it’s frustrating, and it’s insulting.

Here are a few films involving pregnant characters that do not make me cringe, and are decent films to boot:

Fargo (1996) ~ Frances McDormand won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her turn as North Dakota police chief Marge Gunderson in the Coen brothers’ offbeat “homespun murder story.” Marge investigates a series of grizzly murders while smiling through a polite and bubbly “Minnesota nice” accent—and she happens to be quite obviously 7 months pregnant and not making a big deal about it. Just a pregnant woman doing her job, being police chief, catching serial killers, stopping guys from loading legs into wood chippers. The way the world should be.

The Other Halfway

A pregnancy isn’t really 40 weeks. It’s 38 because the first two weeks you aren’t even pregnant.

Today I am 21 weeks pregnant, which means my baby’s gestational age is 19 weeks, which means I have reached the true halfway point. So yay for me.

Not much new to report. Though the substitute doctor was nice enough, he was over an hour late to an 8:45 AM appointment (!), and I had an appointment at a temp agency at 11:00 AM, so this was a bad day for my doctor to be so late. Though he was cute, he was nowhere near as cute as Sark. (Because that’s what really matters in a doctor, right? )

He wants to see me again for a “social follow-up” on the 29th. I’m not sure if that means he wants to get to know me better or he wants to talk about my “social stressors,” i. e. my separation. I’ve made the appointment, but if I am working by then, I’m canceling it. There’s no way I am taking more time off work than I need to.

I’m a little stressed on top of everything else right now because the Social Security office has canceled my daughter’s SSI for June on account of them losing the paperwork I submitted. My experience with SSI has been that once they cancel your payments for a month, it doesn’t matter if it was their mistake, nor does it matter how many caseworkers you meet with or appeals you file; you will not get it for that month. At best you will get a double-payment the following month. That will still leave me needing a way to pay my rent on June 1st, so I really hope I’m working soon. (Yes, I could call my stepmother and borrow the SSI money for a month until they get my case straightened out, but I was hoping to avoid having to borrow any money from her.)

I just finished finals. I have a few papers to finish and then I will throw myself entirely into my job search. I did well on all of the temp agency’s exams, so I am hopeful they will put me to at least earning some income soon. They sounded optimistic as well.

I can now add “acid reflux” to my still-short second trimester symptoms list. It’s irritating but manageable.

What I have coming up:

• May 14th — 21-week ultrasound
• May 31st – June 3rd — Traveling to Georgia for sister-in-law’s wedding
• June 13th — Seeing my one-and-only hot doctor for a routine 2nd trimester check-up, as that is when he is back in the office. I’ll be 25-almost-26 weeks

Halfway

Today I am 20 weeks pregnant. If all goes well, I am approximately halfway to holding baby Ivy or Constantine in my arms, and a mere 3-4 weeks away from the point where baby could potentially be saved if born premature.

I continue to deal with my separation. Everyone I have talked to feels that I am doing the right thing given the circumstances. I have my up days and my down days. Husband says that he doesn’t want to lose me, but shows no interest in making the changes to his life that I’ve asked him to make. I’ve reached the sad conclusion that he doesn’t love me anymore. He says he does, and I have no doubt that he has strong feelings for me, but he is completely uninterested in translating those feelings into action. And that isn’t love.

I just keep trying to think positive and visualize. Me, my daughter, my baby, the job I want to have, making a daycare routine work, living in a clean and uncluttered apartment. I’m going to make it happen.

My Would-Be Birth Plan

This was my first draft of my birth plan, but my doula thinks I should do something more serious.

Posting for your enjoyment (I hope).

The Most Awesomest Birth Plan Ever That Will Never Be Used (PDF)

Doin’ okay

I am doing surprisingly okay for a pregnant woman who just decided to separate from her husband of 9 years. In the past few days, I have:

• Taken my husband off of our joint checking account. As much as all of this hurts, it is a huge relief to look into my bank account and only see the charges that I know should be there. 
• Begun applying for jobs.
• Applied for a few social welfare programs (WIC, food pantries, SNAP, TANF). I do have a small nest egg in the bank, and I will have an income of about ~$1000 a month from other sources, but sad experience has taught me that it’s much easier to get help with food than it is with cash or rent, so I need to supplement with food as much as possible in order to make my cash last as long as possible. My hope is that my use of these programs will be extremely temporary, and that is kind of what they’re there for. 
• Had an offer from a friend to take out a small loan so that I can get my own car. I’m determined to have this be a loan and not a hand-out, so I’m not taking it until I have a job lined up. 

Sadly, my extended family has been incredibly unhelpful. I live in Illinois and they live in Washington state, and most of them have been like, “You should just pack it up and move back to Washington.” Um… why? Are jobs easier to find there? Are apartments easier to get into? If you guys won’t cosign for me here, then why would you if I’m there? Everybody there has a full-time job and I won’t be getting much help on raising the children, so I don’t see why I would be better off there than here. I do get that they would love to see my children more often, but that helps them, not me.

Besides, I don’t have any interest in taking the children away from DH. DD loves her daddy and would miss him horribly, and other than sucking at providing for his children and giving their money away to his freeloading friends, he is an incredibly good father who loves to spend time with his kids.

I also have a lot of hope that this experience is going to teach him to grow up and be more financially responsible, whereupon we could reconcile. DH has already signed up for his own checking account so that I can transfer over our regular insurance and IPASS (tollway) charges. I honestly thought I was going to have to twist his arm to get him to do that like I usually do with anything involving money. There is hope.

I think I just lost my husband

Hey men: do not be this

Here goes.

DH and I have been married for almost 9.5 years. We married when I was 21 and he was 22. Truth be told, he has always been a little on the immature and naive side, but I have stuck with him because of his many other good qualities (and he does have many). But having to always be the only responsible adult in our family has been a recurring headache.

Periodically, DH has done something extremely immature and irresponsible that just made me want to scream “WTF?!” I don’t even say the F-word–it’s on my no-no-list–but he makes me want to say it. For example, last year, he spent a large chunk of the money in our bank account on work expenses without telling me. He did this on the first of the month, right as our rent was due. I looked in the account on the 3rd or so and was shocked to find that there wasn’t enough money in there to cover rent. I was livid. It takes his boss forever to reimburse us on work expenses and I’ve told him a million times I don’t want him making them, but he keeps doing it. (His irresponsible boss could be the subject of a whole other post.) And he did not even tell me about this large expense. Had our landlady tried to cash the rent check, it would have bounced. How is it that I am married to a 31 year-old man who does not understand why paying rent on-time is important, or why reporting large expenditures to the person who does the budget is important?

Sixteen-week prenatal check-up

Listening for baby’s heart tones, 4-8-2013. Photo by my doula.

What a busy day I had today! In the morning I was preaching at the retirement community where I volunteer with the chaplaincy ministry, then I went to my prenatal appointment, and immediately afterwards I went to set up for tomorrow’s election, where I am serving as an election judge. I find it satisfying to be staying so busy.

It was the 16-week prenatal today. My doula came to the appointment. I think her and my hot  doctor will get along well. She seemed to agree with my assessment of his looks. Always good to have a second opinion when it comes to prenatal care, right? He mentioned that he has never worked with a doula before, and he’s done 48 deliveries now, so I hope this is a learning experience for him.

My Pregnancy Announcement

This is how I am going to announce my pregnancy on Facebook on Sunday (face blocked out here because I value my anonymity):

I am just going to change my timeline cover photo and my profile photo to that let people notice.

Then wait for DH’s parents to be pissed that we did not tell them sooner…