Once More, With Feeling

Hello, Partus Melior, and here we go again. I currently find myself 9 wks + 5 days geriatrically pregnant.

Some updates:

• It turns out that my first husband was a serial adulterer, whose cheating went back to our first year of marriage. Life is full of surprises. [1]
• My divorce from my first husband was finalized 10-29-14 — one year to the date that I first requested it, which itself was one month after Constantine was born
• After a few years as a single mom, I remarried in June 2018 to a kind, gentle, softspoken man who has made me deliriously happy. He has no kids and had never even kissed a woman when we began dating. Sometimes, the guys who are shy and awkward with women are the right choice! We own a five-bedroom house together, a dog, a cat, a fish, and three hamsters.
• Constantine was diagnosed with high-functioning autism in 2016. He has had great success with ABA therapy. He is intelligent, verbal, precocious, and extremely energetic. His reading level is several grade levels past kindergarten.
• I never knew that life didn’t have to be perpetually stressful. I never realized just how abusive my first marriage was until I got out of it. My first husband may not have been hitting me, but he was verbally, emotionally, and materially abusive as well as coercive. I breathe a sigh of relief when I think of my escape.
• My first husband has pretty much been just as bad at co-parenting as he was at marriage. At one point he took off to Indianapolis and tried to dodge child support. I figured out where he was working and got a garnishment in on him. No one ever said he was a smart manchild.

Anyhow, NuHusband is now 40 years old, and I’m 37. I’ll be 38 when the baby is born and he’ll a few months from 41. Though I was ready to be done with kids, and he loves his stepchildren, he wanted a biological child of his own. So I agreed to do this one more time and we switched to not-trying-not-preventing in April of this year.

I found out I was pregnant on Columbus Day, after returning from my sister’s wedding in Houston. I had no idea how pregnant I was, but estimated I was 5 weeks. Did an ultrasound this past Monday thinking I was 8 weeks pregnant, but my doctor put me at 9 + 2.

We find out the gender via NIPS next week. NuHusband would prefer a boy; I told him I’m only doing this once and if he doesn’t get the gender he wants, to go pound sand. We’re not going to be one of those families that keeps trying and trying until we get the gender we want. (In my case, I’d kind of prefer a girl to a boy, but am A-Okay with either.)

I am currently hunting for a doula as the one I had for Costa’s birth is retired, and I love my OB-GYN. Hot doctor finished his residency and went back to Canada in June 2014, and I’ve only seen him once since, though we remain friends on Facebook.

That’s it for now, until next time . . .

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.

Amni-Oh-Noes!

What I was doing today.

(Image Source)

Here’s how my amniocentesis went:

I arrived at the maternal-fetal-medicine clinic, which is in a different hospital from the one where I usually see my doctor. The first thing they did was to send me to the lab to have my blood drawn because I’m Rh-negative and they needed to prep my RhoGam shot. Had the blood drawn from my left arm and headed back to the MFM clinic.

A genetic counselor called me back to her office and we spoke for 20-30 minutes. We talked about the genetic problems in my family and my daughter’s diagnosis of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. I said that, while I believed my daughter’s condition was a de novum appearance of the disorder in my family line, I had felt so much grief at my daughter’s birth with a new doctor coming into my room every few hours to tell me something else was wrong with my daughter, it had just been overwhelming. If I was going to have another child with special needs, I needed the time to grieve and adjust.