Long Live Greek Yogurt with Honey

I am pretty much never going to stop missing Get-Up Grrl. I still cannot believe she hasn't come roaring back from anonymity with a book contract, but what are you going to do? Her humor got so many of us through dark days, but perhaps her single best piece of advice was more basic: get yourself some Fayeh yogurt. Savor the honey on your tongue. Good for what ails you. Hunger, heartache, or stomach ache. If you have all-day morning sickness (yes I am still pregnant, it would seem) you might want to stock up. Passing on that there piece of advice is my good deed for the day... now I am going to dance with Turtle (but I will *not* twirl or fall down).

A Mother's Eyes

In some ways, my husband has great vision. Whenever we're in the car, he keeps up a constant running commentary on everything he sees. He'll glance casually out the window and say, "see that line of spray paint? That means they're going to add new electric lines there and that means they're going to build there and given the size of those sewers it's definitely going to be multi-family housing and..." Even if I take the time to look up from my book and peer out intently, I can never so much as glimpse what he's talking about. The man has never had a proper nom de blog and he deserves one. I hereby name him Hawkeye.

Hawkeye, however, cannot really see color. Oh, he's not color blind in the technical sense, only in the practical one. When he dresses Turtle, he sees nothing wrong with matching the lime green shirt with the forest green pants. "How can green not match green?" he'll demand indignantly. To me it's like listening to someone hit a flat when singing the national anthem: too cringe-inducing for words.

Take another example. Once on a long road trip we passed a huge billboard for a china outlet right off the highway. They carried our brand and we'd just broken two plates, so I badgered Hawkeye till he turned around and took the exit. Sure enough, the warehouse had our pattern prominently displayed on a front table. But I immediately realized that there was something off about the colors in the glaze. They weren't so much the beautiful cobalt of my dish set as some kind of muddied off-denim blue. "Never mind," I said, "these are clearly seconds." My husband stifled a sigh at being dragged off route for nothing and reasonably pointed to the sign that said, "all china first quality."

I kept arguing with him about the ineffable color of cobalt until he fetched a salesperson who agreed with him that the dishes on display were the genuine article and that I was either crazy or seeing things or both. I wandered the rest of the store in frustration until by chance, on a completely different display, I saw a vase in the same pattern as our china with our blue glaze, the right blue glaze, and I bore it over to them in triumph. With that, the salesperson agreed to bring out every plate she had from the back room and we went through them one by one. Half way through a pile of 30 plates, we found a single one to match my cobalt.

When we turned the plates over, Hawkeye realized that the logos on the plates were subtly different (a point I myself would never have noticed). The muddy denim plates had the logo written in slightly italicized font. In fact, the objectionable plates turned out to be slight update on my older--far superior--version of the pattern. So we bought the last old-style plate they had in stock. And even though I was still one plate shy of a dozen I crowed to Hawkeye for the rest of the trip about my incredibly refined color vision.

I have never known to what possible end nature could have endowed me and my foremothers with this extraordinary gift of color perception. To spot the ripest berries on the Savannah? But now I know.

The whole point of acute color vision is to allow me to engage in minute scrutiny of my toilet paper, scanning for any trace of blood each and every time I wipe. In the absence of any other scrap of information about the state of this pregnancy (all symptoms having vanished) I am left screening shreds of toilet tissue for hints of embryonic tissue. Thanks to my UTI (yes I have another one) I have at least one opportunity per hour for this joyless performance. So far, we're all clean. But it's gonna be a long 10 days...unless it all ends shortly.

For now, if you're looking for me, you'll know where to find me: crouched over in the bathroom, swiping, squinting, praying.

Trying to Keep from Cracking

Well, I went in to get wanded this morning and the news is decidely mixed. I am 5 weeks 1 day today. There was a visible amniotic sac measuring 4 weeks 5 days and a yolk sac measuring 5 weeks 2 days. Dr. Cookie Pie said the yolk sac had a "hat" ( a tiny white line on the border that indicated early growth of the fetal pole) and that such a line does not develop before 5 weeks 2 days. She said that the am sac measurement was within the margin of error and that I just should not worry. But I feel like I am going to crack from anxiety. I am sitting here pecking at my mobile device and trying not to cry. I just don't know how to keep enduring these losses. Worst of all, I can't go in again until 3/3 because she is away next Friday and Monday. So next scan will be at 6 weeks 5 days (unless I start to bleed first).

Half-Expecting

Don't you think that would be a great new name for my blog? As in, I'm on my 3rd pregnancy in the span of 9 months and I still half-expect the arrival of a live baby? Of course, I also half-expect to wake up 6 inches taller and ten pounds thinner. Regular pregnant ladies get to say, "I'm expecting." But we recurrent miscarriers daren't do more than half-expect.

Beta was 300-somethingish. Can't even remember, but double what it was with the blighted ovum at the same gestational date. V. sore boobs, crazy fatigue, no sick yet (knock would, cross fingers, toss salt, etc.). So um, 1st ultrasound to look for sac is Friday and I think I'm just too stupified with fatigue to write anything else.

Thank you for the comments, my loyal old friends on the internet. I go back and forth on whether to tell the world at large about each new pregnancy. Last time I told everyone who so much as said hello to me, but this time, it's just you Nets. SO *thanks* for the support and good wishes.

Seven

You guessed it. I'm back on the blog with number seven on board. In an unusual display of self control, I waited until today, the actual day my period is due, to test. Reward: a nice dark pink second line. By yesterday, I was pretty confident of the facts and cocky enough to enter the day of my last LMP into the handy due-date calculator at Bby Ctr. They actually provide the result by saying "your baby will be born on..." WILL BE BORN? Can I sue them for malpractice if/when this one goes south?

Anyway, feeling good, feeling hopeful. Irrationally exuberant one might say. I blame the hormones--for which I also blame the decision to place a partially open bottle of Fizzy Lizzy into a purse full of library books on the way to the doctor's this afternoon.

Mostly feeling pretty proud of myself for having the sheer guts to try this again. Lucky # 7 (yes, I'm hoping to steal a page from Tertia's book) would be due just before my 37th birthday. Sure would be nice...

Will post Beta when I get it. Cheers!