So, maybe I'm losing my mind. Maybe I just need to get this out of my system and exhaust all possibilities. Maybe it's just hormones. But, lately I've been really freaking out over giving birth in a hospital setting. I swear every other blog I read is posting amazing home birth stories these days. And not just run-of-the-mill home births, but HBACs, something I would, by all medical smarty-pantsness, be nutso to consider. I read all of these women's stories and I get teary-eyed, I get all smooshy thinking of new babies, and I get all sorts of thoughts of "Well, why not me?"

So, I've spent the morning scouring every midwife database I can for even semi-local midwives in private practice.  Of the two closest, one didn't have any contact information listed (but I managed to find a number listed under her name) and one I'm not so certain about just based on it's location (it's a mere 6 miles from us, and I'd really like to think that if we had midwives that readily available I would have known about it. But, man would that be convenient.) I e-mailed a home birth service based in Erie, even though we're 10 miles south of what they list as their coverage area. And the drive from Erie to here is an hour and a half in good weather, so late February to mid-March could be sketchy. But, I'm determined to start somewhere.

Edited to add: According to our doula, the first midwife I came across seems quite nice and does attend VBAC's. So that's definitely good news. I'll be giving her a call later today. And the home birth service that's super close to us seems to be two doulas, one of which also states that she's a Direct Entry Midwife and the other is an assistant midwife. I didn't see anything about whether or not they attend VBAC's. But based on their website I think they're a little too fanatically religious for me.  Their proximity would make them ideal, but I don't think they'd enjoy my profuse use of the Lord's name in vain while in labor.
Thought? Words of wisdom?

Bump Watch: Week the 28th

I should take a new photo, since this one is from 26 weeks, and I am undoubtedly more round by now. But, now is break time while Finn and his buddy Harper nap, so blogging after over a month is the most activity I'll be doing at the moment.

Cab is growing quite well (as illustrated by my expanding midsection) and on the whole this pregnancy is just as uneventful and average as the last one.  I did have to go in for a third ultrasound so another attempt at seeing his spine could be made, but once he cooperated everything proved to be just fine. The only things vastly different this time are that I have a toddler to chase around (which equals extra sore back and extra frayed nerves at the end of the day) and Steve is working at a much, much busier shop, so he hasn't been able to make it to any of my appointments.  His work schedule has also thrown Finn into a loop since he only gets to see him for a couple hours between dinner and bedtime. Add that on top of whatever teething/growth spurt/realization-that-he's-not-going-to-be-the-baby-anymore thing that he's been going through, and you've got yourself a recipe for a great time (read: at times impossible to deal with little boy).

That's all for now. Time to revel in the plushness of the couch. Which really means that I will sit down for 10 seconds and then panic that I have laundry to switch, a butcher to call about a half hog I ordered a week ago, dinner to start prepping, and million other little things.

It's amazing.

Just a few little things that wow me.

1) Obviously, this little man. And his dimples. I love how you can see all four of his dimples in this picture.One in each cheek, one in his chin ("Dimple on the chin, devil within", right?") and the one I like to call his "thinking dimple" right along his hairline in the middle of his forehead.  He was actually quite crabby this day, but at least I got one good, big dimple-y smile out of him.

2) Finn's rate of learning. It more than wows me. It blows me away. He quickly learned his whole alphabet by sight, upper and lowercase. And his numbers 1 through 10. His sentences get longer and longer by the day. He can have pretty full conversations with people and loves to tell stories about his day. We just recently started going over the sounds that each letter makes. Today while waiting in the car for Nana, Finn pointed at a sign and said "Look up there! It's a 'D'! What does 'D' say? Da-da-da-da!" I was speechless. We spent the rest of the car ride with him yelling out letters and their sounds.

3) Also, with Finn's sentences growing longer, he's taken to telling people all about his baby brother. It goes something like this: "There's tiny baby in mommy's tummy. So tiny. Is my baby brudder. Calloway! He's sleepin' *insert snoring noise* He's warm. He has a blankie."  The first time Steve heard Finn say "Calloway" I think he nearly cried. Adorable.

4) Though we see him only for a short time at night, Steve is also pretty awesome. He works so hard for our little family and I can't express how much I appreciate it. Because of him I get to stay at home and see my kids grow up and teach them to be good, hardworking boys too.

5) I'm happily amazed that I'm about halfway through this pregnancy. 

6) I'm in love with the fact that the baby's tiny jabs have become full on kicks and headbutts. Steve felt him for the first time last night, which is always neat. I'm fairly certain he was perfecting his Charleston in there.

Meet Calloway

Hooray for the awesomeness of ultrasound. I could never be one of those folks who wait until the baby is born to find out whether it's a boy or a girl or a t-rex. Plus I think it's super neato to finally see what's been growing inside of me. And today confirmed what I was worried about, it's not a kraken or a walrus. Just a normal, healthy human baby. And a boy baby at that. (And there was much rejoicing in the exam room.) The tech had some trouble at first because I had drank the prescribed 20 ounces of fluid beforehand, which ended up squishing the baby into a little ball instead of making things easier to see. She managed to get all the needed measurements on the heart, the brain, arms and torso. But the legs were tucked up under the bottom to the point that she couldn't get a measure on them at all, let alone see what was in between them. I got shooshed off to the bathroom and got rid of some of the water (quite possibly the best bathroom break ever. Making a pregnant lady drink copious amounts of fluid and then forbidding her to pee for an hour is on par with torture.) Baby had some room to stretch then and ta-da! Boy bits.  We got a lovely shot of his little bum, his long legs and his teeny boy parts. And of course his little hand groping the bits. The one thing the tech was unable to see was his spine, so I'll be going back again for another scan in hopes that he'll be more cooperative.

As for his name, originally we were settled on Bixby for either a boy or a girl. Then Steve decided it sounded to girly. I decided Steve is crazy. But I made up an alternate list, consisting mainly of traditional Irish names. Not that either of us is Irish, mind you. But Polish names are fairly awful, German names aren't any better and Italian names sound like the names of bizarre internal organs. So, since we obviously have one child with an Irish name, I stuck with that. We narrowed it down to a small handful of choices and figured we'd wait. And then we were putting laundry away one night, listening to a jazz and big band mix, and Steve blurted out "What about Calloway?" I immediately thought it was a genius idea. I've loved Cab Calloway since I was a little girl and he was on Sesame Street. I'm not big on the nickname "Cal" so we'll be calling him Cab for short. Perfect. The middle name has yet to be picked but I have a few in mind.

So, yay for new boys!

Relaxation

Do you hear that?
That's the silence that only occurs when you don't have a 72-pound dog beast sitting next to you licking his nether regions. Sweet, sweet silence.
Harley went to the vet yesterday to get his 2 year vaccines and stayed overnight to get neutered this morning. I'm to give them a call around noon to check in on him and he'll be rescue by Steve this evening once all the sedatives have worn off.  But right now, I'm just enjoying the decreased level of crazy in our house. Ahhhh.
We have great hopes that getting snipped will calm him down a good deal, or at least keep him from going bonkers when our neighbor's dog goes into heat.We shall see though. I do know that not being able to clean himself while the stitches heal is going to drive him mad. And I also know that seeing him with the "cone-of-shame" is going to provide us with hours of laughter and plenty of funny pictures.

In non-dog related news, I had a check-up on Tuesday. My mom tagged along to help wrangle Finn if needed. I really wanted him to hear the baby's heartbeat. And he did, but he was massively unimpressed with the whole ordeal. He was pretty angry that I was laying down on the exam table though, yelling "Mommy get up! Mommy get up right now!". Because heaven forbid Mommy lay down while Finn is awake. Sigh. All is well with the developing kraken as far as we can tell. Heartbeat is very strong and fast, much like Finn's. And I've started feeling bits of movement as well. It took a few times for me to be certain that movement was what I was feeling. I expected the first moves to be similar to Finn's: small, sweet swishes and flips. But this one has somehow already acquired the pointy jabs and pokes that Finn had past the 23 week mark. Clearly I have feisty one on my hands.
Last evening we had a meeting with our doula, Amy, which went stupendously well. She won Steve over, which was my only worry. I had asked him many times if he was okay with having a doula there, and if he would feel like he was having his toes stepped on in any way. He assured me that he would actually be relieved to have someone else there that had a better understanding of everything and who could be extra emotional/mental support. But I still worried. It's what I do. But he got along with Amy very well, and seems really excited to be able to kind of take a step back when it comes time to actually have this baby. He's decided his job is to keep my water filled, sneak me granola bars, and tell me I'm gorgeous even if I'm drenched in sweat and wearing ugly slipper socks. Good man.

Big ultrasound appointment on Monday, so hopefully I'll have exciting news to announce then. Hooray!

Bump Watch: Week 16

I've read dozens of times that with each successive pregnancy you "show" sooner and get larger. But I'm still shocked at how much more bump I have this time around. When I was 12 weeks pregnant with Finn I shot a photo set with Alissa Brunelli. I looked amazing. My stomach was teensy from 3 months of constant vomiting. My boobs looked cartoonishly disproportionate. My butt was darn near perfect from all the running I had been doing prior to discovering I was pregnant. I may have felt like death slightly warmed up, but damn if I didn't look awesome. This time though at 12 weeks, I was poking my belly, turning this way and that trying to discern whether it was a bump I was seeing or just a "food baby" from the extra large banana split I had just consumed in 2 bites. This week I ripped our house apart in a frantic search for a  bellaband that has apparently disappeared into thin air. The only thing keeping me out of ugly maternity pants at this point is the fact that my favorite jeans are cut much lower in the front than the back. Thank you, Levi 504's. And see that striped shirt. I have two of them. And I live in them. Chances are if you see me out and about, I'll be wearing one of them. I have other shirts that fit (that aren't empire waisted circus tent maternity tops), but I've developed some sort of dependence on these two Old Navy shirts. I really should have purchased more of them.

Right now I'm just looking forward to the big ultrasound appointment in a few weeks. I'm dying to know what exactly is in there. With Finn I had kind of a feeling that I was carrying a boy. But with this one, I have no clue. It could be a kraken or a walrus for all I know (I'm kind of hoping for a kraken). We went through a little debacle over the unisex name we've had picked out for two years, which lead to coming up with an entirely new boy's name. A boy's name we've been keeping from my mother, which is apparently killing her. I've promised to tell her once we find out if it's a boy or a girl, so I'm exciting for the appointment just to put an end to her constant digging for hints.

Itchy

We had quite the exciting night last night. And by "exciting" I mean "terrible, no good, very bad."

We had Finn in bed early. Relaxed, played some Yatzee (which I won, for once), and had a delightful evening leading up to grown-up bedtime. Because of the heat Steve and I were already sleeping restlessly, when Harley came bounding back the hallway. And then he ran full speed back to the living room. Repeat this several times, with some pausing to shake in between. We assumed the obvious, he had to pee, so Steve let him outside for a few minutes and then brought him back in. We'd just settled back down, when Harley started the whole routine over again. He positively would not calm down. Determined to have a few hours of sleep, Steve contained Harley in his crate. Just as we drifted off to sleep, he did his pitiful whining. So back out of the cage he came, only to repeat the running of the hallway again. At this point, I start thinking maybe he's pulling a Lassie-esque "Timmy's in the well!". So I jump out of bed to prod the completely dead-to-the-world toddler awake, just to make sure he's okay. All was well, and after Finn gave me the stink eye for waking him up we all went back to bed. Harley continued his running. We tried to ignore  it, thinking that giving him attention for it would just encourage him more. This lasted until he bounded into our room and slammed his entire front half into the bed. We stuck him outside on the run, hoping he would wear himself out and fall asleep on the porch. Thirty minutes later he was crying his head off and was brought back inside and put in the crate. Either he was so exhausted that he gave up or we were so tired that we passed out without noticing any more antics. I'm not sure.

So, we wake up this morning and start to get ready to leave. As I'm in the bathroom, Steve yells "Ashley! Get out here!" I lazily wander to the living room, assuming this has something to do with SportsCenter. Nope. Harley's neck was scratched raw to the point that it looked like someone had tried to slit his throat. I fetched a cold washcloth and cleaned him up as best as I could. We both thought his harness had irritated him and he had scratched at it profusely. Then as I cleaned further down, I saw huge red welts on his chest. And behind his front legs. And on his front legs. All over his belly. Covering his doggy junk. Ugh. I honestly had no idea dogs could get poison ivy. Somehow Steve did know this though.  I just know our furkid looks miserable. We've been giving him children's benedryl to help with the itch, but he still looks mighty pitiful. I gave him a nice long scrub this afternoon to get any remaining residue off of him, which hopefully keeps us from getting it and keeps it from spreading on him anymore.

A few pictures of his itchiness:

Front leg

Neck (these are the sores he had scratched open last night)

More of the neck bumps

Even on the paws

And the worst. His belly. I feel so bad for him.