The Never Ending Game of Repeat

From the time I was a little child, I already felt annoyed with the repetitiveness of mundane daily tasks such as brushing your teeth, combing your hair, eating dinner, etc.  I could feel at that young age a sense of boredom with the world and what it had to offer.  

I always felt a feeling of lack, even when we would go out as a family and do some expensive form of entertainment, I always came away feeling jipped somehow.  We didn't get to stay long enough, we didn't get to do the one little thing I wanted to do, I didn't get to go down a certain slide one more time… This sense of un-fulfillment just continued with everything I did.  

And now that I'm an adult, these things are only augmented with the repetitive tasks of never-ending laundry, cleaning the kitchen so I can cook dinner, and then having to clean up the mess of cooking all over again.  Last night as we drove to the grocery store I asked John "What's the point? We're just going to have to buy food AGAIN!"  I was feeling particularly exhausted about how pointless it all is, and how maddeningly repetitive it all is.
 
And it's not like these things improve by being done over and over again.  The groceries are always the same. The meal you made still tastes the same next time you make it.  Your hair doesn't get any nicer with more washes.  The house cleaning doesn't get any better or easier the more days you clean it.  It’s a life of doing pointless things that mean zero improvement to yourself or the planet or your family.  

Instead we gradually get older, more fragile, more wrinkled, and less capable of doing these daily wastes of time.
I just can't bear the thought of daily nothingness any longer.  It's all so pointless, so meaningless, yet all the while so annoyingly demanding that we keep doing them over and OVER and over again.  

There has to be some way out of this meaninglessness.

Abigail's Birth - All the details!

Our sweet little Abigail came into this world on June 22nd at 4:11 am weighing 7 lbs, 11 ozs and measuring 19 inches long.  She looks so much like Elizabeth; more than any of the others did.  Her birth was quite the roller coaster of emotions and not quite what we had planned.

As her due date was drawing to a close and we'd done nearly everything in the wive's tales book to get her to come, I decided it wouldn't hurt to try a little castor oil.  We'd tried it in the past with Isaac and it started a false labor that we were able to keep going with pitocin when we got to the hospital.  I figured if she wasn't ready, it wouldn't work, and if she was ready it could help move things along.

I took 2 Tbsp of the stuff around 2pm and took a nap until 4:30.  When I woke I had the usual trips to the bathroom that castor oil causes, but no serious contractions resulted from it.  So we went to our ward party at 6:30 still very much pregnant and waiting.

When we came home I decided to try some oil again and took 2 more Tbsp around 9pm.  Then I did some dancing to help encourage her to come, and we climbed in bed around 10:30.  At that point I started having some mildly intense contractions coming every 4 minutes apart and got up to use the bathroom.  I was shocked and terrified to see that I was bleeding quite a large amount and lost a large blood clot.  We immediately called the birthing center and they told us to come in right away.

Luckily the children were fast asleep at this point, so we transferred them to the car along with all the hospital gear and headed to my mother-in-law's to drop off the kids on the way to the birthing center.  When we got to the birthing center I'd been having pretty intense contractions coming 3 minutes apart. The midwife was concerned about the large amount of blood because it meant the placenta had separated from the interior wall, or had an abruption in it.  She also informed us that if the placenta had gotten underneath the baby, I would not be able to deliver her and would have no choice but to have a C-section.  The only thing they could do was transfer me to the hospital to find out the position of the placenta.

During our drive to the hospital I was completely devastated.  I'd been planning a natural birth in a completely different environment than a hospital, and now we were having to come to terms with our worst nightmare of having a C-section.  In this moment I knew I'd be swallowing all of my dislike for the medical system and felt so much gratitude for the miraculous emergency care they are able to perform in situations like this.  I was willing to do anything to get my baby here safely.  And for the second time in my life since losing Elizabeth, I felt completely powerless to having things go the way I'd planned them and knew that a higher power would take care of us.

When we got to the hospital they checked the position of the placenta in an ultrasound, and then confirmed it with a vaginal ultrasound to be safe.  To my complete relief, they informed us that the placenta was not in the way of baby's head, and that I might still have a natural childbirth as long as the baby continued to have a strong heartbeat.  They were still concerned that we might have to do an emergency C-section at any point, but were willing to let me try and have her vaginally.

I felt peaceful about her safety and knew that whichever outcome, she would be okay - and that was all that mattered.  They talked about putting me on pitocin and/or breaking my water to help speed things along and I thought it would be a good idea, but they had to leave the room to take care of some other concerns before we got it going.  This turned out to be quite a blessing because my body was already in active labor (thought I didn't quite realize just how active) and I didn't end up needing the pitocin at all.  This was a blessing because pitocin or breaking the water could have caused her to go under stress and cause more complications, and I feel so thankful that Heavenly Father blessed me with a super speedy delivery.

The doctor had left the room around 3:00am, and by the time the doctor came back in the room to check me around 3:45 I was completely surprised to find out I'd progressed to 8 cm.  I asked if we could just let me progress without the pitocin then and they laughed and said of course we would.  I remember thinking we hadn't even turned on my relaxation MP3 yet, so I couldn't possibly be having this baby yet.  I asked John to put the earbuds for my MP3 recording in my ear and baby Abigail was born just 25 minutes later.  I went into this amazing place in my mind and the whole transition felt so short - it was the easiest most relaxed delivery I've ever had.  And the best part was that for the first time I didn't tear!

The doctors and nurses at IMC were the most amazingly accommodating staff we'd ever had.  I think because we'd transferred from a birthing center, they were so much more open about letting us know our choices, and not pushing for us to have all the standard procedures the hospital usually does.  We had to sign a few refusal forms and listen to a few shpeels about how we could be endangering ourselves by declining some of the routine things, but the staff was absolutely wonderful about honoring our wishes and making sure we got the birthing experience we wanted.

After the birth we had really minimal interruptions compared to our past experiences in a hospital, and they gave us very little trouble about wanting to leave the same day (as we were planning to stay at the birthing center only 4-6 hours after the birth).  Overall the experience was amazing, and I went from expecting the worst to having the labor of my dreams.  Everything was completely perfect, including my sweet little Abigail.

Those first few hours we were alone with her I just kept staring in awe at her little sleeping face, amazed at how much she looks like her big sister in heaven.  I've studied Elizabeth's pictures so many times wondering what she might look like if she'd opened her eyes, or how she would have looked even a few days after the birth, and knowing I might never know.  But looking at my sweet Abigail and seeing such an amazing resemblance between the two, I will always know that she looks similar to her sister and it makes my heart so happy.

7 Years without my Elizabeth

Happy 7th Birthday sweet baby girl. The years keep taking you farther away from me, dimming my memory of that moment we were together, making me question how I could love someone so much that I never got to meet. 


But my love never fades. It still brings me to tears after all this time. Sometimes it doesn't make any sense that I should love you after all this time. So hard to love someone I can hardly remember. But still there it is welling up in my eyes. 


And still here I am without you. A lifetime of loving someone who is not even here. This is why a mother’s grief just goes on… until I hold you again, little princess.

What Bipolar Means to Me on a Daily Basis

I am a chaotic mess of ideas every morning.

Some of them are normal, legitimate things like "take the kids to the park".  But so many of them are crazy, illogical, even impossible things to accomplish in a day like "write a sci-fi novel" and "create a nutritional youtube channel".

These ideas would be manageable if broken down into steps over a lifetime, but the problem is that the sheer quantity of these gigantic tasks I think up for myself every morning simply takes over my To-Do list with impossible feats for a single day.

So in order to create some semblance of organization, I empty these thoughts onto paper, and create for myself time after time, an endless To-Do list of randomness that I must sort through to find the day's legitimate tasks.

If I do not empty the thoughts into a list and prioritize them, I end up impulsively doing the most illogical task of all to start off my day.  Which craziness usually keeps me wrapped up and deeply involved for several hours, until children and hunger and life catches up to me, the crazy fog starts to clear, and I realize I am wasting my life chasing some nonexistent and impossible dream.  And then guilt and sadness drops me from the top of the world, to a very black hole at rock bottom, at the speed of light.  Just like that.

If I do have the sense to write this To-Do list and prioritize the craziness somehow, the sadness begins to sink in on me a little sooner.  I realize how pathetic the ideas are during the process of sorting through them, and my drive to work on something exciting is turned into a melancholy realization that the mundane tasks are the only ones that make any sense.  I feel a loss of the opportunity to be wrapped up in something I'm passionate about.  I feel the dull thud of waking up from the fog too quickly, and the depression starts much sooner in my day than ever anticipated.

Today at the bottom of my To-Do list, I wrote simply, "Stop being bipolar" and prioritized it with the phrase "HIGH priority."

Then I curled up into a ball and started off the day with a good cry.  This is my life.  This is the craziness I live with while trying to stay sane. Somehow through all the wasted hours of time, I manage to accomplish some things of value.  Maybe I am getting somewhere.  But the only problem is I'm not sure where it is I'm going to.

Artsy Maternity Pictures

I've been having fun with collaborating with different photographers to capture my new body shape!
These are some of my favorites :)

Photographer: Michael Gaffney

Photographer: Michael Gaffney

Photographer: Michael Gaffney

And the following pictures were all taken by the amazing David Terry! You can see his photography website at www.dterryphotography.com 

Pregnancy & Movies

Some of these symptoms I don't remember from my last pregnancies, but after watching What to Expect When You're expecting, I realized it's all very normal!  This show was awesome by the way.  I laughed so hard. And this was before we found out.

But really, all this acne?  Gas?  I remember the nausea and being more tired and emotional.  And scatter-brained. Speaking of emotional, you should really watch the movie October Baby.  It was so beautiful, heartfelt, powerful, and moving.  Rent it on Redbox!

And get ready to cry. A lot.

Speaking of movies... another of the top 10 inspirational movies is Courageous.  This movie rocks.

Yep. I've been distracting myself from the nausea by watching lots of movies and playing tetris online.  It's better than puking in the toilet and not being able to keep anything down for the rest of the day.  I can't wait for Christmas this year because it means my 14 week mark & freedom from morning sickness has arrived!
I'm due the middle of June, by the way.  And I'm so excited.  I really feel like it's time for another sweet little one to join our family and I think I'm ready.

You know what's hard?  Not being able to tell anyone I'm pregnant during the hardest weeks while I'm sick... and then once I start showing and everyone is asking "how are you feeling" that's when I feel the best! I guess it means I get to tell people good news instead of complaining to them, so that's good. :)  I'll just get all that complaining out right here. 
 
But it really is nice to have an excuse to let my house go to pot... and to lie around on the couch all day... and not cook dinner... and keep eating out.  It's just not nice that I'm doing all those things. :S

I'm glad I have an awesome husband. :)

Family Halloween Party 2012

A smashing success! Although, we didn't smash any pumpkins... that would have been fun.  We had tons of fun just being together!  Check out everyone's costumes.

 

And here's my cute little Dorothy all tuckered out after one of the 6 Halloween Parties we attended last week!! I'm all Halloween-ed out this year!