Answer Me This: Ejection Seats and Atticus Finch.

The estimable Kendra at Catholic All Year has brought back her popular linkup, Answer Me This, for the summer. Here's how it goes: she posts the questions one week; you take your leisurely time answering. The next week, she posts her answers and next week's questions. Join us, won't you?

1. What's the best thing about your dad?
He can spin a yarn -- you can't believe a word he says, but you will be entertained {I'm not saying he's a liar, just a teaser}. I waffled a little bit about last week's AMT question about things you believed as a child; I almost shared some of the nonsense my dad told me, but ended up going boring with Santa anyway because ultimately I never believed my dad for long. 

For instance: once he had me and my immediately-younger sister very upset because he told us that the seat-adjustment lever was an ejection seat in his Jeep. He explained that it was there in case you were about to get into a head-on collision, and that the part where the sides of the car met the cloth of the roof had little explosive charges to blow the roof off. It seemed very real (I was probably 11 and my sister was 7 -- but I have to admit that even 20ish years later with an engineering degree under my belt, I still think it was pretty clever and entirely too plausible). 

He maybe took it a little too far when he said he was going to pull the lever and eject us under an overpass (Jeez, Dad) -- that's when my sister started hysterically crying into the Mylar balloon she'd gotten from the party from which we were returning home. Her face was silver where the Mylar rubbed off from her tears for the rest of the day! 

2. If you've got kids, what's the best thing about THEIR dad? (If you don't, feel free to substitute your grandfather or another father figure.) 
His generosity. My husband is a giver, and he would walk over broken glass for me or our kids. Or, you know, wear the 20lb baby and hold the toddler's hand on the way to breakfast while Mommy lurks and takes photographs.

3. What's the best advice your dad ever gave you? 
He's fond of the John Wooden quote, "The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother." And I think it's absolutely true for mothers too: I shall love my husband as a favor to my children. My dad has also always told me that the order of my devotion ought to be: God, then my spouse, then my children, then my other family, and then everyone else. Parents of littles, especially mothers I think, find it hard to put our spouses over our needy babies, but my dad was right. We have to maintain Us first and foremost amidst the chaos of molding young lives -- we made a vow to each other. 

4. What's something you have in common with your dad? 
I may have picked up his fondness for teasing. I hope I have a better sense of when it's going too far and I'm about to traumatize my kids! 

5. What's the manliest thing you know how to do? 
I am really good with my hands. I love power tools, although it's been years since I used one -- apartment living is a drag. And unlike a man, I do not think it a mark of weakness to take the proper precautions. {If I catch my husband doing electrical work without having turned off the breaker one more time...}

6. Who is your favorite fictional dad?
I'm sure 95% of everybody is going to say Atticus Finch. Because Atticus Finch is the best. And then when you watch the movie and realize that Gregory Peck is the absolute handsomest, you love Atticus Finch just a little bit more.

Answer Me This: The Triumphant Return!

It's baaaaaaaaack!

The estimable Kendra at Catholic All Year is bringing back her linkup, Answer Me This, for a limited time ("It's the McRib sandwich of blog linkups," haaaaaa). She wrote and posted the questions last week; I took my leisurely time answering. This week, she posted her answers and next week's questions. Join us, won't you? I don't know about y'all, but I like/need some prompting to post in this space right now, because my kids have been sleeping like garbage. F'reals.

1. Any big plans for the summer?
Ongoing potty training for my toddler, who will be three in October. Our nanny wants to potty train all of her toddlers (there are like five or six at daycare, I think?) together, so we maybe started this journey a bit before she was strictly ready. I'm not entirely sure she recognizes the sensation of needing to go, because she will regularly sit on her little potty for the length of an episode of Little Einsteins and then ten minutes later wet her panties. After four days of significantly more accidents than successful trips to the potty, I was ready to call it off, and then she had (comparatively) a really good day. And last night she even did a #2 on her potty, and that's a milestone. (Right? I've never done this before.) Anyway: please pray for us.

Other than that, we have some little trips scheduled here and there, plus ten days at my parents' at the beach in July. It seems like it's going to be mostly just us (plus my parents and my 19-year-old twin sisters who live there for the summer) which is kind of a bummer because Keira will miss her cousins, and kind of awesome because we won't all have to sleep together in one room for ten nights.

2. What is the strangest thing you believed as a child?
I believed in Santa for a REALLY long time. I was a logical child and that's actually why I believed: I was one of five children (six and seven -- the above-mentioned twins -- hadn't yet come along), and money was tight, always. Tight enough that a child would notice. But on Christmas morning it always seemed like there were so many presents they would burst through the windows. I distinctly remember being in elementary school and presenting my argument to my unbelieving friends: "Look, there is no way my parents can afford all those presents. It has to be Santa Claus." Also one year I sat on Santa's lap and he asked me about a picture that was on the fridge that I had drawn; he described it to me. Which in retrospect is kind of creepy, but at the time it seemed like proof.

3. What is your favorite amusement park ride? (can be a specific one at a specific park or just a type of ride)
I am prone to vicious motion sickness, so anything like the Scrambler might as well be called Barf Machine. I haven't been on those giant swings since I was a small child, and I think I would like it: wind in my hair, swinging my legs... Except I know I'd be tossing my cheese fries after, and I don't like to waste cheese fries. I like bumper cars/boats, because I'm in control and there's no whipping around. Luckily my children are 2 and five months so I have some time to just sit sedately on the merry-go-round while they react as if it's a roller coaster.

4. What's on your summer reading list?
I just downloaded Sabriel onto my Kindle. It kept popping up as a suggestion here and there and it was $1.99, so I can't vouch for it yet but it has glowing reviews in the young-adult-literature-enjoyed-by-adults oeuvre. I'm also re-reading the Song of Ice and Fire series because it's been years already and there are 248ish characters and twice that number of storylines and there are still more books to come out, if George R. R. Martin ever deigns to finish. I'm not a list-maker when it comes to reading; I tend to have three or four going at a time, scattered around the house. I'll read whatever's handy while nursing or waiting in line at Kohl's for ten million years to make a return. I'll probably try out of some of what's on Modern Mrs. Darcy's Summer Reading Guide if I get bored -- which is unlikely with two kids under 3 and too little sleep.

5. Have you ever fallen asleep in public?
I had an arrangement with the guy who sat in front of me in American Civics in tenth grade. He was my lookout, because I fell asleep in that class on the regular. I'm convinced it was a defense mechanism against the indoctrination that happens in your average American Civ class these days. (Which is why I intend to home-school my children.) Since then, I don't think I have -- I probably fit the clinical definition of an insomniac and I don't fall asleep easily.

6. What is your favorite smell?
The first thing that comes to mind is honeysuckle. Or lavender. Which is weird because I would tell you quite definitively that I'm not into florals. Oooh, I know: lemon. It's lemon.

Also! On an unrelated note: my second-youngest sister, Mackenzie, has opened an Etsy store. She sells vintage maps, hand-lettered with the saying of your choice. They're quite reasonably priced (... because she didn't listen to me; I think she could get a lot more!) and she does a great job. She's saving up to finish her last two years of her undergraduate education at St. Louis University in Madrid (my sister lives in Spain!) to become a Spanish teacher, and you could get some great art, hand-lettered with a Bible verse or (short) saint quote and help her out, if you so wish. No pressure. ;) 

AND FINALLY, because I haven't been great about posting and kids grow so fast, here's what my kids look like right now: 

Keira requested pizza for dinner, and got it! PLUS PEPPERONI! She wasn't at all happy about it, as you can tell.

And this chunky monkey, at five months old, has begun wearing size 12 month clothing. We skipped right over the 9 month size because I figured there was no point, and I was right. Declan Michael, what are they feeding you? (The answer is: breast milk. Plus one 5 oz. bottle of formula a day, which he almost never finishes.)

Rioting in Baltimore

There are a couple fellow bloggers/blog readers who stop by here on occasion who live in Baltimore and its environs; if you are that person, know that I'm praying for your safety.

I don't know if it's national news (I'm local enough that it's been dominating my news), but there are riots happening right now in Baltimore following the death in custody of a 25-year-old named Freddie Gray. Gray was arrested for carrying a switchblade; at some point during his transportation to incarceration, he suffered a serious spinal injury. He doesn't seem to have been given timely medical attention, and as a consequence, he passed away.

And now Baltimore is ablaze, literally.

It's not clear quite what happened to Freddie Gray. It seems to be undisputed that he wasn't buckled into the transport van, but I don't see how that can cause, as his family alleges, his spine to be 80% severed at the neck. It's certainly possible that Freddie's cause of death was some form of police brutality, but we don't know what happened to him.

Meanwhile, since I live in the Northeast corridor, Facebook is rife with opinions. They range from the simple and poignant: "Prayers for Baltimore," to the vitriolic: either "The rioters are animals," or "Anyone who would call the rioters 'animals' is an animal."

As always, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly there is something to be said for making an effort to understand. I don't know what it's like to be a young black man in a majority-black, economically declining city like Baltimore. I also don't know what it's like to be a police officer in Baltimore, on the other end of the kind of interactions that cause mistrust on both sides, and charged with keeping the peace.

However.

There is never any excuse for the kind of rioting happening in Baltimore right now. Rioters looted and torched a CVS drugstore, and then punctured the firehose so that the blaze couldn't be put out. Explain to me how CVS is responsible for what happened to Freddie Gray. A store run by Chinese immigrants was completely wiped out. Innocent people are losing property and they're being made unsafe because all the police in the city are otherwise occupied.

After the death of Michael Brown in August 2014 in Missouri, Ferguson experienced weeks upon weeks of this kind of unrest. It is widely accepted that it only died down because the weather got to be too inhospitable. Unfortunately for Baltimore, protest weather is just ramping up.

I have to withhold judgment on what happened to Freddie Gray in Baltimore. But I do not have to withhold judgment of indiscriminate destruction. 

Four Reasons Why Early Teething is THE WORST.

Early teething suh-huuuuuucks. I've been through this before; Keira had ELEVEN teeth on her first birthday. I'm enjoying it no more the second time around.

My son will be four months old tomorrow. He has already been teething for weeks. Here's why it sucks:

1) He can't have Advil yet (two more months!), and as I'm sure the formerly-pregnant remember, Tylenol is a cruel joke on the pain-having community. It. Is. Worthless.

2) He, like all other babies his age, isn't even close to having the coordination to hold his own teether.

3) He's going to have a couple of razors in his gums e'er long. Waaaay too early. By which I mean: long before I have any hope of convincing him not to bite me while nursing.

4) His sleep has gone to crap.

I guess #4 is true of babies teething at any age. Poor little boy, and poor us!

Seven Quick Takes - April 24, 2015

These Quick Takes are in no particular order. They're up and down from important to trivial and back again.

1. It is almost May in Virginia and when my two-year-old walked out the door this morning, the first thing she said, while her hair blew back from her sweet little toddler face, was, "Ohhh it is COLD out here." Seriously, VA, what's up. Dwija's Instagram has been making me jealous, and she lives IN MICHIGAN.

2. Grey's Anatomy hit the airwaves at some point while I was in college. I graduated in 2005; I'm not going to look up when it actually debuted because I don't care that much, but I distinctly recall watching with my roommates. I quit watching a couple of years later, I think around the time Kate Walsh went to that terrible spin-off I cannot recall the name of, that I quit immediately because holy manufactured drama, Batman (and then I was mad I'd ever watched any of it when I found out how radically pro-abortion Kate Walsh is). Aaaaaanyway: I haven't thought about Grey's in years, but this morning my Facebook had exploded with ridiculousness because SPOILER ALERT, they killed off McDreamy. I saw at least two people declare that they needed to take bereavement time from work today, and three separate people said they were sitting shiva.

It made me laugh, and then it made me so relieved that I'm completely divested from Shondaland. I hope that all those people can see their way clear to get a life soon.

3. This is National Infertility Awareness Week. I wrote about my experience with infertility here.

4. We finally shuffled the furniture around so that little man would have a real place to sleep. He hadn't been doing so great in the Rock 'n Play anymore because he weighs like 20 lbs at almost four months and every time he moved the thing creaked and the creaking would wake him up. So two weeks ago we transitioned Keira to a big-girl bed...

And then yesterday we finally had the time to move the guest bed out of my office and move the crib from Keira's room into the office so that Declan could have the crib.

It was all very, very promising. And then Declan, my good sleeper, slept like crap. I'm hoping it's just the transition, and the fact that we haven't hung the blackout curtain yet, and the fact that I need to put electrical tape over the 1,000 bright little LEDs on my office equipment, and he'll be back to sleeping like a champion again soon. This week has been challenging.

5. I'm expecting a new little niece or nephew any minute. Please say a quick prayer for my sister-in-law, so that she has a quick and uneventful delivery of little Tanner or Bryn (unless they change their minds about the names).

6. This week, a judge ruled that Sherri Shepherd is, in fact, the mother of the child she and her husband commissioned from a surrogate. ("Commissioned" is the most accurate term. The baby boy is biologically the child of Shepherd's ex-husband and a donor, but Shepherd was complicit in the ordering of a child as if children are custom couches instead of unique and precious gifts from God.) This makes me so disgusted. Please say another prayer for that poor baby, who's going to grow up someday and find out that his father had to go to court to force his mother to be his mother.

7. I think I found a new favorite meal. I had made this kielbasa and potatoes recipe for dinner a couple of nights ago. It's the non-soup version of this Crock-Pot potato and kielbasa chowder, which I LOVE and my husband loves less, because he's not into soup (i.e. he's a crazy person). We had a ton of leftovers because 5 large potatoes and a pound of kielbasa makes a lot of food -- plus we obviously had to have a vegetable on the side so I couldn't just totally fill our plates with it like I'd have wanted if I didn't have to be concerned about our health. Stupid health. It occurred to me that the leftovers would be perfect for breakfast with eggs. Specifically soft-boiled eggs. But I'd never made soft-boiled eggs before and I struggle out of all proportion with hard-boiled eggs and soft-boiled seemed even harder. So I hopped on Pinterest and found a tutorial that was perfect. And easy. And when I opened up the perfectly soft-boiled egg and the yolk ran down into my potatoes and kielbasa...

I may have cried. With deliciousness.

Seriously.

Thanks to Kelly for hosting!

Infertility Awareness Week

Soooo... I've never gone into much detail in this space on my struggles with infertility. I have (finally!) been blessed with two gorgeous children, and hopefully there will be more, but they were years in arriving. So buckle up, here comes all the nitty-gritty.

Michael and I were married in October of 2008. A couple of days after we got back from our honeymoon, I realized my period was overdue and we went to CVS to buy a pregnancy test.

{I'm not going to go into details about the fight we had in the car about my husband's reaction to finding out I might be pregnant already. ;)}

It was the first of many, many negative tests.

My period arrived a few days later, typically keeping to no kind of schedule, and we went on with our lives. We had been married for two weeks and we were relieved that we could get used to being married before having to make such a major adjustment -- Michael especially.

It was probably seven or eight months later that I had reason to take my next pregnancy test, which was again negative. At this point I started to wonder if something was wrong; we had made absolutely no effort to avoid pregnancy -- and I knew Michael was ready now, as I had caught him eying up strollers -- and I come from a long line of endlessly, effortlessly fertile women.

I was between gynecologists. When I had last been, just prior to getting married, my doctor had asked me what I intended to "do about birth control." I told her that we were practicing Catholics and would be learning NFP. She laughed in my face and told me that with my irregular periods, "there's no way that's going to work for you." I immediately resolved never to return, but I hadn't yet found a new one. It was almost time for my yearly exam anyway, but I didn't know how to go about finding a doctor who would not laugh in the face of my deeply-held religious convictions. On a whim, I Googled "pro-life OB/GYNs" and stumbled on Tepeyac Family Center.

{I have since discovered the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is a great resource for finding out if there's a pro-life doctor in your area.}

Founded by Dr. John Bruchalski, Tepeyac is named for the hill on which the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to St. Juan Diego. It is an entirely pro-life practice, and I immediately called for an appointment. I was unable to get an appointment with Dr. Bruchalski, who's a very busy man, so I took one with another doctor in the practice, Dr. Cvetkovich. {I mostly see Dr. Bruchalski now; he's a wonderful man. A third doctor in the practice, Dr. Pereira, happened to be on call and delivered both my babies.}

After my first appointment, I had a raft of blood tests done and was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This is when I started to get mad. The previous doctor (you know, the laugh-in-your-face secular nightmare) had done the same blood tests for PCOS (but her office had neglected to call me with the results) and had sent me for a pelvic ultrasound, which uncovered no ovarian cysts. Dr. Cvetkovich told me that the actual ovarian cysts need not exist for PCOS to exist; my bloodwork made it clear.

At this point, we still weren't necessarily trying to get pregnant. I started taking metformin, the non-birth-control-pill protocol for PCOS, in hopes of getting my hormones under control. Unfortunately, I was completely unable to tolerate it. It was months before I was ready to admit it; nausea is a known side-effect, but it typically subsides as your body adjusts. Mine never did. I slept with a mixing bowl next to the bed in case of vomit the entire time I was on the stuff. Dr. Cvetkovich prescribed me the name-brand version, which tends to be better tolerated. When I filled it, it was $90 for a 30-day supply so I thought, "This stuff had better be a magic bullet," but if anything I felt sicker. Dr. Cvetkovich took me off of metformin. She also referred me to a doctor who would give us private instruction in the Creighton Method for NFP. {We hadn't yet learned a method because I wasn't getting pregnant and it didn't really occur to me to get that ball rolling; Dr. Cvetkovich wanted me to have charts so we could find out if I was anovulatory.}

My charts showed that I probably wasn't completely anovulatory, but that during each cycle my body was trying two and three times to ovulate before it happened.

A healthy chart usually looks something like this:

We have a period, then a handful of infertile days, followed by a week or so of fertile days, a peak day, three post-peak days, followed by another (usually consistent from one month to the next) number of infertile days. And then another period, or a pregnancy.

And mine looked more like this:

Imagine that first line starts with a menstrual period. Then we have a bunch of infertile days, dotted with the occasional maybe-fertile day, and two-to-three peak days, after which the period does not come but instead another bunch of fertile days and a peak day. Eventually a period.

At this point I had been married for more than a year, and we were starting to move from the if-we-get-pregnant-it's-fine stage to the let's-get-this-show-on-the-road stage. Since my hormones were not fixed, I began taking fertility drugs.

I took cycle after cycle of fertility drugs, but I did not get pregnant. My charts got more uniform, but I did not get pregnant. I had horrible hot flashes and routinely woke up in a puddle of my own sweat, but I did not get pregnant. I prayed and cried, but I did not get pregnant. My friends had baby after accidental next baby, but I did not get pregnant. I took a dozen premature pregnancy tests and then got annoyed with myself for effectively peeing on $8 each time, but I did not get pregnant.

I was so sad all the time. I wouldn't say that I was ever mad at God, but I did ask Him a bunch of times what the deal was. I had maintained my virginity for my husband. I had never taken birth control pills or otherwise messed with my fertility. I had done everything "right," so why the heck could I not get pregnant?

Eventually, I marched into an appointment with Dr. Cvetkovich and pretty much demanded a laparoscopy. I was 99% sure I had endometriosis on top of my PCOS. There's no test for endometriosis except laparoscopic surgery. On December 1, 2011, I underwent a (thankfully outpatient) laparoscopic procedure, which uncovered and addressed the endometriosis that I was right that I had.

In mid-February of 2012, I finally, finally, finally took a pregnancy test that showed that wonderful little plus sign. Me, plus a baby on board. Thanks be to God. It felt like a million years, but I gave birth to my firstborn a week before our fourth wedding anniversary.

I know it takes a lot longer for some, and those people have my utmost sympathy. If you're still struggling, know you have my daily prayers. It's a terrible burden.

When we started thinking about a second baby, it only took two cycles of fertility drugs before I conceived again. I think God knew I didn't have another protracted battle in me again just then! I found out I was pregnant again with my little man a year ago today, and gave birth to him just after Christmas 2014.

Questions? Leave 'em in the comments and I'll get right back to you!