Seriously?

I’ve seen my CEO maybe three times since I’ve been back from maternity leave.  The first time, I was exiting the room where I pump, breast milk in hand, and he walked by with pretty much the entire executive committee.  He said “welcome back,” and I smiled sheepishly and scurried off to my cube to hide.

The second time I was headed to lunch.  Not bad at all.  Nice conversation.  Breast milk incident officially replaced with normal colleague interaction.

Today, I was in the kitchenette cleaning off my breast shields and pump what-not and guess who walks in?  Yup.  And we then proceed to have a five minute conversation about some meeting later in the week, all while I rinse off various bottles and membranes.

Seriously?  This is ridicules.

I guess it’s better than being a guy on the same floor as him and running into him on my way to the bathroom on a daily basis.  I think.

Phew!

As in relief, not as in dirty diaper.

I just returned from a visit with the breast surgeon and she gave me what amounts to a 95% all clear… the one looks like a cyst and she’s not concerned at all.  The other does look like a fibroadenoma with calcification.  She says the edges look fine, there is no blood supply, and it generally feels like a fibroadenoma.  Because of the calcification, there is shadowing on the ultrasound, which is something cancerous tumors have (the sound waves can’t penetrate the mass so it appears to have a shadow on the screen), which is probably what prompted the radiologist’s concern.  The surgeon said she wasn’t concerned about the lump, and that she didn’t want to do a biopsy (something about fistulas and spurting milk, all of which sounded highly unpleasant, plus I’ll take any excuse to avoid a needle), so instead I’m just supposed to come back when I’m done breastfeeding. 

Yippee!  I don’t have to worry about this.  I don’t have to stop breastfeeding.  I don’t have to turn this into a cancer blog (ok, now I’m being dramatic).

My kinda website

Go check out Let’s Panic About Babies  right now.

No, I’m serious.  You must click that link.  You must then fall off your office chair because you are trying not to laugh out loud at the “what kind of mom stereotype are you” fake quiz.  And that’s only the beginning.

So cute my ovaries hurt

Yes, I realize this confession officially makes me crazy, but Heather over at dooce.com  just had her baby, and while I’ve never met this woman, nor conversed with her (heck, I don’t even comment on her blog, I just lurk), looking at pictures of her newborn baby girl gives me baby fever.

And my kid’s only 7 months old!

Only someone who spends 8 hours a day away from her baby could possibly be so delusional as to even let the thought “I want another one” pass into her brain this soon.  No no ovaries.  Sorry uterus.  You guys are on the bench until at least 2011.

Not exactly a first word, but…

Sure, we’ve been hearing the small one babble “dahdahdahdah” and “ma ma ma” for weeks now, but it has always been indiscriminate and varying in the number of “dah”s or “ma”s, so we thought little of it beyond its enduring cuteness.  This weekend, however, were introduced to “guh.”

As in dog, but drop the beginning and only go with the drawn out g sound.

And not just “guh” whenever the small one felt like singing, but only when our beagle-mutt wandered into the room in the that forlorn way that only a creature with bassett hound blood can muster (and Eeyore).  It’s probably because both my husband and I always chorus “is that your dog?” whenever the mutt is in sight, and the small one lunges his body towards the fur ball he so desperately wants to grab. 

We even went to a friend’s house the other evening and when I pointed to their lab and said “that’s a dog, just like Watson” I was greeted with a smile and an assertive “guh” from the small one.

Am I insane to find this completely awesome?

And yes, poor Watty is now officially referred to as “guh” whenever my husband and I want to talk about him without his knowing, as in “you are so walking guh tonight” or “did you feed guh yet?”  As if the poor animal wasn’t neglected enough, he’s now been reduced to a consonant.

Boo for Boobs

So it’s been awhile. Sorry ‘bout that. And now onto the post…

The “girls” have been causing problems as of late, so this can officially be categorized as a boob bitch session. You are forewarned.

About two month ago I noticed a pea-sized lump in lefty… no big deal, as I’ve had fibroadenomas before (three, to be exact), so I simply went on with my breastfeeding self. A month later I found its friend on the other side. I called my doc and scheduled a “I’m so not worried about this but so as not to be the chick who was all ‘sure, I felt that thing ages ago, what do you mean it’s malignant?’ I’m coming in anyway” appointment. My doc, despite reassurances that everything felt harmless, scheduled me for an ultrasound “just to be sure.”

This week, I went to said ultrasound. Only the night before said ultrasound, lefty decided it would be an awesome idea to get mastitis mere centimeters away from the very spot where the next morning’s prodding would occur. Yippee for 100+ degree fevers and first trimester like exhaustion. Did I mention how I’m not a real big fan of the girls right now?

And so in I go the very next morning, fever back down to a mere 99 and breast throbbing. I must say, the tech was extremely merciful, and even checked to see if I had an abscess in the mastitis-y part (on that front, I was a-okay). I redressed and sat ready to put this whole inconvenience behind me.

And then the radiologist came in. Almost everything he said should have reassured me, like “the one looks like a textbook fibroadenoma” and “both have smooth edges, which is a great sign.” But out came a stream of qualifying statements said in a tone that put me on edge. Because I’m lactating, apparently it’s difficult to accurately scan my breasts as there’s just so much going on in there. And then there were calcifications on the one lump. Plus, he described the other lump as a complex cyst, and recommended that it be monitored by a breast surgeon (the hormone changes related to breastfeeding could “change things”). I couldn’t tell if his tone of defeat and caution was one of “I wish I could say everything is a-okay but the test was too inconclusive for me to let you off the hook completely” or “oh shit, I am so not going to be the one to tell the 28 year old she may have something to be worried about if I’m not 100% sure.” Yup, panic.

This is the point at which I begin to kick myself for only have $150K in life insurance, as that probably won’t even cover books by the time the small one goes to college.

The next day I spoke with my doc, who said, based on the notes, she’s not worried. She still has no idea why these lumps would have appeared, but she is not in the least bit concerned about the c-word. And then my shoulders removed themselves from my ears.

I’ll be seeing the surgeon in two weeks. My fear is that I’ll be told to stop breastfeeding. Or that I’ll have to get the lumps removed (been there, done that, rather not do it again). I’m not even contemplating the other option. Seriously. That would be melodramatic, which is so outside of my personality, right? (I love me somes denial.)

Oh and did I mention that, post bout with mastitis, lefty has decided she no longer needs to perform (she’s “recovering”), and now Lady Lactates A Lot (read: me) has only one back up bag of milk left in the freezer? After all that, I now have to work on upping my supply? Fuck you, boobs.

No really, I didn’t mean it. Just work with me, ladies. I’ll even buy you something pretty.

So how have you been?

First Mother’s Day, First Cold

On Tuesday, the small one awoke congested, resulting in a rough day in terms of not much appetite and his having a hard time going down for naps, but really nothing more to speak of.  No fever.  Still a giggly, good natured boy.  Still slept through the night.  By Thursday, the snot had begun to subside and we were excited to have almost survived the first sickness unscathed.

And then I awoke on Friday morning with a sore throat.  And by the time I came home from work, I looked like a certain famous reindeer and I was a big sack of miserable.  Saturday proved much of the same and was the first day since the small one’s arrival where I thought “if my mother lived in town, I would so call her right now so I could tag out and go to sleep.”  I even contemplated “borrowing” the babe’s bulb syringe (ie booger sucker-outer), but thought better of the notion. 

On Sunday morning, while nursing the small one, my husband stood in the doorway and said “so you had a sore throat first, right?”  It was official – the whole family was taken down by a single rhinovirus. 

Despite the copious amount of tissues, we had a lovely first Mother’s Day.  My husband made crepes, we sat in the backyard to enjoy the first rainless day in weeks and I spent all day holding my wonderful baby boy, both of us with matching trails of snot running down our faces.

Date Night Revisited

My husband called me today and said “Guess what?  My dad wants to babysit tonight.”  To which I responded “But we’re both sick, and I kinda told the neighbor we’d watch the season finale of Fringe tonight.”  To which my husband responded something which amounted to “Woman, when you are offered free babysitting, you go out!  I don’t care if neither of us can breathe through our noses and I’ve already gone to the midnight opening of every movie worth seeing right now, we are going OUT.”

So it looks like date night tonight.

Might I add that the last date night we took involved my insisting we stay and wait for a table at a hip bar and my husband grumbling about the wait and my responding “I’ll leave if you can come up with a better option” and his still grumbling despite a complete lack of anywhere else to go, which is to say that it went poorly.  But at least my cocktail was tasty, despite having been consumed through moderately clenched teeth.

Maybe the greatest mommyblog post of all time

… no, it’s not something I wrote.  It is so so so so so much smarter/snarkier/better spelled than anything my angst could muster.  And I love it.

The Most Popular Zombie on the Block, by Amy Myers

Enjoy!

6 Month Postpartum Checkup

My checkup with the OB was a success (if you can ever really say that about anything involving stirrups).  I’m actually two pounds lighter than I was when I got pregnant (only proving the adage “muscle weighs more than fat,” as I still don’t fit in a lot of my clothing and I no longer have abs, I have a tummy), and my uterus is “back to normal size” which I’m assuming is good news.

I asked the doc about my chances for attempting a VBAC with No. 2, and he sounded optimistic.  He said that I was a good candidate and that it would really come down to how the next pregnancy goes and how the baby appears to be fitting in my pelvis when we’re closing in on go time.  He’s performed 4 VBACs in the last two months, so I’m confident he’s not just giving me lip service about this only to ask me when we’d like to schedule surgery once we hit the 9th month marker.

Not that No. 2 is anywhere near happening.  I just like to know my options.