Adventures in Baby Making

Alumni Magazine Blurb Meme

Stacie over at The Twinkies  has come up with a fun new meme - the Alumni Magazine Blurb meme.  These are the instructions

Write two versions of a blurb to your high school or college alumni magazine. (If your school doesn’t have one, fake it. It’s just a genre.) The first should be the perky kind you always actually read in these things and the second version, well, less perky and more brutally honest.

This seemed fairly timely as I just received my own alumni magazine.  So here goes...

1.  Lori and J have recently welcomed their first and second child - twins!!  C and N are an absolute delight.  Lori is currently enjoying her days at home with the little munchkins.  Every day brings a wonderful new challenge as Lori is already preparing them to be academic superstars!  Lori is graciously volunteering her free time by taking on pro bono clients.

2. Lori, J and the best fertility clinic in the region are proud to announce the birth of their twins.  Against all odds, Lori was able to pass the bar (the first time!) while pregnant.  Shortly after taking the bar, she collapsed in complete exhaustion.  Nothing has changed since that initial collapse.  She still babbles about incoherently.  Especially at 3 am when Lori wakes in a cold sweat thinking about the $100,00+ loan she used to finance her spanky law degree.   These days, Lori spends her days with C & N and can often be found trying to figure out which baby has "poopy pants" and when she'll ever find a job using that spanky new degree.

So go ahead and give it a try - let the snark flow!

Dirty Little Secrets, Part 2

I know - this is just crazy, huh?  All these posts, and no one to read them!  Ha!  I don't want to jinx anything but maybe I'm back to blogging regularly after all...

So my next dirty little secret involves S-E-X.  For all that IF blogging involves conception, I often felt there was a lack of s.ex talk amongst us bloggers.  As if with all the talk of cooter cams, sperm and eggs, talking about se.x was just too much.  Sure, I wrote the token "will I ever be able to reclaim my se.x life again after all the IF damage" post.  Do we all just assume that as we deal with IF and treatments that the magic is a bit dim?  If that's the case, it doesn't get any better once there's a baby or two on the scene.

I've heard the stories - people unable to keep their hands off one another and jumping the gun before getting the green light at the 6 week post partum check up.  Didn't happen here.  Given the extreme sleep deprivation, I believe I may have fallen asleep during my post partum exam.  I have a feeling I was snoozing about the same time the doctor was saying "and it looks like you've healed nicely, you may resume sexual intercourse".

I've also heard the other stories.  From people who laugh at the idea of sex at 6 weeks post partum.  Oh no.  They were still too tired.  Geez, must've been about 2 months before they had sex again.  At which point they praise the patience of their spouses.  Didn't happen here.

Okay, those are really the only stories about post partum s.ex I can recall hearing.  So when the N & C's 4 month birthday rolled around, and the magic still hadn't returned, I started to worry.  Would I ever be hot for my husband again?  I figured maybe I should just give it a try, maybe once we got started, it would be more fun than sleep.  You never know until you try, right?  Not so much.  Maybe if I hadn't been gritting my teeth trying not to think about the pain, it could have been more fun than sleep.  But as it was, sleep would have been my preferred way of passing the time at that moment.

Fast forward 3 months, and still leery of voluntarily subjecting myself to such pain again, the magic had definitely not returned.  So a few weeks ago, much to my husband's shock and amazement my surprise, I had a hankering.  And I acted on it.  And it didn't hurt.  The next night when I got the same hankering, I acted on it again and J nearly died from the shock of se.x 2 nights in a row.  Now don't get too excited, such craziness hasn't been repeated but at least I wasn't gritting my teeth in pain - in fact, I actually enjoyed myself.  So maybe it just might happen again.  And in less than 3 months.

If you've been doing the math in your head, you'll realize that we've had s.ex 3 times in 8 1/2 months.  I know, pretty impressive, huh?  But I have hope - I've seen a glimmer of the magic.  It's just taken a while to see the glimmer and that is my dirty little secret.  Or not so dirty actually.

Dirty Little Secrets, Part 1

I know - 2 posts in the same month!  And the post title implies more to come to boot!  I've had these posts (Part 1 and what I hope will be 2 and 3) on my mind for some time - it's only now that I have the mental energy to write them.  But anyhoo - everyone has their own take on issues they feel no one tells them about the transition to motherhood but that should be told.  Here's mine.

I really, really hated my husband for the first 2 months after N & C were born.  As in "oh fuck, why did I marry him and how the hell can I get out of this?"

I would say that J and I had a very strong relationship as we got closer to the birth of our babies.  We certainly had plenty of time to contemplate the shift in our relationship and family.  Yet, still we were entirely unprepared for the impact parenting newborn twins would have on our loving marriage.  Some of the issues were genuine and others the result of sleep deprivation, stress and hormones.  But at the time that distinction was irrelevant.  Almost every time I slipped out of the house to run errands, I ended up sitting in some store's parking lot, sobbing and screaming on the phone to my uber-fertile best friend about how much I hated my husband.  Every single thing he did infuriated me - without fail.  I was so confused as to why I was feeling so much rage toward the man I was pretty sure I loved.  On all those stupid baby shows on tv, everyone says something to the effect of how they love their husbands oh so much more when they see them holding their baby.  So that was my expectation.  We would bring our babies home, J and I would gaze lovingly at them and then at each other and all would be fuzzy and lovely.  When I said as much to my uber-fertile best friend on one of these parking lot phone calls, she reminded me of when we visited our friend S after the birth of her first baby (she was also the first of our friends to have a baby).  While visiting S, she and her husband got into a vicious screaming match about using the microwave to heat formula.*  It was ugly.  Uber-fertile best friend and I left that visit, talking about their shaky marriage.  Both of us having bought into the "love the husband on a whole new level" crap, reassured ourselves that clearly S and her husbands marriage just wasn't as strong as our marriages.  We would obviously sail through the shift to parenthood.  Ha!!

Even feeling as strongly as I do that this is one of those dirty little secrets, there's a part of me that worries that I'll hit the Publish button only to hear silence in return.  That what I think is a dirty little secret about the motherhood transition, is in fact, just me having been crazy and hateful - everyone else is gazing lovingly at each other.  Maybe so.  All that matters though, is that now, I am incredibly glad that while at the courthouse getting sworn in to the bar at 5 weeks postpartum I did not file the divorce papers I had mentally prepared.

*She had a breast reduction and despite her best efforts, could not breastfeed.  But more importantly, why do I feel these "choices" need to be explained?  Probably a topic for a whole other post.

Anyone there???

Um yeah, so I guess I kind of suck at the whole blogging with kids bit.  I miss it though.  I've been trying to keep up on bloglines.  Most of the time, I'm in the middle of a post and one or both of my bambinos is in need of attention.  I don't want to be one of "those" bloggers that just drops off the face of blogosphere, though I suppose that's exactly what I've done.
Not much on my mind tonight other than the anxious wait for the latest HP book.  But I just thought I'd post and let you all know that we're doing well over in our little corner.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that there is not a single day that goes by that I don't look at my babies and think "wow, how lucky am I?"  It really is that great.  But don't be fooled some days are monumentally harder than others though for the most part we've got a good little routine going. 
As much as I'm enjoying being home with Nate and Catherine, I've just started my job search in earnest.  I really need to get out of the house before I lose my shit.  I have most definitely not discovered domestic bliss.  It's not that I mind being home, I'm just an uncomfortable with the dynamic being an at home mom creates with my husband.  A little to June Clea.ver for me.  Makes me a little bitchy.  When I asked him to get me a bottle of wine on his way home one day and this is what he bought, I realized I wasn't exactly hiding my feelings all that well.  Relying solely on J's income feels very imbalanced to me.  I hope once I'm working it will be more that we both do a little of this and a little of that rather than I do this and he does that.  If that makes any sense.
Well, that's really all I have for tonight.