Thumb twiddling

Still in au pair drama land over here.  Waiting for something to work itself out.  I don't like the deadlines.  At all.  I'm overall feeling calmer, or at least handling the continued setbacks and confusion with more grace.  I think.  I hope.

My husband just got back from a 9-day trip to Europe.  I think the first day or two is always rough for me because I think it's going to make life SO.  MUCH.  EASIER!  and it doesn't.  I mean, its a little better, because the kids love their dad and he likes to do fun stuff with them, but he doesn't handle any of the housework, and he doesn't enforce them doing anything like cleaning up or brushing their teeth, so I still end up being the annoyed wicked witch.  Ah well.  It's still nice to have him home, I guess.

A discussion on one of my social media groups provoked some interesting thoughts for me.  It's a Mom's group, and I only know one of them personally, but it's a very nice, interesting, somewhat diverse group.  Well, maybe not that diverse - I think a lot of the moms are older and many have been through at least a small amount of ART.  One recently posted lamenting about how having a singleton can be considered weird, abnormal or worse, selfish.  How she is the only mom at her kid's preschool with a singleton and they put up family information recently and instead of just not mentioning siblings at all, on her kid's info they put "Siblings: None".  Someone else pointed out that having 3 or more kids was also seen as out of the norm these days, and the original poster admitted that on further thought, there was one mom at the school with 3 kids, but all the rest had 2 kids, and usually one girl and one boy.

This made me think.  We were already unusual in having twins, I suppose, and I got a lot of comments for that.  Since they were boy/girl twins, I missed out on the questions about whether we'd try for another one of the opposite sex.  Instead, I got a ton of comments saying "Perfect!  You already have a boy and a girl, now you're done!"  Now that we're having a third, I am starting to wonder what people will say.  And they're 5.5 years apart, which is unusual, too.  It sort of smacks of infertility, just like the boy-girl twins.  Which is funny, since this time around, it was not only totally natural, it happened basically the first month that everything lined up just right.

Anyway, I guess we are technically a "big family" now?  I grew up with two siblings and my grandmother living at home, but I certainly never felt like a big family at all.  My grandma was my last living grandparent, and we had no aunts, uncles, or cousins.  I was jealous of all my friends who had big family gatherings at the holidays, and we'd always be just us.  I realize in retrospect that my family had a lot of problems and our relationships weren't always very good.  My siblings and I at least got along well, but my mom and grandma had lots of weirdness between them, and my mom was a very difficult person, which I didn't start realizing until high school.  So perhaps what I was secretly yearning for was a more psychologically normal family.  I don't know.

Anyway, little Nameless is doing well.  I toured the birth center yesterday as part of my prenatal group appointment, although we started late and I had to leave before we got to the postpartum room tours.  Which is ok for a variety of reasons, but mostly that I remember the postpartum rooms very well and that's not the part I'm nervous about anyway.

At 33 weeks, I've gained more weight than I'd like, but not so much that I'm terribly worried.  Since everyone is telling me how small I look, I'm really not concerned, although I am a little concerned about how out of shape I've become.  I just managed to get to yoga again this week, and went for a walk this morning  I'm quite sore, but that's ok.  I also have been biking the kids to school most days, which is 1.5 miles round trip, so some days I'm doing 3 miles on the bike.  Not a lot, but better than nothing.

The midwife thought the baby was head down, but I will find out for sure either at my VBAC consult next week, or at a future appointment closer to 36 weeks.  I have lots of questions for the doctor at next week's VBAC appointment, which will be at 34 weeks.  Yeesh, time is going fast now.

I got a prescription for a pump, so I need to call the insurance and get that taken care of.  I might wash some bottles soon and get those organized.  I should clean the house a bit, really.  I need to get the guest room cleaned out and set up for the au pair (fingers crossed that this works out).  I am starting to work on Nameless Baby's Christmas stocking, or at least I've gotten Turtle and Tadpole's out of one of the Christmas boxes to start using as a template.  I want to start getting things where they need to go in the next few weeks, also just to get stuff out of the garage!  Our house is going to be messy and chaotic, but I'm ok with it.  I'm actually very, very happy.  And excited.  And I'm working a bit more on finding names for poor little Nameless.  And now I really need to go get a few more things done before I go pick up the kindergarteners.