A couple of months ago I joked that if I was writing a book about last year, I would title it A Year of Being Pregnant. Books about doing a thing for a year still seem popular and trendy, so perhaps someone would publish it. Except there is such sadness in being pregnant for a year. No one pregnancy lasts that long. And yet, I was pregnant every ( Read more... )

Warning: This is not a happy post. This is a sad and disappointed post about miscarriage. I still want to share, but you don't have to read it. Do what you need to do for you ( Read more... )

For a few days every year we look like a community. All manner of LGBTT2IQQA people that I don't see during the rest of the year come out for Pride. We come in from the suburbs, we drive down from Northern Ontario. We take the GO train, we car-pool, we cycle in from neighbourhoods East and West. We come downtown, and we throng. We march up and down ( Read more... )

It's true that The Small Boy has an exceptional lot of family. When we wrote his birth announcement for the LGBTQ Parenting Network's newsletter Pride and Joy, they had a stern conversation with us about the length of the announcement. We wrote back that sometimes, this is what a queer family looks like and that he does indeed have "grandparents ( Read more... )

Today is our theoretical due date. I've been saying it like that for the last couple of weeks. Most people talk about having an "actual due date" but I've been pretty adamant that the kid's numeracy skills are pretty low at this point, and besides, there are no calendars in there, and even if there were, it's too dark to read. Noting that only 10% ( Read more... )

We live in a culture that values count downs. Big things like space ships get count downs, every day things like movies get count downs, and in this season, the stores are full of advent calendars when one can count the days down to Christmas, one crappy chocolate at a time. Around here we still count sleeps - as in how many sleeps until something ( Read more... )

Yesterday was a day of dull cramps. Dull and present, making bending uncomfortable, but not debilitating cramps. Most of the day, I just moved through them, got done the things I needed to get done and went on with things. By evening I was exhausted, and aspired to an evening of dinner, bath, and bed. However, my Tender Beast is away, and  ze would ( Read more... )

Being a keener, and being away this weekend and really busy all next week, I decided that I should get my H1N1 inoculation at the earliest possible opportunity, which in Halton was last Wednesday. I'd looked up the clinics well in advance, noted that the clinic ran from 2:00 - 8:00 at the Halton regional building. I wrote that down in my day-timer ( Read more... )

Practice Contractions

Apparently, many pregnant people have practice contractions. Again, apparently they often start at about six weeks, but usually aren't felt by the pregnant person until about 20 weeks. Usually they are called Braxton-Hicks contractions, but I'm going to call them practice contractions. These contractions are named after John ( Read more... )

The teenagers I work with report that high school sex education says basically this about pregnancy: "Don't get pregnant.". They describe it as a little hysterical and one of them reported that the teacher actually said "Don't French kiss - you might get pregnant.". I have to say, it has occurred to me that you have a far more effective anti- ( Read more... )