J has had his first cold and fever. Poor boy - couldn't figure out why he was such a mess last Friday until he woke up in the middle of the night all hot and snuffly. We all survived it, though it was a bit of a hard weekend. He's doing much better now and actually slept for 6 hours straight last night - for the first time in a long while...
B and M are both invited to a friend's house (not L, someone else) on Thursday. He's an only child to a single mother and is one of the more popular kids in B's year. I'm reluctant to send them both as I've noticed that when there are three, B is often left out and M and the other child seem to gang up on him. M says that they're just "on the same team" but as M has so many more friends and is invited to many parties and play dates, I think I'm going to just send B. Thoughts?
My in laws are thinking about a visit during half term in February. The idea does not fill me with glee, mostly because D is teaching then and can't be around as much, and the rest of us will end up stuck in the house. I can't fault D's parents for wanting to spend time with my kids, but they often encourage the start of endless board games (like Monopoly) that take hours and I feel wrong leaving them all at home and going out with J (or, in the past, alone) because that would imply that I expect them to take care of the kids for me. In actual fact, I really look forward to half term and spending time with the kids, doing art projects, going to the library and the park, getting together with friends, etc.
I have an appointment on Thursday with the cancer genetics team to figure out what the chances are of me ending up with breast cancer. I have four close relatives who are survivors, but it's hard to know what the odds are because they're all on my dad's side and two of them have been tested for the gene and they're both negative. I also have an appointment on Friday morning to do something about birth control as D has had it with condoms. We've gone over everything back and forth and I think I really prefer to try a cervical cap - hopefully I'll get on with it as well as I did with the diaphragm (for ten years) but without all the UTIs. D is staying home with J both mornings :-D
D is really insistent about wanting another baby and making it be a girl. Luckily sex selection in this country is illegal (whew!) and the cost of doing it abroad is rather steep. He says he would want us to do it anyway but I think I've managed to make him see that it's an awful lot of money considering how likely I am to miscarry. On top of the fact that I just feel it's morally wrong. As I have a nephew who is the product of sex selection, I've felt this way for a long time and I just think it's tacky. Not to offend anyone who feels it's necessary to create a so-called "balance" in their family, but I believe - and this is more of a moral belief than a religious one - that if children are the product of love, then they shouldn't be made in a lab unless IVF is necessary, and not to create "designer babies". As I have no trouble conceiving, I feel that our children should be conceived the traditional way. I mean, we have all these jokes about some of the times I've gotten pregnant. We made B in Cleveland. E and K often joke that M was conceived when they were visiting one March, on the one night they returned from London, realized that they didn't have their key and needed to ring the bell. So imagine if we had another child, and the story went along the lines of, "well, they put your father's semen in a centrifuge and picked out the girls...".
On top of that, I'm pretty sure I don't want any more children and while I might consider another pregnancy if D really, really wanted another child, I think that wanting a girl is the wrong reason to spend nine months being pregnant (assuming I don't miscarry), labor, breastfeeding, sleepless nights, putting any thought of a career on hold again, etc. If J were a girl, I think D would agree that our family is complete. I don't think it's really another child he's after - it's just that he's always wanted a daughter.