My Lady of the Lantern

I am currently busy solving Fermi's equation writing sequel to Cinderella reading Ashtanga Yoga books moving a tiny continent to UsualCity. The next few days will be about settling in, checking out stuff, and getting comfortable in the new digs. I might not be here for a teensy-weensy while - it could be two days, two weeks or a little longer than that. But remember what this gentle giant said: (Image Courtesy: http://www.johnkhor.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/i-will-be-back-terminator.jpg / Image not used for commercial reasons, and I don't mess with the Terminator.)

Spent the weekend with DH's family, and came back to my mum's place on Sunday afternoon. It took me not-long to see the mosquito bites....Figlia has got these red dots on her face mostly - six of them, with one on the nape of her neck, all thanks to mosquitoes! Aaargh! Since Saturday, my bleeding has turned from brown spotting to fresh red blood. I am not even sure what to think of it. I am still not ready to go back to the hormone, and 'try it out to check if this gets controlled'. By my calculation of April first week, my next AF should have arrived mid of this week. Now I don't know if it has come earlier, or I am just sitting as a dice, and being constantly played. Aaa-Aaa-Aaaaaargh!!

- All the things I did not like much during pregnancy are back on my food list for e.g. capsicum. - I haz a sweet tooth. Well, I always liked sweets, but I could never say that I had a sweet tooth. I had a chocolate toothie, but not this. - I lost weight and sometime in March I was just two kgs over my pre-pregnancy weight, and then rather than falling any further my weight seemed to increase. Joy muchos? I haven't stood on the weighing scale, but I feel heavier. And on Wednesday, I was four steps close to a scale, and still did not stand on it. Yeeeouch. - I am not going to worry about my weight more than twice a day. Once when I see myself in the mirror and then when I undress. Cool, huh? - I still don't feel like wearing any perfumes. Incense from my mother's incense sticks sometimes seems to curl and sit on my nostrils.  - I got fresh stretch marks this time, but they are localized at those very spots as where I developed the stretch marks from the previous pregnan...

Sometimes, I really go back to the drawing board and wonder what God's plan really means. Recently, that thought was set off by the news that someone I knew in real life had conceived on contraception. And she was not ready to have the baby. The couple finished family building more than a decade ago. The lady has old eggs by all medical standards, and yet the egg of questionable quality, and her hubby's made-of-steel sperm converged on a full moon night and resulted into a baby. She did not want the baby, but she was, let's say 'very affected' by having to not continue the pregnancy. She happens to be the second person I know who has managed to conceive while actively trying to prevent a pregnancy. And one of them has conceived twice on contraception! And I can look at number of people here, in this corner of the blogosphere who would have readily accepted for that conception to have happened in their own uterus. God's will, Yadda Yadda....and I wonder how f...

A little after the 11 week update , I found the girl clenching her fingers and moving them dodgily towards her mouth. We sometimes wake up in the wee hours, and convey sermons to the dark room in general and to yours truly specifically. And yours truly is not supposed to show that she has gone back to sleep/wants to go back to sleep. That ends with a lot of persuading to go back to sleep, and some amount of feeding. She now rests her feet against any surface and pushes herself against it...That had been happening well before the 11 weeks, but it was not forceful and intentional...now she seems to have found the force and way to do it intentionally. She is now able to focus at objects at varying distances. Do babies have colour preferences? Figlia focuses very well on red colour. And then there is this yellow pillow cover too that often catches her attention. She had a lazy left eye...that coordination has now become a-ok. We just faced our first cold+cough bout. Glad to have the...

Someone hinted to me yesterday that I must take precautions because I become pregnant very fast. (That led me to think, for the first time, that this person had actually not assumed I would conceive Figlia so quickly after getting back into the fray.) I have been labelled a lot of things, but never as a quick conceiver. How outrageous really! ~eyes rolling in my skull~ Ha Ha Ha! P.S. There is no word such as conceiver in English language?

- My AF creole reads Bleeding, Silent/Spotting, Silent/Spotting, Bleeding And Then Spotting, Spotting. Needless to say, I am worried the missus being so unpredictable this time and being almost not-to-be-seen in between will show its licks again and again for a while. Translate it to: wear protection constantly. - I read a very very funny breastfeeding story courtesy an FB friend. You have to read it. You must. - Baby Girl's cough has become better but has not disappeared. There will be immunization in the coming week and I am hoping that it either go away by then or I get some lasting solution. - Yesterday night, while changing her clothes I made her wear her a top that used to fit her fine. It now fits her snug! And maybe in a few days, it will become too tight to be worn comfortably. Clothes have become shorter. I am lovin' it. - I have finally started packing, albeit a little half-heartedly and with not much tempo, to go back to UsualCity. When I came he...

(Background: The sleep rituals involved swaddling and cuddling...and sleep would usually get fractured if I let go of her during the night. It took me a while to experiment with independent sleeping - on the same bed but not cuddled to me. I have tried this before, but there was always a difference between how much sleep she would garner with both modes - cuddled or independent.) Thursday Night: I swaddled her and got her ready for the night. I took her downstairs. I had my dinner while mummy held her. She was twisting and stretching and making all the motions that she does for escaping her swaddle. She was able to wrest a hand out from it.  I finished my dinner. The girl was yawning but hadn't fallen asleep.  I carried her upstairs and undid and re-did the swaddle. The girl wanted to be moved around. She did not want to sleep. And I was wanting to. 'This could be a long night' , that's what I thought. I fed her a bit, and she continued to ...

There was a post that bubbled in my mind while I was trying to take a siesta. Too bad, the words and the train of thoughts got lost by the time I sat down to compose it.  Why do you cry? It was just a girl...   A little while back I was thinking that next year the two girls would be having a birthday almost at the same time. That's not true. The older one would have turned older three days later. And I can think of a birthday, but not the party. What an unnecessary thought to be mulling over.  Why do you cry? It was just a girl...   When CBub died, family skeletons tumbled out. I had some wind of the pain my grandma had undergone, but the force of it tumbled out only after Cbub's death.  For all the pregnancies she had, only the daughters survived. Grandma suffered first trimester, second trimester and third trimester losses. She suffered neonatal losses, and one of my uncles died as a toddler.  Why do you cry? It was just a girl......

Oooh...the sky is falling...the sky is falling? No? It wasn't a pig who said that? I woke up today morning sharp at 5:30...it was crisp, and beautiful...Well, mentally scratch that. I woke up today morning sharp at 5:30...because I felt a gush...I am bleeding again, ladies and well, ladies mostly. My AF is back. I have the option to go back on medication. I don't want to. This has to even out....Gawd...please.... We have three plus two days in our hands...and if this thing does not die down, I will be bound to consider going back on medication. I am in two minds about the medication...it persists for 21 days...then you take a break and period comes....every week the dose is slowly tapered - 4, 3, 2,1, stop, period. And this time around (that is the current post-partum period), if I just go from 4 to 3, my periods begin. The body doesn't wait for the medicine to be done away with. When my periods came in April-beginning, I had already decided to wean off completely,...

Every semester, a day before what I perceived as the toughest paper of the semester and/or the last paper of the exam, I would always dream a bit about how sweet the next evening would be when the exam was over and I was done with that particular subject. Sometimes, it was Law, or well some Accounting Paper...anything. That's what I cling to when I have a tough day with Figlia. And I am such a chicken. My tough days are not exactly here. When I go back to hubby next month, it will be just the three of us, and hubby will be back to work...it would be me and the baby at home...not even a thin sliver of a chance of someone holding her while I can catch a fresh break. Figlia's bathing time got changed...which wonderfully cut down her post-bath-I-do-not-want-this-to-end crying. But now, she refuses to nap in the afternoon. For a small, sweet while, she used to hit the bed from 11 to 5 in the afternoon, and used to feed 3 - 4 times in between, but that was the time band she reste...

I never wrote a follow-up post to Sleep Improvement , though I always meant to. I told you how the gaps were being bridged on Figlia's end, but the truth is that life is improving on my end too. I have realized that napping as soon as she is sleeping does not work for me at all. I nap when I want to, anytime during her afternoon sleep, but I can't just lie down. I would be too restless and fidgety to pull it off. So I head to bed when I get sufficiently drowsy, and sometimes she wakes up just by my movements, but then we do go back to sleep often, and I take my dutiful rest. And if she does not go back to nap in the afternoon when I hit the bed, I just make sure that I manage to lie down a bit and attempt to keep her sated for a while. If I can pull it off for 30 minutes, I am a hero. Figlia continues to throw curveballs at me. But I have become better at handling them. I have become comfortable waking with her often at night. But she goes back to sleep again, and that is wh...

And there is another thing I noticed on the Bloggy Island. Our old addresses are being snapped up by these 'people/profiles' and I find several, as in several blogs (all empty, no posts) listed under those fictitious profile names. For e.g. there once was a popular blog - I Can Haz Bebe...I think the blogger discontinued blogging. And sure, the new blog with the same address is here . And oh, I made the shocking discovery not with her blog, but by the fact that THERE IS in fact a blog now which has my previous-abode address. (You may remember that one, I am not linking to it). And the profiler added one post with the blogname, and some of my old commenters have actually left messages underneath. Hmmm...whoa?

Yeah, I had no title for this post. --- The captchas that blogger throws at me look like ants eating each other. For me, 'd' is 'cl' and 'vv' and 'w' - all so confusing...Plus the ants were involved in a head-on collision, so somehow the alphabets are climbing and twisted all over each other sometimes. I still can't prove I am not a robot. Blech. -- Does anyone have any news Chronicles Of... ? I have been wondering about her...seriously, I just hope she has no internet access and that's why she is not updating, but I feel like I have been left out in lurch. If she had a post about the babies having arrived safely, and then no posts, I would have assumed that she is too full-on busy to look at or update her blog. But when you just nip it off like this, mid-pregnancy, and leave no words of not wanting to be back...and not updating in a year, some crazy thoughts start coming to me. I had been following her story for a while. In case, someone...

I bled and then bled some more last night. Just imagine a broken faucet. It took two pills, including one to kill the cramping/pain, three change of napkins, spoiled clothes and spoiled bedsheets to achieve the grossed-out, fed-up me. It's the same every time...just the same. It was the same last time. Some menstrual rite of passage before normal resumes. It's the same this time too. I ended up crying a wee bit in the morning hours. I could not sleep, just hoping that the morning/daylight could be here please already. I should rather have starred in some zombie/vampire flick where the hapless protagonists wait for the dawn to break so that the zombies/vampires lose their power/go to sleep/blah blah blah. Dear body of mine, we can cut out the menstrual fireworks already. It is okay to just slip into mode normal. Just do it.

Once I wrote it out (in the last post), I started feeling a little better. There are a couple of things for which I can't decide from now, and for the rest, I need to stop over-reacting - for example, the house. I know that DH knows what I like...he will take care of it. I know. So, I may not go back to what I was used to, but I will not whine about something I have no preconception of. I feel better about that already. --- Last evening, AF #2 made her appearance and I have decided to not do anything to stop or control it. I had cramping and grumbling tummy and I did have to take something to stop that pain...but yeah, my cycles have now resumed. I actually had some bleeding on April Fools' Day too, but it stopped on its own. I am counting yesterday as CD1. Not that I am TTC. But having a fully functional uterus can't hurt, right?

Sometimes, things just happen. And there is not much that can be done. When I go back to UsualCity, I will not return to the house we are currently occupying there. I fell in love with that flat. We did not have it very well furnished...but there was light in our house. When I shut the main door, I always felt relief. That privacy was my cocoon. I felt safe. It was my own world. I could be changing clothes walking between the rooms, and simultaneously making tea for myself, turning on the TV, and prepping for a quick shower. There was comfort there. Our landlord gave us the due notice to vacate the flat. I can't hold it against him for not specifying a reason, and since the 'agreed' notice term is in play, I can't complain about it either. There were no rent issues. All the landlord says is that he is in need of the house. I don't want to move. We could shift to another flat within the same building, but it is way smaller than our present abode, and whether the...