Claire's New Floor

We had new carpet installed upstairs this weekend and Claire had a funny reaction to all the chaos. We had been talking to her about how she was going to have a new floor and she seemed excited. We started clearing out our upstairs rooms early in the week, but saved Claire's room and most of the big stuff for Friday while she was in preschool.

When she came home from preschool, she didn't even notice the giant pile of stuff we had moved into our living room. (A testament to my housekeeping, perhaps?) But when we went to the staircase, she immediately noticed the gate was gone. She asked me if it was broken. I explained it was not broken, but that we moved it because we were getting a new floor tomorrow. She insisted that it was broken and that "when Daddy gets home, he will fix it." Satisfied with her understanding of the situation, Claire proceeded to climb the stairs. When she reached the top, she was astonished to see the gate at the top of the stairs was also missing. She looked confused, then said, "Hey, what's going on here?" I couldn't stop laughing long enough to answer her.

Then, she walked into her room, which was empty except for her bed. I could literally see her brain trying to process that discovery. She gazed silently at the empty place where her dresser used to be. Then, she looked around at her bare walls. Suddenly, a look of horror crossed her face. I knew exactly what she was thinking, but before I could say a word, she whipped around to the face the vacant spot her bookcase used to occupy and cried "My books! Hey, where did my books go?". Immediately, I knelt down to reassure her that we had just moved her books downstairs and offered to show her where they were. She looked relieved, and from that moment on, she has been perfectly happy and easy-going about all the change.

She really likes that all the furniture is out of her way, so she has lots of room to frolic upstairs. After the carpet was installed, she ran into the empty guest room and said, "This is my gymnastics room!"

She's also loved having the freedom to go up and down the stairs whenever she wants. She's really good on them and always holds onto the rails, so we're thinking of leaving the gates off for now. As long as she continues to be careful and doesn't start playing on the stairs, I'm trying to let go of my mommy worries and allow her some freedom. Plus, Josh really likes not having to deal with the gates any more, and even I can admit it makes it easier to carry laundry up and down the stairs.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised (once again) by how easily Claire deals with changes like this. I'm so thankful that she's flexible and can handle a little chaos because, frankly, life gets a little crazy around here sometimes (although most days, Claire is responsible for at least half the craziness at our house). :-)

The Results Are In

The doctor called yesterday to let me know all the test results have come back... normal, completely normal. The good news here is that I don't have any scary, miscarriage-causing diseases. The bad news is there's no treatment that can help if there's no identifiable cause for the miscarriages. If they had found something, medication might have lowered my future miscarriage risk dramatically. Instead, my risk for another miscarriage will be pretty high (over 40%). The worst part of the testing is that it came with a really ugly label - habitual aborter. The doctor warned me I would see that on some paperwork from the tests, but what an awful term. You would think whoever comes up with medical terminology would have a little sensitivity to the fact that patients are likely to see or hear how you're referring to them. Regardless of where she may stand on abortion issues, I think any pregnant woman with repeated pregnancy losses would find that label a bit jarring. Can't they just write "multiple miscarriages" on the paperwork?

Anyway, now that the testing is over, I won't have to look at the label again for a while. The doctor said we could try again when we're ready. While we really are eager to grow our family, I think we might wait a little while. I want to feel excited about the decision to have another baby, but right now I just feel sort of scared of the idea. I don't feel ready to risk another miscarriage, another heartbreak. I'm surprised at myself for wanting to wait awhile. Usually, I'm the kind of person who goes straight for what I want and keeps working until I get it. But I guess something this personal affects me differently. I feel like I could use some time to process everything that's happened over the last six months. So we're going to just relax and enjoy the holidays with our sweet Claire Bear.

Thanks for all of your kind words, prayers, and support through all this. We're hoping a new year will bring some better luck and new blessings to our family.

Candy, Candy, Candy!!!

Last year, we went to several Halloween events, but we didn't actually go knocking on any doors. This was the first year we took Claire trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. As you can see from the picture above, she was a little uncertain when we went outside and she saw other little ghosts and goblins running around. But after hitting up a few neighbors for candy, she decided Halloween was her new favorite holiday (at least until Christmas). As soon as we left the front porch of one house, she would tell us we needed to find a new house and get some more candy.

Overall, she was a very polite little trick-or-treater (saying "thank you" to everyone and even "Happy Halloween" a few times when we prompted her), but her enthusiasm for candy did cause a few small issues. It took a few discussions for her to understand that we weren't going to eat any candy until we got home. Then, once she realized that we had to get all the candy home safely before she could have any, she became a little protective of her loot. She seemed to think someone handing out candy might look into her bag and be so overcome with candy envy that they would steal her stash instead of adding to it. So, she really wouldn't let people get close enough to her bag to put candy in it. Instead, she wanted people to put the candy in her hand, so she could inspect it and then put it in her bag. If anyone made a move to put the candy directly into her bag, she would look up at them suspiciously and slowly back away until the bag was out of their reach. If it was a particularly special candy (aka lollipop), she didn't think it was safe to leave it in her bag at all. The lollipop had to be carried in her hand for safe keeping.

After an hour of running around the neighborhood, Claire's footsteps got a little slower. She asked us to carry the candy bag she had so closely guarded at the beginning of our adventure. Then she asked us to carry her. We knew it was time to call it a night, so we headed home.

She looked over her loot and picked out a couple of pieces to enjoy while we watched a Halloween cartoon and handed out some candy to other trick-or-treaters. Then, she went to bed and slept the long, deep sleep of a sugar coma. Once she drifted off, Josh and I looked through her bag and scarfed down took care of all the choking hazard candies. Overall, it was a great night.

Update and Cute Kid Pictures

Okay, I'm feeling much better today. I saw the doctor and she is running some tests to see if we can find a cause for these miscarriages. Yesterday, I gave what felt like half my blood to be tested for a variety of disorders, imbalances, and defects. Hopefully we'll find something minor and treatable so this won't happen again. The doctor did warn me that sometimes they run all the tests and still don't find anything conclusive, so we'll just have to wait and see. For now, I'm no longer in the "angry phase", so there won't be any ranting in this post. ;-) And since we all made it through my venting in the previous post, I think we've earned some cute kid pictures!

Yesterday, we took Claire to a Halloween Kids Night Out. She got to wear her costume, decorate cookies, and go trick-or-treating. She had a blast!

Of course, that was a lot of activity for a two year old and she was up well past her usual bedtime. She was so exhausted that she apparently didn't even have the energy to climb all the way into her bed before falling asleep.

Even after a good night's sleep, she's still been a little zombie-like all morning. She did, however, have the presence of mind to add a cute sweater dress over her pajamas - always the fashionista!

Miscarriage #3

We've been in a sort of pregnancy limbo the last two weeks - getting good test results then not so good ones, feeling pregnant sometimes and not pregnant other times. We were waiting for more test results today after a discouraging ultrasound yesterday. But this morning, I woke up and told Josh, "I don't I feel like today's headline is going to be We're Having Another Miscarriage." I was wrong.

I've had way too much practice telling people this, but we're having (another) miscarriage. I was six weeks along, and just got the news that it's another blighted ovum.

Really?!? Another one?!? It almost doesn't seem real right now. I never thought we would be the couple with fertility problems. We're young, we have a reasonably healthy lifestyle, and no family history of serious genetic disorders. How is this happening? I am heartbroken and so scared of what this third loss means.

Will we be able to have another child on our own? A blighted ovum usually means there is genetic material missing. Maybe all my remaining eggs are missing the genetic material necessary for a healthy pregnancy. Can't cure that. Or what if I have some serious medical problem that's causing me to lose these pregnancies. I just heard about some famous woman who was having infertility issues and it turned out she has cancer. Is that going to be me?

Logically, I know that those are worst-case scenarios and it's far more likely that there is a treatable issue here or possibly no issue at all, just bad luck. I know I shouldn't let myself think the worst right now. I'm trying to be positive, but the statistics aren't very encouraging. I was just reading about recurrent miscarriage. One prior miscarriage gives you about a 20% risk of another miscarriage (pretty much the same as a woman with no history of miscarriage). Two prior miscarriages gives you about a 28% risk of another miscarriage, which is a little higher. But three miscarriages? That raises your risk of another miscarriage to 43%. So, my odds of a successful pregnancy next time around are now only a little better than 50/50. Great. Flip a coin and predict whether or not I'll have a baby next time.

I know I probably sound a little angry right now (it's one of the stages of grief, right?), but I am trying to stay mostly positive. I'm trying to think of all the fun things I can do while we wait to try again - eat a medium rare steak, drink a gingerbread latte, dye my hair, wear skinny jeans. Those things are all fun, but my heart knows I would rather be pregnant right now than have any of that.

Truthfully, I know I am blessed because we have already been given a beautiful little girl. I am so thankful for her. She is such a smart, healthy, and happy toddler. And I'm certainly hugging her a little bit tighter these days.

The thing is, I really don't want her to be an only child for too long. I was an only child for 12 years and I always wished for a sibling growing up. When I finally got a baby brother (Jonathan, you rock), I was so happy. But we were so far apart in age that I was leaving for college when he started kindergarten. So I feel like we missed out on a lot of the sibling experience you get when you grow up together, close in age. I always wished we had more time together before I left home, and I really want Claire to have that time with her siblings.

I'm going to talk to the doctor tomorrow. She wants to run some tests and I'm hoping we find something minor and treatable. I used to think the miscarriages were a fluke. I don't want to find out that the real fluke was my ever having a healthy pregnancy.

Please pray for us. I know God's here. I know I have to trust Him. We just need prayers.

Potty Training, Revisited

A few months ago, we attempted potty training with Claire (you can read about it here), but it was interrupted by a stomach bug that left Claire and my floor in an unfortunate mess. I've been meaning to pick up the potty training ever since, but something always comes up. We were going out of town, then I got sick, then Claire was in a rebellious phase, then I had a miscarriage, then we went out of town again, then Claire started preschool. There was always a reason to wait. After preschool started, I decided I wanted to get serious about potty training again.
To get (re)started, I read "Stress Free Potty Training" by Sara Au, which helps you determine your child's personality type and offers potty training solutions that target each personality. It was great. I determined that Claire's personality is impulsive with a side of goal-oriented, which basically meant that she would be excited about potty training, but would be easily distracted after the first few days of training. Hmmm... I wonder where that personality came from? Who else dedicated herself to potty training for a few days, then got distracted and took months to pick it back up? Oh yeah, me.

So, since it had been so long since our last try, I decided to start fresh at step one. Two weeks ago I started giving Claire "naked time" every day so that she could see the mechanics of how pee and poop come out. We only did it a few hours a day, so we weren't on house arrest the whole time, which was nice. I brought a small potty into the living room because impulsive kids tend to have a hard time holding it all the way to the bathroom at first. Plus, seeing the potty helped remind her (and me) that she needed to use it regularly. And, it really hasn't been a big deal to clean it. Within a few days, she was using the potty consistently during naked time with no accidents, but she still used her diaper when she wasn't naked.

When the weekend came, we gave her two full days of naked time and she used the potty like a pro. So we decided to try big girl panties. Claire was so excited to put them on! Unfortunately, she treated them like diapers. When she was naked, there were no accidents. When she wore panties, I had to clean the floor constantly. I was getting frustrated, but then it occurred to me that I never actually explained to her that even though panties feel a little like diapers, they don't work the same. I told her to use the potty and to try to keep her panties clean, but I didn't really explain why. So, the next morning, I explained how panties worked and told her they wouldn't hold her pee and poop the way her diapers did. That was all she needed to know and she immediately started making an effort to use the potty instead of her panties.

She still needed reminders to sit on the potty and "try", but she was doing pretty well on her own, only one or two accidents a day. She wore her panties to preschool and to Kid's Night at the gym. She was accident-free every time we picked her up. At home, though, she was still having an accident at least once a day. That's when I realized that her impulsive mom (that's me) wasn't doing my part. I had been slacking on the potty reminders after meals. So I re-dedicated myself to potty reminders and.... we have been accident free for two days!!!! Yay!!!!!

I know we're not potty professionals yet, but this is a huge milestone and I am so proud of our little Claire Bear.

The Great Cake Caper

My grandfather (Claire's great grandfather) just celebrated his 75th birthday. Happy Birthday, Grandy! To celebrate, we all gathered at my grandparents house for food, fun, and some great family time. Claire was excited to find out that we were going to be celebrating a birthday because she is well aware that birthday means cake. She was on the look out for a tasty treat from the moment we arrived.

After dinner, my grandmother and aunt set out the cake with candles and began arranging the cake table with supplies. While they were still getting everything ready, someone spotted Claire tasting the cake. It started out innocently enough. She used the tip of her finger to rub off a little icing from the bottom corner. Some onlookers (I was not in the room at the time) thought it was cute so they didn't stop her. As she realized no one intended to punish her for her crime, she did what most small-time thieves do... she escalated.

The tip of her finger soon turned into a pincer grasp as she tore small chunks of icing and cake from the side. When she discovered that her behavior had drawn smiling photographers instead of corrections, she grew bolder still. She reached into the cake with her entire hand and enjoyed a rather large chunk of birthday cake bliss for her efforts. At this point, someone told me to come see what Claire was doing.

Everyone, including the birthday boy, was laughing and taking pictures while Claire continued to enjoy increasingly generous helpings of my grandfather's birthday cake. Then, she looked straight into my eyes and... requested a spoon.

So what did we do? Tell her to stop digging into someone else's 75th birthday cake? Explain that the cake was for everyone and taste test time was over? No, not at my grandparents house. There was only one thing to do...