another tiny bean

I've wanted to post for weeks. But it's the same old thing--hard to find the time to write and then there's the old paranoia. It gets better, but it's still there.

Every milestone, every check point, every little victory...followed by the old familiar fear and the sensation that there's another shoe and it's gonnna drop.

But here we are again.

I had cerclage surgery last Tuesday, just as I started week 16. Everything went well, very well. And now I am recovering and will figure out, each day, how to "take it easy" while being a mom to a very active 18 month old.

We had a hard time getting pregnant with Vincent and expected it to take a while again. Five weeks later, when I finally admitted to myself that my period was a week late, a test from the dollar store confirmed it. It's been a combination of joy, fear, denial, and hope ever since.

Mothership gave me my first P17 shot this morning. One down, twenty more to go. If we make it that far then it will be a week farther than I made it with Vincent. Into the pregnancy, that is, as he was born at week 35. I stopped the P17 shots at 28 weeks with him. Why did I do that? My doctors exhibited very little faith in the shots, so maybe I was influenced by that. I don't know. At any rate, I stopped and a few weeks later my water broke. Interestingly, this time my doctor brought them up on his own. He seems to have had a change of heart about them.

Other than the familiarities of a pregnancy after a loss and all of the high-risk blah, blah, blah--this pregnancy is completely different than my first and second. It's hard not to buy in to all of the old wive's tales and imagine that this time it's a little girl. Time will tell. Of course that is of no real concern to me. Alive, that is all I care about.