No. NO!

About two weeks-ish ago, Kristen H commented that there's nothing like a pregnancy scare to REALLY help you figure out how you feel about having another baby.

When I missed my period this weekend, my feelings were something like: oh hell oh shit oh fuck oh minivan.

When I stopped at a drugstore near by parents' house in Pennsylvania for a pregnancy test, the girl ringing me up gave me a knowing sort of stinkeye, and I stared at my feet and felt awkward and...you know, SHAMEFUL. I shoved the bright pink package into my diaper bag and ignored it for the next several hours while Jason kept looking at me with his eyes bulging out of his head. Who was I and what had I done with the peestick-happy woman he'd married? What was I waiting for, already?

"I don't have to pee yet," I whispered. Even though I did. Kind of. Let's just say I've peed on sticks with less.

Finally I retreated to the bathroom and dug out the package. I opened up a stick -- careful not to destroy the wrapper, since I sure as hell wasn't leaving pregnancy-test debris in my parent's wastebasket -- and whoa, deja vu. So many times -- SO MANY TIMES -- I'd done this, desperately hoping, knowing in my head that I was going to be disappointed, but still. Hoping.

I still wasn't exactly sure what result I was hoping for this time. But when the test result displayed a resoundingly solid negative, I realized that wasn't it.

I wrapped the test up in a tissue and shoved it back in the package and into the bottom of the diaper bag and went back downstairs. I shook my head -- just a tiny bit -- at Jason.

"No?" he asked. I shook my head again. I felt so obvious -- and so very lame, and a little arrogant, for assuming that my body would ever make anything that easy.

"NO?" he asked again. There was obvious disappointment in his voice. I raised my eyebrows at him, like, really? REALLY? You realize we're insane, right? Only one of us is allowed to be insane about stuff like this. And I believe I called dibs on the baby-making insanity years ago. You be the practical one, dammit!

"It's for the best," we later agreed. Definitely for the best. Fun and exciting in theory, certainly wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen but...yes. For the best. Like we said! Give us time to get back above water after a bad year of medical bills and taxes and everything in our house deciding to up and break at the same time. Give Noah some more time to really progress at camp and school.* Give us all some time to really soak up and enjoy Ezra's babyhood.** Give me time to actually not have a baby for awhile before deciding that I cannot live without another one.

(Of course, I did only take one test, and I did buy a two-pack...and...)

(STOP IT, SELF. OH MY GOD.)

So. No. That is that. I am both relieved and disappointed. Mostly relieved. No. Yes. I don't know. Make that relieved, disappointed and conflicted. Three things. Relieved, disappointed, conflicted, and batshit insane. Wait. Amongst my weaponry are such emotions as...eh. Fuck it, I don't know how to end this entry so I'm just going to go with the ol' just-stop-typing method. Right after a couple footnotes and photos.***

* Camp. CAMP! They keep losing our lunchboxes. But they also keep sending home a child who is a million times calmer, more coordinated, more talkative, better behaved and possibly even more adorable than the one I dropped off in the morning. Either Noah is REALLY clicking with this particular approach to occupational therapy or they are slowly turning him into a cyborg. He went on the monkey bars for the first time ever this weekend, and did a damn good job on them. Today he came home and told me everything he learned about whales.

 

** I swear, that child woke up this morning looking two months older than he did when I put him to bed last night, what the HELL.

*** Yes. They match. Sometimes I do this to them, because I am Like That. Look, I have no dresses or bows or adorable little striped tights, so you have to indulge me here.

I Asked a Bottle of Red Wine to be My Life Coach, and Look Where It Got Me

Conclusion to Amy Takes Her Foot-in-Mouth Show On the Road: Holy awkward SHITBALLS, people. She walked by me this morning and didn't even LOOK at me. And then picked her son up EARLY this afternoon. Probably just to avoid me, because I am sure I made that much of an impression and there couldn't possibly be any other explanation, like a doctor's appointment or a vacation or...okay, there are possibly a few other explanations. But me and my mad social skillz remain suspicious. Suspicious and lonely and very glad we were both too lazy to follow-through on the cookie idea.

Over the last few weeks I've read more than a smattering of blog entries addressing the whole "are we done having babies" question. A good number of them were written by women with babies somewhere around Ezra's age. And they of course got me thinking about writing a similar entry, because I haven't had an original thought bash around my skull since at least 2004. (Unless you include the thing with the talking deodorants. Then I am a national treasure of useless creative vision.)

A few weeks after Ezra was born, I tentatively said something to Jason about the topic. Something like, "We're done, right?" And he immediately said yes, we're done.

So I asked him when, you know, he planned on calling the doctor, as per our longstanding agreement on the division of childbearing and childpreventing duties. And then he immediately said, oh, wait, I didn't mean THAT done.

Noah was going to be our only child -- a plan that lasted about five weeks or so. The whole experience was exactly like a roller coaster -- terrifying, thrilling, hard on the eardrums -- and we were already shrieking "LET'S GO DO THAT AGAIN!" before the safety bars had even been released.

And Ezra, of course, was going to be our last child. I tried to savor my pregnancy accordingly: This is the last time I'll feel a baby kicking. The last time I'll prepare a nursery. The last time I'll have the belly and the boobs and the nausea and the fat face and the weird skin and the backaches and the puking for SIX GODFORSAKEN MONTHS.

Right. So maybe I could kind of see the positives of the "no more babies" situation. At times, anyway. Plus, it was finally dawning on me that babies are actually SMALL CHILDREN. Who become slightly bigger children. And that no matter what we do or how hard we pray it to be otherwise, I am going to have to deal with a three-year-old ALL OVER AGAIN.

We're done. Right?

***

Last week Jason and I booked the babysitter and went out for some sushi and a movie. There was a young couple next to us with their baby girl, who was about Ezra's age. I made some kind of involuntary squawk at the sight of her adorable little cotton sundress, and Jason sighed.

"You want a girl, don't you?"

Do I want a girl? Do I really want a girl knowing how hard it is to raise one in this culture of over-sexualized Princess Dora Bratz dolls and Mean Girls and eating disorders and oh God, the INTERNET? Do I really want a girl, a teenage girl, who may end up being exactly like me, or nothing like me, but either way will be all but guaranteed to hate me for at least a few solid good years? Do I really want a girl to come along and blast me out of the comfort zone I've created as being the mother of boys?

"Yes. I think I do."

Jason sighed again and admitted that if we KNEW we'd be guaranteed a girl, he'd love to have another baby. And before I could even mention the A-word (a complicated discussion we've had many times before, for the record) (edited to add: ADOPTION, holy crap, not the other A-word), he went on. "Whatever. Even if we had another boy, I'd be so happy."

He then went on to wax rhapsodic about Ezra, sweet Ezra, the baby who at one time Jason hoped would be a daughter, but who is a son and who is exactly who he is supposed to be and who our family needed, because HOLY CRAP HE IS SO AWESOME.

***

Okay, so maybe we're NOT done. At least, as Jason said, not THAT done. But I am not in a rush, far from it. We have a few more years before my (admittedly already erratic) fertility clock winds down, so perhaps it's best to simply say we're not ruling it out sometime in the future, when the boys are older and a little more mature or at least capable of wiping their own butts. Perhaps, as Noah's issues become a little more understandable and a lot less of a question mark, we could adopt, thus skipping the fairly awful process of trying month after month after month to conceive. Perhaps we will rule it out later down the road, but for now, let's not rush into anything. Let's just leave everyone's anatomy as-is and...you know...BE CAREFUL in the meantime.

Yes. Good plan!

***

So of course this means that I -- she of the 75-day cycles, the wildly erratic and oftentimes completely absent ovulation -- would suddenly start getting regular periods. Like clockwork! Like birth-control-pill regular, down to the HOUR. Down to the hour BEFORE, when I suddenly realize that I've been a raving bitch all day and developed a single angry large pimple right in the middle of my forehead. Of course.

See, here's the thing: When you don't ovulate, you don't get pregnant, even if you want to! And I've spent most of the past six or so years of my life wanting to get pregnant, TRYING to get pregnant, but only very rarely actually succeeding in getting pregnant. And even before that, I generally viewed my condition as a plus, a perk -- who cares about birth control! I've got your birth control RIGHT HERE! <points to barren, uncooperative womb area, ohhhhh yeah>

And here's another thing: As a relatively-inexperienced regular-period-type-of-girl, it turns out that I am also really terrible at math.

And...dates. And...calendars. And stuff. I pulled up my old fertility-charting/period-reminder program this morning and entered in some data and...oh. What? This weekend? When we...and we didn't use...and...oh. OH.

Cough.

No. I don't have any big announcement to make. NO! As I scan what I've written so far I realize it totally sounds like that's what I'm leading up to, but no.

I'm just a 31-year-old mother-of-two in the midst of her Very First Pregnancy Scare, on the short end of the first Two-Week Wait where she honestly has no idea what outcome she's hoping for.

On the one hand: SPECTACULARLY TERRIBLE IDEA.

On the other hand:

I wouldn't kick another one out of bed for eating mini-waffles, you know?