MyrtleBeeotch

post partum depression 1

2012-07-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

okely dokely - when i was going through my post partum depression, or ppd, i tried to research it online. i found many web sites' clinical descriptions of ppd, but i wanted to know what to DO about it. my little sara catherine is only 16.5 weeks old, so all of this is still recent, and i want to make sure i record what i can about it while i still remember it. my point is not to whine and complain, though i am a certified expert in that, but if someone in the future is trying to find an online resource for help with ppd, maybe i can at least offer my experiences and a ray of hope. i'm going to go through the pregnancy and then into the ppd, partially for sc to know about the pregnancy, and also for some details that later contributed to my ppd.

so, realizing i need to go back at some point to fill in the Andrew & Me story (for sara catherine) from my first post about my seeing him on facebook for the first time and then all the way up to our wedding, i will start with our pregnancy. andrew and i got married in a beautiful small ceremony june 4, 2011, surrounded by friends and family. sc is definitely not a wedding night baby, since i passed out post haste as soon as we got back to the hotel room, and andrew's good friends mike and jason hung out with him in the living room. anyway, andrew was set to leave for almost 5 months of JAG training (meaning he's a military attorney along with his civilian job as a public defender. BECAUSE HE'S AWESOME.). so, we prepared ourselves for his being gone, leaving july 3rd, less than a month after we got married. we had talked about having kids, but neither one of us was all, YES LET'S DO IT, because our sisters have children, and we see how hard it is to raise children RIGHT. so that they don't become terrorists when they grow up. when we got married, i was 38 and he was 40, and not only does that mean we are OLD and have less energy than young parents, the chances of birth defects triple after age 35. i also think neither of us wanted to be the one whose idea it was to have a kid, in case it really ended up sucking. like when you don't want to pick the movie or it's your fault if it was shit. for real though, i know that God put andrew and me together, and i thought that a little baby, made from the love God allowed us to have for each other, was an appropriate thank you for giving us our soul mates. also, i thought that, if we got pregnant, it would be best for me to go ahead and do that before andrew left for 5 months, so that he wouldn't divorce me while i was weaning myself off of all my vices. so, without sharing all the AWESOME details (boom chicka), on july 2nd, we decided to, as andrew says, "pull the goalie." a few boring details and weeks later, on july 22, 2011...

when i texted this picture to andrew at jag school, he texted back: whose is that?

by the way, if you're pregnant, i HIGHLY recommend reading What to Expect When You're Expecting, current edition, and signing up for updates from both www.whattoexpect.com AND www.babycenter.com. also, GO AHEAD AND READ ANYTHING YOU CAN, NOW, ABOUT THE FIRST FEW MONTHS OF A BABY'S LIFE. while pregnant, i only read the chapters when i was actually in each month described, or i'd freak myself out. and i HAD the baby's first year books, but didn't read a PAGE until the baby was born. looking back, if i had armed myself with some of the background knowledge available on newborns, my ppd wouldn't have been so horrible. not preparing myself mentally and emotionally for a newborn, especially while trying to recover from the c-section, was a huge mistake. instead, stacks of books that may or may not help me while in the middle of horrible ppd despair was just another nail in my coffin of what a bad mother i must be. because after the baby was born, i was too emotionally, physically and hormonally drained to take on ONE. MORE. TASK, especially if it might take away from one second of the sleep i needed so desperately. so! look at all this crap i've typed and i haven't even started to get through the pregnancy yet to reach the ppd!
so, andrew continued along at JAG school, and the pregnancy went reasonably well. i was nauseated and freaking EXHAUSTED in the first tri-mester. i'm a sleeper. i love sleep. i love naps. i love sleep naps. but this new tiredness really kicked my ass. it was, at that time, the most tired i've ever been. i was working only 4 hours a day at that point, thank goodness, so i could come home and take naps every day. i tried to imagine being pregnant while having a full-time job, and i realize if you HAVE to do it, you'll find a way, but STILL -- i cannot imagine how most women deal with that! and if they have another kid at home already to deal with? or MORE? it seems impossible to me - those moms are heroes. brave (crazy! >;) sike) heroes. and....CLIFFHANGER!!! sara catherine is awake and giving me the stink-eye from the swing. so i will continue rambling and blah-blah-blah-ing when she's asleep! thanks for reading! :)

BABY PLAY DATE!!

2012-07-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

BABY PLAY DATE! today my friend luann is coming over with her little baby girl emma kate, who is close to 10 weeks old, i believe. it will be sara catherine's first play date, wheee! i hope to be able to straighten the house before they come over so that luanne won't report me to child services! or dog services. or husband services. i think we'll have Craft Day, where we dig around under the furniture and make a baby coonhound puppy puppet made of ruby-hair, dust bunnies and any other random debris one finds. oooo, maybe luann has some kind of AWESOME ocd where she feels obesessed AND compelled to clean my house! oooo, or maybe our doggie smelling like fritos will drive luann crazy enough to go wash her!!! i hope she appreciates that i'm wearing my faintcy matching jomjoms.
will report later how everything went. ...

MOMMY MILESTONE!! this is yesterday's facebook post. sorry i didn't get to shave my legs. well, i'm not REALLY sorry.
happy friday, beeotches! :)

i'd like to thank the academy, and my new friend Angie Cooper for the gameplan and encouragement, because THIS CHICK just took a shower while sc sat in her bouncie chair in the doorway! (angie, you will probably also receive a handwritten thank-you note from my husband. and my neighbors. and the mayor of myrtle beach.) sc just batted at the swinging butterflies in her chair and checked out her surroundings, and i took a speed shower, wheeee! that's a mommy milestone! rock ON with my bad self!

Calli Sewell Scully It's the little things really;-) Also, when she's too big for that you can do like I do and bring the exersaucer in there.
Luanne Norris Kea Fabulous!!!

Perri Koplen Sullivan And, as soon as she is sitting on her own, put her in the shower with you! That's what I used to do.
Wendy Wells Kimble Exersaucers are great, but so are Johnny JumpUps that attach to the doorframe. They just kick their little legs and bounce and bounce.... Those are really good for the kitchen. Wait... Do they still make those, or are my kids really that old?? Ugh. :(
Calli Sewell Scully They make them, and they are great!
Angie Swayney Cooper I love it!! You go girl! :-)

Suzi Hinen Henry Woo hoo! I also told you to use that! Small successes!
Rachael Bowman Bradbury I did that shower trick for the longest time. Then one time I peeked out from behind the curtain and Rebekah was bent over the side of the bouncy chair, still strapped in, with her hands practically on the floor. So, no more showers for a while after that.
Melanie Robinson Take a bath, then you can see little munchkin is safe and happy while you get a little time to soak!
Wendy Wells Kimble I used to have Joel hand me the baby when I got in the tub. I'd bathe him/her first and then hand em back and have some mommy tub time. Two birds with one stone! (wash my hair in the kitchen sink the next day! Totally worked!) BUT- the quick and dirty shower thing wif the kid in the doorway in an exersaucer is AWESOME!

2012-07-05T10:08:00.002-07:00

this morning i found a site called archivedbook, and it pulled all my facebook posts (status updates, pictures i posted of animals for adoption, etc) from jan 2011 until this morning! for some reason it won't go back any further than that, tho it did go back to dec 2007 and showed me all my posts from my friends since then. i copied and pasted them all into a document so i can share some of them. apparently i have a slight facebook addiction, as i had over 2500 posts in 18 months. lalala. better than a crack addiction! www.archivedbook.com. also, I AM HILARIOUS. sike. of course those 18 months included quite a few things going on in my life - andrew and i became engaged in december 2010, i lost all 3 of my little doggies (ages 14, 15.5 and 16.5 years), got married, got pregnant, and had the baby 16 weeks ago. so shut it. :)

now, the main purpose of putting all this shizz into one place is to share it with our little babygirl one day, so that she knows how her mommy and daddy met, knocked boots and made her! i also want to share the post partum depression i experienced, in case, when she is allowed to have sex at age 39, she has a baby and goes through it also. maybe it will help her. (italicized picture captions are the original captions. otherwise i'm just adding my own willy nilly.)

heyyy. how YOU doin'?

Yes I WOULD like a wet cheerio from the floor...thank you!

— with tee tiny baby J

first! andrew and i met in march 2009. we both went to irmo high school but we graduated 3 years apart and didn't know each other, tho andrew knew my brother jolyon, also in his graduating class of 1988. (<*singsong*> aaaaancient!) i graduated in a different decade, in 1991. so. i saw andrew's picture on facebook and thought he was very cute, and clicked on his picture. fortunately, andrew didn't have any privacy settings so i was free to stalk his profile. he hadn't completed the relationship status section, but i was sure he was not married. see, his profile picture was of him in a tuxedo, and i took that as a good sign because a) if he were married, the profile pic would've been him AND his wife and b) if he was separated/divorced, NO ONE would be tacky enough to use their own wedding picture sans former spouse just because it was a really good picture. (so it turns out he was separated and that WAS a wedding picture, ha!) anyway, i perused andrew's pictures and shtuff, and was drawn first to his pictures of him and his teeny niece jordan. his caption was funny, also, and sounded just like something i would've said to ellie: "Yes I WOULD like a wet cheerio from the floor...thank you!" i also saw a picture of this cutie pie andrew with a darling doggie, and that was awesome because i am a little bit of a dog freak. So then i sent him this cute guy andrew a friend request. and since our lil babymuffin is waking up, i will continue with the story of how her daddy and i met later on. so, rock on witcha bad self ( i say self instead of selves since i think andrew is the only poor guy reading this. :) and he has to! ha! :))
happy thursday july 5th!

With Lucy Furr.

2012-07-04T15:39:00.001-07:00

just a quick overview: (i'm typing with one hand right now, while feeding the babymuffin a bottle with the other hand.) this is my first post since december 2009, which is when i moved down here with my andrew. he already lived here in myrtle beach and had just accepted a position with the horry county public defender's office. i had lived in maryland since august 2007, and met andrew through facebook in march 2009. what i want to do with this blog is compile/record the story of andrew and me and now our little butterbean baby, so that when baby sc grows up and her parents are old and decrepit, she'll know the story of why she is here. because we are ALREADY old as dirt and can't remember why the hell we got up to go into the kitchen/living room/bedroom until we get back to sitting on the couch. so it's best we get it "written" somewhere or we'll forget. now, where was i...? OH. so i'm going to try to start including shtuff from march 2009, at the beginning of what eventually led to our angelpants. so feel free to read along. :)

my thoughtful man

2009-12-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

ha! my sweet man left me a darling love note this morning...taped to the underside of the toilet lid. ahh ha ha ha! sweet angel muffin. :)

first entry! the days leading up to the move.

2009-12-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

so andrew flew up to baltimore last thursday and helped me finish the packing i promised would be all done by the time he got there. lalala. :) it was 28 degrees the next day, friday, when we ("we" meaning barry and andrew) loaded the uhaul (paid for with my teeny little liquidated 401-k - i KNOW. i didn't have the luxury of NOT taking the liquidation). i HATE really cold weather, and i puttered around cleaning under and around the stuff they moved. i had just donated my two lhasa-stank couches the day before to habitat for humanity. i felt so bad for the poor pick-up guys carrying the stinky couches out; their faces were all shmooshed up against the under-cushions where i had JUST vacuumed out approximately 19 lbs of milk bone crumbs from each couch. BUH-bye couches. so now we have no couches! but i didn't want to bring stinky couches from one home to another, or make everything else in the uhaul smell like feet, too. anyway, so friday night we went to dinner with sara, barry and ellie, as a goodbye meal. ellie was just as darling and precious as always and i did cry a little bit about leaving her and sara. *sniffle* anyway, so saturday morning we got going, with the doggies tranqed in the back seat of my car, and ME extra-medicated on anti-anxiety meds because driving long distances freaks me out. don't judge, mofos. immediately, as soon as i backed out of the parking space, rosie tried to propel herself into the front seat through the piece of shit car-net barrier i got on ebay. so i'm trying to drive, follow andrew in the truck, hold the POS net high enough for the doggies not to hurl themselves over, AND push their sweet little noses BACK through the net openings so they wouldn't strangle themselves trying to reach the front seat. i was cursing fairly creatively at this point. *sigh* memmmmmries...light the corners of my miiiind... okay, that's enough for this evening. night night. :)