Hayley and Kate Minter

Holly had the actual, physical miscarriage event Friday up at her parents house in Virginia. She went ahead with a scheduled trip up there, so I was in North Carolina when it happened. She was apparently in a great deal of pain from around 9am-4pm, so it was very hard calling her up every hour or so and checking in on her.

But, she started feeling better Friday night, and is doing very well now, with only the occasional twinge of pain. She’ll check with the doctor on next steps early this week. I know we have at least one more set of bloodwork (they want to check her blood until the pregnancy hormones are down to 0), and they may possibly do another ultrasound to check and see if everything has come out.

I’d like to thank everyone who sent emails, Fed-exed flowers (Andrew, Jen, Nora, and Senor Dale) or posted comments of support during this time. It really meant a lot to us to have our friends beside us. And many people wrote in saying that their mom/wife/self had gone through this situation. It’s apparently much more common than one would think.

So we’re making it through alright. Thanks again for all the support.

This is probably why “they” advise couples to wait a while before making announcements, but Holly and I are sad to say that we got notice during our first ultrasound on Monday, and confirmation from the doctors today, that we’ve suffered a miscarriage on this pregnancy. So just two weeks after announcing our good news, we have to follow it with bad news. It’s just one of those things that happens sometimes, I guess. Nothing we could have done any differently to change things.

We went into the doctor on Monday not expecting anything but a routine epside of Baby TV, but as soon as the tech started looking, we could tell something was wrong. She seemed concerned, and reported that the fetus was only measuring around 6 weeks in size, which didn’t mesh with the 11 weeks along that we expected. They couldn’t find a heartbeat, and said that the yolk sac was in the wrong place, “which could be a sign of chromosomal abnormalities.”

We met with the OB on duty that day, and he said the odds were that we’d suffered a “missed miscarriage,” meaning that something had happened a few weeks ago, but Holly’s body hadn’t gotten the message yet. They took blood to run a check of hormone levels. We went back on Wednesday for another blood test, and they finally called this afternoon with the results. Her pregnancy hormone level had fallen from 15,000 to 12,000, instead of rising, which confirmed it.

Holly’s doing as well as can be expected, and we’re just waiting for nature to take its course as far as the ultimate results.

Thanks to everyone for their support during this time.

The other day, Daddy came home from work chewing bubble gum. He made sure Hayley was watching as he blew a large pink bubble. She fearfully cried, “Oh, no!” and ran to Mommy for refuge. Daddy then spit out his gum to calm Hayley down. Daddy admitted that he only did it to see her reaction.

No one knows why Hayley has this strange fear of bubble gum. She likes the kind of bubbles you blow with soapy water and a wand. But, she really doesn’t like gum bubbles.

On an unrelated note, Felix Felicis, our new kitty, is the world’s most tolerant cat. He allows Hayley to pick him up and carry him around like a rag doll all day long. She loves him, and always wants to know where he is. Lucy has never allowed Hayley to play with her, so I’m sure this new, laidback kitty is just her speed. Felix is a very sweet kitty, even if he is a little crazy.

The other day, Wade was being silly, making silly noises. Hayley was using the potty when Wade made a particularly loud, strange noise. Hayley said, concerned, “That’s Daddy. It sounds like he needs help.” Mommy laughed and agreed.

Holly and I are pleased to announce that, after a year of attempting, we’re pregnant again. We went to the OB/GYN this morning and found out that Unnamed Fetus Project is nine weeks along, and has an estimated due date of March 14, 2006. Baby!

It’s exciting to think that our family is growing again, and somewhat daunting considering we’re just getting the hang of one child, now we’ve gone and thrown another one into the mix.

I’ve changed the URL to this website from www.lunenburg.org/hayley/ to www.lunenburg.org/kids/ - I figure that when I write about one of them from now on, the other one would be at least somewhat involved, so it didn’t make sense to keep separate blogs for the two of them. Look for updates on Hayley and Unnamed Fetus Project here in the months to come.

Next up for Fetus - our first ultrasound, a week from Monday. Look for scanned and posted pictures shortly after that.

Next up for Hayley - the shock of her life.

We’d been in a pretty good nighttime ritual for a while, but that’s gone to hell in the last few weeks. Now, Hayley sees bedtime as a way to run around her room like a maniac, kicking and laughing as she fights our attempts to get her into her pajamas, teeth brushed, and in bed. In fact, she’s lately been screaming and crying when we tell her it’s time to get into bed, saying “No, no, no, I not sleep in my bed. Sleep in Mama’s bed!” Not that she’s ever slept in Mama’s bed since the first two months of her life.

In fact, it’s becoming too common that I have to put her in time-out after five minutes or so of her refusing to get in her bed. Which, of course, makes her cry even more. Tonight, after she had been in time-out and said she’d get in bed, and Holly was rocking her, she said in a pitiful voice “Daddy put me in time-out.” Yeah, Daddy’s the bad guy. Then, once she’s in bed, we have to go through a few iterations of her getting out of bed, opening her door, and wandering out into the hall. I try the “nice Daddy” routine the first few times, but eventually have to fuss at her to lay down and not get out of bed before she’s down for good.

I hope this is just a phase.

This entry’s going both to my blog and the BabyBlog, because it was just too weird to limit to one place.

I had a show at ComedyWorx tonight. Normally when I do a show on Friday, I stay in town after work instead of driving back to Fuquay just to turn around and come back to Raleigh. In a bit of a change from our normal routine, Holly IM’d me asking if I’d like to have dinner in Raleigh with her and Hayley. Of course, I said yes.

We hemmed and hawed trying to pick a resturant, and finally settled on Casa Carbone, a small but well-known Italian place. We’d eaten there once before, but it had been years.

We got there and had a nice dinner. Hayley was extremely well-behaved, laughing and talking, coloring in a coloring book they brought by, not whining at all. She was getting a little antsy right at dessert time, wanting to go see the fish, so we got the check and started gathering our stuff.

Suddenly, this guy shows up at our table. Probably in his late 30s, business casual dress, not one of the wait staff. He comes up to me and says “Excuse me, but Senator Helms would like to say hi to your daughter.”

…

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I look around, and sure enough, sitting at a table on the opposite wall, is former 30-year US Senator Jesse Helms and his wife. Now, I’m not a huge Helms fan. In fact, I probably disagree with more of his positions than I agree with. But I do have a certain degree of respect for the man’s career, and the position that he held, so I turned to Hayley, picked her up, and said “Hayley, you’re going to meet someone important. Be sweet.”

We walked over to the Senator, I shook his hand, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve been having the time of my life watching this little girl. She’s beautiful, and very smart.” I told Hayley to say hi, and she responded “Hi, I’m Hayley.” He said hi to her, then she said “I wanna go see fish.” So I put her down, and she ran over to Holly and the aquarium, completely unimpressed by what just happened. Some other people came in at that point and started talking to the Senator, so I excused myself, signed my check, and left. He looked old (not shocking, since he’s around 84 and has had health problems over the past few years). But he was very nice to Hayley, and in a tally book that includes segregation, ignoring AIDS, and being obsessed with Cuba, is now offset to a small degree by a check mark in the “pretty cool” column.

With all my years of improv, it’s fairly hard to rattle me, but the whole encounter was so random, I didn’t think to get him to sign something for Hayley’s baby book, or take a picture with my camera phone. So all we have is a blog entry, and a memory of an extremely random encounter in a resturant. It’ll be a fun story to tell Hayley when she gets older.

Funny how a series of chance decisions (Holly just happened to want to meet me for dinner, we just happened to pick that place, we just happened to be running later to the resturant than we had originally planned) all led up to that. As I said, a very random day.

In spite of all the changes Hayley’s gone through, we’ve had one very reliable routine, for probably a year and a half or more - the morning routine. Hayley would wake up, sit in her bed, and call for us to come get her. Even as she progressed into walking and running, this was a constant.

So you can imagine our surprise last week when we were awakened by the sound of our door opening and closing, followed by a small person jumping into bed with us and saying “Wake up mama! Wake up daddy!” Yes, she’d gotten out of bed by herself - quietly enough not to wake us over the baby monitor - opened her door and shut it, opened our door and shut it, and just walked on it.

This has been the trend at naptime and mornings ever since. Good thing we still have the gate at the top of the stairs up, or she’d wake up, go downstairs, pop in a “Dora” DVD, grab some cereal and orange juice, and leave us sleeping.

. . .

On second thought, maybe we don’t need the gate.