Sundays I go to my parents' house for dinner. Dad's a great cook and Mom loves my leftover beauty/gossip magazines. Heather stays home because there's only so much time a woman wants to spend with her... parents-in-law. Also I think she just likes having the house to herself.
It puts a strain on our Sundays, though, because I like to sleep in, and later in the day I like to have a nap, and then I leave around 6:30, so we have to find a way to have together time, and to get some stuff done. This is why we never have clean clothes.
The last couple nights we've been drowsy and gone to bed early, so the cervix-monitoring has fallen by the wayside. (I'm noticing there's a sleep theme here. So sue me.) Today, knowing I would absolutely not want to do it at 9:30 when I got home from my parents', I dragged Heather from her online shopping for iPhone remotes and insisted we take a look right then. I found the sucker-- another tally mark for my cervix-finding chalkboard-- but the experience is best captured by Heather's own comment: "It's like my [redacted] is fighting it!"
That's personal, but everything about the conception/charting/insemination is pretty personal, so here's hoping Heather loses the link to my blog again.
A speculum, if you haven't experienced one, is not lady-part-friendly. It is shiny, metallic, and full of unexpected nuts and bolts. (Note: I initially wrote "nuts and bolts," found it inappropriate, replaced it with "screws," and felt there was no safe option here.) It makes angry sounds. Heather's lady parts are full of unexpected twists and turns, too, and today it was angry without my even coming near it. Its bad attitude manifested itself in declarations from Heather like, "Of course you got the soft pillows" for under her hips. No, Heather. No, angry lady parts. I did not. I got the memory foam ones and it is not my fault that not everything is as relaxed and welcoming as it might ideally be.
Nina, our charting mentor, came into the store the other day. Aside from an alarming overlap of her visit and my oblivious dad's, we chatted about the monitor Mamie and Whitney recommended and which we'd just gotten in the mail. She grimaced, clearly indicating that she thought the monitor was a tool born of the unholy fertility industry. This is probably true. I say that because a) I want her to like me so I want to agree with her, and b) if I don't trust her judgment in everything, then I'll have to think for myself, which is a lot harder, especially when I don't know anything. At the same time, I feel defensive of Mamie and Whitney, since they clearly made the right calls to get a baby and they've been incredibly generous with us.
Nina's contention is that the monitor is a relatively meaningless tool compared to the traditional charting options-- cervical monitoring, primarily. I told her that it was awesome to have a little toy, and that, honestly, it was reassuring to have a machine make judgments for me when my observation of Heather's cervix was so subjective (and, frequently, traumatic.) Today I saw the cervix, saw the os, saw the mucus, but if Nina had seen Heather's lady parts fighting the speculum for ten minutes, the monitor might not have seemed so meaningless after all.
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