Snowbound Herpetologist

*** This is another older, previously written post.  Resolution at the end :) *** My blood type is A negative.  Several of the women along my mom’s side of the family have also been Rh negative, a number of them far enough back to pre-date RhoGAM shots and to have tragically lost/nearly lost Rh positive babies to hemolytic disease of the newborn ( Rh disease ).  I grew up hearing these family stories and feeling so incredibly grateful that something existed to save any future Rh positive babies of mine from anemia and death.  Rh incompatibility is no joke, and RhoGAM has been a true life-saving miracle since its introduction in the 1960’s. However. My husband is AB negative.  He doesn’t just test negative serologically - he and I also both genetically test homozygous for the fairly common “European” deletion of the entire RHD gene that is responsible for 99% of Rh- phenotypes among Caucasians.  Although such is not always the case for two Rh-...

***Note: this post will be way funnier to anyone who has actually tried to get pregnant before, especially if they did any charting. For the rest of you - sorry!*** I suppose that for most people, the *wtf* moment of pregnancy comes when you get the positive pregnancy test.  For us, though, it came much earlier than that. Having watched a number of friends struggle with infertility, miscarriages, and worse, we had prepared ourselves for a long, slow slog towards parenthood.  At my preconception checkup, my doctor was very clear that because of my “advanced” age, it could take me 9 months to a year to start ovulating normally after stopping birth control (oral contraceptives).  We decided to start trying early. Because I had no idea when my cycle would return to normal, I immediately started charting basal body temperature and cervical fluid in an effort to get more data (gotta love data!).  Well, CF was not being cooperative (basically, no changes at all...

Since I expected the whole “getting pregnant” thing to take much longer than it did, I never imagined that I’d have a new baby in the dead of winter.  As I have also never lived in a place with real winters before last year, I have spent a good portion of this pregnancy pondering how one possibly dresses a newborn for a North Country winter. Through a long and convoluted path, I ended up seeing this BBC article today titled “Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes” (ww.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415).  The basic gist is that all Finnish mothers get a little box full of baby goodies from the government after they give birth, including the World’s Cutest Baby Snowsuits : Through this webpage, I ended up reading the official Finnish guide to motherhood, which includes this incredibly helpful graphic that tells me, in no uncertain terms, exactly how I should dress my baby for the winter - and the box gives you everything you need to do it! Now all I have to...

I like to avoid the spotlight.  The idea of telling my parents (or anyone, really) that I’m pregnant fills me with the same feeling I get watching really awkward, awful scenes in movies.  I cringe and hide under my pillow. So what do you do when you have a really tough problem but you can’t ask anyone for advice because no one knows your predicament?  You Google it! And then you find out that 95% of the links are for teen moms, because apparently, 30-somethings aren't supposed have this problem. One of the gems was this one - How to tell your parents that you’re pregnant: 8 steps (and you gotta love that two of the steps were actually blank).  Here are some highlights: - Prepare your opening.   Don't scare your parents by saying, "I have some really bad news."   (I actually did end up leading with, “We have news, and you both need to be on the phone for it.”  Mom gave equal odds to me saying that we were moving back to California :)) ...