20 Weeks

I started drinking coffee again. I've always like the taste, but you never would've found me drinking it near-black a few years ago. I say "near black" because, well, I guess it's technically just as black as "black", but I add sugar. I used to add a little milk, but last week I kinda went milk crazy (unrelated to coffee) and maxed out the milk budget. Justin is one of those people who's more likely to be a psychopath since he drinks his coffee true black, so we don't have creamer of any kind. So, you could say what I've been drinking is like strong, dark tea. Sweet tea. Not as good as cold, sweet, actual tea, but that's not the point.

I'm drinking coffee again because I need it. Well, what I actually need is a minimum of 12 solid hours of sleep every night, but LOL, amirite? It's not just that I need coffee; obviously, I crave it. You know what this baby in me wants? Near-black coffee, fat rare steak, sharp cheddar, and chocolate.

...which means it's OBVIOUSLY a boy.

For real! A real, living, ultrasound-confirmed boy.

So far, both of my pregnancies have been healthy and generally uneventful (which is great). In nearly every other way, my current could not be more different from my previous. With Maya, I think I had exactly one week of nausea and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I threw up the entire 40 weeks. This time, almost the entire first half was all-day sickness. I don't generally suffer from allergies, but with Maya, allergy season had me feeling dead and wishing I actually was. With this baby, nothin'.

There have been some other differences that are probably normal for second vs. first. I felt baby boy moving much sooner than I felt Maya, and this pregnancy has gone by significantly faster than hers. Duh. When I was pregnant with her, I didn't have a crazy kid running around, dancing, climbing, breaking all my stuff. I still wonder what I did before I had kids. There was so much time for activities! Why don't I have my own business? Why haven't I traveled the world already? Why am I not a plastic surgeon or something? I remember being busy... with stuff? I worked. I... showered regularly?

I've decided that parenting is for Type A people. We should just leave the procreating to the responsible adults who can handle it.

On that note, here's a sonogram of the baby I'm about to have! ...which is not at all contradictory to my previous statement. I refuse to admit that it is, and you can't make me.

I'm officially halfway through this pregnancy, and I've only started to panic a tiny bit. On the one hand, I know having two kids is totally possible and people do it all the time. On the other hand, how does anyone have two kids at once?! I'll figure it out, probably. Plus, I'm totally used to being awake at night now. It's like my brain learned which lights to keep on up there. You gain a new state - awake, asleep, and now, zombie. "Mombie", if you will. I'd say it's different than your traditional zombie in that you don't want brains, but that would be a lie. I need brains more than ever. There's that saying about how having kids is like letting pieces of your heart go walking around outside your body. Well, that's not all. They take some of your brain, too.

I'll leave it to more experienced moms to tell you if you ever get any of it back.

How My Daughter is Like Me & Not Like Me

This article was originally posted in November 2015 on TheBLT, where I'm a guest columnist.

Last fall, shortly after Maya's first birthday, I wrote an article about the ways she is similar to me but still very much her own person.

"She's like Stitch," my sister says, referring to the rambunctious cartoon alien who causes much chaos with little effort. (Stitch has four arms but Maya only needs two.) She is quite the whirlwind and always has been. She was the most active baby ever in utero, and I remember the days when she was still very new and would kick her legs all around as if it were impossible for her to stop moving. I would spend so much time just looking at her, staring at her face, memorizing it. It's a good thing, too, because getting a good look these days is hard with all the moving, talking, screaming, laughing, and running."

We initially thought she was leaning more like Justin in personality. While she is very much like him, she's not a perfect fit for either of us. Obviously, since she isn't either of us - she's both. A mixture of us and the ones before us, she is not a copy of anyone else.

Maybe I'll end up with a daughter who's just like me, but better. Better, obviously, because isn't that what kids are for? We make brand new versions of ourselves, a Reghan 2.0, so we can hopefully be saved in their perfection. We give up our whole selves so they can be the best they can be. 

I'm bringing up this post again because it is still so true. Sometimes, the similarities between Maya and me or Justin (or a grandparent) are uncanny. But, with every day that passes, it gets harder and harder to see others in her because she is so much like... well, herself. Every parent wants their kids to be better than we are; not to share our struggles, but to give them tools to help others struggle less.

Read the article in its entirety here.

Hey there.

I'M BACK!

This would be a lot better if I had announced my leaving. I mean, I didn't leave... I just went off the blogging grid for a while. Accidentally.

I won't go too deep into anything, but in the interest of full disclosure, life and depression got to happening. As it turns out, being pregnant and not fully over postpartum depression from the last baby is not the best mix. (Does a person ever get "cured" from depression of any kind? I don't think so.) Add in regular life stress and you've got a recipe for an absent blogger.

Currently, Maya is a year and a half old (19 months) and the little nugget is nearly halfway done cooking (19 weeks). All-day nausea is gone now and I think I really should be getting about 14 hours of sleep per night. I'm trying to make myself more ambitious because it hit me yesterday that I'm halfway to having two - TWO!!! - kids under my care. Maya is in the process of transitioning to her own bed, to my disappointment, but they've gotta grow up eventually, right? She's also in the stage of pre-potty training, which basically just means she's much more aware of what is going on, and we're familiarizing her with the potty. I doubt she'll be out of diapers when the baby is born, but that's okay, developmentally. I'm not really in the business of rushing things, am I?

Obviously, this pregnancy has flown by. Maya is what they would call a spirited child, which I'm sure I'll dive into later on here, and that has kept me quite... distracted? Busy? On the brink of insanity?

Easter was very fun this year. With a few exceptions, I've spent nearly every Easter of my life at my grandparents' house. They've got a lot going on this year, so thankfully, all of us were able to put it together. We colored eggs, made some delicious deviled eggs, hid some plastic ones for Maya to find, and had a great lunch. I also became aware that I've transitioned from pudge to bump, which was equally exciting and scary.

Justin's Frankeggstein