Do I Laugh Or Do I Cry?

My house hates me.

Don't look at me like that - it's true.

When Peyton died, our seemingly perfect house had over $40,000 worth of unnecessary repairs come up over the first six months to a year of our grieving - talk about an expensive distraction.

Now, here I am, hugely pregnant and on bedrest, and our house has decided to turn on us again.

Honestly, at this point I no longer know whether to laugh or cry.

Yesterday morning I woke up to an odd sound. In my slumber filled haze I thought it was the dog licking something - herself, some furniture, something she had picked up off the floor. "Be quiet Charlotte," I muttered into my pillow, but the sound persisted. When I opened my eyes, I was astonished to find that the sound I heard was water dripping into the room from above our window casing. We live in the northeast and have had a TON of snow and ice in the last month - apparently yesterday our roof decided it had had enough.

I called hubs at work in a panic because there was water everywhere, and I am on bedrest, and what the heck am I gonna do about something like that? He came home and raked what he could off the roof (which, while it was a valiant effort, was kind of useless against the 8-12 inch thick ice pile-up that we have going on up there) and to both of our surprise, the water stopped.

Phew!

I had had an NST scheduled for the morning, and I asked hubs if he needed me (what I thought I was going to do, I couldn't tell you) and he told me he had it covered, so I headed off for the hospital. We were predicted to get a major storm, but luckily it was supposed to be clear until well after my appointment. I arrived at the hospital and wouldn't you know, they put me in the bed RIGHT NEXT TO that same woman from last week... the one with the junk food and the soda and the healthy babies - what are the odds? They did a BP check, overall pretty good though a little high, I am assuming from the stress of my house revolting against me, and hooked me up to the monitors.

The nurse asked how my morning was going, and I told her about the leak, at which point she told me a horror story about it happening at her mother's house, and how it did super extensive damage, and blah blah blah. She then told me to not go into the attic to check it out (like I was gonna do that anyway) and that if it started again, to let someone else deal with the leaking water. Well that is sort of hard when you are home alone. I mean if there is  a new leak that pops up, I can't just let it pour in without going over to stick a bucket under it or something.

After scaring me about all the crap that could be in our leaking water, and all the damage it could do and dollars it could cost, the nurse asked where the babies were, and I told her. She tried for a while but couldn't get a heartbeat on Baby A. The nurse kept leaving me and saying how strange it was that it wasn't monitoring, and then she would come back, contort me into some strange position where I had to hold this pad with one finger and that pad with another and I couldn't get to my ginger ale and boy did I want that ginger ale...

What may come as a shock was how unconcerned I was through this whole process. The snowflakes had been so incredibly active all morning and I think that is why. Sometimes my little baby boy A likes to hide from the NST pad so knowing this helped too.

Well an hour went by - then two, and still nothing but spotty recordings of his heartrate 99-200-154-96-202 like that it went on and on. I heard the nurse mutter something about "go see if you can find those twins" to another nurse, and a new woman appeared. She wheeled over the ultrasound machine, found the two babies and figured out the big mystery - both of the snowflakes are now lying transverse (horizontal!) Baby A has been head down and low for months, where as B will flip from vertical head down to transverse from time to time. I guess A got sick of having B sitting on his head, so he flipped too!

I have to admit, I was really frustrated and disappointed by this discovery.

I know it sounds silly to be upset over this but I really REALLY want to VBAC these babies. The nurse gave me some bullshit about how whatever the doc chooses I should be happy, and I wanted to scream because not for nothing, I know many women have c-sections without any issues, but my c-section with Peyton caused me MANY issues, not the least of which was robbing me of my fertility, so I am really not walking lightly into having another one like it is no big deal.

I am a realist, I know the possibility, and maybe the probability even, are there that I will have to c-section these babies, but that doesn't mean I am not wishing for VBAC. C-sections limit the number of children you can have, and we have always wanted a large family. I just don't think that unless you have had a c-section to bring a child into this world, and then lost that child, that someone can fully understand. It was also because of my c-section that we had to wait a year to start trying again, and another 6 months after that to discover I even had an infertility issue... so now that I am beating a dead horse here... let's just say I don't want one. I may need one, but I certainly don't want one.

Once the babies were found on ultrasound, my NST went a lot more smoothly. They checked my fluid, which they told me was wonderful, and sent me on my merry old way. I came home to find hubs working like mad at trying to get ice off the roof to no avail. I usually feel pretty grown up but I have to say, when things like this happen with our house I feel like a kid who is in over her head.

So after a long (and exhausting for hubs) day, we moved back into our bedroom last night- finally! We have been staying in the guest room for about a month - since the infamous mercury incident - and the water dripping in the guest room was just the motivation I needed to get out of there. I had been holding off, since we had put in new wood floors in the bedroom and I wanted to give them time to off gas, but I figured a month was sufficient.

 Well, to say last night was a sleepless night would be an incredible understatement. For whatever reason I was nauseous all night, and kept getting up to deal with morning sickness. At about 4AM, I finally closed my eyes and kept them shut, but wouldn't you know... 7AM I woke up to new drips - IN OUR BEDROOM! UGH!

Ty Pennington where are you!?

Hubs was outside shoveling, and looking mighty exhausted by it - poor thing! The storm we got last night was very wet and heavy, and I could see that each shovel-full was making him wish he had stayed in the midwest, rather than move up here to all this snow and mess to marry a northeastern girl!

I peeked my head into the guest bedroom to see how the dripping was going in there, and what had been a controlled drip into a bucket, had spread overnight into a splattering mess! Hubs came in and I gave him the bad news about the leak getting worse, and he headed back out, head down, to re-roof rake the roof! After that, he put more plastic and buckets and towels down in both bedrooms, and looking defeated, headed for the shower.

"We are gonna laugh about this someday." I called to him from the bottom of the stairs.
"About what?"
"About our house deciding to fall apart over the last month of this pregnancy. About not being able to get anything ready in time because of it. About all of it."
"We are?"
"Yes. We are."
"But not today," he grumbled.
"No," I admitted, "not today. But someday."