CHAPTER 16 BABY CLASS

For about 4 out of the nine months my husband and I attended parenting classes that my insurance paid for. For the most part they were good. The bad parts were when they showed us what could happen in delivery. First they pulled out some salad tossers that they called forceps. I guess those were to grab the baby by the head and pull him out if he wasn't coming. Then they showed me a vacuum. I wasn't happy I was freaking out. Finally they showed us some wierd contraption that screwed into the babies head to monitor him. That was it I was officially freaked. I made up my mind. I was having a C-Section. Another scary day was when the dentist came to visit. He told us horror stories about cavities and showed pictures of babies with rotten teeth. Then he told us that if parents brought in a child with a cavity and they brought it in a second time with another one he would call social services on them. Whoah what? Kids get cavities. Mental note..don't go to this crazy ass parent hater. finally though the best day of all was the day that we actually got to play with little dolls. The teachers assumed us moms knew what to do and set in teaching the dads. First they asked the dads to change the dolls diaper. They opened it up to find peanut butter smeared all over the babies butt (interesting we have seen some similar stuff after having him.) So the dads had to figure out how to get all of the peanut butter off. Then they had to put a fresh diaper on. Rob tore the little straps off his first one and had to get another diaper. Then they had to put a hat and shirt on the baby and master swaddling. It was hilarious seeing how it took some people twice as long as others to get the shirts on and some peoples swaddle fell apart in seconds. The best though was when they turned out the lights, turned on a tape of a screaming child that got worse the longer it was on and handed them each a bottle, some formula and water and said make a two ounce bottle. Man there was formula flying everywhere. They forgot to cover the nipple and when they shook water was alllll over. That class was my favorite because it was the first time I actually felt like I knew something.

CHAPTER 15 WAIT NOW I HAVE TO WORRY

So the pregnancy progressed and before I knew I started to worry. What if I"m not a good mom. We started taking parenting classes which are a whole chapter in themselves and during these classes they talked about SIDS. OMG I became obsessed what if my baby died of sids. What if I didn't hear him at night. What if someone kidnapped him. What if someone came along and cut him out of my belly (yes I really did think that thanks to my mom telling me that it had happened on TV.) Anyway another thing you should know about me is that I am the queen of "whatifs." I can what if any situation. What if a car hits mine and I didn't put the carseat in the middle and the baby dies because it hit me on the side his seat was on. What if I'm crossing a bridge and a spider gets in the car and bites me and I drive off. Did I mention I am also totally insane. Basically I went into major freak out mode about being a bad mom. Thank god for what to expect when your expecting and Jenny Mccarthy. Both of those books told me that by worrying about not being a good mom I was actually being a good mom. That meant that my natural instincts were kicking in. They said if you didn't think about that stuff it was a bad sign. Hell I was about to become an excellent mother then by their standards. This made it okay to worry that although I do have a state of the art alarm system in my house I don't have an alarm on my crawl space meaning someone could cut a whole in the side of my house and come in through the crawl hole kidnapping my son. HEY It could happen.

CHAPTER 14 THE CAT FIGHT

My husband likes to drink. No he's not an alcoholic he just thinks he is still 21 and loves to party with his friends. Needless to say he is usually very shy. Not so true when he is drunk. He will talk and do wierd stuff and yell and jump around with his friends like a bunch of drunk idiots at a SF Giants game. He is very amusing to watch as this is not a side of him I normally see. Anyway another thing that happens when he drinks is that he is not affraid to talk about stuff. He will actually tell you what he is feeling. But the best part of it all is that when he wakes up the next day he usually has no idea what he said. So one night he has a few to drink and since I'm pregnant I am dead sober. So he is eating some chicken I believe and I say to make sure he puts it in the garage trash since my cat is notorious for getting stuff out of our trash. In fact he was notorious for just dumping over the whole trast. Some how this conversation turns to "You are going to love your cat more then your baby." This upsets me. The way I saw it my cat was my baby. I know I know a lot of you are saying ITS JUST A CAT. But, if you know me one thing you know is for the most part animals are a bigger part of my heart then humans. I cried for two days over a baby bunny that I had had for a bout 4 hours when it died. Anyway my logic was that this cat was like my kid. To be honost if someone told me now that if I had a second child I would love them as much as my first I would laugh at them. I am not programmed that way. I am not made to think of anything but the current. My husband on the other hand started to love the baby the day he found out I was pregnant. I tried to explain this to him but he didn't get it. To him he thought since I was carrying this thing I should understand the most. I didn't. I"m not that person. That person who just gets attached right away. Maybe part of me was thinking I would lose it or maybe part of me was thinking something would be wrong with him and he wouldnt make it. What ever it was I still though I was going to love my cat more. So we got into it and of course I cried. In fact he was still ranting as he passed out in bed. I think he fell asleep in the middle of a sentance. The next morning he had no clue that any of this had happened but I made sure to fill him in. I tried to think about it all. I tried to figure out if maybe I was wrong. If I needed to change my feelings. The problem was I didn't know how. All I could think of was this poor little cat who had no clue what was going on and would never understand becoming second in my life. (Yes at this point I think I cared more about my cat then my husband. The thing is once I do form a bong it is iron clad. There is no getting over it. Ask me how many of my previous relationships I still care about. So to me it made sense. The cat was there first there for he won.

CHAPTER 13 THE SHOWER

My friend Katie decided to plan the shower. Katie is a very classy gal which is totally opposite of me. I wanted chips and dip and weiner wraps. Katie wanted pinwheels, fruit bowls and mimossas. We met in the middle and had it all. My mom also brought alon egg salad sandwhiches and PB&J. Thank god because I was addicted to Peanut butter during the pregnancy. And I mean addicted. But we will address that later. Anyway I made sure we had fun games because she prefers showers with out games and just casual conversation. So we ended up with baby food tasting, a game where we melted different chocolate bars into a diaper and then made people guess what it was (it looked like poo in a diaper I loved it, everyone else thought I was gross for liking it) and the measure your belly game. I think there was more but I can't remember. Anyway I thought it would be more fun to have Rob come and bring a few of his friends. And also since I had lost so much weight and Rob had seemed to gain it all I thought why not have us stand back to back and measure how big both of our bellies had gotten. At this time he was actually as big as me. The shower was a little wierd though because the friend who had had all the abortions had come and I didn't know why because I hadn't really been talking to her. She acted like my best friend and ran around opening stuff and un packing and all the while I was thinking what on earth is she doing here. That was the last day I talked to her. She came to the hospital but I didn't talk to her becuase I was so caught up in me and Brandon. I remember my mom asking to take a picture of the three of us and the whole time I was sitting there thinking wow this whole thing is soo fake. I remember realizing that the things she was doing with her life were things I no longer wanted to be a part of. I was about to have a baby. I needed to grow up and realize this little baby needed a better environment and better people then who I was with. I made the decision to get rid of all the bad in my life and make it good. Anyway the shower was really nice and I got some great pictures of my husband eating gross food so that made it fun for me.

CHAPTER 12 A NAME

We had been going back and forth on names for a while. Rob had been driving home one night and fell in love with the name Taylor. I wasn't so hot on it for a first name so we decided to stick it in as a middle name. My dad called and said Aloysious was his grandpas name and he wanted that too. So our baby had two middle names. Finally I was reading the Tommy Lee book one day and he was talking about his sons Brandon and Dylen. That settled it My son was going to be named Brandon. Brandon Taylor Aloysious Mateo. What a mouth full. We had a name and set to work planning a shower.

CHAPTER 11 IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH

Have I told you yet how sick I was during the pregnancy? I vomitted so much I actually lost 20 pounds. I had morning sickness the whole pregnancy. In fact I had morning, noon, night and in between sickness. I also became enemic and I was always dehydrated. I didn't mind though the babys was growing and healthy and that is all that mattered. The baby was very active and always on the move. They would tell me how your baby is on the inside is how he will be one the outside. The first time Rob got to feel him kick he had been trying for hours to feel my belly with his hand. Finally I said put your head on my belly and see if you can hear anything. Whack. The baby kicked Rob right in the head. HA HA HA I loved it. His favorite thing was to stick his butt or foot out so you could see it from the outside and people got all wierded out.

CHAPTER 10 THE THING INSIDE ME

The whole first five months of the pregnancy I didn't really know if I wanted a boy or a girl. When people asked me I usually said I wanted a girl because it was what they wanted to hear. Everyone always assumed since I was such a girly girl that I would want to raise a girl like that. Don't get me wrong if I had a girl I would. She would become the pinkest barbie doll cheerleading designer clothes wearing person ever. The whole time I was pregnant from about the second month I started dreaming that I was having a boy. Not just anyboy though, a bald headed cartoon boy. If any of you watch the Simpsons and have seen Apu's kids I kept dreaming that I was having the little one with the culdisac hairline. I think I dreamt this because my husband is so dark that I naturally assumed our son would come out dark and Apu's kids must have been the darkest kids I could conjour up in my dreams. Anyway some nights I would wake up pretty upset that I was going to have a cartoon baby. We were going to find out in March what our baby was going to be. About two days before we were going to find out I was driving home up my street and I saw this little boy about 7 years old outside running around in a spider man costume. Mind you it was March so it wasn't even a Halloween costume. I could not get the image of my neighborhood spiderman out of my head. That night I couldn't sleep I woke up Rob at about 3 to ask him what he was for Halloween when he was younger. He told me he had been a base ball player, a cow boy, batman and robin and so on. It was settled. I wanted a boy. I didn't want 10 years of princess costumes and butterfly wings. I wanted a boy. I wanted someone to climb the walls and play in the dirt. We have a family friend named Norma who is from Mexico and doesn't speak the best english. I have always thought she held some secret powers. Anyway from the day she found out I was pregnant she touched my stomach and said "You are having a boy, I know." So the day we are going to find out I made the appointment before work. We went in and the lady was doing a ton of measurments. She kept telling me the sex wasn't important and she would get to it after all the other stuff was done. So I stopped watching and started talking to Rob about how she had just told me the baby had a full bladder. "Okay so it looks like you are having a boy." I'm sorry what. I wasn't even paying attention. "You are having a boy, look there is his little turtle right there." (she actually referred to my sons penis as a turtle." I was so happy. I started to cry because I knew that me and this thing inside were going to get along. During this ultrasound we also got to se a little bit of his personality. First he started jumping up and down inside me. Then the lady moved the wand so it was pressing his head. And you could see him start jumping up and trying to head butt the wand out of there. He got so mad he started stomping his feet and shaking his arms. It became obvious this little boy was going to have some personality. I liked that. I went to work and made the annoucement. My dad was so excited he actually drove to Babies R Us all by himself and brought back a little tiny Giants baseball hat and a yellow bib with a lizard on it that when you pressed a button it burped at you. He was over the moon. That day started a chain of random stuff buying. He bought him little carharts and flannels, a santa outfit, a raiders outfit (or two or three, shoes, Nike socks and so on. (The insaine grandparent buying hasn't stopped. In fact my dad can't even go to the grocery store or a 7-11 with out buying something for my son.) After this my husband, my mom and I loaded up and took a trip to Babies R Us. We bought a crib, a night stand and the most beautiful bedding ever. I ran home and set it all up and before I knew it we had a babies room. I found a song that I loved to play to the baby called Simple Man by Lynard Skinard. I would play it in the car, at work or in headphones to my belly. I was starting to like the thing in my belly. However I was still convinced I was going to love my cat more then my baby.

CHAPTER 9

The months started to pass and I was soooo sick. I actually dropped 20 pounds during my pregnancy. During the pregnancy I went through all of the normal motions. I registered and decorated the baby room and got excited over all the little clothes. All the while I was thinking I don’t even feel attached to this thing inside of me. In fact that is really what I though of it. It was a thing. Stay tuned to find out what happened. Did I learn to be a mom or what.

CHAPTER 8 WAIT WHAT

I got so caught up partying and having fun that it took me a while to notice the differences I was feeling. The first thing I noticed was that I got car sick just driving to the end of the street. The next thing I noticed was that if Rob and I were having a tiny fight I would end up throwing myself on the floor crying. All the sudden I knew. I was pregnant. I figured it out in the middle of November and decided to keep it to myself until I knew for sure. I wasn’t going to take a test or anything I just figured I would wait and see. So thanksgiving rolled around and we were all at my moms and everyone was doing shots of Tequila. I said I had to be the designated driver and declined to do shots. The drunker everyone got the more they tried to force shots on me. I refused and Rob took me in a room and said its okay to have one. I told him no and to drop it. That was that. A few days later I finally decided I would take a test. Only I was so nervous I couldn’t tell what it said. I went running out of the bathroom at work with a test in one hand and a box in the other and threw them at my mom. I said tell me what that said. She was shocked. She had no clue I even thought I might be pregnant. She looked down and said it was positive. I freaked out. I called Rob right away and immediately scheduled an appointment to go to the doctor and have them tell me for sure. It was set I was pregnant. I was going to be a mom. Wait a minute. I was going to be a mom holy shit. Now what.

CHAPTER 7 I DO

Our wedding was so beautiful. I am not traditional at all. We had the wedding outside at the Rose Garden in Reno. They were in full bloom. I picked a dress that was strappless with teeny tiny pale pink rosebuds on it with little pale green leaves. Then I had them cut it too what I believe is called waltz length and I had pale pink tule sticking out the bottem. I also had them rip out the back and make it a corset with pink ribbon. It was great. My bridesmades wore strapless dresses from macys the were the same length and had pink and green roses on them with pink tule coming out the bottom. My husband sweats a lot so we decided to go with super thing kahki linen pants and he had a thin white button up short sleeve shirt. It was awesome it looked almost like a beach weddding only in the grass. The guys also wore the linen pants and said they were the greatest things ever. We bought roses at Costco and made our own boquets. Then we had the reception next door at the California building. The food was great and so was the party. We honeymooned in Hawaii and it was beautiful. OMG I would move there in a heartbeat. Our wedding was so perfect for the two of us. Totally untraditional, fun and outgoing.

CHAPTER 6 WOW

After talking a lot Rob let me know he was going to ask my dad if he could marry me. I was so shocked. I couldn’t believe this was going to happen. So the day came and he asked and all was well and my mom and I ran right out and bought wedding books. We even looked at rings and Rob knew exactly what I liked. A few weeks passed and nothing. Finally one day Rob came by my work and I showed him all of the magazines and he was furious. He said we weren’t even engaged and here I was planning a wedding that I wasn’t even happening yet. I started bawling and tried to tell him that girls just did this kind of thing. We planned our weddings from the time we were old enough to know what a wedding was. He didn’t care he told me to stop it he was feeling pressured. I cried some more and finally he said what ever I could look at my books but that was it because he was in the winter season and didn’t even have money for a ring. I was really sad about this but decided I would take what I could get. That night I was sitting on the couch feeling like crap from my period so I popped a vicodin and went to work swooning over my wedding magazines. He just laughed at me because he couldn’t believe girls really liked all that junk. He told me I was a dork and went to get ready for bed. I couldn’t tear myself away from my book especially since one of them had a special insert dedicated to wedding rings. I was poking holes in the rings and sticking my finger through to see what they looked like on. (I know I’m such a huge dork.) Anyway he came back out to see what I was dong and mostly to laugh at me. I was showing him different rings I like and pointing out everything but the style I had already picked out. I could tell I was pissing him off so I made sure to say but I really like the one I already showed you more. He decided to get into the fun and started checking out guys bands and then pointed to one and said what about this I wrinkled my nose and said no I like the one we looked out. He said how about this and again I said no. I wasn’t even paying attention to the fact that he was holding a real life ring right in front of my face saying how about this one. All the sudden it clicked. I stopped turned and looked at him. There he was the man I loved so much sweat on his head, heart beating so loud I think I could hear it, holding the worlds most perfect ring in his hands.

CHAPTER 5 I'M OVER IT

The day I was supposed to go in and get my blood work to see if I was pregnant I got my period. I decided that I had enough. I threw away all of my fertility drugs and bought a bottle of Amaretto. I got drunk. At this point I decided that I was only 22 I was gong to live it up. My husband and I started going out and meeting new friends who weren’t pregnant or having abortions. We concentrated on loving each other for the time. Finally the day came that my cousin had her baby. The whole time in the waiting room people kept telling me I wasn’t getting pregnant because I wasn’t married. Wow I was shocked. How rude for them to say. I mean its not the 50’s anymore and here I was finding out how old fashioned my whole family was. I fell in love with my cousins daughter Jaida immediately. She was beautiful. At that moment I realized I was okay with out a baby. I was okay just being aunt Shannon and partying with my friends.

CHAPTER 4 HEARTACHE

The years past and the next thing I knew we had been together for two and a half years. Rob moved in and we started talking about having kids. He knew I had trouble having kids so we decided we would go to a doctor and see what they had to say. The doctor decided we should try IUI. Intrauterine Insemination. What this meant was that they would take his sperm and inject it up into me and see what happened. I had to take tons of fertility drugs including getting a shot in the tush every night. Rob enjoyed that part especially when we were fighting. what would happen first is for about a month I would take a shot in the rear every day for a month. Then I would go into the doctors office and they would do an ultrasound once a week to see how my eggs were growing. Finally I would take ovulation tests and when nothing happened they would give me a shot to force me to ovulate. Later I figured out that I ovulated at a very different time then they thought and they were forcing something that wasn't going to happen. This was a really hard time in my life. When I went to my dad and told him what was going on his response was that he didn’t want me having a bastard child. I was pretty pissed. On top of this my best friend had just had her first abortion and treated it like it was nothing. My cousin decided that she wanted to try and have a baby with her husband and I was in shock. So our first insemination came and nothing. I got my period and the doctor assured me that this was normal and I was increasing my chances each time. The second insemination came around and we did everything right. Two weeks later my cousin called me to tell me she was pregnant. Three minutes before that I had started my period. I didn’t know what to do. I worked with her every day. Everyone at work including my parents were so caught up in her pregnancy they didn’t even notice I was falling apart on the side lines. I guess I didn’t handle it very well and I basically alienated my cousin from my life. I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want to be a part of something that I was having so much trouble with and I hated that it was right there in my face every day. Her whole pregnancy was very hard. The worst part is that every time I offered her advice she brushed it off like it was nothing making me feel like my thoughts on parenthood and being a mom didn't matter. Simple things like telling her it was very important to go to the dentist while she was pregnant. She acted like she knew better. I felt like a no one. For the most part I just started doing my own thing and not involving my cousin or my family in my life anymore. At this point the doctor came up with the idea that I should have a third surgery for endometriosis and get everything cleaned up again and then we would try for a baby one more time. So the surgery came and went and the third insemination came. I went to the doctor got shot up with sperm and went to spend some time by myself. I called my friend only to find out that very same day she was off having another abortion. I wanted to puke. Being the friend that I am I rushed to her house and spent time with her telling her that her decision was fine and that I didn’t feel any different toward her. My husband and I waited and waited to find out if we were pregnant.

CHAPTER 3 YOU WHAT?

“I LOVE YOU.” What???? I stopped dead in my tracks and turned around and looked at him. The look on his face told me this wasn’t some joke or ploy just to get me to stay. I dropped everything ran over and said “I love you too.” It had only been 4 months but I knew something was different with this one. I asked him why he was so afraid to tell me that and he said it was because of what had happened with Jeremy. He was afraid that I would drop him like I dropped Jeremy for saying he loved me. It was so funny because everytime I would talk to Justin after that he would say, “You know you and Rob are going to get married right?” Ha I would laugh. It had only been 4 months I couldn’t even think of marriage. Things seemed to be going pretty good with us until Valentines rolled around. I don’t know what it was but I realized that something was wrong. I picked a fight with him and then finally I said I think you are still in love with your Ex. I told him he needed to think and figure things out. So he went home to Cali for a week and we didn’t speak. All the sudden out of nowhere he called me and said I want you to come here I miss you. I rented a car and drove down. Spent the weekend with him and we came home together. After that he realized I was where he wanted to be.