Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Stress and thankfulness

I read this headline Pregnancy stress passed to baby and my first thought was "Great! Another thing for pregnant moms to be stressed about." On the other hand, "Stress does not cut IVF success" and I had always thought that stress did affect fertility so perhaps the pregnancy study was flawed in some way. The sample size of 74 is very small.

I realised one thing that stresses me is when I think I'm going to have some time to myself and I don't get that time. Special K went to preschool this morning and a respite care worker was supposed to show up to take care of Little T. I was going to work on my children's book and my non-fiction book. I did actually manage to work on both while Special K and Little T played. Mobility is a marvelous thing. Now Little T can entertain himself for fifteen minutes at a time. It's very freeing. However Little T hasn't quite figured out how big and bulky his head is. He keep bonking his head on things and crying. He bonks his head on different things each time, and he doesn't even really hurt himself. It's more that he gets stuck and is annoyed. It's stressful for both of us. I know he needs to learn, but I wish learning didn't have to be so literally painful.

I should also mention that I no longer have a Sims child. I have a mostly potty-trained child. On good days, I do nothing, except occasionally walk with her to the bathroom. On bad days, well, I'm sure you can guess what happens then. Today was a bad day. That was also stressful.

On the plus side, I had time to feel stressed today. And my stress stemmed from ordinary problems of motherhood. Right now I'm watching Little T eat a saltine and scoot on his butt on the floor. And try to figure out how to eat and scoot at the same time. He's mostly mushing up the saltine. He says "gah" and sprays crackers out of his mouth. I feel grateful that he can move around now and get cracker crumbs everywhere, that he has an interest in getting cracker crumbs everywhere. He smiles at me and holds up his cracker and my heart melts.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At least according to my doctor, they have never found any connection between stress and infertility. In *very* extreme stress, it can cause failure to ovulate.

At least according to my doctor, the stress thing is a myth which he particularly dislikes, since it tends to be used as a stick by mother-in-laws to beat career women who are trying to get pregnant. What he said was that stress could cause not having enough sex, but that was it. He also said was that it was usually the other way around-- infertility causes stress!