Contracting Away in Southern California

Seriously, isn't it a wee bit early to be having all these contractions? The new semester started this week and I was on my feet a LOT. I lecture three hours Thursday nights and then teach a three hour lab on Friday mornings, where I'm either lecturing or wandering around helping the students with their lab work. My uterus had a field day. I'm going to have to bring this up at my appointment next week.

Next week is pretty appointment-heavy, actually. Monday is the big level II ultrasound at the perinatology office. Baby organs and placenta will be minutely inspected. I'm so focused on what the placenta will show that I've almost forgotten to worry that the ultrasound will turn up some other kind of problem with the baby itself. (Herself? Himself ? I should just pick one and go with it.)

Then Friday is my normal cervix check at the OB. Wednesday D has a checkup with her eye surgeon. (Have I mentioned D's eye issues here? Probably not. Anyway, she's got lots of doctor appointments of her own.) The fun never stops around here!

I am relieved to have the first week of classes under my belt. I tend to get myself pretty worked up before the new term starts, and then I get through the first week, remember that I both enjoy my job and am good at what I do, so I unwind a bit and it's all fine. I did have a conversation this morning with the former department chair. He just finished 2 years as department chair. So, at the start of his term he just missed having to deal with my abrupt disappearance midway through the summer session when my pregnancy with D went crazy, and at the end he just missed having to deal with the possibility of it happening again this semester.

What did happen with Former Department Chair was that he neglected to include me in the e-mail that went out last spring organizing who was going to teach which classes this fall. In his defense, I was moonlighting for a different department last spring while one of their full-timers was on sabbatical, so I wasn't officially teaching in his department that semester and I just fell off his radar. Anyway, by the time this was discovered, he had to do a lot of scrambling to find a lecture and a lab for me to teach. He managed it in the end, but it took a long time and a lot of e-mails back and forth. I didn't end up with times that I liked, we had to switch around D's daycare, etc., but we worked it out.

So this morning I ran into him and his wife in the faculty parking lot. I should mention that they are in their late forties, are childless, and he's mentioned that they had issues of their own in the childbearing department. So, I think they would have liked children but it unfortunately did not happen for them. He didn't know I was pregnant again until he saw me today. He made a comment about how he'd gone to all that trouble to arrange classes for me to teach and now it looked like I may bail partway into the semester again and leave everyone else scrambling to cover my classes! I laughed it off but I was rather upset. I do hope he realizes that we have not made the decision lightly for me to continue teaching this fall. We've asked our doctors repeatedly if they think it's a good idea and they keep telling us it's fine. Anyway, I let it go with the former chair, but it still rankles. Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive and cannot take a joke.

I'm very, very glad it's the weekend.