Very Superstitious...

I’ve been a little bit superstitious since I was a kid. Ever the athlete, I had lucky socks that I would wear for basketball games, lucky underwear (no, not that kind of lucky underwear – I was a kid) that I would wear on the days I had math tests, and a lucky meal of a Pizza Hut personal cheese pizza.

These pseudo-illogical ways disappeared for the most part during college and my twenties. My only momentary lapse was buying a plastic statue of St. Joseph, the patron saint of home and family, and plant him in the ground upside down next to your “for sale” sign. You then say a prayer to him every day for nine days and somehow house should sell more quickly. So, maybe it’s more religious than superstitious, but you get the idea. Anyway, I tried this method to sell our house. And it worked.

And then I started trying to get pregnant.

Since I originally thought it would only take a few months, six max, to get pregnant, I started buying cute unisex onesies, décor for the nursery and other baby belongings. We’d buy our future baby souvenirs while we were on vacation, too.

After 6 months of temping, charting, checking CM and bugging my OBGYN nonstop, I started reverting back to those old superstitious ways, and wondered if buying all the baby stuff was actually inhibiting my ability to get pregnant. So, I went cold turkey and stopped the shopping spree. You would’ve thought I was a heroin addict, I’d get the shakes when I’d pass a Gymboree.

Now that everyone BUT me is knocked up, those baby buying tendencies have started right back up. My girlfriends almost had an intervention with me after one trip to an Outlet Mall – I tore threw Oshkosh B’gosh and Gymboree like there was no tomorrow while visions of my little one danced through my head…


So I had to go into withdrawal once again. But, I have stuck to my guns and haven’t bought any baby-related stuff for more than a year and a half, except for shower gifts for friends, which is incredibly hard to do.

Most recently, I've been adhering to some of the Chinese superstitions. Of course, they wouldn't call them superstitions, they are just things that go along with the Chinese way of thinking. I have rubbed the lion cub on the lioness statues at the front of Buddhist temples, which is supposed to bring you children, and I have started drinking warm water instead of cold water.

Here’s hoping that I’ll have trips to Baby Gap in my near future, or at least the Chinese version of BG. At least once, on every shopping trip, I say to myself, "That's something I will get once we have Little Bean."

What about you? Any superstitions about trying to conceive?