Modified diet and eating better

Pic of me at 27 weeks:

The slowed down intestines and all the ramifications are driving me nuts, so I've gone on a rampage to have a better diet to help.

So last night, I cooked a wonderful pan seared salmon, in a honey balsamic glaze, served over spinach salad with red onions, garlic, artichoke hearts and sundried tomatoes. It looked a little minimal on a plate, so I thought Mark might scoff at it, but he LOVED it! He said that the salad was a perfect compliment to salmon since it's so rich and fatty on its own.

I ate a banana today (trying to help keep more potassium in me and maybe help the leg cramps some), am aiming to eat an apple or an orange a day. I bought some benefiber, soluble liquid fiber and (thanks Kenya) it's amazing. It's not all metamucil thick and disgusting, it really just disappears. I had it in some berry tea this morning and it was untraceable. Had a bran muffin (still yuck!) and some nuts and a boiled egg for breakfast. Boiled eggs are my morning staple. I have this rice steamer that does a great job of boiling eggs with no effort whatsoever and it's quick protein to start my day, which is important for the preggers.

I'm also going to try to have a salad a day, so I have 3 types of lettuce in the fridge and bought some slawish mix that I'm going to use today to have a chinese salad for lunch. Since I'm being so healthy and domestic today, I started dinner this morning in the crockpot - curry beef and vegetables. Mark's going to be shocked when he gets home and all the food's already cooked, house perfumed with the aroma of home cooked meal.

I already drink tons of water, and the fridge w/the auto water dispenser helps, but the growing belly makes you feel full like you don't have room for more water and the having to pee every 20 minutes is so annoying that it's tempting to do the wrong thing and not drink as much water. But hydration is SUPER important for the babe, so I've kept it up. I did yield to the temptation to stop taking iron temporarily. It sort of made me sick, I'd belch iron supplement for the next four hours and it definitely doesn't help with constipation. And when I learned that it's not hurting the baby (he's gonna get his, by any means necessary) it's just hurting me, I stopped for a couple of weeks. Then we got some other routine tests and my iron level went down to 10, so I sucked it up and now I take the iron, in addition to the iron already in the multivitamin which I've been great about taking. In general, the baby gets its nutrition - your body is dedicated to feeding it. It's you who suffers if you don't get enough of the right stuff. A lot of women half teeth problems or lose teeth during pregnancy because the baby takes all of their calcium and leaves none for the mommy. Needless to say, I make sure to get enough calcium!

But it takes a lot of discipline to eat well. And this trimester is all about the baby's brain growth (more Omega 3's and fish) and fattening him up. So I've got to be extra on top of it. It's funny, I don't eat a lot, am not hungry that much and haven't had cravings since the middle of the second trimester. So I'm not even that food motivated anymore. But, I have taken to Jack in the Box strawberry shakes and cherry Slurpee. I have a slight increase in the need for sugar, but other than that, same old me.

Xmas and Baby stats - 28 weeks - Pics added!

Baby presents from Mark's folks: onesies, stretch mark lotion and a Bob Marley inspired lullaby CD:

Xmas was good despite a couple of inconvenient mini-scares: I had crampy bad pain for the whole day and Max got inexplicably ill and wouldn't eat, drink or move and screamed bloody murder if you picked him up or touched his back half. I thought it might be a flare up of pancreatitis since we found him eating an avocado, dropped by a squirrel from the neighbors backyard into our yard.

But our vet wasn't open on Xmas. Normal. But she's not open until January 5th! Okay, I might need to find a new vet. I love her dearly, but she's very prone to closing for personal stuff for long periods of time and not only do you not have access to blood tests and records (meaning you'll have to pain someone AGAIN if the dog's sick while she's out of town) but we buy our dog food from her and can't get it when she's closed. It's not normal food you get from a pet store, so it's an issue.

After much grinding, I found a different vet on the 26th and he gave Max a steroid shot in his back and took x-rays and said he has a disk that is beginning to herniate. So out came the stairs for the sofa that Chantel gave me. We had to ferret them out of the garage, but after he got better (fairly immediate after the shot) he got overconfident and wanted to jump on the sofa. We did our best to block him and kept moving his dog bed into different spots, but every now and then he'd catch us off guard and hop up. Needless to say, he's feeling no pain. He's on oral steroids and is healing his back.

Despite all the nonsense, we went to a friend's house for Xmas dinner and had a ball with their kids who range in age from 4 to 14 approximately. It was great. I didn't have to cook, which was really good considering I wasn't feeling great. We almost didn't go, but Max had appeared to perk up throughout the day and didn't deteriorate again until the next morning, so we felt okay leaving him. We didn't stay too long and when we came home, Max seemed a little better.

Xmas day was the day baby Miles decided to do a little descending into my lower uterus. My body wasn't really ready for this, so I had a lot of pain and cramping that day and the day after, but I think it was intestinal cramping, not uterine. I also had what seemed like Braxton Hicks contractions, but we can't really test since the front left of my belly is already hard from the fibroid, you can't tell if it's hardening because of a Braxton Hicks or if it's just the baby moving underneath the fibroid, pushing it up and making the stomach temporarily tighter. I got a little concerned, but finally felt better on Sunday and decided to call the OB on Monday morning to ask if this was normal.

When I called the OB this morning, the nurse didn't like my symptoms last week so they called me in. Everything checked out, but she told me if it happens again, I should go to the hospital! But today, my cervix was nice and tight and long, so those were both really GOOD things. I think was considering putting me on bed rest, but since I don't work a 9-5, she didn't think it necessary. I've only been teaching one day a week since I've been pregnant, so it's not strenuous at all, just a bit of driving to my students.

Baby's getting into position, lower and head down, but he's not too low, so it's all good. And he's been much kinder with the kicks since Sunday. He was merciless on Xmas Eve, Xmas Day and the day after. I mean, you could see his kicks and such from across the room with me wearing clothes. But now I'm getting gentler motions. Thank you baby. It's disturbing when you want to sleep, but I mostly like it because I know he's thriving with all that motion. You're supposed to do kick counts from week 28, which I'll be as of tomorrow, but so far, I don't need to count. He's moving so often all day, he's clearly above the 10 kicks in 2 hours range, which is the minimum recommended activity.

All the way around in terms of statistics, we are doing great. My belly is 40.5" around. The baby is a nice good heavy weight so far - probably between 2 and 2.5 pounds. I tested negative for gestational diabetes on the routine test, so he's thriving and so am I, but I realize that we are entering the third trimester and here's where the real stuff begins!

Here's a listing of what to expect from weeks 25 - 28 that I found on the web.

Pregnancy: 25-28 Weeks

Changes Your Body Will Experience

• Strong and more frequent fetal movements
• Lower abdominal achiness which is related to the stretching of ligaments
• Difficulty sleeping
• Braxton Hicks contractions
• Leg cramps
• Backache
• Constipation
• Heartburn
• Varicose veins and or hemorrhoids
• Mild swelling of ankles and feet
• Shortness of breath

I have all of the above except the last two, and I just got a lot of the newest symptoms last week in week 27.

Pam's visit this weekend - Pics of her and me and Mark

My sister zipped into town for a quick visit. She was traveling with a friend and we had the afternoon together today and then she zips off again tomorrow for DC and work on Monday. She wanted to go to our premier swap meetish type place, Santee Alley. It's the wholesale district and it's got everything and it's a lot of fun. You see everything from crap, to knock-offs to the exact same stuff they sell on Melrose, just at an extreme discount. It's arranged into sections - there is a street that's just accesories, several streets of women's wear, etc. I've never been in the men's section.

Here's the catch: it is a swap meet. It is craptastic. You're going to be among the unwashed masses. The streets burst with folks, lots of Latinos and Mexican food. There are a thousand little street vendors with teeny carts, selling hot dogs, or pupusas or ice cream. There are almost no bathrooms to speak off, you park a couple of blocks away and just walk through this virtual outdoor mallish area.

I developed a defensive stance, with both arms held rigidly out, so that anyone bumping into me would catch a fist first before catching my belly, but really only one man careened into me the whole time. Considering how many people were out there, that's amazing. Pam was usually walking ahead of me, running interference. It was funny, she was very protective and nurturing with me - always checking if I was tired, not making me walk far, leaving me sitting at the food court while she ran up and down the street, etc.

I wonder if it was the Indian Tikka Masala (yum) that led to my little dizzy spell I experienced later. We were in a store, hadn't been out long at all, and I all of a sudden felt like I might faint. Having never fainted, it took me a bit to even understand what the bad feeling meant. But I caught on and went to sit outside on a step. As soon as I did, the cold outdoor air made me feel better almost immediately. I took off my jacket and scarf and surmised that I had probably overheated. I don't know if the semi-spicy Indian food got my insides warm because I didn't consciously feel hot. I'm the queen of cold. But either the food helped me get hot, or it was simply not good-for-me food and made me sick. So we walked around cautiously to just a few more stores before we left. Didn't really make a difference, the bag of her purchases was SO big
that it was hard to navigate and she was getting sick of the crowd anyhow, so I didn't feel too guilty about being fragile and ruining the shopping. Good booty was gotten by all - we really got some bargain stuff that was great. She bought me a really cute purse and I bought a pair of earrings.

We went back to my house and I showed her around and she saw the house's promise with all the crap still hanging out. Okay, not all the crap, we're down to only about 5% of stuff that should be put away, still out. It's hard finding a proper home for everything, especially clothes with the lack of closet space having moved from an apt with two wall to wall closets in two separate rooms, into a normal, older home with 3 small closets. All the bedroom closets combined here, don't equal one at the apartment. It's going to take a little creativity, but there's lots of other storage space, just not so much for clothes. I have the baby's closet full already and he's not even born! And that's with all my non-pregnant clothes bussed out of the house, into boxes in the garage. Just coats and jackets alone take up a lot. I've got some strategies in my head that involve Ikea...

Pam took pictures of me and Mark in the yard, and Mark took some pics of me and Pam. I look like a stork standing next to her. I'm surprised I never felt for it when she told me I was adopted as a kid. I guess I look like my parents even though I don't look much like her. I don't how we're going to get the pictures to my dad - he's only mildly internet friendly, but way better than my mother was. Mark's mom is a little hipper than both of my. My dad's a business man, so he can always have his admin at work do stuff for him, so he only has to halfway get it.

Baby kicking video #1

Things are going well.

Today our new motion sensor lights were installed! Yippee! Gate was fixed, blinds in bedroom fixed, bathroom heater cleaned out, yaddah, yaddah. Found a new space heater that doesn't beep. We had a tower ceramic space heater that drives Max crazy. It beeps when you press any button to turn the temp up or down, turn it on or off. Max hates it so much, he runs away. So on the winner that I got today. It does about the same thing as the Lasko heater, but without the beeps.

Life is looking up. My sister's coming to visit for 1 day, but that's better than nothing and she'll get to see me pregnant in the flesh. Got a sofa slipcover to cover the godawful southwestern lodge themed sofa they left behind. Mark bought some throws to camouflage the jean/denim sectional other sofa they left as well.

Got some videos of the baby kicking. It takes a lot of luck to capture it because he somehow knows when Mark's around now, and stops. Or if I pick up the camera, he stops. There is some way that he knows, I don't know if my muscles tense, or my breathing changes, but whispering doesn't help fool him, neither does talking more - I've tried it all.

Computer still dead

I have lots more house photos I could post, but they are on my dead computer that's still at the mac store. It's been slow going - I haven't gotten my office up and running since I have no equipment to use out there and before that, had no internet. A time to reflect, huh?

The HMO problem is almost fixed. My cell phone bill this month is going to be exorbitant since all the utilities people are calling me on my cell. And my home phone, the temporary one at least, gets about 5 telemarketer calls a day. I haven't given the number out much, since I'm hoping my old number comes through this week, but I almost ignore the home phone since I know that no one real could be calling, and sure enough, it's always telespam. It's funny, Mark's really concerned now when he hears the phone ring and jumps up to answer it, now that it's telemarketers, whereas when we had a number that REAL family and friends called on, he never answered the phone and barely twitched when it rang! Maybe the placement on the phones in the house are more annoying and louder or something, it's just ironic.

We had an ant invasion yesterday. Turns out the dog food is yummy and I come home to find the pantry with ants crawling all over and throughout the dog food. The bags have a ziploc enclosure, but it's not always tight and they were in one of the bags in particular. So I spent awhile rinsing the dog food and then rebaking it to dry it after I de-anted it. That's about $36 worth of food and I just bought new bags on Friday, so I refused to just throw it out. Now comes the war on ants.

I have this orange oil that kills them and doesn't poison people, kids or dogs, but I need something stronger to prevent them wanting to come in. A friend suggested something called Home Defense, so I'll have to try it. Whenever you live in a house vs. an apt, there is s much wildlife you interact with. We hear squirrels skittering on the trellis. One day I was a victim of a fly-by from some ridiculous big, badly behaved jay bird who starting squawking from behind me as I walked towards the house from the yard. He was behind him screaming, "incoming" but the feeling of it was more like, "get out of my way," and then he landed on the trellis roof. Most birds go out of their way to not deal with humans, yet this one was all aggressive and came up from behind, swooping way too close to comfort to tell me to get off of his turf. So I found a nice broom handle and went outside to way the bar of the trellis and he squawked and ran off. Haven't seen him since, which is good for him. I was considering a BB Gun! I don't know what to do about the squirrels.

We had squirrels in our attic in Hyattsville, but a) that was our house, b) it was indoors. This is just squirrels cutting through our roof as a shortcut to someplace else, so I don't think it's worth much effort. Just a little unsettling to hear random noises. And houses all have their own sounds that one must get used to. Like the ticking in the vent when the heater turns off, or the humming of something of other. And this house has wood floors and there is always some settling noises and wood expansion noises that happen. I'm getting used to them, but they haven't become so second hand to me that I don't even notice.

Baby boy in here is doing great. I practiced doing kick counts for fun and he does 10 kicks in about 10 minutes when he's up and moving. Very strong boy.

Hopefully my computer will come back soon. I'll keep y'all updated.

PS- the pregnancy nightmares have begun. I've had vivid dreams for months now, but never pertaining to pregnancy until two nights ago. I guess it was supposed to be like in vitro or something, where me and Mark had this premade seamonkey baby that we were supposed to defrost and reconstitute with water. So it was his idea to do it, and I think the deal was that you had to thaw the baby and once it was thawed, reinsert it into your hoo-ha for the next 6 months or so to let it finish growing. So although it was his idea, he went off someplace and I was left alone with these nebulous directions and I think I screwed up and didn't cover the baby with enough water, so I had to come back and keep refilling the sink. One time, I almost washed it down the drain and I was freaking out silently throughout the whole process.

Then it turned out that Mark was no longer Mark, he was now Charlie Sheen, and he was introducing me to all his preexisting kids. Most of them liked me, but the 2 yr old baby girl was scared of me, and I was sure that she could see through me and that she sensed how bad I was messing up with the sea-monkey baby in the sink And then I woke up. Welcome to the dream life of a pregnant woman...

Good news, bad news

Bad news:

• HMO hell - We switched to HMO to save money and it's screwed up from the get-go, can't use my OBGYN at the moment and worst case scenario couldn't see her or sign up to use her until JANUARY! HMOs suck. I've always been PPO in the past, for good reason. Mark's never sick, never goes to the doctor and doesn't understand the difference really since he doesn't use their services, so he wondered why we were paying so much more for PPO and wanted to switch. I was told HMO isn't so bad for pregnancy since you only need 1 referral and after that, it's 9 months with no red tape, but this one mistake signing up has caused me to have to spend about 1 1/2 hours on the phone Friday, 20 minutes Saturday and so far an hour on Monday.
• DirecTv - don't even ask. Talked to the one friend who likes it, didn't manage to hear from the other 3 who hate it before signing up and ending up with a contract that makes me feel like an elderly victim of a scam. Worst company ever, using a 1994 business model, lots of small print, varying degrees of idiots and non-idiots at customer support, and all this to hide a not-so-great product with less functionality than most plain ol' cable. If their product didn't suck, they wouldn't have to trick people into contracts and omit tons of things on their website beforehand.
  
• My imac is dead, I don't have access to several of my email accounts, addresses, old emails,etc.
• Haven't found my answering machine, which I actually need now that I have POTS phone service again. Vonage still hasn't transferred my old number yet - might take weeks.
  

Good news:

• House is starting to look like humans live here and not Katrina victims.
• Baby kick count - you don't have to do it until week 28, but so far, it takes my baby less than 10 minutes to give me 10 kicks (their aim is 10 in less than 2 hours) at his most active time. I think it's supposed to slow down as he has less room to move, but for right now, he's kicking my butt, and I don't mind. I love it!
• Imac is under applecare warranty!
• House phone is now routed to the correct phone jacks - AT&T took a week, but came out and fixed it, probably for free.
• Owners of house have agreed to add lighting to the back office and garage so that I won't trip trying to get to my office after dark which starts as early as 4:45 now.
• Can cook in the kitchen and dishwasher works VERY well.
• LA weather is going back to normal - I can enjoy my patio now and Max can get back to sunbathing in the yard.
  

Pictoral proof that I am not just a walking belly

My friend Kenya rightfully complained that I never include pictures of my face, that it's always just a belly and she personally asked Mark to take more candids. So here goes some pics of me last night right before Mark and I went to a bday party for one of his new coworkers and 1 of me and Mark together at the party.

24 weeks pics

First day of grocery shopping in the new place. Found a closer store (than I'd thought from looking at Google Maps before) and went. Was a little disappointed when they didn't ask if I needed help out to my car. I guess that's why Pavilions costs more than Ralph's, huh? But driving around, I was pleasantly surprised that the neighborhood has more to offer than I'd thought. I'd been west, east and to the glorious south of us, but never due north. North generally takes us to Panorama City aka Mexico, but apparently there's some nice stuff on the border. And Mark and I drove around this weekend and found that in Panorama City, there's actually a lot of fun 'crut shopping' as my mom and dad used to call it. You know, cheap stores with bargains. Yes they look cheap, and smell cheap, but they sell okay stuff.

The tide has finally turned and now it's an adventure getting to learn a new neighborhood and finding shortcuts and highway exits I didn't know existed.

I don't know if the pictures above accurately show how big I'm getting. I think I look smaller front to back in the photo than I do in real life. The baby seems to be just going longer from the front to the back. I'm not getting any wide or higher, just longer. His weight is excellent and I have to take the standard gestational diabetes test in a week or so. So many tests, right? I think this might be the last standard one left...

4th Day at the New House

Doggies are sleeping in their crates, not in our bedroom, just like real kids. They are adjusting to the house well although there is a bit of separation anxiety from when we left them here alone to get stuff at the apartment this weekend. The result is unusually clingy dogs following me around every turn, making sure I wasn't escaping through some unknown door. Today I was home all day and they relaxed and bit and cut back on following me - even went outside a couple of times on their own. They still are unaccustomed to the yard. They are prissy and don't want to get their feet wet on the grass, so I've got to shoo them into the yard or walk out there with them to get them to go. But it gets better each day.

And so does the homeyness of this house. I cleared out several boxes today and the difference really helped. I think a lot of stuff will get put away this weekend and it'll look even more like a house. The first couple of days it felt like we were staying at a lodge or vacation property. But as all our crap entered, then it just felt like some random weird place, not yet home. Even the dogs wouldn't eat because they were scared of where I put their dishes. After a day that I heard Max's stomach growl twice in quick succession, I had to resort to giving them a hot meal (dry dog food microwaved with a bit of chicken broth) that they couldn't resist to make sure they'd eat at least once a day and get used to where they are eating. There's proof that they are getting a lot more acclimated: Max likes to drink water before going for a walk. I told him that we were going outside to go potty and he disappeared around the corner first to get a drink of water. He remembered exactly where everything was and put 2 and 2 together that it's just a slight deviation from him normal nightly regimen, and adjusted accordingly.

The house is really starting to feel like a home now to me as well. The trek to the bathroom at night is automatic mostly, and I remember that I have to wear slippers for the cold bathroom floor, even while only mildly awake.

2nd sleep at the new house

Last night was the 2nd night we slept at the new house and once again, I slept like a baby. Mark usually needs the air cleaner on making white noise in order to sleep, and we haven't even plugged it in here - not necessary.

And we left the bed normal height. At the apartment, we'd raised the beds for more underbed storage, but so far, we've left the bed flat and it's made a world of different in terms of me being able to get in and out of bed on my own. These are all logical things, but in terms of the intangible, I could swear that the actual bed itself feels better! I don't know how it's possible. Maybe it's feng shui or the fact that we've been plum tired by the time we hit the bed (I went to bed after my blog post last night at 2 am) but whatever it is, the house feels good. Less bathrooms than before, colder climate and it still feels amazing. There's something about living in a house, and there's something even better about this specific house. The family who left here, left it with love and maybe that counts for something.

The dogs are super funny. They are averse to walking on grass, especially in the morning, so I have to watch them to rap on the window to tell them no peeing on the climbing vine on the leg of the patio trellis. And they walk politely around the walk to my office to stay on concrete before they find a reason to go back onto grass. Minnie stays out there for just long enough to pee twice and then she runs full speed back the house. She doesn't appreciate the cold! She heads straight back to her crate to go back to sleep. Max lingers for a second before he sees that he's out there alone.

Last night Mark changed the lawn sprinklers from 8:30 to 11:30, halleluiah. We were in mid walk to my office and they came on, and I knew enough to go in to the garage and turn them off, but we hadn't figured how to set the timers to a later time so that the we, and the dogs, would have enough time to our nightly do's before the sprinkler-fest. It's cold here now, so it's not so much fun, but the first couple nights that we got to be here when the sprinkler came on when it's warm were so glorious. All the water in the air smelled like the beach. It was gorgeous seeing the spray and hearing the water fall. I think it's supposed to go back to normal LA weather next week.

The baby kicked tons again at 9pm, not related to a meal. It turns out, it's just his time of night to do his calisthenics. I love it when he kicks. It really hips me to what's coming. It makes everything worthwhile. When he kicks, I remember that I'm not just losing physical capabilities (like putting on socks and shoes alone) I remember that I'm just being a polite hostess and making sure the lil' feller is getting all the space he needs to grow. When I remember that I'm helping somebody get ready for life on earth, it all makes sense. And the patience that is coming to me about needing help doing things will help me remember when I have a little helpless baby, and later, a bossy 2 year who wants to do everything themself - why it's important to let him. Being helpless requires a lot of grace and faith. Being a baby is being in a constant state of grace. Dogs are pretty good at it too. They just trust that what they need will show up. How much more spiritual can you get?

It's good design that you get slowed down in pregnancy, because if you think your life's going to pop back to normal speed once the kid is out, you're mistaken. I better learn now how to slow down and appreciate all the little teeny good things that happen daily since that's going to be the bulk of my life later. The baby slept all night. Or, the baby held his held up. Those are going to be the big wins of next year, so this is good training for me to calm it down a bit.

Small victories - fix it girl makes good!

Imagine not feeling in control of anything and just swinging in the breeze. That's been the bulk of my life since pregnancy. But today I had a near meltdown at the end of our move. We're 98.6% done, which is good. We've only got to get a bicycle, make sure our storage spaces are empty and pick up the vacuums and carpet cleaner AFTER we finish cleaning the old apartment tomorrow. Probably only 1 car worth of stuff and then we're done...at the old place. Great.

Over here, different story. We're just beginning, and I've barely any energy to get stuff out of the boxes and into places. The place is made like Fort Knox, where if you break in, you're trapped because you need a key to get out of every door even from the outside - sort of seems like some type of fire code would prevent that. What's your opinion about that? So everytime we need to go someplace, we've got to find our keys! There's not adequate lighting to get back to my office at night time either. Then some aggressive jayhawk type bird did a drive-by on me and squawked at me to get out of the way as I tried to walk back to the house from my office. He didn't appreciate me being in his way and made a lot of noise to deter me from going toward my own house! A BB gun is looking very appealing at this point. I haven't seen this type of bird aggression since my friend Carla's bird used to dive-bomb me for fun in their house because it sensed my fear.

But here's the capper: we've had no internet or phone for several days here, and I demolished the internet setup at the old place. But one day, I noticed ringing coming from my vacant office as I walked through the yard with the dogs (who don't yet understand the concept of yard freedom - they still need to be virtually 'walked' in the yard!)

It turns out the house was wired for two lines. And AT&T didn't choose to just turn on the line (I sort of asked them to - I was only keeping them because it was supposed to be faster and easier to keep things as they were) that was most recently in use. It had only been off for a week before ours got turned on. Wouldn't it make sense to use whatever the last configuration was? No, instead they revive a defunct line that hadn't been used in 4 or so years that only went to the office. So no jacks in the house as far as I could see and definitely not the jack that the previous home owner had hardwired under the garage to the office so that there was a hard-wired land lined internet connection out there, not relying on a wireless router to broadcast that far. He'd left me his modem and everything.

So finally after a calls to AT&T, 1 disconnection in the middle of the escalated phone call (which wasn't returned by the rep I was speaking to who knew my phone number because it's on the account) I had to call in again, re-explain to level 1, wait for level 2 again. After a 30 minute wait the 2nd time, I gave up. I called Time Warner to see if I could get phone and/or internet service from them without getting their cable and asked 1)how much and 2)when they could get out here to install it. The last thing I'd want to do is threaten AT&T with disconnection when it'd take me 2 weeks to get another company to come fix it. Time Warner could do if fairly quickly and charged a very small installation fee - half of what AT&T charged me to flip a switch from the office with no visit to my house, no modem delivered, and not even the correct line activated. I then called AT&T back, got someone who this time put me through to repair. The repair guy said it was something I could do myself easily.

He told me to find a gray box outside of the house and to switch the wires from line 1 to line 2. Sounds easy enough. Problem #1 - we can't find a gray box. Finally we see 3 little gray boxes that have been stucco painted shut and can't tell which is the phone box at first because it doesn't have the testing jacks he said would be inside, probably because it's one of the oldest boxes ever. How old is it? Well, our service is AT&T, but it used to be SBC. Our box said Pacific Bell on the inside! I hadn't even heard about any Bell companies since I was a kid and they got busted up, so you know the box is like 20+ years old.

Problem #2 - He said I'd need a flat-head screwdriver to get the box open. Nope. Needed a hex-shaped ratchet wrench. We go back to the old apt. to get the tools and think that we've gotten it all, including a set of different hex heads. We get back hours later, tired and hungry. We stop to eat, unload the car and find that the ratchet we brought back only has 2 sized in our tool bin. The mystery set must be still in the other apt. Well, nobody's going back for it now. I go to my neighbor's house, the one I met with a 10 week old baby. She's not home - she's on a hot date w/her husband for the first time since the baby's come since her mom just got in town for the first baby visit.

I then go next door to the house w/the for sale sign. I've heard them clattering about, so I thought the house was inhabited, but I get to the porch and look in and the living room is empty, save for the largest xylophone I've ever seen in my life! Turns out also, that house has been split into two units, has a guest unit that's 650 sq. ft and they are trying to sell it for $699,000. Yeah, right. In your dreams. This is totally unrelated to my quest for internet, but it's just interesting. That's why our landlords are renting this place we're in - nobody's going to get what they paid for their house if they bought it while things were inflated. And you're not getting top dollar for the next year at least, so they'd rather rent it and wait for it to re-appreciate, than to sell at a big loss.

Back to my trek. I then go two doors down and meet a nice latino family named Aquino. They lend me a ratchet set. I HATE borrowing and asking for stuff, but this was the perfect type of occasion to borrow a cup of sugar (in the middle of baking) and also, if I don't meet people now when I need something that forces me out my comfort zone, I'd never bother to meet anybody other than the lady with the baby, whom I connected with for obvious reasons.

By the time I get back, Mark has figured out how to get the box open with another type of tool! Now, Problem #3: we look at the box and it looks NOTHING like the tech told me it was going to. But guess what, now it's past business hours and I can't call back. It have been much help anyhow - I wouldn't have gotten my smart, nice guy back and the box was so complicated, he probably couldn't help much over the phone. Instead of just being two parallel sets of similar looking wires to swap, there are maybe 8 sets of posts, with 4 sets of post having something hooked to them. So there are four possible lines in play and I can't tell what's what. To make it worse, some of the posts have 1 wire connected to them, while other have 2 wires connected. Some of them are solid colors, some are double swirled colors. Nothing's parallel or standardized. I just look at the box, it's now dark enough that Mark's got a flashlight and I see myself doing more harm than good.

The phone company's closed. They don't want to fix it anyhow - they want to charge me for someone coming out to switch the lines although they could've done it right from the office. I think they actually do it on purpose - choosing the least used line at a residence - in hopes of having to send out a tech to make money for the 'repair.' Repair my eye. You're not getting one more cent out of me. I paid $40 a connection fee that didn't connect anything I wanted, and plain old telephone service, POTS as they call it, is so outmoded and outdated anyhow. They charge you for caller id, for call waiting, for long distance even w/in your city. After having had cable and VOIP internet phone for the last 4 1/2 years, I was shocked that they hadn't updated their charges to at least throw some stuff in for free, or promising you some jacks.

So now, I'm sort of livid. All weekend with no internet. Okay, I think, plan B. Let me climb up and take the modem the owner left me and move it to my office, and use a wireless router and see if it can make it all the way to the house, and to Mark's room which is the farthest away. I get up and then find that the power cable is pinned behind one of the many shelves they left us, which is somehow immutably, permanently stuff to the wall. Mark and I discovered this earlier last week. So now, I'm really about to lose it. Even Plan B sucks. I'm helpless and useless and can't do anything. The modem was next to a jack that the owner had used, but now that jack was dead. Modem was trapped. What to do?

After trying to use as many anger management methods as possible - I couldn't just go to bed, it was only 6pm! And I had a friend's party to go to, but couldn't see when or where it was with no internet access to the evite. So I was pissed and unable to take my mind off it. I called the property mgmt company to no avail as well. Finally, I sucked it up, called Canada on my cell phone and talked to the former man-of-the-house and asked him how to liberate the shelf and if they'd indeed used that line last (to find out if AT&T was intentionally using the wrong line, now that I was thinking class action lawsuit seemed likely). He told me how to undo the earthquake bracket that held the shelf in place, what his old phone number was (so I can try to call and ream AT&T on Monday - they aren't used to the old and new residents comparing notes) and he was very sorry they'd done that, but absentmindedly said something about Mark's room having a dual line jack someplace that would access BOTH lines of the house.

Got a phone peeped behind things and saw that indeed he has not a dual-lined jack, but a jack with two separate plugs. Tested the lines, hooked up the modem and voila, it sort of worked. I got an error message that AT&T had disabled my access to internet until I tell them the serial number of this modem and registered it, yadda. They'd given me diddley squat in the way of ids and usernames, so I spent an hour on the phone w/a tech lady, registering the modem and so then I at least had wireless internet in the front of the house and 1 phone jack indoors.

But the whle incident had me already bloodthirsty. In addition to wanting to leave AT&T ASAP, vowing to NEVER get an iphone if I have to use AT&T, I also now aspired to be a phone technician and to know how to wire jacks. I'm tired of moving someplace and having this type of thing happen if there was a prior 2nd line. I've worked around it in the past by buying phones with tons of cordless extensions, but I long for plain old telephone jacks. Something I thought I could look forward to with AT&T.

So now, armed w/internet, I looked online and found some DIY explanations. It turns out my phone box has a mix of old wire colors: black/red/yellow/green and newer wires that are swirled blue/orange/etc. So it still looked like a nightmare to try to fix tomorrow at daylight. Then I lucked onto a page that said that most home jacks are already wired for two lines. All you have to do is switch them.

So I went to the kitchen - easiest access - and opened a jack. I didn't see the colors they'd mentioned, but then saw how to translate them, and switched the wires with Mark standing nearby with my scalpel and sponge. I switched them, stuff a phone in the jack and VOILA! I successfully switched a jack inside the house from line 2 to line 1. No technician necessary, and it seems like it's a lot easier than dealing with the tangle of wires in the outdoor box. So, now, it's time for sleep after a hard day.

Winning at something really gave me back something I'd felt I'd lost in my identity since being pregnant: competence. Today I finally had a situation where mind over matter won and it made me feel really quite good. I'm going to sleep very soundly tonight and on Monday, if I can't talk AT&T into just switching the darn lines, I'll work on switching the other 2 questionable jacks myself, knowing that I can!

Hope everyone's having a good Thanksgiving weekend.

Happy Thanksgiving - Latest ultrasound

Happy Thanksgiving!

Baby weighs a pound and a half which is very good. Doctor was pleased w/all the measurements. Here are the latest 2d ultrasounds. The top one is the face turned sideways (turn your head to the left and you'll see eyeballs) and the bottom one is of his boy-parts. I don't know why the doc was so obsessed with that, maybe it's because he could get a clear shot. I have no idea what else is in the picture, it's a strange angle, but he put a little white arrow pointing to the little peter.

Moving alone is depressing, so is this post...

There is nothing more depressing than moving by yourself.

My day goes like this. I wake up.  If Mark has pre-packed the car the night before with light things I can lift, I can then go over to the other house, carry the stuff into the house. Can't actually put anything away because it would require actual furniture to put it in.  But because we're doing our move backward and the big furniture doesn't come until the end, all I get to do is make a pile in whichever room I think won't get in the way of the movers, who now are moving furniture into nice empty rooms, but now rooms with piles.  So I have to figure where I think the furniture goes and make piles away from the empty spaces where things might live.  Or I just make piles in the dining room or baby's room since there's no furniture for either room.

I get hungry at the new house, where there's no microwave and nothing to eat, so I either have to starve til I get home or go out to Jack in the Box for junk food.

I have to rush home before it gets dark to walk the dogs at the old house, so I've got to beat rush hour.  Then I try to cook if I'm not wiped out.  I then regroup and try to gather more light stuff.  Now if I make a big box of light stuff, I can MAKE the box, but then I can't move it.  So it's just sitting on the middle of the floor, wherever I made it.  

It's pretty aggravating being handicapped AND alone during a move.  I keep seeing things that I could normally lift, but now since I'm pregnant, I can't.  I'm tempted to pick up things I shouldn't, I tire out easily and Mark's not that patient because he's worked all day and then comes home to be a 1 man moving crew.

Once Mark gets home, he packs the car.  We drive eat, he does some work on the computer, then we drive to the other house and he pretty much single-handedly unpacks the truck.  Some days we regroup and do it again, other days, we just do one run.

This is getting OLD.  I've resisted the urged to rebel and to hire one of the bazillion migrant Mexican workers sitting in lawn chairs in front of the U-Haul across from our apartment to either help me move boxes in the house during the day, or just move a shelf or dresser or something so I can put stuff away into something.  Because the worst part is that this move isn't over.  We're going to get out the apartment and then the real work begins at the house.  All the stuff's got to be put away!  I'm so tired of this I don't want to put anything away.  I just want to be there and be done.  It's so inefficient and driving me crazy.  

But it'd be bad no matter what.  Being temporarily disabled is new to me, and not good for my personality type.  If I were the type of person who was always helpless, I'd probably have friends used to coming to my rescue and I'd attract that type of assistance.  But it's usually ME coming to someone's assistance and now that the tables are turned, I'm fairly empty-handed. All my really useful friends are strewn about the country and as a transplant, you have a lot more friendly acquaintances than real friends.  My friends in Atlanta have gone through the same type of thing, moving alone, but as single women, the choice is easy.  Hire movers, period. Or if you've got young, nearby parents, you get some help.  My dad joked about coming to help and I thought, old man, moving me would kill you! Pregnancy is stressful enough without you killing off your child's grandparents!

As part of a couple, all decisions are joint, which means that Mark has the final say. And not working because I AM pregnant means that if I'm not putting money into the pot, I should probably smile and go along with whatever. I'm not a control freak per se, but I normally like having SOME control of my life and when you get pregnant, all of your control is gone.  Control of your bladder, your diet, your sleep habits, your energy level, your exercise regimen, your emotions, your figure, your skin...do I need to go on?

In France, more than a year ago now, I researched home and rental prices on Craigslist, made all these best-laid plans to find a new place WAY before getting pregnant (also planned) and not a single thing happened as it was supposed to.   When you make plans, God laughs.  The economy crashed, our lives stalled and you can't really tell your eggs to wait another year and a half to see if the market's going to rebound.  I wasn't guaranteed the ability to get pregnant easy or to carry to term so all the doctors really urged me to just try it and find out.  Medicine is really just informed guessing. So I tried.  And I've found out that at the very least, I can get pregnant very easily if I want to. Woohoo! One down, two to go (not # of babies, number of tasks required to bring a baby into the world.)  

So now, we're moving at the most 2nd to most inopportune time.   I can't paint and decorate a baby's room - I'm not allowed to handle chemical stuff like paint.  I thought I'd seen movies with pregnant women painting the baby's room, but I guess that's just Hollywood.  I can't move furniture around either.  It's pretty annoying.  The only way it could be worse would be for us to move 3 or 4 weeks from a caesarean birth with a baby.  But our apt. is too small to be able to make it until I'm all healed up from the surgery and then another 4 or 5 months until the baby's old enough for us to want to try and move then.  

Once the house is together, it's going to be amazing, though.  We now have a room for the baby.  We have room for people visit the baby and all.  By Christmas, this will all be a distant memory.  But for now, I'm frazzled and on the edge!  This is the last piecemeal move I'll ever do.  I said it before and then Mark and I ended up driving back and forth to Pico Rivera for 2 weeks to get our stuff out of storage, but this time I really mean it.  I've moved about 8 times since college and I'm over it.  The next time, we get movers and it all goes on the same day, or at the very least, everything goes but a mattress and 1 tv if we really need the utilities to be set up and somehow can't manage to get that done before the move date.

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On the baby front, my fibroid seems to be as well behaved as a fibroid its size could be. It's grown an inch or two, but it's not degenerating or hurting yet, but I still have to be mindful or it's existence.  Today at the perinatologist, he couldn't give me a good 3d of the baby's face because the baby doesn't have a lot of space in the womb and was too close to the uterine wall to get a good picture.  I've still got 4 months to go, so I ignore everybody's well-meaning, but ill-thought out advice to get a job or pretend like I don't understand what a high-risk pregnancy entails.  I tread the line of trying to not SOUND handicapped, while realized that I actually sort of am and am heading towards more and more limitation as time goes on.  It's like a slow curtain of dread unfolding as you lose the ability to do more and more things each day.  I can paint my toenails if I splay my feet out sideways behind me (I'm sort of a contortionist).  I can tie my shoelaces if I have any.  But I have to least the dogs with them on the sofa - can't bend that far.  I can pick up things from the floor as long as I'm allowed some time and the right to grunt.  But I see it coming.  It's getting harder each day.  I get stuck in a position on the bed and have to do about 3 pivoting moves to get up and out of bed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.  I have learned to eyeball the depth of chairs when I go someplace foreign. If the seat is too low, I should just stand.  Every week there's a new level of complexity as one of my faculties becomes less accessible.  I had a friend who said she'd like to get pregnant to have the experience and me and her mom were like, if you're doing it for that reason, don't.  It's not a cute science experiment, so unless you have a serious, unwavering desire to bring a child to earth through YOUR body, just skip it.  If you decide you want kids later, you can always adopt, so unless you've been pining for a baby your whole life (I've wanted one since I was a kid), don't feel pressured by society to have a birth child.  Also, I do believe a lot in nature more than just nurture, so I really want to have my own biological kiddies.  I can't wait to meet Miles w/his big eyes and a mix of me and Mark's features and intellect and sensibility.  The kid's going to have a wicked sense of humor, I'll tell you that for sure.

He's still gaining weight well - weight more than a pound, is VERY active, is sized correctly and according to the doc - well-endowed at the moment.  Only a male doctor would notice and mention that!  It was funny, yet ridiculous!  I'll try to post an ultrasound pic if I can find time to scan it or take a picture of the picture.

I might not write another post 'til this weekend when phase 1 is complete, so Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Packing, moving, packing

We spent the whole weekend moving, a bit at a time.  I had to wait around for hours on Friday for a repairman to do the final walkthrough repairs on the house, then the Direct TV guys was 2 hours late for being 2 hours early (don't even ask!) today, so not as much stuff got done as could have, but I'm still very satisfied with what we did.  Today, we took the dogs back and they had a ball once again.  They are instantly at home, no conflicts, no memories of the past.  They just picked a spot on the sofa the folks left behind and hang out.  

I cleaned the fridge, lined the kitchen cabinets with contact paper and put some stuff in them. Emptied a couple of boxes of bathroom stuff into the bathroom cabinets and brought the boxes home to re-use and the coup de grace: did the laundry!  Woohoo!  Laundry in a house.  Laundry with no quarters.  No restrictions on the minimum size of the load.  No psychic timing challenges, trying to guess when the laundry room is going to be empty, or being frustrated that somebody's wet laundry's been sitting in the washing machine for 30 minutes!  We have a REALLY nice front loading washer with so many choices it overwhelmed me temporarily.  I got to dry my delicates the right way too, checking every so often so that nothing got hot.  Can't do that with a commercial dryer - it automatically deducted about 3 minutes every time you opened the door, so you'd have to just leave it alone.  Some things would be burning hot, other stuff still damp.  Not any more!

There are so many simple joys we have to appreciate at this house.  It was freezing on the inside on Friday, and so I got smart and went and sat in the sun on the patio for 10 minutes.  Voila, instant heat the old-fashioned way.  Got some Vitamin D while I was at it. Doing laundry, not having to walk the dogs, watching the dogs romp, a refrigerator with an ice maker and a filtered cold water dispenser in the door!  Nirvana.  We'll save a lot of money on bottled water, I'll tell you that.

I'm letting go of some perfectionism and just going more with the flow.  I'm not that concerned that I'm putting stuff in the utmost "right place."  I'm just happy to get it out of a box and into the new house.  If it needs rethinking or reorganizing, I can do that later. (Well, no I probably can't redo it later, I'm getting more pregnant by the day and even bending over is hard, but what the heck, nobody ever died over inefficient placement of bathroom products.) Mark and I did, however, try to carefully think out the placement of furniture within the rooms.  Me and the handy tape measure have been measuring everything to see where things can and will go.  And we had to have a clue for the cable guy so that we'd know where to put the outlets.  He was a little frustrated because we only had 1 tv at the house, and we'd brought that especially for him.  Why have a tv there if there's no cable and no bedroom furniture and no tv stand?  But he said he could come back next weekend to program the remote for the other tvs once they are there.

The baby's been quiet this weekend.  Still some kicks and some flops and moves, but I think he's active when I'm not and vice versa.  I usually feel him most when reclining on the sofa after a meal and doing nothing.  I think all the moving around lulls him to sleep.  I've got an appointment on Tuesday with the good perinatologist and if I can find a VHS tape, I can record the visit and the ultrasounds.  They don't do DVD because it'd take to long to burn it afterward.  My first chicken-hearted doctor always gave you a dvd, but then again, he also gave you a heart attack with his habit of pre-worrying.  I think most doctors are so cautious and concerned today because they don't want to be sued, not because there's such a likely of anything wrong.

With Mark at work tomorrow, I wonder what's left that I can even carry to the house?  Maybe some more clothes on hangers.  All the books, cds and DVD are there already.  Well, there are probably enough boxes that Mark left me from this weekend that I can unpack.

I'll have to take a picture of the baby's room - it's sort of funny.  It was a boy's room before, so there are baseball and soccer ball door handles and these solar system switchplates.  I might need to switch that up a bit for our baby, but it's still kind of cute in a hokey way.

I've lived in houses before, even owned one, but I don't think I've ever been so grateful to be in one as I am right now.  So far, for both me and Mark, this house is Thanksgiving and Christmas come early.

Got the keys to the house...

Okay, we have the keys to the house and are SLOWLY moving, I mean S L O W L Y. Mark doesn't want real movers until the weekend after Thanksgiving, so as of yet, we take stuff over after work, leave stuff for me to unpack the next day. All I can really lift is books and clothes, so that's it mostly. And I can't take anything that must either go in a big box, or have a home once it gets there like DVDs - they'd need the appropriate furniture to house them at the very end. However, they left us a BUNCH of bookcases, so I get to put the books in them.

The top two shelves of all of the glass-doored cases are glass and have an overhead spotlight for brick-a-brack.  I think my precious rock collection is going to retire from the glass coffee table, where they can be sniffed by dogs and touched by crawling toddlers, to the lighted shelves. It's great timing.  Some of the rocks are toxic, since they are natural and not polished or sealed.


I'm too tired to talk, so here are some sneak peeks at the new house:

Patio with cute overhead beams w/climbing vines and white xmas lights.

Oversized cactuses on the side wall of the outside office.

View of the yard from the patio.

Door to my office - she left lots of western themed decorations, kokopellis and suns and moons.

What was I saying again?

I've finally gotten the absent-minded-mama complex I've read about in pregnancy books. I wasn't sure that it was really a phenomenon, or at least one that would strike me until yesterday when I went out bright and early, smiling and chipper to walk my dogs with the garage door opener and two ziploc baggies in my hand. By the time I got from the garage gate to the front door, I realized what I didn't have in my hand: house keys! I'd left the apartment without keys. Sort of a big deal. So I high-tailed it right away to the intercom at the front door (didn't have a cell phone with me either) and hoped to catch the apartment manager before he left for any errands. Luckily, he was there and I just had to wait a couple of minutes for him to come down and let me in.

Big deal, one forgetful episode, right? Then today, I had an appointment with my obgyn and I'd fueled up pretty well - drank some orange juice and water before going in. They always need a urine sample, which they check for protein, sugar, etc. routinely. So I have my appointment and when it's time for me to go to the bathroom, I do just that: go to the bathroom. Not in my little cute cup with my name on it! So now, I'm left pee-less. What to do now? So I tell them that I'll come back later, but then I see that I have half a bottle of water left and I'm not in much of a hurry because I saw the doctor within 20 minutes of getting there - a first for me at that office.

I'd brought 2 books and planned for a major stay. So now with extra time to boot, I drank up, stayed put and wished for the best. After a couple of chats with other patients, the waiting room started to overcrowd badly. Turns out the other doctor was busy delivering a baby and my doctor was handling both of their caseloads. Luckily, I got the very first appointment of the morning, so I was unaffected.

However my brain seems to be affected by the baby. I'm going to have to tie little ribbons on my fingers now to make sure I don't forget things, or have little checklists before leaving the house. The difference between pregnancy amnesia and normal forgetfulness is that usually, if I'm forgetful it's because I'm thinking about something intently or upset. But lately, I've been blissfully ignorant that I was doing something illogical until about 2 seconds after it's done. I remembered the door key before getting far from home, but after locking myself out. I remember the urine sample after flushing, yet before leaving the bathroom. It's as if my brain is out of order and the misplaced thought is only about 20 seconds behind at worst.

Well, hopefully tomorrow I'll remember to bring everything I'd planned to bring to my new house. I do the walk-through with the realtor tomorrow. Luckily for us, he had to go out of town later in the week, so he volunteered to give us the keys early. Woohoo! I'd been saying all weekend that I wished we could get in earlier, but it didn't make sense to pay for a lot of overlap, considering that we had to give 30 days notice here. So my prayers were answered and we get a couple of extra days. We'd already snuck into the backyard with my ailing lemon trees this weekend. My trees were doing amazingly well in our extra bathroom here, until I fertilized them 2 weeks ago. Leaves started dropping like crazy and the weather changed as well, giving them less light and lower temps. My grow light wasn't helping enough either, so I asked them to please hold on until we got into our house. Mark thought they looked pretty sorry and suggested we take them and put them in the yard someplace where they could get REAL sunlight, so we did. I'd hoped the gardener wouldn't mistake them as something left behind and poach them, but we'll be in residence by the time he comes now.

Tonight, when I spoke with my father, he seems inordinately amused with me saying that the baby was "kicking my butt from the inside out" with all the punching and kicking. For some reason, the idea of a rascally, mischievous little boy thrills him. Mark rebuked this and told me sternly that we do NOT have a rascal in there. Spoken like a true father, huh?

It's nice that a baby is a pleasing thing to me and Mark, but it's even nicer that by his mere existence, this child thrills other folks as well. Both the grandfathers are getting excited. Mark's mom is pleased, my sister is making plans for all sorts of "revenge spoiling" (don't ask - I'm not sure if I understand it yet, she just said it) and my aunt and friends are also pretty thrilled, so it's nice to enjoy this along with other folks. People on the street smile at you and are much more interested in the fact that you exist, once you're pregnant. In short, the world becomes a lovely, lovely place in lots of ways.

Bellyvision

Mark and I watched the wave on bellyvision last night. The baby started visibly doing the wave in my belly at about 10pm. Mark remarked how it’s usually the same time of night 9ish or 10ish when the baby gets active. This trend being only about a week old, since we didn’t start noticing the kicks and stuff as a REAL phenomenon until maybe last Wednesday. Friday and Saturday the baby was quiet, although I felt a couple little poofs in a new section of my belly.

Sunday, the baby was back to kicking the regular spot, first while I was out eating cinnamon roll french toast (heavenly) w/my friend Trish and her mom after church. Then later at 10, more rolling and kicking.

Then later, I heard a rumbling stomach, but I wasn’t sure if it was the baby at first, but upon further inspection, the wave wasn't happening near my actual stomach. I wonder if the noise of gurgling stomach wakes the baby and/or riles him? Or does all his disco dancin’ make my stomach gurgle? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Whatever the reason, we’re starting to get hip to little Miles and his ways.

PS - people at church yesterday were evenly divided between Miles and Kai. I think we should just name him Miles Kai Harris and call it a day!

Books and toys and presents

We haven't bought much for the baby yet. Our apartment's cramped as it is, and we have plenty of time, so I've exhibited extreme self control and only bought some pacifiers (which I then found out you're not really supposed to use if you can help it) and 1 baby book, a Dr. Seuss book to read to the baby in utero.

I saw this in a cute little hippie restaurant in the Valley that also has a gift shop/bookstore. I got it when I was about 9 weeks pregnant. That was soon after my gynecologist stopped freaking out about everything and actually congratulated me on being pregnant.

Recently, Mark came home with this:


It's got a stuffed bunny on the inside, tethered to a rope and you move it into pockets on each page, putting the bunny in a new scene.

So today, I gave in and bought the baby his 3rd book. Now the baby can hear now and after Mark and I have read the same book to the baby a couple of times, I started to want at least one more book (Sleepy Bunny needs an actual child out of womb to enjoy the visuals, so I'm not counting it.) I'm sure the baby could care less, but I felt silly repeating the same story and thought, "can I make it through four more months with this same book? No way!" So, today, I was out with my friend Trish and gave in to this:

It's very readable, long enough to make a baby pass out during a reading and has a little dance bit that you do at the end that'll age well. An older kid will like to get to the dance part. Turns out, Mark is acquainted with the illustrator and actually likes her stuff.

It's hard picking out baby books for a newborn because it' all about the "why" you're buying it. The first and last book above are good books to read to a child to make them fall asleep and even to let a fetus hear your voice. But when the kid's actually out of the womb, they can't see colors, so they've made these black and white picture books. Not sure if I'd buy one - they are godawful. But if you wanted your child to look at a book, that'd be the one to buy.

And there's a whole other set of books that are very rudimentary with one word and picture per page, but those are for kids old enough to try to read along. Right now, we're going all the reading, so really the book care bore ME to death!

The baby's also gotten a few presents. My friend Kenya bought the baby his first cd, lullabies from the Baby Einstein series.

Now that he's going to have his own room, I'm more willing to start getting stuff, but I also don't want to be one of those nuts who buys all this stuff before the shower and gets dupes. So I can exercise control until after the baby shower, and give myself something to do in month 8 while I'm waiting. Lord knows I'll be able to do very little other than shop or eat!

A nice lady from church, Ginny, works at Disney and has already gotten me a diaper bag, and without knowing it was a boy (we didn't know yet either when she bought it) got me the perfect bag for a little boy with Winnie the Pooh on it.


It had a little stuffed bear with a built-in picture frame. I had to promptly hide this from Max who thinks that everything stuff that enters the house is clearly for him. I wish I had his self-esteem. He's living The Secret and he never had to read the book or watch the film! When Mark and I first started dating, he brought me stuffed animals often - helped heal my childhood that was devoid of stuffed things. He didn't know that, he just liked bringing me presents. :) But the presents would fall off the shelf and boom! Max's new toy. Didn't matter how big it was, he'd carry it off in his mouth, which was really funny when he tried to drag this bear that was about 3 times his size.

Note Max in the corner of the photo! Aha!

Mark's parents also gave us a well-timed present: a baby memory book. Originally meant as a Xmas present, Mark's mom decided it'd be better timed to give it to us now. She was right! It has sections for before the baby's birth as well as afterwards.

Mark's going to have to do the actual long-hand writing in the book. It's way too cute for my chicken-scratch. I can do the content, but the artist in the family is going to have to write it out. I always wondered why his handwriting was so much better than mine and one day, watching him hold a pencil like a paintbrush it dawned on me that an artist is an artist in all facets regarding writing and drawing instruments. He doesn't even hold his pencil like the average person.

Once we get a crib (not sure when that's going to happen - the baby will probably cosleep in a cosleeper next to our bed for the first 2 or 3 months before he moves to his own room) I would like for Mark to decorate it with one of his illustrations, like Pam did for Damone's crib when he was a baby. I was only four, but I remember the day that Pam painted a puppy on the back of Damone's crib. I was so impressed. Not only was she a big kid (about 13 at the time) but she could draw and paint too!

Looking back though, I have more questions than answers. I remember Damone's crib being in a humongous room on the 2nd floor of our house, across the hall from me and Pam's SHARED room. Why did my parents put a nursery upstairs when there were two rooms on the first floor next to them? And I called up Pam recently and asked why was a 13 year old sharing a bedroom with a four year old in a room with at least 2 extra bedrooms? She laughed and told me that would have started WWIII at the time. Whatever. Mind boggling. I liked the company - I was scared of the upstairs (but I could have slept downstairs next to my parents as well) and probably scared of the dark too. Besides, they probably needed someone to check me out when I brained myself periodically, falling from a big-girl four poster bed onto the hard wood floor of our room. Once again, why a four year old was sleeping in a bed that high, I'll never know! :)

Bill Cosby said that he thought his parents were stupid and the older he got, the smarter they seemed and the more he realized that it was he, himself, who was the not so bright one. I'm sort of the opposite: I always thought my parents were geniuses (because they are both extremely intelligent, book smart and successful) but as I get older, I get stumped by how they did things back then. My dad can never remember why anything happened a certain way, or that it happened at all, and you wouldn't want to ask my mom at all!

I think it's great that all these memories of my childhood have started to flood me as Miles' birth comes nearer. It's a great time to reflect on what I'd hope for him and to remember what the best moments were and what I'd skip in retrospect.

One of my fondest memories of early, early childhood was sitting in the rocking chair with my mom, back with those old Jenny Lind chairs with the humongous curved rails at the bottom. The impressions of early childhood aren't always clear, more like watercolor pictures. But remember the calm and the joy of being held and rocked in the rocker. So for sure, I'm getting my baby a glider for his room at some point. And the new house has a outdoor bench glider on the teeny front porch, near hummingbird feeders, so we can do the outdoors as well.

My childhood memories before the age of 6 were mostly near bliss, so I'd like to replicate a lot of that for our baby, but even better. Phew! Six years that I can just follow the template of what my parents did (minus the bizarre room arrangments) without having to think. Yippee!

I'm off to bed at 9:45 like an old lady.

Catch you later.

P.S. - Thanks for all the yummy little presents, y'all. :)

The Organ Relocation Project aka Pregnancy

Okay, finally found close to what I was looking for, in terms of showing where my organs are located now that baby is taking up most of the space:

This PDF diagram, showing organ movement during pregnancy is great- shown below as as jpeg.

This 2nd one is also good:
Originally from this original link

This animated one on the right hand side of the flash animation from the following link http://www.umm.edu/pregnancy/000088.htm is just OKAY. It shows the growth of the baby, but doesn't really show how the stomach relocates north and the intestines straighten out along the back of the baby like the PDF does.

The reason I wanted to know and I'd think ANY pregnant person would want to know is that it's hard to guess what you're feeling when things start moving around. You can't tell what's gas, because it takes you a bit to figure out where your intestines actually are! Stomach gurgling? Well, I'm not used to my stomach being so high up under my ribs. But now, seeing it on a diagram helps me know what took me 4 months of guessing to figure out. If I feel movement from high to low, it's got to be gas because although the baby flops around, it stays in the same general area. The intestines are the only thing that exists both above the uterus and below where the baby is. And so far most of my kicks seem to be actual kicks and not punches if the baby is indeed head down when it happens because he's always kicking the middle to top right of my upper stomach.

Mystery solved. Now why didn't I see drawings like this in any of the bazillion pregnancy books I've been reading?

The gourd and the kickfest

Okay, I felt two more kicks later on in the day on Monday. Once again, only with my hand on the outside of my belly. I haven't felt the kicks from the inside yet.

It's time for new belly photos in commemoration of 21 weeks, and here they are. My stomach looks like a gourd!


I can't wait to get new ultrasound photos now. The baby's getting bigger at a quicker rate and it'd be great to see the new developments. I feel little flutters now and then, but I'm not sure if that's the baby or just gas bubbles. I think the difference is if it's a quick jab and up fairly high, it's probably the baby, if it's slowly moving and rising or falling, it's gas. Those are usually the only 2 moving things in a pregnant woman's abdominal area!

If that's TMI for you, tune out now. Childbearing is graphic and physical, I'm sure there is worse to come. What I really want to see is a diagram of where your organs actually go when they are all squished because your baby's taking all the space in your abdomen. I've searched all over the internet and I find it odd that nobody's done it yet, or that it's not readily available. I find all these sanitized diagrams that show the baby and the uterus, but not a single one that shows your stomach or lungs or bladder.

All is well, I'm sleeping okay and still fairly mobile. Mark wanted us to move soon so that I could still be of help in the moving process, but it's getting close to the cut off time for my usefulness. Right now, I can pack things, but I can't move the boxes once they are packed. Our move date is still 2 weeks away and I'm getting antsy. The good news is that at the new house, in addition to having a room for the baby, we'll have a fenced yard for the dogs and I won't have to worry about walking 2 yanking dogs with a healing C-section scar. So far, 3 doctors have said that it's likely that I'll have a C-section. I have a large, grapefruit-sized fibroid located on the left top of my uterus. It's not in the uterus itself, so I have a shot at a normal delivery, but my main doctor things that the contractions will be "dysfunctional" meaning, she thinks the contractions won't close tight enough to get the baby down and out. So they are planning to let me try, with the thought that it'll probably be a C-section ultimately.

Cross your fingers. Doctors just guess, and they are wrong everyday. I'd rather have a normal birth that takes a week to recover from than abdominal surgery that takes a month or so. And if I need surgery later to remove the fibroid, I'd prefer that to be my 1st abdominal surgery and not a 2nd one.

So far, the fibroid is pretty darn innocuous. It barely hurts and it's in a great location. It's not sharing space with the baby, so little Miles/Kai is thriving in there. But it makes me look huge and my stomach is getting lopsided as the baby grows bigger. So older motherhood (that's what they call it, even though I think I'm still pretty young here) plus fibroid equals high-risk pregnancy. But I've got to say, it's been a relatively easy pregnancy so far. Morning sickness (all-day sickness) didn't last that long and was aggravated mostly by prenatal vitamins! My second trimester has been almost all sweetness and light.

I've seen difficult pregnancies, and this isn't one of them. I DO take it easy, but other than a bunch of acne, it's been great. It's such an amazing experience as you catch on to the gravity of what's happening. There is an actual child in there! You don't really get it completely until you see it move or suck it's thumb in utero. But every single day, it gets more real for us. This time next year, there'll be a little boy crawling around!