There is nothing more depressing than moving by yourself.
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.
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