Mea Culpa

I realized tonight that it's been almost two months since I las posted. I really have no excuse, other than the fact that I've just been too damn lazy to actually do much lately other than work and sleep. Actually, that's not entirely true; I've been working on a huge freelance project for the Seattle Children's Museum that I just finished up the other night. It was such a blessing to be able to have the extra work, especially as The Husband is still job-hunting.

However, there's a distinct possibility that those days are coming to an end-- he's in the running for this amazing job back at the school we graduated from. It really is his dream job, so we're praying hard that it all works out the way it's supposed to. It's just a bit crazy because if it does happen, we'll most likely be moving across the country a couple weeks before The Bean makes his appearance.

Not a long post for today, but just trying to get my feet wet back in the blog pond and make a commitment to actially keeping this thing updated. My goal is to liveblog through delivery for everyone who can't be there, so that means I actually have to be dedicated to it beforehand. Time to crack down, I guess.

Aww, I'm loved!

I received this adorable award from Krystal over at Tap That Mom the other day. I'll try to pass this on to some of my favs later this week... right now I'm pretty exhausted. I had a pretty bad fall at work today, and the doctor wanted me to come in just to get checked out, so we had to go to the ER as I didn't get off work until after 9 PM.

Thank goodness, everything is ok, and we got new ultrasound pics of The Bean. The staff was fantastic-- sweet, professional, completely on top of things, and best of all, I was in and out in less than two hours, which involved heart rate monitoring, an ultrasound, and blood workups.

Needless to say, though, it's been a long day, especially because I worked a double shift and have been fighting a rather severe cold/ flu thingy for the last couple of days. I'm feeling better for the most part, but I can't get rid of the cough and stuffy nose, and I think Hubby is getting sick too. So it's off to bed! Hope everyone is doing well in your neck of the woods.

Gratitude.

I'm tired.

I have been all day. In fact, I don't remember the last time I wasn't tired. I work, and I come home to stressful situations, and I don't really sleep at night for more than a couple hours at a time. I stress about:

• the baby being healthy
• gaining too much weight
• Hubby's job situation
• living with my parents
• whatever drama is going on at the moment with various people in my life

And here's the thing... these are all completely valid things to stress about, I guess. I want to stay healthy, it's important that Hubby gets a job, and as much as we love my parents, we don't want to live with them forever. and interpersonal drama is never fun. High school and college are over, people.

However, it's all been piling up, and it all really came to a head today for me mentally. Work sucked. I woke up feeling crappy and flu-y, had to go to work early, and then got shafted by a big party that sat in my section forever, and then i gave somebody the wrong change and had to pay for it out of my tips, so I basically made 2/3 of what I should have. So of course, I had a crappy attitude from the beginning, and it just got worse.

I finally drove home, listening to angry music all the way, sat down and read for a little while, and felt sorry for myself. And then I felt a little mental nudge. A memory popped into my head of one of my tables yesterday.

A young man and woman came in, neither of them over thirty. Both were dressed very nicely; the man was handsome, and the woman was absolutely beautiful. Not physically, but...

She was obviously very ill, or was recovering from illness. Her skin was wan, her face tired, and she was attached to an oxygen pump, the kind you usually see carted around by 75 year old people with holes in their throats. But she had the most beautiful, warm smile of anyone I had ever met.Although it was obvious that she wasn't very strong, and was very tired, her and her companion lingered over lunch, having glasses of wine, savoring their appetizers, ordering expensive meals, and enjoying each other's company. They laughed together; he touched her hand tenderly and she leaned over to stroke his face; they tried each other's meals. She was generous and kind even though she was obviously physically struggling.

I think that dealing with these people,and having the memory pop into my head today, was God's way of nudging me into the realization that yes, things are stressful and crappy right now on a lot of fronts, and it's ok to realize that and be frustrated and stressed and tired-- but things could be so much worse. Michael and I are healthy. He has a few job opportunities that look like they might pan out. We have a place to live and people that love us. My pregnancy has been, in the words of my doctor, "remarkably healthy and low-risk". The attitude is really unneccecary and counter-productive.

We are blessed.

That's not to say that I won't spend the next couple of days trying to stay healthy, both mentally and physically. I don't have to work Thursday or Friday, so I fully intend on sleeping in, reading lots, and just relaxing and making a concerted effort to avoid anything that stresses me out. On that note, Friday should be interesting. Lots of really amusing family dynamics coming in to play, on top of which, Hubby and I have to make dinner for who knows how many people. But if nothing else, I will sit back, observe, and let the chaos happen around me. Eye of the storm.

On a side note, Dad's got a cold-fluish type thingy, so I'm staying away from him, but I think I might have a touch of it, so resting for the next couple days is not a bad thing at all. I keep forgetting I can't push as hard as I usually do. There's a little person floating around my insidey-parts that just does not care whether the laundry gets put away, or if I work an extra shift to pick up some more cash. He just isn't happy when Mommy isn't happy.

Weekend Update

I'm really too tired to even think about being funny right now. The Bean is having a growth spurt, I think, and for the last few days has been sucking all of the energy out of me. Pair that with the fact that in the last week, we went from 85 degree weather to 55 degree weather-- literally, it happened in a time span of two days-- and I had a serious case of the fall blahs.

However, lots of positive stuff has been happening. We went in for my 24-week checkup on Wednesday, and everything is right on track. Good weight gain, good measurements, no complications so far, knock on wood. So that day we also went and did our baby registries for the shower, which my mother is very generously throwing for us/ me/ Charlie Bean on the 28th of October.

(Dude. that's totally this month. Thanksgiving is next month. Christmas is the month after that. And then, a month after that, Charlie will be born. Insane.)

Speaking of registries, that was one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life. Registering for the wedding was fun; that was all just gadgets and toys and upgrades and stuff that we didn't really need, but was fun to have. Registering for a baby... well, one, it makes it even more real. But also, you realize how much stuff this little person needs.

"Well, we definitely want to register for a breast pump."
"But then we need accessories for the pump."
"And bottles! ...Ohmygosh there are literally seventeen different brands of bottles."
"and we need more than one size of nipple....hehheh, nipple." (That was me... I have the mind of a 12 year old boy lately).

Ten minutes later:

"Where the heck are the diaper pails?!?"
"uh, do we need a high chair?"
"DIAPERS! Must. get. LOTS. of. diapers."

Notice how I totally thought about the diaper pail before the diapers? Yeah. Pregnancy brain.



On a completely unrelated note, there is only one thing that is EVER appropriate to say to a pregnant woman when you are talking to her about the physical manifestations of her pregnancy: "you look great/ beautiful/ wonderful/ SODAMNGOOD!"

Not:

• "Oh, you're hardly showing at all!" I'm 6 months pregnant. Don't freak me out about my baby not growing, please.
• "Oh, you're really big for six months!" Oh, you're really chubby for someone eating lasagna. Shut up. ( I had guests say both of the above things to me tonight... two consecutive tables that I was serving. Do I make comments on your food choices or your obnoxious tipping habits? Well...not to your face. And DON'T TOUCH MY BELLY!)
• "Are you sure you should be eating that?" That's between me, my doctor, and the parasite in my abdomen who is telling me that I must ABSOLUTELY have chocolate chips and garlic bread, along with a nice strip steak.
• "When I was pregnant, I never got sick!" Aren't you the lucky duck. Excuse me, I have to go impersonate Linda Blair.

OK, so maybe I'm a little... assertive.... tonight. Blame it on the hormones. (Every time I say "blame it on the...." now, my brain goes, "Blame it on the vodka, blame it on the henny, blame it on the blue tap got you feeling dizzy, blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol, blame it on the ah-ah ah-ah ah-al-co-hol..." Damn you, Jamie Foxx!)

Of course, all of this (except the part about Jamie Foxx) was said much better by the wonderfully hilarious Assertagirl over at Aiming Low. If you haven't checked out Aiming Low, you need to. It's a fantastic group of hysterical (in more ways than one) female bloggers. It is my crack.

21 weeks later, I'm finally starting to look pregnant.

Charlie is growing faster than I can keep up with him. This is actually a very exciting thing, because I'm finally starting to look pregnant. Still, nobody at work actually believes it, so here's photographic evidence that I do, in fact, have a baby and not one too many hamburgers in my stomach. Although, if I did, I might just post a picture up like this anyways to try to convince you that I'm not just chubby.

Note the classic "hands on top and bottom of the belly, pensively looking at the ground" shot. It's even in black and white with sepia tone layered on top. That's right. I'm artsy.



I made the mistake the other night of having a glass of chocolate milk before going to bed the other night. Dude. I totally had a PB and J with it too. And baby carrots. That's right, not only am I artsy, I'm five. And I'm totally craving chicken nuggets and goldfish crackers now.

Er. Anyways. Point being. (cough *preggoADDmoment* cough)

Charlie had his first sugar rush... and kept me up all night. First of many, right? I know. All you moms out there are cackling. I know it.

This morning, I had to be up ridiculously early to go to a mandatory licensing class for work on serving alcohol. Here's what I learned:

• Don't serve booze to drunk people.
• Don't serve booze to teenagers.
• There's no technical law, per se, against serving booze to preggos. You would think... but of course if you refuse service to someone because you think they're pregnant, and they turn out to be... simply Rubenesque... they could potentially sue you for discrimination. Then again, if you knowingly serve booze to a pregnant woman, they can turn around and sue you for causing damage to their child. So... have fun with that one, Washington State.

The point of all this is, it was ridiculously early to be dealing with this kind of silliness, even if it is state-mandated. So I decided to take my one serving of caffeine per day as a cup of coffee, with about seventeen glasses of water. Charlie was doing back-flips the entire class. If nothing else, it kept me from falling asleep. And now he's kicking again, hard. Repeatedly. In the same place. Dude, kid.


Oh! ha. Yes. I got a job. This is news. Blogs= places to put news. Duh. Apparently there is a restaurant out there crazy enough to hire a pregnant chick to wait tables. Score. I was rather flattered, though-- I was one of seven out of 200 people to apply that actually got hired. So I've spent the last week in ridiculously intense classrooms learning about food, Italian wine, and how to write my name upside down in crayon on butcher paper. I still have to do two more follows with other servers and then take a humongous oral test in order to get "certified", but hopefully that'll be by the end of this next week. All in all, things are starting to look up...now to find a job for The Husband.

Because it just won't do to start embarrassing the kid AFTER it comes out of the womb.

There's something immensely gratifying about being in a waiting room for five minutes at the doctor's office, having your name called, and seeing the room full of other patients giving you slightly dirty looks because they had been waiting for half an hour. That being said, today we got our first look at our

beautiful

baby

BOY!

It's good to know that my intuition was right all along... I had a gut feeling that it was a boy since I found out that I was pregnant, and The Boy thought I was a little goofy. I got a good "I told you so" in today at the ultrasound.

Fifteen years down the road my kid's going to pull up mom's old blog on his holographic wristwatch thought-activated I-puter, roll his eyes, sigh, and mutter, "OMG, mom..." except he won't because "OMG" will be tragically 2009 and he would never be caught dead saying anything that uncool. And he will die a little inside at the mortifying fact that his mother put pictures of his boy bits on the internet for the entire world to see. And I will smile in satisfaction, knowing that my age-old right as a mother to humiliate my children has been fulfilled.

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our son, Charles Scott. Hey, 15-year-old Charlie... we love you more than you'll ever know. You've already left your footprint on our lives and hearts.

I feel accomplished... not that it takes much these days.

After eighteen weeks of stress and freaking out, we finally made it to the doctor's office today. Can I just say one thing? We have the greatest clinic ever. Why, you ask? Valet Parking. No crap. They have valet parking at the Women and Children's Pavilion of our local hospital, the one that I happen to be going to for all of the prenatal and actual-birthy parts of The Bean's life.

Just let it sink in. Valet Parking. For free.

That was only, like, the third-best part of the day. The second-best part? The nurse that we dealt with was was the sweetest woman on the face of the planet. We only saw her, because it was just a preliminary appointment, but I was completely OK with it. She was knowledgeable, efficient, and the kindest, most generous and funny person I've talked to in a long time. In fact, it was the day of incredibly nice people. Even the people at the grocery store seemed sweeter than usual. Maybe I've just started looking more pregnant, and people like pregnant women more? I'm sure as hell not going to complain. The nurse also managed to get us in for an ultrasound next Tuesday. I had assumed we would have to wait a while longer, but she called them up and sweet-talked them into finding an open spot for a comprehensive scan.

The absolute best part of the day was that the nurse bogarted the Doppler on the sly and let us listen to The Bean's heartbeat. The Boy was a little freaked out at first because it took her a few minutes to find it--apparently my own heartbeat is incredibly loud-- and The Bean kept moving around. But she finally put the monitor in just the right place, and we heard this incredible, insistent thumping. This kid is strong.

It's such a surreal experience... you intellectually know that there's a baby in there: you've peed on the stick a million times, you've peed in the cup (which, by the way, is not really as easy as it sounds after a while... enough said about that. Thank God for paper towels), you've done the blood tests, the doctors' tests have come back positive-- but it doesn't really seem real until you hear the little thump-thump-thump-thump. A startling affirmation that, all of the sudden, you've accomplished something, you're responsible for something-- there's an entire other life hiding out inside of you. Something in you, and of you, but not you.

I've never felt more accomplished and terrified and thrilled in my entire life. I wonder how I'll feel when I actually see The Bean in person next week.

Sleeping? Who actually sleeps these days?

Certainly not me or The Boy, although I'm pretty sure he's at least getting some amusement out of it. A perfect storm of ingredients has combined in a whirling maelstrom over my bedroom to make an Adam Sandler-worthy slapstick routine storm of epic proportions, with, apparently, highly comical results. This all culminated last night with me flailing over the dog, the hubby, the shoe rack and, almost, a fully loaded bookcase at 3 AM. In the dark. While really, really needing to pee.

Fact #1: I can't sleep on my back or stomach, apparently, during this whole preggo thing. So we rearranged the room so that my side of the bed was against a wall. Great for side-sleeping, really-- it gives me something to lean against and prop me up. Unfortunately, this also puts me on the inside of the bed. Ever had to pee while sitting in the window seat of a plane? OK, so I might only have one person to crawl over, but he kicks. The best I can say is that he probably doesn't mean to, since he's at least half asleep. So I usually try to clamber to the foot of the bed and dismount that way. All that gymnastics training from when I was seven is finally kicking back in. We are going to have to change this system very soon, for reasons which will presently be made clear.

Fact # 2: I am pregnant. If you've never had the misfortune of either being pregnant or sleeping with a pregnant person, here's a fact for you. We pee all the time. All the freaking time. Meaning, I might get up four times a night.

Fact# 3: Our dog is needy as heck. Right now, the rest of the family is on vacation, so she refuses to leave our sides. She drags her baby blanket into our room, and usually sleeps on it, but will occasionally sneak up onto the bed when The Boy and I have fallen asleep. The other night I woke up to her actually laying smack in between us, head half on my pillow and half on his. Most nights, though, she's content with sneaking up and laying on the foot of the bed.

Fact #4: Our room is very crowded right now. Basically, we're trying to compress a one-bedroom apartment into... one bedroom. Granted, it's a decently sized room, with a walk in closet and an attached bedroom, but we have lots of stuff. So our shoe rack is at the foot of the bed, and then there's about two feet of space, and then one of our four bookshelves is against the wall facing it. There's enough room to walk....barely.

Can you see where this is heading?


Suffice it to say... at about three AM last night, the kid started dancing on my bladder, so I pulled myself into a half-crawling position.. and into a minefield. I managed to step on the dog's tail, trip onto the shoe-rack while aiming for the floor, and barely catch myself on the bookshelf, which has a rather alarming top-heavy wobble.

Did I mention that my ligaments are loose, so sometimes when I stand up, my hip pops and it takes me a minute to get my balance? Yeah, both hips decided this would make a perfect time to try to get me to waddle like a duck.

I have never been more grateful for the...extra padding... I carry around on my backside. There might have been some cursing involved. I certainly startled both the dog and The Boy out of a sound sleep. The former started barking her head off, and the latter, after flipping on the light and making sure I wasn't bleeding or concussed and hadn't fallen on the bean, started laughing his head off. Apparently, he finds something about his wife sitting on the floor, blinking against the super-bright energy efficient halogen light-bulb with a four inch heel that had tried to impale her in one hand funny. Jerk.

(At this point The Boy would like you to know that he is, indeed, a wonderful, loving, caring sensitive husband who regularly loads and unloads the dishwasher and promptly gets anything smelly out of range of his very sensitive wife, and kisses the preggo belly and talks to it. Sigh. Fine. He's right. He also made the bookshelf less top heavy so it wouldn't fall on me. Sigh.)

I still had to pee.

Crazy ninja cat-dog

This is Chloe.





Note the aloof bearing, the noble set of the ears, the haughty look in her eyes that tells you she knows you know she's in charge here, even though you pretend to be. Yeah, that's right. See that green leather? That's the couch. The one you spend most of the time telling her to get off of... see how effective it is? She's stealthy though... it starts with a head laid harmlessly on your knee. You have to pet it. Chloe is one of those weird dogs whose fur never really lost the puppy softness, so petting her ears is like jumping into a pile of clean laundry heaped on your bed that still smells like fabric softener...irresistible.





*cough...cough*





Oh, shut up. You know you do it too. Don't be such a snob.





*anyways.*





Net thing you know, she's managed to work a paw up on to the couch beside you. This inevitably gives you a better shot at her head. Then, before you know it, she's got both front legs and her torso splayed out next to you.





Pet, pet, pet.





Somehow, when you're not looking, she's managed to squinch her entire body up onto the couch beside you, flop over on her back, and wiggle around until she's in the perfect position for a tummy rub. She's a freaking ninja dog. And she gets around it by being so damn adorable. I mean, for goodness' sake, she carries around her sleeping blanket in her mouth like a baby blanket.

Ridiculous, isn't it? This picture is kind of old; her new blanket is black and white spotted. She lies on the stairs on top of her blanket, and blends in. She likes sitting on the top step of the stairs leading down to the den, where nobody can ignore her.

I don't know how we got such a neurotic dog. She acts like a cat more than anything else. But she knows how damn cute she is, so she milks it. Today, she crawled up on bed with me (another place she knows she's not supposed to be. My belly is finally starting to pop, and I was rubbing cocoa butter on it in the ridiculously vain hope that maybe I won't get stretch marks (I can hear all you moms out there laughing your post-natal butts off me. Leave me the hack alone). The dog crawled up next to me, stretched out beside me, and flopped her head onto my belly. Awww. Of course you can stay on the bed with me. I'll even pet you and snuggle you up in the blanket. I don't mind that you stretch your legs out so much you nearly push me off the bed.


I'm going to be such a pushover... my kid's going to look at me with big toddler eyes and that will be all it takes. All it takes. That kid will be rolling in toys. I can just imagine trips to the grocery store now if I don't get this under control. Start praying for me now.

If I keep eating like this, it'll be a butterbean.

Mmmm. Butter. Maybe I'll make popcorn when I'm done posting.

What a hell of an introduction. What else can you expect from a crazy preggo lady, though? I have to admit, I've always felt like blogging was a bit self-indulgent (not as bad as twitter, though... don't even get me started on twitter. No love for the tweeting), but I am currently unemployed, four months pregnant, and I'm pretty sure my poor husband is either going to me or himself over the head with a frying pan soon in order to put us both out of our misery, so a dip into the blogging pool might be a healthy alternative to blunt force injuries. There's only so much bitching the poor man can listen to.

So... boy+ girl= bean.

Boy= my wonderful husband Michael. Graphic designer by education, IT miracle-worker by occupation. Although he grew up on rural Long Island, we met in college in Florida. After we found out we were expecting (2 weeks after our honeymoon the test came back positive), he unselfishly decided that we needed to be closer to my family, so we moved to Seattle to actually live with my parents for a while as we looked for jobs, houses, etc. Its like the white Cosby show around here. If you have a business in Seattle, you should hire him. Now.

Girl= me. Sarah. Went to school to be a high school history teacher, because I have a machoistic streak a mile wide. Now, five months after graduation, I am living with my parents again short term (oh, God, I hope short term... I love them, but being married and living in your high school bedroom is weird),have no job yet, and I have no idea what I want to do with my life... other than take care of the Bean.

Bean= the parasitic thing that will be gradually taking over more and more of my womb in the next five months. We don't even have ultrasound pictures yet. Part of the whole unemployment thing is no insurance, so Medicaid is naturally taking forever to go through. Almost there, though, and then I will be doctoring it up as much as possible. I know everyone says some variation of this, but it's bordering on asinine how much I love this three-inch long thing that's taking over my body. The only thing it's ever done for me is give me an aversion to anything fried or sweet, which, pre-pregnancy, were my two main food groups. And still, I have fallen head over heels in babylove. It's affected The Boy too. He kisses my stomach and talks to the Bean and gives me hugs when I feel fat. He made me cry in the car today:

Boy (apropos of absolutely nothing) "you're so pretty..."
Girl: "Thank you.. I'm glad you think so."
Boy: "You don't think so?"
Girl: "...I'm having a pregnancy day."
Boy: "Well, you look beautiful now, and you're going to look beautiful when you're eight months pregnant and waddling. Because you're taking care of the Bean.
Girl: ".........."
Boy: "Ohshit. are you crying? WHY ARE YOU CRYING?!?"
Girl: " ...sniff....that was so sweet....sniff"
Boy: *palmface*

Yeah. I cry a lot. For all of you who haven't ever been pregnant, try combining the worst hangover of your life with the worst PMS of your life, and then stir in the knowlege that in a few months, you're going to spend a day or two pushing a screaming, writhing, bloody creature that you'll be responsible for during the next 18 years out a hole that's usually too small to comfortably fit anything other than a tampon or your husband's youknowwhatimtalkingabout. You would cry a lot too.