Fireworks

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As a kid I thought it was great fun to set off fireworks. When my daughter is old enough we’ll probably buy some small firecrackers for her to play with (supervised of course). For now I’d really rather just go downtown and watch the professional fireworks.

I still live in an area where fireworks are legal although legally they’re only supposed to be used on the 4th of July. The reality is that my neighborhood sounds like a war zone two weeks before the 4th and two weeks after. I don’t mind that they’re legal I just wish people would respect the fact that others need to work in the morning and not shell the house at midnight and two am for a month. At 6am Saturday morning, my boyfriend and I woke up to four very loud explosions – not horribly neighborly if you ask me.

If they would actually restrict their bombings to the fourth and maybe New Years, I wouldn’t have any issues with it. It’s not that big a deal for me to sedate the dogs two days a year and keep them in the house. I don’t want to ruin someone’s celebration, but until everyone follows the rules I’m forced to stay home every night lest my malamute starts pulling the siding off the house to try and get in (He’s never actually done that but he does run around the yard too scared to even drink water because he doesn’t want to turn his back on the kids setting off the fireworks.) My husky takes it well (she’s too stupid to be scared) – The malamute on the other hand has had an extremely bad experience in the past with kids actually lighting a whole package of “black cats” and lobbing it at him. Now every year my 120-pound dog shakes like a shell shocked Vietnam Vet at even the tiniest “pop” and he hates little boys.

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Cloth diapers – am I crazy?

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I’ve been thinking about using cloth diapers. Yeah Yeah I know – with advances in technology and ease of use of disposable diapers why would I even want to deal with something like cloth diapers. For once, I’m not trying to do what seems more natural due to environmental reasons, well not really. I’m not afraid of adding some more diapers to landfills – they aren’t as evil as some may think. Many are actually becoming rather green by turning the methane produced into electricity. My “environmental” concern is actually the powder, which turns into a gel when wet, used in disposable diapers to make them super absorbent.

The one of the cloth diapers I’m really considering is the Bumgenius 2.0. I know what you’re thinking – holy cow 17.95 per diaper! That’s expensive! But the one size fits from newborn to potty training age and no covers or extra liners needed. The one thing that I don’t like is the “hook and loop” fasteners AKA Velcro. I used to have Velcro shoes as a kid and I’m afraid that type of closure may not last long. I also read some reviews about the elastic not lasing very long on them. Those reviewers still gave these diapers four out of five stars though. On the upside as long as I do the washing there is nothing extra that Kurt would have to do as far as diaper changes go and he might actually be willing to use them. At this point I have agreed that he can use disposable diapers, I already know I’ll probably never find a daycare that will deal with cloth diapers, so really they’ll be getting the most use while I’m on maternity leave for the first six months – yep I know I’m very lucky I get six months, so I’m taking it! With the schedules Kurt and I are negotiating with our work places Sophia will only be in daycare a maximum of three days a week, so the cloth diapering can still be about 50/50 after my maternity leave.

Using a chart that I found I figured the number of one-size diapers that I would want is 36, so the cost of buying the Bumgenius 2.0 pocket diaper would be $646.20. I used the same chart on some fitted diapers I was looking at (Thirsties fitted diaper). For those I would need to buy three different sizes as Sophia grows along with covers which also come in three sizes. The fitted diapers I was looking at were only $7.75 each which seems a lot better but the total cost including covers would come out to $855.00. The covers were $10.50 each and I figured I would buy the maximum recommended for each size.

The overall cost is higher for the Thirsties and because they’re a fitted diaper and not a pocket diaper they might be harder to get clean.

Ecobaby one-size diapers are the third brand I shall use to torture you. These only cost $13.00 each. They come with snap-in doublers for more absorbency and the closure uses snaps, but they require covers. The total cost for these (using the same chart) comes to $625.50. That’s less than the Bumgenius, but not by much. In addition, according to the same site that sells them they don’t fit very well at birth so I might need to use something else for the first couple of months.

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Pregnancy symptoms and emotional drain

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Ok forget the leg cramp connection. I did it again this morning and I don’t remember dreaming. I’m feeling miserable lately from emotional issues that began last week when a close friend/coworker of mine had a miscarriage to some crappy pregnancy symptoms that are either, coming back or getting worse as I enter the third trimester.

My nosebleeds are back again. I think they were gone for a total of six weeks. I forgot to mention them (along with the fact that I felt like I breathing through a respirator) on my post about my first trimester symptoms because it’s not really that big a deal. It isn’t like gushing – I have to pinch my nose and tilt my head down – actual nosebleeds. It’s just when I have to blow my nose, which in my first trimester was all the time, blood does come out. The closest I came to an actual bloody nose was the three days I spent at a conference in Vegas the first week of last month. I woke up one morning with a stuffy nose so I went to blow my nose and the only thing that came out was blood. I used three tissues – I mention it because I know you live for such details.

The other pregnancy symptom I’m battling is relatively new. I think I’ve had it for about two weeks now, but it truly jumped on my nerves in the past two or three days. I have this almost constant tickle in my throat that feels like there is something stuck. This doesn’t happen merely along with meals and doesn’t get better with fluids – as a matter a fact it can start two or more hours after eating. It feels like I can get rid of it by belching, but that doesn’t actually work. The feeling is worse when I go to bed because laying down causes me to cough and in turn loose sleep.

My emotions from the past week’s events aren’t helping my sleep either though. I keep thinking back to the miscarriage I had nine years ago. I didn’t have a job at the time so I was on state insurance (WIC?). At eight weeks I started spotting and of course went to see the doctor. They told me that it was probably just my body trying to have a period at the same time it would have normally or something like that. I didn’t believe them and so they did a stupid urine test. Of course the hormones still registered because I hadn’t miscarried – I was just spotting. But they didn’t bother doing anything else for me and sent me off on my merry little way. The spotting only lasted for three days and was very very light. Two weeks later I was sitting in my computer operating systems class, and I felt a very cold feeling come over me. I wasn’t actually cold nor was my skin cold to the touch – it was a cold feeling similar to walking into a creepy old house. That night I started cramping up. It was Monday July 13th 1998. At around ten that night I was alternating between lying on the floor and sitting on the toilet waiting for it to come out. Aloud I kept saying, “If it’s going to happen just make it happen.” The “if” was me trying to hang on to the last bit of hope that it wasn’t what I thought. By 11 it had passed in one solid unidentifiable mass into the toilet about two inches in diameter and six inches in length. It doesn’t seem right that my baby had the same burial that many give to a goldfish, but I still wouldn’t know what else to do. I bled for the about the next two weeks.

Everyone at work knew my friend and I are close and that she didn’t want anyone to mention her miscarriage at work, so they came to me on the days that she was gone to give their condolences. That was fine but a few made the comment of, “well she’s still young”. I know they didn’t mean anything hurtful by the comment but to me it’s about as appropriate as commenting at a funeral, “well grandma was old after all”. It’s as if there is no real reason to mourn. Nine years later it still hurts and I still think about what my eight year old daughter would be like. I didn’t actually know the gender I just feel like it was probably a girl. Her name would have been Mikah Jenelle and her due date was February 14, 1999.

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Leg cramp connection

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There seems to be a connection between my dreaming and leg cramps. Last night I dreamed I was in high school again and had just started at another new school. I had located the girl’s locker room and was early for my gym class. The locker room was located down an empty hall behind a thin but heavy steel door immediately followed by two other doors, one literally after another. I sat on a bench across from another early bird comfortably stretched across the bench on her belly resting her chin on her crossed forearms. Apparently I was in a class that was generally just for freshmen and I was a junior. The girl didn’t understand that I wasn’t just new to the school but also to the area. Finally she got it and asked me if I had left a boyfriend back home. I told her, “no but I already have one here.” I guess I was dating a 23 year-old. At this point, I started to wake up and that always means it’s time for the morning stretch – OUCH! I stretched both legs at the same time. Oh why did I do that?! Why did I do that?! Why did I point my toes? I’ve been so good about it lately.

Just for the record, in real life I attended three high schools. I had left a boyfriend at my first high school and I turned down the 23 year-old that asked me out when I was a sophomore attending my second high school. I guess I don’t dream too far outside reality.

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Adventures in Hand-Eye Coordination

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Is sloppiness a side effect of pregnancy? I’m not usually this clumsy. I just made myself some toast and I think the counter received more of my apricot preserves than my toast did. And yesterday I hope none of my co-workers noticed my shirt after lunch. With a few exceptions, I’m generally not a messy eater. Tostadas and Ribs are the only two foods I can think of that I tend to wear as much as I eat. I reserve them for my grubbier – there is no one here to impress days. Now I can’t even eat a piece of fruit without squirting the juice all over myself. Thankfully the fruits I’ve been eating dry clear and don’t leave stains. But fruit juices weren’t my problem on Friday, nope. On Friday I ate lunch and apparently had a hole in my lip or a tracheotomy that I’ve never noticed before. Sometime after eating I got up to use the restroom and saw that I had a creamy white streak down the front of my black shirt. Oh isn’t that a lovely site possibly belonging in a porn movie! It was just cottage cheese – really I swear!

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Things I can’t do

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On Monday I discovered two things I can no longer do. The first is getting off the couch without using my arms to help lift myself off or rolling. I tried to do this without the help of my arms and my stomach muscles (what’s left of them) felt like they were going to split. The other thing was sit in a chair with my feet on the seat and my thighs against my stomach – it simply doesn’t work. My stomach is a greedy ba$t@rd and won’t allow my legs to get that close to me.

Today I had a doctor appointment. I now weight 158 pounds. For those keeping track – I have gained 28 pounds and I’m only on week 25. How on earth does one gain 28 pounds eating fruit? The doctor took out the measuring tape and announced that my uterus was in the right spot – Well that’s just fabulous because I was worried that half of it was in my thighs and @$$.

The doctor also said that according to my ultrasound the updated due date for Sophia is September 27th.

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Where are all my pink flamingos?

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I noticed this morning in the shower that I have lost my bikini line. I have no idea why loosing my bikini line made me think of a line from an old Jeff Foxworthy skit for the title of this post, but it did and so I went with it. It’s possible that I have also lost my marbles. Now back to my line. I know I should start looking where I last left it, but I don’t remember putting it anywhere new. I’ve kept it pretty much in the same place for 31 years! Unlike my hip bones my bikini line was there just two days ago. I know this because I remember checking just to make sure. I could see my hip bones disappearing almost right away and I knew they would eventually disappear completely. It used to bug me that my hip bones stuck out further than my stomach – almost like shelves. I always thought I looked like a starved cow with my bones poking out everywhere, but now I want them back. I hope I’ll be able to see them again after all this. And another thing, where did all these blood veins come from? They aren’t bulging – They aren’t varicose veins, but damn these blue lines are all over the place!

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Urge to bake

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Last week I received a newsletter from a magazine to which I subscribe. Actually it was from their website birdchannel.com. At the bottom was an ad from hobbyfarms.com that caught my eye. It read, “Looking for good recipes? We’ve got everything from animal treats to zucchini bread”. I didn’t bother to see where the ad was from at first. I just saw that picture of zucchini bread and wanted some. I snagged recipes for cornbread and pumpkin biscuits as well.

Tonight I made the biscuits which reminded me why I don’t bake, ever! It started with me getting out the mixing bowl to combine the dry ingredients the next step was to mix in the cold butter until the mixer was “crumbly” but I couldn’t find our 30 year-old avocado green hand mixer. “Kurt where’s the mixer?”

“You mean the old hand mixer?”

“Yes”

“You threw it out when we got the Kitchen Aid mixer” Yep that sounds like me. I can’t deny that one. So I wash out the bowl that comes with the Kitchen Aid, dry it out, and pour my dry mixture into the bowl dumping some of it into the sink (at least I think a little bit ahead and know some ain’t gonna make it through the transfer). I added the butter, but I never got the “crumbly” look that the instructions said to watch for – I’m not even sure the butter really mixed in. Oh well, the next ingredient is milk – oops that was a little too much. Add the pumpkin – oops a bit too much of that too. Why is this stuff so damn sticky? How in the hell will I roll it out? Ok I’ll just add more flower…this isn’t working. I told Kurt I didn’t think they were going to turn out and he said, “that’s ok I appreciate your effort.” Now most women would say, “aawww that’s so sweet” but I know Kurt.

With one eyebrow raised, “You just said that so you have the freedom to spit it back out in front of me if you don’t like it didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah” he answered. In the end he said they turned out pretty well even though at one point during our meal Kurt accidentally dropped his biscuit and it made a “thud” sound on the table. We burst into laughter and of course had to tease the crap out of me by writing on our calendar that I made, “Bean soup and pumpkin flavored concrete”. He actually ate two of my pumpkin flavored concrete disks. And yes, we keep a calendar of who made which meal on what day – it helped eliminate most of our arguments about whose turn it is to wash the wretched dishes.

If you can’t find the recipe on the hobby farms site here it is:

You can use commercially canned or homegrown pumpkin for this recipe. If doing the latter, bake the pumpkin rather than boil it in order to get a drier, denser product. After scraping the baked flesh from the rinds, use an electric mixer to beat until smooth. Remove any tough, fibrous pieces that didn’t cook down.

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
3 T. baking powder
1 Tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. nutmeg
¼ tsp. allspice
1/8 tsp. ginger
1/3 cup butter, cold
¾ cup pumpkin
¾ cup milk
additional flour if needed

Preparation
Stir together dry ingredients. Using a pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add pumpkin and milk, stirring just until ingredients are moistened and a soft dough forms. If the dough seems very soft, add more flour, a few tablespoons at a time, just until the dough is easy to handle.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out dough to a half-inch thick. Using a 2-inch biscuit or cookie cutter in a simple shape of your choice (such as a pumpkin or leaf), dip the cutter into flour, shake off excess and press into biscuit dough. Place biscuits on a lightly greased cookie sheet one-inch apart and bake at 450 degrees F for 8 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Serve hot with butter and honey or apple butter. Makes about 12 biscuits.

That is the recipe exactly as it shown on the hobby farms site, so I have no idea if the “1 Tsp. cinnamon” is actually a tablespoon or a teaspoon. It is the only one with a capital “T”, but still has the “sp”. I used a tablespoon. In addition, I think if I make this another time I’m going to cut the baking powder to one tablespoon instead of THREE and just add more flour. I hope that I’ll get more fluffy biscuits instead of such dense and heavy bread.

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Dizzy Scare

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This morning I woke up like any other morning this week. I specify “this week” because lately some mornings have been little unique with me constantly loosing my keys and forgetting what I’m doing – did I brush my teeth already? Oh, well I’ll just do it again. Today I got up and ate breakfast (cereal) with Kurt, drank my Citrucel, took a shower, got dressed, fed the bird, and then began to make my lunch. I took out a few things for my lunch and then very suddenly felt light-headed/dizzy and decided it would be better if I sat down for a bit. After sitting I quickly felt that maybe laying down would be safer. I drug myself upstairs and laid down taking note that I had ten minutes to try and make it to work. It took me three attempts to complete an email to my supervisor letting him know that I would be in late.

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Leg cramps and nightmares

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On Friday night I stretched out on the couch and watched TV with Kurt. Sometime during the movie we watched I felt the urge to stretch my legs and didn’t pay attention to the fact that I was pointing my toes – all of the sudden – OUCH! SONOFAB#@$!!! I got a pain the shot from my back, which always seems to hurt if I’ve been sitting anywhere in any position for more than fifteen minutes, all the way to the bottom of my right foot. It feels like the arch in my foot just popped out. I read in one of the weekly emails I get about the growth of my baby and what my body is going through that I shouldn’t point my toes when stretching, but I keep forgetting!! What a painful F$#@% reminder! I can’t remember WHY I’m not supposed to point my toes – other than to avoid that shocking pain. I’ve made this stupid mistake about five times now. The first time was just shortly after reading the article that told me not to point my toes.

Saturday night I remember having a nightmare. I can’t remember what it was about I just remember Kurt trying to wake me up. He said I was mumbling something incoherent. I must have also been screaming, yelling, and or thrashing about in order to wake him, but he didn’t mention any of that. I’ve read that pregnant women tend to dream a lot more and extremely vivid dreams. I guess it’s true since so far I’ve had two dreams and one nightmare during my pregnancy. Prior to that I had only had maybe one dream and two nightmares in the eight years Kurt and I have been together. I can’t remember what my first pregnancy dream was about but it was during the coma that was my first trimester. My second dream was just a couple weeks ago and was about a four year-old Sophia getting ready for her dad to take her to daycare on his motorcycle for the first time. I was freaking out and telling her to make sure and hold on and not to fall asleep. “yeah yeah I know mom,” she says.

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