The First step is admitting you have a problem, right?

Now that I’m feeling much better it has come to my attention that I’m going to be very busy for the next 6 months. Some part of my brain (which is now controlling me like a marionette) has decided it’s perfectly acceptable to spend the rest of the pregnancy nesting. Problems, I haz them.

Here’s my list:

Make the nursery linens, including the comforter.

Re-do the coat, linen and nursery closets. (Meaning- strip them down, paint them and install new storage and organizational systems.)

Wear my husband down until he caves and helps me build a new media unit in the living room. (I love you, babe.)

Build a platform and under-bed storage for Jack (and soon to be Henry’s) room.

Tear down our rusted metal storage shed and build a new-and-improved custom shed/ workshop with room for bike and toy storage. Who needs a garage, right?

See, I already started the coat closet. I’m such an over achiever!

I’m resisting a near overwhelming urge right now….

to rip up the carpet on these stairs and run to the store to buy oak treads. This too will happen, but perhaps today is not the day…

Don’t worry, honey, today you will not come home to basement stairs torn asunder.

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Room for one more?

Jack and Henry are best friends. Like, BFFFFFFFF.

Jack walks in the door of his classroom Henry whimpers and reaches for him, “Don’t leave me, bro!” I wake Henry up to pick Jack up at school Henry, who is usually the crankiest kid in the entire world when he wakes, up is downright excited. We’re going to get “Aaack!”

During nap time I have to keep a close eye on Jack, because he has been known, on occasion, to deliberately wake up his playmate. “Because Henry wants to play.” Riiiiiiight.

When Jack lands himself in timeout Henry will join him as a sign of solidarity. This never works in reverse, however. Jack is not a martyr.

If Jack tries to help himself to a snack, like a tube of squeezable organic yogurt, or an apple, or whatever he often comes with one for Henry. He tells me that Henry needs one too.

Sometimes Henry will come across a toy of Jacks. 50% of the time he will look around to see if Jack notices before frantically starting to play with Jack’s toy. The other 50% of the time he will run right to Jack and hand him the toy.

They have brotherly love in a big way.

It’s going to take a while before Hitch is able to participate in the friendship too, but when it happens I hope there will be room for one more. I’m sure there will be.

Lookin’ Good

Hitch is looking good! And most importantly, he appears to have normal growth and bone structure. I still have that next blood draw in 2 weeks to check the trends in my Lyme titers. In the mean time I will bask in the awesomeness that is a clean bill of fetal health from the supervising OB where the midwives send us for sonograms.

My life just came full circle

This is me. At 16. I was a junior in high school. I was taking my first real yoga class, in high school, for my gym credit. Have I ever told you my high school was awesome? It was awesome.

My parents did yoga in the 70’s… hippies! So I already had exposure to yoga-type-stuff as a child. When I had a hard time falling asleep I would often be lead through a common yoga relaxation exercise where you tense up your feet and then relax them, and then your calves, thighs, etc. till you’re scrunching your face and finally tensing and then relaxing the whole body in unison. And then ZZzzz…

I digress, so I was in high school taking yoga with a teacher who insisted we called her “Griff.” It was a wonderful experience, aside from the obvious yoga being better than a semester of soccer, football and baseball. I remember telling all my friends in school that they should take yoga for their gym credit because it would make them feel so good! I even wondered if I tested better after a morning yoga class.

Yoga was always something I came back to, in college and graduate school, when I was pregnant with Jack, and obviously I’ve been majorly addicted for the last three years. It always felt like home.

Since January of this year I’ve been going through the process of becoming a yoga instructor. It’s been an incredible and transformative journey. Just as I had hoped it would be. We had a pair of guest instructors who were teaching our class about Aruveda, which in and of itself is incredible and mind-blowing.

The instructor for this class? My first yoga teacher, Griff.

Woah.

Knock, Knock.

Who’s there?

Hitchhiker. Dancing around in my uterus. Clearly the baby is enjoying tonight’s brownie, because he’s kicking around in there. I thought I felt something a few days ago. Now I’m sure. There is a human growing in there!

Somehow the awesomeness of that doesn’t get old!

Would you like the good news first or the bad news…

I’ve been distracted.

When your midwives call you with results of your blood work, it’s not a great sign. They are concerned about my Lyme titers, which is essentially my antibody levels. They aren’t Lyme literate but they have told me they will take any article, pamphlet, tidbit of info I have and run with it. They finally have a copy of the original labs run by my primary care doctor. It’s helpful to have a better picture, but it’s only two sets of blood work and 2 points does not a line make. They plan to run titers again at my next appointment so that we can see which way I’m trending.

Since the tick bite is so recent, my body would still show signs of infection, even if I’m totally “cured”. The question isn’t if the infection is totally gone, but if my titers are decreasing. Which would show my body isn’t actively fighting infection (just continuing to flush the system). I hope this is the case. I’ll get the blood draw in 2 or maybe 3 weeks, which would conveniently put all the draws about the same amount of time apart. I don’t actually know if that will be more informative, but I like the sound of it.

If my results are not good I probably should have been on antibiotics for the entire pregnancy. Preventing the transfer of Lyme to the baby is key. Otherwise, I could have a chronically ill baby/child and I’d like to prevent that if I can. There is also the possibility of testing the chord blood at the birth, which can tell us if the baby has contracted Lyme, but finding someone willing to treat a baby, or even small child can be a huge challenge. We are just becoming sensitive to the overmedication (writing a Rx every time a kid has an ear infection, etc) so now doctors are extremely hesitant to put a child on a month-long course of antibiotics.

I don’t honestly know how likely any of these scenarios is in my situation but I’m worried that one of them- that isn’t the I’m fine, the baby’s fine, is going to be the situation I find myself in.

Here’s hoping I’m worrying for nothing.

I must confess

I have been a naughty naughty gardener. The front yard still looks nice, I’ve been keeping track of that. But the back garden, with the veggies…. is a hot mess!

So I have to figure out if I should chop down and turn the garden now or leave it in it’s deplorable state till spring.

3rd time’s the charm

 

This pregnancy has been (for the most part) the easiest of the three.

I can only draw one conclusion from this:  this baby will be born flipping me off.

I come to this “easy pregnancy” conclusion after careful consideration of the facts.  I am enjoying my first morning-sickness free pregnancy.  With Jack I felt like throwing up for about 8 weeks, but never actually threw up (go me!)  With Henry I puked.  Every morning when I brushed my teeth, barf.  Some days after breakfast, barf.

Both times I was SUPER picky about food, like the smell of garlic would make me want to vomit.  But I was ravenously hungry.  Which lead to the consumption of many bagels.  This time, no barfy feelings to speak of.  No weird food aversions.  No feeling super hungry.  Just:

Pregnancy Narcolepsy.

I don’t nap.  I have never been a napper.  (I know where Jack gets it.)  My husband is a light sleeper, but he can say “I’m going to go upstairs and take a nap” and usually within 30 minutes he’s out cold.  I can’t decide to nap.  It takes me more than an hour to fall asleep unless it’s night-time and then I’m out in 20 seconds.

So when I tell you I’ve been taking one or two naps a day you will understand my meaning.  Hell hath frozen over.

Downside?  Well there are two, really. 1. I can’t control when it happens.  It can be 7:30 am and I’ve just woken up and as soon as I sit down on the couch I’m asleep till 9:30.  Sometimes it coincides with nap time, and that’s nice.  But if I go all narcoleptic at 4:00 or later my night is totally humped.  I’ll be laying awake till 2am cursing my later afternoon nap.  So I wish I could choose when to nap, but hey, it could be worse.  2. Like, for example, how messy my house is because aside from sleeping all the time, when I try to get things done around the house it drains my energy at an exponential rate.  It’s craaaazy!  If I run to the grocery store in the morning it’s guaranteed that I will fall asleep at some point during the day.  Forget trying to go for a walk or do yoga, it takes days to recover.

Surprisingly, having two at home is not what’s making me tired.  It’s what’s saving me!  Jack and Henry are content to play together unsupervised in the playroom for an hour at a time, which means I can attempt to be productive or use that time to sleep.  Being pregnant with just Jack (ha ha) at home was much harder.  The only person who could entertain him was me.  Now they can lean on each other.  And the more they do the better they play and the stronger their bond.  It’s a win-win-win!

The biggest downside is my yoga.  I’m too tired to clean my house and often too tired to buy groceries.  So I’m almost always too tired to do the readings (spontaneous napping) and way too tired to do justice to the self-reflection.  My home practice has been reduced to supta baddha konasana on my couch.

If there is one thing that yoga teaches me that most certainly applies, I need to meet myself where I am; and I am tired.

Also I spent Henry’s entire pregnancy obsessing (like, every hour that I was awake) about whether or not I was going to have a VBAC and about whether he was going to be a boy and then whether or not I was okay with that.  I’m so good at obsessing about things.  Seriously, I’m awesome at it.  So when I say I’m not worried, I’m not wondering, I’m totally at ease, hopefully you understand how HUGE that is for me.   Maybe that’s the thing that makes this pregnancy easier than the other two… I’m finally free of all that.

Jack’s First Day

I’m so glad I waited to write about this till today. Yesterday was awesome, until it was a disaster. Lets re-cap:

Jack believes school is cool!

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Jack's classroom is a huge room so there's a portable wall that divides the room in half, which means there is a great mingling area for the parents!

Finally they opened the velvet rope!

Jack thinks circle time is for the birds.

So on the drive home from school Jack told me he didn’t like his new school. He wanted to go to his old “red” school. Commence hyperventilation! He went through a litany of reasons why he couldn’t go to his new school anymore, among them, “he needs to go to a red school” and “school makes my belly hurt.” Grrrrrrreat.

Jack froze up during circle time. When the group went to sing “If you’re happy and you know it” the song should have been “If you’re pissed off and you know it, stare daggers…” It’s less catchy, though. And then I remembered I HATED singing in school. It made me feel worried and anxious. Crap, he’s totally me.  (He may or may not have been bribed with ice cream when he got home.)

Today we played at a park in the morning, went out on a lunch date (with Henry, of course), and then went to school. He was excited to go. But I told his teachers that he doesn’t like singing. Which is true, he’s the same way at library story time.  He is not a fan of the big group sing.  They were all “No problem, we won’t push it.” Hopefully, when daddy brings him home today we will have a good report!  Fingers crossed!

Pumpkin Mummy

I saw this on Pinterest.
I couldn’t help myself. Have I mentioned lately how much I love fall? Particularly Halloween?

Pumpkin scone. Butternut squash soup. Fire in the fireplace. Falling leaves. Brisk air… and now the Pumpkin Mummy. I think the whole thing cost $6! Get a foam pumpkin and glue the eyes first, then wrap as much or as little as you want. I used a t-shirt, you could also use gauze.