Relaxin

Relaxin...

Have you heard of it?
It's a hormone during pregnancy. It's supposed to loosen your joints so you can squeeze a watermelon out of a straw.

It's a blessing and a curse.

For one, it has given me carpel tunnel syndrome and made the fingers of my right hand numb - constantly.

But the worst of this relaxin stuff was evident these last couple days.

Sunday night we were saying goodbye to some people from our small group as they left our house. Jim was hyped up and gave me a quick, side-armed hug. Holy COW!!! I immediately started coughing as I felt my lungs constrict. I was kind of sore the rest of the evening and aware of the pain as I shifted in my sleep.

So today I went to the chiropractor and learned three of my ribs were dislocated. UGH! The chiro says the relaxin makes things pop out easily but the good news is that he can move it back easily. My ribs have been killing me all day ever since he "fixed" me. Chiro says I have to tell Jim that everything has to be bilateral now - if he kisses me on one side, he has to kiss me on the other side.

Does that mean if he breaks my ribs on one side he has to break them on the other...?

Just For Fun!

I love it when I come across just fun things on the internet. I think YouTube is one of the best inventions ever!

Enjoy this fun video. Make sure you enlarge it to full screen for the full effect.
Makes you want to have another wedding day, eh?

Sleepless Nights - Not What I Bargained For...

Let me start off by saying that Jim is out of town. Normally this is not a problem for me as far as sleeping goes. I’m not the type that’s nervous to stay alone. However, last night was a different story and it would have been nice to have him at hand.

It was quite a night.

First, I woke up around 1:00 am for my first potty break of the evening. For some reason I decided to see what my cats were up to. I found Sophie sitting in the middle of the main hall staring at the window in the top of our front door. She looked like she was howling at the moon. I finally spotted the catalyst for her paralysis – it was a moth. Then I joyfully discovered it was on the INSIDE. So I tried to open the door for it to go outside but it just flew up to the ceiling and wouldn’t budge.

Back to bed I went.

About an hour later I woke suddenly to what sounded like a hissing/scratching/screaming sound. It was a horrible sound. My first thought was that Sophie was really going after that moth and making a spectacle about it. As I came more into consciousness, I realized the sound was coming from outside my bedroom window. So now I’m thinking that a stray cat is at our back door hissing at Sophie. Bailey was sitting in the bedroom window (breaking the rules as usual).

So I venture out to the living room and see Sophie staring out the sliding door. Outside is an opossum. First of all – YUCK! It is on top of a second opossum which is slightly smaller than the first. Mind you, this is right outside between the living room door and my bedroom window, almost against the house. In fact they were under the grill. My new thought is that it’s a momma opossum trying to transport a younger opossum.

Wrong. Oh so very wrong!

Opossum #1 was viciously ending the life of opossum #2. It was clamped down on its neck just squeezing the life out of it; jerking its body in ferocious execution. I was HORRIFIED!!! I tried knocking on the glass; opening and shutting the slider – anything to scare this guy away. Then I start to worry that he’ll leave the dead body on my patio. This is why I got married…so that my husband could deal with that kind of stuff. But he’s not here. What am I going to do with an opossum carcass?

Sophie is pretty upset by all this too as she starts pacing around the living room – kind of walking in circles. Not sure she wants to watch; yet can’t pull herself away.

15 minutes later I finally decide to try to go back to bed. I figure I’ll shut my window and if I have to I’ll turn on the TV to drown out any noise. But by the time I reach my window, this murderer starts dragging his victim across the patio. It drags it through my pots and knocks one over. It makes its way across the yard until it’s too dark for me to see. I just hope he doesn’t dump the body in my yard. I really don’t want to find that later.

I try going to sleep but just can’t. I kill some time on the computer. Watch some TV and finally shut down at about 3:00am.

This time I don’t know what time it was, but I was awakened by another horrible sound – my cat puking. Wonderful. They never puke. Maybe Bailey was expressing his disgust over the crime scene and couldn’t hold his cookies any more. Cat puke is always lovely to clean up.

I know pregnancy is supposed to prepare you for the sleepless nights, but this is ridiculous. Must I really be exposed to creatures of the night upsetting my household?

Here’s to hoping for a more peaceful night tonight…

Nursery Progress

It's been quite a while since I've posted and that's partly due to busyness and laziness and partly due to my ability to wrangle the computer away from Jim long enough to have my turn to play. There's lots of other things I would like to post about and hopefully I will get to those soon. But Jim and I are both really excited about the progress that's been made on the nursery.

When last we checked in on this room, we found major work needed to be done to re-frame the windows. So Jim has had fun learning how to do this and trying to make things fit and function.

In fact, here's Jim now... Fitting in pieces of wood to fill the gap between the window and our house. This was also necessary to make the molding work properly.


Our room also got a case of chicken pox and we applied the calamine lotion as necessary.

As you can see, it was quite necessary.

We had to fill all the nooks and crannies with spackle and/or drywall putty. Then the real fun is sanding it all down. That's why the room is covered in plastic. We learned our lesson after doing Jim's office. We covered the furniture with cloth and that was just a joke. Plastic worked much better this time.

The molding was finally put up.

Isn't it pretty?

We custom ordered new blinds from Home Depot. We were really excited about the look and how they could split the blinds to accommodate the way the windows split and open. The first lady that helped us learn about what we could do was SOOOO helpful, I was rather impressed. But when we went back in to place the order she was not there and I was a little leery about the guy taking the order. But incredibly everything worked out.

Jim works hard to hang the blinds.

Ta-Da!
Good job, Jim!

Now we'll watch the other window evolve a little...

Here we have the chicken-pox-pre-molding stage.

Ah, molding and primer. Now we're getting somewhere.

Blinds are up and the painting begins.

I've inherited the painting gene from my mom, so that's always my job.
But I love it.

Jim was very proud of his super-straight line.

This yellow is called Caribbean Sunrise.
My friend Andrea breaks into a Billy Ocean song every time she sees the name.
Can you guess what song?

It was an incredibly hot weekend and it took a lot out of me.

So pretty!
I was worried at first that it was going to be too orange.
But the more I got painted the more I saw it was exactly the color I wanted.

And the windows now look 100 times better being offset by the yellow.
Once again - Good job, Jim!

The biggest recent excitement for me was FINALLY finding fabric for the room. I do not consider myself a decorator in any sense of the word. I have a hard time conceptualizing things. In fact, for my wedding I turned over the design of the aisle thingies (see? smart, eh?) to my mom and bridesmaids. I knew that would stress me out and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But I did have a vague idea of what I was looking for. Any of the packaged bed sets were not appealing to me. I couldn't find anything online. I went to JoAnn's to look at fabrics and practically ended up in tears. (No coincidence that a new batch of hormones seemed to kick in that week causing me to loose all control.)

Natalie, a friend and co-worker suggested a quilting shop to me so my mom and I shot over there on Saturday. Hallelujah!!! Their fabrics were organized by color which helped my feeble mind. It took quite a while of wandering, but long story short I found just what I was looking for!


And just to give you a slight idea of what I'm going for, this is the fun inspiration for the bedding that my mom will work on making.




My mom painted the closet for me this weekend which meant that Jim and I could finally start moving things to places where they belonged. This is how we'll have the dressers set up. The tall one will be the changing table. I'm thinking we'll paint both dressers, but that kinda scares me. Any volunteers?


So, it's taken longer than we wanted, but we have made a lot of progress on the nursery. The next big piece is to go get our crib. We have a pretty good idea of what we want and it's just a matter of finding it. We'll get crackin' on that first thing in August.

A Big Day

Our latest family adventure has reached the halfway mark. Saturday we reached 20 weeks. Woo-Hoo!!!



It's a little hard to believe we're here. Sometimes it feels like we've got a long way to go, and sometimes it feels like it's going by so fast.


The belly is definitely getting bigger and rounder. While this is all such a new experience for me, I find it odd that when I look in the mirror that this growing body seems so natural. It doesn't seem foreign or weird - which in a way is weird.


I'm still waiting to feel those first baby kicks. I wondered if I felt a little last night, but didn't really think I did. Jim says I get to say that what I felt were baby kicks, so I'll take it.


The big news for today was finding out the sex of our little one. Jim and I have both been very excited about this day. We played around with different scenarios of finding out (at the doctor office; in a secret envelope at a romantic dinner; buying baby clothes to indicate; having a baby-guessing party), but when it came down to it, we just wanted to find out during the ultrasound. Plus I have had a huge fear of the technician being wrong and I wanted to have everything pointed out to me.

Here is a picture of the Enterprise for your enjoyment...



Unfortunately, we didn't get any GREAT pictures to bring home. This little peanut was being shy. To my surprise they did do the 3-D view so we got to get a little bit of a better idea. Still a little blobby, and the poor baby's head looks like it's missing the top. But you should be able to see the nose and figure out the rest of the head from there. The arm is clear as day and, to me, looks like it's resting on the knee.


So what did we learn we're having...?

It's...
a...

BOY!!!!