Confessions of a Blogaholic

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and as I get ready to clean my kitchen before the pumpkin cookie baking warfare begins, I thought I'd take a moment to think about the things I am thankful for...

Today, I am thankful for...

1. First and foremost, that the miracle of making a child finally happened for Nathan and I, and that this will be the last Thanksgiving for us without Miss Rylee tagging along.

2. My husband, for putting up with me when I am impossible to deal with, and for continuing to love me even when I am downright mean and unloving toward him.

3. My Mom, for being my best friend and for putting everyone else before herself.

4. My G-Ma, who defies the odds every day by staying as healthy as possible and fighting her cancer with all of her strength.

5. My friends, for listening to me babble on and on about the baby like a self-centered fool even though you have many important things going on in your lives as well.

6. My fantastic job that I love.

7. Being financially stable and being able to save for our future.

8. New Moon (I know, not appropriate, but I had to slip some humor in here)

9. Finally, I am thankful for every memory I have of all the previous Thanksgivings my family has been able to celebrate together.

Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

**Side note: I always thought it was funny that "devil" backward is "lived". Random.**

Anyhow...

I always wondered why pregnant women complained about having a difficult time watching TV when they were pregnant. I thought it was dumb, to be honest. Why worry about things beyond your control? What will be will be. I've heard some women complain about shows like CSI being too graphic or even the NEWS being too depressing (for God's sake! It's the news!!). I never understood how something as simple as a television could be so awful to pregnant women.

But, now I kinda get it.

Just in the last week, I've started having this new....um....development in my journey to mommyhood. Every time I watch TV, I seem to find SOMEthing difficult to watch. For instance...on Grey's Anatomy last week, this girl was in the hospital with no heart and her parents weren't there. I found myself thinking, "Oh, please don't EVER let me have to deal with my child in the hospital." Or, when those St. Jude's commercials come on, I find myself thinking, "Please don't let me go through that. Please let my baby be ok and perfect forever." Or, the news will talk about some rape story or even those women that were murdered in Cle.veland, and I'll think, "Not my daughter. I can't let this happen to my little girl."

So, I now understand why pregnant women freak out about the things they hear and see on TV. I haven't even had this baby yet, and I'm already worried about her life 20 years down the road. I'm already afraid she'll get pregnant as a teenager, or struggle with obesity. I'm worried she'll have a difficult time in school, and I won't know how to help her because so much of me expects her to enjoy school the way that I did. I'm freaked out that someone will do something awful and evil to her and destroy all that is good about innocence and childhood. I'm afraid something will happen someday in the distant, distant future and I'll get "the phone call" that no parent wants to have. I understand how other pregnant women feel when they say TV can get to be too much sometimes; it reminds me what a crappy world I have to protect my daughter from.

...and turning into a basketball, lol. In a few more weeks, I'll be busting out all over!

Nathan and my mom were the first to notice. Mom said my stomach was looking bigger, and Nathan (after commenting on how wide my belly button is all of a sudden) noted that from my belly button down, I am growing. I noticed it, too, when I laid on my back in bed last night--all of a sudden, a little, hard pooch is appearing.

Luckily, I have still only gained 6 pounds, so I am feeling pretty good about all of this. None of my pre-pregnancy clothes fit comfortably, and by comfortably I mean I can't write on my chalkboard in my classroom without feeling exposed in my pre-pregnancy gear.

I feel good, though. In fact, I feel wonderful. My uterus measures about 3 weeks ahead of where it should be right now, but my midwife said some people just grow big during pregnancy--she would question my due date and how far along I am IF I wasn't able to pinpoint my date of conception due to the IUI.

We are looking into buying a house again, which is exciting. We can pay two months rent to get out of our lease, and we're thinking if we buy a house in March/April, we can use a little of that $8,000 to pay off the lease. Another teacher at my school wants us to buy her house, but she paid A TON for it, and rightfully so since it is an insanely beautiful 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom home! She said she is willing to take a "significant loss" on it just to get out of it to move to her daughter's school district (to avoid the 45 minute commute each morning), but I just can't imagine she wants to take as big of a loss as we are prepared to pay. Who knows, though...we can't know until we make the offer :)

We are going the week of December 3 to look at the house, and we are already saving like mad to afford the down payment and closing costs (we have been saving since our snafu in May trying to buy a house). From the pictures she has shown me, it is truly a beautiful home, and a place I'd love to buy if all the financing works out. Here's a picture of it from last Christmas...

Beautiful, eh? The teacher is really adamant that she is willing to work with us to allow us to buy it--mainly so it doesn't have to sit on the market and because she wouldn't need to use a realtor. She even brought us in blueprints of the house so we could get a better idea of what's inside. Such excitement. We'll see what the next month holds.

I am not going to spend all of this pregnancy complaining about this, but I have to admit, this baby is a PAIN IN THE BACK.

I know, I know, it seems early for back pains already, but I've been having this intense pain every single evening since about week 6 of pregnancy. And when I say "intense pain," I truly mean INTENSE. Every night, regardless of the shoes I wear to work or whether I have been on my feet all day, my lower left back hurts so bad that not only can I barely walk, I can hardly change positions when I'm sleeping. Especially during the last two weeks, while the pain is getting even more intense, I wake up several times during the night when I'm unconsciously trying to roll over, to pretty much yell, "Oh my god! Oh my god! Ow! Ow! Ow!" as I have to grab on to either the side of the bed, the headboard, or my hubs just to switch positions. Forget getting up to pee at night--it's definitely a good thing I have a HUGE bladder--because the pain causes me to stumble so badly that I can hardly walk to the bathroom.

Now, I'm not generally one to complain about pain. I have to be getting pretty bad to even recognize that a pain exists. But I realized this pain is "pretty bad" when I just tried to walk down the stairs...every step, the pain shot from my lower left back down to my left mid-thigh. Every step, I thought my leg would give out. Now I know this pain is a lot. I am not looking forward to how much worse it is going to get over the next 23 weeks.

Last night I had the weirdest baby-related dream...I dreamed my belly was like a pocket and that the baby was growing sideways inside the pocket. Whenever I wanted, I could just open the pocket and there she was in all of her tiny glory. The inside of the belly pocket wasn't all gross and bloody or anything, nor was the baby alien-like and translucent. She just looked like and everyday baby (except only 5 inches or so long), pink and healthy, growing sideways in my belly. Weird!

Sometimes it seems like life turns into some sort of steamroller racing downhill; once it starts going, it just keeps going faster, and faster, and faster!

Stink has been getting worse, so we finally got him into a referral-only dermatologist at the OSU vet hospital. I was there tonight for 3 hours to find out that he has a pretty crazy skin bacterial infection and that all this immunotherapy we've been doing since June may have been causing more harm than good. As of tonight, he's on antibiotics and I have to use a topical antibacterial spray and cleaning cloths on him. Depending on the results of his bloodwork (the dr. said he seems really depressed and she wanted to test his blood for any additional kidney and liver issues), which we will get tomorrow, we may be starting him on a steroid to help get him stabilized and negate the effects of the allergy treatments.

Once he is doing better, we'll figure out the next step, but for now we have to treat and cure the infection.

After this, I come home to find out the homeowner's credit has been extended, which I was desperately hoping would happen. Nathan and I have been talking the last couple of months about trying to buy a house before the baby is born IF we could take advantage of the credit. Well...now we can. We can get out of our lease with a two-month rent payment, and doing that while getting the $8,000 credit is a damn good deal. So now, after spending all that we've spent on Stink, we're going to scrounge up our savings again and look into buying a house :)

Like I said...once life gets rolling...

Yes, the baby is a girl, and we are so excited. I have to say, though, that I have been calling it all along--blame that on a mother's intuition. Baby Rylee Ann is 4.5 inches and a little chunky at 5 ounces (supposed to be 3.5), but she and I had a talk and she agreed to do some extra jogging so Mama doesn't have to push out a 10-pounder.

Yesterday, we got the office cleared out and cleaned. We took most of the furniture to either our storage unit or my mom's house. We also got the letters of her name to paint for the wall, and we started to go buy the crib, but my mom insisted we wait another week or so until we can buy all the furniture at once (*eye roll* since we didn't intend for her to buy us a bunch of stuff!)

Today, I am going to clean our green recliner that somewhat matches the bedding we picked out at Buy Buy Baby. Then, Nathan can get that taken upstairs (must keep cats far away from baby's room and the furniture since I definitely don't want cat pee and hair everywhere again!). I'm also going to go ahead and paint the letters since I have nothing else to do today...The letters are going to be green with alternating polka dots or stripes. I'll try to post a picture later if I'm feeling at all motivated to go through that hassle, lol.

In all, we are obviously excited. We have to get as much of this stuff done now as possible, since we have some pretty big events coming up in the months ahead (Thanksgiving/possible trip to W.Va to see the Christmas lights, Christmas--trip to Myrtle Beach, January and February--all my energy expended on dragging the children through their research papers, then *BAM* it's almost baby time!). Plus, it's just nice to see things in the room and know that eventually we'll have a little one in there.

1. THE BABY IS A GIRL!!!!!!!!!!!!

2. Sometimes, people in positions of authority really piss me off.