We're having a quiet morning at home. Nora played with her Calico Critters on and off for a couple of hours, and now she's "reading" a Mercer Mayer book. This tendency to play with the same toys for long periods of time is new. A while back she was more like a whirlwind, bouncing from activity to activity and leaving a huge mess in her wake. She's really enjoying her Christmas gifts and really all of her toys right now. That reminds me, I still need to do a "purge" and pack some things up for the future and donate a few things she doesn't use anymore. I need to do that like... now. Like I should be doing that instead of typing this. :P

Above I've posted a picture from the "Great Atlanta Snow Storm of 2009," ha ha. I actually can't believe how much it has snowed over the past few years. Last year it snowed at least twice if not more, and the year before that, too. It's fun as long as it's temporary. You'll notice that Nora is wearing her rain boots in this picture. Jason took her outside to play (briefly)--besides the rain boots she wore flannel pajama pants (?) and her big, puffy coat and gloves which I'm glad I decided to buy a while back. The snow only looked really neat for a day or so, but traces of it stayed around for almost a week since the city stayed cold. I was still seeing snow and ice in some places until late Wednesday, and it snowed last Thursday.

I realized I haven't posted about the pregnancy recently. I'll be 35 weeks tomorrow, so I have a month or so to go, give or take a couple of weeks. I really don't know what to expect because I was induced with Nora right around 40 weeks. Some women seem to love being pregnant and others seem to hate it. I fall somewhere in the middle--I don't mind it, but I don't really savor it either, although I do appreciate the miracle and wonder of it all. I don't feel "done" being pregnant and last time was kind of the same. I'm anxious to meet my baby, but not in a hurry. The only thing I'm ready to be done with is diabetes. It's not that bad, but sometimes it's a drag to make sure I have my injections ready, make sure that I have enough to eat certain times of day, etc. Like breakfast is the worst--I am always in a bit of rush trying to get Nora fed and both of us out the door with jackets, mittens, etc. but I have to find something fast and good to eat for myself and prepare an injection and take oral medication. Sometimes I really don't feel like dealing with all that.

Physically, though? Late pregnancy is not that bad. I've experienced major fatigue before (when not pregnant) and at this point I don't feel that tired, though I'm slowing down a little bit lately. I am becoming limited in more ways, though, like the obvious bending over and picking things up (like say... toys) and getting up and down from the ground. I have some soreness when I'm sleeping, and sometimes I hop out of bed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and I realize that I can't really move as quickly as I thought I could. Overall, though, it's very manageable. And we're seriously so busy, time is flying.

Oh--and I finally discovered that there is a perk to having gestational diabetes. (Accentuate the positive, right?) I'm having bi-weekly prenatal testing these days, which is not a perk but more like a pain in the rear. Yesterday, though, I went to a new location for testing and I ran into the ultrasound tech I had in my last pregnancy. She was so sweet and I had actually wondered what happened to her. The test on the baby went quickly so the sonographer switched over to 4D, which is something I've never seen before. That's something that some people pay big bucks for, but I never have because I already get so many ultrasounds it's really not necessary. I didn't feel like I was missing much since I already get to "see" the baby so much, but when I saw the baby on the 4D it was really quite clear and a lot more amazing than I thought it would be. Anyway, here's one of the pics.



The first thing everyone notices is the chubby cheeks! Nora had chubby cheeks at birth, but she lost some weight after she was born and after that she was a fairly petite baby. I spent the whole time trying to figure out if she looks like Nora, but I can't decide. Jessie says that she thinks this one looks a lot like Jason again, but we'll see. There's only so much you can tell from an ultrasound, even a fancy one. This makes me even more excited about seeing her in person!

We have had a busy, busy couple of months. I knew the months around the holidays would fly, and they did! We stayed here the weekend of Christmas and enjoyed some quiet time as a family. My sister and her husband were here for a few hours on Christmas day and we all went to brunch at the Ritz Carlton Downtown Atlanta. Oh. My. Gosh. Recommend. I am usually a fan of "traditional" Christmas dinner (i.e. turkey/ham/all the trimmings, cooked at home!) but being about eight months pregnant was an excellent excuse for breaking tradition. (I also just wasn't in the mood to cook.)

Here's Nora in her Christmas dress before church on Christmas Eve.



Me.



Jason with the longest hair he's ever had (he's had it cut since then):



Here's a blurry pic of our tree.



A couple of things about the tree--every year I laugh at how pathetically skinny and unrealistic-looking it is. But I kind of love it for being that way. You can't tell this from the picture, but about 50% of the ornaments are concentrated in the bottom 1-2 feet of the tree (Nora hung them). I think it's silly-looking, but perfect at the same time.

Jason had to work the week after Christmas, but we did make it to Pensacola for about two days around New Year's. There, we opened many more presents and we got to visit with a lot of people, though not everyone we would like to see. We did see six different groups of people, though, and opened presents with all of them! Whew.

We've been doing a lot of stuff around the house. We got new furniture for the living room and slowly that room is finally coming together--for the first time, really, since what we had before was a mishmash and we were never really happy with it. We still need to hang pictures and do a few other things in there, but I am really liking it these days. Our new couches are so comfortable! (Ask Jason--he keeps falling asleep on them!) we moved out old, ugly computer desk in there and it doesn't really match anything else, plus it's not meeting our storage needs. There's a secretary desk I've been eying on Overstock.com, but we don't have the money right now. It sold out a couple of days ago, but I'm going to cross my fingers that it comes back in stock in a few months when we expect to have a little more cashflow.

See? Pretty.















Jason's in the process of painting Nora's new room. We hope she'll be moved in sometime this week. I know "they" say that you should have this taken care of a few months before the new baby comes (we're looking at ~6 weeks) but, well, obviously that didn't happen. I need to do a major toy and clothes purge. Most of what we've been working on lately is going through all of our things and trying to get rid of things we don't use anymore. Living in a small space is challenging! I'm probably the least likely candidate for making the most out of the least amount of space, but I'm trying. As I type this I'm going through all of our old CDs and making sure we have them on ITunes so I can give away the physical CDs. We just don't have room for them anymore! There are some boxes/crates/closets that haven't been completely cleaned out since we moved in almost five years ago, so I guess it was time, anyway.

I realize this is pretty much the most boring blog in existence, but there you have it.

Conversation with Nora

Just writing this down so I don't forget it.

Nora: All right! Now I have my suitcase all packed so I can go to North China.

Me: What's in North China?

Nora: It's a country.

Me: I know. But what's there? Like why are you going there?

Nora: Oh... I...

Me: You're just going to hang out? See the sights?

Nora: I'm just going to... go there and get some sleep. But first I need to put on my fairy wings so I can fly there!

Hello, blog!

I'm not making any resolutions or anything, but I'll try to catch up on the last couple of months when I get a chance.

In the meantime...

This afternoon, Nora was looking at a book called Trick or Treat. Yeah, a Halloween book, on New Year's Eve. Every day's a holiday, right? Anyway, she was singing, "Trick or treat, smell my feet! Give me something good to eat!"

I said, "What if I don't give you something good to eat?"

"Well, it's only a song, Mommy."

November November

Guess what? I finally got another cord for my camera! My friend Jessie had an extra one sitting around her house, so when I got home with the cord I uploaded 380 pictures to my hard drive. Whew! A good number of those, going all the way back to Nora's birthday, ended up on Flickr. Here are a couple of fall pics for the blog, though.


Nora as Alice in Wonderland.


I don't know what's up with the look on her face here. Obviously not in the mood to pose. That was about a month ago, so 22 weeks maybe?


At the Naguchi Playscape at Piedmont Park.


First day of school.

There! Consider me as caught up as I'm going to get. I will try not to break my camera cable again, and continue my stellar record of updating at least once a month. :P

This week I started my Hypnobabies study. I am doing the home study. So far, so good? I have to admit that I have some major doubts that I will probably have to overcome if hypnosis going to work for me, but I'm really encouraged by the birth stories and videos I'm reading. So we'll see. I started insulin for my gestational diabetes a few weeks ago--not really good news, but I knew it was coming, and it is what it is. With just a little bit of medicine my fasting number is behaving really well and the other numbers continue to do well, so I feel pretty good about that. I also switched back to my specialist from my last pregnancy, which has been a good decision, I think. I still have a ton to do around here (as I sit in the "guest room," which should be Nora's by now, but so far it's untouched...) plus I have to get ready for the holidays, but I suppose it will all happen somehow. One of my friends is letting me borrow a ton of newborn cloth diapers (the one size I underbought last time). I picked them up today, so that's one thing I can cross off my list! My virtual list. I haven't gotten around to making an actual one yet; I think I'm scared to....

Our "sick day" turned into a sick week. I thought for sure that Nora would be in school on Thursday, but that day she started coughing pretty heavily. She's been having rough nights, too. She again had a low fever, so I kept her home that day. I have a little bit of a cough, myself, and on Saturday I didn't have much of a voice during the day. We're going a little bit stir-crazy, but everyone is in good spirits. Surely she'll be back in school next week? I don't know if we have the flu or not; if we do I guess it's a really, really mild version. Which, I guess if you have to have the flu it might as well be mild, right?

Last weekend, pre-quarantine, we went to the pumpkin patch. Good times--Nora enjoyed apple cider ("It's like apple juice, but it's hot!"), a hay ride, and picking out a pumpkin. I have a hilarious little video of her trying to roll a pumpkin. I really should get another camera cord so I can upload these things. The other day Nora said that she wanted to "cut a hole in my pumpkin and put a face on it and a candle inside," so we decided for the very first time to carve our pumpkin. When I was growing up, my mom always painted ours. Jason said he doesn't remember having pumpkins at his house. We decided to wait until the weekend to tackle it, so last night we got out our dollar store pumpkin-carving kit (we bought it on clearance last year) and decided to make a go of it. This is our result (cameraphone pic).

You'll notice it's toothless. That wasn't the original plan, but whatever, right? It was also supposed to have pupils, but that didn't work out, either. Still, we all worked on it and we all feel a sense of accomplishment. After we were done, I rinsed the seeds and now I'm drying them out so we can roast them later. I don't even like roasted pumpkin seeds very much, but they are a nutritious snack, and Nora and Jason will eat them. I'll nibble on a few. If I end up with more than one cookie sheet's worth, I will probably send a baggie to Nora's class on Tuesday. They could possibly use them for play or for a craft.

If you've ever been on a pregnancy or parenting message board, you may have seen a countdown "ticker." Many women add them to their signatures; you can use them to count just about anything (vacation countdowns, etc.) but pregnancy is the most common. Here's mine.

Is it just me or is 118 days not a long time?

Sick day

Monday night, Nora woke up crying around 1:30. Jason went to check on her and she said, "Daddy, my brain hurts!" She didn't really need anything, though, so she went back to bed. 15 minutes later, Jason was asleep and I heard her whimpering. It wasn't even the type of whimpering I would necessarily check on normally (could have been just sleep noises), but for some reason I decided to go in there and see what was up. I went in and asked her what was wrong, and she said, "I want my daddy." So I picked her up to bring her to our bedroom, and in the hallway she puked on me, and on the floor. By the way, I'm looking forward to the day when puke goes in the toilet at least some of the time. I called for Jason and he took her into the bathroom and instructed her to try to puke into the toilet, but she was like, "What?! No! Why!?" And by that time she was done, anyway.

After we got everyone cleaned up, she was feeling a lot better. We got in my bed and she was in my lap and I told her she couldn't go to school the next day. She said, "But I'm all better! Or it will make me all better if I go to school!" I told her no, she needed to stay home, because she didn't want to get anyone else sick, did she? And she said, "Yes I do." Then she said, "But I can still go to gymnastics...?" Her head was in my lap and she was looking into my eyes. I said, "No, honey, probably not..." and her little eyes welled up with tears. Poor kiddo. Tuesday was the first day of class, and one of her favorite little friends is in the class with her. She was really looking forward to it.

Yesterday we stayed home all day, and Nora was her energetic self all day long. She watched too much TV (my bad), but she also nurtured her dolls and stuffed animals and wheeled them around the house in a stroller. She took them all to the "'Quarium," as she calls it. Late in the afternoon, I was debating letting her go to gymnastics since she was feeling better, but I asked a friend for advice about whether I should send her and warily decided that it was better safe than sorry, so she stayed home.

Today is another "better safe than sorry" day. She woke up with a cough and a fever of 99.9, but she apparently feels like a million bucks. She is bummed about missing school. We're both a little bit bored. I'm a bit of a homebody, so we've spent plenty of days at home in the past, but it's frustrated to feel like we can't leave, even if we wanted to. I'm not very inspired today, but I need to come up with something to do. I might actually have to clean something...