Le Grand Phew

On Wednesday I was 19 weeks and 4 days pregnant, and we went in for our ultrasound.

Before I get to the results of said ultrasound, let me describe for you who have not had one what the process of getting a second trimester fetal ultrasound is like. When I booked the appointment, the woman told me to drink two litres of water starting two hours before my appointment. Maybe that was 1 litre of water 2 hours before, but I couldn't specifically remember, and went for the gusto just in case. I had two glasses before I left home – which is totally fine, I normally have a large glass in the morning – and then panicked on my way to town that I hadn't had enough and had sabotaged the entire process and so I had to stop and buy a bottle at a dépanneur. So that means two glasses of water, plus a bottle. Add to that my tea, which was too hot to drink so I sipped it slowly in the waiting room. I only made it through half a cup.

Well. By the time I was called in to get my hospital card the situation was already critical. I felt like perhaps my bladder was going to fall out of my body and land on the chair. I pictured it all swollen and pressing downward and I didn't think I would be able to make it from the waiting room to the ultrasound room. I made hubby hold my tea, because I didn't want to be reminded of the existence of liquid. I went in and begged them to let me pee, but the receptionist didn't speak English very well, and said "10 seconds". I took that to mean I would have my ultrasound in 10 seconds, but that was not the case. She meant I could pee for 10 seconds. Anyway once I sorted that out, I ran to the washroom and peed a bit. Turns out, once you've started peeing and you really have to go badly, it's quite hard to stop but stop I did, proudly. I went back into the office and they told me it would be another half an hour; I was irate. I sat in that waiting room and 10 seconds later the situation became gloomy once again. Hubby went to find the cafeteria to get something to eat, since he hadn't eaten breakfast and it was going on 11 am, and left me squirming in my chair. Finally I decided to take matters into my own hands. I angrily jogged to the bathroom, peed most of what I had, then marched out, dumped my tea into the water fountain, filled my cup with water, and started all over again. Man alive, it's torture to make someone drink all that water and then make them wait an additional 30 minutes. They should know that these things are timed very carefully….

The ultrasound technician was very nice, though language was still an issue. I could understand her, she just couldn't understand us completely. Anyway. She didn't have much of a sense of humour because when I asked her to please tell me that my baby's head wasn't too too big, she didn't get it. I think I even said "I don't want to pass a giant head" but nothing. Silence. I can't complain, as she was very sweet, patient when the baby wasn't cooperating, waited for the baby to get into a good position to see what sex it is even though it's not part of her required exam, and gave us four pictures to take home instead of the standard two.

All news was good news. This baby is freaking adorable, and so far perfectly healthy. We saw the heart pumping, the little empty stomach, the brain (a genius, of course), the little toes and fingers and nose and mouth and chin and everything. All in all I would estimate that all stretched out, baby is approximately 9 or 10 inches long (this includes legs, which don't usually get measured, as they're all folded up). By the end of it, I predictably had to pee like a racehorse once again. The moral of this story is that Gennyland only requires like one large glass of water before having a fetal ultrasound. Gennyland has a tiny bladder.

So here's the result: our beautiful baby girl. I have never seen anything so perfect in all my life.

Take that, snow.

I was right – spring is on its way. These days the temperatures are normally over 8 degrees, often as high as 12, and the snow is hastily making its exit. 'Tis the season of dog poo and snow mould, but I'm not complaining – my dryer broke down at the right time, because I've been happily hanging the laundry outside for the past couple of weeks.

Hubby and I took Rosie and hiked up the hill the other day to check for fallen deer antlers. We found nothing, but it was nice to get out and stretch my legs a bit. I found myself scampering up icy rock faces (not crazy high, don't anybody worry) and thought Dang, being pregnant's not that bad just yet. I am still fairly mobile, and I do believe my energy is restoring itself. Enough that the spring air has made me cleaning/organizing/renovating crazy, much to hubby's chagrin. I shouldn't say that – he's been patient and cooperative, it's just that I feel like everywhere I look something needs to be fixed or thrown out or cleaned or re-arranged. Maybe it's spring or maybe it's nesting but pretty soon it's going to make him snap, I'm sure of it. Thank god fishing season is around the corner and he'll be able to get away from me and my lists. Hi hubby, glad to have you until April 22.

I've been knitting quite a bit – I made a really cute bunting bag with a hood and pompom, which still needs to be finished off (ends woven in, zipper installed), and am working on an adorable little cardigan the colour of a cooked egg yolk. Mom says it's a girlie colour, but I can butch it up if need be. We'll see. Other projects on my list include a colourful baby blanket, which I hope to work on this summer so that I have something to occupy me in case labour is a drawn out process, and perhaps some little wooly pants to go with the egg yolk sweater – colour to be determined following the ultrasound. I'm sure I'll find 17 more things to knit along the way, but that's the list so far. I had started a sweater for myself and bought yarn for another sweater for hubby, but sorry hubby, grown-up knitting is on the back burner for awhile. I'm sure you understand. My mom's also been knitting, so my baby will never go cold. So far she has made the most beautiful white little outfit for bébé to wear home from the hospital or to receive visitors. It's light, so it'll be ok in August. She's also working on an adorable aran cable sweater. Remember how I once posted about how amazing my mom is? You should see the maternity clothes she's made me. I never have to set foot in Thyme Maternity to buy their crappy $69 pants again. She's even figured out maternity dress pants with the stretchy panel in front. She's such a pro.

Next week is my ultrasound and I'll be almost halfway through. I'm a bit worried about the ultrasound, only because we didn't do any of the 11 – 14 week genetic testing, so this is the first glimpse we'll have of the wee one since he or she was 3.7mm long and had no face. I hope it all goes well and will report back on the results, perhaps even with photos. He or she has started to kick me around a bit, I occasionally feel a light flicking sensation in my belly that isn't gas (I know my gas, and this isn't it).

I'm trying hard to pay attention at work, but it's frankly an uphill battle. The internet makes concentrating hard. I'm ticking down the days, so by my calculations, I have 95 working days left until I'm off on mat leave. Not that I'm counting or anything. At first I was like "mentally check out of work? No! Not me!" but here I am, signing up for prenatal and CPR classes, looking up ultrasound pictures online, and searching for a daycare spot for August 2011. I make it sound worse than it is, but overall, concentrating is a challenge, and baby stuff is fun and necessary. Whereas a couple of months ago I felt that August was a lifetime away, and I had all the time in the world to figure things out, all of a sudden I'm down to 5 months and things are starting to ramp up. My daycare search began late, apparently, at 17 weeks pregnant, and I've missed the boat on a couple of prenatal classes already. Our first baby shower is April 10, and already we've lined up stuff like an infant car seat, a playpen, and other necessities. Things are really moving now.

I'm going to take pictures of all the things I've made in the last while, because it's been awhile, and I've been busy. Aside from the knitting, I've also taken a pottery class (another pottery class) and made us a set of 8 plates for the cottage. They're all different sizes and colours but I think that's perfect for the cottage. They're quite cheery.

That's it for me this week- work will be busy from now until late next week, but by then I hope to have pictures of a healthy baby to show off. Fingers crossed.

 

 

Springing

There's something in the air these days, and it isn't freezing rain. There has been a shift in light and smell that makes me think that winter's finally on its way out, and spring is forcing its way in. The road is snow-less, and last night when I got home I found something in my bed that I haven't seen in about 5 months: mud. Apparently Rosie found the only mud she could roll in, and rolled in it.

This weekend I will be starting my seeds. I haven't yet made the final decision as to what I'm going to start, because every year I get tempted by things that I should know won't work out (red peppers, leeks, eggplants). This year I am going to focus on things we'll use, like tomatoes, several varieties of basil, squash, and maybe cucumbers. At the land, I intend to plant things like sweet potatoes and large squash, and just let 'em go crazy (it's all sand up there, with a nice layer of black earth on top) and hope to collect them sometime before or after I give birth in August. I already have garlic, rhubarb, blueberries and strawberries (for what it's worth) on the go in the garden, but they will all need a bit of TLC come spring. I will do normal potatoes in the bin once again, but I think I'll forget about onions this year – my soil was too heavy last year and it was so wet, and none of them got larger than a kumquat. I will once again have to dump in a load of topsoil, some peat moss, and some compost to mitigate the clay, which dominates by end of year.

So this weekend, I am going to start my tomatoes and basil. It's too early to do squash yet – they get pretty big pretty fast and it's almost better to just put them directly into the ground – but I need to do the tomatoes properly because every year they get all long and stringy. I want chubby fuzzy plants this year.

Speaking of chubby, in the best possible way, my cousin had her baby on Monday. She weighs 10 lbs 1oz so welcome to you, Azalea! Hope you like gardening with a name like that! Another sign of spring has been that babies and pregnant ladies are popping up all over the place. I myself have started to pop a wee bit – I no longer just look like I ate a big dinner. My tummy protrudes ever so slightly and it's as hard as a rock. Had a Doctor's appointment last week, and heard the wee lad/lady's heartbeat (135 bpm), so all is still well in womb-land. I am now nearing 17 weeks. I have an ultrasound March 24 and then on April 15 I get to start going to the OB-Gyn at the hospital where I will eventually give birth, instead of to my family doctor.

Another sign of spring: work's being done back at the homestead. I have reserved our lovely handyman Stuart for the week of April 18 to finally come and finish the siding on our house. He works super-fast and is cheerful and reasonably-priced so I am pretty excited. After that, we'll start moving the furniture around and getting ready for baby. Also happening in April, hubby's going to build us a dock up at our land, so I will have somewhere to lounge my beluga belly this summer. I look forward to rolling off of that dock when the sun gets too hot to handle. Too bad I can't drink beer. I wonder if I will fit into the bathroom of our trailer come late July…

An Ode to Winter Olympics

Those of you who know me in person know that I am not an athletic person. I may have mentioned this once or twice before on these pages. I do not enjoy working out or training for anything, and my competitiveness is limited to board games. I was once recruited for the high school downhill ski team, but only because I was a girl who could ski, and I distinctly remember sitting out most if not all of my races. DNS was my middle name (I now realize this was really short-sighted, but at 15 I had none of that wisdom or selflessness). I don’t enjoy team sports - physical or intellectual – and I don’t like to join things like clubs, leagues or groups of any kind. I dislike watching sports on t.v.

Every four years though, every four years I go a bit nuts. It hit its peak in 2006 for the Torino Winter Games, where I remember I was on a trip for work and actually retired between events to my hotel room to watch the Olympics. I remember lying on my hotel bed, all dressed up, glued to the Mens’ Downhill. Every four years I will regale whoever is in the room with me with my in-depth (not really) knowledge of speed skaters, various world cup downhill runs, trivia about athletes from other countries, the origins of the Nordic biathlon, and our chances against the Swedish hockey team. I become a completely obnoxious sports lunatic.

The winter Olympics are far superior to the summer Olympics. Purists and ancient Greeks will argue that there’s no better competition than who can run faster, or who can throw that stick the furthest, but I will say that there’s no better challenge than doing all of that on ice with blades on your feet or with a gun. I’m pretty sure your chances of death are much reduced when participating in the summer Olympics, though some of those marathoners look pretty close to it most of the time. Summer Olympics are short-and-wiry-person friendly, whereas you need height and weight on your bones to get any speed going on a downhill run. I will grant you that there are some thrilling summer Olympic sports; velodrome biking, motocross, mens’ swimming, and triathlon are all kind of fun to watch. But nothing lights my fire like watching a sleek and enormous Dutchman fly around a shiny ice track in a skin-tight orange suit, thighs growing before my eyes. In my mind athletes of the winter Olympics are giant Nordic machines, built for icy climes, descending from the hills every four years to make use of the ice and snow around them. They go faster, higher, more super-propelled than any summer Olympian. They fall spectacularly, and get up and go down the hill again, like Anja Paerson of Sweden did just yesterday. People ask “how did she not break in half when she fell on that downhill run?” and the answer is “she does this all the time. She knows how to fall and is 99% muscle.” A couple of months ago 19 year-old US speedskater JR Celski sliced open his leg with his own skate blade, cutting 6 inches across and two inches down into his thigh. When he pulled out the blade, he saw his own femur. He went on to race a few months later and won a bronze medal. See? Winter Olympians are made of tough stuff.

Take Luge, for instance. I know everyone talks about Luge in hushed tones since the death of the Georgian luger the day of the opening ceremonies. That accident highlighted what is truly scary about the winter Olympics – they are unforgiving. Luge is like kiddie tobogganing, only on the craziest steepest iciest hill ever on a steerable toboggan with blades. Then there’s skeleton. The braver kids on the toboggan hill do their runs on their stomachs, holding onto their crazy carpets with their mittens instead of their boots. When those kids grow up they can go 140 km/h on the skeleton run – face first. I love downhill skiing, but I rarely even drive my car as fast as those male downhillers race down the icy mountain. We always think “oooh that hill looks icy and hard” but actually, for a true downhill run, they inject water into the hill to make it harder. It’s icy on purpose. Does anyone remember Brian Stemmle’s crash? Don’t look it up, it will make you toss your cookies. These guys are inherently insane, and that just makes for amazing television.

So consider me a Winter Olympics junkie. Watching these world-class athletes in peak physical condition compete at the highest level in their sport gives me a good excuse to lay on my couch and eat pizza, which is ironic but true. The house is a mess, the dog feels neglected, and I am getting by on very little sleep, but man, do I love these Olympics. I have to go. I think there’s a Mens’ Super G on right now.

One Down, Two to Go

Tomorrow I will be 14 weeks pregnant, so I’m now starting my second trimester, and so far so good. I have to say, after all of this dramatic lead-up and thinking that pregnancy is this huge crazy thing and wondering what kind of pregnant lady I will be, this pregnancy has so far been a piece of cake.

My belly’s starting to expand a bit. Where I previously had a mushy sort of pot belly, it’s now firm and I can’t suck it in. I am tired a lot, but it’s usually due to something I ate or being in a social situation (parties wipe me out unless I take a nap first). I am having some troubles sleeping at night, because my sleep cycle seems to lighten at around 3 or 4 a.m. and I invariably wake up from hubby’s snoring. His snoring’s not terrible – the neighbors can’t hear it or anything – but when you’re wide awake in the dark at 3 a.m. it’s pretty tough to ignore. I guess I am a bit more emotional than usual but I can’t say that I am a wreck or anything, aside from a handful of really down days. I don’t have any weird food cravings, haven’t really had any nausea, don’t miss drinking booze at all, and I have only gained about 2-3 lbs so far.

Challenges have included: getting dressed in the mornings, as I previously mentioned. My options are limited daily – I never know in advance what’s going to fit unless I stick with maternity clothes. And if normal clothes fit in the morning they often feel terrible by 2 p.m. as I seem to expand throughout the day. The biggest challenge this week is that I’m finding breathing more difficult than normal. I am asthmatic, but it doesn’t really feel like asthma; it just feels like I can’t take in enough air. It’s made me a bit lazier if that is even possible.

I am really trying to eat right. All bread-type products I eat are whole wheat (well, 80% I would say), and I try to eat as many fruits and veggies as possible. As snacks, I indulge in the occasional chips or chocolate, but usually it’s yoghurt or fruit juice or something, or triscuits which are my new top cracker. I drink a lot of water. The other day I got to work and had to go pee 5 times before lunch, from one large cup of tea.

Pottery classes are helping me get through the weeks; I’m on week four of an 8-week course that my friend is teaching, and since it feels like those are passing me by quickly, it means that the weeks are falling away. I am working on a set of plates. I’ve made three so far, all different sizes with different edges, not on purpose. Oh well, I imagine they will hold food even if they are tough to stack. By the time I finish this pottery course I’m hoping I can throw all of my effort into trying to feel this baby move around. It’s apparently the size of a medium-large shrimp right now (they always compare them to food – usually fruit, so I guess it's a lime this week or something) so I wouldn’t feel the force of its kicks just yet. Those legs are too noodley still, but hopefully by nearly 18 weeks it’ll be knocking on my belly, saying howdy-doo.

I have started to indulge myself in researching baby equipment. We seem to have chosen a stroller that we like, and I am looking at car seats that fit it. Our stroller needs to be tough, with good wheels for dirt roads and other rough terrain, lightweight for hauling up and down deck stairs, and fold compactly into the back of our car for shopping trips etc. We like the BOB Revolution stroller, which is a pretty sweet ride – it turns on a dime. I like the orange and brown version and hope to find a sale on it somewhere. It fits different brands of infant carriers/carseats so we’ll have to pick one of those out too. I already know which crib I like and what the baby’s room is gonna look like so all we still need large-things-wise is a smallish change table for our bedroom, a crib mattress, and a new t.v. – a flat-screen, not large, so it can unobtrusively go in the living room.

Future time markers include: next doctor’s appointment Feb. 23rd. I will be in meetings solidly from March 18th to 23rd, and my next ultrasound is March 24th, with another doctor’s appointment sometime around there as well. My second trimester goes until mid-May. The Austrians arrive August 5th, the Germans August 14th (my due date – don’t worry nobody’s staying at our place) and hopefully the baby will arrive sometime in there as well. I’m sure more time markers will pop up in that span, which will help me get through this waiting game.

I made the mistake of watching childbirth videos the other day – they were eye-opening, to say the least, but I don’t think I’m scared. I don’t think. I had to rewind the part where the baby came out about 5 times to fully absorb what my eyes were seeing. The head struggled to come out, all messy and squished-like, and then BLUP the rest of the body sort of barfed out of her hoo-ha in one fell swoop. Like I said, eye-opening.

Waiting makes me write more in this here blog, so expect to hear more from me in the coming months I’m sure…

Mid-Forevuary

My hubby long ago dubbed February ‘Forevuary’ and it stuck. This January-Forevuary is so far proving to be the longest-seeming one so far on record, and I’m frankly getting a bit tired of it.

There are reasons for the neverending winter this year: one, I am pregnant. I am thrilled to bits about this and really enjoying it, feeling great, etc. but I have to say, the only things that get me through winter are skiing and other pursuits like toboganning, drinking, etc., and I can’t do any of them. I can’t do anything that involves speed and I have to watch myself on the ice. Something about my increased rate of oxygen exchange added to my perennial asthma yadda yadda makes breathing kind of an issue these days, so even walking the dog is an effort. Also, winter = a nice fire + red wine and that last one’s off the table, so I’ve tackled this Forevuary stone sober and breathless.

Secondly, it’s been pretty darn cold. This week’s not so bad but a couple of weekends ago when it was minus 30 and windy, I felt like the winter might never end. Poor hubby went on a ski vacation that weekend and his skin is still peeling off of his face. Change is in the air, however – something about the light this past few days has indicated that spring might be on its way, the temperatures have gone a bit more moderate, and no new snow has fallen, which makes me hopeful that winter will go out with a whimper.

Thirdly, I’m pregnant. And early-type pregnant, like I’m now 13 ½ weeks, and every day is being counted. As prisoners and kids waiting for Christmas know, counting the days makes them go more slowly, like watching the proverbial pot of water come to a boil. So today I am 13weeks 4days pregnant, tomorrow I will be 13weeks 5days pregnant, etc. etc and man, February is only 28 days but that is long. I hope that time will go more quickly once I start to grow, and start feeling kicks and stuff. Once I allow myself to start shopping for this baby (furniture, stroller, car seat etc.) it will go a bit faster, make it seem a bit more real.

Fourthly, I love to knit, but I’m working on a never-ending knitting project that’s got the whole system slowed down. There are three or four projects on deck, but I can’t start them until this one’s completed. It’s the second half of a Christmas gift, so it’s already tardy (sorry Kelly!), and it’s just taking me ages to get through it. Once I move on to baby stuff (a hat for a newborn, little sweaters for fall, perhaps a cheery blanket) things will click along again and I’ll get my mojo back. Just no cables for awhile, ’kay? I’m all cabled out.

Fifthly, I am officially sick of my winter clothes. I bought some new maternity clothes to get me over this little hump (in reality, I don’t really need them, but dayum maternity pants are COMFY. Why didn’t I know this before?) but in general the wardrobe is pretty limited and drab. I look forward to wearing lots of dresses (with no pantyhose), sandals, nice t-shirts, and not having to top it all with an unflattering puffy coat that’s getting tight in the belly. I look forward to walking the dog in my hiking shoes that lace up and fit me correctly, instead of my giant clompy boots that are a size too large and make my socks shuffle down into the arches of my feet.

Sixthly, my skin is suffering. This may also be a symptom of pregnancy, but I’m kind of dry and itchy in patches, and my face has taken on a ghostly cast. Deathly white is my normal winter skin tone, but I really look forward to lazing around at the lake, tanning my big oiled-up belly, getting some rays on my face and looking healthy once again. I also look forward to floating around on my air mattress and being pulled up the hill by some kind of elaborate harness-and-pulley system that I haven’t yet dreamed up, but may require. Our land is kind of steep. Anyway, once the sun hits my skin I will come alive once again and I will stop scratching at my hips and the sides of my tummy.

Seventhly, winter food is dull, man. I went to the grocery store the other day and was trying to pick out fruits and veggies and was totally uninspired. Everything comes from Mexico or Peru or other warm and distant climes. I was handling a mango and realized that only one side is red, the rest is green, likely because that’s how they were packed when picked under-ripe and only the exposed side went red. That’s depressing. Also, I keep checking out the strawberries but they’re $5 a box and probably anemic looking/tasting. I kind of wish I was eating ice cream a lot of the time but who eats ice cream in the cold? In early winter I was all into squash and heavy pastas and carby deliciousness but lately I find it hard to get all the veggies into my system that it requires. I’ve been drinking lots of natural-type fruit juices to make up for it. I saw a picture of BBQ-grilled vegetables the other day in a magazine and it very nearly made me drool.

Eighthly, my house is cold. Enough said. I’m tired of wearing layers indoors. The other day found me all confused, wearing olive-green fleece leggings, a black-and grey striped long-sleeved t-shirt, a bright fuchsia fleece sweater, and those Ugg-type slipper boots. I was a vision. My kingdom to be able to wander around in a tank top. My next house is definitely going to have radiant floor heating, because all of the houses I’ve visited with that system are over-warm, and that sounds pretty good in Forevuary.

So boo-hoo hoo eh? I thought I might stop complaining, since life’s been pretty good these days, but it seems I can always find something to whine about. It’s not all doom and gloom though: pretty soon I will get the grow-op up and running once again, and start all the plants that will go in with good intentions in May and June and be completely wild and ignored by August, when my mind will be elsewhere. I promise to keep the veggie garden to a dull roar this year. The aforementioned outdoor light change will start to warm up the air, so that come March, I’ll hopefully be able to drag out some lawn chairs and sit in the wind-free area of my deck in the sun on a Saturday afternoon, reading a book or something, NOT drinking a glass of wine. Pretty soon my belly will pop out a bit, and I look forward to an ultrasound in late March which will show us our little one and turn up some fetal genitals of one sort or the other. Our new pick-up truck is up and running, having gone through the safety check process and come out the other side, (with us $1,700 poorer). I look forward to driving that sweet truck up to the land some weekend in late March and checking out my brother-in-law’s cottage, which has been worked-on steadily throughout this winter, and seeing if our trailer’s still standing under the snow. Several of my loved ones are expecting babies, so to Leslie, Peggy, Kris and all you other growing bellies, I can’t wait to meet your new little ones in the coming weeks and months. I will start shopping in March or April, getting my ducklings in line so that I won’t be waddling around the malls in August all large and resentful. All in all, life is good.

If only I could just put Forevuary behind me!

Lucky Number Three

December 5th 2009 was the one-year anniversary of my dear Loki’s disappearance.

It was also the day that I found out that I am pregnant.

What a whirlwind. I’m only now able to talk about it, since I’m never sure who reads these things and I didn’t want work to know before everything was absolutely affirmative (i.e. nearish the end of the first trimester), but yeah, the third IUI worked. No need for the big nasty IVF.

I did a pee-on-a-stick test the morning of December 4th. You’d think I’d know better after four years but apparently old habits die hard, because I knew I was 13 or 14 days past ovulation, and I just happened to have a test kicking around. I groggily did the deed when I got up in the morning, before walking the dog and waking up hubby, and voilà – a faint pink line appeared for the first time in my life. My reaction was funny. I kind of went “huh, whaddya know” and went out to walk the dog. When hubby got up I said “hey check this out” and he was cautiously optimistic as well. Both sort of stunned, we went to work, I thought about it in moderation throughout the day, but was kind of in a daze. On the way home I went out and bought another test, a different high-quality brand.

The next morning (Saturday), I peed on it, and the line was darker. Glory be. Angels sang, and maybe there was a rainbow over my house or unicorns or something. My mom came over for coffee and could tell that I was mucho distracted, so I slapped the test down on the table between us (I had wiped all the pee off of it first, duh) and we were all a bit incredulous, teary-eyed, in disbelief.

Then Monday I was starting a week-long high-stakes meeting at work, but first, I had a blood test at the fertility clinic – a quick in and out. I got a call at lunchtime with good news: it was positive, the hcg levels were good, and I was set to come back Dec. 21st for an ultrasound and meeting with the doctor. Needless to say, it was tough to concentrate on the meeting for the rest of that afternoon – nay – that week.

We went to San Francisco in between. You can see why I wasn’t blown away by our trip, as I was sort of preoccupied, and was a bit tired and crabby and concerned throughout. Also I wasn’t able to drink which kind of sucked but really, I didn’t miss it. Flying made me nervous (nervous that my nervousness would affect things) but we got through it just fine.

December 21st we went in to the clinic, had an ultrasound, and saw the little bean and its nice, strong heartbeat. It was the size of a grain of rice – 3.7 mm. The doctor and ultrasound technician both said that we are ‘textbook,’ to enjoy my ‘good, strong pregnancy’ and to send him pictures after the big day. Doc then told me what not to eat and sent us packing – we graduated from the clinic, a day I had never really envisioned.

Christmas was a hoot. Again, it passed in a blur because I was so distracted, and on the 28th I started with the symptoms – feeling gross, super tired, and I couldn’t look at coffee. I had those for about 5 days, until I went back to work, and then they lessened a bit, which freaked me out completely. Word to the pregnant and wise: stay off the internet when you’re newly pregnant and paranoid by nature; my doctor calls it ‘googlitis’. I still am turned off of coffee, and am really into potatoes, oatmeal, rice, pita bread and other starchy things. Grapefruits are excellent, as are pomegranates, olives, pickles, and avocados. I drink tea in the mornings now, which is fine, and treat myself with yoghurt or milk chocolate – dark no longer appeals to me. I am tired a lot, and am having a hard time doing my job effectively. I have headaches, but I always had headaches so I can’t really tell if they’re pregnancy-related. Aside from these things I feel fine. Easy.

I read somewhere that some food aversions and nausea are caused by smells, because apparently pregnant ladies have an increased sense of smell. This doesn’t really apply to me, since my nose is always stuffy and I have a terrible sense of smell anyway, so perhaps it’s the reason for my lack of nausea so far.

By mid-January I needed to invest in some stretchy clothes with forgiving waistbands, because sitting all day in dress pants or pantyhose was killing me. It was kind of making me have indigestion. The pantyhose almost made me throw up and I had to cut a big slit down the front of them halfway through the day. I wore a lot of stretchy blousy things to work so for all of you who thought I was being kind of a slob, now you know why. If you were also wondering why I’ve adopted a bit of a waddle in the last couple of weeks, your questions have now been answered. Pregnancy seems to make my hip problem much much worse, so now when I get up from a seated position, I have to take a moment to adjust, and I limp a bit.

I have started planning what we’re going to do with the house. The t.v. will have to move to the living room (yuck) because the current t.v. room will be the kid’s room. For the first while, baby will live in our room upstairs, so I can get up in the middle of the night and not have to negotiate stairs. Guests are just going to have to put up with the nursery-like décor, because the guest room and baby room will be one and the same. Rosie’s going to have to learn some boundaries when it comes to toys and jumping on people, and she will perhaps have to be restrained by a seatbelt while riding in the back of the car.

Speaking of cars, we bought a truck, which will be my maternity-leave vehicle. It’s a 2001 Dodge Dakota king cab, so it has a full back seat (very comfy) and is nice and clean inside. Lots of room for baby and dog. It’s not too high and not too low, so I won’t have to lift the baby up or bend down to put it in the carseat; this truck is perfect for my height. I already have my eye on a nice red stroller/carseat combo, and have started to acquire gender-neutral baby gear as well. Friends have all been very generous so my baby-stuff Rubbermaid is filling up nicely. Pretty soon we’ll have to start moving furniture around and filling up dressers.

We spent so much of our time and energy thinking about conception that we never really allowed ourselves to consider it actually happening, and what comes next. It all feels very surreal.

Anyway, I am now sitting at just over 12 weeks pregnant. My boss knows and was amazing about it. My belly has started to pooch out a bit so soon everyone will guess. I heard the little watery bah-boom bah-boom bah-boom heartbeat last week, so everything is just clicking right along.

Phew.

My Telephone Allergy

I am a person who hates the telephone. Back in the day, when I was a teenager, getting a phone call was a really exciting thing – an indicator of social importance, that someone was thinking of me, or someone needed me for something.

Nowadays, aside from phone calls from friends and family, I tend to avoid the telephone. I find it frustrating, like a sneak attack. At home, I let hubby get it. Telemarketers send me into a blind, seething rage. At work is much much worse. You never know what’s on the other end of the line, and if you’re like me and you don’t think quickly on your feet, it can be embarrassing and leave you feeling less-than-intelligent. I am an introvert, in case you didn’t know, and what that means (as I learned in a “Leadership Training Course” offered at work a few years back) is that I like to think for a bit before I speak up or answer any questions. I don’t pipe up in meetings a lot, and I don’t have quick retorts when I get into arguments. It’s not that I’m not thinking – often I will attend a meeting, think about things, and then discuss them with my supervisor one-on-one later on that day or something. I don’t like to be put into a position where I have to stammer an answer out immediately, just because someone decided to pick up the phone and demand it from me. I truly see it as an assault. I am the opposite of Blondie.

This is not to say that I am an unresponsive person. I am a great and warm-hearted lover of e-mail. Give me a keyboard over a headset anyday. With e-mail, I can read the message at my leisure – several times if that’s what it takes to absorb it all. Then, I can formulate a detailed response that is well-crafted, answers all the questions posed, and sounds halfway intelligent. I write very quickly, and it comes out sounding the way I sound to myself in my head. I can send links to appropriate forms, when necessary (try sending a link over the telephone). Most often, what I get in return is “well thank you so much for writing me back so quickly – that was very helpful”. So you see – it’s not my fault; it’s the medium. I see telephone calls as pointless. Do you really need to HEAR my nasal voice on the other end of the line, stammering and going “uh, wait a second while I find that information (paper shuffle paper shuffle paper shuffle) Oh! Here it is!”? It’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be. I am often congested (damn allergies) and so I sound a bit Minnie-Mouse-ish on the phone anyway; I sound like I’m six years old.

Also, as another blogger pointed out (can’t find the link): if any important information is relayed in a telephone call, you have to write it down anyway! Two steps, where one would suffice. Someone tells you their address on the phone? You’ll find an old receipt or something lying on the counter and scribble it down in a hurry, and probably forget to shove it in your pocket before you go, or if you’re like my hubby you might just mix up the address numbers and go to the wrong place (he’s kind of number-impaired. But still very, very intelligent - in case he's reading). If they send it to you in an email, and you are like me and don’t delete things quickly, you can log in anywhere and find it again whenever you’re stuck.

I admit that there are times when a phone call is a necessity. When you’re traveling and you need to know where to meet someone, you can call them and say “hey I’m at such-and-such spot – where should we meet?” or “I’m on my way”. But I like phone calls that last less than two minutes, in general. Any more than that and my ear gets sweaty and I get bored and start to fidget. Conversation devolves into “mmmhm. Uh huh. Wow.” My cellphone is never charged anyway – every time it rings I have an anxiety attack.

So if you need something from me, send me an email. If it’s cute, I’ll save it and come back to it often, read it, and smile. If you need information from me, this is the most effective way to get it, and to get it good. If you want surly, confused, bored and resentful - call me. *

* this in no way refers to close friends and family members, who can call me call me anytime.

Christmas in This Country

We just got back from a week-long vacation in San Francisco.

The timing on that is kind of weird – leaving December 13 and returning December 19, but it was nice to get away all the same. Also, it was really very nice to come back, to realize that I am kind of behind on this whole Christmas thing. It’s now December 23 and I’m putting the finishing touches on some home-made gifts while living in squalor, my house is a filthy mess of wood chips, empty suitcases and dirty laundry.

San Francisco is a nice city. Saying that is like saying “I like weekends” or “chocolate is tasty.” Everyone knows San Francisco is nice. It has a big orange bridge (“International Red” I learned from the guidebooks), a bunch of hills, and good shopping. We were lucky enough to be visiting family – hubby’s half-sister and her hubby rent an apartment there for a month each year – and so accommodations were inexpensive and we had built-in tour guides. The backyard of their apartment featured two lemon trees – a meyer lemon and a regular (?) lemon – so we had fresh lemons whenever we wanted. I was blown away. Not only were there lemon trees, there were lemons in DECEMBER. I picked one that was almost the size of my head.

We wandered around town. We saw and went up Coit Tower, went to Pier 39 and checked out the sea lions (Feist running in our heads the whole time), ate chowder on the waterfront, shopped on Fillmore street and Union Square, poked around Japantown, drove across the bridge four times, went to Muir woods and Muir beach, Sonoma (a good somnolent word for this horribly boring town), Monterey – to the Aquarium, Salinas to see hubby’s amazing 91 year-old aunt and her little dog too, Ocean Beach, Cliff House and the amazingly un-barricaded Sutro bath ruins. We had a typical-for-us whirlwind vacation. Our hosts thought a week was too short but in fact it was long enough.

I was impressed by the palm trees (they get me every time!) and the surfers. We definitely do not have surfers here in December.

I have to say: I thought experiencing Christmas stuff in a warm place would be weird, but it’s not, really. Those people have some crazy spirit. Many of the houses are decorated, Christmas music blasts in every business and everyone wishes you a ‘happy holidays!’ well mostly everybody – not that crazy old bitch in Sonoma who got mad at me for my chair placement in the bakery (I’m sending a hex her way and hope she has a terrible Christmas full of personal tragedy and financial misfortune) – but generally Christmas spirit there is almost more intense than it is here. Palm trees with Christmas lights on them are funny to me.

Rosie stayed with my parents/her grandparents, and they had a blast. I think both parties were sad when it came to an end. We were so happy to get back and to see her; while we were away I had to touch every dog I saw, I missed her so much. We came back early Sunday morning to a freezing cold northern weather blast, a cold house, and a lot of laundry.

So now it is Christmas. I hope that you and yours have a wonderful holiday however/whatever you celebrate. As for me, I look forward to giving everyone my wee gifties and am planning to eat my own weight in Oma-food.

See you in the new year!

We did it!

We ate hors d'oeuvres for dinner!

gotcha.

Getting to know all about you....

I have worked on a lot of projects over the past 4 and a half years – since I started this blog. You have all been thrilled by my accounts of things like planning our wedding, making shelving in the back room, the annual vegetable garden, terracing my front perennial beds, the cider-making, renovating the trailer, building a new deck, the siding on our house, purchasing and developing our waterfront land, getting a puppy, raising said puppy into a very nice (yet still crazy) two-year-old dog, and various knitting projects here and there. I am a project person, and have enjoyed the varied successes that have come along with each of these.

There remains one project that we have been working on for the past four years, which I’ve alluded to yet never described in any great detail. This involves something that we’ve attempted to build, but can never really get off the ground. It’s been in the planning stages for four years, and sacks of money have been invested into it, but still we haven’t met with any success. I will attempt to go into some detail without getting maudlin, but this project has been to build a family, and so far it’s the one thing that we’ve been completely unsuccessful at. Turns out it’s way easier to build a deck.

We’ve always wanted kids. I’m a kid-person who can often be found in the kid room at a party, being entertained by the under-3-foot set. When I was young I babysat, and man did I babysit; one summer there were 20 families in my area whose kids I babysat. Those kids are all driving and going to university now, and here I am with grey streaks in my hair, wondering how the heck it happened that my kid-friendly house hasn’t got any kids in it.

Lots of people that I read about start families in their mid-thirties, and they’re all like “I wanted to be sure that I was established in my career before I started my family.” Fair enough. I was the opposite. Until a year ago, I had jobs that made me crave a one-year slate-wiping maternity leave. I couldn’t wait to announce to someone “I’m pregnant, and I’ll be leaving for a year. Let somebody else have fun at my desk.” I can’t really account for why we waited so long, just that it took us 7 years to get established enough to be married: in the first year hubby moved to Thailand for six months. In the second, we were getting used to co-habiting and working out the kinks of job, bills, lifestyle, etc. In the third, we bought a house. In the fourth I guess we just sat around, and in the 5th I got a new job. It wasn’t until the 6th that we got engaged, and in the 7th we got married. I was never curious as to why I’d never even had a pregnancy scare in those 7 years, but that has since explained itself.

We started trying to have kids right away. I remember the anticipation and assuredness that I felt, that yes, we’d timed this one right and we’ve been married for two months and we are going to have a baby! How exciting! But life doesn’t work that way. I learned that if you wait that long to find out if you can get pregnant, you’re already a few years behind the eight ball if you find out that you can’t get pregnant.

After a year and a half of timing things just right and taking my temperature every day, and spitting on an ovulation ferning kit predictor thingy every morning and peeing on sticks of all kinds, with no results, my doctor referred us to the fertility clinic. So in our 9th year we met with the nice doctor there, who is a young asian man with an ok sense of humour. He subjected us to rounds and rounds of testing and more months of recording my temperatures before he decided that I don’t ovulate very consistently and hubby’s swimmers aren’t in peak condition. We just miss each other every time. It kind of figures. When asked what causes the lack of top-drawer sperm, he said that the only cause they have found so far is environmental pollutants, which build up in a body, emulate estrogen and do all kinds of other wacky things (and it's on the rise). Needless to say, hubby now uses herbal shampoo, soap, and doesn’t put his food in plastic containers. We have recently seen some improvement.

We went on a few rounds of Clomid, the second of which stimulated my ovaries so much I couldn’t walk comfortably or do my pants up all the way. Clomid was easy to take but tough to deal with. That was two summers ago - I think I wrote about it. After about 5 months (not consecutive) of Clomid, Dr. determined that that wasn’t likely to work either. I then took a break, as my resentment towards the clinic and the process had built up and my stress levels had risen – being told one appointment that I likely had PCOS and the next appointment that I did not, over and over again, made me beyond frustrated – so in our 10th year, I had to step back.

Which brings us to the present reality: we returned to the clinic early in 2009, and decided to give the Dr. the ‘go’ to do whatever it takes to have a kid. Tickety tock, in our 11th year. By May we were signing consent forms for IUI and IVF, and in July I was on my first round of injectible fertility drugs. They are a trip. Being a kind of science nerd (secretly), the process of giving myself the injections doesn’t bother me a bit. I got a kit containing a fun little pen-like syringe thing, and it comes with lots of needle heads, and alcohol pads, and I crank it to the right dose and just pop it right into my belly. That first month it sent me for a loop – I was tired all the time, cranky, woozy about an hour after the shot, and kind of forgetful, like I was in a fog. When in early August I went to the washroom and found out that it didn’t work, I was distraught.

The process isn’t really fun, for any of you who haven’t had the pleasure: for about two weeks, you inject every day, into your stomach or your thighs. Every other day, you go into the clinic in the morning for blood tests and an ultrasound (not the on-top-of-the-belly one you see in movies, either). They count and measure your egg follicles, and then you meet with the Doctor, who tells you what dose to continue with and when to come back. Towards the end, you go in for bloodwork every day. You have to wake up early because you live an hour away, and you are generally late for work each time. Also, the medication has to stay refrigerated so it’s really fun up at the lake, and you can’t travel anywhere because you have to go to the clinic every damn day. Oh and the medication is really expensive and my drug plan doesn't cover it. When you’re ready (meaning your follicles are big enough your estrogen levels have risen), they tell you to ‘trigger’, which means you use a different injectible medication to make you ovulate. Then you wait a day (phew, a day of respite, where you wake up at a normal time and don’t have to inject anything into yourself). Then you go into the clinic (hubby goes at 8am, I go at 11), his little guys get spun in a centrifuge so only the very best survive, and they use a catheter to put them inside your uterus. You wait 15 minutes then go back to work. You stop drinking wine and start making lots of jokes about 'eating for two.'

I’ve done this twice now (number two gave me nothing either), and am close to the ‘trigger’ of my third as I write this. My stomach is covered in bruises as I think I’ve been a bit more cavalier with the injections this cycle. It’s really pretty. I've had 16 needles in 10 days. They added a new step this round, which is apparently now common practice: progesterone suppositories, which sound superfun. I am to take those twice a day for two weeks once the procedure’s done. The bottle has to be disguised or stay hidden in the back of the drawer, as it says “INSERT INTO VAGINA TWICE DAILY” in big black letters and I don't want company finding it. Is that TMI? I am kind of blind to TMI these days, sorry. Also, it has a fun sticker on it that says ‘may cause dizziness’, illustrated with a fun confused-looking little character. This will be my excuse for doing a lot of sitting down over the next two weeks.

I have high hopes for this round ‘cause if it doesn’t work, we’re on to the big bad IVF in the new year. This whole thing has been a bit disruptive to the new job that I love and don’t really want to leave (a strange sensation I am experiencing for the first time), as nobody at work can have any idea what I’m cooking up in the background. I don’t exactly work at a daycare, and this beloved job is a contract.

All in all, it’s not something that brings me sadness on a daily basis. I am pretty matter-of-fact about it. I suppose that if this one doesn’t work and then IVF were to fail, then I would be despondent, but I’d probably just pull a Madonna and steal a kid from somewhere. I am at the point in my life that I could bond to a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel. I make jokes about it, and will discuss the process with anyone who’s interested. I just don’t want anyone waiting on tenterhooks for me. I want it all to be a surprise when it finally happens, a miracle of life. There are many blogs dedicated to the fertility treatments and exploits of women who’ve been through much much more than I have, so if you’re really interested and want to hear more about this, then I advise you go to explore over there, because I don’t intend to talk about it much more in this blog.

In the meantime, Christmas is coming, and I wish I could tell you all about the knitting projects I’m working on, but THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU!

Better late than never

I’m a big liar and didn’t post pictures of my Halloween party last week like I said I would. It was a great success (I think) – in total 27 people showed up, the place looked great, and we had so much food that I never even remembered to crack into the boxes of frozen hors d’oeuvres I’d bought in a panic at 4:30 p.m. Now I look forward to enjoying hors d’oeuvres for dinner some night.

People took the zombie theme and ran with it, even though dressing as a zombie wasn’t mandatory. We had a zombie fisherman (dear hubby), a zombie bride, a zombie fireman, a zombie barbarian, a zombie tinkerbell, a zombie doctor, a zombie cowboy, a zombie country girl and me, the zombie hostess. We also had a mad doctor, a clown, a Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, a beautiful Wakefield lady, a man in a sari and pearls, his lady friend in a long Moroccan jacket (kind of a last-minute costume), a mummy, a Bolivian person (actually a Cuban person in a Bolivian hat), a spooky scarecrow, a Frida Kahlo, a man in a fur vest and bowler hat (maybe he was a zombie man in a fur vest and bowler hat?) an undertaker, a sex criminal, a pumpkin, a family of circus freaks (a bearded lady, a werewolf, a baby werewolf, and a ringleader) and I guess that about does it. There was dancing. At one point, we had 100% dance floor participation, as everyone contributed a semi-coordinated effort to Thriller, of course (zombie anthem).

The next morning I was full of vim and vigour and got up at 7 a.m. and cleaned the house. I crashed around 2 or 3 but there’s nothing I love more than having a party and then, the next day, getting the house cleaner than it was before.

Now here we are at November 10th already. We visited the cottage construction site on Sunday and oh man, am I jealous. It is gorgeous. And expensive. The roof is on and it’s the talk of the lake. Once the windows go in it will truly be stunning. We moved our mini-kayaks into our trailer and tarped it up, and it’s pretty much ready for winter now – though Ben the builder still has to put a little roof over it. We may go up one more time once the windows are in the cottage, just to check it out.
I’m off tomorrow because government employees get to stay home on Remembrance Day. I have a day of medical interventions planned – at 7 a.m. I’m going to go and try to get a flu shot for the H1N1, because I’ve had rather a yucky case of asthma since I was 12 and any respiratory illnesses would be rather serious for me. Then I get to go to the fertility clinic and have another blood test and ultrasound. I hope to be home for 11, so I can clean my house and perhaps teach my neighbor how to knit. I am working on my Christmas knitting and making good progress, aided by the fact that a new yarn ‘warehouse’ opened up not too far from my workplace. There goes the neighborhood. On Friday I look forward to a visit from my cousin and her boyfriend, who I have not met, and who knows what the weekend will bring – perhaps I’ll try taking Rosie to the city again, if the weather’s nice.

No more parties for awhile. Our next big thing is a trip to San Francisco in a month, and then onto Christmas. Ah Christmas.

Two Halloween Revelations

Two things came to my attention this morning:

1. I have readers who are not related to me, and
2. There are other folks out there (adults) who are just as enthusiastic as me about Halloween.

So for all of you out there (relatives and non-relatives) who are glueing, sewing, painting, last-minute-craft-supply-shopping and figuring out how to wire your wigs into just the right shapes, I want you to know that I'm here for you, and we can have a virtual brag-fest right here. Send your pictures to me at gennyland(AT)yahoo.com and I will post them. In the meantime, here's some inspiration. Celebrity Halloween Costumes.

Halloween is for Grown-Ups

I am dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm around Halloween these days.

My friends are all in their thirties and forties. I understand that life is busy, dignity has to be maintained, and children complicate things. I understand all that but yet I still can’t figure out why nobody can match my enthusiasm when it comes to Halloween because it is seriously my favorite holiday of the year (sorry Christmas, you’re stressful).

This year I am most disappointed by the fact that even though Halloween falls on a Saturday, I’m still having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for my Halloween party. Not to sound like a whiney 12-year-old, but really? For once you get to dress in disguise and drink all evening, not have to work the next day, and you’re choosing to stay home? Maybe I need to re-think my lifestyle choices but that sounds like a load of fun to me.

Also for the first time, we’re having a party that may not be for the kiddies. I am going out of my way to make things truly disturbing – blood in the bathtub, gory art on the walls, creepy lighting, boozy punch, décor that hints at recent not-exactly-professional surgical operations, etc. I can’t wait to decorate. So far in my social world I’ve made a real effort to incorporate my friends’ kids into our gatherings, but this time, not so much. I’ve bought a spray bottle of fake blood and will use it liberally. I’ve made frozen hearts out of fruit juice, to use as ice cubes in my bloody punch. I’ve gathered ‘creepy’ fruits (there are a lot of creepy fruits, as it turns out).

This year I get to develop two costumes: since I work in the Visual Arts section at work, we have collectively decided that everyone, all 17 of us, will dress as a famous work of art. They actually organize a Halloween parade at our work, so at 11:30, up to 50 trick-or-treaters will weave up and down the hallways collecting candies, and judges will dole out prizes to the best costumes and best-decorated section. We’re going for gold this year; five of my colleagues are going as ‘dogs playing poker’, one’s going as Van Gogh, a few of them are going minimalist – a Mondrian, a Malevich, and a Magritte, two are teaming up to do ‘American Gothic’, the CanCon will be Emily Carr, we have a token Mona Lisa, and I will be Frida Kahlo, which has been a hoot to (re)create.

For the party Saturday night, I’m going to be a terrifying zombie, plain and simple. Halloween is meant to be scary, in my book. That leaves the door open, as one can be a zombie anything (except a zombie vampire, which my neighbor Dawn argues is entirely possible “what if you were bitten by a vampire AND had your brains eaten by a zombie?” she asked in all seriousness). First Rosie goes to the kennel, because she lost her mind last weekend when I put on my Frida Kahlo wig and I don’t really think she’ll be able to hack a costume, let alone a room full of costumes. Then I’ll decorate, and then will get the trick-or-treaters out of the way, and then I’ll get into my costume. I am so excited. Only two more big sleeps!

I PROMISE I’ll post pictures next week.

Pizza Night!

So evidently my mother now feels that she needs to make my lunch before I go to work and/or drive in to give it to me, to make sure that I get a healthy balanced meal every day and don’t waste my money. Sorry Mom, I didn’t mean to make you concerned. And today’s Moroccan vegetable soup and strip of baguette is delicious so please don’t start delivery just yet.

Tonight is pizza night. We are creatures of habit, my hubby and I, and so every Thursday night since approximately 1999 we have had pizza for dinner. We’re flexible on this of course – sometimes we go out for dinner, as we did last week (it was Thai). Sometimes pizza doesn’t make sense, either because there’s something else that absolutely has to be eaten before it turns green or we’re out of the ingredients. Yes that’s right, ingredients – our pizza is homemade. We have an amazing pizzeria in our small town (we have almost no delivery food in our region except pizza, and we have about four pizza options) but it’s for special occasions only because it’s a bit expensive. It’s so good that our German and Austrian visitors annually request Luigi’s at at least one point during their stay. But I digress.

I make my pizza dough in the breadmaker, once every three weeks (theoretically). I put it on the ‘dough’ setting and take it out when it’s a large fluffy warm blob, I divide it into three portions, I roll/shape them into pizza shapes (not exactly round) and then I half-bake them. They go into the freezer after that, to be pulled out one by one every Thursday night as soon as we get home from work. It’s all very well-orchestrated: Rosie goes to daycare Thursdays so we go and pick her up first, and then when we get home, she doesn’t really need a full walk because she’s been running around all day. Hubby gets a crust out of the freezer and I start chopping. Our Thursday pizza usually has the same toppings each week, with some room for variety: sauce, pepperoni, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, mozzarella and feta cheese. I am so confident in this combination that I am able to buy the vats of sun-dried tomatoes at Costco. Hubby grates the cheese and the pizza goes into the oven for a few minutes, to be ready at approximately 8 pm when our t.v. shows start. We eat it on the couch in front of the television and Rosie’s (hopefully) so zonked that she doesn’t harass us too badly, and falls asleep soon after. We proceed to watch two hours of fine comedic television programming. Ah Thursdays.

NBC is the pizza network at our house. We find NBC on the dial at about 7:54 and stay with it until 10 p.m., until we switch to the CBC for the national news. These days we get to enjoy the weird Saturday Night Live Weekend Update not-so-Saturday special, Parks and Recreation (which is really getting its legs these days), The Office (Jim and Pam’s wedding last week made me cry), and then Community, a new addition to our roster that we’re 75% enthusiastic about.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, however, because tonight is special: it’s the season’s premiere of our all-time favourite, 30 Rock. 30 Rock is the jewel of Thursday’s crown and takes precedence over everything else so I’m pretty sure that the weird SNL show has to go, and the schedule will shift back, making room for the three real shows (The Office, P+R, Community) before 30 Rock, which usually has to be on at 9:30 p.m. due I’m sure to its fairly-mature content. We’ll see. I am a super big ladynerd when it comes to Thursday night television so I just checked NBC’s website and indeed: Community, Parks + Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. Only 6.5 hours to go.

I buy food.

My husband and I have a somewhat unorthodox way of managing household expenses. More traditional folks have looked at our system and wondered why we go through all the trouble and not just do it their way, but for us, it works. What we do is, we save all receipts for things that are shared expenses; this category includes things like groceries (I buy most of them), gas (hubby buys most of it), bills (I pay them) and other incidental things like furniture or goo-gaws from garage sales or the occasional “hey I have no money in my wallet can I borrow 20 bucks?” Half of all of these amounts are written down into two columns – what I pay and what hubby pays – and every two weeks we ‘tally’ these two columns up, or balance them against each other. Since I have paid more things (mortgage, bills, etc) whatever he has paid for is put against this to come up with the amount that he owes me. Then he pays up through our shared account, which is really just a ‘bounce’ account.

This is good for a few reasons: we can itemize all the things we spend money on and figure out what our household expenses generally are, we can track trends and major projects, and it’s an easy way for me to pay the bills but for each of us to still have our own accounts, so we don’t bicker over the small stuff (like shoes I might buy at Winners, or the fishing stuff he buys constantly). Nobody feels slighted, and we have never once fought about money. So far, so good.

Adding it all up and looking at it over a number of months, I figure that our household expenses – everything from groceries and gas to mortgage to phone bill and hydro and insurance – usually averages between $1800 and $2400 a month. This doesn’t include personal expenses, like entertainment or clothes or the hairdresser or those shoes I was talking about earlier. Since we make considerably more than that in a month, I often get to wondering where I’m spending all that extra money. Sure I have investments, and other accounts with little pockets of money here and there, but something is eating up a large part of my budget and I needed to get to the bottom of it.

And then I held that thought and went downstairs to get something to eat and realized: I buy food.

I’m not an enormous person - I’m a healthy size, pretty tall for a girl, medium active – but man can I pack it away. Here’s today’s menu: coffee from home, a breakfast sandwich (no bacon – this means English muffin, egg, cheese) from the shop downstairs, a Caesar salad from the salad place downstairs, and no doubt I will head down around 3 or 3:30 for a coffee and a cookie because salad never fills me up and I have yet to really internalize that lesson. That list doesn’t even include dinner or wine or after-school snacks – in fact, our dinners are so economical, my lunch costs about twice what my dinner costs, on average. The breakfast sandwich is $2.60, the salad was $7.55, and the coffee and cookie will be about $3.00. Add that up! That’s $13 bucks per workday down my gullet! I am an idiot!

I have really good intentions. I bought a beautiful metal one-cup Bodum at a garage sale in Toronto in August, and have since failed to buy a supply of coffee, cream and sugar to go with it. It sits on my bookshelf looking terrific and virtuous but it’s pristine for a reason. We have a huge cupboard at home filled with plastic food storage containers of all kinds but I don’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A because I never fill them with anything. Even when I do prepare a nice little lunch the night before, I unfailingly forget it in the fridge.

I think the truth of it is that I like to buy food. Nothing makes me feel more at peace with the world than going to the market to buy vegetables, or hitting the Italian specialty shop for some nice cheese and ‘authentic’ pasta. This carries over into my work life, because let’s face it, food from home is boring. That and I don’t love sandwiches. I see colleagues walk by my office with plates of re-heated lasagna or salads brought from home and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have home food and then I have the entire world of work food and I like it that way. Every day at 11:45 I think ‘what will it be today? Indian? Thai? Salad? Sushi?’ and my life feels all the richer for it, even if my bank account is not. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid or dirty (last week I bought a pizza for $8.95 that turned out to be a SMALL pita bread with toppings. That’s a snack at my house), but mostly it keeps the line between work and home firmly drawn.

I have officially accounted for another $275 out of my monthly budget. Now I have to figure out where the rest of it goes.

Fall Obsession

Well fall is officially here, which I could have told you without even looking at the calendar. There’s a bite in the air, especially at night, and we know that even if it gets hot in the day, the sleeping will be cool and comfortable at night. The sumacs are electric red, if that's a colour. I think I have to bring in my peppers, pick the rest of my tomatoes, and plant my garlic this weekend.

We had a visitor yesterday – a rude houseguest who trampled the perennials in front of my deck, ate the apples off of my tree, took a big poop in front of my veggie garden, and then crushed my plume poppies on the way out of the yard. I think he had a rather large bottom, by the looks of things. Tonight we are going to go to Canadian Tire and buy one of these, because how many times have I thought that I wanted one over the last 7 years? Too many to count. I am looking forward to it; if we get good shots I will definitely share. Fun for home and cottage!

I was having this discussion with my sister-in-law today: it is fall and for some biological crazy reason, all I can think about is food. I am packing it on. I’m not alone in this so don’t get excited or anything, but fall is when the bear in me goes “get fat and hibernate.” Maybe if I kept my house warmer in winter, that urge would go away? I eat one thing and start thinking about the next. I feel like baking, even though I don’t specifically know what to make or how I’m going to eat it. I’ve started to crave stews and things with apples in them. She mentioned pumpkins and I went “oooh I haven’t even thought about pumpkins yet!” I want to buy some squash this weekend just for the sake of buying and having squash in my house. Is that ridiculous?

So this weekend, on top of cleaning the house and garden and preparing for more guests, I want to bake things with apples, buy a bunch of squash, buy organic garlic and plant it, pick the apples off of our trees to save them from the wildlife, and plan things to bake and experiment on with pumpkins this fall (pumpkin cinnamon buns? Pumpkin pasta? Pumpkin cookies?) Man I am hungry already. What time is lunch?

Things I Hate.

Things that I find really oppressive right now are the following:

Fruit flies I am at war with fruit flies. I surmise that they are coming in through the screens in the kitchen windows, because right outside the kitchen is our apple orchard (two trees). There is a lot of fallen and rotting fruit, and I believe this is where the flies originate. The compost pail has now moved outside to the deck, which is for the best because it’s a breeding ground for fruit flies, though hubby insists on bringing it inside from time to time and enraging me. There are flies in and around the sink, and flies around our heads while we eat dinner. I bought a trap from Lee Valley Tools but I don’t know how many have fallen for it. They are wiley, those fruit flies.

Threatening wildlife, fattening up for winter Apparently this is the time of year when I have to really worry about fishers, coyotes, etc etc. Cats are starting to go missing, and we all know how I feel about that. My little fatty Sasha sticks close to home most of the time, but she’s started staying out later and later at night, and it makes me nervous. We’ve started enlisting Rosie to go out (on a leash) and find her in the dark.

My slow garden I have tomatoes, they’re just not red yet. I have picked a bunch, and want to bring them inside to ripen, but am terrified of encouraging the abovementioned fruit flies. Any ideas are welcome. I am still waiting on some potatoes (I planted them really late) and am still getting zucchini, but everything else is a wash. I got garlic (whoop, that’s the easiest thing) and onions, and potatoes (which were all floury and terrible), and four carrots which were purple, so I suspect my sister-in-law threw them out when she found them in the fridge. They were meant to be purple but she didn’t know that. I got one plum. At least we will have a wonderful apple harvest. Everything is a giant mess, as it always is at this time of year.

The onset of fall We’re unprepared for fall this year. We don’t have our firewood, let alone have it split and stacked and put away. We haven’t had our chimney cleaned. I haven’t cleaned out the garden. The grass is half-mowed, because our mower died. The car needs repairs, and we need to sell the Saturn station wagon that lives in our driveway which will get us peanuts I’m sure. We sold the blue truck (sniff) and will keep it to the Vibe for the winter, I think. We may need new winter tires (cha-ching). We haven’t done anything regarding our siding this year, though Stuart, our handyman guy, said he’d do it in the fall sometime. However, I haven’t painted any boards for it, and don’t even know how many we’ve got. The trailer is woefully unprepared for the winter onslaught, as we don’t think it can handle 4 feet of snow on top of it, and it’s definitely not mouse-or-water-tight, I’ve learned. I feel like I just pulled the garlic out of the garden and I need to think about weeding it and planting next year’s. I need to buy an extra month somehow. I am anxious just writing this out, and could really use a glass of wine.

Junk I am tired of dealing with all the junk in our house. I keep trying to encourage a clean up day (!! to make it sound fun) but we never seem to get rid of a satisfactory amount of stuff. All the empty spaces fill right back up again. This is why we need a cottage. I keep things around (old kitchen sink, old bottles, etc) because I have plans to put them in a cottage someday, but in the meantime you can’t hardly walk through our basement. This weekend I have to do the ol’ twice-annual clothing switch (summer to winter, boo hoo) and I really want to get hubby to do a major sort in his closet. We need to make space, because it’s getting a bit oppressive, and winter only makes that feeling worse.

However, all of this being said, I am a person with a can-do attitude (ha!) and this list of things that I hate now turns into a list of things to deal with:

- put up sticky traps for fruit flies.
- pick tomatoes, remaining potatoes and onions. Ripen them in a fruit-fly-free locale.
- Buy organic garlic and plant it for next year.
- Rip all the weeds and old plants out of the veggie garden.
- Pick apples.
- Order firewood.
- Split and stack firewood.
- Have chimney cleaned.
- Repair car.
- Sell Saturn.
- Call Stuart.
- Check winter tires.
- Winterize the trailer.
- Clean closets.
- Switch clothes summer/winter.
- Put junk away or throw it out.

I should just keep this list as a template, an annual to-do list, because these tasks are the same from year to year. Fall sucks.

Things I Love

These are the things that I presently am really into:

Reading Reading is a funny thing to me. Either I do it 100% or not at all. I can go months and months without reading anything and then all of a sudden the dam bursts and I read three books in a week and will read while doing everything; going to the bathroom, cooking dinner, watching t.v. even.

Free decorating magazines My fertility clinic has a lot of decorating magazines. My hubby and I worked out that this is very savvy on their part: not only does the demographic match (usually thirty-somethings, many females, and most of the people I see in that clinic are fairly upwardly-mobile), but it’s a comforting subject to boot. Fashion magazines might make people feel even worse about themselves than they already do – infertility is a real punch to the gut for body image – and decorating magazines appeal to the nesting instinct that is zinging around that waiting room. Anyway, I pay the damn clinic so much money that I feel justified stealing their magazines, and have come away with two good ones in the past week. I also feel justified because I have a major project (a cottage) coming up so this is like R+D.

Kitchenalia There is this terrific store in Ottawa called Kitchenalia, which stocks really nice high-end and esoteric kitchenwares, but also a lot of antiques. The Austrians bought their kitchen table there. The little old man who runs it is super-nice and knowledgeable and he stocks a really wacky and eclectic mix of antiques. I just love it. I am going there now. There’s an orange table I’ve got my eye on. Edited to note that the table is $325 so it seems I won’t be buying it.

Rosie Rosie came in second in the photo contest. We didn’t get enough votes to win the spa package, which is fine, because it was enough to get her picture in the paper. We got 104 votes in the end. Rosie was very pleased. She has become such a lovely dog, you have no idea. We just finished 8 weeks of obedience and agility training with her and while she wouldn’t win any contests in either (come on people, it’s only 8 weeks), she can do all of the tricks, and doesn’t even hesitate on the teeter-totter, the bridge, the high jumps or the tunnel, which is her favorite. She is so smart. Lately her entire diet is apple-based, so her breath is always sweet and kiss-ready. I just wish I could bring her everywhere with me. If I ran Kitchenalia, as is my dream, she would totally come to work with me. Bull in a china shop anyone?

Bears We have bears in our neighborhood. It used to be an orchard, years and years ago, so there are apple trees everywhere. We find bear turds all over the roads, and bear prints in the mud, but they are so funny because they’re really well-fed in our area, and are therefore relatively non-threatening. All of the turds are like big piles of apple-pie filling. Rosie eats those too. We haven’t actually seen one in our parts yet but we go out looking every night, and one was huffing at my husband in the front yard (from a distance) around midnight a couple of weeks ago. That is a bit scary, but it adds an element of suspense to our days that keeps things lively. My new job as the car passenger is ‘bear-spotter’. So far I have seen only one.

Cottages I am all about cottages these days. I doodle floor plans, I research dock designs and materials, and I mostly just dream. It keeps me going, and will keep me going through the winter.

Family Time

Gosh I don’t even remember the last time I wrote you. So much has happened in the meantime – all of August has passed us by, and nearly half of September – that I don’t think I can recount it in these pages.

Sorry. I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and it’s affecting my writing style. I’m going all Jane Austen on your asses. I haven’t read the original, but this one’s much more exciting. I enjoy a Victorian comedy of manners so much more when it’s laden with gut-wrenching zombie-killing violence. It’s the love child of Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino.

In early August, back in what I like to call ‘the rainy season’, I hosted a BBQ party for my mother’s side of the family. It was a hoot, from what I remember. There was dancing. There was drinking. People fished and golfed and swam and one of our number even went zip-lining in the quarry. We had big plans to go on the aerial adventure at the Cavernes Lafleche aerial park but those sizeist bastards wouldn’t take anyone with hips larger than 42 inches. For those of you who are familiar with my family, there are very few among them with hips smaller than 42 inches. Thankfully this is balanced out – many of them (females, mostly) are six-footers. I am a shorty at 5’7 ½ (barefoot). What can those cave-people expect?

After that, we began preparations for the arrival of the Austrians. During this time, we didn’t really visit the land much, so when we finally went up with the Austrians we were pleasantly surprised to find a lovely first-floor and three walls standing where there once was only bush. I must admit to feeling a sense of accomplishment. While the majority of the actual work has been done by my brother, by builders and various other service-people (septic installation, laneway backhoe, etc), I feel like as a unit we’ve moved the project in its entirety along at a great pace in just a few months. It also just so happened that the arrival of the Austrians was timed perfectly so that they could watch their cottage being built.

Their visit was a bunch of fun. We went to the land. We swam, we boated, we kayaked (we bought kayaks!), we slept in the trailer, we drank beer from the bottom of the lake (warm beer!), we fished, I watched Rosie redundantly chase a loon, before she decided she was outmatched and gave up. I kayaked WITH Rosie, which was adorable even though nobody else even saw it. We went bowling. We went shopping, and I forced them to buy stuff for their cottage so progress could be made on things like bathroom and kitchen fixtures, when the time comes. My brother came over a lot, which was nice, and many decisions were made about construction details. I got a really great sense of what goes into building a cottage, so that I now feel better prepared to tackle our own when the time comes.

They stayed for two weeks. It was great fun and we all got along and Rosie behaved herself, but I was exhausted at the end of it, and I’m still (four days later) setting the house to rights. I really look forward to the day when we will have side-by-side cottages, so we can play together, we can eat together if we want, we can visit for coffee, campfires, games, and then have quiet alone time when we want as well. My idea since the beginning that we should remain in seperate cottages was reinforced during this visit, so I feel better about the decision, even though it may seem frivolous from the outside. While we have many of the same tastes and interests, several factors would make it difficult to share: they have a lot more disposable income than us, so their standard for household things is higher. The budget for building their cottage is higher than ours will ever be. We will beg, borrow and steal whatever materials we can use, where they are thinking about buying fixtures in Italy and filling a shipping container to get them here. They were actually contemplating commissioning someone to build them a wooden bathtub, where I want a used tin farm tank as a shower stall. They are discussing having the visible steel i-beams in their living room be pierced with plasma-cut ovals where we would be happy with rough pine. They bought an antique dining table for $800, where I hope to use the table my Opa built. They don’t love kitsch as much as we do. They don’t like colour as much as we do. They don’t like spicy food as much as we do. We let our dog onto the furniture and they don’t. They don’t wear as many clothes as we do. I would hate to have my sister-in-law’s quality bed linens muddied by my dog’s filthy paws, or have anything petty like that become an issue between us. I think we have such a lovely relationship, the five of us, that this set-up will be absolutely perfect. If you feel like curry tonight, feel free to come over. Otherwise we will meet afterwards at the campfire, or for games and dessert. Quality, enjoyable, family time.

My mom thought that this project would slake my desire to build right away, but it’s done the opposite – I can’t wait to start. I think we’ll get a move on next spring, start by plotting it out, and putting in a septic. I am jealous.