Slowly but surely, I feel as though I am getting back in the swing of things.
My bedrest edict was lifted officially about a week ago. Unofficially, I am supposed to get horizontal whenever I feel winded, crampy, tired, or just plain not good. So I'm spending a lot of time on my back. Morning sickness continues--I can't seem to eat enough food to keep the nausea at bay. I've actually lost weight in this pregnancy, which marks the very first time ever that I was not fat enough. The only thing that is getting me through this is books and prayers, both of which I have gotten from kind friends. I am extremely grateful for all three.
I actually had to turn down a work project that I felt would be a good opportunity because overall, I thought it would put too much strain on me. It worried me to give up such a great opportunity; I have to keep reminding myself that an opportunity isn't actually that great if it comes at the wrong time, and this one did, for me. There will be other projects.
But I am starting to stop worrying and start to really love my baby. James and I found out there is an 85% chance she's a girl, and so we tentatively started calling her by the name we picked out, instead of Jawbone. But the more that we called her that name, and the more we looked at her little pouty face in the 3D ultrasound, we found that a particular nickname suited her better. It just feels more natural. I mean to do a first trimester write-up, because there is so much I want to remember about this pregnancy--my Tabasco cravings, my crying jags over children's literature, being SO HOT and sleeping with all the windows open on 40-degree nights, not wanting to "jinx" things, but not being able to stop from buying the baby books, spelling out VIVAT JAWBONE in word tiles on the coffee table and leaving them there for weeks, seeing a pair of perfectly formed feet frog-kicking across an ultrasound screen--the greatest moment in my life to date... But to be quite honest, the way things are going, I probably won't get around to expounding more on these things than I already have. It makes me sad to think that this time is already slipping away from me, but then I remember all the things I will be glad to miss. Reading in front of the toilet, sick sick sick, mood swings, food aversions, sleeplessness, never being able to empty my bladder quite completely...
My good friends Jamie and Patrick had their baby early on November 10. His name is Atom Gray I_____. I am not a fan of the name, but I am a fan of Baby Atom himself. He is so sweet, with Patrick's Austrian nose and Jamie's Korean eyes, in a peculiar shade of blue that I hope endures. He never fusses, and he makes the grumpiest faces when he is displeased. He is going to be my baby's first friend, and I love him for that, but I also love him because he is the living embodiment of my friends' love for each other. I love going over to their house with supper and folding his little onesies and then holding him while his mother eats and naps.
In non-baby related news, we've completed a few home improvement projects in the past few weeks. Rather: James has, although I consider myself the mastermind behind the finished products. Example: James laid new vinyl flooring in the bathroom and I caulked! And also: I laid tile on the easy parts of the kitchen floor, and left the cut outs around the radiator and doorjamb to him. Tomorrow, James will spray paint a new bookcase that I picked out online! I just love feathering my little nest.
Thanksgiving is in three days, and I am looking forward to spending it with James and James alone. No cats, even! It seems impossible that we have been together for 10 years and never spent the holiday alone before (unless you count the impromptu Ghetto Thanksgiving of 2003 with Patrick Riggs, Eli, Alex, etc), but this has been such a nice entry that I will decide not to go into the "James's Mom is a Crazy and Manipulative You-Know-What" spiel and just say that we're looking forward to it. We rented a luxury cabin in the mountains near Luray, Virginia, and we will spend it there (and keep our phones on silent to avoid the thousand mournful calls from You-Know-Who, just checking in! To say she misses us! And ask if we need anything! And by the way, she misses us! And isn't having such a good time. Because she misses...)
There is a great big golden orb of a moon tonight, hanging in a ring of hazy smoke right over top of my building. I keep going downstairs to look at it. Because it's pretty, and because I can.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Monday, November 22, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Picture post
I've been super busy/sick/tired lately so I haven't had the energy to do much beside work/eat/sleep. But a lot has been going on! My brain has sort of stopped functioning properly enough to tell you about it, though. So I'm going to rely heavily on visual aids to get me through this post.
First, and most importantly:
This is the Jawbone 3 weeks ago at 7w1d. It was the first time he looked like anything more than a speck and it was so, so exciting to us. We saw his heart beating again, not just a flicker like the first time but more like an actual heart, with a pumping motion. (His heart rate was 140, which puts him right on the cusp of that old wives' tale: below 140 bpm is a girl and above 140 bpm is a boy. I still think boy, though, and James still thinks girl.)
We were just amazed by this picture, and we didn't mind at all that our baby looked like a delicious shrimp and not actually like a baby at all. So imagine how we felt when we saw him again:
That looks definitively babyish at 9w1d. Here's Jawby hanging out upside down like a bat. Bat-baby! His head is on the left and you can see his little feet sticking out on the right. And when we were there, we not only saw his heart beating some more, but we saw him moving his arms, legs, back, and head!!
He is 2.36 centimeters (or was, there--I understand this is a big growing week for him, so he's almost double that, now, or should be). That's about an inch, and about the size of a medium green olive (which actually...sounds pretty yummy. I need olives. And I don't even LIKE olives!)
James totaled the old green Camry last week (he's OK, the car is, sadly, not) in the lamest accident resulting in a totaled car ever (but the safest, so we're not complaining). He was pulling out of a parallel parking spot on the street and a guy came roaring by and smashed into him, crumpling the hood and breaking an axle. So....we got a new car!
It is a silver 2007 Toyota Rav4 with 35,000 miles on it. It was listed for a good price, but even so, James haggled them down another 1,000 and got the dealership to pay the taxes on it for us. This is the first time we have ever really bought a car instead of just driving what our parents didn't want or buying a car from a friend for $300 or so, so he had never bargained like that before and I wasn't sure he could. Disloyal wife! I was so nervous, and then when the salesman agreed, I wanted to jump up and down going, "IN YOUR FACE! HA HA! WE GOT YOU!" I think James did, too, but instead we settled for giving each other a surreptitious high five under the desk where they couldn't see.
We love the new car. It has already been to Roanoke and Norfolk. It has so much space and is so clean and I love driving it.
Because we saved so much money on the car, we can afford to replace the gross old couch and chair we've had since 2001. We're thinking of something like this:
The fabric is microfiber, and the color would be the lighter khaki instead of the darker sand on top. I'm not 100% sure about this couch because I find the arms a little funky, but I like the shape of it overall and I like the three-cushion back a lot. And the space underneath would keep things from becoming irretrievably lost under there (Like the TiVo remote that was missing for three months...)
I won't let anybody buy anything for the baby until 12 weeks (only 14 days to go!!!) and that includes James (although he might have accidentally gotten some little pumpkin socks) and me (who might have sort of kind of gotten the baby a book called The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat--but only because the cat looks like our Hank). But it hasn't stopped us from planning out what to do with the study when the baby is born. Right now, James works from home at the dining room table and I work in the second bedroom. But I've heard from all kinds of people about how HA HA you can't work in the same room where the baby is sleeping YOU CRAZY PERSON AHAHAHAHAHA. So we were chagrined to find out we probably wouldn't be able to have a nursery/home office like we had planned.
Our condo is really, really small, guys.
We have about 850 square feet. That's not a lot, since it feels like 30 or 40 percent of that is taken up by closets. We have 9 closets in this place, including pantries and the double closets in the bedrooms. I am not complaning, since I love closets for storage, but it does make it rather difficult to position furniture in the rooms. There are only so many combinations that don't leave you blocking a door.
This weekend, I made James push all the furniture around in the living room, wondering where we could fit an extra desk. (We call this game House Tetris, but it is NOT AS FUN and FAR MORE SWEATY than regular Tetris.) It was very frustrating because there was no good solution and I made James push the furniture around for two hours and finally we got snappish with each other and went to bed.
In the middle of the night, one on of my frequent (bi-hourly) bathroom breaks, I got an idea. A brilliant idea. This morning, I sat down and drew up a plan that I am pretty sure will allow us to have a workspace in the living room without sacrificing space or aesthetics.
Here is our living room as it stands now:
This is not really done to scale, but I think it gives you an idea of what we have to work with now. But this is what I think can happen:
The wine bar didn't make it--I think with it it will look too crowded--but I don't know where we'll put everything in it. I guess I could buy one of those vintage-y globe liquor cabinets or put a wine rack in the kitchen?
A better illustration of the desk/TV setup:
I get a workspace and I get to have my house still look nice and Pottery-Barn-esque. James gets a flatscreen TV! And Jawbone gets his very own room. Everybody wins!
James thinks that if it works, I should take pictures and send them to Apartment Therapy. I probably won't, but this post has given me the idea of doing a virtual tour around my house--I wish I had more pictures of different places I have lived throughout my life. I don't remember places very well--I have vague ideas, but it would be nice to have a concrete reminder of things. And it's neat to be able to look back and see how my design style--how my idea of home--has changed over the years.
I wish the gorgeous crisp weather we were having would come back and replace this muggy awfulness. Autumn, where are you?
First, and most importantly:
This is the Jawbone 3 weeks ago at 7w1d. It was the first time he looked like anything more than a speck and it was so, so exciting to us. We saw his heart beating again, not just a flicker like the first time but more like an actual heart, with a pumping motion. (His heart rate was 140, which puts him right on the cusp of that old wives' tale: below 140 bpm is a girl and above 140 bpm is a boy. I still think boy, though, and James still thinks girl.)We were just amazed by this picture, and we didn't mind at all that our baby looked like a delicious shrimp and not actually like a baby at all. So imagine how we felt when we saw him again:
That looks definitively babyish at 9w1d. Here's Jawby hanging out upside down like a bat. Bat-baby! His head is on the left and you can see his little feet sticking out on the right. And when we were there, we not only saw his heart beating some more, but we saw him moving his arms, legs, back, and head!!
He is 2.36 centimeters (or was, there--I understand this is a big growing week for him, so he's almost double that, now, or should be). That's about an inch, and about the size of a medium green olive (which actually...sounds pretty yummy. I need olives. And I don't even LIKE olives!)James totaled the old green Camry last week (he's OK, the car is, sadly, not) in the lamest accident resulting in a totaled car ever (but the safest, so we're not complaining). He was pulling out of a parallel parking spot on the street and a guy came roaring by and smashed into him, crumpling the hood and breaking an axle. So....we got a new car!
It is a silver 2007 Toyota Rav4 with 35,000 miles on it. It was listed for a good price, but even so, James haggled them down another 1,000 and got the dealership to pay the taxes on it for us. This is the first time we have ever really bought a car instead of just driving what our parents didn't want or buying a car from a friend for $300 or so, so he had never bargained like that before and I wasn't sure he could. Disloyal wife! I was so nervous, and then when the salesman agreed, I wanted to jump up and down going, "IN YOUR FACE! HA HA! WE GOT YOU!" I think James did, too, but instead we settled for giving each other a surreptitious high five under the desk where they couldn't see.
We love the new car. It has already been to Roanoke and Norfolk. It has so much space and is so clean and I love driving it.
Because we saved so much money on the car, we can afford to replace the gross old couch and chair we've had since 2001. We're thinking of something like this:
The fabric is microfiber, and the color would be the lighter khaki instead of the darker sand on top. I'm not 100% sure about this couch because I find the arms a little funky, but I like the shape of it overall and I like the three-cushion back a lot. And the space underneath would keep things from becoming irretrievably lost under there (Like the TiVo remote that was missing for three months...)I won't let anybody buy anything for the baby until 12 weeks (only 14 days to go!!!) and that includes James (although he might have accidentally gotten some little pumpkin socks) and me (who might have sort of kind of gotten the baby a book called The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat--but only because the cat looks like our Hank). But it hasn't stopped us from planning out what to do with the study when the baby is born. Right now, James works from home at the dining room table and I work in the second bedroom. But I've heard from all kinds of people about how HA HA you can't work in the same room where the baby is sleeping YOU CRAZY PERSON AHAHAHAHAHA. So we were chagrined to find out we probably wouldn't be able to have a nursery/home office like we had planned.
Our condo is really, really small, guys.
We have about 850 square feet. That's not a lot, since it feels like 30 or 40 percent of that is taken up by closets. We have 9 closets in this place, including pantries and the double closets in the bedrooms. I am not complaning, since I love closets for storage, but it does make it rather difficult to position furniture in the rooms. There are only so many combinations that don't leave you blocking a door.
This weekend, I made James push all the furniture around in the living room, wondering where we could fit an extra desk. (We call this game House Tetris, but it is NOT AS FUN and FAR MORE SWEATY than regular Tetris.) It was very frustrating because there was no good solution and I made James push the furniture around for two hours and finally we got snappish with each other and went to bed.
In the middle of the night, one on of my frequent (bi-hourly) bathroom breaks, I got an idea. A brilliant idea. This morning, I sat down and drew up a plan that I am pretty sure will allow us to have a workspace in the living room without sacrificing space or aesthetics.
Here is our living room as it stands now:
This is not really done to scale, but I think it gives you an idea of what we have to work with now. But this is what I think can happen:
The wine bar didn't make it--I think with it it will look too crowded--but I don't know where we'll put everything in it. I guess I could buy one of those vintage-y globe liquor cabinets or put a wine rack in the kitchen?A better illustration of the desk/TV setup:
I get a workspace and I get to have my house still look nice and Pottery-Barn-esque. James gets a flatscreen TV! And Jawbone gets his very own room. Everybody wins!James thinks that if it works, I should take pictures and send them to Apartment Therapy. I probably won't, but this post has given me the idea of doing a virtual tour around my house--I wish I had more pictures of different places I have lived throughout my life. I don't remember places very well--I have vague ideas, but it would be nice to have a concrete reminder of things. And it's neat to be able to look back and see how my design style--how my idea of home--has changed over the years.
I wish the gorgeous crisp weather we were having would come back and replace this muggy awfulness. Autumn, where are you?
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