Entries from March 2008 ↓

34 weeks. Wow. It seems so….. pregnant. The other day it struck me that I will be breastfeeding in 6 weeks or less. At first I had a hard time thinking about this as a pregnancy, rather than an illness. Now don’t get me wrong - I definitely do not view pregnancy as an illness in it’s self, but when you are throwing up multiple times a day, it starts to feel like an illness. Especially when you aren’t feeling movement yet. So then the baby started moving, like a wild child, so I can view it as a pregnancy, yes! But it’s hard to focus on anything past birth. I totally forgot the child needed to eat! Or that I needed to figure out where to put the co-sleeper in my bedroom. By the sounds of it, you’d think eating and sleeping were not my priorities, but you couldn’t be more wrong! So anyway, time to start thinking of things like packing my hospital bag, finding a place for the babe to sleep, and exciting things like nursing bras. Blechity blech.

Physically, I am not to the completely miserable stage yet, which is nice. I’ve actually felt a bit more energy in the past several days, so that is good. Especially for someone who has a To-Do list as tall as Mount Everest. I am experiencing some pretty severe pain from my sciatic nerve though at times. I had this with Warrior and it can really get debilitating.

 My wild child is insane with her movements. I believe this is probably my most active babe ever. I swear she is still flipping from breech to head-down about every other day. She enjoys laying completely sideways in my stomach. Which is an oh so pleasant feeling! And she is awake for literally hours at a time where I can feel little body parts poking out in all directions!

 I have gained about 18 pounds thus far. I gain all my weight at the end. Slow to gain at the beginning, but once I start…. oh, do I ever gain! I’m gaining about 1-2 pounds per week. I’m sure it doesn’t help that I’m eating Fun Chip Frosting off of a spoon, and indulging in my FIL’s home-made ice cream with cut up pieces of Schwann’s chocolate chip cookie dough in it (Thanks to Karianne, I’m hooked! lol) on a daily basis.

 I feel like I am carrying very compactly. Now, I’m not saying I’m small. Small would not fit me in any sense of the word. But I just feel so blasted full of baby in there. Already. I mean, I feel like she might be 6 pounds already, or something. I’ve not had an estimate on weight since my 19 week u/s, so I don’t even have a ballpark figure of what she actually is.

Now for the fun stuff… if you can call double chins, fat arms, a zit in the middle of my forehead so big the best acne treatment wouldn’t cure it, and an outtie belly button fun:

Why did my 4 year old just come over and say “The cold war is over now, didn’t you know?”Why does my baby have the hiccups more often than not? And why are they almost always in my left hip bone so it feels like I have a constantly hiccing hip bone?

 Why do my children constantly ask for food? How are they famished and starving 20 minutes after a meal?

Why do I keep getting sick over and over and over so that it feels like I have one eternal sickness during this pregnancy? (Why yes, I am sick again. Fever and all.)

 Why does the mailman insist on coming at random times everyday? Why does he sometimes taunt me into thinking he has a schedule by coming at the same time 2 days in a row?

 Why did 2 car sales men today offer to pay me to come look at vehicles they have that I called to inquire about? I don’t sell my body, so why would I sell my time looking at things that don’t interest me?

Why did Warrior color his pen!s and bum yellow and stand in the window?

 Why am I gaining 2 pounds a week all of the sudden? Do the weight loss gods want me to have to live on an elliptical post pregnancy?!?

Why does it annoy me so strongly that my children are still in my bed 1/2 the night, kicking me in the gut, yet I don’t have enough energy to train them to stay in their own beds?

Why does my hot water decide to give me lots of hot water one day and then 2 minutes worth the next day? Is it a trick?

Why do I have this powerful urge to nest, yet sit on my butt playing Tile Towers?

And seriously, why am I asking as many questions as Forest asks me every minute? Perhaps he is wearing off on me and I have decided to try the Chinese water torture of seeing how many questions you can ask in a single minute without having the party listening fall over and go mad?

Here are our Easter photos. Please excuse the fact that Forest is going through a stage where he either runs away from the camera like it is a deadly weapon, or if he doesn’t do that, he decides to tease me with the weirdest looks possible. Kind of like he’s jacked up on something or else there’s a man behind me holding a knife. (Almost as annoying as the coronary he has when I put anything on him but his ‘basketball jersey’ or pajamas. The look he gave me when I gave him his Easter outfit was so disgusted that you’d think I was offering him boardshorts to wear to church or something.)  Anyway….. here they are in their Easter finery: (Why yes, I did happen to bribe them with candy for this photo.)

And I know this is supposed to be wordless, however I have to leave you with one funny story from Easter. We were in church and this woman was singing a solo. Behind her on the screen they were flashing relevant pictures of the Crucifixion, the cross, Jesus, etc. One came up on the screen that was a tad blurry showing Jesus wearing the crown of thorns. Forest belts out “Look! GOD HAS A BIRD’S NEST ON HIS HEAD!”

As I may have mentioned before, my mom had to find a new Oncologist, as her old one was leaving. She is doing poorly again, and was really anxious about finding a new Oncologist during this period of time. She didn’t have a lot of options, as we come from a very rural area, and with her cancer being so rare, she was really worried about finding someone that was in the know about the disease as well as someone she trusted and liked.

She ended up switching hospitals completely, to one another hour away from her in the opposite direction. Last week she had a consultation with him, and much to our relief, she loved him. She said she may even like him more than her last one, whom she really adored and trusted. This doctor is more willing to look into some more non-traditional and new treatments available. He mentioned stem cell harvest, which her other Oncologist was opposed to. He also mentioned several new chemo-therapies that carry more risks, but have better returns. There’s a lot of things for her to be thinking about now. She has a regular appointment with him to discuss her current situation and which direction to take in a week and a half. Depending on how quickly her levels are dropping is indicative of how soon new treatments will start. It really is a crap shoot, because this disease is so blasted unpredictable.

My parents were over here yesterday dyeing Easter eggs with the kids (I’ll attach some pictures to the bottom of this post), and my dad shared with me how hard it is becoming at home again with the sheer exhaustion she is experiencing as well as the ever increasing pain. She has a super good attitude towards it all, but it is hard when she is so down physically.

 One thing she shared with me that is weighing heavily on her shoulders these days is her life insurance. She bought term insurance, which is what most financial experts advise you to do if you are young and healthy. It is much cheaper than the alternative. However, her term runs out next year. Because of the cancer diagnosis, she will never be able to buy insurance again. This worries her, because they do not have a lot of money (living very meagerly on a minister’s income), and she knows what a financial toll it will be on my dad when she passes. I told her she can’t think that way. If you can have insurance and choose not to, then that is when you should feel guilty. If you can’t, there’s nothing you can do, and you have to put it out of your mind. It really upsets her though.

All in all, we aren’t just surviving anymore, not feeling smothered, like in the beginning - we are working through it. No, we are not blind to reality. Obviously we are not promised 5 years of tomorrows, or even tomorrow it’s self,  but we are trying not to think about the long terms. Instead, focusing on the simple joys and blessings of what we do have - the everyday. Like yesterday - I saved the egg dyeing for the kids to do with my parents - and they had a blast! Warrior would hold the egg up about a foot above the dye and drop it in. The eggs that managed to survive the plunge without cracking, were then stirred around vigirously with a metal spoon, clattering up against the sides of the cup. If 1 out of 10 survived, it was pretty much a miracle. We made different colored dye, some with lemon juice and some with white vinegar. The vinegar made the colors more vibrant, I told them. Forest insisted on only using the ‘vibrating’ colors.

I hand-made my birth announcements for the boys. With Forest I worked on them as I was on bed-rest with him. With Warrior, I worked on them during Forest’s naps. This time, I am not even going to let my mind go there. Okay, maybe it did for a teensey weensey little second. I swear it was the pink stuff at the craft store - it’s all so cute and I could do such fun things on a card with it. But no, I cannot. My to do list taunts me as it is. I do not need to add 70 home-made cards to it. I do not. So I am going to order some cute photo birth annoucements from this sweet little mom owned company I found - Photo Card Designs. They have some very adorable cards that I think will be almost perfect. I did consider for one second just typing out the mailing addresses on some kind of Primera labels or something, but I don’t think I can do it. I really enjoy the writing part.