Category - All About Me

I have had a very emotionally and physically tiring 2 weeks. Sometimes it’s taken everything I have not to pull all my hair out and gorge myself with food. Especially bacon. Bacon makes everything better.

What little extra time and energy I’ve had has been devoted to keeping up with my watercolor class. I’m behind on my Alphabet Project. I’ve got deck pictures to share. At some point I’ll even tell you about Boo’s Tiger Cruise. So give me a couple of days to decompress and I’ll be happily blogging again.

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Yesterday I bought new sunglasses.

I wore them out of the store since my old ones were broken. When I got to my car I realized that the little vinyl sticker with the brand name was still on the lens. I peeled it off and stuck it to the window of the car next to me.

I wonder how long it’ll take them to find it.

I also wonder what gets into me sometimes.

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We’ve been having a mild, snowless winter. But God is good and sent me snow for my birthday. Not enough to do anything but say, “Oh look, it’s snowing,” but snow nonetheless.

Phil did good by giving me an Andrew Lloyd Webber DVD collection that included the movie versions of “Cats”, “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.” The children and I sat down after lunch and watched “Superstar”, which prompted a discussion about what happened to poor Judas after he killed himself.

Pumpkin Girl made me these thumbtacks. I love them particularly because she did them all by herself. She snuck down to my craftroom and found my craft glue, made herself a palette out of wax paper and quietly crafted in her room with her door closed.

Bip gave me a dime from his “Clifford Red Dog” bank. It was all he had.

My parents surprised me by remembering for a whole year that I had said I wanted a brown Betty teapot. Isn’t she cute?

As for my meeting – it was OK, I guess. I was in the back, bouncing and walking Pipsqueak and I couldn’t hear too well. When I did sit down, the people around me were taken in by his toothless smile and gooed and cooed back at him, so I was pretty distracted. Could have been worse.

All in all, it was a good day.

PS- Don’t forget, tomorrow (Jan 24th) is “B” in The Alphabet Project. Jump in anytime, participate as often as you are able!

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I love the New Year. I love a blank journal and new calendar. I love the idea of a fresh start. So many opportunities lie ahead. So much possibility.

I started to write a totally different post yesterday, but sometimes you start writing and just end up with something else. I usually just go with it.

I meant to tell you that we’d had a very difficult December, behavior-wise, so this New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were delightful. We built Legos, made Shrinky Dinks, watched Star Trek TNG and ate cherry-almond eggnog bread. We ate our traditional New Year’s Day leftovers for dinner (I just made that up) and watched the Rose Parade. Not at the same time, of course. The Rose Parade has been a part of my New Year’s Days ever since I can remember. We’d watch it live and without interruption on KTLA. Channel 5, if I remember correctly. Now we watch it on HGTV, live, no commercials. Its the only way to go.

I’ve got a couple of changes in mind for this year. We’re going to move some furniture around and do a little more decorating. We’ve got to get our deck fixed and the house painted, too. Personally, I’d like to get back to blogging more. And look, I’ve already been at it two days in a row! And I’d like to learn to take better pictures.

A couple of years ago in the knitting blog world, there was a project called the ABC Along. The point was to work your way through the alphabet in pictures. Every two weeks a different letter was assigned and you took a picture to correspond with that letter. I’ve poked around and it doesn’t look like they are doing it this year. I don’t want to just steal the name ABC Along, but I’m stealing, er, borrowing the idea. Maybe I’ll come up with a different name. But in any case, I’ll be posting my pictures to my blog. So I’ll be working on my photography AND posting regularly. Yay, me!

If you’d like to join me in photographing the alphabet, please do! I’m going to post a schedule, mostly to keep myself on track, but it’ll be a guideline for anyone who wants to play along. If I get enough interest, I’ll think up a new name for the alphabet project (ooo, that’s a good name!) and make a little button.

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I am 37 weeks today. The baby is “officially” full term, he’s been head down for a while, and all systems are “go” for launch. Just waiting on God to light the fuse, so to speak.

I’m anxious. I have been blessed with easy labors, the kind which make people want to throw things at me when I talk about them. So I wonder, is this the one that will be long and dragged out? Am I really up for doing this one more time?

I’m uncomfortable. I’m only 5 feet tall, so there is not much room for a baby to be in my belly. At the end of the day, everything just hurts.

I’m caught. I’m so done being pregnant, yet the only way out of this is to go into labor. I don’t like either choice.

Bip is worried. It seems like every fairy tale we read has the mother dying. Cinderella, Snow White, even the Little Mermaid has the mother gone. I know it’s just a plot device, but to a 5 year old, it is too close to home. The thought of breaking his heart like that just shatters mine. But I can’t make him any promises. When it is my time to go, then it is mine time to go. Now or another 40 years from now, it is in God’s hands. Small words of comfort to a sweet little boy who needs his mother.

If you could spare us some prayers, I’d sure appreciate it. Above all, I would ask that you pray for a safe delivery, with a healthy mom and baby at the end. And until that time, a peaceful heart for both me and Bip. Knowing that others are praying for me has always eased the load, so I thank you in advance.

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So.  I am awake.  Considering the night I had, that is saying quite a bit.

I went to bed with a headache that I’d been having for a day and a half.  I blame the Boy Scouts.  See, I got myself a nice little caffeine addiction back when a nice, cold glass of Coca Cola was the perfect thing to ease my pregnancy nausea.   If I was drinking Coke, you knew I was nauseated.  And since I was nauseated all day, every day until late May, well…you get the point.

So now I need 2 glasses of Coke a day or I’ll get a headache.  I don’t get normal headaches, either.  I get these not-quite-migraine things that are cured by a dose of Extra Strength Excedrin plus one Coke.  Even in my normal, not pregnant and addicted to caffeine state, if I get a headache, it’s that combination of aspirin, aceteminaphin, and caffeine that works.  But I can’t have aspirin while pregnant, so I try to tough out the pain and have 2 Cokes a day.  Purely preventative, of course.

But on Sunday, the moms of Boo’s Boy Scout Troop had a little get together of wine and appetizers.  The only things offered to drink were water and booze, so I drank water.  We’ve got really good tasting water here, right out of the tap, so I wasn’t suffering.  Yet.  But by the time I got home, it was much to late for me to be drinking caffeine, even though I could already feel the headache creeping up.

The next day I tried to shake my headache.  I took a 2 hour nap.  I drank my soda.  I kept otherwise well hydrated with cool and tasty mountain water.  By the end of the day I was hurting.  I went to bed, hoping I’d be better by morning.

I slept like a rock until 3:00 am.  Then I was awake and my head still hurt.  Plus I had a stuffy nose.

My nose has been giving me a hard time for about 3 weeks, when we had built in bookshelves installed.  Which you don’t know about, because I haven’t mentioned it yet.  I think the sawdust bothered my nose, which made me feel like I was right on the edge of a sneeze all day.  Then it started to hurt.  It hurt so badly that I actually googled “my nose hurts on the inside.”  The general wisdom was to swab it with vaseline, which I have to admit helps a lot.  But my nose still seems to go from hurting, to congested as it tries to lubricate itself, to normal and back again.

Last night it was in its super-congested/hurty phase.

So I lay there, wide awake, head pounding, nose congested, mouth open trying to breathe.  I got up and walked around, trying to “reset” myself.    That attracted the cats to my room.  I propped myself up, hoping a change of position would clear my nose.  Nope.  I avoided looking at the clock.  I thought about Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey.  I tried not think about what it was like to know you were about to have your head lopped off.

I got up to blow my nose, which caused the cats to follow me into the bathroom as my personal escorts.  One cat rubbed my legs while I swabbed my nose in the dark.  The other explored the plants around the bathtub.

I went back to bed.  The cat in the bathtub managed to get behind the bathroom door and close it, trapping herself inside.  I watched the two cats paw at each other under the door.  This amused me for about 15 minutes, then I got up to liberate the poor cat.

I lay there some more, now having contractions.  My midwife assures me that with a 5th pregnancy, my uterus is quite crabby and contractions are normal, especially in these final months.  (I think the actual term she used was “irritable uterus”, not “crabby”.)  They were painless, but annoying nonetheless.  Like someone grabbing hold of your arm and squeezing.

Finally, the sun rose.  I heard the 6:30 schoolbus stop, just as I was getting drowsy.   I didn’t hear the 7:30 bus, or Phil’s alarm go off, or him get up.  I did feel him kiss my cheek and I told him I hadn’t slept.  He told me he’d tell the children to be quiet so I could sleep now.

I heard my clock radio turn on, then off again 5 minutes later.  (It really turned itself off an hour later.) I didn’t hear the 8:30 school bus.  I woke up at 9:45 and realized I’d been asleep!!! then the next thing I knew it was 10:15.

My head still hurt.

I gave in to the Extra Strength Tylenol, got some breakfast, poured myself a Coke and went back to bed.

It’s now 12:30 and I am awake.  And some days, that’s as good as it gets.

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This is very cool.

Way back in 2007 I was planning our Disney Cruise.  There is so much Disney planning information out there, it’s just crazy.  I wanted this cruise to be the trip of a life time and trying to gather all the information together and make sense of it all was overwhelming.  Plus, given the choice between reading something on the computer or reading it in a book, I will choose the book every single time.

I don’t know how I stumbled upon PassPorters, but it was just what I was looking for.  I blogged all about them here: Just A Little “Dis”tracted.

In 2008 we planned our first ever trip to Disney World, this time toting along my cousin and his family.  Of course, I turned to PassPorter.

However, last year when we went to Disneyland, I didn’t get one.  Why?  Because I have been there more times than I can count.  (But I secretly wanted the Disneyland Passporter.)

And the point of this whole post?   Right before Easter I submitted a Disney tip to PassPorter folks and it was selected to be published in their email newsletter.  Cool.

But wait, there’s more! Because my tip was chosen to be published, I won a free PassPorter!!  I chose the Disney World one because I think they used one of my pictures in it.  (Also very cool.)

Now for some links.

Here is the link for the PassPorter News that has my tip.  The tips are along the left hand side, mine is the one about fireworks.  PassPorter News 4/9/10

Check out the book trailer for the Passporter.  You’ll get a glimpse of why I totally love them.  It’s almost as good as coming over to my house and letting me show you in person.  PassPorter’s Walt Disney World book trailer.

And now that you’ve watched the video and so totally want a PassPorter and a trip to Disney, here’s their website. PassPorter.com

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