Thursday, January 29, 2015

Baby's and Couch Legs: Our Newest Life Update

Back from my blogging hiatus. Well life went from really pretty normal and laid back to crazy again in just a couple weeks time. I plan on trying to write more frequently again but my plans usually don't happen the way I planned them. The biggest news....Travis and I are going to have a baby! Just a disclaimer, this may contain some TMI depending on your level of comfort about pregnancy. And mostly I'm writing about pregnancy this post because it is my biggest news. 

This Thanksgiving I wanted to have some wine as per usual. So I decided to double check and make sure I was being a responsible adult. Naturally, it was the one time I'd ever attempted a test where I wasn't the least bit concerned and forgot about the test before getting the results. Because there was just no way I'd get a test so early, I'd be only 3 weeks pregnant. So I was a bit shocked when I went back in to throw my test away and it looked like there was a second line on it. Travis and I spent most of Thanksgiving in our pajamas staring at a tiny stick that I'd peed on. Classy. And the trip to the grocery store felt like one of those that the checker probably laughed and gossiped about after we left. We bought a turkey baster, pregnancy tests, and some sparkly juice.

I should be due early August. Current due dates are the 12th or 10th, depending on methods of dating I should be edging towards the 2nd trimester very shortly. Pregnancy math is stupid, you're pregnant for 40 weeks but the first 2 really don't count. There's something like 3 different ways to count trimesters.  And 9 months is total crap. It is more like 10. Unless you don't count those first 2 weeks, but it is still more than 9. And babies don't apparently care about deadlines, so basically I'm due anytime in August. Or there's a very slim possibility of late July. 

Travis' sense of humor has grown since finding out the news. He has nicknamed my pregnant alter ego "Tina."  My brother on the other hand, nicknamed it "Smaug" or "Mike Tyson."  But I swear, I'm really not THAT awful and hormonal. I don't think I've done anything crazy yet. And fun fact, Travis has also seen much more childbirth than I have, so it is nice to have him to rely on, knowing he'll handle it well. However, Travis likes to say he is fairly certain this video (You can skip ahead to second 19 or so) is an accurate representation of what will happens during birth. My brother found it so hilarious that he decided I must name my child Uruk Hai. Travis, being the mature adult that he is, claims the only boys names that he likes are Uruk Hai and Marty McFly. He is at least slightly more reasonable about girl's names. So naturally we're probably going to have a boy.

We had our first ultrasound a few weeks ago and got to see a surprisingly squirmy baby with a nice heartbeat. And there was only one in there, phew.  I was a little nervous my early positive test meant I'd get twins, but I was wrong! It is really surreal to realize I have a tiny human growing inside me though.  I actually also got and echocardiogram the same day and saw my heart on ultrasound. So really I saw more of my innards in one day that most anyone else ever does, and we got to hear/see the inside of both my heart and the baby's heart.

Our new baby measuring at 10 weeks 1 day. We got to see arms and legs flail and kick around. He or she looked even more like a baby watching this in person. 

We got to tell Travis's family in person when we visited before Christmas.  We had everyone get together for a picture and had his mom take a video instead of pictures while saying, "Everyone say 'cheese'...everyone say 'Miriam's pregnant!'"Mostly people thought it was a joke at first.  Travis's Grandma Micki had my favorite reaction, "I noticed she wasn't drinking and was running to the bathroom all the time, I thought the poor girl had a kidney infection!" As if that would deter me from a glass of wine or a beer. My mother annoyingly enough, called me exactly 2 days before I found out and said, "I predict you will get pregnant while home for Thanksgiving."  Sometime's she is spooky and weird like that. Travis and I did have a good laugh at my parents during our Thanksgiving phone call with them before they had been notified of the new arrival.  My mom started griping about how someone needs to get them grand kids already. Other than family and very close friends, our bartender was the first to know. (She was actually the fourth person to find out if you count Travis and I as people 1 and 2).  I ordered three sodas in a row. And when I went to ask for n OB recommendation (she was days from giving birth at that point), she screamed, "HAH! I knew it!!! I always know when our beer girls order sodas!" And then the whole bar knew after that. 

My brother came to visit for a week after New Years, which was a lot of fun. Luckily he is family so he wasn't shocked when everything fell apart into a chaotic mess about an hour after we got back to the house. We were playing a board game and everything was fine, when suddenly I had to vomit. So I run to the bathroom. Apparently pregnancy does a number on your digestive system. I had eaten an apple but turns out, my stomach decided to do zero work on digesting said apple. When I puked up an entire, virtually solid apple, I became convinced that I would die.  I would meet my end while choking to death on my own vomit while Travis and Martin sat in the other room, blissfully unaware. As soon as this ordeal was over, I wandered to living room, in tears, step directly into a puddle of dog pee, and immediately started to swear violently. Martin and Travis looked up and immediately become very alarmed.  It appears Dinger got nervous or macho with a new person in the house and decided to show us all who was boss.  Martin and Travis begin running around trying to clean up and bring me a new pair of socks while I tell them about how I nearly died. Welcome to our life, Martin.

I've been feeling relatively normal other than this whole morning sickness business. (I wrote that sentence a week or two ago and I now take it back.)  The weirdest symptom for me...I can smell things! I know this is a typical pregnancy thing, but I've never had much of a sense of smell as long as I can remember.  It is actually rather unpleasant and makes the morning sickness worse. Everything is just too much and it has changed the way everything tastes. I hate the grocery store, I can smell the candy and fried chicken at the same time....not ok. And my dogs....their farts are a whole new level of hell.  Unfortunately this morning sickness seems like it is getting worse instead of better. Which is just lovely since it also makes me extra motion sick and we have a long road trip coming up.

Which brings me to the other major news came about a week into January when Travis and I found out that we were moving back to Fairbanks, Alaska by the end of the month. We had entirely discounted that possibility as an option, which is probably why it ended up turning into our definite plan. We're still figuring out all the details but hoping to be settled into a house before that baby arrives. Movers are coming today and tomorrow and by Friday Travis will be trekking across Canada in the middle of winter with a pregnant wife, a mastiff, a tiny dog, and a car stuffed with supplies. Wish him luck....someone should start a betting pool on which of the four of us is left somewhere by the side of the road in Canada.

We can now say we officially finished unpacking this house the same day the movers are coming back to move us back to where we started.  I don't remember if I have complained about our cursed couch before, but here's the back story to all this. While living in Fairbanks, we got this sale couch on a trip to Anchorage after realizing we had no furniture upon leaving college. The couch was called a "Click Clack" (you can convert it to a bed and it makes a click clack noise).  It was made from this brown suede like material and it also had no arms.  That was our first mistake. Never buy a couch without arms, you'll regret it, I promise. It also had a small but "fixable" rip in back. I say that with quotations because, obviously, we never got around to fixing it, and it just became a larger gaping hole as time went by. By the time we got it to our house after the 6 hour drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks, something had snapped on the bottom of the couch and it developed a slouch. One side of the couch was just a little more sloped and closer to the ground. Annoying, but we were stuck with the non returnable sale couch. And what were we supposed to do, make another 12 hour roundtrip to Anchorage? Soon the couch began to develop a lean as the click clack function broke down.  The slouch side of the couch no began to more permanently recline back at an angle.So now we have this couch with a gangster side where you sit close to the floor and have to lean waaaaay back if you sit on the left side.  It feels like a fun house couch without any fun. Meanwhile we are dealing with it while trying to save up for the wedding and other furniture essentials, like a bed so we didn't have to sleep on a mattress on the floor anymore, and a table so we didn't have to eat sitting on the gangster lean couch, etc. 

So the movers pack this cursed couch along to Republic.  As we begin to unpack we are a little confused about where the movers might have put the couch legs, so we leave the couch sitting directly on the floor while we unpack, keeping an eye out for them. They are gone, completely missing, and we are eventually forced to conclude that they somehow did not get packed, even though the movers packed an empty tissue box and the coffee grounds. At this point, Dinger came into our lives. With the couch sitting at floor level, and this new mastiff puppy, we had some pretty serious pee on couch situations. At this time, I hate this couch with a fiery passion that continually grows. It has no arms or legs, it has been peed on, it leans back at approximately 140 degree angle on one side, (but at least the bottom half is level since the legs are gone) and it is ungodly how uncomfortable this couch has become. It just feels lumpy and makes my back hurt (the reason for this became clear to me today).  Finally we move the couch to the porch for the dogs to sit on and we buy ourselves a real, non-sale couch complete with arms and legs. 

This should have been the end of the cursed couch story.  But today, as Travis dragged the old couch to load in the car for the last trip to the dump, I made the comment, "We never did find the damn legs for that thing." Not two minutes later, Travis comes running inside with a large paper wrapped bundle yelling, "I found the couch legs!"  Apparently, there was a secret compartment on the bottom of the couch.  No wonder the stupid thing was so uncomfortable, we'd been sitting on couch legs the whole time.